JosephRoth-10.html

1925–1933

Paris, Points South and East, Disappointment, Tragedy, and Triumph

JOSEPH ROTH WITH THE TRADEMARK NEWSPAPER

France—the Midi, Paris, Marseille—marks nothing less than the appearance of grace in Roth’s life. (And for once, not—his phrase—the “grace of unhappiness.”) Something unlooked for, undreamed of, or perhaps only dreamed of, something exceeding any human measure of reason or cognition. It is one of those classic collisions between the highly intelligent and almost post-mature but somehow starved observer and the Abundant Place: other instances that come to mind involve poets: Osip Mandelstam in Georgia, and Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil. Roth for once flaps at the limits of sense—which, as witness the reproving letters to his friend and protégé Bernard von Brentano (or later to Stefan Zweig), is something he hates to do, he disdains anything incoherent, stuttering, pompous, blathering. “I feel driven to inform you personally that Paris is the capital of the world, and that you must come here,” he writes in no. 14 to his boss-cum-friend Benno Reifenberg, “Paris is Catholic in the most urbane sense of the word, but it’s also a European expression of universal Judaism.” (Reifenberg got it, and later got to be the paper’s Paris correspondent himself.) Roth’s delirium, cooled and formed, is still palpable in the beautiful series of pieces he gave the Frankfurter Zeitung (they ran between 8 September and 4 November 1925), called Im mittäglichen Frankreich, “In the French Midi,” and a projected—and sadly, rejected—book version to be called “The White Cities.” I found the white cities just as they were in my dreams,” he writes in the title piece, ending with a landscape of Matisse-like strength, serenity, and loveliness:

The sun is young and strong, the sky is lofty and deep blue, the trees dark green, ancient, and pensive. And broad white roads that have been drinking in and reflecting the sun for hundreds of years, lead to the white cities with flat roofs, which are as they are to prove that even elevation can be harmless and benign, and that you never, ever fall into the black depths.

In a life full of calamities—his father’s madness before he was even born, Friedl’s schizophrenia, the end of the Dual Monarchy, Hitler’s coming to power—the loss of the Paris correspondent’s job for the Frankfurter Zeitung seems perhaps the most gratuitously wounding of all. It is too tantalizing to imagine Roth’s life with—in the full, officially possessing sense of the word—Paris. Perhaps his critical, oppositional spirit would have asserted itself sooner or later anyway; the novelist would have shouldered his way out past the journalist. But as it was, the Frankfurter gave, and the Frankfurter took away: for Roth, the flat roofs of the white cities were to have hurtful and malign black depths below them after all. In its unwisdom (and in the financial and organizational and political nervousness and turmoil of the twenties), this Jewish-liberal institution made the Nationalist—and later Nazi—Friedrich Sieburg its Paris correspondent, reasoning that Sieburg could do reporting as well as feuilleton. Roth in 1934 made a sour little joke about Sieburg’s busily seeking God in France (it’s an expression meaning something like “high on the hog”), while the Germans had happily found Wotan at home in Germany—but his feelings toward the man were not amusing or benign. Roth—hardly nature’s idea of a docile employee anyway—never subsequently trusted the paper, but then you could argue that he had probably never previously trusted it either. In any case, who could blame him? He remained based in Paris, half out of protest, but demoted, casualized, cantankerous, and impatient to be done with newspapers.

The antagonistic relationship between the FZ and its star writer is one of the burdens of this correspondence. Lines of command at the paper were, to say the least, fuzzy. There was an editorial committee—hence the extraordinary proliferation of newspapermen’s names in some of these letters (a history of The New Yorker would be no different, of course). Design, personnel, allegiances, politics, finance, all underwent continual change. Hence one’s sense of Roth’s at times loitering unhappily and unproductively around the head office in Frankfurt—he was watching his own back. Hence, too, his adoption of the slightly younger Brentano—it was so that he too might have someone to command, to patronize, to induct into mysteries, and to lead into battle. From these letters, one feels that there was any number of chiefs at the Frankfurter, and Roth their only Indian. It was a remarkable paper, distinguished, even unrivaled, in its roster of writers, among them Walter Benjamin—but it also had a powerful (and to Roth, never that much of a team player, rather nauseating) sense of its own distinguished remarkability. Newly arrived in Paris, or in Russia, out of sight of it, he still had some interest in its affairs, and wrote painstaking critiques and—practically!—memos to senior colleagues. A few years later, he had none. In 1931, he wrote to Friedrich Traugott Gubler, Reifenberg’s successor as feuilleton editor, “It’s just a paper, only slightly better than the others in Germany. It’s no longer absolutely good or essential. And neither you nor Reifenberg nor Picard will be able to fix it. You will sacrifice your personal lives, the only important thing.” And this is what he then, rather movingly, goes on to prescribe: “Always do what your wife says, spend time with her and the children, discuss everything with her, and don’t do anything just because your obstinate man’s head tells you to.” The Frankfurter’s sense of exceptionalism—one might almost call it “manifest destiny”—mixed, of course, with relativism, kept it going, trimming as it went, through ten years of the Third Reich, until it was finally closed down in August 1943. Like some of his colleagues, Reifenberg, who stayed at the paper throughout, and was involved in its next incarnation as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of today, was persuaded that they had managed to keep up some coded, clandestine resistance to the Nazis in their columns. Looking at some contributions with a view to putting together an anthology of them in the 1950s, he was forced to realize there was no resistance in any meaningful sense, not that any reader would have understood. The newspaper was trapped in a vainglorious bubble of its own making; and Roth, who after 1933 would have nothing to do with it, and broke off all relations with colleagues still there, was tacitly and belatedly vindicated in his intransigence.

It was in France, you could say, that Roth learned to fear and hate and see Germany as it was. The specimens of German-ness that fetched up in Paris—the Prussians he thought of as boches—and penitential return visits to Frankfurt or Berlin taught him a sort of visionary anthropology. Once Paris was denied him, and he had been to Russia, and a further visit there failed to come off, the FZ had only Germany and Germany and more Germany to offer him, and Roth’s responses became swifter, more virulent, more instinctive, and less patient. His eye was trained by the health, glamour, and nature of a sort of anticipatory self-exile in France. Germany, by contrast, was a disfigurement, a freak show, a deeply sick patient:

This account matches the sarcastic horror paintings of Otto Dix. Roth tried—further driven on by the plight of Friedl, who required treatment, and finally hospitalization—to save himself in fiction. He put out a book a year: Flight Without End in 1927, Zipper and His Father in 1928, Right and Left in 1929. (After 1933, it was to be more like two books a year: a completely ruinous and impossible production.) The rejection by S. Fischer of The Silent Prophet and his own abandonment of Perlefter: The Story of a Bourgeois checked his progress. When the firm of Gustav Kiepenheuer took him on, and Job, subtitled The Story of a Simple Man came out to excellent reviews and—for the first time—appreciable sales in 1930, it looked as though—after seven novels!—Roth might be poised for a new career as a novelist, and he quite deliberately set himself (bought himself time and space, and as much peace of mind as a monthly stipend could buy) to write the “book of old Austria” that was to be his masterpiece, The Radetzky March. It was serialized in the Frankfurter Zeitung (among his last gifts to the paper), and published in August 1932—nicely in time to be fed to the flames by enthusiastic National Socialist students in Berlin on 10 May 1933.

14. To Benno Reifenberg

Paris, 16 May 1925

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,1

I fear this letter may give you the impression that I am so besotted with Paris, and with France, that I have lost the balance of my mind. Be assured, therefore, that I am writing to you in full possession of my skeptical faculties, with all my wits about me, and running the risk of making a fool of myself, which is just about the worst thing that could happen to me. I feel driven to inform you personally that Paris is the capital of the world, and that you must come here. Whoever has not been here is only half a human, and no sort of European. Paris is free, intellectual in the best sense, and ironic in the most majestic pathos. Any chauffeur is wittier than our wittiest authors. We really are an unhappy bunch. Here everyone smiles at me, I fall in love with all the women, even the oldest of them, to the point of contemplating matrimony. I could weep when I cross the Seine bridges, for the first time in my life I am shattered by the aspect of buildings and streets, I feel at ease with everyone, though we continually misunderstand each other in matters of practicalities, merely because we so delightfully understand each other in matters of nuance. Were I a French author, I wouldn’t bother printing anything, I would just read and speak. The cattle drovers with whom I eat breakfast are so cultivated and noble as to put our ministers of state to shame, patriotism is justified (but only here!), nationalism is an expression of a European conscience, any poster is a poem, the announcements in a magistrate’s court are as sublime as our best prose, film placards contain more imagination and psychology than our contemporary novels, soldiers are whimsical children, policemen amusing editorialists. There is—quite literally—a party against Hindenburg2 being celebrated here at the moment, “Guignol contre Hindenburg” but then the whole city is a protest against Hindenburg anyway, against Hindenburg, Prussia, boots, and buttons. The Germans here, the North Germans, are full of rage against the city, and they are blind and insensitive to it. For instance, I quarreled with Palitzsch,3 who is of the better sort of North German and who can only understand my enthusiasm as a sort of poetic spleen, and thereby excuses it. He makes allowances for me! Me, a poet! That much vaunted North German “objectivity” is a mask for his lack of instinct, for his nose that isn’t an organ of sense but a catarrh dispenser. My so-called subjectivity is in the highest degree objective. I can smell things he won’t be able to see for another ten years.

I feel terribly sad because there are no bridges between certain races. There will never be a connection between Prussia and France. I am sitting in a restaurant, the waiter greets me, the waitress gives me a smile, while the Germans I am with are frosty to the manager and the errand boy. They give off a ghastly rigidity, they breathe out not air but walls and fences, even though their French is better than mine. Why is it? It’s the voice of blood and Catholicism. Paris is Catholic in the most urbane sense of the word, but it’s also a European expression of universal Judaism.

You must come here!

I owe it to you that I was able to come to France, and I shall never thank you enough. In a few days I’m going to take off for Provence, and I won’t write until my ecstasy has calmed down, and become the ground plan for the edifice of my descriptions.

My wife is staying here for the moment, she’s unwell, I’m afraid it may be her lungs. Please write to her:

Friedl Roth, Place de l’Odeon, Hotel de la Place de l’Odeon/Paris. It’s so cheap: 10 ff for a good meal, 15 ff for the night!

I’m also writing to the paper for the rest of my payment—perhaps you could remind them in accounts as well.

Greetings to you, and I kiss your wife’s hands,4

Your Joseph Roth

1. Reifenberg: Benno Reifenberg (1892–1970), journalist, and JR’s boss-cum-friend (though as he says frequently, this sort of mixed relationship is hard to negotiate; JR is forever talking to him privately in the office, or sending professional démarches to his home). Joined the staff of the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1919; editor of the feuilleton from 1924, Paris correspondent from 1930 to 1932, political editor from 1932 to 1943; co-founder and co-editor of the journal Die Gegenwart (1945–58); on the board of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from 1958 to 1964.

2. General Paul von Hindenburg was elected president of Germany on 25 April.

3. O. A. Palitzsch, journalist.

4. Born Maryla von Mazurkiewicz, to whom JR had a cordial relationship.

15. To Bernard von Brentano

Paris, 2 June 1925

Dear Brentano,1

don’t be annoyed! In the first place, I’m incredibly mixed up. I don’t know if I’ll ever write another thing. Maybe I’ll go back to where I came from—you know—and herd sheep. I don’t see the point in being a German writer. Here is like being on top of a tall tower, you look down from the summit of European civilization, and way down at the bottom, in some sort of gulch, is Germany. I can’t write a line in German—certainly not when I am mindful of writing for a German readership.

Secondly, I’ve failed to do all the bureaucratic police stuff on time, and am forced to hang around waiting for a visa extension. Don’t snigger—it’s not the French who are to blame, it’s purely my fault.

Third, don’t give the O.2 episode any more importance than it has. Don’t bother your head about him, or Mr. Stark,3 or any of the rest of them. The Illustriertes Blatt4 is none of your beeswax. If someone tries to accuse you, shrug your shoulders. I can’t understand your worrying about it. Ott is a fanatic of bad behavior. Be distant to him. Don’t get “cross.” Be “nice” to him. Be like a father, or a nobleman: remember, distance. Basically he’s just a soft and decent human being, just a little “nervous.”

4. Be as industrious and objective as you can. Write, write! Then none of the others will get a look in. Why don’t you have anything for me to read? You’re my hope, and I’m too proud to admit you’ve let me down.

5. Thank you for giving me news from Frankfurt. It sounds rather favorable. I have no plan and a guilty conscience. I feel as though I’ve duped the paper.

6. We’re writing to your wife now.

7. I’ll write at greater length when I’m through with the police.

8. The mail is so unreliable here, if you could, let me know you’ve received this.

9. Even if I don’t get to Germany, I’ll always be your friend.

10. My wife sends her regards

Yours Joseph Roth

Hotel de la place de l’Odéon,

VIe, place de l’Odéon 6.

You’re wrong to think people are the same the world over. The French simply are different. Yes, they whistle and clap during war films. But trust a fanatic and a “subjective” like me: I’ve never heard such feeble applause.

1. Brentano: Bernard von Brentano (1901–1964), publicist, essayist, and novelist. Descended from the Romantic poet Clemens von Brentano. From 1925 to 1930, Berlin correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung. He owed his introduction to the paper to JR. There was a violent breach in the relationship in the late 1920s when Brentano swung first left, then hard right. JR was described as “foaming with rage” when BB’s name was mentioned. See no. 83.

2. O episode: Ott episode?

3. Stark: Oskar Stark (1890–1970) journalist. From 1920 to 1931 in the Berlin office of the Frankfurter Zeitung, from 1935 to 1943 in head office, after the war with the Badische Zeitung in Freiburg.

4. Illustriertes Blatt: magazine produced from the same stable as the Frankfurter Zeitung.

16. To Bernard von Brentano

Paris, 14 June 1925
Hotel de la place de l’Odéon
6. Place de l’Odéon

My dear Brentano,

many thanks for your letter. I haven’t seen your articles. It’s hard to find the Frankfurter Zeitung in Paris, it gets here a week late, and not always then, even to Dr. Stahl, its representative here. Put some clippings in an envelope, and mail them to me. Work harder! Three pieces a week. Practice that manner that’s eye-catching and load-bearing at the same time.

Thanks for your crossed fingers, my bureaucratic hoopla is looking reasonably promising just now. My wife went along to the Interior Ministry, and Frenchmen will do everything for a woman. Germans just get impatient . . .

I’m just as enthusiastic as before, and just as depressed about Germany. I can understand a German poet1 coming here, digging himself a mattress grave, and giving up the ghost. Before we get around to making a German nation, we may find there’s a European one. Perhaps to the exclusion of the Germans.

I’m taking my novel to Provence round about the 20th. I’m probably going to write a book about Marseille. My book has been translated into Russian 4 times. I have 200,000 Russian readers. And 4½ in Germany. Does that make me a German writer? I’d say of those 4½, 2½ are Russian Jews anyway.

I don’t know how things are going to go on. I think I’ll be back at least once, for practicalities. But I’m a different person, and it won’t be for long.

Will you ask your wife whether she got our postcard?

Give my regards to Dr. Guttmann,2 who behaved scandalously badly here—to me as well.

Regards to the great Sonnemann.3

Don’t go anywhere yet, and don’t talk about it either. I hear a schoolboyish eagerness has come over Otten.

I shake your hand and remain

Your old4

Joseph Roth

My wife says make sure to send her best.

1. The reference is to Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), who died in Paris. In 1848 he was suddenly paralyzed, and spent his last eight years in agonies in what he called his Matratzengruft.

2. Guttmann: Bernhard Guttmann (1869–1959). Before 1914 London correspondent of the Frankfurter Zeitung, from 1918 to 1930 head of the Berlin office, then Frankfurt, retired in 1933.

3. Sonnemann: Leopold Sonnemann (1831–1909). Founder and co-proprietor of the Frankfurter Zeitung. JR is being whimsical/facetious.

4. Roth, who will usually sign like this in his remaining years, is just thirty years old, younger than Jesus Christ and Alexander the Great.

17. To Benno Reifenberg

Lyon, 25 July [1925]

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

thank you so much for your letter. With the same post I’m sending a feuilleton to the office, entitled “On the Road in France”1—it’s your title, and I’ve borrowed it—hope you don’t mind. I’m putting these business things in a personal letter, because I can’t trust the post, and I always worry a letter to a German official address wouldn’t get there.2 Please drop me a line at the Hotel de la place de l’Odeon, where they’re keeping my mail for me, just to confirm its safe arrival.

Splendid is such an overused word, but if you were here, you’d understand why I had to reach for it. Lyon is splendid in the old way, majestic and lovely, but without pomp. The Rhone is an old wide river but frisky as a stream. It doesn’t know the meaning of the word gravity, it’s a French river. I walk through the streets of the town, and the country roads about—everywhere you see the Roman flowing into the Catholic, and you see (what you must never write!) the continuation of something archaic and heathen that has found a form for itself in Catholicism, but still exists.

The people are wonderful, very open, mild, with lovely irony, the women terribly delicate, always young, always naked, a lot of Oriental blood, Negro mixed race, the middle classes quieter than in Germany, politically on the left, the men practically as well dressed as the women in Paris. The women still better, silk everywhere, wonderfully adaptable material, soft, coarse, simple, imposing—all silk.

I kiss your wife’s hand, and shake yours. I must say, Paris felt a little empty after you went, your old

Roth

Hug your little boy for me. He must learn French. It will make a European of him.

1. “On the Road in France”: this became Roth’s series of articles in the Frankfurter Zeitung “In the South of France,” which ran from 8 September to 14 November 1925, and was to have been reworked into a book called “The White Cities.” See letter no. 19. See Report from a Parisian Paradise (W. W. Norton, 2003).

2. wouldn’t get there: a habitual anxiety of JR’s. Then again, we are just seven years after the end of World War I, and the bad atmosphere between Germany and France lasted into the 1950s and beyond. Cf. de Gaulle’s dictum that he liked Germany so much, he preferred there to be two of them.

18. To Benno Reifenberg

Avignon, 1 August [1925]

My dear Mr. Reifenberg,

I’d like in this letter to tell you about my great good fortune, only I have such a fear that my pieces aren’t reaching you. It’s a sort of illness, of course, but it threatens to make me sterile, and that’s my excuse in perpetrating such a breach of decorum as to ask you in a personal letter to send me confirmation at the Hotel de l’Odeon that you have safely received the 6 or 7 feuilletons from France. My mail is being forwarded to me.

Even as I write this, I’m unsure whether you will get it. But even if you don’t, I still hope you will somehow sense that I am enjoying—seems wrong, quaking, yearning, crying—the best days of my life. I shall never be able to describe what has been vouchsafed to me here. You will probably best assess the scale of my good fortune by the way I see how small and powerless I am, and yet seem to live thousandfold. I love the rooftops, the stray dogs that run around the streets, the cats, the wonderful tramps with their red leather complexions and young eyes, the women who are so terribly thin, with long legs and bony shoulders and yellow skin, the child beggars, the mix of Saracen, French, Celtic, German, Roman, Spanish, Jewish, and Greek. I am at home in the Palace of the Popes, all the beggars live in the most wonderful castles, I should like to be a beggar and sleep in its doorways. Everything we do in Germany is so stupid! So pointless! So sad! Come to me in Avignon, and I promise you you’ll never set another article of mine. I’m learning French poems by heart for the fun of it. Kiss your wife’s hand, greet your son from me in a way he’ll understand, and write a personal letter to your old

Joseph Roth

19. To Benno Reifenberg

Marseille, Hotel Beauvau
rue Beauvau, 18 August [1925]

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

I am making one last effort to find out whether I haven’t sent 6–7 feuilletons to the FZ for absolutely nothing, and haven’t written a further 3, which I’m not sending until I get a reply from you or the board. You know as a rule I couldn’t care less what they do with my stuff. But one thing I cannot be indifferent to is if all reports of a journey whose fruits are a moral victory for me, disappear without trace. I don’t know if it’s the post that is to blame, but I’m presuming I must have breached one of the unwritten Hindenburg laws that even decent people now follow in Germany, from what I hear. Perhaps an infraction of tone, a word, a suggestion, who knows. Anyway, I want to know. If so, then continuing this journey makes no sense—because I can’t deal with events in Germany, perhaps I’m not equal to the politics of the newspaper either. I can’t change my tone. Maybe the newspaper would like to be rid of me—well, fine by me. I can understand that there’s no wish to put up incendiaries in a burning house.1

I have material for a beautiful volume with the title “The White Cities”2 for the book-publishing arm. But I don’t know whether the house will still print books that make a sound like mine. I understand the air has become fairly unbreathable in Germany. That fact, combined with the circumstance that you’re not printing anything of mine, prompts me to address to you these admittedly somewhat bitter, but personally beholden lines—and address them to your private address, so as to put off for the moment a needless public kerfuffle.

I intend to wait here until I get word from you.

Till that time, I remain your—and your wife’s—old

Joseph Roth

1. The office wired JR back, “No pink elephants, all articles arrived safely, write just exactly what you want, pay no regard to anything.”

2. “The White Cities”: which sadly never came out in that form, though the revised sequence of pieces, some of Roth’s finest, happiest, and most boisterous writing, is included in Report from a Parisian Paradise.

20. To Bernard von Brentano

Marseille, 22 August 1925

My dear friend,

I’ve received one typed letter here, and another rather hasty one. A third therefore seems to have gotten lost.

If I can begin by setting your mind at ease regarding our relationship: your income doesn’t stand between us, rather it connects us. A relationship between two people isn’t based on bread, but it remains important that both should have enough to eat. Hunger trumps sentiment. It’s important that neither of us should starve. That’s why I raised the matter, and that’s why I mentioned you to Reifenberg and Simon.1 I think you’re over the worst. I think I’m headed straight for it.

I have sent the FZ 7 articles. So far as I know, not one of them has appeared. I think I can no longer hit the democratic tone. In every line of mine the republic gets slapped around—whatever I’m writing about. The paper is cowardly. It won’t print my articles, and it won’t tell me why. I think its behavior is immoral. I wrote to Reifenberg to say so. If the publisher has the courage of his convictions, he will give me the boot. Then I will be free, as I was for twenty years of my life. I’ll go to Mexico. If he wants to be a coward, then I’ll demand that he pay me properly for his cowardice. If he doesn’t publish me, I want to see money. And even so I’m going to go to Mexico one day, in the not too distant future. I’ve been established for too long. You see: I really don’t care about an income. I don’t care about a bourgeois base. It gets in the way. It makes me ill. I am ill already.

Name and reputation in Germany—what’s the good of that? I can see past the nationality. But not the language. German is a dead language, as dead as late Latin. It’s only spoken by scholars and poets. By Jews. In the Middle Ages a man had power if he wrote in that language. In our democracy today he’s nothing. I can cope with the fact that the Germans are barbarians. But not with my inability to convert them. We’re like missionaries addressing heathens in Latin, to convert them. Futile endeavor.

To move from proletarian to human is easily said. But what if I’m only having my first experience of human beings now, at the ripe old age of 31? What if I met my first humans here in France? Germany is populated by geniuses and murderers (half animals). Humans begin at Aix. I would have to live and study for another twenty years before I could write about humans. And even then I wouldn’t be sure it was possible to do it in German.

Tomorrow the Socialist Congress begins here. I have spoken to acquaintances from Berlin and Vienna. It’s a terrible thing to see those people in this setting. The sun shows how much dust there is on them. They have landed here, like the Lombards a thousand years ago. With Schiller collars! With briefcases! With umbrellas! With fat flat-footed wives! And hatless! They sweat. They smell. They drink beer. They are noisier than the many Orientals who make a deafening noise here in the port city. Social Democrats always look German. Even when they’re technically Lithuanians. Because the type is native to Germany: honest, hardworking, beer-bibbing, world-improving. A socialist and a democrat. “Justice!” Hope for evolution. German through and through. The aspiration of the German woman to march through a busy life on flat heels is already halfway to socialism. They all carry on as though they had to determine world history in the next decade. They have come together to fight for Ibsenite ideals. Not knowing how antiquated those are. I saw Friedrich Adler,2 my great compatriot. A tyrannicide on his uppers. No pistol in his briefcase any more. Features shaped from the mealy dough of humanity. The monarchies are dead—here are people with nothing left to slay. They haven’t a chance against industry.

I have visited so many towns in Provence, I could write a book about them: “The White Cities.” But do I know if I still need to write it? It’ll be settled one way or another in the first half of September. Write to me in Paris.

Regards to your wife. Mine is in bed with a fever. Brought on by the climate, obviously. I’m just off to spend the night in the old port. That’s the world I feel really at home in. My maternal forefathers live there. We’re all kin there. Every onion seller is my uncle.

Your friend

Joseph Roth

1. Simon: Heinrich Simon (born in Berlin in 1880, robbed and murdered in 1941 in Washington, D.C.), son-in-law of Leopold Sonnemann, the founder of the FZ, on the board from 1906, co-owner from 1919. Went into exile in 1934, first to Palestine, where he co-founded an orchestra with Toscanini, then the United States.

2. Friedrich Adler (1879–1960), son of the Austrian Socialist leader Viktor Adler. In 1916 he made an attempt on the life of the Austrian prime minister Count Friedrich Stürgkh, was condemned to death, and pardoned in 1918; secretary of the Second International.

21. To Benno Reifenberg

Hotel Beauvau, Marseille
26 August [1925]

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

you are much too zealous in your self-accusations. It’s wrong to think you should have known how nervous I am. No one can know about the level of my agitation—constant and powerful—about everything under the sun. I am never at ease. Of course I exaggerate. When I write in that vein, you shouldn’t take it seriously.

For all that, I’m grateful for your letter. I sent off three feuilletons today. Not everything in them is the way it ought to be. But they are entirely honest, I think that will come across. I have seen a bullfight for the first time in my life. If you’ve never seen anything like that, then you can have no conception of the gruesomeness of it. I know of no French writer who has written about—much less against—these Provençal bullfights. Not Daudet, not Mistral either, to the best of my knowledge. I think they’d be ashamed, and they’re scared. They’re happy to write about the wind, the sky, the people, the riders, the women. Tell me why a great writer isn’t duty bound to accuse his country instead of praising it. They all write as though they wanted their personal monument. And I’m not just talking about their relation to the patrie, but to humanity, to society, to every manifestation of life. These writers are all so appallingly affirmative. They reinforce their readers in their bourgeois—i.e., antiquated—attitudes, instead of destroying as many of them as possible. They themselves are nothing but superbourgeois. It’s perfectly OK for a little burgomaster to put up a statue to a great writer from time to time. Next to the statue of the little burgomaster. Perfectly OK for the older daughter to play Schubert on the piano. Schubert composed for her.

I was depressed to hear of Willo Uhl’s1 death. He was the first person I met in Frankfurt 3 years ago, and I’m fond of his children. I got a couple of recent editions of the paper. There were only two decent feuilletons: Rudolf Schneider on “heroes” and Willo’s obituary. He was such a good and cheerful goy, he stood between the sentimental Jews and the awkward ones on the board, and he was the very opposite of German democracy. It’s too bad he’s dead. He could never have made 60, but 45 is maybe ten years too early. What did he die of?

Slap in the middle of my lovely time in Marseille is the Social Democratic Congress. 200 Germans, 100 Austrians. The latter a nasty perversion of Germans. The Austrians look like Germans who have understood nothing. As vile as a Prussian is when he’s taking his pleasure, that’s how ghastly the Austrian is all his life. Degenerate boches.

Not that the real ones are any better. A second wave of Lombards. This time toting briefcases and sporting Schiller collars. Fat wives, heelless sandals, perms, hatless. Jews who aren’t Jews, because they have taken up the cudgels for some foreign proletariat; bourgeois who aren’t bourgeois, because they’re fighting for a foreign class. Continually steaming with activity and talk. The conference extended into the evening in the café, big groups and long tables, all to the horror of the waiters and the exotic foreigners of whom there are so many here. Nothing is so exotic as a German. No group is more eye-catching. But the Germans are social democrats to beat the band. If you don’t like Germans, you won’t like social democrats either. Half citizens, half politicians, half minds, moderate beer drinkers. Good old Stahl is here. He doesn’t have a clue about the true nature of this party of toothless dragons. He still gets excited about congresses. I’ve seen Friedrich Adler. No pistol in his briefcase any more, just checklists. Face gone flabby like dough. Once upon a time he shot Stürgkh. Beginning of the end for the monarchy. When I see Adler today, I understand Stürgkh was a martyr. Because his killer is the secretary of the Second International. They should have hanged him. One shouldn’t let heroes live.

Not one of these representatives of the proletariat goes to the old harbor quarter as I, a so-called bourgeois intellectual, do. No one threatens me. They would quite rightly beat their brains out. Eck-Troll is here. Do you know him? A queer sort of idiot. He sits in a bar for three hours, and is fleeced, and they compliment him on his French, and afterwards he tells me he has done some wonderful “studies.” He pulls a photograph from his wallet: wife and child. He shows the photo to the objects of his studies. A German journalist on the job. Stahl says: Come with me to the harbor quarter! Shall I take a pistol? What a fighter. Shame there wasn’t a cinema handy.

If you think of bluing laundry, you’ll have a sense of how blue the sea is here. The sky, on the other hand, is as pale as a sheet of paper.

There are 700 vessels in the port. I’ve half a mind to suddenly take one of them. My wife cries every day, if it weren’t for her, I’d be long gone. It’s the first time I’ve had a feeling for the presence of my wife. It’s only in a port that you know you’re married.

I had whooping cough as a grown-up as well. Look after yourself. The consequence is often swollen glands, as with me, and mumps, which is unpleasant, if harmless. Regards to mother and son. Have a look at the clipping from Le Matin2 enclosed. I give you my hands.

I remain your old

Joseph Roth

I can’t permit this letter to go without the following.

Last night they played L’Arlésienne at the opera. As in Paris, when you get a ticket, you get your “location” to go with it. As a result, no one finds his seat, because three-quarters of the audience have two. The foldaway seats are all full. The aisles are stuffed with people. Everyone is wandering about. Three ancient usherettes have been driven demented. But the people aren’t the least bit bothered. While they’re looking around, they all have smiles on their faces.

The music starts, and the foldaway seats keep clacking up and down. People are yelling. Music is a bit like sweets. A component of an evening in the theater. Music is metaphysical, and the southern Frenchman doesn’t get it. The gorgeous women are loathsome, because they won’t shut up. The musicians don’t care about the noise. They play. When there’s a quiet passage, the audience thinks it’s over, and they go wild.

The musicians go on playing through the interval, all the while they’re hammering at the set behind the curtain. The whole theater is like a country fair. Complete strangers start to tell me their life story, because they’re bored with the music. The actors are unbelievably hammy. They speak their lines in a kind of graveyard whisper. People laugh themselves silly. Which doesn’t prevent them from applauding once a speech is over. The desperate hero, resolved to take his own life, exits triumphantly, arm aloft.

Doors open and shut all the time. People pop out for a smoke. Come back, clacking of chairs. Squeaking of benches. Laughter of women. Rustling of paper.

You can’t imagine the lack of respect of the French. They obviously can’t understand that art is a form of reality. If you told them a fairy tale, I don’t think they would understand it. I should like to know how French children behave during fairy tales.

The Viennese, who are of course besotted with theater and music, turned up in their droves. They thought the continual hubbub was somehow accidental, and kept going Sssh! For two whole acts. The locals laughed at them. Eventually the Germans gave up. Halfway through the act, all the French moved forward and took their empty seats.

Every act is an interval. The whole performance is interval. The French roll around at a tragedy the way we do at a comic routine. They haven’t the least idea of art. The Germans at least show respect. It would have been good to have the Berlin police to keep order in the theater yesterday.

Inevitably, the Germans and the French are going to intermarry. They are both desperately short of what the other have.

1. Willo Uhl (1880–1925), feuilleton editor on the Frankfurter Zeitung since 1913.

2. Le Matin, conservative French newspaper.

22. To Benno Reifenberg

Hotel Beauvau, Marseille
30 August [1925]

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

I really don’t mean to alarm you with these registered letters. They are the consequence of my morbid fear of things getting lost in the mail. I’m sure their content is in no relation to the care of their packing. The post makes a lot of money from me. I beg your pardon, and console myself with the fact that the content of this letter can’t be more displeasing to you than the fact of its being registered.

It’s not easy to write this letter. Not least because I find it immoral—tactless at the very least—to burden our personal relationship with matters of business. I don’t want to abuse the fact that I am fond of you (and you, I hope, have a liking for me) to perpetrate the unfairness of leaning on you—influencing is too certain—in your relation to me as an employee. You’ll know what I mean. True, we only know one another through work, and thanks to work. But I refuse to relegate a relationship that has outgrown the professional to the merely professional again. But what else can I do? Should I take my case to a tribunal that a tribunal won’t understand, when I know a human being? That—to my way of seeing—would mean going over your head. There is still the chance that you will preserve the distinction: on the one hand, feuilleton editor, on the other, well-disposed human being. If such a thing should seem necessary to you, I would even ask that you do so. Please don’t show me any sort of private forbearance. You can always give me advice, as if you had nothing to do with the firm.

I’m afraid you probably guess more than you know, and this introduction has been too clear. My stylistic affliction, not my personal one.

My tour will be over in the middle of September. I have enough material for a book. There too, I would like to ask your advice: I should like to write a wholly “subjective” book, in other words something completely objective. The “confession” of a young, resigned, skeptical human being, at an age where he is completely indifferent whether he sees something new to him or not, traveling somewhere. Someone with nothing of the “travel romantic” in him at all. And he sees the last vestiges of Europe, places that are innocent of the ever more apparent Americanization and Bolshevization of our continent. Think of the books of the Romantics. Take away their tools and props, both linguistic and perspectival. Replace them with the tools and props of modern irony and objectivity. Then you have the book I want to write, and feel almost compelled to write. It’s a guide to the soul of its writer, as much as of the country he’s passing through. What do you think of the idea? It’s very creative, more than a novel. I think it’s a form that would be congenial to the house. To put it in a nutshell, in a way that you don’t like, and I always do:

Books with practical occasion elevated into the poetic sphere. Were I the publisher, that would be my motto.

There would be something else as well, which you in the house are quite rightly not keen to see, but which is generally necessary, and in books quite indispensable. That is comparison. The first chapter would be called “The Other Side of the Fence.” But the book would be on far too high a level for it to contain a “critique” of Germany. Say perhaps that the critique would be on so high a level that it would no longer count as such or read like it.

What do you say?

I would like to spend two weeks in Paris, working on this book. I trust you are not party to that German prejudice that a good book cannot be written fast. Fast is the only way I can write well. The Germans write even literary books scientifically. Their feeling is scientific. That’s why they write slowly. The slow working of someone like Flaubert is based on completely different grounds: laziness, namely. You must remember from your schooldays that it’s possible to slog away all day with the greatest laziness inside you.

During those two weeks I would write nothing for you. Then I would come to Frankfurt with my book. And not to deliver the book, but to talk to you about the coming months.

Principally about money. It matters less to me than to the publisher. Three months are up, in the course of which I should have been paid 900 marks, 300 as expenses. It might have been more “sensible” not to mention it, but it would have been craven. Frankly I am too proud to behave in such a way. Had I been in Berlin now, I would probably have called for a raise because of the inflation, even though that too is craven, and disgusting moreover. I am not in Germany now. (I almost said thank God.) And, as you know, I don’t want to go back there this year.

I see three possibilities:

1. Either the firm demands my resignation and I offer it,

2. or it gives me leave to stay,

3. or I don’t offer my resignation, and the ball is back in their court, whether I starve as an even more occasional contributor, or manage to go on living, as I have lived the past 20 years. You know I don’t demand a steady income. Even so, the third possibility would be the worst, and it would be truly stupid of me not to try and go for the second.

Nothing ties me. I am not sufficiently sentimental to believe in categories like future, family, etc. etc. But sufficiently sentimental to feel devotion to this house and this newspaper, the last vestiges of the old humanistic culture. I am being straight with you—this is entre nous. I know perfectly well I couldn’t work for any other German paper. I know none would have me. And I still couldn’t go back to Germany. It’s a tragedy, not a passing fancy. Perhaps it’s the height of “patriotism” not to stand to see the tip of a pyramid not formed by a tip, but by a shaved blockhead.1 I can’t stand to see the whole of Germany turning into a Masurian swamp. If I were there now, it would drive me crazy. Everything affects me personally. If they lock up Becher,2 it’s me that’s behind bars. I don’t know what would happen. I’m capable of shooting someone, or throwing bombs, I don’t think I’d last very long. I risk my life when I return to Germany. Physically, I can’t do it.

But do you think I can say that to the newspaper? Ever since his letter to Stahl, I’ve had a great respect for Simon. I would like to talk to him, though it’s probably too personal. He might misunderstand, because he thinks of me as unscrupulous—when all I am is shrewd. I could never tell him. I always worry he doesn’t hear half of what I say. If he has ten minutes for me, eight go on all sorts of other stuff. I worry once I’m in Frankfurt again, sniff the air in the office, which has so little in common with the rest of Germany, that the newspaper can’t see Germany, and that I’ll weaken, and go back to Berlin, and it will finish me off. Berlin is bad for my liver, I have trouble with gall production. Should I not go to Frankfurt?

Can I spend the winter in Paris then? I wouldn’t care to stay any longer than that. Can I go to some third country—Albania, maybe—and write another book? Should I forget about the 100 marks, and so free myself from Germany? Can I go to Moscow? Schotthöfer3 is back. Russia and the East are familiar to me.

I am desperate. I can’t even go to Vienna since the Jewish Socialists have started clamoring for their Anschluss. What are they after? They want Hindenburg? At the time that Emperor Franz Joseph died, I was already a “revolutionary,” but I shed tears for him. I was a one-year volunteer in a Vienna regiment, a so-called elite unit, that stood by the Kapuzinergruft as a guard of honor, and I tell you, I was crying. An epoch was buried. With the Anschluss, a culture will be put in the ground. Every European must be against the Anschluss. And only those mediocre Socialist brains don’t get it. So little difference between German Nationalist and Socialist policies! Between Jew and Christian! The various camps are united by their mediocrity more firmly than by any principle or ideal. Can’t anyone feel that an independent Austria is still a gesture toward a united Europe? Do they want to become a sort of nether Bavaria? More than German reactionaries, I hate that obtuse German efficiency, decency, honesty, the Löbe4 type, the accountant who has found his way into politics. Those people should have remained civil servants. But just because there are no politicians in Germany, the civil servants go into politics, and the idiots occupy the chancelleries, and because the prisons are overcrowded the criminals have moved into the police stations. I can’t go to Germany, I can’t!

I hope you liked my last three articles. If not, please tell me straight out. Someone who writes day and night as I do has no vanity. Nor is it vanity that is unhappy with an “appendix” to my essays. It’s the formal conscience of a journalist. There is such a thing as a typographical conscience. It insists on a preamble and won’t stand for an afterword. That would have to be in a different typeface. The newspaper is insufficiently expressive in that way. There is no smallest type size. I’ve just forgotten the name of it. Petit and leaded petit are too small. Formal technical resources allow for more expression. It’s terribly important for the paper to have a thousand faces; it has a thousand news stories. Congratulations, anyway, on the new masthead and design. Who is it who sets the paper now? The best-looking edition was the one with the French diplomatic démarche. Who set that? I like the layout of the world news as well. If only I could have that column to myself three times a week. With specifications as to layout. Would that be possible?

How are your invalids? Give them my best, I mean it. I remain, come what may, your old Joseph Roth

1. shaved blockhead: an unmistakable limning of Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934), World War I general and then elected president of Germany in 1925 and again in 1932; the man who in January 1933 gave the German chancellorship to Adolf Hitler.

2. Becher: Johannes Becher (1891–1958), poet, playwright, novelist, and member of the Independent Social Democratic Party.

3. Schotthöfer: Fritz Schotthöfer, worked on the Frankfurter Zeitung from 1900. Retired in 1943, died in 1951.

4. Löbe: Paul Löbe (1875–1967), member of the Social Democratic Party.

23. To Bernard von Brentano

Paris, 11 September [1925]

Dear friend,

I got your two letters before I left. I’ve been in Paris again since yesterday. I’m working very hard, starting my travel book tomorrow, and hoping to finish it by the end of the month. Hence just a few lines now. My address is the same. Please tell me right away that you’re better. I worry about you, not just for your sake, but because it’s important that decent people remain alive and in good health. My liver’s already packing up. The fools aren’t to remain unsupervised, and in the happy knowledge that the good people are getting sick and falling away. My relationship with the firm is being decided now. I’ll probably take the finished book with me to Frankfurt.

Write if you must. I imagine you’ll have been paid, in accordance with the snail’s pace of everything in Frankfurt.

Send me a detailed note.

My best to your wife.

Get well.

When is Guttmann back?

Your old

Joseph Roth

24. To Bernard von Brentano

29 November 1925

Dear friend,

let’s start with your affairs:

1. I’ve checked with R., I won’t be able to hear you speak in Offenbach. The paper doesn’t run to that kind of thing.

2. Reifenberg will bring up your 5 mss. with Nassauer.1 There shouldn’t be a problem.

3. Come here, I would be delighted. So would Reifenberg.

4. Your articles will be out soon. The film [piece?] wouldn’t fit in the politics [section?].

As for me, or rather my book,2 I’ve withdrawn it, and offered it to Dietz.3 Thus far—it’s too early still—no word. I wouldn’t have left it with this lot for all the tea in China. R. once remarked it was a pity I’d already sold it. R. apparently upset about the rejection. Upset is about as good as it gets with him. The degree of his upset might have made a difference, but probably not much. I’m still not sure who turned it down, even though I know Dr. Claassen,4 the editor. He’s a little Galician Jewish egghead—with German education, formerly a tutor in Simon’s employ. It’s possible the decision was his. Everything is possible.

I’ve only had one conversation with Simon, which was chilly, almost hostile. He’s depressed that he isn’t allowed to spend any money. It’s very hard for me to get a wage rise put through here. A freeze has been slapped on everything, the atmosphere in the firm is gloomy. I’m unable to suggest any more jaunts, they all cost money. There is as yet no Paris correspondent in place.5 They are so desperate to make economies, they hope to find one who will double as a feuilleton writer, and all for 800 marks. I have half a mind to quit. Through my personal friendship with Nassauer, I might be able to get a few advances that I could earn out later. But I’m not looking for favors. I am looking for practical, material acknowledgment from the firm. But it’s in no position now to treat itself to what it sees as a luxury.

I don’t know what course is more sensible: to sit tight and get out of Germany, or to resign and stay out of Germany in less comfort. The whole FZ looks to me like a microcosm of Germany. My loathing for it is growing all the time. I don’t have a publisher there, I don’t have readers, I don’t have recognition. But nor do I feel pain, because nothing makes me sad there; or disappointment because I have no hopes; or melancholy, because I am just cold and indifferent. It’s snowing here constantly, the world looks like a German bakery, sugar-sweet and sickening. I have nothing to do with the landscape, nothing to do with this sky. Nor anything with the technology, with the paving stones and the construction of the buildings, with the society, with the art. It’s very hard to change anything in the feuilleton. They keep running German nature scenes, they pile up here, and they’re all taken. It’s only really when I’m here that I see how poorly we fit in. I’ve given up the struggle. There’s no point. I just want to finish my Jewish book.6

The German brutality of your chauffeur is no worse than the German mildness of the culture. There’s nothing to choose between them. Cultural Germany lies between Ullstein7 on the one side and the FZ on the other. God punish it!8

We’ll see each other over a glass of wine.

Shall I book you a room?

Kiss your wife’s hand for me.

I remain your

Joseph Roth

Please, if you can, bring me as many of the reviews of me as you can lay hold of. I haven’t looked up Mr. Stuffer yet. Why would I? I only ever get to see Binding.9 Yet more Bindings?

1. Nassauer: Siegfried Nassauer (1868–1940). From 1906 on the board of the parent firm that included the FZ, the Illustriertes Blatt, and the book-publishing firm.

2. My book: the never published “The White Cities.”

3. Dietz: a Berlin press, which published two novellas of JR’s, April and The Blind Mirror, both in 1925 (see Collected Stories).

4. Dr. Claassen: Eugen Claassen (1895–1955), son of a Russian emigrant; not a Jew. Head of the book-publishing firm until 1934, when he started the Goverts Verlag with Henry Goverts, later Claassen and Goverts, and from 1950 the Claassen Verlag.

5. no Paris correspondent in place: and when there was, it wasn’t Roth, to his enormous chagrin.

6. My Jewish book: The Wandering Jews (1927).

7. God punish it: a bold variant on the German World War I refrain Gott strafe England!

8. Ullstein: Berlin “Konzernverlag”—synergetic and avowedly capitalist combination of a book-publishing house with many newspapers and magazines, among them the Vossische Zeitung and the Berliner Zeitung. Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen Nichts Neues—for decades the best-selling book of all time—was published by Ullstein in 1929.

9. Binding: Rudolf Binding (1867–1938), poet and short story writer.

25. To Bernard von Brentano

Frankfurt, 19 December 1925

Dear friend,

don’t waste your time thinking useless and foolish thoughts. Dr. Kracauer1 is a poor wretch. Once every ten years he’s given his head, and is allowed to visit Berlin for a week or just a weekend, but—on account of his speech impediment and his un-European appearance—he’s never allowed to represent the paper abroad. He has a clever and ironical mind with no imagination, but in spite of so much understanding he remains naïvely likable. Help him to the best of your ability, take him under your wing, and you’ll be able to learn a lot from him. I myself am always learning from him, I just muster the patience to wait for half an hour while he stammers out his pearls of wisdom. It’s worth it, believe me.

You say something about some woman or other you claim to be in love with. This condition is known to be delusory, and ends in bed, just as pink elephants go away when you have a drink. Just call a spade a spade and I’ll understand you better. If you want to sleep with her, don’t come telling me you’re in love with her. I might have believed it from Clemens Brentano, but not from Bernard. That’s “literature”—i.e., unworthy of a writer. You must never take a woman as seriously as, say, mounting debts. Only the latter can make us lose a night’s sleep. I am sufficiently old-fashioned as to hold marriage—not that I overestimate that either—in higher regard than “love.” In marriage, coition isn’t the be-all and end-all, rather it’s a whole string of intercourse, which may as much take the form of looks and conversations, as that of so-called physical union. I appreciate that it’s upsetting not to have one’s way with a woman. But a fat man put on a diet by his doctor is much more upset, and with far more substantial reason. If you can unmask your “love” as a minor irritation, your unhappiness will be greatly reduced.

That’s the sort of low rationalist I am.

You say some pleasant and confusing things about my influence on you and your development. Evidently, it’s still insufficiently strong, while you continue to make such tangled confessions. A clear profanity would suit me better. And you as well. It’s not only when one has nothing to say that one should shut up, but also when one is unable to express it clearly. You will never attain artistic perfection unless, at the instant you reach for your pen and paper, you are as sober as if someone had emptied a bucket of cold water over your head. Your job is to communicate, don’t forget. Even your dim semi-lucid states have to be expressed clearly. In Germany they don’t set much store by that. Only the stammerers are great poets in Germany. But you, like me, are a favorite of reason. Remain true to her, and don’t allow yourself to be seduced by the wiles of sweet German pain. You’ll make—fail to make—your way in life, just like me. But you’ll have your satisfaction.

Reifenberg went to Munich today. He’s staying till Wednesday.

Fill a couple of columns with Christmas stuff. Facts, rather than reflections. No preamble. Start in medias res. Let me have them soon, and I’ll be able to get them set, without anyone’s vetting them.

Keep me in mind, not in heart, and don’t go crazy as a result.

Kiss your dear wife’s hand for me.

Your old

Roth

1. Siegfried Kracauer (1899–1966) was on the staff of the Frankfurter Zeitung in Frankfurt and Berlin. Went into exile in 1933 in Paris, from 1941 in New York. Novelist, biographer, film theorist, and historian.

26. To Bernard von Brentano

Frankfurt, 30 December 1925

Dear friend,

thank you very much for your Christmas letter and present. You’ll understand, I waited before writing back. Well, as far as you’re concerned, Reifenberg says you can go whenever you like. I seem to remember your saying you wanted to be back ca. 11 January. There are no obstacles from the board. It’s possible to get an advance from Dr. Geisenheyner.1 Only you haven’t yet let him have the story he’s bought—he mentioned it to me a couple of days ago. Send it to him now, and with an accompanying letter. The best thing is pick up the advance while you’re here. G. is a primitive-sensuous type, your presence, in person,2 will be a big facilitator. Till then you can take out a loan on the money from Frau Sternberg.

There are some strange goings-on here. As far as I’m concerned, I’m going to have to remain here probably till the end of January. I don’t know what I’ll be doing after that either. Maybe I’ll tour a few German cities. Paris is rather doubtful now, it seems. Dewall,3 who’s in charge of foreign affairs here, has proposed Sieburg,4 instead of Reifenberg’s candidate, Lachmann.5 It’s very hush-hush, not even Reifenberg must know that you know. There may be some anti-Semitic feeling against Lachmann from Dewall. There are no other candidates. Basically, Sieburg, who’s not a political journalist by training, would be another writer. Apparently a better writer than he is a character. They still haven’t made up their minds. Anyway, my Paris stint is under threat, because the firm would say, why have more than one feuilletonist, if he can do political reports as well. I told Reifenberg I wasn’t going to stand idly by while they pulled the rug out from under my feet. He thought I ought to go on the road and do some work. But of course I am far too worried to leave the building, now there’s all these rumors flying around. For the first time in his life Nassauer’s ill. I heard from an indiscreet bank employee that he, Nassauer, applied for a loan, and was turned down. For the first time in its life, the FZ wants to borrow money, and isn’t able to. I see in that the malice of the banks, trying to teach an independent paper a lesson. The paper’s teetering on the brink. Should it move to the right? Throw in its lot with the hopeless Social Democrats? Democracy has vanished in a puff of smoke. Should it woo subscribers? Remain aloof, and let the subscribers come by themselves? The board is naïve, the editors rudderless. The last man, Naphtali6 is leaving, and so is another young person, Dr. Marschek, and Feiler7 wants to take his hat as well. They are the best rats this ship has to offer. Is it doomed to sink? Looks like it.

That’s why there was no Christmas bonus. The company no longer turns a profit. It doesn’t sell. No reason to call it names. The BT8 can afford more than a fortnight’s salary, because it’s already been sold. Whereas we sell our own freedom in return for our bonuses—indirectly, of course.

With things as they are, it’s bad if I stay, bad if I go. Then there’s the fact that Reifenberg needs someone to hold his hand here. He’s not quite a match for Diebold.9 Geck10 and Diebold annoy him, and in the end he’s a rather haughty passive character, whose passivity may well win out, but only at the end of ten years. I wish we could just both leave. Think about it. This place lacks control and direction. I have no idea how that could be arranged. I really don’t want to spend half my time in Berlin. All I know is that someone needs to be sitting with Reifenberg in his office, otherwise things will get worse. I’ve suggested guest writers as star turns. But with the stodginess of this outfit, there’s no sense in even waiting for an answer. We could think of a plan and put it into effect by ourselves. If you were to turn up here one day instead of me, no one would say a thing. While everything’s in the balance, it’s still possible to get things done.

But I’m afraid it won’t be like that forever, and once Guttmann’s regiment has taken over, nothing will be possible any more. He’s just hired another sergeant major. Gradually he’s taking over the building. Nassauer’s powers of attorney have been limited, and Lasswitz11 is turning into a chief under one’s very eyes. Today he’s still glad of a smile and a friendly word from me, but who knows if that’ll still be true the day after tomorrow? He complained to me about your standoffishness. I told him distinguished people were like that, and to prove it to him, I went in the next day to see Nassauer, who was out—as I knew he would be—and I was even more standoffish to him than you are, and told him grand people were painfully inhibited in matters of money, and that it took years of friendship to gain their trust. So he gets the picture, and I’m afraid next time you see him, he’ll probably be all over you.

I keep a thousand ears pinned to the ground, I have confidants in every camp, and I’m noiseless as an Indian. Dr. Simon is in Berlin now, if you should run into him, treat him nicely.

Come soon, and kiss the hand of your dear wife.

I remain your old

Roth

1. Dr. Max Geisenheyner worked on the travel section of the FZ.

2. your presence, in person: a recurring idea with JR in these letters, where he connects it with the Austrian character. (See, for instance, no. 276.) I fancy it is just as true of JR, personally.

3. Wolf von Dewall (1882–1959) joined the staff of the FZ in 1916, correspondent in London and Ankara; after the war freelance journalist in Stuttgart.

4. Friedrich Sieburg (1893–1964), author, poet, essayist, translator. Correspondent for the FZ from 1923 to 1942. After 1942 press attaché in Paris for the Nazi envoy Abetz. From 1948 to 1955 co-editor of the magazine Die Gegenwart; after 1956, literary editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It was probably the greatest disappointment of JR’s life that he was passed over for the Paris job in favor of Sieburg in 1925–26.

5. Kurt Lachmann, journalist. Went into exile in 1933. After the war, was a correspondent for U.S. News & World Report in Bonn.

6. Fritz Naphtali (1888–1961), business editor of the FZ from 1921 to 1927.

7. Artur Feiler (1879–1943), business editor from 1903 to 1909, domestic political editor from 1910 to 1930.

8. BT: the Berliner Tageblatt.

9. Dr. Bernhard Diebold (1886–1945), theater critic for the FZ, who in 1934 returned to his native Switzerland.

10. Dr. Rudolf Geck (d. 1936), feuilleton editor on the FZ; at the paper since 1898. Credited with first having brought JR to the FZ.

11. Erich Lasswitz (1880–1959), technical director and writer for the FZ from 1918 to 1943. Roth sometimes strikes one as the only Indian, among this collective of chiefs, and less able to make his way than he proudly/overweeningly thinks.

27. To Bernard von Brentano

[undated]

Dear friend,

you fell for the fool’s mate, because you were working on the false assumption that the Schmiede was going to be even more stupid than it actually was. I read the carbon of your letter, there’s nothing in it but my address. You shouldn’t have even started talking to those idiots. Now it’s finished. We’ll have to just let them write. I don’t care. I’m past the stage where I would give them anything of mine—even if it was the last thing I wrote in German. Please tell me, more precisely, what your conversation with them was. That’s not a reproach to you, but a lesson. You haven’t yet got that Jewish cunning, with which it’s possible to keep an entire country at bay. But you might need to have it one day. Above all, learn to speak less.

If you’re doing badly, so am I. I want to send my wife to Paris, while I go on my German tour. I’m going to be spending some 3 or 4 weeks in the Ruhrgebiet,1 and probably go to Paris once that’s done. I’m skint. I can’t get by, never mind how much I earn. Germany is making me ill. Every day I feel more hatred, and I could choke on my own contempt. Even the language is loathsome to me. A country’s provinces give it away like nothing else. The fake elegance, the loud voices, the yahoos, the silence, the respect, the impertinence. There is a sort of unfreedom in these people that is worse than the subordination in front of a sergeant major. I understand that the rest of Germany kowtows to Prussia. It has one method: to distract people from their lack of inner freedom by external impositions. The way you make your toothache better by slapping your face.

I saw Dr. Simon. We concluded a sort of truce. He admitted he was slightly afraid or wary of me. I suspect that hasn’t entirely vanished. We were somewhat reconciled. We talked about your brother.2 He made a very good impression, albeit still a “Catholic-Jesuitical” one. Simon feels a degree of suspicion of him too. Suspicion will always accompany admiration in him. I understand it very well, and let it pass, having encountered it a thousand times myself.

My dear friend, I’m becoming more and more solitary.3 More manifest in the details of life, in matters of taste, food, clothing, restaurants, and pleasures than in questions of principle or philosophy. Sometimes I catch an echo of it from Reifenberg. Even my wife is withdrawing from me, for all her love. She is normal, and I am what you’d have to call insane. She doesn’t react as I do, with vehemence, with trembling, she’s less sensitive to atmosphere, she is sensible and straightforward. Anything and everything is capable of provoking me. The conversation at another table, a look, a dress, a walk. It’s really not “normal.” I’m afraid I’m going to have to forswear society, and break off all ties. I no longer believe anything I’m told. I see through a magnifying glass. I peel the skins off people and things to see their hidden secrets—after that, you really can’t believe anything. I know, before the object of my scrutiny knows, how it will adapt, how it will evolve, what it will do next. It might change utterly. But my knowledge of it is such that it will do exactly what I think it will do. If it occurs to me that someone will do something vicious or low, he goes and does it. I am becoming dangerous to ordinary decent people because of my knowledge of them.

It makes for an atrocious life. It precludes all of love and most of friendship. My mistrust kills all warmth, as bleach kills most germs. I no longer understand the forms of human intercourse. A harmless conversation chokes me. I am incapable of speaking an innocent word. I don’t understand how people utter banalities. How they manage to sing. How they manage to play charades. If only the traditional forms still applied! But the new informality in Germany kills everything. I can’t participate. All I can do is talk very cleverly with other very clever people. I am starting to hate decency, where—as is so often the case—it’s paired with limited intelligence. The merely decent are beginning to hate me back. It can’t go on. It can’t go on.

My novel is coming along.

I got an invitation to join Döblin’s group.4 I will accept it in a noncommittal way, out of politeness. I don’t want any ties to German writers. Not one of them feels as radically as I do. Read my essay on Döblin. I think it will offend him. I can’t help it. Ask him about it sometime.

Say hello to Dr. Simon. I wrote to Guttmann yesterday.

Write me at the office. I am leaving this week. If I get enough money, I’ll look you up in Berlin. Otherwise I’ll be there in about three weeks.

Your old friend

I’m off.

1. Ruhrgebiet: the industrial sector in western Germany. From 1923 to 1925, it was under the occupation of the French, exasperated by the German nonpayment of reparations (this was during the time of the inflation). Roth wrote a series of reportages from there. See also no. 29.

2. brother: Heinrich von Brentano (1904–1964). German foreign minister from 1955 to 1961.

3. more and more solitary: cf. the dangerously detached Franz Tunda, the hero of Roth’s 1927 novel, Flight Without End, which is also the novel that is described as “coming along.”

4. group: the “Gruppe 1925,” a Marxist discussion club, whose secretary was Rudolf Walter Leonhard, and whose members included Johannes R. Becher, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Ehrenstein, Egon Erwin Kisch, Kurt Tucholsky, and Alfred Döblin. Not a natural or congenial habitat for Roth.

28. To Bernard von Brentano

[undated]

Dear friend,

thank you so much for your letter. I wish you would always write with such detail and clarity. Today I got your piece on the blown-up building. It’s not outstanding, but it is journalism. In such pieces I miss information. The number of workers, the buildings on either side, the neighborhood and its social setting.

Your visit to Frankfurt will probably encounter difficulties. I haven’t discussed it with Reifenberg yet.

Nor can I tell you whether I’m coming to Berlin or not.

I want to turn down your suggestion regarding the Modeblatt. I have no desire to take on the goodness of your mother and your family for an organ I’ve never even seen. I don’t think it’s quite right. Not even with your permission. The sort of journalism that makes profit (“tacheles”) from a chance personal relationship seems dubious to me. There is only one person who can take this thing on, whether for the FZ or the Modeblatt, which is you. I don’t understand why you didn’t do it long ago anyway.

From your wife’s letter I see that Landau did come in useful. In matters of health and money, prominent Jews are always a good idea. Jewish doctors are a sort of atonement for the crucifixion.

Will you tell me what Florath is up to.

Call Reifenberg about Diebold.

Neither with Reifenberg nor anywhere else in the Lothar1 establishment did I come upon any favor for the idea of your visit. It wouldn’t greatly matter anyway. I’ve been there, and heard a lot. The party was arranged for and partly by Simon. It was my first experience of the Frankfurt haute volée. Seven counts were of the company, Unruh2 drank champagne in an exclusive circle. Jewish and Christian bankers behaved abominably. Their wives were whores manquées, dreadful informality for all their efforts to stay among themselves and in costume. Panic at the approach of any outsiders. A fancy dress ball where everyone pretended not to know one another, and where all those who wanted to, rapidly got acquainted. A few didn’t—and remained tiddly ridiculous outsiders. I was the only one with more pride than the counts and bankers. I sat there silently. Simon crept around me, my look drove him away, he saw bombs ticking in my eyes. A stench of living bourgeois corpses.3 For at least a day Simon hated me. If our relationship takes account of this development, I will leave the paper.

No, my dear Brentano, this isn’t a society where I want to be known and read. The aristocracy is visibly subservient to industry, industry to the banks, and turn about. It’s a world dying of ugliness. If the Andrä society in Berlin is anything like that, I want no part of it. I’m afraid I’m right. These people will cling to power for another 5 years. Their manners gave them power over the proletariat. Now they themselves are unmannerly plebeians. Proles have better taste.

As of yesterday my hatred of the country and its rulers has grown considerably. I am bound to leave it.

Your old

Roth

Kiss your wife’s hand. Get well!

1. Lothar: Hans Lothar, relative of Heinrich Simon’s, working on the FZ.

2. Unruh: Fritz von Unruh (1885–1970), playwright, novelist, essayist. Pacifist after World War I. Went to live in France and Italy in 1932, in New York from 1940. Wrote an autobiography, The General’s Son, in 1957.

3. living bourgeois corpses: see the ferocious party scene in Flight Without End, based on such experiences. JR in those days was like an open knife, a mixture of prophet, revolutionary, and sociopath.

29. To Bernard von Brentano

Kaiserhof, Essen, 11 February 1926

Dear friend,

your letter of the 6th was forwarded to me here today. By now you will have spoken with Reifenberg, and you will know my views on editing. But just in case, let me say again: it goes against the grain of journalism to forbid an editor to make cuts. Since I fought for this principle the whole time I was in Frankfurt, I can’t very well turn around and say you shouldn’t be cut. (It wouldn’t do much for you either.) Not only is it right to cut and to make changes, I see it almost as an imperative. Of the 40-odd pieces I’ve written, maybe ten appeared “unshorn.” You are no soloist, you’re a choir member. You toe the line. In questions of detail, you can argue the toss if you like. But in principle you are duty bound to submit. Perhaps, with your jealous love of every single line you write, you will become a brilliant poet, but you’ll never make a half-decent journalist. The subject of your article is sacred to you. Your article is means to an end. Your subject and you, the writer, are more important than your article. As much more as you are more than the air you breathe out. As far as your latest piece is concerned, it wasn’t any good. Kracauer cut it. He was right to. It was loose, inorganic, the description of a path, but not the path itself. You have good ideas, good images, good turns of phrase. But they don’t grow together. Your pieces are chain links without any coherence. Read French feuilletons, read Heine’s prose. Learn about natural transitions. Your spade was the best piece of yours I’ve read. In poems, atmosphere and rhythm fuse loose things together. In so-called prose, the context must make the atmosphere.

My wife is in Paris, Hotel de la place de l’Odéon. I’m about to go on the road for a few weeks. With no money. It’s terrible to set off in such a state, I’m desperate, I can’t forsake my expensive habits, and the newspaper is economizing, and economizing horribly. It’s no fun any more, I haven’t even had an advance for March, I have no contract, I am inconsolable.

It’s not pretty in the Ruhr, Nationalist like everywhere, or still worse, in Cologne. Everything is red-white-and-black, all the cinemas are showing Nationalist trash, the “black shame”1 is proclaimed on every street corner, “the enemy is gone,” our culture is under arms.

Tell Dr. Guttmann, to whom I send regards, I’ve written to him already.

Write to me at my old Parisian address, or at the newspaper, it’ll be forwarded to me either way.

Don’t take my strictures amiss. You are the only young person I have any regard for, don’t go fishing for compliments from the clientele at Schwannecke’s,2 you shouldn’t trust compliments anyway. If you don’t live up to your own standards, no amount of compliments will help. Don’t write letters in your initial excitement. Leave it for 24 hours, if you’re still excited.

I didn’t write to Döblin, who’s not the president of the association, but to Rudolf Leonhard, who was responsible for inviting me. Between ourselves, it’s no advantage to belong to such a club. There are people in it I despise. I told Leonhard that I wondered if I could praise an association whose task it was to get all decent people to emigrate. The state is not just Gessler’s3 and Stresemann’s4 and Gerhart Hauptmann’s,5 but also Heinrich Eduard Jacob’s,6 Alfred Kerr’s,7 and Rowohlt’s,8 and there’s nothing in it for us.

Let’s meet up when I have money again. Keep me posted.

Your old

Joseph Roth

1. “black shame”: an allusion to the Nationalist campaign against the African soldiers who were a prominent part of the French occupying force in Germany left of the Rhine.

2. Schwannecke’s: rather preening literary café in Berlin in the 1920s, just off the Kurfürstendamm. See JR’s feuilleton “At Schwannecke’s,” in What I Saw.

3. Otto Gessler (1875–1955), German defense minister from 1920 to 1928.

4. Dr. Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929). German chancellor in 1923, foreign minister from 1923 to 1929. Responsible for the Locarno treaties in 1925, and shared the Nobel Peace Prize in the following year.

5. Gerhart Hauptmann (1862–1946), playwright, novelist, essayist. It seems the first three names here meet with Roth’s approval—or at any rate are figures of substance—and the second three not.

6. Heinrich Eduard Jacob (1889–1967), writer, biographer, essayist.

7. Alfred Kerr (1867–1948), the other well-known theater critic of the day (with Ihering).

8. Rowohlt: Ernst Rowohlt (1887–1960), founder of the publishing house bearing his name; it was situated first in Berlin, and after the war in Hamburg.

30. To Benno Reifenberg

Paris, 29 March 1926

Dear friend,

at last, spring has come to France, and our meteorological soothsayer, the abbé Gabriel, is said to have predicted fine weather for Easter. Come and visit, there are plenty of things we can do! We can take the boat to Sèvres, past the irrigated fields of Asnières, and Sèvres-Ville d’Avray, where Gambetta died and Balzac lived. We can visit the grand, famous, and now verdant park at St. Cloud, more of an aristocratic wood, really, stand on the plateau from where one can look over the whole of Paris, the cheerful squirming of its chimneys, and the stately, dignified, and happy dance of its towers. Would you like to go to Versailles, Malmaison, St. Germain? Would you like to see the old cathedral of St. Denis? Wherever you go, you will find the earth drenched with history, a cultivated nature that, with proud grace, has yielded to human wishes; humane landscapes, endowed with common sense; paths that seem to know themselves where they are going; hills that seem to know their own height; valleys that can dally with you.

There will be many people too. Charabancs take inquisitive Englishmen all around the outskirts of Paris, travelers of the kind we are familiar with, who need to feel they have understood something to enjoy it, and can’t in any case enjoy it without taking a photograph of it. It might be an idea, therefore, to head out to Normandy, by way of Rouen. It’s really not far! If we’re at the St. Lazare Station at ten o’clock on Good Friday morning, we can lunch in Rouen at noon, with a view of the cathedral, the lean singing central tower of Rouen Cathedral, the old medieval city, whose bells are very powerful and very distant, and whose streets and lanes are of a bright and cheerful narrowness, of the sort one finds only in French towns.

And two hours after that, we’d find ourselves in Le Havre, the second-biggest port in France. We’d tour the old harbor together, where the little bars are: where the carousels turn, and the dance halls are packed, and where you can win—or lose—a lot of money. Then we can go on a walking tour of Normandy. People will stop and stare. Because in this country, no one goes anywhere on foot, even though the roads are as fine and smooth as parquet floors. The livestock will be grazing in the fields. Every hour, we will hear the chimes of Lisieux, Honfleur, and Pont-l’Evèque. By night, the searchlights of Le Havre stroke the dark countryside like silver hands. And always, the song of the sea.

I think we’ll go to Deauville, the very ritzy, still empty, and in any case boring spa town. From there, there’s a direct express to Paris. Four hours.

There, doesn’t that sound good to you? Come, and come soon!1

Your Joseph Roth

1. Reifenberg had this letter printed—see no. 33—in the Easter supplement of the FZ, on April 4, 1926; it is included in Report from a Parisian Paradise.

31. Benno Reifenberg to Joseph Roth

Frankfurter Zeitung, editorial
Frankfurt am Main, 7 April 1926

Dear Mr. Roth,

I have much to thank you for, Le Sourire1 and the American magazine; for your punctual Easter letter which I took personally, even though I went ahead and printed it in the newspaper; for your continuing work on the Ruhrgebiet, and the “private lives of workers”; and now for your reportage from the battlefields. I would put it to you that you change the title from “Don’t Forget the Battlefields” to: St. Quentin, Perronne, La Maisonnette.2 That gives the piece a geographical title that is a continuation of my Champagne. Hermann Wendel is writing on Verdun. In any case, I don’t think the title “Don’t Forget the Battlefields” is a great loss.

Dear Mr. Roth, I won’t have to tell you that your departure from our newspaper is the gravest blow I have experienced in the course of these early years. I was simply counting on you. I need the work of men of my generation with whom I can communicate effortlessly, with whom I share ideas that I have grown up with. I would see it as a defeat if your name were now to appear in Berlin newspapers. I have said as much to the firm, and ask that you believe me when I tell you that the firm shares my view, and is very concerned to reach a solid understanding with you. If you think the suggestion that you go to Italy was a refuge, a pis aller, then you are right inasmuch as the firm is really in a tricky position with you. When they took on Mautner, they did give you a fairly firm guarantee of Paris. Then, through the physical incapacity of Mautner, which emerged only later, it was forced to take on Dr. Sieburg. It’s not altogether that they don’t want to send Dr. Sieburg, a noted feuilletonist, as you yourself concede, together with you to Paris. But the firm wants to keep you on at the newspaper, and your name to appear in it, come what may. Given the pithy way that you write, the dateline or subject matter of your pieces is always a secondary concern. If therefore Italy does not agree with you, I have been asked to put the following proposal to you: the firm is ready to send you as a feuilleton correspondent to Moscow, and is also prepared to send you to Spain for a time. True, we have an elderly correspondent in Spain, but he writes little or nothing any more, and we have little sense of contemporary Spain. This last proposal comes from Mr. Schotthöfer. The proposal relating to Moscow may be more attractive to you. There is, admittedly, the question whether your knowledge of Russian is good enough. You personally, Schotthöfer insists, would not only experience no difficulties, you would be received with great warmth. I still cling to the idea of Italy as the best suggestion. The problem of Mussolini and Fascism is internationally acute, and it will be a question of identifying the national component of Fascism. To date, we have heard far too little from Italy.

I would like to add (and Brentano will bear me out) that Sieburg is very unhappy about the way that he and you have by force of circumstance been turned into rivals. To my mind, Sieburg is very frail, and uncertainty has made him adept. I don’t quite trust him on the surface, but I do truly believe that among the few genuine sentiments he is capable of is the desire to get along with people of your stamp.

I now must ask you to let me know your decision soon. Sieburg starts in Paris on 1 May. It would be ideal if you could keep us supplied with occasional short pieces and news stories throughout April. We are rather too insular, and have nothing about France in the newspaper. Yesterday we ran a report that 350,000 French war veterans demonstrated for Locarno, we should have been able to offer a little background on such a story.

I wish you well, and remain with warm greetings and in expectation of a speedy reply your Reifenberg

1. Le Sourire: a Paris-based humorous paper.

2. St. Quentin, Peronne, Maisonnette: see Report from a Parisian Paradise.

32. To Bernard von Brentano

8 April 1926

Dear friend,

you write me bafflingly unclear and ill-conceived letters. I worry about you. You are in a bad way, I know, Frankfurt and the firm are to blame. But you must be stronger than your surroundings at all times; remember that.

Don’t worry about a hotel or spa. There are plenty of rooms, it’s enough if you write me 4–5 days before you come, no earlier, no later. Most likely you have different standards than I do where hotels are concerned, but you can always move. There are plenty of quiet places on the map, some in Brittany come to mind, which Professor Hensard told me about. Just see that you get here!

As far as my position is concerned, you are entirely mistaken. You think I fear having Sieburg in Paris as a rival, whereas the situation is that the firm is compelling me to leave Paris. They won’t let me stay there. I informed Reifenberg of my decision to stay in Paris, and leave the paper. Now the publisher proposes Italy, Spain, or Moscow, doesn’t seem to be that shaken about my departure. I’m not keen to go to Ullstein, though I could. Stahl would like to have me. I don’t want to surrender to the firm that has treated me badly. I don’t want to turn down Moscow just like that either. I am thinking my position through very carefully.

That, for your information, is how things stand. Mr. Reifenberg doesn’t seem to have told you. I don’t know if he has a reason for keeping his correspondence with me secret, but I don’t think so. I am writing this to put you in the picture. In any case, my trust in this Jewish firm is shaken, and nothing remains but my friendship with Reifenberg. I know he will get old and gray before he achieves anything here, and that he himself has no idea how little he has achieved. I only hope he doesn’t have a bad awakening one of these days. He is anything but careful.

Give him my regards, tell him—which is true—that friendship has compelled me to share this with you, and try to be calmer and not so nervous and fidgety when you next write,

to your old

Roth

33. To Benno Reifenberg

9 April 1926

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

thank you very much for your long letter, which must have been as hard for you to write as mine was for me. I am terribly cast down, I can’t answer you yet, I beg you for around 8–10 days’ grace. To leave you behind in the firm is like leaving a brother on the field. Believe me! You have no idea how much I stand to lose in both personal and career terms if I have to leave Paris.

Change the title of my piece; change the content too, if you like. I came up with the title as a nod to yours. As of and by itself it’s not very good. The article isn’t very good either, by my standards. I have just now written and mailed you a good one, about Paradise.1 I hope you print it soon—or not, after all, what does it matter?

How is your heart, and how is Jan?2 Write me a personal line or two. There is nothing so cruel as having a friend in an editorial office. The friendship of the poor! You hear the chains rattle.

Be well! Paris is warm and lovely! (Won’t you come here spontaneously?) My letter was meant personally, you understood . . .

Your very old

Joseph Roth, I will call myself Moses3 from now on, just so

1. Paradise: see the feuilleton “Report from a Parisian Paradise” on the pleasures of, entre autres, calvados.

2. Jan: the Reifenbergs’ son, after whom Roth almost always asks fondly.

3. Moses: a prime expression of JR’s variable identity.

34. To Benno Reifenberg

22 April 1926

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

I’m going to give you my answer today, and beg you to forgive me for having taken longer than I said. I am ill and in bed, my handwriting won’t be distinguished, my style not very accomplished.

Let me tell you once again that leaving you and the FZ concerns me more than taking a job at Ullstein, for example. I’ll be perfectly candid, and admit to you that I’d rather not write at all, than write for another paper.

The fact that the firm wants Mr. Sieburg in Paris—that’s not for me to comment on. But sending me packing from Paris, because Mr. Sieburg doesn’t want me there, that hurt.

Mr. Sieburg is an excellent feuilleton writer. Do I therefore have to suffer because a feuilleton writer decides to try and double up as a political correspondent? You can’t write feuilletons with half a mind or one hand tied behind your back. And it’s wrong to write feuilletons on the side. It’s a bad underestimation of the whole profession. The feuilleton is just as important to the paper as its politics—and to the reader it’s even more important. The modern newspaper is made of everything else in it before it’s made of politics. The modern newspaper needs a reporter more than it needs a leader writer. I am not an encore, not a pudding, I am the main dish. Why won’t people stop kidding themselves that a fancy-pants article on the situation in Locarno will grip readers and win subscribers. If Mr. Sieburg is to write mainly feuilletons, then I don’t see why I shouldn’t equally well have remained your Paris correspondent. I won’t be gotten rid of just because it happens to suit a colleague. It’s like a curse: how can the FZ not manage to retain two such gifted journalists as Mr. Sieburg and me.

I love this paper, I serve it, I am useful to it. No one asks my opinion when it occurs to someone to have me removed from Paris. They read me with interest. Not the parliamentary reports. Not the lead articles, not the foreign bulletins. But the firm persists in thinking of Roth as a sort of trivial chatterbox that a great newspaper can just about run to. Wrong. I don’t write “witty glosses.” I paint the portrait of the age. That ought to be the job of the great newspaper. I’m a journalist, not a reporter; I’m an author, not a leader writer.

I asked for a contract. Stenographers and telephonists get contracts—I don’t. I asked for a raise. My pay is among the lowest in the company. I submit a book. It’s turned down. Since I’ve been with the FZ it seems to me, the only respect I’ve encountered has come from rival papers. It really is an art to take someone as willing, and useful, and loyal as me, and alienate him.

Of your various suggestions: Moscow, Italy, and Spain, only Moscow is an adequate replacement for Paris, though I don’t want to rule out the others. You will understand that my reputation as a journalist is paramount to me. It will be damaged by my departure from Paris, and my replacement by Mr. Sieburg. Only a series of Russian reportages can rescue my good name.

Spain is journalistically uninteresting. Italy is interesting, Fascism less so. I take a different position on Fascism than the newspaper. I don’t like it, but I know that one Hindenburg is worse than ten Mussolinis. We in Germany should watch our Reichswehr, our Mr. Gessler, our generals, our famous compensation program to landowners. We don’t have the right to attack a Fascist dictatorship while we ourselves are living in a far worse, secret dictatorship, complete with Fememorde,1 paramilitary marches, murderous judges, and hangmen attorneys. My conscience would never allow me, as an oppressed German, to tell the world about oppression in Italy. It would be a rather facile bravery to report behind Mussolini’s back, and keep my head down in my homeland, and go on subsidizing the thugs of the Black Reichswehr with my taxes. While I mounted an attack on Fascism in my feuilleton, in the political pages they might just about risk a mild whispering against Mr. Gessler. That’s cowardice, as I see it.

I propose: Russia until winter, not just Moscow, but Kiev and Odessa as well; and in the winter Spain and Italy under some other aspect.

Manfred Georg2 is going to America for the 8 Uhr Blatt. Kisch3 is going to Russia for the BZ. I can’t be seen to do any less than them. There is so much going on in Russia, one doesn’t have to write about the Communist terror. The presence of so much new life springing up from the ruins will give me a lot of unpolitical material.

Will you please ask Mr. Schotthöfer—and my greetings to him—what I need to obtain a Russian visa. My skin disease will take another 3 weeks or so to heal. Till that time, I would like some time in which to convalesce.

That’s what I propose. I hope the company won’t need to think twice, this time. I’d like a speedy answer.

With best wishes I remain

Your old

Joseph Roth

1. Fememorde: “Vehmic murderers”—an anthropological label from the Dark Ages for these political killings that appear in a list of shameful manifestations in the Weimar Republic.

2. Manfred Georg (1893–1965), journalist and writer. Left Germany in 1933 for Prague, then 1938 to New York, where he founded and edited the German-language progressive Jewish weekly Der Aufbau.

3. Kisch: Egon Erwin Kisch (1885–1948), the so-called rasender Reporter (roving or racing or raving reporter), one of the most prominent journalists of the time, and possessor of a suitably adventurous life.

35. To Benno Reifenberg

Café de la Régence
Paris, 29 April 1926

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

thank you for your letter, and your kind words on my “Paradise.”1 Entirely undeserved. There was so much more that might have been said, and my feuilleton covers only a small part of Paradise. Tomorrow, I’ll send you a couple of book reviews, and in the coming days a feuilleton on the preacher Samson.

I will answer your official letter tomorrow, officially, and for the firm. I have a few counterproposals, details that might mitigate my defeat, our defeat, if the company agrees to them. Thank Picard.2 I’m going to see him tomorrow. It’s too bad I can’t go to Ullstein for 1,500 a month, and write for Monty Jacobs3 instead of Benno Reifenberg. I would have to close my eyes and think of journalism, or else write for the Frankfurter Generalanzeiger. Even that is better than Ullstein. Plus I’ve suddenly come down with something “very nasty,” a serious skin condition. For a while it looked “like syphilis,” the blood test hasn’t been done yet. I am completely covered with red boils, I can only go out after dark, can’t shake hands, I’m completely slathered with sulfur, and stink to match. You wouldn’t so much as spit at me, in spite of being my friend, because in addition to being good and distinguished, you are sensitive. This illness lasts for 4–5 weeks apparently, or it may do, dermatology is learning from me, and claims it is an illness associated with hair loss, and—in me, imagine—the END OF PUBERTY! It’s God’s revenge, praise be to Jehovah. I already have a mattress grave, and must leave Paris. Please will you see that I get paid, it’s the end of the month already. My money for May. I’m writing a separate letter to the firm and to Mr. Nassauer. Regards to him! Is he better? Why does the firm ignore my appeals if it cares what happens to me? . . .

I am miserable, industrious, poor, and abandoned. It’s a cold spring this year. I’m itching all over. I have to stay up and work at night to keep from scratching myself, and in the day I’m wretched. The doctor tells me it may start to improve tomorrow. I’ll be relieved once my extremities are in the clear again. At least it’s not infectious. I’m proud of that.

Who is Professor Salomon4 from Frankfurt? He’s been in Paris, telling everyone (telling Valeska Gert)5 that I have the most modern style of any journalist around.

This letter will—I know—make you disgusted with me, but you should fight the feeling, that’s what friendship is. Of the two of us, things are easier for me, because you are certainly a finer, handsomer—what a comparative—human being than your wretched old Moses Joseph Roth

I thought Kracauer’s umbrella piece was delightful up until the last 2 paragraphs. The style of the evening edition is still not right: too small.

1. This is the feuilleton “Report from a Parisian Paradise.” It is interesting that JR wrote it as he did, under threat of imminent dismissal.

2. Picard: Max Picard (1888–1965), doctor and cultural philosopher.

3. Monty Jacobs (1875–1945), editor of the feuilleton section of the Vossische Zeitung from 1910 to 1934, when he went into exile in London.

4. Professor Gottfried Salomon (1892–1964) was a sociologist at the University of Frankfurt.

5. Valeska Gert (1892–1978) was a “grotesque dancer.”

36. To the Frankfurter Zeitung

Paris, 2 June 1926

Dear Sirs,

I hear that you of your kindness are deliberating as to where I should send my next dispatches from, and are tending to favor America against Russia. I don’t think you are seriously afraid that I might convert to Bolshevism, but your line of thinking may be that the so-called New World would be inappropriate to my habitually satirical mode, and that I would be condemned either to supply optimistic reports in an access of youthful enthusiasm, or to clam up entirely.

I am grateful to be the subject of so much consideration. However, I would be sorry if you concluded that my specific gifts would incline me to ironize Western institutions, customs, and habits, following the doubtful successes of the Russian revolution.

On the contrary: I am (perhaps unfortunately) wholly incapable of allowing any enthusiasm in me more space than my skepticism. I ask that you not infer from this “negative attitude” that I would substitute the deficiencies of one world view for those of another. I don’t believe in the perfection of bourgeois democracy, but I don’t doubt for a second the narrowness of a proletarian dictatorship. On the contrary, I believe in the terrible existence of a sort of “petty working class” if you’ll allow the phrase, a species that would be still less inclined to allow me the freedom I require than its bourgeois cousins.

I am carrying none of the ideological baggage of the sort that most literary visitors to Russia have carried with them in the last few years. Unlike them, as a consequence of my birth and my knowledge of the country, I am immunized to what goes by “Russian mysticism” or “the great Russian soul,” and the like. I am too well aware—as western Europeans are apt to forget—that the Russians were not invented by Dostoyevsky. I am quite unsentimental about the country, and about the Soviet project.

On this occasion let me admit—not to burden you with a full-blown confession—that my relationship to Catholicism and the Church is not at all as one might imagine, on the basis of a fleeting knowledge of my person, my essays, and even my books. That fact alone guarantees a certain distance, when it comes to things in Russia. Things that, incidentally, concern us more nearly than things in America. I get the impression that a certain useful calm has set in there, useful in the sense that people may finally be coming to terms with the recent past. I get a sense of things being about to change therefore in Russia, while America in a year’s time will still be America, if not more so.

Since I report on actual conditions, depicting daily life rather than expressing opinions, the danger that I might be unable to send objective reports from Russia is not very great. Even in countries without censorship, my criticism was more to be found between the lines than on the surface of my pieces.

I will be greatly obliged to you if you were to see these depositions as a basis on which to make your decision.

Yours respectfully

Joseph Roth

37. To Benno Reifenberg

30 August 1926

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

I am writing to you from the deck of a mail steamer on the Volga. I plan to stop in Astrakhan for a couple of days. I hope this finds you back in Frankfurt, having enjoyed your vacation. I shall be sending my first pieces to the paper from here, and would like you to read them as they come in. I know you won’t read them after others have. I have been unable to write anything till now. I was overwhelmed, famished, continually shaking. It’s taken me two months. If one were to set foot on a different star, things couldn’t be more different or more strange.

I have no money. I need 42 marks per diem, excluding travel and the vast tips a visitor is obliged to leave. I am experiencing incredible things. Almost more than I can put down, in terms of fullness and intensity. My illness is almost gone. I eat black bread and onions and for 3 or 4 days of the week, live like a peasant. The remaining days, admittedly, I spend in the best hotels I can find. I spent a week tramping on foot through Chuvash villages. I have been to Minsk and Byelorussia. I am now on my way to Baku, Tbilisi, Odessa, the whole Ukraine. A few newspapers greeted my arrival: “Revolutionary writer comes to Russia.” Reviews of my books continue to appear. I have avoided doing anything officially sanctioned, even though most doors were open to me.

I live in the continual fear that it’s all too much for the company. It’s been paying me money since JULY and has received no copy. Perhaps you could set their minds at ease—and mine too!

Poland was in such an abject political and human state, that I’ve put off writing about it until I’m on my way back. I’m sorry to say that blasé German correspondents are not always wrong. For now, silence is the best policy for me.

There’s no doubt that a new world is being born in Russia. For all my skepticism, I am happy to be able to witness it. It’s not possible to live without having been here, it’s as if you had stayed at home during the war.

Write and tell me what your dear wife is doing, and my friend Jan. I carry his picture in my wallet—any other photograph would be sentimental. Is he well?

In old friendship I shake your hand, and remain as ever

Your Joseph Roth

Picard didn’t reply. I feel offended.

I haven’t seen a copy of the newspaper for months. My permanent address is:

Moscow, Hotel Bolshaya Moskovskaya till October,

Thereafter c/o German Embassy for Joseph Roth, Frankfurter Zeitung

Moscow Leontyevsky pereulok 10

38. To Bernard von Brentano

Odessa, 26 September 1926

Dear friend,

you must be puzzled and irked and probably less puzzled than irked. Calm! Forgiveness! Today is the first day I have given myself off. Not that I have deserved it. I really ought to walk around and gather material and order it in my head, just exactly as I have on all my other days. I have never worked as hard as I have in Russia; and you know I have never been one for idleness. I shall be staying in Odessa for another two weeks; then through the rest of the Ukraine. At the end of October I’ll be in Moscow again. You could write me Hotel Bolshaya Moskovskaya ca. 14 October, or here, Odessa, Hotel London, but only by airmail. An airmail letter takes 5 days—unless the censor happens to take an interest in it.

I feel as though I’ve been gone from Europe for six months. I’ve experienced so much here, and all of it strange to me. Never has it been brought home to me so strongly that I’m a European, a man of the Mediterranean if you will, a Roman and a Catholic, a Humanist and a Renaissance man. Everything I told you about myself in Paris was wrong, and a lot of what you told me was right. It’s a boon that I’ve come to Russia. I should never have gotten to know myself otherwise. Finally I have the subject for the book that only I can write, and will maybe write while in Russia. It will be the novel I’ve waited for for so long,1 and with me a couple of other people in the West as well. You would be amazed if I were to tell you the story. But you will get to read it in a year’s time.

I hope my articles have got through and been printed. Write and tell me, if you will. The most important of them are still to come.

You know I’m a celebrity here. I enclose a clipping of an interview with me—it’s as if I were an American shoe-polish king, or something. I am mobbed by journalists wherever I go. They don’t always get things right, but I’d be the last person to object to a false echo, so long as it’s just an echo. (Jesuit.)

Everything Toller2 and Kisch have said about Russia is wrong. And all the attacks are not just unfair, but misplaced. It’s like viewing a human residence through the eyes of a fly. I’m not talking about a positive or negative view of the Soviet states—I want to show you that both the positives and the negatives are completely wrong, because they are political. The issue here is not politics, the issue is culture, religion, metaphysics, spirituality. You will understand what I mean if you recall our conversations about Russia, and my exposition, and if you see the situation diagrammatically.

In other words, I am looking in a completely different direction. Russia is somewhere else. I was like a mariner from antiquity or the Middle Ages, setting off for the Spice Islands, in the persuasion that the earth was flat. If you know it’s round, you know how mistaken the voyage was.

It’s incredibly difficult to write newspaper pieces about Russia, unless you stick to processing other people’s research, like Kisch. I won’t do that at any price. You were right about that too, when you said the time for that sort of journalism was over. I’m glad you were right on those important things, and I was wrong. That shows me I judged you correctly, which pleases me more than merely being right about something.

I’d like to know what you’re working on, how you’re living. The Frankfurter Zeitung is nowhere to be found here, of course, unlike the Vossische, or the Berliner Tageblatt. Which means it has an incredibly exalted, if somewhat legendary, reputation.

Give my regards to Dr. Guttmann, I think about him sometimes and how useful his bitter clarity would be in reportages from Moscow. Scheffer from the Berliner Tageblatt enjoys an unfair prominence, as the one-eyed among the blind.

Regards to your wife, regards to Dr. Guttmann, and don’t forget

Your old

Joseph Roth

1. The novel I’ve waited for for so long: perhaps the first glimmerings of Job?

2. Toller: Ernst Toller (1893–1939), prominent left-wing playwright, poet, essayist. Leader of the Bavarian revolution in 1918, for which he was imprisoned for five years. It was news of the despondent Toller’s suicide in New York that prompted Roth’s final collapse in May 1939.

39. To Benno Reifenberg

Odessa, 1 October 1926

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

it’s hard to describe my pleasure on receiving your letter. A day ago I got an old letter (August) from Mr. Geck, asking—oh so discreetly—whether I was ill, why they had heard nothing from me. I gathered from that that 2 pieces I dispatched from Poland, and 1 letter and one book review have failed to arrive. It turns out that the Poles have an occasional, but then all the more inflexible, censorship. I wrote back right away, you’ll see the letter, just asking for confirmation of arrival. I’d had a nightmare, namely that my articles on Russia were all appearing in the Bäderblatt.1 It was a hideously real nightmare, my articles were on page 2, column 4, over a large ad for Bad Nauheim, and I was cross that the photograph of the Kremlin had been stuck on page 4. You said just one word: “misplaced!”—dolorously, as if on stage. Only one creature is endowed with dreams like that, namely a reporter on the Frankfurter Zeitung. I’m sure I’m more afraid of your restraint than you are of a scoop. What a happy awakening when your copies arrived, with that dignified, if rather flattering byline. Thank you! But isn’t it too chancy to settle on a particular day? What if I have no ideas, can’t write anything for 3 weeks? Have you got all 7 articles? The tenth is already done, I keep putting off making a fair copy, it’s torture for me, I have to keep thinking about the blond sub with the academic qualification—geology, wasn’t it? I dread misprints, two jumped up at me just now like fleas from the type.

It was very funny to read about your brother Hans. You nailed him in your article. I think of you calmly watching him, you must have been writing the piece in your head already. What material! I’m envious of both material and execution. It’s an excellent piece in literary terms, almost a reportage, I can see you growing out of literature and becoming a proper journalist, and then Maryla will no longer be able to say “a smart journalist!”—How is she? Give her my regards! And your mother-in-law. You don’t say anything about her, or JAN. I asked specially. What’s Jan up to? How is he? Will he still recognize me? Or is he growing up too fast?

As I am myself. I won’t stay as long as I thought I would. The money hurts. I would like to save it all, and spend all of it instead. I’m going to ask for damages for all the torments of this exotic journey in the Caucasus, on mule, bus, bumpy carts, for seasickness, mountain paths, Ararat—Leopold Weiss2 rides on camelback and has his wife and child with him, and I’m dreaming of a room at the Frankfurter Hof. Oh, for running water! Hot and cold, telephone, ten bells, three lights, bathroom ensuite, fleecy towels, cars, white napkins. Hausenstein3 asks whether there might be interest in Russia for his work on Rembrandt. I can’t give him an answer at the moment, tell him it’ll be another decade before they acquire an interest in Rembrandt. How little we know about Russia. Everything we say about it is mistaken. I read Lenin and Victor Hugo alternately, political authors both, chance purchases, cheap, secondhand editions. Perhaps it shows in my articles. Lenin is a great dialectical brain, Victor Hugo a great dialectical heart, and he writes a better style. I long for Paris, I have never given up on it, ever, I am a Frenchman from the East, a Humanist, a rationalist with religion, a Catholic with a Jewish intelligence, an actual revolutionary. What an oddity! (Please excuse this outburst!)

What’s Dr. Simon up to? At this distance, he seems even stranger to me than he does in Germany. He is very much a Westerner, I think, the farther east I go, the farther west he seems to recede in my mind. The last time I saw him was in Paris, six months ago—five months—an eternity. Time is little, space is everything! I took his wife to Moulineux. How far Moulineux is from Russia . . .

1. Bäderblatt: literally the “bath” or “spa” paper. A low-brow, commercial supplement that features repeatedly in Roth’s nightmares.

2. Weiss: Leopold Weiss (1900–1992), the FZ’s special correspondent in the 1920s. He converted to Islam ca. 1926.

3. Hausenstein: Wilhelm Hausenstein (1882–1957), art critic and essayist, worked for the FZ from 1917 to 1943. Later was the German ambassador in Paris.

40. To Bernard von Brentano

18 October 1926, Moscow

Dear friend,

I am back in Moscow, here for another two weeks, an airmail letter would reach me in time. In the German embassy I got an old letter of yours, with enclosure. Thank you for the feuilleton, it’s good, in places very good, but unjournalistic, by which I mean it didn’t have to be written. Journalism has little tolerance for an indirect form, i.e., the disguising of an observation or an event. Your letter attests to your needless nervousness. What you think about me is mistaken, what you think about my wife is triply mistaken. She doesn’t dislike you. At the same time as yours, I got a letter from her where she wrote about the moving way you were waiting for my articles. (I quote: “B. is incredibly moving, the way he waits for your articles.”)

It’s been a while since I felt completely well. I think I’ll leave Russia earlier than planned.

I hope you’re well.

I shake your hand. Write soon

to your Joseph Roth

41. To Benno Reifenberg

[October 1926?]

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

unfortunately I’ve mislaid the original of my article on petroleum. I want to ask you for certain reasons to cut the sentence where I refer to workers of the Krupp dependencies. If there’s a lacuna, fill it. Please. The piece can come out after the one about the Jews, after or before, it doesn’t matter: The Street.

For some weeks now, I’ve heard nothing from my friends. Even Brentano, to whom I wrote an incredibly cordial letter, won’t answer me. I’d be sorry if things had gotten to that pass. I pride myself on not being wrong about people. Anything but that.

At this distance, everyone seems transformed anyway, all the Western men and Fräulein Weber as the prototypical Western woman. Only you remain tall and handsome, and Kracauer small and miserable. Dr. Simon, Geck, Diebold, Nassauer, Dr. Guttmann, and Rudolf Guthmann1 look like mirror images to me, they loom out of the mercury. I see a framed Geisenheyner on a desk, resting his hand on the back of an armchair, Dr. Lothar is in the corridor, I can see him on the other side of the glazed door, he has lost weight, and is looking sporty in tennis shorts. For some reason, Max Beckmann2 is often in my thoughts. His legs are stretched out in front of him as though he were sitting down, but he’s standing up. I am going slightly potty, have vivid dreams, am living in tremendous isolation, in a state of not-hearing. Snow falls and melts, the wind blows, my feet are always wet, I’ve ordered a second pair of boots and will need a new wardrobe. I now have the ability to sit somewhere for two hours, and look at all the people, near and far, I wind them up, and they process past me, part of some mechanical toy. My wife is coming ever nearer, writing me strange love letters: lots of grumpy, dissatisfied, almost angry reviews of my articles. Perhaps she means me and doesn’t know it. I must have become very sentimental. Hausentein is always turning his back on me. That offends me. You are closer to me as well, but generally chilly. Still a little objectivity. I am always on the point of giving in to you, but hesitate—a fox who’s read Plato, the older Brentano put it. You have your hand extended but won’t give it to me, your big hand. There’s tension now between you and Kracauer. He is angry with me at some level. Because I’m in Russia. Cheers!

I’m working on a novel. I work very hard on my articles, writing them slowly and entirely subjectively. Each one takes me 3–4 days. Some I’ve torn up.

My isolation is enormous, unendurable. I need a letter now and again. People, people, all day long, politicians, journalists. No women. Hence the isolation. Nothing but men is like a desert full of sand. Lots of unimportant men. I’ve just been with Scheffer, the BT’s man in Moscow. A clever fellow, but something I don’t quite like about him. He’s too evangelical. He is married: a very nice, distinguished, no longer young Russian woman. She took him because her German isn’t good enough to work him out. He took her because he knows next to no Russian, and sees her as something entirely different from what she is. And so they sleep together. How is it possible? I keep meeting foreign journalists and diplomats there. All banal! I get a lot of invitations. Don’t speak a lot of Russian, but what I do say has a Slav accent, which makes me a miracle man. I’m getting vain in my old age. Tomorrow I’m going to visit a lady from the Old World, who has turned Communist. All sorts of people turn up there, and I’m very curious.

Presumably the party season is getting going in Germany. Do you remember the time when you, Kracauer, and I went to the Christmas market together? And you went to the watchmaker?3 There is something terribly affecting about Germany when everyone goes soft, and the Jews decorate Christmas trees, and the theaters put on Christmas pantomimes.

Something astounding has happened: get this: my dear German professor, Dr. Brecht, who is going to Breslau now, hasn’t written me in 6 years. At the time I was his student, I was a German nationalist, as he was. Of course I assume that as a result of what I’ve published, I assume he will have effaced me from his heart. Then in an old newspaper in the Caucasus, I read that he’s turned 50. I write to congratulate him. And today the FZ forwards me a letter from him: he sends me his photograph. I was his student in 1912–13. He is completely unchanged. And he has just put me forward for a prize for young authors. He’s read everything I’ve written. He is just tidying up, and he packs—he packs my papers I wrote for him as a student. HE’S PACKING THEM! He’s taking them to Breslau with him! He put me up for scholarships then, and for prizes now. A German nationalist! Son of a professor, son-in-law of a professor, a friend of Roethe’s!4 There’s a German professor for you.

What do you say to that? The older you get, the better people become. At some level feeling is what counts. You can only hope to judge the Germans when you’re past forty.

Alfons Paquet5 is fondly remembered here. Give him my regards when he comes, with a greaseproof parcel in his briefcase that he leaves in the secretary’s office. He picks up review copies of books, and needs packing paper for some purposes of his own.

I’d be grateful for a line, and send my sentimental greetings

Your Roth

1. Guthmann: Rudolf Guthmann, a manager on the FZ.

2. Max Beckmann (1884–1950), generally regarded as the greatest German painter of the twentieth century. He went into exile in Holland in 1937, and died in New York City. Reifenberg was a long-term admirer of the painter’s, and wrote his biography. See also letter no. 136.

3. watchmaker: JR loved and collected (and gave away) watches. Watches and knives.

4. Roethe: Professor Gustav Roethe (1859–1926), Germanist.

5. Alfons Paquet (1881–1944), poet, dramatist, novelist, essayist. Traveled extensively, and wrote for the FZ.

42. To Benno Reifenberg

23 April 1927

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

thank you for your letter. I’m late with my reply, because ever since Vienna I’ve been caught up in a steady stream of nasty banalities. The deal with the novel must have put you to so much trouble that I’m embarrassed to think about it—that, and the sheer impossibility of ever paying you back in important things what you expend on unimportant ones. What’s depressing about having you as a guardian angel—as you are to several of us in that firm—is the fact that you achieve tiny results with colossal expenditure of effort. Your friendship deserves greater outcomes, just as your talents deserve a better and nobler setting. I am continually moved, but rarely assuaged. I know that a big part of Dr. Simon’s decision was the consideration “you can’t do that sort of thing to Roth” when even you know how little vanity I have, and how difficult it is to offend me.

Anyway, your proposal seems impractical to me. The novel—let’s just say for the moment that it’s a flawless piece of work—given that sort of publication will not only get no attention, but no interest, either from readers or from publishers. It will drop out of the structural, as we’d intended, and be left with the chance and circumstantial, which will do more harm than good. So, I’m against it—in favor only because I need money badly. But then something else comes into play: namely that I don’t think the novel is at all flawless—this has nothing to do with the objection advanced above—and I am having to add another 40 pages or so of Parisian meat to the bones. I have been in negotiations with Ullstein about it. Kurt Wolff1 has spoken to his director Meyer, whom I saw in Berlin, of the necessity of publishing me. Max Brod2—who will already have sent you his novel, which I started (in Prague) and endorse—has recommended me to Zsolnay.3 If I accept your proposal, that means losing Ullstein. He’s not yet decided—and I need money. I’m now embarked on another novel, which is going absurdly smoothly, a book with plot, tension, hooks, twists, something even suitable for the Illustriertes Blatt. I hope to bring it with me, completed. I would far prefer to have that appear as my novel with you. At any rate, you should send me money. I guarantee that you will have one novel manuscript.

I am flat broke. I was in the rotten position of having to take an advance from the Prager Tagblatt—I can’t stand to travel on that basis. I am slow, thorough, full of fear that I might see something wrong, my so-called style is based on nothing but an exact understanding of the facts—I write badly without that—like Sieburg in the Easter issue. I don’t have “ideas,” only understanding. I am incapable of vacuous writing. I need money, and won’t be finished with the Balkans4 till June. Four weeks is not enough time to understand anything. Four weeks might do for one reportage or lead piece. So I will have to live off my royalty, and when I’m back, resume my campaign: either an unambiguous relationship with the newspaper, or else 6 articles a month, free agent, small retainer. The firm puts out a history of the age, not a newspaper, it has no idea of how to treat a journalist. You’ve seen yourself how little the editors are able to do. I won’t spend another 3 months sitting in the Englischer Hof, twiddling my thumbs. It’s a waste.

I’ll wire the address from Belgrade. I’ll be there for 6–8 days. If you have a moment, write me as soon as you get my wire.

Please tell the editorial conference that I won’t be able to write anything about the Yugoslav–Italian conflict before my visit to Albania—for fear of the trouble the Italians can make for me in Albania, where they are effectively in control.

Best regards to Dr. Kracauer, and tell him his Parisian article caused a real stir, and that people ask me about him—people in Berlin, Prague, Vienna.

[. . .]

1. Kurt Wolff (1887–1963), publisher. In 1913 started the imprint bearing his own name known mainly for bringing out Expressionist writers. The Kurt Wolff Verlag was sold in 1931, and in 1933 Wolff went into exile, to Florence, Paris, then New York. In 1942, he founded Pantheon Books with his former secretary and wife, Helen. (The novel at issue here, Flight Without End, was duly published by Kurt Wolff.)

2. Max Brod (1884–1969), novelist, essayist, translator. Editor and friend (and executor) of Franz Kafka.

3. Zsolnay: the Paul Zsolnay Verlag, in Vienna.

4. the Balkans: Roth traveled to Albania for the paper and wrote a series of articles.

43. To Ludwig Marcuse

Paris VI, rue de Tournon 23
Hotel Helvetia
Paris, 14 June 1927

Dear friend Marcuse,1

I owe you a long letter, but since I have only grim news to report, I’m going to keep this as short as I can. I was in Berlin, but didn’t get to speak to anyone at Ullstein. Apparently it takes two weeks to get hold of anyone authorized to take a decision. So I decided to give it one last shot after my return here. Now Reifenberg has written to say he does want my novel after all. I made no great efforts therefore with Krell, the novel isn’t for the Vossische Zeitung.2 While I was away in Albania—as you know—Black Friday happened on the stock exchange.3 Dr. Simon seems to have taken that very much to heart. Even though I’d only been furnished with 1,000 marks, they wired me to say they were sorry I hadn’t written anything. It was a snotty, provincial, and wounded telegram, and hurtful too. I requested another 400 dollars—life is very expensive there. They wired me back that I’d had all I was going to get, the expenses account was empty, and I should come home. I got sick, got on a ship, I didn’t have enough money to go via Berlin, I went straight back to Paris, sent them another rude wire, asking whether they’d meant to get rid of me, and whether that were still their intention. I came back from that trip with 14 articles, of which just 2 have appeared. I had no reply, no money, I expect I’m too expensive and too demanding for them—now that old Mrs. Simon has probably lost money on the stock exchange. I wrote to Kaliski4 in Berlin, about Ullstein—no answer. I wrote to Lania,5 about the BC6—no answer as yet. I am desperate, sick, penniless. I’m wondering whether to write to Dombrowski about Ullstein—whether he would write to Magnus, or whether I should wait for Kaliski to reply. The novel has gone to Kurt Wolff.

What now? Paris is more expensive than ever, I have a terrific reputation, which makes it impossible for me to hawk myself around—hence no prospects.

What are you up to? And Sasha?7 It costs me a lot to write these sorry lines—if I had any better news, I’d have written long ago.

Greetings from your old

Joseph Roth

1. Ludwig Marcuse (1894–1971), German Jewish biographer, essayist, theater critic for the Frankfurter Generalanzeiger. Went into exile in March 1933 to Paris, and Sanary-sur-Mer, in 1938 on to Los Angeles, where he became professor of German literature and philosophy at USC.

2. Vossische Zeitung: elegantly described by Hermann Kesten as having been started by Lessing and ended by Hitler.

3. On 13 May 1927 prices on the Berlin stock market suffered precipitous declines.

4. Kaliski: worked in the Ullstein Verlag.

5. Lania: Leo Lania (1896–1961), journalist, biographer, novelist. Went into exile in 1933. Wrote an account of Willy Brandt’s coming to power.

6. I.e., the BBC.

7. The later Mrs. Marcuse. Bronsen tells the lovely story of how they met: Marcuse was upset after being dumped by some other flame, Roth reminded him that the world was full of attractive women, and pointed to the waitress in the bar in Berlin where they were sitting. This was Erna, who, a little later, became Sasha when Marcuse told Roth that he loved her dearly, but found her Berlin speech full of embarrassing solecisms. Roth’s solution was to dub her Sasha and claim she was a Russian princess; his policy with Friedl, his own wife, was not dissimilar, but much less successful.

44. To Bernard von Brentano

Paris, 19 June 1927

Dear friend,

thank you for your letter and review.1 You shouldn’t worry: there is nothing finer than being bribed, I’ve long prided myself on that condition. It’s the height of morality. More than for your review, though, I’m grateful for your letter. If it weren’t that the book was with Schmiede, it might be a great success. Stefan Zweig, Toller, Meier-Graefe2 have all written to me. Do you have an address for Emil Ludwig,3 by any chance? I’d like to send him a copy. He was here, and I would have tried to meet him if I’d been well. As it is, I read an interview with him in the Nouvelles Littéraires4—and for the first time felt something like respect for him. He’s the only one who tells the truth about Germany, literature, his preferences and opinions. What’s your opinion of Keyserling?5 Absurd and completely unimportant figure! I’ve yet to hear a German talk the way he does—twerp. Of course, it’s easy for L. to be brave. But some people can’t be prevented from being deceitful or polite (as people call it), so consumed are they with the task of “representing” Germany.

The paper has treated me shabbily. Reifenberg will tell you about it, though you’ll have to make allowance for his conciliatory manner. You don’t see the paper anywhere, I think it must have a smaller readership than even the Hamburger Fremdenblatt! Ullstein has written to me again.

I’ll probably be better in two weeks, go to Frankfurt, then Berlin. It’s not so awful that you’re in Frankfurt. The closer to the epicenter of the disaster, the calmer it probably feels. Renew a couple of old friendships, move in a society that impresses the snobs, go to a dinner club where the saddest knights in the world flank the saddest king.

Where is your wife? I send you my regards, and thank you for your kind words—I’m afraid I can’t reply in kind, because I haven’t read anything of yours for a while. I remain, as ever your old

Joseph Roth

1. review: a review of JR’s book The Wandering Jews.

2. Meier-Graefe: Julius Meier-Graefe (1867–1935), art critic, novelist. Co-founder of the journal Pan. Supposedly matched Roth’s royalty of one mark per line at the FZ, and the only other writer to do so.

3. Ludwig: Emil Ludwig (1881–1948), journalist, biographer, novelist.

4. Nouvelles Littéraires: a literary weekly in Paris, founded in 1922.

5. Keyserling: Count Hermann Keyserling (1880–1946), popular philosopher.

45. To Ludwig Marcuse

Paris, 22 June 1927

Dearest Dr. Marcuse,

thank you for your letter, your touching anxiety on my behalf, your friendly offer. You have no idea how little Reifenberg is able to accomplish for someone like me. Some resent me because of my talent, and others—the bosses—because I’m ornery and intractable. Even so, I will try Ullstein once more. (Keep it under your hat.) Reifenberg has written to say this and that. Then the company goes and does the opposite. At any rate, they still haven’t sent me any money. If and when they do, I’ll be in Frankfurt on July 2 or 3. You know exactly how things stand, and there’s nothing to be done about S.1 He doesn’t like me, and takes the worse state of the newspaper as a pretext to get rid of me. I can stand it.

Will you be in Frankfurt?

Till when can I wire you for the fare to Frankfurt, if the need arises?

My wife is well. She sends her best to you both. Drop me a line. I’m feeling a bit better.

In old comradeship your old

Joseph Roth

1. I.e., Heinrich Simon.

46. To Ludwig Marcuse

Paris, 28 June 1927

Dear Marcuse,

I have to go to Deauville for 3 days for the Bäderblatt,1 because it will bring in a little money. Unfortunately, my dear fellow, it means I won’t be able to see you in Frankfurt. I’ll stay there a week, and then Berlin, or else perhaps go on a tour of Germany. The business with the Foreign Ministry is awful. I’m afraid it kept several of the articles. We’ll see each other after your return. I take it you’ll be going via Berlin? I’ll be able to tell you personally what I’m not really able to write. Your friendship, let me say this, almost frightens me. Your comradeship goes to a point I’m sure I’ll never reach—and there’s no point in thanking you any more, because that’s not enough. Suffice to say, I won’t forget it—if that does.

I hope you and Sasha have a good trip, and offer you my warmest greetings—from your grateful

Joseph Roth

Bye!

1. Cf. “A Couple of Days in Deauville,” in Report from a Parisian Paradise.

47. To Bernard von Brentano

Marseille, 31 July 1927

Dear friend,

the news of your father’s death has just reached me. (I go to pick up my mail every ten days or so.) I never got to meet him, but even so I mourn his passing. I imagine he was one of those characters that no longer exist in Germany, a person with the aura of the Counter-Reformation, and the old Holy Roman Empire. You know how drawn I am to such people, even if most of them don’t share my politics.

I mourn his death of course not least for you, my friend, because you still needed him, and it would have been only fair if he had lived to see your literary fledging. His passing marks a turning point in your life. If you feel too alone, then accept my assurance that I am standing at your shoulder—now, and in every enterprise in which you should feel in danger or alone.

Don’t take it amiss if I tell you that such moments are necessary and even fruitful. They attach us to the beyond, it’s a little like going to church, which of course we don’t do.

Write to me through Miss Weber—but only if you want to.

Please send the enclosed letters to your brother. I don’t know his address.

Always your old

Joseph Roth

Give my regards to your mother.

48. To Benno Reifenberg

Grenoble, 17 August 1927

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

I hope you are already off on vacation with wife and child. I am trundling across France, a wandering writer, a genuine minnesinger. I hope my novel doesn’t appear before you get back. I must see the galleys, if you write to the office, ask them to send them to the Wagner address in Paris.

My new novel is wonderful. (Keep it under your hat: I’m ashamed to tell anyone else.) I couldn’t after all muster the strength or the brazenness to write a novel in episodes for the Illustrierte. All I’ve done is written one called

Zipper and His Father.1

I’m looking forward to reading it to you! It’s so wonderful when you pay close attention, and are open and engaged!

I’ll be done in 12 days.

When are you back?

I met Dr. Simon in Marseille. Very happy. He looks like a stripling—or a stripeling—in his striped summer suit.

Kisses to Jan, and both Maryla’s hands.

Have a lovely time.

Don’t forget your old

Joseph Roth, and read the last two volumes of Flaubert’s correspondence.

1. Zipper and His Father (Munich: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1928).

49. To Stefan Zweig

Glion near Montreux, 8 September 1927

Dear esteemed Mr. Zweig,1

I’ve been in debt to you for an unconscionably long time. You sent me kind words on my Jewish book.2 I thank you for them.

I don’t agree with you when you say the Jews don’t believe in an afterlife. But that’s a debate that would take an awful lot of time and space.

I’m thinking of bringing out an ampler version of the book in the course of the next few years. Perhaps I can combine some of the research with my reporting work for the FZ.

In the autumn I’m bringing out my next book (a novel, or rather, a sort of novel)3 with Kurt Wolff. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to have a copy sent to you.

With sincerest thanks and regards

Joseph Roth

1. Zweig: Stefan Zweig (1881–1942), privately wealthy writer, translator, collector, patron. In touch with most of the leading personalities of the time—from Rilke to Freud, see his autobiography, The World of Yesterday—and probably the best-selling international writer of his day.

2. my Jewish book: The Wandering Jews, 1927.

3. a sort of novel: Flight Without End (Munich: Kurt Wolff Verlag, 1927) was subtitled “a report.” It marked the height—the beginning and end, really—of JR’s flirtation with the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit, or “New Objectivity.”

50. To Félix Bertaux1

Hotel Foyot, Paris2
16 September 1927

I am just back from vacation for 2 days, and am deeply sorry I don’t have a moment to see you before my departure. I have to go back to Germany—already, and contrary to the wishes I told you of on the occasion of our last time together. The silver lining is the fact that I will be able to meet your son3 in Berlin—and as I am looking forward very much to showing him something that other people might not be able to tell him about, I would ask you to let me know his address in Berlin, and how long he will be there; either via the FZ, the Kurt Wolff Verlag, or my wife, who will probably be here for some time yet.

My regards to your wife.

Yours truly,

Joseph Roth

My wife will either be staying here or at 23 rue de Tournon. Her address is mine too.

1. Félix Bertaux (1881–1948), leading French Germanist and critic, friend of the Mann brothers Thomas and Heinrich, author of the standard work on German literature between 1880 and 1927, Panorama de la littérature allemande contemporaine (Paris, 1928).

2. Hotel Foyot: JR’s favored residence in Paris or pretty well anywhere. See the elegy he wrote for it in 1938, “Rest while Watching the Demolition, in Report from a Parisian Paradise.

3. son: Pierre Bertaux (1907–1986), a Germanist like his father, specializing in Hölderlin.

51. To Bernard von Brentano

Frankfurt am Main
20 September 1927

My dear Brentano,

thank you for your troubling letter. Still, part of me thinks it can’t be as bad as you say, at least from what I hear from dear good Mr. Reifenberg. I know he is such an inveterate optimist, he often distorts things the other way. But there’s no call for you to become nervous. Human relationships with newspapers are just impossible. For every decent, confident, self-willed individual there comes a time he must break. As far as I’m concerned, I’m hoping to be able to give up journalism as my principal occupation fairly soon. If you’re smart about it, you’ll be able to yourself in 2–3 years. You have the talent.

I don’t think you can present yourself to Ullstein, unless invited to. Would you like me to recommend you to Katz?1 I’ll write you the warmest note of which I’m capable. He is not without influence, he’s the man who wrote those great travel pieces and started the Grüne Post2 (or was it Welt). I don’t understand why you continually want to move in Jewish circles. If you gave the least indication you wanted to, you’d be the big chief at the DAZ.3 They are deficient in temperament, and could use men with a line to intellect. The people there would be more grateful than Jews, they are freer and more receptive. The concept of the reactionary has moved again—for now. Have you not noticed that? If you only wanted to, you would have all the necessary requisites to be an important figure—over there. Whereas if you stay here, all you have to look forward to are a couple more years of inadequate pay or poor job or scheming Jews. There you would be the smart Jew—and your own man on top of that. Do you think freedom or intellect can be found with the Reichsbanner?4 I’d a thousand times rather Hindenburg than Koch5—more honest, stronger, freer.

I’m bored, had to dash off a miserable article for someone else about a wretched trade fair. Hope to be back in Berlin soon, and write 2 or 3 articles. Then it’s Russia again—in the spring. Since my Russian pieces were not up to my usual standard, I have to revise them continually. (But keep that to yourself.) Write to

your Joseph Roth

1. Katz: Richard Katz (1888–1968), travel writer, correspondent for the Vossische Zeitung. Worked for Ullstein Verlag, still a major German publisher today.

2. Die grüne Post: a weekly paper for country people.

3. DAZ: Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, newspaper for heavy industry.

4. Reichsbanner: liberal soldiers’ union in the Weimar Republic.

5. Koch: Erich Koch-Weser (1875–1944), one of the founders of the German Democratic Party; from 1919 to 1921, minister of the interior, 1928 to 1929, minister of justice.

52. To Benno Reifenberg

Strasbourg, Tuesday [1927]

Esteemed Mr. Reifenberg,

1. I’m returning Holitscher’s1 manuscript by the same post. I didn’t care for it. It had some potential, but for H.’s unbearable views on grand monde, fashion, women, prostitution, etc. A man who is only familiar with life in Berlin or Munich, is naïve, and doesn’t understand the first thing about women, shouldn’t write about such topics. It’s just one more sorry confirmation that the German author remains hidebound and ignorant. No homme social he.

2. The first of my thin but full Diaries will go to you tomorrow. I’m pleased. Setting off deliberately from the personal, it slowly spreads into the universal. My work as a reporter is always done with a book in mind, which doesn’t stop it from falling apart into separate articles. The binding is my style, is me. You will see.

3. I’m finished with the Saarland.2 I left because I wasn’t able to write anything while there. I need to fill two more diaries, almost a book. I have visited factories and a mine. For half a day I worked as a salesman, got drunk at night, and slept with an ugly hotel chambermaid from sheer wretchedness. But I am steeped in the Saarland, and know it as well as I know Vienna. You will see.

4. I’m going to go to Paris for a few days. My wife is very ill in St. Raphael. I may have to take her to Frankfurt. From Thursday, my address is c/o Wagner 8 rue Mignard.

5. In about 10 days I’ll be through with writing my reportage. Where would you like me to go then?

6. I can’t get by on the money. In 4 weeks, I’ve gone through 500 marks. And they use francs. 6a.

7. I am very widely known—almost popular—in the Saarland. Asked to give a talk on Russia, at the request of some cultivated middle-class people. The paper is widely and attentively read. The only place where we are ahead of BT, Voss., and Cologne. People mostly very much in favor. Complaints about the books pages. [. . .] Promotion, sales, wooing of subscribers, advertising space, all inadequate. Bäderblatt is popular. My novel much admired. Kracauer’s photograph likewise. [. . .]

I think that’s everything!

Best wishes, your

Joseph Roth

1. Holitscher: Arthur Holitscher (1869–1941), travel writer and novelist. He was Thomas Mann’s model for the awful writer Spinell in the novella Tristan.

2. Saarland: Roth was engaged on writing a series of articles on the Saarland and Lorraine, which appeared in the FZ in 1927 under the title of “Letters from Germany.”

53. To his parents-in-law

Hotel Englischer Hof
Frankfurt am Main
30 November 1927

My dear parents,1

thank you for the gloves and the kind letter. I’m going to be here for another 10 days, then to the Ruhr, and then probably joining Friedl in Paris. We could only go to Vienna if I managed to sell my new novel first, but the chances of doing that by Christmas are slim. Also, to get a better offer, it would be more advisable to allow its predecessor a little more time. I hope it is a success! There’s no point in going to Vienna with a little money, and Hedi2 needs our expenses even more than she needs our physical presence. I send her my very best.

My health is so-so. Next spring, I should like to take a cure in Vichy or Karlsbad.

Regards to you and the children, from your

Son M.

1. parents: Selig (1875–1958) and Jenny (Jente) Reichler (1876–1954), née Torczyner. They lived in the Leopoldstadt in Vienna, and in 1935 emigrated to Palestine, where they died.

2. Hedi: Friedl’s sister; she left Austria in 1938 for exile in London.

54. To Félix Bertaux

Hotel Excelsior, Munich
21 December 1927

Esteemed Mr. Bertaux,

I’m sorry I couldn’t answer your letter before today. I’m so grateful to you for your kind words—they filled me with a childish glee. I really don’t know whose verdict on my book1 could have had more importance than yours. Only French Europeans of your stamp are still in a position to recognize the European tradition of stylistic purity—certainly not the American Germans in whose midst I write. If it hadn’t been for your letter, I would have despaired at the stupidity of all the German reviewers, all of whom praised me, but for things I don’t see. Except for one piece of advice, which I am unable to follow: to write in French. They all talked about my “Latin clarity.” You may see thereby how far the Germans of today are fallen from their own literary traditions. It’s the country where the British and American authors have the biggest print runs, and the greatest successes. Whereas I—according to my German reviewers—am a “one-off in German literature”! The feeling of not belonging anywhere, which has always been with me, was borne out.

I am glad you recognized Rohan.2 Oui, c’est ça, c’est lui!

May I tell you I am now working on a novel on the postwar generation.3 I hope the material will be of interest to you.

I’m going to be in Berlin in February. I will be delighted to seek out your son. Before that, though, there’s a chance—a probability, even—that I’ll be in Paris. End of December—I’ll try to see you, if you have time.

Once again: my best thanks!

Please give my regards to your wife.

I remain, as always, your

Joseph Roth

1. my book: Flight Without End.

2. Rohan: presumably Prince Karl Anton Rohan (1898–1975), editor of the European Review, and a proponent of good Franco-German relations.

3. novel: Right and Left (Berlin: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1929).

55. To Georg Heinrich Meyer

Paris 16e
152–54 rue de la Pompe
27 December 1927

Esteemed Mr. Meyer,1

you will have heard by now that I have concluded a new contract with Kurt Wolff. I had hoped to see you in Munich, and talk to you once more. I’ve been more convinced than ever, since Frankfurt, that your memoirs would be an important book. If you do write them, then be sure to mention me as your newest acquisition in nonpareil at the back.

Are you pleased with my book? Happy New Year, and a great success for Flight Without End from your old

Joseph Roth

1. Meyer: Georg Heinrich Meyer (1869–1931), editor with Kurt Wolff. The book JR asks after—already, before exile, before Friedl’s diagnosis, he is knocking them out at a dangerous rate—is Zipper and His Father, which Wolff brought out the following year, 1928.

56. To Benno Reifenberg

Paris 16e
152–54 rue de la Pompe
27 December 1927

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

I didn’t go to the Ruhr at all, of course, but to Paris. I couldn’t even stand Munich. If I had money, I’m sure I would have gone back to Frankfurt—Ruhr or no—for a day. But I didn’t get the whole of the sum I was counting on. Can I ask you please to take out the rest of my 400 marks for January on the basis of the accompanying letter, and keep them for me.

Nenikekomena.1 I am glad for once to be able to give you some good news. Through April I will be getting 700 marks a month from the Kurt Wolff Verlag. For another 4 months at least as much, if I give them my next novel (“The Younger Brother”).2 The publisher is compelled to take the book (unseen), but I don’t have to give it to him. As I’ve since had a rueful letter of apology from Zsolnay, regretting the loss of my Zipper through his little “zsenanigans,” I have reason to presume on Zsolnay’s interest in my next book, and thus be able to get more like 800–1,200 marks per month out of Wolff. Use your loaf! So for the next 7 months, I’ll be able to eat, with no newspaper work, almost like a prewar novelist. I don’t like admitting to you that it’s Zipper that is the cause of my first true independence—i.e., that I am able to live, without submitting to the censorship that any newspaper exerts. I’m glad, because it’s the novel I dedicated to you—you have no objection, I take it? I’ll make some changes. I’ll take out the somewhat mystical conversation with P. at the end; instead, the conversation will be between me and young Zipper. Following the conversation, and ending the book is the letter to him. In the middle a dialog between old and young Zipper. The character of the actress fleshed out a little. Dedication: to Benno Reifenberg, in warm and wary friendship. (only joking) What do you think?

It appears I made a favorable (i.e., unfavorable) impression on Kurt Wolff. Hence the contract. That, and the current view that I am among the 20 or so writers who can write German. At last I am making converts, having converted myself long ago—other people are always slow on the uptake. I really don’t want to write for the paper any more. Only on occasions, so I have to visit that accursed country less often. They spoil my enjoyment. But for you, I could stop just like that. Sometimes I wish you would leave, and I could follow you.

[. . .]

Viewed churches, streets, and Annette Kolb3 in Munich with Hausenstein. Good tour guide, splendid churches, spring-summery, sparkling Miss Annette. Mrs. Hausenstein gets younger all the time. Younger and sweeter. Good eye. Child is a gifted little rascal. Flirty at bedtime. The evening at Wolff’s. Mrs. Wolff well-bred. A character—not in quotation marks either.

Introduced to A. M. Frey:4 nice. Schneider: ghastly.

Munich: Gothic and Baroque layered over Romanesque. Not a German city at all, a royal city.

Recommended Kracauer’s novel.5

Read Hauser’s book6 on the road. Little sleights of hand. Tries to create an atmosphere by enumerating and describing other destinies, local color, and water. Doesn’t understand that atmosphere doesn’t grow out of humanity but out of the facts. Still, competent enough. Technically, too, in spite of alternation between 1st and 3rd-person narration. Irony. Tension. Living language, if a little porous. Gave the novel to the publisher. Will present Hauser with my objections, though I know he’s not open to criticism.

Do you see Soma Morgenstern?7 I’d be grateful for his address in Frankfurt.

Liver flushed with calvados. Otherwise OK. Writing scene of Franz Joseph’s departure for Ischl. Very effective. 300 marks worth. Net.

Paris lovely, with thousands of naïve booths on the boulevards. A fair—the 12 days of Christmas. Little harlots down from Le Havre on vacation.

Christmas tree in Montmartre, little baby Jesuses in all the brothels. Currently resting happily on my laurels.

Happy New Year to you.

Tell your mother-in-law: Szczesliwy Nowy Rok!8 From me.

Is Liselotte with you? Greetings to Maryla and Jan.

Your old

Joseph Roth

1. Nenikekomena: perfect tense of Greek nikein - to win or conquer.

2. “The Younger Brother”: working title for Right and Left; perhaps as a result of JR’s maneuverings/sharp practice, it didn’t appear with Kurt Wolff, and he had some difficulty placing it at all.

3. Annette Kolb (1870–1967), Bavarian-French novelist of great subtlety and charm.

4. Alexander Moritz Frey (1881–1957), novelist.

5. novel: Ginster, by Siegfried Kracauer.

6. book: the novel Brackwasser, by Heinrich Hauser (1901–1955), who also wrote for the FZ.

7. Soma Morgenstern (1896 Brody–1976 New York), friend of JR’s. Vienna correspondent for the FZ, novelist, and memoirist.

8. Szczesliwy Nowy Rok: the Polish for Happy New Year.

57. To Félix Bertaux

Paris, 5 January 1928

Esteemed Mr. Bertaux,

illness has detained me in Paris—and so your kind letter from Berlin only reached me today, after many detours. I’ll be here another couple of days till I’m restored; if you would let me know when you can see me, I’ll be very glad.

Fischer1 has written to me, and I want to thank you for your advocacy. In the meantime, though, Wolff has bought the book from me.2 Still, I’ve written to ask Bermann3 if he’d be interested in my next novel (should be finished in October). I’m waiting to hear. It’s about the new generation, and is called The Younger Brother. The generation of German secret associations, separatists, Rathenau murderers—in short, of our younger brothers, today’s 25-year-olds.

The version in which you read Zipper was not the final one. It’s missing a couple of dramatic scenes, and the conclusion, which takes the form of a letter from the author to young Zipper.

Kurt Wolff would be very happy for advice from you concerning translation rights. And I—you know this—would throw my arms around you, which I’d like to do anyway, for your wonderful humane interest in my literary fate. It makes me very proud.

I hope you found Pierre doing well in Berlin.

My regards to him, please.

I wish you a Happy New Year, and kiss your wife’s hand

Your devoted

Joseph Roth

152 rue de la Pompe

Hotel St Honoré d’Eylau

1. Fischer: i.e., the publisher S. Fischer, where Roth had hopes of being published at this time.

2. Kurt Wolff: Wolff published Flight Without End in 1927, and Zipper and His Father in 1928.

3. Bermann: Samuel Fischer’s son-in-law and designated successor on his death in 1934. He took the firm to Vienna, Stockholm, and New York, before relocating it in Frankfurt after the war.

58. To Benno Reifenberg

Paris, 8 January 1928

This letter doesn’t need an answer/

contains no questions!

Dear Mr. Reifenberg, I address this letter to you at home, in the hope that you’ll be resting for a few days, and not going to the shitty office. Don’t worry, I’ve been ill myself, and only recovered consciousness about 3 days ago, with an understanding of what it all means. It’s a residue of the animal in us, the hibernal instinct, strongest when the days are shortest. I could have burrowed myself into my nest, had no desire to eat, and am perfectly convinced that I could curl up in a hole and sleep uninterruptedly from December 21 to January 15. And if you don’t, and you stay awake, you fall prey to all sorts of diseases and nervous weaknesses. Neuralgia is rampant. So you should listen to your body, and sleep. Only an increasingly instinctless humanity has decided to begin each year at such a time, which is what makes our years so miserable.

Yesterday I sent you a piece from “Cuneus.”1 I’m afraid it may step on a few political toes. Maybe it could be given to a tame pol.2 I also hear that the Saarbrückener Zeitung came up with a couple more attacks on the 19th or 20th last. Send copies, if possible. If Matz comes back for more, following the mild cuffing I gave him, then I’ll beat him up good and proper, for all my manifest disgust with these roaches.

To me the Frankfurter Zeitung isn’t so much a springboard, more a sort of spring mattress, of the kind we used to see in variety shows, with zebra-striped ticking. It’s my only home soil, and must do for me as fatherland and exchequer. All I want now is time to write my books. Here enclosed—to be returned at some convenient time—is an offer from Fischer. He has also asked Annette Kolb—who wrote me a lovely letter—to ask about my availability. Nor is he the only one. The Verband der Bücherfreunde has been in touch. I won a humiliating victory over Zsolnay. He wrote me an abject letter of apology. In the event of a good offer, I’ll swap Wolff for Fischer, if less good, I’ll just play them off against each other. My stay in Paris is very important just now, because I can follow up the translation, and make connections with the literary establishment here. Unfortunately, my French isn’t quite good enough. The pax with S.3 is opportune because otherwise he could have been a (small) hindrance here. Diplomacy. Don’t you hate it. It’s as much trouble as 3 books.

[. . .]

Cottage or apartment in the environs of Paris as cheap (or dear) as near Frankfurt. Only made expensive by travel (40 marks per person, 60 for wagon-lit, 80 for luxury train via Cologne). But why not. Polish newspapers available here for your mother-in-law. (Convey regards, please.) Air is best in May. Possible trips to the Alps, etc. My wife is asking for precise details of Meudon. I’ll let you know. Best New Year wishes from us both.

Kracauer demanded his chapter back. What’s he doing? Best regards.

Health, luck, blessing,

Your old

Joseph Roth

Am writing generation novel.

Have a thick notebook with yellow paper set aside for you.

1. Cuneus: Latin for “wedge,” and Roth’s pseudonym for the politically delicate series on Lorraine and the Saarland.

2. tame pol: i.e., a colleague from the paper’s political section who will vet it permissively?

3. S.: Sieburg.

59. To Félix Bertaux

Paris, 9 January [1928]

Esteemed Mr. Félix Bertaux,

I was thinking for a long time about your inspired translation1 of “Neue Sachlichkeit,” and came to the conclusion that “l’ordre froid” is far too good for that ugly label, which seems to have reached German literature by way of German painting. It exalts all the productions that sailed under that flag to a level they don’t deserve. The French reader will be inclined to think more of that objectivity than he should, simply by dint of your splendid term. If I were you therefore, I would note that the translation (“l’ordre froid”) is better than the original (Neue Sachlichkeit), and refers not to the achievement but the orientation of most of the so-called Objectives.

Please excuse the advice, and the following too. You will probably be unable to avoid connecting the absence of a truly German novel (in the French sense) with the absence of a truly German society (in the French sense). In this context, can I draw your attention to the newest novel by Annette Kolb (published 1927, chez S. Fischer)?2 It describes nothing less than the last remnants of a cultivated German society. It’s exemplary, less a novel than a symptom, last sign of life of people who no longer exist.

Enclosed, you will find the review by Franz Blei,3 not so much for itself, as for the way it stands in for very many other reviews.

Once again, thank you for your great, humane, and just sympathy.

Ever your

Joseph Roth

1. translation: in Bertaux’s survey, Panorama de la littérature allemande contemporaine.

2. The novel in question is Daphne Herbst (Berlin: S. Fischer, 1928).

3. Franz Blei (1871 Vienna–1942 New York), short story writer, essayist, humorist, editor, and translator of Gide and Claudel.

60. To Félix Bertaux

Monday [early January 1928]

Esteemed Mr. Bertaux,

just got your card! Of course. I’ll be honored and delighted to read your survey,1 even if I’m quite sure you won’t have perpetrated any solecisms. You certainly have finer instincts than German literature professors, so even if you happen not to know something, you’ll be correctly oriented.

I’ll give you my next address in Germany—or is there any chance you can get me the proofs by Wednesday?

I enjoyed myself very much at your house yesterday, and hope to be in a position to invite you to a home of mine one day, if royalties should permit me ever to have one.

Please convey my regards to your wife. I remain your grateful

Joseph Roth

1. Félix Bertaux’s Panorama.

61. To Benno Reifenberg

Kaiserhof, Essen
17 January 1928

Esteemed Mr. Reifenberg,

I got your forwarded letter, thank you! I’ll answer the reader’s letter after this. If it’s physically possible, I’ll try and do corrections and cuts myself. Maybe on the galleys. It’ll save you the trouble, and the awkward entry into a different sentence rhythm. The question mark you allowed to stand is part of the signals of our correspondence: a private code emerging from our conversations—don’t be surprised if others don’t get it. Why didn’t Dr. Feiler go over this feuilleton? Why give it to Dr. Drill1—and for how much longer does the political desk (i.e., not the editorial conference) intend to supervise our feuilletons? If it’s to be a form of censorship, then let it be according to the views of the whole board, not the more or less reactionary—or revolutionary—views of a single politician, whom as an individual I will not allow the right to represent our age better than I do. (I’m not referring to Dr. Drill, whom, as you know, I rate very highly.) I’m going to raise this matter of censorship—if it’s agreeable to you. Or I will make the perfectly reasonable demand that the political correspondents submit their pieces to me for censorship. This absurd supervision is wholly unjustified. We represent the paper no better and no worse than the leader writers.

I enclose something for the books pages, very topical, highly controversial. If you have any doubts about it, feel free to add an editorial preface.

I am writing two more articles for the books pages, namely: Gide and the Congo2 (in a fortnight) and on Benda’s Trahison des Clercs.3 Linguistic analysis in Frankfurt. Could you send me the money for the three articles, so that I get it on or before 20/21. Because on the 23rd I will have to be in Frankfurt again, but I need money here, before that. If so, please wire me that it’s coming, so I’ll be sure to be at home.

I finally got to be introduced to Gide. He Olympian, I merely snotty. He was in Berlin to give the standard talk on mutual understanding. I told him what I thought about it. Who’s covering it for us? Brentano? Was asked later what I thought of Gide. C’est un acteur, n’est-ce pas?—said Paulhan.4 And I: il est plus qu’un acteur, il est une actrice!

Dear Mr. Reifenberg, I’ve long owed you thanks for your violets. It was excellent, save one clearly intentional childish note. What should have been someone’s distant recollection sounded like the zoom of a fresh close-up. A “plus serré” would have fixed it. But perhaps then the lovely, mysterious to-and-fro would have been lost!

I’m uneasy about you. What’s happened? Something must have happened! Something unexpected!

Sincerely, your old

Joseph Roth

Please don’t forget money and censorship!

1. Dr. Drill: Robert Drill, with the FZ since 1896, dismissed in the Third Reich, died in South African exile in 1942.

2. Gide and the Congo: The travel diary Voyage au Congo (1927), by André Gide (1869–1951), the French novelist and essayist.

3. Benda: Julien Benda (1867–1956), philosopher, novelist, and essayist, whose treatise La Trahison des clercs appeared in 1927.

4. Paulhan: Jean Paulhan (1884–1968), essayist, literary critic, and director of La Nouvelle Revue Française.

62. To Stefan Zweig

Cologne, 24 January 1928
Till 30th at the Englischer Hof, Frankfurt

Dear Mr. Zweig,

I was very glad of your letter. If anyone has a right to demand perfection of me, then surely you, who write so cleanly and immaculately. There’s much I could tell you about my Tunda.1 You’re right, though, it was an intentional break. The book switched from the first person to the third. While one might not sense any tragic quality in the narrator, then perhaps in the “hero” he talks about. But I had qualms, I have qualms about that “tragic” component, I think our postwar man no longer has that “classical” capacity for tragedy, which is no longer a component of character but is still present in the “historical view.” Which means there is perhaps tragedy in the way we view the fate of someone like Tunda, even though he himself won’t see it or feel it.

At Easter another novel2 of mine will appear, carefully written. I will send you a copy if I may. Right now, I’m busy on a third,3 on the young generation in Germany. I have drafts going back to 1920, half-written manuscripts that I didn’t have time or leisure to complete. Now I’m at least able to live respectably and write like a madman. Unfortunately, I’m still not able to give up the journalism. My articles probably get in the way of those “creative pauses” that a writer needs. But even though publishers are queuing up to offer me little 3,000-mark advances in return for 2 or 3 years’ work, not one is really willing to back me, which means freeing me of the necessity of writing for the paper. I’m still waiting, in effect.

I would very much like to meet you.4 But then I’m always back and forth, without a fixed address. I wrote to you in November when I heard you were coming to Paris (I was there in December), but I didn’t get an answer, and thought you were probably traveling. But it’s also possible you never got my letter. I’m going to send this one by registered mail, at the risk of interrupting your work just to elicit your signature. When will you be in Paris? I have an address there which will be valid till mid-February: Paris XVI, rue de la Pompe, 152–54. Perhaps you could write me there, and let me know your whereabouts in spring?

Yours with heartfelt thanks,

Joseph Roth

1. Tunda: Lieutenant Franz Tunda, hero of Flight Without End.

2. another novel: Zipper and His Father.

3. busy on a third: Right and Left.

4. In the event, JR didn’t meet Stefan Zweig, the man who underwrote his last ten years on earth, until May of 1929, in Zweig’s house in Salzburg.

63. To Félix Bertaux

St. Raphaël, 13 February 1928

Esteemed Mr. Bertaux,

your card has just been forwarded to me here—because I suddenly had to up sticks and head south with my wife, who was feeling poorly. I hasten to thank you, my dear esteemed Mr. Bertaux. To me at the beginning of my literary career, I know of nothing better or greater than for my words to be translated into the language I love, and the one that is used by the greatest contemporary authors. It really is reason to wax pathetic—forgive me, if this is happening to me. But let me tell you how deeply grateful I am, and that I thank heavens for the fortune that brought us together.

I will write to Kurt Wolff tomorrow about the rights for Gallimard,1 and concerning Monsieur Betz.2 In any case, I hope I shall have the honor of knowing my book will be scanned before its appearance by you. It’s my belief that in France people still listen to the word—as opposed to Germany, where if you write passable German they call you French. I can’t say I mind.

I am still negotiating with S. Fischer about rights to future books. I hope we come to an agreement, even though it would be Wolff’s loss. But it seems to me that, in Germany, I need the full authority of the Fischer imprimatur.

I heard (while in Germany, for January and early February) that the Nouvelles Lítteraires published an essay about me. Did you get a chance to read it?

I’m here till the 16th, and then taking my wife to some other place where they have no mistral. She is doing better today already, and sends her regards.

I hope to meet you in Paris at the end of the month.

For the time being, I remain, with regards to your wife and self,

your grateful and obedient servant

Joseph Roth

Villa Alice (Var)

Thanks again for the essay in the NRF!

1. Some of Roth’s novels were published in French translation in the Nouvelle Revue Française imprint of the famous house of Gallimard.

2. Maurice Betz (1898–1946), noted French translator, of Rilke, among others.

64. To Félix Bertaux

St. Raphaël, 24 February 1928

Esteemed Mr. Bertaux,

thank you for your card. My wife is feeling better. She thanks you for your concern, and sends her regards. She is staying here while I go back to Paris today, for 2–3 days, and then probably on to Berlin, to draw up a contract with Fischer. I would be glad indeed if Dr. Bermann turned out to be the excellent person I seem to see in his letters.

Kurt Wolff has written to Gallimard. I have written to Betz, using your name—I hope that’s not unwelcome to you?

Your question regarding Ulitz1 refers to Franz Blei’s review, I take it. Where you and I are both praised. In my view: c’était de la politique. Döblin: un juif, Musil:2 juif-Viennois, moi: encore moins qu’un juif. On a du nommer au moins deux Allemands de “pur sang.” Blei is a real tactician, a literary diplomat, of Semitic cunning. Ulitz is a Silesian writer, bags of pathos, big heart, small head, perspective narrowly provincial (he used to be a primary school teacher in Breslau). But at least he writes correct German. Morals: excellent. Mental capacity: below average. Industry: praiseworthy.

What did please me was the reaction of your son Pierre. I will seek him out in Berlin. He seems to have inherited his father’s eye—and if he has your conscientiousness, and your extraordinary flair for a phrase, then German literature will have a rosy future in France.

Dear, esteemed Mr. Bertaux, may I ask you to leave word at rue de la Pompe 152 on Saturday 25th or Sunday 26th when I can see you? I’ll probably be going to Berlin on Monday or Tuesday. And, as you know, to me you are both a literary patron saint and a warm and clever person who never fails to cheer me up.

Kiss your wife’s hand for me!

I am, as ever, your grateful

Joseph Roth

1. Ulitz: Arnold Ulitz (1888–1971), Silesian writer and poet.

2. What Roth is saying here, its bluntness softened perhaps by being said in French, is that Blei’s selection of German writers was guided by tokenism, choosing Döblin, a Jew, Musil, a Viennese Jew, and himself, something less than a Jew (perhaps by virtue of being an Eastern Jew). Blei then saw himself faced by the need to name racial Germans, and came up with two further names, one of them Ulitz’s (See the essay list “Auto-da-Fé of the Mind,” in What I Saw, where Roth lists the Jews among the German writers of the period.) The intellectualist Robert Musil (1880–1942) and Roth did not get on. In point of fact, Musil was not a Jew, not even a Viennese Jew.

65. To Félix Bertaux

Grand Hotel Victoria
Zurich
26 March 1928

Dear esteemed Mr. Bertaux,

thank you for your kind letter, and please forgive me for being so tardy in answering it. My wife’s illness has upset all my plans. I had to accompany her to the Ticino, and am now on my way to Vienna with her. I hope to be in Frankfurt early in April. It’s too bad that you’re going back to Paris as early as the 3rd or 4th, and I lose the delightful prospect of seeing you and your son Pierre together.

Please send or hand in the proofs and a possible accompanying note—which I would beg you to write—to the Feuilleton department at the Frankfurter Zeitung. They will give you an address for me in Vienna.

My wife is feeling much better. She thanks you and your wife for your concern, sends her regards to you both, and will write as soon as she is up to it.

Please don’t forget to call on Mr. Reifenberg at the FZ. And Dr. Kracauer too. There are not many such people in the whole of Germany.

I look forward to seeing the proof1 and your accompanying words—kiss your wife’s hand for me, and give my regards to your son Pierre.

Cordially as ever,

your Joseph Roth

1. Still, no doubt, of the Panorama.

66. To Félix Bertaux

Lvov, Poland, 31 May 1928

Dear esteemed Mr. Bertaux,

I hope your wife is better, and ask you for a few words to set my mind at ease.

I’ve been on the road for the past 3 weeks, and have only had an address to give you as of today. It will be my main address while in Poland. In a few days, I’m going to Vilnius and the Polish–Lithuanian border.

I am writing a series of “Letters from Poland” and at the same time working on my new novel. Fischer—I’ve grown fond of the old gentleman by now—will be pleased.

Is it possible for you to send me your survey here?

My wife is with me. Not well, but better.

In old friendship and gratitude I press your hand, and remain your

Joseph Roth

P.S. Franz Blei urged me to drop the introduction for the French edition of Flight Without End. What do you think? And if you agree, would you be kind enough to let Gallimard know?

The address:

c/o Madame Helene de Szajnocha-Schenk,

Lvov, Pologne

Ulica Hofmana 7/1

67. To Stefan Zweig

Warsaw, 10 July 1928

Esteemed Mr. Zweig,

I am late in thanking you for your book.1 I read it on the road as I was passing through many small towns, and must thank you twofold: for your company in that somewhat bleak setting, and for the enjoyment of your book at all (the effect of it was intensified by my solitariness). I have the sense that I am closer to you now than if I had read you or met you, say in Berlin or Paris. All that remains to be sought is an opportunity and your permission to seek you out personally. Perhaps sooner rather than later, because on the 20th or 21st I’ll be in Vienna, where I have to see to a (for me very tedious) formality regarding nationality.2 I hope it won’t eat up the whole 5 days I’m there. I can be found c/o Mr. E. P. Tal,3 Vienna VII, Lindengasse 4.

The Stendhal section was I thought the best part of your book—perhaps because he is such a sympathetic figure to me anyway. But, even though I know him well, I still have a sense that he comes out as a character in your pages. It’s a real portrait vivant that you’ve composed. What you are so masterly in, if I may make so bold, is the yoking of a cool and precise language to a warm and relaxed patience. You write a remarkably human literary history, but always with dignity and distance. I knew little about Tolstoy, and next to nothing about Casanova. I thank you for introducing me to the material, and assure you that I feel a colossal knowledge on every page. How industrious and exacting you are!

Superfluous to remark that I’m giving you poor words in return for good ones. But you will have seen from my books that I would be ashamed to be untruthful—and already I am ashamed to have uttered such a sentence. Please disregard it.

I wish you happiness and industry! Where will you be this July and August? Till the 19th inst. my address is as below:

c/o Frau H. von Szajnocha-Schenk

Lvov (Poland)

Hofmana 7/1.

With warm and grateful regards

your Joseph Roth

1. book: Zweig’s Drei Dichter ihres Lebens, lives of Stendhal, Casanova, and Tolstoy.

2. nationality: Roth was attempting to get Austrian citizenship. See no. 69.

3. E. P. Tal: a Viennese publisher.

68. To Benno Reifenberg

Hotel Imperial, Vienna
[July 1928]

Dear kind Mr. Reifenberg,

I was very glad of your short letter because it was yours, even though I understood almost nothing of it. Why don’t you ask to see a carbon of it, and read it back to yourself. It has an unnatural laconicism and a hortatory tone and makes it clear that you are doing your duty in running the feuilleton section, while I am writing a novel. That’s not you, that’s not your tone, and the gravitas in which you fail to say anything about yourself is almost more pathos-laden than that of someone talking about himself. Why not tell me? Why conceal yourself “behind your job”? I’ll tell you anytime that you are much more important than the feuilleton section, than the whole of the Frankfurter Zeitung and all German Jews and the ridiculous “duty” we are allegedly performing in Germany. You know I’m not offended or hurt by your brevity. If you’d written me nothing but: I’m out of cigarettes!—I would have recognized you. But now fulfilling duties and beavering away at Europe or Germany or the whole world in those tawdry editorial offices—well, I don’t recognize you. Your latest very good feuilleton about Frankfurt regrettably starts off with a Faustian paragraph about heaven and hell—by way of a so-called introduction—and what you say there is unnecessary because it’s between your lines anyway, all it is is the outpouring of a homesick heart, and it recalls the song of the archangels, and has a gentle parp of trombone. What’s keeping you, my friend? I don’t know where to find you any more, it’s as though we were both standing in a pitch-dark room. The cuts you undertook yourself soothe me, but just a little. You’re not cheerful, you’ve spent too long in that self-important office—and it’s time you knew that I’m convinced that you and you alone (not you with me or you with Kracauer) will save the FZ from the fate of becoming a General-Anzeiger. Germany is one General-Anzeiger: It’s all they know.

Be well, I pray that you might not have become so humorless as to take umbrage at my directness.

I’m not too well myself. (We’ll talk.)

Your old

Joseph Roth

Regards to your folks. A word about Jan and your mother-in-law, and a smile from your wife is worth more than all the duties of German newspapers and books.

69. To Benno Reifenberg

Hotel Imperial, Vienna
30 July 1928

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

thank you for yours. A few more words on your article. You know I write with exactly the same intentions and the same means as you do. The reason I took against your introduction has nothing to do with that chronically misunderstood term “objectivity.” You’re right to be Goethean—it’s the only way of writing well in German. What I was critical of was the irrelation between introduction and subject—your private view of Frankfurt can’t be permitted to set the tone. The archangels’ song is in Faust and not Werther—not to compare the worth of the two works, but the value Goethe wanted to give them. An article about an exhibition for instance can’t be used “naïvely” as an occasion to vent one’s private feelings or moods too crudely. You violate the rule that demands information. If you wrote more regularly, you would come to the conclusion all by yourself that an impulsive rush of writing will match the object maybe 2 or 3 times in the course of a lifetime, and that those times when you write freely and with pleasure are precisely those times when you have to be extra careful you don’t give yourself away. Rush and pleasure have to be confined in or to the subject, for that to acquire a sort of sheen. That’s the only way. But in your article, Reifenberg gets more gloss than Frankfurt—which is surely the last thing you wanted. And because you started off with Reifenberg, you used up your whole tank of fuel, and ended up pushing your vehicle by hand. You understand me, don’t you? If you don’t write often, it’s necessary to write a lot to write better. You will draw such security from it that you won’t have need of any mornings, or any vainglorious moods.

I am in critical difficulties.

Firstly, I will shortly have to move my old friend Mrs. Szajnocha in with me. Which means founding a household. She can’t stay in Poland for many reasons—and I am her only material prop. Secondly, I need to come up with an arrangement for my wife. Where? What with? How? Where am I going to put these two women?

3. I need to begin a new life. The time has come once more when I must transform my entire existence, go away, be gone by myself—to America, or Siberia, for that matter. I am so dependent on reality that in the most ordinary sense of the word, I need to experience something, to have something to write about.

4. The position concerning my documents is tangled and difficult. You remember how I changed from being a Russian to an Austrian—well, now I have to prove that I was always an Austrian. The unorthodox means by which I furnished myself with names, dates, schools, and army career are to be tested to their destruction—and I’ve spent the past fortnight trying to establish my literary and journalistic existence to authorities who don’t know anything about me. The earth would betray me, so I’m forced to use Olympus. Arguing that papers are quite rightly bound to have disappeared—hence the absence of conventional documentation. I’m living and improvising twenty novels. It’s so exhausting, I haven’t a hope of getting on with the one I’m trying to write. I’ve called a halt. My nationality is connected—via the question of passport—both to the question of household and to the questions of travel. Without a passport, I’m toast. This month, August, I shall have to find my way to a document that accords with my present identity. For the past 25 years I’ve been living as a sort of fantastic figment.

You can imagine how I feel. Every day I go to some office or other. Fight against the recalcitrance of the lower officials and the cunning of their superiors. Trying to make play with my “social position” and call in aid the patronage of personal acquaintances. Another two weeks of this, and I’ll be done in.

My liver is playing up again.

Cordially

your old Joseph Roth

Address: c/o Tal, Vienna VII, Lindengasse 4.

No hotel, because it’s very expensive, and I moved out, am only hanging on here to suggest a fixed address to officialdom for a few days.

70. To Benno Reifenberg

9 August 1928

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

even though I wrote you two letters yesterday, one after the other—which I hope you received, they weren’t registered—I’m writing you again today. Because, given my intense mistrust toward the world, FZ included, the sudden announcement of my visit to Italy1 makes me suspicious. (1) How is it that you don’t try and see me in Frankfurt, following the end of a tour? (2) Why does the board agree to a proposal of yours so quickly? I, or if you like, my suspicion, can think of the following reasons: (1) You, dear Mr. Reifenberg, have some reason not to see me right now. You’re planning something, or have just done something that you assume I wouldn’t approve. (2) The board thinks Roth shouldn’t be running around drawing money, unless he’s been given something to do. (3) The board is able to sell copies in Italy again, and thinks Roth is sometimes tame enough for Bäderblatt articles, and maybe we could use him to try and sell space and subscriptions in Italy. You see what sort of things are apt to fly into my mind when someone does me a good turn. What pains me the most is of course (1) that you might have some personal grounds, and that makes me ask openly and suspiciously: if you go on vacation, who is filling in for you? Whose job is it to unpick the little bit that has been achieved? Please tell dear Kracauer that I don’t trust him, ever since the books pages under his command have been opened to the tone and the feeling of Fred Hildebrandt.2 If Kracauer carries on like that, out of laziness or apathy or whatever, then I promise I will wreck his literary career for him. Please give him my regards, I remain personally very fond of him! Dr. Morgenstern seems to be personally offended with me, I haven’t seen him for a long time. And now you pack me off to Italy. Faced with so much kindness, timeo danaos, I start to scent mischief.

You’re none too well, I know. You run around with a heavy heart, and need to groan: Oh Lord! at least twice a day—and that takes some doing. And it’s not the case that you can shake off that sort of thing easily. Cycling doesn’t always help. You’re stuck on a horrid treadmill, and you won’t mind my giving you the truth. I make no demands of you, as you know, only that you don’t go to the trouble of being diplomatic with me, because I won’t even believe the unvarnished truth.

Warmest regards to all at home, and no one in the office.

Your old

Joseph Roth

1. Italy: JR visited Italy for the paper in 1928, and wrote a series of articles called “The Fourth Italy.”

2. Fred Hildebrandt, the feuilleton editor of the Berliner Tageblatt.

71. To Benno Reifenberg

telegram from Vienna, 22 August 1928

reifenberg grueneburgweg 95 frankfurtmain

wire deputy prior departure what I should write if not italy stop paris hotel foyot stop propose resigning because simon hindrance to my participation on paper till tomorrow Vienna stop in event of future difficulties am prepared to write publicly against paper have received request cordially

roth

72. To Benno Reifenberg

[1928?]

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

I wrote you at home a week ago.

I would like, not a reply, please don’t go to any trouble, but just a confirmation. Since the 2nd I’ve wanted to go to Essen by way of Cologne. But I am incapable of traveling, of writing, am completely crushed, fighting an illness I won’t allow to break out, days in bed, curing myself with raw onions, and tired, terribly tired.

A little patience still, please. I’m writing two more letters.

Cordially,

your old Joseph Roth

Big successes. Offer from S. Fischer.1

1. This seems doubtful, or at least overstated. The closest Roth got to being published by Fischer was when a chapter from his unfinished novel The Silent Prophet was printed in Fischer’s “house” magazine, Die Neue Rundschau, in 1929.

73. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Englischer Hof
Frankfurt am Main
26 November 1928

Dear esteemed Mr. Zweig,

after a long stay in Italy and France, I happened to pick up a newspaper, where you mention me in connection with another book. After a long time, it’s the first positive sign from you, and I hasten to thank you for it. I have the faint hope that fate might favor our meeting, if I tell you a little more.—Tomorrow I am going for 2 days to Vienna, where my address remains c/o E. P. Tal Verlag, Lindengasse 4, VII. Thence to Berlin to deliver my new novel1 to S. Fischer, I finished a week ago, after 8 months of work. I heard once indirectly, that you expressed the wish to see a manuscript of mine.2 It is yours whenever you want, I’ll be in Berlin ca. 1–2 December. Then a day in Frankfurt Englischer Hof, then 1–2 weeks Paris 6e, Hotel Foyot, rue de Tournon.

After that I don’t know. I can’t work so much for the newspaper any more. I have major projects in mind, and nothing to keep me fed, if I don’t write articles.

How have your recent books fared? Are you satisfied?

A line from you to one of my addresses would make me happy, a meeting with you would be the fulfillment of a long and deeply held desire.

As ever your

Joseph Roth

1. new novel: either (probably) The Silent Prophet or Right and Left. When Fischer declined, Roth took himself off to Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, Berlin.

2. a manuscript of mine: Zweig was one of the leading autograph collectors of the day.

74. To Félix Bertaux

Hotel Imperial, Vienna
29 December 1928

Dear esteemed Mr. Bertaux,

I want to wish you and your wife a Happy New Year! Tomorrow I’m setting off for Zurich, and from there to Marseille. Maybe I’ll be in Paris in the course of January. Then I will have the great pleasure of seeing you. If not, I’ll send you 3 or 4 of my articles on the Saarland from Marseille. Some were unavailable from the FZ—the issues sold out—and I’ve had them copied, though I don’t know if a manuscript is any use to you.

Fischer didn’t like my novel. I won’t therefore get it published—because I don’t want the publisher to bring out a book of mine without conviction. Perhaps Fischer, who even as I speak is thrilling to Gerhart Hauptmann’s new novel Wanda, is getting on a bit. The people around him are marionettes!

Your son Pierre will have written to you about me. His development is really exceptional, he is becoming terribly clear and wise and warmhearted: a young Mensch in the old, almost lapsed sense of the word. We became very close, and I will be delighted if he can accompany me to Russia in the spring.

Goodbye, dear Mr. Bertaux, and please give Mrs. Bertaux my regards,

Ever your grateful

Joseph Roth

75. To Benno Reifenberg

6 January 1929

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

I got your kind letter today—thank you. I know how hard it is for you to send me money, but still I have no option but to take it. I am simply too wretched. Thank you for the improvisation too. It’s in your best vein. What else can I write you? Yes! I would like to have written an introduction to my Panopticum,1 making the entire book over to you. But in the meantime, misfortune struck, and I had to content myself with a hasty dedication, for which I ask your pardon.

Best regards to you and yours, especially Babuscha.2 I am still a wreck, a long way from being whole. Who knows if I ever will be again.

Ever your old

Joseph Roth

1. A collection of Roth’s feuilletons that appeared under the title Panoptikum: Gestalten und Kulissen (Munich, 1930), all part of a deal with the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten. See no. 84.

2. Babuscha: Maryla’s (Polish) mother, of whom JR remained very fond.

76. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Beauvau, Marseille
15 January 1929

Dear esteemed Mr. Zweig,

as Ernst Tal was away for the Christmas holidays, I didn’t get your wife’s1 kind note in Vienna, but forwarded to me here. Please kiss her hand, and thank her for the answer to my first telegram, and beg her forgiveness for the second.

I had so looked forward to meeting you at last. All these wretched obstacles that make us slip past one another.

I heard you were going to Russia again.2 I am to visit Siberia in early April. Will you let me know when you set off? I’m sure I’m going to be here for the next 10 days. I must finish my Jewish book—a revised version is to appear with Kiepenheuer, including a new section, called: The Jews and Their Anti-Semites.3 I am also finishing a new Zeitroman that’s been on the go for a long time.4

I’m delighted to hear of your success with the Volpone adaptation.

Let me say again how much I long to see you in the flesh. I have a sense of your humanity, even though—as you will know only too well, all the literary dogs are yapping. Just because would be too easy. No. There is something else in you, a humane heart surely, and a fine humanistic contempt. Happy New Year to you,

Cordially your

Joseph Roth

1. wife: Friderike Maria von Winternitz-Zweig.

2. Zweig had been to Moscow in 1928 for the Tolstoy centenary celebrations, where he had met Maxim Gorki.

3. The Jews and Their Anti-Semites: long mooted by JR, but it was never written.

4. This sounds like Perlefter: Story of a Bourgeois, which remained unfinished, unpublished in Roth’s lifetime, and untranslated.

77. To Félix Bertaux

Hotel Beauvau, Marseille
18 January 1929

Dear esteemed Mr. Bertaux,

I enclose a couple of my old articles—copies, because as you will see from the FZ’s letter to me, the numbers in which they appeared sold out. Is it too late?

Forgive me for keeping you waiting so long. I have a lot to do just now, working on 2 books at once, which must be finished before I leave for Siberia.

I got a charming, clever, and very intimate letter from your son Pierre. He is some fellow, as they say in Germany.

Always your grateful

Joseph Roth

P.S. I can’t find Reifenberg’s letter just at the moment. I’ll send it later.

78. To Pierre Bertaux

Hotel Beauvau, Marseille
26 January 1929

Dear friend,

your letter came, like a good friend, like a personal envoy of yours. Thank you! As you say, I’m sitting in the southern part of Europe, feel happy and at home, and not the least bit romantic. You came up with an excellent definition of modern man, showing the true measure of difference between the past and future type. Incidentally, the one who’s never surprised by anything is a type that has existed before. It’s not my sense that Alexander the Great felt romantic emotions—which after all began with Napoleon—when he was in Egypt. Nor did Caesar. In the Middle Ages, people shuttled between Padua and Krakow. And we’ll be going to Moscow in just the same fashion. What’s insufferable about Germany isn’t the technology so much as the romantic cult of the technology. The German is always a small-town person, so he always finds something to gawk at. Really, the Tartarins1 belong in Germany far more than they do in your land. See how every German is equipped with all kinds of gadgets and portable knickknacks, forever on the hunt, the police are kitted out à la Tartarin. The most important difference between the American and the German is that the former uses the technology as naturally as a baby drinks milk, while the latter is incapable of making a phone call without lyrical commentaries on what a great thing the telephone is. That’s what preserves Germany from ultimate Americanization. We’re half ashamed of still being Europeans, and are not capable of becoming Americans. (That’s part of the German misfortune.)

It’s a wide field.

Outside it’s bright and clear, a mistral blowing, typical Marseille weather. I’m writing this in a café, excuse the scruffiness of my writing, and this letter. I’m hard at work, writing two books simultaneously (my novel and the “Jews and Their Anti-Semites”), and articles 4 times a month. My wife isn’t quite well, is in bed, sends her regards. I’ve become very moody, toying with my novel, assaying various willfulnesses, all to loosen my stiffness. Like a form of gymnastics.

I hope your work is going well. I hope to be here 2 more weeks. Please write, and don’t mind my irregular replies.

In old cordiality ever your

Joseph Roth

1. the Tartarins: see Roth’s piece on Alphonse Daudet’s delightful book in What I Saw.

79. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Foyot, Paris
27 February 1929

Esteemed Mr. Zweig,

your kind letter has been in my correspondence file for a month now. I was delighted by it. It’s a kindly proof of the humanity I sensed in you, and a generous present to a near-stranger who is unable to reply in kind. I had other reasons, admittedly, that kept me from writing to you: a protracted illness of my wife’s (who is still not completely well), a flu that laid me out, and the aggravation of a chronic stomach ailment, and on top of everything else 10 hours a day working on my book, of which 30 pages remain to be written, and which I hope to finish by the end of March. Even if there hadn’t been all those distractions, I would have sat over my piece of paper just as perplexed as I’m sitting over it now. I don’t know what entitles me to your great trust, and to what extent I may reveal my (unexpected) self-confidence without making myself ridiculous to you, by answering a personal letter of yours as though I’d all along been entitled to receive such letters. By making me a present you embarrass me.

The book I’m working on now isn’t the one I told you about then. I traveled to Marseille for material for the book that is to come after this one. What I am working on now is the story of a German bourgeois up to 1928.1 As you see, I work hard. I have the feeling it takes a great deal of talk to get one out of the stage of being utterly misunderstood into merely partial misunderstanding. The only reason I work though is material. I must succeed in producing the minimum from my existence, without regularly writing articles that undermine my health. So that my life isn’t too grotesquely abbreviated, I should like to find myself a free man in a year’s time. And for that to happen, I have to write every day. But that’s a change. It’s impossible to fix myself. I have no such thing as a stable literary “character.” I am not stable in other respects either. I haven’t lived in a house since my eighteenth year, aside from the odd week staying with friends. Everything I own fits into three suitcases. It doesn’t strike me as at all odd, either. What is odd, though, to me, and even romantic, is a house, with pictures on the walls, and so on and so forth. In a fit of mindlessness, I took on the responsibility for a young woman. I need to keep her somewhere, she is frail, and physically not up to a life at my side.

You write true things about Marseille. I want to write a (commissioned) article on the city for the Wiener Neue Presse,2 and then you will see how much our views coincide. Marseille has another side: the terrestrial one. The city is even more colored by Provence than it is by the sea. I spent months living and working among peasants. The city quite lost its maritime aspect and acquired a wholly continental character. (Please excuse my skewed handwriting.)

1. Hermann Kesten thinks Right and Left, but this is more likely Perlefter: Geschichte eines Bürgers, a satirical novel that Roth began and abandoned. The manuscript surfaced only recently; there is no English translation.

2. Presse: JR means the Neue Freie Presse, for which Zweig made his literary debut, and remained a regular contributor.

80. To Félix Bertaux

Hotel Foyot
Paris
27 February 1929

Dear, dear Mr. Bertaux,

I begin this letter with a burdened conscience. I didn’t answer your kind letter, but put it off, day after day. My wife has been in bed for weeks, I was unable to leave the room in Marseille, and have become ill myself. I have been working on my novel 12 hours a day. Finally, I came back here, because I didn’t want to see a doctor in Marseille, and my wife’s state was getting worse all the time. She has a swollen cheek (this is to do with her general frailty) and will perhaps have to undergo a minor sinus operation. The doctor who will come this afternoon will make the decision.

Dear Mr. Bertaux, I am so indebted to you that every word I write seems hollow and formulaic to me. I cannot tell you what it would mean to me to be read by a generation of young Frenchmen. If I were a master of pathos à la pacifist Curtius,1 and “Europeans” of that ilk, I would beat my breast with pride. But I have not those means to hand. I am not one to overestimate “nations” or the relations between them, and don’t feel called to “represent” anything at all. My modest personal relationship to “France” (every other word has to go in quotation marks, that’s how damaged I feel they are) is approximately this: the fond hope that simple human freedom will never be lost in this country, as it has been in others. Maybe I can convey to the odd young Frenchman what a terrible thing unfreedom is for the individual. By way of warning!

I’ll be staying here for about 4 weeks, to write the last 30 pages of my novel at a page a day. Is there any possibility of our meeting? Perhaps we could have lunch somewhere (although my stomach is bad, and I’m not much of a companion at mealtimes)?

My wife sends her regards to you both.

What news of Pierre?

I kiss your wife’s hand, and salute you cordially,

your grateful Joseph Roth

1. Curtius: Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956), German essayist and thinker on European matters.

81. To Félix Bertaux

Hotel Foyot, Paris
Friday
[postmarked 1 March 1929]

Dear Mr. Bertaux, mon ami,

thank you. I’ll be waiting for you tomorrow then at half past 12. I’m sending you a note, because I’m having so much trouble with the telephone. 12 young Germans, teachers or students, aspiring Curtii the lot of them, have broken into the hotel, and spend half the day on the phone, forging pacifist links with France.

Thank your wife for me. Mine will be very pleased.

Till soon,

Ever your

Joseph Roth

82. To Pierre Bertaux

7 March 1929
Hotel Foyot, Paris 6
rue de Tournon

Mon bien cher ami,

it’s not enough to “thank you sincerely.” It may be more to tell you that your letters are a real comfort to me—as they say, a reconfort—and that I have a physical sense of your friendship. It’s correct that one may not share griefs, that only redoubles them. But there is an infinite solace in that redoubling. My grief leaks out of private things into the public realm,1 and that makes it easier to bear, just as, for instance, a war appears more bearable to an individual than a bout of pleurisy.

So far as my wife is concerned, her present illness is only an acuter version of her chronic weakness, a complete lack of resistance, in which I am not without blame. There are various causes. These things, of which I have been unable to speak for months, if not for years, oppress me more than the form of the illness itself. Perhaps in another ten years I will be able to write about them, if I am still a writer then. For now, I drag them around with me, and torment myself.

Ernst Weiss,2 whom you mentioned, is to me a sort of cas typique, if you are interested in Prague and the Jews of old Austria. He is from the ghetto. A man who sailed past foreign shores as a ship’s doctor, without ever setting foot on them, who stayed in his cabin to write. A mind that is ashamed of being a mind, and so instead, without realizing it, plays a “folly.” It seems to me the man is incompetent, crippled, infantine, never left puberty, and dwells in it still happily. Read his books Nahar and Animals in Chains. You will see that this highly gifted writer joined the expressionistic bandwagon for no very good reason, other than his shame at “normality.” He always lacked courage. He was always ashamed of having courage. Courage is a brother of sense, and Ernst Weiss chose folly instead. He was a German writer. The best thing he’s written is the novella Franta Slin.

Have you met Mrs. Coudenhove?3 A rare instance of a robust hysteric. It’s not possible to like her, because she’s so ill-mannered. But she’s head and shoulders better than her husband and the pan-Europeans, and the society where she is disliked. She is a pan-Jewess. A daughter of Jehovah’s.

You will have enjoyed stammering with Kracauer. He’s a sweet boy, only cowardly, extraordinarily cowardly. He’s capable of betraying you, and becoming a bastard out of cowardice. A beaten-up-on (outside) and pampered (indoors) Jewish boy.

You can tell me what your “project” is. I won’t be in Berlin till mid-April at the earliest, I’m working on my novel till the end of March.

My wife sends cordial regards.

I had dinner with your father, and mean to telephone him one day soon. He is dear, distinguished, and moderate, as always.

Write me soon. I suffer from the idée fixe that the post is unreliable.

In friendship, your grateful

Joseph Roth

1. into the public realm: this strikes me as a remarkably acute self-diagnosis. There is something terrible, even tragic, about JR’s susceptibility or responsiveness to public events, from the mid-twenties into the thirties; one feels it continually exceed its “cause.”

2. Ernst Weiss (1882–1940), doctor and author. He committed suicide in Paris on the eve of the German occupation. Several of his novels have been translated into English, most recently Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer, in 2010.

3. Mrs. Coudenhove: Ida, wife of Richard Count Coudenhove-Kalergi, founder of the pan-European movement and the European Parliamentary Union.

83. To Pierre Bertaux

Hotel Foyot, Paris
28 March [1929]

Dear friend,

thank you for your letter. I hope to see you here before my departure for Berlin. So it won’t be possible for you to come to Russia—I shall feel lonely on my trip, having prepared myself with the thought that you would be coming with me.

Your description of your meeting with Brentano was very amusing. I know exactly that you will have gotten excited to no end with him, because he is one of those people who will go on and talk to others, using your arguments, and simultaneously bad-mouth you. If Brentano is as unhappy as you say he is, then with every reason. No one has merited unhappiness as much as he. I only fear he won’t be unhappy enough. Another thirty years of life for a creature like that are in my view too many. In thirty years, he can wreak much more destruction. He is one of three or four people I would happily murder, with no more compunction than putting out a cigarette. I don’t know if you’re acquainted with the feeling that removes any so-called humanity in you, and renders absurd the notion that killing a human being was anything special. Sometimes I feel the murderer in me is as natural as the writer, and if I were arrested and put on trial, I would be utterly perplexed.1

I’m fairly sure that my name will have been sufficient cause for an argument between you and him. I am a red rag to him, just as he to me is a slavering dog. His brain is mad, his heart is weak, his tongue is glib and stupid. I have no sort of magnanimity or “Christian feeling” for those who dislike me, and not sufficient dignity. I will hurt them as much as possible, with cunning and violence, and am only waiting for the opportunity of murdering them in a deserted alleyway.

Yesterday I finished my novel. I’m happy with it. Did the silent prophet make sense in the NR?2 I fear it may have made a muddled impression.

You should work or let yourself go. You are one of those people who never lose their senses, and whose brain will keep going even after your (physical) heart in the hour of death.

Greetings in old and cordial friendship.

(Do you ever see Bermann? He doesn’t answer my letters.)

Joseph Roth

1. Roth’s friend, sometime roommate (see no. 313), and editor, Hermann Kesten, is troubled by this letter, and gives it a long note, to the effect that one shouldn’t take it seriously, and that Roth never actually hurt a fly. According to Kesten, Roth turned on most of his friends at some time or other, but more in the spirit of a literary joke, playing with them as with the characters in a novel. “He was more concerned with artistic truth than with reality. Roth had a very strict artistic conscience.” While accepting this—especially the last sentence—one shouldn’t shy away from accepting that Roth all his life was quick to take offense, and was, as Irmgard Keun and others noted, a ferocious, gifted, principled, and implacable hater.

2. in the NR: the Neue Rundschau ran a chapter of JR’s “Trotsky novel,” The Silent Prophet.

84. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Foyot, Paris
Friday
29 March 1929

Dear esteemed Mr. Zweig,

I hope you’re back at home already, and that this letter, which for once I haven’t sent registered, won’t get lost in following you about. I read a short and admiring article on your talk in Brussels.

I finished my novel the day before yesterday. I’ll be happy to give you the manuscript.

Thank you for your kind offer to promote Flight Without End in Russia. With its content and its philosophy, I fear that won’t be possible. On the other hand, you could certainly help me in France. Flight is appearing from Gallimard this year—and if you were to mention me to your literary friends in Paris, along with Fuite sans fin, I would be very grateful to you.

I feel some compunction in voicing such a request. The least resemblance to those individuals who seek your literary patronage is something I would like to avoid.

I’m still not sure when I’m going. Now the Münchener Neuesten1 have sent me an invitation, obviously they want to get me on board. I have so little money, and hate all newspapers equally, I wonder if I shouldn’t take their offer when it comes.

It would be good to talk to you. I hope to be in Salzburg at the end of April.

With cordial greetings from

your Joseph Roth

1. The conservative daily the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten made Roth an offer, which he, cash-strapped and at various times eager to get away from the FZ (or from newspapers altogether, he wasn’t sure), briefly accepted. See nos. 75 and 90.

85. To Stefan Zweig

Berlin, 2 September 1929

Esteemed Mr. Zweig,

I don’t want you to think there’s any trivial interruption in our correspondence. Since we last saw each other, a lot of very grim things have happened.1 My wife was taken to the psychiatric hospital at Westend in a very bad state, and for some weeks I’ve been unable to write a line, and compel myself to scribble just enough to keep body and soul together. I’ll spare you any more detailed account of my condition. The word “torment” has just acquired a very real and substantial content, and the feeling of being surrounded by misfortune as by high black walls doesn’t leave me for a second. I had hoped to be able to give you my manuscript in pleasanter circumstances. I am sending it to you now under the very worst and most grievous. Be well, and drop me a line c/o Kiepenheuer Verlag, Altonaerstrasse 4, Berlin NW 87.

Sincerely and warmly

[Joseph Roth]

1. Friedl’s weakness and unhappiness had lately taken the form of erratic behavior, hearing voices, and physical frailty. There were various diagnoses, culminating in schizophrenia, and JR for the rest of his life was frantically trying to get her cared for, long after he saw that a cure was unlikely. From here on in—not to deny that both may have had their attractions for him before—he was never off the twin treadmills of alcohol and work. The “manuscript” he mentions here to Zweig may have been that of Job (published in 1930), which has harrowing descriptions of the dementia of Deborah, the wife of the central character, Mendel Singer. Zweig, as with Roth passim, gave all the help he could.

86. To Stefan Zweig

Berlin, 16 September 1929

Esteemed Mr. Zweig,

I have just gotten a copy of your Fouché.1 I would have liked to wait to thank you for the book, your inscription, and your warm and friendly letter, but I have no idea when I’ll be able to concentrate in front of a piece of paper. It seems impossible for all eternity, and impossible the hope that I might amount to more than any Tom, Dick, or Harry, and owed more obligations to the world than to my suffering nearest and dearest. Thank you again. Maybe I’ll find the strength to come to you in Salzburg, and shake your hand. Most probably mutely, but a little closer to you.

Your humble servant

[Joseph Roth]

1. Fouché: Joseph Fouché: Bildnis eines politischen Menschen (1929).

87. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel am Zoo, Berlin
17 October 1929

Esteemed Mr. Zweig,

in the middle of my wretchedness, I hear that you are being prodded to write about my book. I hasten to tell you that your silent friendship is much more precious, valuable, and dear to me than the trouble you would be put to even to write to an editor on my behalf. Please don’t trouble yourself! My books are not destined for popularity in any case!

Thank you for the Fouché, your language glittering as ever. In my rush I can think of no more felicitous phrase: brilliant, dazzling history. I know there is more there, more heart, your good, tender, noble heart, which I love.

My wife is beginning to improve. Three days ago they operated. She is still in danger. I am beset by worries, coarse and trivial for the most part, but by higher ones too, completely befuddled, and with a bad liver.

Ever your grateful old

Joseph Roth

88. To René Schickele

10 December 1929

Dear esteemed Mr. Schickele,1

thank you for your dear kind letter. Why are you surprised by my inscription—as it seems you are? Brandeis is the main character in my next novel, “No Entry, the Story of an Immoderate Man.”2

I am writing in a desperate plight. Yesterday I fled to Munich. My wife has been very sick since August. Psychosis, hysteria, suicidal feelings, she’s barely alive—and I’m chased and assailed by black and red demons, without a mind, unable to lift a finger, impotent and paralyzed, helpless, with no prospect of ever getting out. Perhaps I can crawl away somewhere in Salzburg for a couple of weeks, alone with my misfortune. I don’t know what the coming days will bring, but would like to see you.

Kind regards your

Joseph Roth

1. René Schickele (1883–1940), Alsatian novelist, essayist, and magazine editor (Die Weissen Blätter, 1915–19). In 1932 went into exile in France, where he died—like D. H. Lawrence—in Vence.

2. It seems Roth wanted to take Nikolai Brandeis (who appears halfway through Right and Left, and takes it over) and put him in another book, to be called Eintritt verboten, which was never published, and perhaps never begun. Tunda, Baranowicz, Mizzi Schinagl, Trotta, Kapturak, and many others—Roth has a way of injecting names and characters into more than one book; it is one of the things that make his writing seem more like a whole world than something merely excogitated.

89. To René Schickele

20 January 1930

thank you for your dear good letter, and kind invitation, which I gladly accept. Only I cannot leave Berlin before my wife’s situation has stabilized, at least to the point that I know where she’ll be looked after. At the moment, she’s with a friend.1 Every day I need to scrape together money for her, for the nurse, for other necessities. I’m angling for a big travel assignment, so I can leave a couple of thousand marks here, at least in prospect, and wander off. The other thing, the emotional pressure, I shall have to deal with alone. Being an author is actually no help at all. That may be my official designation, but privately I’m just a poor wretch who’s worse off than a tram conductor. Only time and not talent can provide us with distance, and I don’t have much time left. A ten-year marriage ending like this has the effect of forty, and my natural tendency to be an old man is horribly supported by external misfortunes. Eight books to date, over 1,000 articles, ten hours’ work a day, every day for ten years, and today, losing my hair, my teeth, my potency, my most basic capacity for joy, not even the chance of spending a month without financial worries. And that wretch literature! I come from a time when you were a Greek and a Roman if you followed an intellectual occupation, and I stand there now like a stranger in the midst of this ghastly Anglo-Saxonism, that sentimental Americanism that rules the roost in Germany. I am sorry you’ve had such a ghastly boring thing yourself.2 Go to a miracle man, not a doctor! Believe me, it just needs time and rest to cure it. One day it’ll go away as suddenly as it came. I’ll give you a couple of weeks’ notice before coming. How long will you stay in Badenweiler? Are you not going to leave?

Kiss your dear wife’s hand for me.

In heartfelt warmth, your sad

Joseph Roth

1. friend: the journalist Stefan Fingal.

2. ghastly boring thing yourself: Schickele suffered from eczema and asthma.

90. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel am Zoo, Berlin
1 April 1930

Dear and esteemed Mr. Zweig,

for a long time I held off replying, because I was going to wire you any moment that I was on my way to Salzburg. Now I can confirm that I’ll be on my way on Thursday or Friday. I’ll wire again before I leave, and ask you for telegraphic confirmation. Maybe I’ll stop off in Magdeburg for a couple of days.

Last week I finished a novel for serialization in the MNN.1 For the past three days I’ve been back on Job, and find myself continually interrupted: by farewell visits. I’ve always found it hard to break with a place I have no great feelings for. This is my ninth month in Berlin, and it’s been the worst time in my life. Never have I cared less about people. Never did they seem more intrusive and less inclined to leave me alone. And they can’t have given much for what happened to me.

On account of your absentmindedness, I now own two copies of your pretty volume of stories. I took it as an omen, and read them again. I envy you your lovely epic calm, and that superior dignity which is probably a result of so much knowledge of the world and of people. How serene is even the saddest thing you have to say! It’s not for nothing that you have so many readers—and how modest you remain in your private literary demeanor. I am very glad to have come to your attention.

Soon you will get the first galleys of Job. I hope it gives you a little of the pleasure it gives me. I hope to be done at the end of April.

Personally, I am terribly sad. Ten years of my sad marriage can’t be gotten over just like that. I was so cut off from humanity, my wife was my only channel to the world outside, the social part of myself. My own glumness scares me.

Till soon! With cordial gratitude

your Joseph Roth

1. MNN: Münchener Neueste Nachrichten. Roth was to furnish the paper with a novel for serialization, for which he was to be paid 20,000 marks. Along with the manuscript he included a page where he had scribbled a dozen times: Must finish novel in three days! Must finish novel in three days! Disconcerted either by this page, or by the rest of the manuscript, the newspaper tore up the contract with Roth; it wasn’t possible, they argued, to complete a story of the requisite quality in three days. Kesten admirably notes that nothing from Roth’s pen was ever as bad as what the MNN liked to publish.

91. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Stein, Salzburg
Monday, 14 [or 18] April [1930]

Esteemed Mr. Zweig,

I hope you’re back already. If possible I would like to see you today. I write until 2 p.m. After that I’ll be in the hotel. Perhaps you could drop me a line if you are able to see me.

Looking forward to seeing you again,

ever your Joseph Roth

92. To Hedi Reichler

Hotel Stein, Salzburg
30 April 1930

Dear Hedi,

enclosed is a letter from Dr. Lichtenstern, who is the director of the sanatorium am Rosenhügel, and who knows Friedl. Find out when her consultation hours are, I think they’re 3–5 in the afternoon, you can find out over the telephone. Mme von Szajnocha has put her in the picture. She can help in various ways, choice of home, expenses, prescriptions, perhaps a particular nurse. She is a wonderful human being, and very devoted to Friedl. Perhaps you or your husband could see your way to visiting there. You have to wait for her a long time, she’s very much in demand, and it’s not possible to keep her for very long either. Don’t be put off by her manner, she’s not really brusque. She’ll certainly help.

In your last latter I missed an answer to my question how Friedl was with Dr. Schacherl; and whether he risked making a diagnosis. I will write to him, but need to know first whether he agreed to take an interest in her case. You could also ask Dr. L. about orthopedic treatment.

I will know in a few days whether I’ll be able to come to Vienna. I’m expecting news from Berlin. I’ll write you in time. (I’m feeling better, they’re giving me a course of injections.) I should also like to know about arsenic, insulin, and glucose.

I have gotten in touch with a psychiatrist in Marbach. I’m expecting a detailed answer from him about the prospects of a cure.

If Friedl happens to talk about me, whatever she says, good or bad, true or made up, the conversation should be carried forward at all costs. Not: “You’re wrong!” or “That’s nonsense!” Respond to everything. Please. Promise.

I’m going to a lot of trouble, but don’t get impatient, and please write in as much detail as you can.

Regards and kisses

Your Muniu

There’ll be more money coming on the 1st. Let me know how much Kiepenheuer sends.

93. To his parents-in-law

Hotel Stein, Salzburg
3 May 1930

Dear parents,

Dr. Schacherl has written to Stefan Zweig about Friedl. It appears that the doctor is of one mind with me. Friedl seems, thank God, not to be suffering from any form of dementia. She probably has a hysterical psychosis. If it wasn’t that she was so intelligent and so acutely sensitive, the whole thing might have been over in a few weeks. But she is obsessing on a certain point, can find no way out, and, out of despair at this, so to speak, is losing her mind.

I am passing this on to you right away to get your hopes up. Dr. Schacherl is an outstanding diagnostician, and a reliable fellow. Chin up, Friedl will one day speak clearly again. For the time being, her sickness is fed by her physical frailty. I’m in favor of mixing Hepathrat into all her food where it can go unnoticed. If her heart is sound, she can drink good strong coffee. Instead of Luminal, ask for Luminalettes, where the dosage is far lower. A little of that could go into her food as well, so that she keeps ingesting it at a low level throughout the day. Episodes of disquiet cost her strength, whereas the Luminal doesn’t hurt and will only keep her from weakening further. Her weight has to go up to 55 kilos again. If she can tolerate liver and will eat it, give her liver, as much as possible, and slightly underdone. It’s not just a matter of nutritious things, as of such that will replenish her stock of blood. Hence the Hepathrat and the liver. Perhaps she will take blood soup. I am just now in correspondence with a psychiatrist in Marbach about the possibility of blood transfusions. Friedl is seriously anemic, i.e., she has too many white blood cells. Perhaps you might ask Dr. Schacherl on the telephone whether she could be given a hormonal preparation. In any case, her physical condition is of paramount importance. Concern yourselves as little as you can with her mental symptoms. Tell Friedl whenever you can that her confusion is caused by a glandular imbalance. She will understand. She understands everything, it’s just that she doesn’t respond in the right ways. It will come as a huge relief to her to learn that her confusion has a physical basis. Her thoughts should be deflected away from obsessing with some emotional conflict to a solicitude for her physical well-being. (Please write and tell me you understand this!) As long as her weight is under 50 kilos, she is at risk. Please ask also whether short spells of ultraviolet irradiation may be indicated. According to what Professor Kretschmer tells me, such attacks often heal quite suddenly, even after a long time. So please, please, don’t lose patience! So long as I can manage to bring in enough money, I’m sure Friedl will get well without an asylum.

I hope to be in Vienna for a day or two, on around the 6th or 7th or 8th. Please don’t tell Friedl. If it’s not too much trouble, why not give her a canary to keep in her room. It might distract her. You can always give it away, and they don’t cost much. Can you run to a canary?

It does no harm to speak of Friedl’s physical infirmity in her presence. That will stir her will to live. Please follow the instructions of this letter as well as you are able.

I embrace you both

your M.

94. To Stefan Zweig

13 May 1930

Dear esteemed Mr. Zweig,

I should have written to you long ago, I’ve been living in such turmoil since leaving you that I only do what I physically must to survive, and thus dash madly from one bit of drudgery to the next. But I want you to know that I think of you often and gratefully and with an affection that I haven’t mustered for anyone in a long time, and that has the effect of rejuvenating me.

Today, just an hour ago, I learned that a woman friend of mine yesterday shot herself. She was staying here in the hotel, had failed to find me yesterday, and I’m convinced I could have averted her death. All around me are suffering and death, and I could weep at my inability to find a little bit of goodness in myself, to save the life of a single human being.

It’s not my intention to drive you to sorrow, but it’s how I feel all the time. You had the ability, as long as we were together, to tickle a little cheerfulness out of me. You are clever and good.

Drop me a line, but only if it doesn’t get in the way of your work. Keep your fondness for me, as I do for you.

Cordially your

Joseph Roth

Hotel am Zoo

Kurfürstendamm 25

Berlin W.

95. Benno Reifenberg to Joseph Roth

14 May 1930

To Mr. Joseph Roth, c/o Gustav Kiepenheuer, Altonaerstrasse 4, Berlin NW 87

Dear Mr. Roth,

I wired you yesterday. I wouldn’t have waited so long, if I hadn’t thought the correspondence between me and Kracauer about your renewed engagement for us would have been over sooner. Let me tell you then, while the correspondence is still inconclusive, how things stand.

1. If the Frankfurter Zeitung is to work with you again, then it can only be on condition that we once again enjoy an exclusive right to your journalistic work. We will not and must not share a Joseph Roth with other papers.

2. The tedious business with the Weltbühne1 must be put to bed. What you may not appreciate is that the entire editorial board here saw your article as a defamation of the FZ, and you are therefore facing an extraordinary degree of suspicion and resentment. I had thought it might be possible to level off the affair by an open letter to you, and your subsequent reply. However, voices were raised to the effect that you should resolve the matter—where it began—in the Weltbühne. I can’t do anything without my colleagues, not least as I am no longer in charge of the feuilleton section, but rather, as you know, have become the Paris correspondent of the FZ. I wrote therefore to Heinz Simon, and asked him to take a hand in the matter. I hope he will be able to give you a final decision quite soon.

I don’t need to tell you how much I look forward to seeing you here again. We’re well. Babuscha is with us of course. Jan has grown, and is as charming and delightful as ever.

In old cordiality

Your [Benno Reifenberg]

1. Weltbühne: Die Weltbühne, a highbrow weekly magazine founded in 1905 in Berlin by Siegfried Jacobsohn. Following his death, in 1926, it was edited, briefly, by Kurt Tucholsky, JR’s bête noire, and then by Carl von Ossietzky. JR remained rigidly unsympathetic to its politics and style.

96. To Benno Reifenberg

17 May 1930

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

I just came back from Vienna, to find your letter waiting for me. The enclosed letter will probably say more to enlighten you about my state than I could. I have taken my wife back to the sanatorium outside Vienna. You may imagine what a week’s stay there meant for me. When I am in Paris you will have a chance to see for yourself how little of me is left for any newspaper to have. I am completely indifferent to all matters of public interest. As Kiepenheuer’s 50th birthday is on 10 June, I can’t be in Paris before then. How long will you remain in the city in summer?

Max Picard should be there. Give him my best. We’ve been exchanging letters for a while, on the subject of you and me.

I wouldn’t be able to take anything back in the Weltbühne. I am not on terms with the Weltbühne. I want nothing more to do with those scum.

What I wrote at the time was that my views were not identical with those of the FZ. Which is true. I do not have any sort of philosophical solidarity with the likes of Dr. Drill and Junge1 and Schotthöfer, nor do I aspire to it. Do you consider that offensive?

Kiepenheuer won’t be happy to have me on an exclusive contract to the FZ. It would mean he couldn’t pay me anything. But we’ll see about that. For the moment, I’ve asked him to call off other negotiations that were in train. Since he is paying me a stipend, I take it he won’t want to stand idly by for long. He gives me everything, my wife too, he has been very good to me.

I look forward to seeing you in Paris.

Warmest regards to Babuscha, Maryla, and Jan.

Where are your political sympathies just now?

Tomorrow I’ll look for Kracauer.

Most cordially your

Joseph Roth

1. Junge: Karl August Junge, journalist, with the FZ since 1903.

97. To Jenny Reichler

Berlin, 18 May [1930]

Dear mother,

just back today from Frankfurt. Thank you! In two weeks I’ll be finished with the novel. I hope to get an extra 200 marks then, and send them to you, an article has come out in America. I’ll write from Baden-Baden next. I’ve got an invitation there. My health is fine. Apart from that, I’m living off rachmones.1

Give Friedl my best, write me again, and don’t be cross with me if I don’t write. I have thought of a way of earning 2,000 marks at one fell swoop. I have an invitation to write a novella for a Dutch periodical.

Warm embraces from

your Muniu

1. rachmones: (Yiddish) charity.

98. To Gustav Kiepenheuer on his fiftieth birthday1

I have covered many miles. Between the place where I was born, and the towns and villages I have lived in in the last ten years—and lived in only, apparently, to leave them again—lies my life, amenable more readily to spatial than to chronological measurement. The years I have put behind me are the roads I have traveled. Nowhere, in no parish register or cadaster is there a record of my name or date of birth. I have no home, aside from being at home in myself. Wherever I am unhappy is my home. I am only ever happy abroad. If I leave myself even once, I will lose myself. Therefore, I take great care to remain within myself.

I was born in a tiny hamlet in Volhynia, on 2 September 1894, under the sign of the Virgin, to whom my given name of Joseph stands in some vague relation.2 My mother was a Jewess of strong, earthy, Slavic constitution. She would often sing Ukrainian songs because she was very unhappy (and where I come from it is the unfortunates who sing, not the lucky ones, as in Western countries. That’s why Eastern songs are more beautiful, and anyone with a heart who listens to them will be moved to tears). She had no money and no husband, because my father, who turned up one day, and whisked her off to the west with him—probably with the sole purpose of siring me—left her in Katowice, and disappeared, never to be seen again. He must have been a strange man, an Austrian scallywag, a drinker and a spendthrift. He died insane when I was sixteen. His specialty was the melancholy which I inherited from him. I never saw him. But I remember when I was four or five, I had a dream of a man in whom I saw my father. Ten or twelve years after that, I first saw a photograph of my father. I had seen the face before. He was the man in my dream.

At the sort of tender age when other children are just learning to walk, I was already traveling on trains. I came to Vienna early in my life, left it, came back, went west again, had no money, lived on handouts from well-off relatives and from giving lessons, started to study, was keen and ambitious, an odiously good boy, full of quiet malice and poison, modest out of conceit, jealous of the rich, but incapable of solidarity with the poor. They seemed stupid and clumsy to me. I dreaded any sort of coarseness. It made me very happy when I found an authoritative confirmation of my instincts in Horace’s odi profanum vulgus. I loved freedom. The times I spent with my mother were my happiest. I got up in the middle of the night, dressed, and left the house. I walked for three or four days, slept in houses whose state I didn’t know, and with women whose faces I was curious to see, and never did. I roasted potatoes on summer meadows, and on hard autumnal fields. I picked strawberries in forests, and hung around with a half-grown rabble, and was thrashed from time to time, so to speak, by mistake. Everyone who gave me a thrashing would quickly beg my forgiveness. Because he feared my revenge. My revenge could be terrible. I had no particular affection for anyone. But if I hated anyone, I would wish his death, and was prepared to kill him. I had the best slings, I always aimed for the head, and I didn’t just use stones, but also broken glass and razor blades. I laid traps and snares, and I lay in wait and lurked in bushes. When one of my enemies once turned up armed with a revolver, admittedly without ammunition, I felt humiliated. I started off by flattering him; gradually, in the teeth of my true feelings, made myself his friend; and finally bought the revolver from him, with bullets I had been given by a forester. I persuaded my friend that the ammunition on its own was much more dangerous than a weapon without ammunition.

Tender feelings came to me later, and not for long. My first noble stirrings were roused in me by a girl when I was in my second semester as a student of German. The girl in question came from Witkowitz. At sixteen, she had fallen prey to an engineer, and got pregnant by him. Luckily, the child she had was stillborn. The engineer didn’t care about her. So she went to Vienna, as a governess with horrible, stupid people. What else could I do, but be noble? I rented a room for the girl, induced her to abandon her ghastly blond charges in their sailor suits, and decided I would make a live baby with the poor girl, and challenge the engineer. To that end, I sold my coat, and took an advance from a lawyer whose son I was teaching. I traveled to Witkowitz, found the engineer, he arranged to meet me in a café, after he received my blunt little note. He had a pointed black beard, crooked upward-slanting eyebrows, glittering eyes, a fine, brown complexion, slender hands, he reminded me of the devil. On his calling card it said: Lieutenant of the Reserve. He bought me a cup of coffee, was friendly, smiled, admitted that he slept with the daughters of all his foremen one after the other on principle, but didn’t have time to busy himself with them beyond that. He took me to a brothel, bought me three girls at once, and said he was prepared to turn one of his Witkowitz damsels over to me. He bought me drinks, took me to the station, we embraced as we parted. Unfortunately, he was carried off by the typhoid epidemic of 1916. He was one of my earliest friends.

I got back, the girl had found a new job by now. She wrote me a nice farewell letter, from which it appeared I wasn’t the type for her. Quite rightly, she was still in love with the engineer. Thenceforth, I started looking for women in the Stadtpark, the Volksgarten, the Vienna Woods. With modesty and false timidity, I tried to win the pity, and then the love, of the mothers of my pupils. I was especially popular with the wives of lawyers, as their husbands had so little time for them. They gave me shirts, underpants, ties, took me with them to their boxes at the opera, in their carriages, and went away with me to Klagenfurt, Innsbruck, and Graz. They were my mothers. I loved them all dearly.3

When the war broke out, I lost my pupils one by one. The lawyers joined up, their wives grew moody and patriotic, and began to express a preference for war wounded. I volunteered for the 21st Jaegers. I didn’t want to have to travel third class, to salute incessantly, I was an eager soldier, got to the line too soon, I reported for cadet school, I wanted to be an officer. I became an ensign. I stayed on the eastern front till the war ended. I was brave, strict, and ambitious. I decided to remain with the army. Then came the revolution. I hated revolutions, but had to make way for them, and, since the last train had just left Shmerinka, I had to march home. I marched for three weeks. Then for another ten days I followed roundabout routes, from Podwoloczysk to Budapest, from there to Vienna, where, because I didn’t have any money, I started to write for the papers. They printed my nonsense. I lived off it. I became a writer.4

Soon after, I moved to Berlin—I was forced to go by the love of a married woman and my fear of losing my freedom, which was worth more to me than my uncertain heart. I wrote the stupidest things, and so made a name for myself. I wrote bad books, and became famous. Twice I was turned down by Kiepenheuer. He would have turned me down a third time too, if we hadn’t gotten to know each other.

One Sunday we drank schnapps. It was bad schnapps, it made both of us ill. Out of sympathy, we became friends, in spite of the difference in our natures, which are such that only alcohol is capable of bridging them. Kiepenheuer is a West-Phalian, you see, while I am an East-Phalian. There hardly exists any greater contrast than that. He is an idealist, I am a skeptic. He loves Jews, I don’t. He is an apostle of progress, I am a reactionary. He is ageless, I have been old ever since I can remember. He is turning fifty, I am two hundred. I could have been his great-grandfather, if I wasn’t his brother. I am radical, he is conciliatory. He is polite and vague, I am ferocious. He is an optimist, I am a pessimist.

There must be some secret connection between us somewhere. Because sometimes we do agree. It’s as though we each made concessions to the other, but we don’t. Because he doesn’t understand money. That’s a quality we share. He is the most courtly man I know. So am I. He got it from me. He loses money on my books. So do I. He believes in me. So do I. He waits for my success. So do I. He is certain of posterity. So am I.

We are inseparable; that’s his advantage.

10 June 1930

Joseph Roth

1. This, the “Kiepenheuer letter,” is the only thing even resembling a CV that we have from Roth, and for all its dissemblings and dissimulations, it is a revealing document. The one big falsehood of this letter is made up of what are actually lots of tiny truths, concerning his parentage, his fatherlessness, his precocity, his restlessness and rootlessness, his uncertain affections, his haphazard progress (“I started to write for the papers. They printed my nonsense.”), his snobbery and affections across social and ethnic lines (“I don’t”), his underlying, adamantine confidence (“So am I”).

2. in some vague relation: in the circumstances of JR’s life, I find this bittersweet joke positively heroic.

3. This tale has elements of JR’s story “April” (1925), where the “engineer” is a railwayman.

4. I became a writer: cf. JR’s story “Rare and ever rarer in this world of empirical facts . . . ” in Collected Stories.

99. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel am Zoo
Berlin
20 June 1930

Dear esteemed Mr. Zweig,

I no longer ask you to excuse my long and ill-bred silence, that’s how well I feel you know me already, and know what my not-writing to you signifies. It means I am still unable to find the requisite distance from myself, and that it is difficult for me to give you any sort of objective report. Perhaps it’s best if I stick to externals, then at least I won’t make any mistakes.

Over a week ago, Kiepenheuer—who’s since left Berlin—and Dr. Ruppel of the Kölnische Zeitung were negotiating over my trip to Russia and Siberia. The Kölnische should have decided already, but it still hasn’t, and I’m waiting impatiently. It’s the most important factor governing the next few months for my wife and me. Dr. Ruppel (the feuilleton editor) claimed the general editor was very keen on my working for the paper. So long as he’s not lying or exaggerating—and he doesn’t look the sort—then my chances are good. Unfortunately, the general editor is away on vacation. He promised to confer with Dr. Ruppel about my trip on the telephone, and it seemed the decision must be made even before his return (set for early July). I await it every day. If the trip is declined, there will be other reasons I can’t even guess at. There’s nothing to be done about them. The Russian correspondent of the Kölnische was apparently based on the Turksib.1 To improve my chances—and to the universal horror of all who are familiar with the country and my style—I asked for only 10,000 to 12,000 marks—for five months. I didn’t dare ask for more. How I’m supposed to get by on that, I have no idea. I have to leave at least 3,000 marks for my wife. The water is up to my neck. Kiepenheuer’s expensive authors, Feuchtwanger2 Zweig3 Glaeser4 Heinrich Mann,5 are coming in with their new manuscripts, drawing vast sums, and Kiepenheuer is rightly stopping my advance. I’m getting an unreasonable amount, I need 1,200 for my wife, 800 for myself, monthly, and I have already had 22,000 marks advanced to me. Since last week I’ve started writing articles again—stupid of me, given my state of exhaustion, and lack of inspiration—and Kiepenheuer’s newspaper distribution company sells them. But I can’t make more than 500 marks a month from reprints. If Cologne doesn’t come through, I don’t know what to do. It’ll just have to come through. In October I’ll find out how Job does. If only it would sell 15,000 copies! Generalkonsul Pflaum6 has died. But the Munich people may go on paying me till August. Provided I am able to produce articles for them, which of course is now triply impossible. I’m no longer equal to this schmonzes.7 I have trained myself so that I can only think on a larger scale now, and it takes me a long time to tear a pretty little piece out of something else. Which of course I then hate. So you can imagine I’m sitting on coals. My wife’s costs are fixed, I can do nothing to reduce them. I will work to the limits of possibility, even if it kills me. If it’s possible via the Concordia8 to get lower rates—as your wife wrote to me—without her having to go to a different institution, then I’d be very grateful to you. It probably won’t be possible to work with Sarnetzki9 at the Cologne paper. It’s the board that seems to want me. At the moment I am preoccupied with the old business of my wife, and with the visit to Siberia. I am impatient, suspicious, mean, I can’t stand myself. It’s the easiest way to writer’s block.

Now I notice I must no longer ask forgiveness10 for not writing, but for writing. I have written some disgusting things to you today, and I beg your indulgence. If I were with you, no doubt your kindly eye would see more than I am able to write here and now. Please view this letter as strictly a news communication. If anything changes, I’ll let you know. I promise to write to your good wife soon.—I hope you’re well, and wish you all the best. Think of me, as I think of you. The thought of good friends has great power. I hope you feel me thinking of you.

Cordially, always, your old

Joseph Roth

1. Turksib: the Turkestan-Siberian Railway, under construction from 1927 to 1930.

2. Feuchtwanger: Lion Feuchtwanger (1884 Munich–1958 Los Angeles), novelist, playwright, essayist.

3. Zweig: Arnold (no relation) Zweig (1887–1969), writer, playwright, essayist, and man of the Left.

4. Glaeser: Ernst Glaeser (1902–1963), writer and journalist. Went into exile in 1933, only to return to the Third Reich in May 1939.

5. Heinrich Mann (1871 Lübeck–1950 Santa Monica), writer and essayist. Older brother of Thomas Mann. Shared a house with Roth and Kesten for a time in the south of France.

6. Generalkonsul Pflaum: director of the publishing house Knorr & Hirth, which brought out the right-ish MNN.

7. schmonzes: (Yiddish) nonsense, tripe, balderdash.

8. A literary association in Vienna.

9. Sarnetzki: Detmar Sarnetzki (1878–1961), feuilleton editor at the Kölnische Zeitung.

10. forgiveness: typical of JR’s exquisite courtliness, the obverse of his occasional uncouthness.

100. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel am Zoo
Berlin
27 June 1930

Dear very dear Mr. Zweig,

the Kölnische (in the person of Mr. Neven DuMont)1 seems to rate me, but not Russia. I replied I would probably have to accept a tour around Germany. Even though that brings in little money, and Russia would have freed me from more than just the material pressure. I could have become a different person there. On Monday I’m going around to Theodor Wolff,2 and on Tuesday to Ullstein. But the world has been divvied up among those journalistic pashas called special correspondents. There’s probably nothing to be done. Please give my regards to Mr. Sarnetzki anyway.—My wife is no better. I am not just grateful to Dr. Schacherl, I have become humanly fond of him. This fine man tries everything, even though experience must tell him it’s hopeless. If you get a chance to tell him how I honor him, please do so. Though I’m afraid it may all become too much for him. This week, a friend of my wife’s, one Professor Kuczynski (Gelbfieber) made inquiries of him via a mutual colleague in Vienna—and I’d like him not to be overrun like that.—I’m compelled to stay in Berlin. I’m getting hold of all the money I can, with more expertise than I thought I had. Berlin is apt to be forgetful. If you’re not here, you can’t do anything.—I’m glad you’re not bringing a book out in autumn. You don’t have to gallop the whole time, as I do. Miss Baker3 was admired everywhere, is read with interest, and the book will be one of your great successes, even if you wait till spring. May God continue to give you good fortune, I am always on your side.

You are so kind to me, you tell me you no longer get on with contented people. But I know that you need such, and that unhappy people are unlucky. For months your friendship is the only comfort I have felt. (Many times I simply haven’t written, because I am unable to concentrate.)

With kind regards, your old

Joseph Roth

1. Neven DuMont: Alfred Neven DuMont (1868–1940), editor of the Kölnische Zeitung.

2. Theodor Wolff (1868–1943), editor of the Berliner Tageblatt.

3. Miss Baker: Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), founder of the Christian Science movement, and subject of one of Stefan Zweig’s three-for-one biographical excursuses, where she is paired—or trebled?—with Freud and Mesmer (Heilung durch den Geist, 1931).

101. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel am Zoo
Berlin
17 July 1930

To Mr. Stefan Zweig, Kapuzinerberg, Salzburg

Dear esteemed Mr. Zweig,

yesterday I thought it might be possible to visit you for a day in Salzburg. I would rather have spoken to you than telling you scraps of things that I am unable to put on paper. But then I get a letter from the Kölnische Zeitung, in which they agree to my conditions. So on Monday or Tuesday I’ll head off for the Ruhr after a short stay in central Germany. It’s a grisly job, which will take me at least 8 weeks, but it’s the only thing that’ll bring in a bit of money at the moment. I’ll be getting 2,000 marks cash down, of which I’ll be able to send 1,000 to Vienna. That’s all I care about at the moment. Should I write to Dr. Scheyer in Vienna direct, to ask him if I can join Concordia? Is that correct?

I got a kind letter from your wife, suggesting in various ways a period of recuperation for me. I can’t accept any of them. I have to earn money in the period before the book comes out, because the publisher won’t give me another penny.

Letters—and I hope you will write me soon—will reach me from now on c/o Kiepenheuer Verlag, Berlin NW, Altonaerstrasse 4. Mrs. Olden, who left for Salzburg yesterday and to whom I said I would be there on Monday, will give you my best wishes.

In old sincere friendship

Your [Joseph Roth]

102. To Benno Reifenberg

Hotel am Zoo, Berlin
17 July 1930

To Mr. Benno Reifenberg, Paris, c/o Frankfurter Zeitung

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

I believe I owe you the following notification: I will shortly have to undertake a brief German tour on behalf of the Kölnische Zeitung. I know that various parties are interested in my renewed work for the Frankfurter Zeitung; while various other parties have expressed themselves against it. The Kiepenheuer Verlag, to whom, as you know, I have sold my journalistic work, is unable to go on paying me if I don’t take this opportunity, which will bring in quite a lot of money. I know that various parties, in particular your good self, will be disappointed to see me suddenly appearing there. But there is nothing I can do about it. In any case, I think I owed you this notification.

Give my regards to your family.

I am not doing well. I am a little surprised not to hear from you.

Cordially your old

Joseph Roth

Address: c/o Kiepenheuer Verlag, Altonaerstrasse 4 II

103. Benno Reifenberg to Joseph Roth

[Paris] 25 July 1930

To Mr. Joseph Roth, Kiepenheuer Verlag, Altonaerstrasse, 4 II, Berlin

My dear Roth,

thank you for your letter, though it saddened me to think that I must look to find you in other newspapers and not in ours, which is really the only possible one for you. Mr. Jedlicka1 told me you were sad about my silence, but there must be some misunderstanding there, or else you didn’t get the letter I sent you in Salzburg. You see, I was waiting for news of you, not least as I was hoping to see you here in Paris among us. I am alone, Maryla and Jan have gone to the seaside. I should like to talk to you, and hear how life is treating you, and what you’re writing. I was delighted to see that we’re at least going to publish the serialization of your novel, of which Jedlicka gave me a passionate account

Be well, drop me a line to let me know you’ve at least gotten this, and then I’ll write you again at greater length.

Unaltered your

[Benno Reifenberg]

P.S. I enclose an article on the Delacroix exhibition, perhaps it—the article—passed you by. I visited the exhibition many times.

1. Jedlicka: Dr. Gotthard Jedlicka (1899–1965), art historian, writer for the FZ, professor of art history at the University of Zurich.

104. To Benno Reifenberg

[1930]

Dear precious Mr. Reifenberg,

it was very nice to hear from you, and to see Jan again. Unfortunately, you’re right: not since the time of the inflation have I been so wretched as I am now. I find the politics quite paralyzing. It’s so hard to write. I have no money, I mean really NO MONEY, I get by on 5 marks a day. And I’m drinking. And my strength is fading. Just this novel now—then I’m off to Zurich by way of Frankfurt, I stand to pick up 2,000 marks when it’s done.

Kiepenheuer doesn’t want the Hausenstein book. I’ve made inquiries at Rowohlt. Please, could you dictate your letter again, without referring to the rejection by the Frankfurter Societätsdruckerei1 and Fischer! So that I can show it to Rowohlt, and maybe to Tal in Vienna.

Your article was very sensible and radical. Thank you! Do you write much? When is your family joining you in France?

What are our friends doing?

H.S.2 was here, but didn’t come and see me. How are you managing to work? Tired, grumpy, optimistic?

Please give my regards to Gubler,3 and to Picard, if he’s there.

Your old old

Joseph Roth

1. The publisher of the FZ (and book publisher).

2. H.S.: Heinrich Simon.

3. Gubler: Friedrich Traugott Gubler—see no. 118.

105. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Englischer Hof
Frankfurt am Main
22 September 1930

To Mr. Stefan Zweig, Salzburg, Kapuzinerberg 5

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

I must yield to your wish that I not address you as “Mr.” if you think it impedes the friendliness of our communications. That it honors me, I need not say.

Thank you for reading Job once more. I for my part find it superfluous to have written it. I have no ties to it any more. I am tired of it, or I am simply tired. I don’t think the book can engage me any more than I can engage myself. Believe me, I’ve been a burden to myself for years, sometimes intolerably so. If you do write about Job, please don’t go to any trouble, your name will do by itself. I would be sorry if you were to contribute something that would hardly be understood in Germany, and would certainly not be appreciated.

I can hardly tell you how unwillingly I have attached myself to the newspaper again. What else could I have done? Kiepenheuer’s money goes on Vienna, there’s almost nothing left for me. I’ve lived the past 3 weeks on borrowed money. Even though I’ve written 50 typewritten pages for the Kölnische Zeitung, the proprietor tells me it’s not enough, and I have to write another 3 articles if I am to claim the remaining 1,000 marks he offered me. What shall I do? I wrote to him that he is right if he pays by the line, and I am right in that I leave out lines. So I will not have the 1,000 marks. I know of no other solution than the deal with the Frankfurter Zeitung. Perhaps you don’t know what it’s like when you can’t wait for a book to succeed because you have no money at all. I will hardly be able to finish my recently begun novel in the next months. But for the Frankfurter Zeitung, I will have to knock out 4 articles a month, and sometimes more.

Horovitz1 of the Phaidon Verlag offers me 3,000 marks for a book. It’s to be called “The Orient Express,” and is to be about the train, the passengers, the hotels, and stopping-off places. First I had to get Kiepenheuer’s permission for this breach of faith. He isn’t able to give me any more money, but the Horovitz money won’t be here for another ten days at the earliest, and who knows if the contract won’t be such that I can’t put my name to it. This year, apart from Job, I have written a ragged novel, 50 solid pages for the Kölnische, and about 80 articles, and I’m sitting there in perplexity, thinking it would have been better not to work and not have gotten sick, as I have. I literally can’t wait for Job to succeed. It won’t happen before January, and that’s fully three months away.

In case I am able to come to an agreement with Dr. Horovitz, that’ll see me through 2½ months maybe, but then I’ll need to work again, because he wants his book on March 1.

Thank you very much for the Mesmer. I’d like to read it tonight, and send you notes on it tomorrow. I don’t think you’ve forgotten how to write quickly; rather, I think it’s the fault of the material, if you have to do lots of revisions. I’m dying to see your Freud. When will that be ready?

I mentioned the Insel Verlag2 because I’m afraid Kiepenheuer will run out of money, and I need to live. I am too sick to live plainly. I can’t mortify myself in literature without indulging myself a little physically.

Cordially ever

your [Joseph Roth]

1. Horovitz: Bela Horovitz (1898 Budapest–1955 New York), founder of the Phaidon Verlag in Vienna and, later, in exile, the Phaidon Press in London. Roth’s book on the Orient Express was never written; instead Horovitz agreed to take on the second edition of Roth’s novel Hotel Savoy (first published in 1924 by Die Schmiede.)

2. the Insel Verlag: publisher of Zweig, among others (Rilke). Roth’s scorched-earth policy with publishers means he is already thinking of moving on.

106. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Englischer Hof
Frankfurt am Main
Tuesday [23 September 1930]

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

I’ve been trying for a week not to write this letter, now, after a conversation with Kiepenheuer I have no alternative. My wife has been taken to a sanatorium again, I am waiting for a call from Vienna. Kiepenheuer can offer me no further advances. I want to be gone, even before the 3,000 marks from Horovitz get here that I mentioned to you yesterday. Every wasted day is precious. Please please excuse me for introducing such ugliness into our friendship. I urgently need to send money to Vienna, close my tab here, and leave, far away, I don’t know where. I enclose a letter to Dr. Horovitz, asking him to send you the 3,000 marks. And I’m asking you now please to send me part of this amount here, or get it transferred even more quickly. All my endeavors with my wife have failed. I’m exhausted, finished. You will forgive a man in my condition the crudeness of misusing a truly noble friendship. I’ve just been interrupted. The call from Vienna. Another change of plan, I need to send money there, the last vestiges of my peace of mind depend on it. Please will you ask Dr. Schacherl to intervene, I’ll wire you at the same time. Excuse my abruptness, I must stop.

Cordially,

your humble Joseph Roth

107. To Bela Horovitz

Hotel Englischer Hof
Frankfurt am Main
Tuesday, 23 September 1930

Dear Dr. Horovitz,

would you have the kindness to send the 3,000 marks (three thousand) owing to me as per our contract to Mr. Stefan Zweig.

I don’t know whether I’m going to be in Paris—where I’d originally asked you to send the money—hence this change of arrangement.

Humble greetings from

your Joseph Roth

108. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Englischer Hof
Frankfurt am Main
Thursday [September 1930]

Dear highly esteemed Stefan Zweig,

there was more to your Mesmer than I first thought, and I have only just gotten to the end of it. There’s no point making separate notes. Things that were strikingly wrong or that I very much disliked I didn’t find, and you’ll be able to see to other things yourself. The proof is very bad and full of errors. Lots of things are thrown together, with commas where I’m sure you didn’t put any. The beginning is a bit sticky, not like a beginning, stylistically more like a middle. You can’t easily make your way into it. It’s more as though you’ve opened it somewhere at random. I would shorten the sentences and break them up. Soften the tone a bit. Start to tell what is an extraordinary story. You assume too much of the reader at the outset. Even so, it’s not medias in res, so much as medias in scientias. But then, but then! It’s much better than Christian Science, and on the last pages it’s quite splendid. Some passages made me shiver. “Where now, old man?” That got me. And the final paragraph—apart from the use of imperfect instead of perfect—is of a really classic beauty, reminded me of Burckhardt’s1 prose, it has that lightness and massiness of something really good. Habitual mistakes: you put “as” for “than” in comparisons, you don’t use the semicolon enough, you connect syntactically things that are connected only in thought, and you are careless with tenses. Recherché comparisons, analogies, etc. are too frequent and rarely clinching. A half-resemblance, say, to Columbus, you try to make into a whole. Sometimes the wealth of associations at your fingertips tyrannizes you. But then. Then. You display more concentration than ever before. Another writer would have spun it out to 1,000 pages. And that must be praised, especially in you: to know so much, and throw so much away! Dear, dear, esteemed master. In the first 30 pages you should make your richness, your glitter, your fullness more porous, softer, gentler, and also harder. In your beginnings—and I know that’s to do with your kind nature—you are incapable of restraint. At the beginning you come across as positively voracious—but you take the reader’s voracity away. The wonderful last paragraph, I wish it were longer, and I wish the style and feeling of it were somehow also longer.—By the way, this is not an objective critical wish I’m expressing here. It’s my own feeling.

My cordial thanks.

This morning I got your letter, last night your wire. Do you mind if I talk about money one last time. I’ve got to do that job for Phaidon. I’m going to be seeing you. I refuse to borrow money from you while I’m capable of earning it, and as long as I don’t share your optimism that things will look up for me. I’ve just had to send 1,000 marks to Vienna, my wife is in Rekawinkel,2 and once again the doctor there doesn’t think it’s schizophrenia. So quite plainly and objectively this situation can go on costing me enormous sums—and as Kiepenheuer can’t pay me any more, and as my wife remains my first priority, because I can’t forget about her—then I can’t, in banal self-interest burden our friendship with that crap that money is. I’ll work till I drop. My letter to you must have been terrifying, I can’t remember, it was a terrible situation. Calls from Vienna, appeals to Kiepenheuer, who refused, I couldn’t catch myself, I lost my bearings, please forgive me. And I know, I know exactly how much good you do, and that there are other people as well, and that my torments mustn’t be overstated, even though I can feel them garroting me, I can see my last hour before me all the time. But you know about a lot of these torments. And they are all equally important. And I should like to loan Lidin3 some money myself, and please let him know that he can count on me.

I’ve just announced my visit to Königstein,4 where Dr. Simon is lying ill. He is the only one who knows Pagenstecher. I will try, if his fever isn’t too high (pleurisy) to talk to him about Lidin. I know it’s possible to get the price reduced. I’ll wire you if there’s any chance of that. But in any case I’m at Lidin’s disposal.

I’ve just heard that Landauer,5 Kiepenheuer’s managing editor, is coming here, either tonight or tomorrow morning. It seems I am in conflict with the firm after all. It’s shitty that money can wreck something, and that it’s such a force. Maybe I’m being unfair. But my wife is so important, if I am to remain alive! Perhaps you won’t accept that either. You don’t know what it’s like.

I’m going tomorrow, first to Cologne. My mail will be forwarded. I’m meeting Reifenberg in Cologne. My next six months will be filled with shit work, for the newspaper and God knows, all for money. But maybe I’ll be able to get a trip to Russia out of the FZ. And that would rejuvenate me.—Do you still want to do that?

I get the feeling your wife is mixed up. I wrote her yesterday. Kiss her hand for me.

Cordially as ever,

your old Joseph Roth

Another thing: sometimes you have this construction “in the same measure as . . .” That’s not good. “as well as . . .”

And: too many gerunds (verbal nouns), even where authentic nouns are available. As for instance “being near” instead of “nearness” and so on . . .

1. Burckhardt: Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897), considered one of the greatest historians of the nineteenth century.

2. Rekawinkel: small woodland spa in the hills outside Vienna.

3. Lidin: Vladimir Lidin (1894–1979), Russian author, residing partly abroad. Typical of JR: to be dependent on charity himself, and simultaneously extend it to others.

4. Königstein: spa outside Frankfurt.

5. Landauer: Walter Landauer (1902–1945), publisher, first with Die Schmiede, then from 1928 Kiepenheuer. Went into exile in 1933, became (with Roth’s support) editorial director of the German exile publishing part of the Dutch firm Allert de Lange, in Amsterdam, who, with Querido, and later De Gemeenschap, published Roth’s literary output. Murdered in Bergen-Belsen.

109. To Jenny Reichler

Dom Hotel, Cologne
Sunday [September 1930]

Dear Mother,

in November there will be money coming from America at last. 1,000 dollars initially, but that will do for a start, and I hope that you and Friedl will feel better as well.—I’m going back to Paris till then, to resume working for the newspaper. Write to me at Hotel Foyot, 33 rue de Tournon, right away please.—Don’t worry if Friedl blames you for all kinds of things, and don’t be offended, just go to her.—I am hopeful that I might finish my novel, and be in Vienna soon.

Hugs from me, and kisses, especially to dear father.

Your son.

110. To Jenny Reichler

Hotel Englischer Hof
Frankfurt am Main
Saturday
[September/October 1930]

Dear Mother,

thank you. I’m going to Strasbourg till tomorrow evening, Hotel Diebold for any wires. Please write and tell me if Dr. Schmitt made a good impression on you, and if you’re prepared to entrust Friedl to him. I’m loath to trust my own judgment in such an important matter.

What does Father think? What about Sandi?1

Hugs, your M.

As soon as I hear from Dr. Schmitt, I’ll pass on his opinion.

1. Sandi: Alexander Pompan, Roth’s brother-in-law, husband of Friedl’s sister Hedi.

111. To his parents-in-law

Hotel Foyot, Paris
Friday
[October 1930]

Dear parents,

I didn’t learn that it was Yom Kippur till I was back in Paris. Otherwise, I’m sure I wouldn’t have been so crass as to announce my trip to you on that day. Please forgive me.

Write to me here. I have jaundice, and was very sick when I came back.

May God help us finally.

Hugs

your loyal son

112. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Foyot, rue de Tournon
Paris, 8 October 1930

To Mr. Stefan Zweig, Salzburg, Kapuzinerberg 5

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

on the way to Paris I fell ill in Strasbourg. That’s why I haven’t written to you for so long. I thought long and hard about your last letter. Perhaps you’re right in what you say about my wife. I still haven’t gained any perspective on it all. At least I’ve gotten this far, that I can no longer continue to be as sensitive to her condition as I am now—not if I’m to go on myself. I’ll write you in greater detail later. I just heard from Lidin, whose letter followed me here, it probably crossed me at Wiesbaden. He’s still in Paris, it seems, and I’m seeing him tomorrow. I’m leaving on the 13th. A tour of German cities for the Frankfurter Zeitung. My book is out the day after tomorrow. I assume you’ve been sent a bossy letter about your review from the publisher. I hope you won’t blame me. I’d be very glad to hear from you again before I leave.

In old cordiality

your Joseph Roth

113. To Jenny Reichler

Hotel Foyot, Paris
Thursday
[October 1930]

Dear Mother,

thank you for your letter. Milan Wileder’s1 visit appears to have been very useful for Friedl. Even though she didn’t react, I’m sure she will have felt something. If there’s another occasion, please describe it for me in just as much detail. Thank Hedi for writing, and for the article. I don’t think there’s anything to be done about my sadness. I’m through with life, for good. I can’t wait around any more for miracles. I have become an old man, and have gotten used to the absence of joy. In my own life, that is. If Friedl pulls through, I will be far older than she is. Just as soon as I feel really old, she will snap out of it, I know she will.

Hugs from your loyal son

Joseph

1. Milan Wileder: an old (female) friend of Friedl’s.

114. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Englischer Hof
Frankfurt am Main
23 October 1930

Dear esteemed Mr. Zweig,

thank you so much for your kind letters. Of course I found myself staying longer on the road than I should have done; but perhaps it was necessary after all. I haven’t seen the announcement for my book. If you should happen to have a copy, please send it to me, but you must stop getting annoyed about it. Every word you write about me is written out of friendship; and because I am waxing metaphysical, let me add that only things that are done out of friendship have any effect.

I am compelled to dictate this, and am sorry that I am therefore unable to respond to what you wrote about your family. I’ll get on to it as soon as I can. Please tell your dear wife that I am grateful for every word she writes to me, and that I will write to her in the next few days also.

The thought of the Balearics is extraordinarily tempting. Who isn’t disgusted by politics? You’re right, Europe is killing itself, and in a peculiarly slow and horrible way, because it is a corpse already. This ending is devilishly like a psychosis. It’s a psychotic’s suicide. The devil really is in the saddle. But it’s the two extremes I don’t understand, for that I’m too much the contemporary of Franz Joseph, I hate extremism; it’s the most fiery and disgusting tongue of this flame. Do please send me your Freud (and I’m glad you shortened the first part of the Mesmer).

You’re quite right, of course I have to visit the small towns; that was the newspaper’s proposal too. Maybe if I’d visited them before the election,1 the result wouldn’t have come as such a shock to the paper, and to others. I’m still unable to share your optimism with regard to Job; I know the book has captured hearts, but according to Kiepenheuer’s calculations, it won’t actually make any money until mid to late January.

Your telegram reached me too late, because I got to Frankfurt later than I’d planned. I am writing to the Insel Verlag, to ask them for the Chinese novel;2 thank you for the tip.

I’ll make sure that Dr. Moritz Scheyer gets sent a copy of Job too.

In old cordiality

your [Joseph Roth]

1. elections: the Reichstag elections of 14 September 1930, in which the Nazis won 107 of 577 seats (in 1928 they had just 12) and the Communists 70 (as against 54 previously).

2. Chinese novel: Kin Ping-Meh, published in German translation by Insel in 1930.

115. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel “Der Achtermann” and Niedersächsischer Hof
Currently in Goslar, 20 November 1930

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

thank you very much for the Rocca.1 The same day I got a very sweet letter from him. I’ll reply today. I don’t quite understand what sort of issue the LW2 is putting together, and fear it may not be the ideal setting for Rocca. Willy Haas3 is among the very few life-forms whom the Germans view correctly—and his scandalous reputation of course rubs off on any magazine he edits. I’m sure Kiepenheuer, or Dr. Landshoff,4 would be prepared to put out a magazine like that, from business considerations alone. If the plan with the LW doesn’t work out, maybe we can take it to Kiepenheuer?

Please God you’re right about the print run for Job. So far, 8,500 copies have been sold, which is a lot for me. But not enough in view of the money problems of the Kiepenheuer Verlag. Neither Feuchtwanger nor Heinrich Mann is selling well. Glaeser is hovering around the 15,000 mark, he’ll probably get to 30 in the end. How I’d love to be working on my novel on the Dual Monarchy now! But I need at least 2,500 a month, and I bust a gut to make 1,000, and not even that, because I can’t manage 1,000 lines a month for the Frankfurter. That’s almost 50 a day, one would have to be a steam press to manage that. And the traveling on top of everything, and putting up in towns that defy the imagination. It’s a terrible thing, you know, never having more than 50 marks in your pocket. Kiepenheuer can only ever manage installments of 100 or 150 marks, just enough to pay the hotel, and the train fare and the next hotel. I never have enough to be able to settle somewhere for a fortnight, say. Unfortunately, I’ve also signed with Phaidon. Vienna needed another 1,000 marks, and it was a moment when Kiepenheuer had nothing at all. But the contract is more favorable, because I asked for and got only half the advance, and in return secured the right to hand in a different travel manuscript instead. So what I’m thinking of is a “New Harz Journey,” which is due to come out in the FZ anyway. Of which I haven’t written a line. I can hardly access the newspaper tone any more—my head is full of the novel (“The Radetzky March,” it’ll be called), set in the Dual Monarchy from 1890 to 1914.5 I’ll tell you the plot sometime we’re together.

Before that you must permit me to talk you through the ghastly money business. Since Phaidon paid only half the advance, I have 500 in hand. Of those I have sent you none. So I have committed a sort of fraud, admittedly you’re a friend, but in a way that’s even worse. You will have counted on the money for other charitable purposes—which means other people will be suffering on my account. You will know how that torments me, first of all my deception, and second the sufferings of others. The worst was the airiness with which I borrowed from you, on the basis of a promise that turned out to be false. You were perfectly right: I’ve lost my head, I can’t do sums, I am beset with astronomic debts, and I commit one deception after another. Complaints keep rolling in, my lawyer, Dr. Wolf in Vienna, Teinfaltstrasse, who gets nothing from me either, has his hands full with them, and I don’t even dare write to apologize to him, that’s how much I am in his debt. For my peace of mind I urgently need you to give me in writing that you’ll let me owe you those 2,000 marks until February or March—and that, in spite of your generous fastidiousness. I’ve put Kiepenheuer in the picture. He knows I need that amount for you. If you want to upbraid me, please do it, I’ve earned it a thousand times over, perhaps it’s best that it be said out loud, lest it fester unspoken between us.

A set date? In circumstances like mine? The FZ would be angry with me forever after if I left them now, as it was they put me through humiliations to get the 1,000 marks, they think they were generous in forgiving me the episode with the MNN. And then how? How? I need 1,000 marks, my wife needs 800, Kiepenheuer can’t run to more than 500. I need to pay off 200–300 a month. The BT and the Vossische don’t want me, I’m not famous enough for them.

Dear Stefan Zweig, in your friendship and good nature you are apt to confuse your prestige with mine, your freedom with my captivity. Let’s talk about it sometime. I’ll be in Mitteldeutschland till 10 December, within easy reach of Leipzig or Dresden, just wire me when and where. I can be with you in 24 hours. My address is still c/o Grübel6 Leipzig Gohliserstrasse, 18 till December 10.

I think it’s perfectly natural that you treat Freud with kid gloves. The only risk is if that became evident in your book. It’s a matter of technique. If it became evident, then it would be private. And if one couldn’t make it completely invisible, in my opinion a few words of private explanation would be called for. That would be honest. I don’t want anyone to accuse you of special pleading. Of course that’s what it is, objectivity is filth, but it mustn’t show.

Another thing. A propos Rocca, you say: “his German is as good as mine, and almost as good as yours.” Please not to say anything like that again! It’s painful for me to have to blush, and then explain it to myself by reference to one of your magnanimous outbursts. You know and I know the sort of writer you are—it’s far harder to compliment you, because everything is far too obvious. Anyway, all this is much too official, and would fit better in my dealings with Thomas Mann (who is on record as having said something unkind about me, and claims only ever to have read 2 or 3 articles of mine, what do I care!). Please excuse this petition, and accede to it!

Cordially as ever,

your old Joseph Roth

1. A book of essays on German writers by Zweig’s friend Enrico Rocca.

2. LW: Die literarische Welt.

3. Willy Haas (1891 Prague–1973 Hamburg), Communist critic, essayist, and editor of the LW.

4. Landshoff: Fritz Landshoff (1901–1988), co-proprietor of the Kiepenheuer Verlag; started the German exile publishing house Querido in Amsterdam in 1933, and later fell in with Bermann Fischer in New York.

5. First mentioned here.

6. Grübel: JR’s maternal uncle, Salomon Grübel, a hop dealer, who left Brody for Nuremberg, and later settled in Leipzig.

116. To Jenny Reichler

Hotel Fürstenhof
Leipzig
Thursday [1930]

Dear Mother, I’m feeling a little better.

Please address any further news to Grübel, because I’m going in a few days. Thank Hedi for writing. I have to produce 5 articles by Christmas, and am incredibly busy.

I hope to spend Christmas in Paris, a friend has invited me.

The translations of Job will only begin to help in spring, once the book has appeared here and there. Admittedly, the only countries that matter are America and England, all other currencies are inconsequential. The only hope for all of us is a film version in America.1

Please give me details about Friedl.

Warm hugs

your son

1. a film version in America: this came to pass, only 4 years later, and far too late for JR. See no. 256.

117. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Foyot, Paris
27 December 1930

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

I was an idiot: I thought you’d be in Frankfurt already, and wrote you there. Well, my best wishes for Christmas and New Year, and thank you both for the evidence of your friendship. Let’s arrange to meet at last:

until 12 January I’ll be in Paris,

from the 12th to the 15th in Frankfurt,

after the 16th I’ll be in Paris again.

Name your date! Everything else (Spain) can be settled verbally. I need your advice more urgently than ever. My homesickness for you, for your wife, for your clever words (for months I’ve been talking to dogmatic fools) is very great. Yes, I am sentimental. Alright! A rendezvous, with place and date.

Enjoy your proofs.1

Your old

Joseph Roth

Thank your wife, and kiss her hand tenderly for me!

1. Of Heilung durch den Geist, the Freud, Mesmer, Baker Eddy book.

118. To Friedrich Traugott Gubler

Marseille, 31 January 1931
As of: Hotel Foyot, Paris 6e

Dearest Gubler,1

I owe you so much news, I can hardly hope to fit it all into one letter. I’d better try and give you a situation report:

After being in a terrible state in Paris unbeknownst to anyone, even Reifenberg, I have fled here, and am fleeing farther, to Antibes. I am fleeing from bills. Lately three suits have been brought against me. Kiepenheuer wants his novel, and threatens to suspend payments. Phaidon wants his “Orient Express,” or, failing that, the return of 2,000 marks. A bond I gave my father-in-law falls due on 15 February (for 1,000 schillings). I owe you 1,270 lines. Everything is collapsing around my ears. I have drunk a lot, eaten hardly anything, then the flu wiped me out. Only in the past week, since I’ve been here, have I started to come to terms with my situation. I hope to find some peace in Antibes. I have 100 francs a day. By 15 March I must have 4 chapters of my novel done. But how am I going to manage to write in this condition? I hope I’ll be better in Antibes.

I owe you more than lines, namely my collaboration. If you still feel able to, trust me. I will send you 3 pieces a month. I want to write “Ghost of the Present.” (Using quotations from Picard.) Get P.2 to send me a paperbound copy of his Menschengesicht. Use the Hotel Foyot address, because I have no idea where I’m going to be here.

One of my worst persecutors is Hermann Linden,3 to whom I can’t go on owing 500 marks. Ask him to tell you the story. Promise!

I still have to tell you I don’t like the paper. Your nonsensical explanation, the whores of the present age, and cheek by jowl with the Tagebuch. It hurts me to see you and yours enmeshed in that kind of thing. I’ve come to the conclusion that you’ll only wear yourself out there, to no purpose. It’s just a paper, only slightly better than the others in Germany. It’s no longer absolutely good or essential. And neither you nor Reifenberg nor Picard will be able to fix it. You will sacrifice your personal lives, the only important thing. It’s a job for people who a priori have none, i.e., the likes of Brentano. Always do what your wife says, spend time with her and the children, discuss everything with her, and don’t do anything just because your obstinate man’s head tells you to. I can feel you slithering into triviality and shit. There is nothing more important than being a private person, than loving your wife, taking your children on your lap as you did when we came for you. Public affairs are only and ever shit, whether it’s the nation, politics, the newspaper, the swastika, or the future of democracy. You should live like a peasant, and if you don’t make or do anything yourself, or don’t feel like it, then redouble your love for family and friends. In Paris I saw Picard separating me from Reifenberg: his identity with the paper. (Kracauer has finally become a buffoon.) I can’t have a relationship with a person who is prepared to sell my private friendship for the sake of some public totem. I can no longer tolerate do-gooders, people who, when their wife has a pleurisy, still find time to save the world. Don’t get drawn into all of that. It’s only God whom one may serve over and above one’s chosen ones. Not the “nation.”

Forgive the homily. Forgive lots of things! Give your wife my very very warmest regards. Spend time at home with her. Don’t get annoyed, everything’s OK, so long as your family stays healthy. It’s irreligious, ungodly, and collectivist to take thought for public matters! Leave that to Glaeser and (pause) to Brentano.

I haven’t told you all my worries. I can’t. We’ll talk.

I remain your old devoted

Joseph Roth

Do you want to entrust Kesten’s new book4 to me? You know I won’t trash it. The fellow’s my discovery. And toward myself I’m not incorruptible. I tell you plainly, and I won’t mind if you tell me back that you don’t trust me. You know I’m not objective. I hate good books by godless fellows—Kren’s5 next book, for example—and I love bad books by reactionaries.

I’d also like to write, if you’re agreeable, on Stifter and Lampel.6

1. Gubler: the Swiss Friedrich Traugott Gubler (1900–1965) took over as feuilleton editor on the FZ from Reifenberg in 1930, when R. became Paris correspondent.

2. P: Max Picard. The book is called Das Menschengesicht (The Human Face).

3. Hermann Linden (1896–1963) edited a 1949 selection on the life and works of Joseph Roth.

4. new book: Kesten’s novel Glückliche Menschen.

5. Kren: Ernst Krenek.

6. Lampel: Peter Lampel (1894–1965), painter and writer.

119. To Jenny Reichler

Thursday
[early February 1931]

Dear Mother,

thank you!

I’m going to join Stefan Zweig in Antibes.

After you get this, don’t write to me here, but to Paris 6e rue de Tournon, Hotel Foyot. They’ll forward my mail. I’ll wire you from Antibes, after the 10th.

It’s still cold. I hope to get better in Antibes.

Hugs

Your son

Give Father my regards. He’s not to start conversations with Friedl, but wait to hear what she says. Don’t provoke utterances from her.

120. To his parents-in-law

Hotel du Cap d’ Antibes
Antibes
6 February 1931

Dear Parents,

thank you! Go on writing to me at the Foyot, I’m not sure whether I’ll be able to stay on here. Perhaps it’ll be good for me, I’m already feeling a little better. But my worries even eclipse my illness. I have to write a novel with a completely skewed head, Lord knows whether I can manage it. With all my debts, I had to stop writing for the paper, there’s a financial black hole, but what can I do, I can’t tear myself in half. Very good news that Friedl’s putting on weight. Maybe God will help, and she will become herself again. Is her expression changed? Her gaze? What does Father say? People ask after her everywhere in Marseille, in all the hotels and restaurants.

Impossible to ignore the way pain has aged me. I’m going gray.

If I don’t write, don’t worry about it. I’m working.

Cordially, your

Muniu

121. To Friedrich Traugott Gubler

Hotel du Cap d’ Antibes
Very personal
Antibes (A-M.)
Please deliver immediately!
Sunday
[February or March 1931?]

Dear, dear friend,

thank you! I would surely write more, letters and articles both, which come to the same thing, if it wasn’t that I’m caught in a terrible fix. I can’t settle. I’ve fallen in love with a 20-year-old girl.1 It’s impossible, it’s a crime, I know it, to attach this girl to me, and to the dreadful tangle of my life. But I can’t desist. Even if I were free to marry her, her family—very rich, very Catholic, German-hating Flemish barons who suffered under the occupation—would never allow it. The girl (still underage) wants to leave her family after she comes of age in July. It will be a huge scandal there (in Bruges). I am perpetrating a cretinous stupidity at my age but for the first time since my wife’s illness, I feel alive again. It’s not something I can turn away. I think you’ll understand. My novel is going nowhere, I don’t have any income, I’m quite evidently insane. I can’t work, and yet I know I’ll become completely sterile if I can’t have that girl. And then there’s my still warm feeling for my wife. I would never have thought I could be so foolish as this. And the knowledge of my own folly gives me happiness to cancel out my unhappiness, and I am more confused than ever. Dear friend, it’s possible I’ll need your calm, and your kind and helpful heart. Will you promise them to me! Don’t mention this to anyone, except your good wife!—What shall I do? I have three chapters. I must be finished in July. I’m not enough of a novelist to go around thinking only of my book. With all my skepticism, for all my self-analysis, I’m in love. I’m incredibly fortunate. I need it as a thirsty man needs water. And I know it’s poison.

I’m going back to Paris today, Hotel Foyot, rue de Tournon 33, and then Brussels for a few days. Letters please to Paris.

In cordial friendship

your old

Joseph Roth

Will you help me if I need you?

1. 20-year-old girl: a wildly improbable, but wholly true story. Research by Dr. Els Snick in 2008 revealed her identity as Maria Gillès de Pélichy. See Wilhelm von Sternburg’s biography of JR.

122. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel du Cap d’Antibes
Antibes
24 March [1931]

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

I hope you’re safely resettled in Salzburg, and enjoying a second spring. Here it’s finally exploded. Landauer has told me it doesn’t matter, and I should stay here, so obviously Job is still selling, and I’m happy to stay. The guardian has arrived, with long beard and big belly, a clueless man, dimmed by Catholicism. The little girl slips into my room at night, even though he’s sleeping next door, prays, crosses herself, and starts to sin. The guardian has no idea what she’s done with the dog. He says she’s right, it was wrong to try and get such a big animal to sleep in a bed, it remained a hunting animal, and was possibly infectious. He reads your books delightedly, he’s a historian, a beer table pontificator, he loves the little girl to bits, believes everything, is completely unaware of the erotic nature of his relationship to her, prays before and after meals and half an hour before bedtime, busies himself with gardening, drapes cloaks and things round sick trees, and doesn’t hold with shooting rabbits because he feels sorry for them. Goes to Mass every morning at 6 o’clock, sings in church twice a year, wears a shirt for a week, always in black, too tight pants. It’s getting more and more obvious. The mother is the lady mayor of the place, spends half the day praying, cries the other half, and has a relationship with a priest, who out of jealousy intrigues against the girl. The girl’s father hated the mother, and kept getting her pregnant to get him off sleeping with her. He was afraid to go to brothels, in case someone saw him, or he got sick. I’m convinced he died of secondary syphilis. In his fever, he ripped up the girl’s clothes and blabbed about everything. Then the mother started hating her. The church is involved in everything, the whole house, makes everyone blind and deaf and hard. The girl is so soft at night, when the sun rises—different again, and her sex uncertain. She cries a lot, is sensuous and inventive, extraordinary predilection for perversities, extremely sensitive to pain in normal intercourse, probably all stemming from her sensitive psyche. Three Catholic hymens before the real one, a shouter, and I practice the art of deflowering whilst feeling little pleasure. How can I desist from such an interesting hobby? A great aunt of hers was canonized. She wore armor day and night. The bank employees have all propositioned her. Mr. Bridgemann is starting to hover around her, but for once I’m man enough not to be the amuse-bouche. Silent loathing between Bridgemann and me. He started it, of course. He doesn’t know what to do. Day before yesterday a magician came. When he went around afterwards to collect money, B. got up, borrowed 100 francs from the porter, and gave them to the little girl (to make sure she saw), to present them to the magician, B. was sitting too far away. Merci!, she said, and “c’est vilain,” and she pocketed the money, quite the chatelaine, which doesn’t keep her, when it gets dark, from draping her arm across my black dress trousers, she in her light-colored dress. Sella sees and grins at me. The guardian sits there and sees nothing at all. (The Danes want me to pass on their regards to you, the one they like best of yours is Amok.) The curé comes here for lunch, Sunday is sanctified, the little girl is to sell liqueur. Mme Burke has bought and read Job, and taken me violets up to my room, with the classic line: flowers say what the mouth denies. I’m starting to enjoy myself. Only I miss you, your shrewd eye, your shrewd heart. Am writing the fourth chapter with the regimental doctor,1 in bold, strong lines. Very good, I think. Don’t worry about me! I’m more of a writer than I’m prepared to admit. Tear this letter up when you’ve absorbed it all. Give my regards to your wife, I can’t write to her yet, she’s a woman. I feel very much a man, and empathize with manliness in all forms. The red-haired Irishwoman is stricken with yearning for you, she says she has dreams about you.

Write back soon, even if it’s just a line or two. My wife is doing badly. Credit to the girl, even so, that I’m not as burdened by it as usual. I may be a sonofabitch, but defloration in a literary setting, that’s worth something to me.

In old and late friendship

Your JR

1. regimental doctor: Max Demant, the Jewish doctor in The Radetzky March.

123. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel du Cap d’Antibes
Antibes
4 April [1931]

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

just a few words. I’ll write in greater detail once I’ve finished the 4th chapter. Everyone is thinking of you, and sends you their best. A horribly swaggering Remarque is here with hangers-on, Adolf Loos1 very poor and embarrassing, with miserable wife in tow. I wish you happy Easter, good luck with your work, and I look forward to hearing from you, whether my letters are shorter or longer.

The enclosed is for your wife.

In continuing cordiality

your JR

1. Loos: the Viennese architect (1870–1933), known for his buildings in Vienna and the Czech Republic.

124. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel du Cap d’Antibes
Antibes
Saturday [11 April 1931]

Dear Stefan Zweig,

I’m going into Antibes, and think I’ll stay there all day. I’m sorry I’m so unbearable, I can feel you holding it against me. But part of it—you give me the right to be frank with you—is the result of the tension between the three of us, your good wife, and you, and me. It always hurt me, as a friend, once I’d given myself permission to feel it at all. You seem to want to stifle my frankness—and for me that’s what friendship consists of. I feel you holding many things against me that you are unable or unwilling to say. I am too straightforward for that, you are more complex and mature, and I can’t bear it. I hope our friendship—it is in danger—won’t break, either over a wife or over less. To me friendship is as high an ideal as freedom, and I want to keep them both.

I feel a little feverish, and I beg your pardon for possible bad behavior. My writing is brittle and harsh, I’m sure I could find better expressions.

I would have left long ago, if a poor person weren’t keeping me here. You know it well, and you know too that I cannot leave, of my own.

I’ll write from Antibes.

I embrace you in love and friendship

your JR

125. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Foyot, Paris
22 April 1931

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

I am still on my 4th chapter, and have been here since the day before yesterday. Your good letter followed me here. The auction of Flaubert’s estate in Antibes didn’t contain anything remarkable. But the Maupassant manuscript the dealer in Nice wrote you about seemed, in spite of its high price, very interesting.—My life currently has more tensions and complications than I am able to set down. I may tell you about them, in some confidential hour. Will we have one again, ever? I have to go to Poland in the next few weeks. My dear old friend is iller than usual.1 My wife is still silent, and the letters of my in-laws, which continue to speak of cure and a resumption of marriage, hurt me; just like their reports of my wife’s apparent happiness when they mention me in front of her. Miss Prensky,2 in Flanders for 3 weeks, was at least able to relax her. I am grateful to her. I will go and visit her. Even there there are complications I can’t write to you about. The novel remains my chief concern. Being or staying in the mood for it: the tensions help and simultaneously hinder. I feel something important coming, and at some deep level of myself am calm, though agitated on the surface. I am sending your Cure through the Spirit to my Polish friend. She is very eager to see it. Here, another good friend of mine read it in 2 days, with great enjoyment. I am to tell you!

Write in full consciousness of your mastery! Your novel! It’s to be your masterpiece.3 Please don’t tell anyone I’m here. I want 10 days of quiet. Give my fond regards to your wife.

I am your old friend

Joseph Roth

1. JR is referring here to Mme Szajnocha.

2. Prensky: Eva Prensky, translator and literary agent in Paris. In 1941 she was picked up in Nice and put into a concentration camp by the Gestapo.

3. masterpiece: the posthumously published and never properly completed Post Office Girl.

126. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Foyot, Paris
5 May 1931

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

terrible, in the most literal sense indescribable things are happening in my life. Since my last letter I’ve been bedridden. I’m completely shattered. I am incapable of writing. For the first time in my life, I feel that even a letter requires some form of crystallinity. The confessional beckons. Even in Notre Dame confessional chairs are set up before Christmas and Easter with the simple legend: German, English, French, etc. I am writing in a tearing rush, with fever, with sick, inflamed eyes, and I beg pardon for the rapidity, and ask that you be assured of my sincere friendship.

Ever your old

Joseph Roth

127. To Friedrich Traugott Gubler

Hotel Foyot, Paris
6 May 1931

Dear friend, heartiest thanks,

I am in a terrible situation, experiencing terrible things, not since my wife fell ill have I gone through such a terrible time as now. I am waiting for decisions to be taken, and then I’ll come to Frankfurt. Please don’t mention anything to anyone in Berlin. I shall tell you what it is impossible to write. Life has become awful for me, a simple torment. My script is so skewed, and my style so abrupt, because I have pain in one eye, which has been inflamed for days.

My regards to your wife. Hugs!

Your old

Joseph Roth

128. To Stefan Zweig

13 May 1931

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

in addition to all the other things you don’t know about, I have an eye inflammation that stops me from writing. Thank you so much for your letter! I feel bad in every respect. Please say so to Mr. Latzko,1 whose book and letter I received. I will ask Gubler at the FZ to let me review his novel. Please excuse the handwriting. I am writing with half-open eyes. I look like a bloodhound. Flanders has taken a wholly unexpected turn. The little girl has blabbed, and been put in a nunnery where she will probably die. I’ve had a letter from a monk. Life is so much finer than literature! I feel sorry for literature! It is a SWINDLE!

In old cordiality

Your J.R.

1. Latzko: Andreas Latzko (1876–1943), novelist and pacifist.

129. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Foyot, Paris
Whitmonday [24 May 1931]

Dear, esteemed Stefan Zweig

I am writing to you in a pair of dark glasses, prescribed by the doctor, very unpleasant, cornea apparently damaged. (Excuse any abruptness!) My heart is not at all full of Flanders. Though must have contributed to physical malady. I couldn’t stand to have yet another woman suffer on my account. (She would be the fourth.) The second psychotic, this one channeled into Catholicism. Eye is just expression of spiritual depression. Other things, not to be written down. Quarrel with Kiepenheuer, who wants to have my wife put up somewhere more cheaply, sends me no money (but I have some from the FZ), has fucked up French edition of Job, just because Valois, a publisher of the very last rank, offered 100 francs more. Translation putrid. Living with the sense of always working in vain. Many reasons not to get away. Can’t go on a train with my eye this way. Even so, must meet Landauer next week in Frankfurt.

Very cordially,

your old Joseph Roth

Please don’t forget:

Otto Zarek’s1 address.

Thank you!

1. Otto Zarek (1898–1958), novelist, biographer, journalist. A friend of Zweig’s, he emigrated to London.

130. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Foyot, Paris
3 June 1931

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

I’d rather not dictate, I can’t find anyone to take it anyway. Spending half the day in hospital. Sometimes they rip out my eyelashes, at others they inject me, and rub me, and hold my eyelids open till I can’t think any more. In this sort of condition, pity for publishers is about the furthest thing from me. As a sick man, after 10 books1 and over 4,000 articles, I think I have a right to a suit, a pair of shoes, food, hospital fees. Publishers shouldn’t publish crap, and they shouldn’t make dilettantes famous. I need to go for treatment every day for at least another 12 days. I know I’m thinking like a sociopath, but unfortunately it doesn’t help much. If there were some lousy idea that would help me make money, do you think I’d hesitate. I have to be healthy and free and able to work. I can’t stand this imprisonment. I’ve gotten so indifferent to everything.

Cordially

your old Joseph Roth

1. No exaggeration. Hotel Savoy (1924), Rebellion (1924), April (1925), The Blind Mirror (1925), The Wandering Jews (1927), Flight Without End (1927), Zipper and His Father (1928), Right and Left (1930), Job (1930), Panopticum (1930). A few of these, admittedly, are “only” novellas, but even then Roth doesn’t list either his first book, or the nixed “White Cities,” or the abandoned Perlefter and Silent Prophet. To get to 4,000 articles, he would have to have written nigh on one a day—not impossible, for him, then.

131. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Foyot, Paris
27 June 1931

Very dear, very esteemed Stefan Zweig,

I have one good and one bad conscience simultaneously, because I avoided writing to you while my eye wretchedness was so bad that I could have done nothing but wail to you. For two days now, no dark glasses, on the other hand, a pair of normal ones that are here to stay, a symptom of aging I can’t do anything about. My left eye still very weakened by the inflammation. I myself still very confused, an illness I couldn’t suppress is a shaming defeat for me.

Day after tomorrow I go to Frankfurt, after that Berlin.

Unable to work on the novel.

Where are you now?

I lost Otto Zarek’s address again. Do you have it?

In old cordiality

your old Joseph Roth

132. To Jenny Reichler

Hotel Foyot, Paris 6e
29 June [1931?]

Dear Mother,

please write me the name of Father’s illness.

I have money for Friedl till August.

Sorry to write such a scrappy note.

Kiss Father for me.

When I come, I’ll wire ahead.

Most cordially

your son

133. To Jenny Reichler

Hotel Foyot, Paris 6e
Thursday [1931]

Dear Mother,

it takes longer than last time to shake off my jaundice. I am so feeble, please forgive these short and illegible notes.

Please, go on writing to me at this address.

By the 15th I shall have to be writing again. I hope I’m restored by then.

If Friedl were to get better at last, then I would get better too. It’s brutal, I can’t stand it.

Hugs to you both

your son

134. To Benno Reifenberg

Hotel Englischer Hof
Frankfurt am Main
Thursday [1931?]

Dear Benno Reifenberg,

I feel Germany right off the bat, and all of it at once. Every street corner expresses the awfulness of the whole country. It has the ugliest prostitutes, the girls indistinguishable from the women who swab the floors of the FZ at night, in fact I think they’re the same. The men are all scoutmasters on display. You see more blondes in summer than in winter. All tanned and deeply unhealthy looking. An awful lot of bodies, precious few faces. Sports shirts, no skirts. Yesterday, my first day back, was ghastly. Immediate plummet of spirits, the way mercury can fall to zero. The feeling as though your genitals were gone, nothing left! Skirts, where there are skirts, all buttoned up, crooked gait of the men, as though they were originally designed as quadrupeds. Refreshing humanity among the little people, far more kindness than in France. All the little employees at the FZ, very, very human. Silent suffering, you get a sense of what these people have to live through. Somewhat perversely: a touch of patriotic feeling. Envy of France. Arch-envy, like arch-enemy. The former more appropriate than the latter. Saw Peters.1 Equanimity and nobility at the same time. Like a pair of scales that always hold exactly identical weights, but sometimes I think: perhaps the pans are empty? The needle hardly moves. (Not like mine.) Complete absence of crests and troughs. Eat with him on Friday. Englischer Hof completely empty. Great rejoicing at my presence, tipper, unrest-creator, asker-after-more. Page boys get errands. Arrived like a prince in Sleeping Beauty’s castle. No sleeping beauty, though, bought a street girl from the Alkazar perfumery. Wouldn’t stop kissing me. Felt as though I’d been blessed by the Holy Fathers or something. Convey my regards to all at home.

Your old

Joseph Roth

1. Peters: Hans Otto Peters (1893–1943), a landscape painter.

135. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Englischer Hof
Frankfurt am Main
4 July 1931

To Mr. Stefan Zweig, Salzburg/Austria, Kapuzinerberg

Dear and esteemed Mr. Zweig,

may I trouble you to forward the enclosed letter to Otto Zarek, whose address I’ve lost again.

My eyes are much better. Unfortunately, I wear glasses now. It will take another 3–4 weeks before they’re completely healed. Apparently I have an astigmatism.

I’m going to Berlin now. The only hope for Kiepenheuer and me is the American edition of Job.1 Perhaps you’ll run into Mr. Huebsch. Give him my best regards; I’m going to miss him in Berlin.

Have to stay here though to settle the question of what to do with the advances I’ve had from the Frankfurter Zeitung. Ghastly business.

Because of my eyes, I won’t be able to get going on the novel for another 2–3 weeks. I’m staying in Berlin for about 3 weeks.

Very cordially your old

[Joseph Roth]

1. American edition of Job: it was published in 1931 in the translation of Dorothy Thompson, by the Viking Press (director, Ben Huebsch). The Thompson translation is still in print.

136. To Benno Reifenberg

Hotel Englischer Hof
Frankfurt am Main
6 July 1931

To Mr. Benno Reifenberg, Paris 5, Place du Panthéon

Dear Benno Reifenberg,

I went to the Städel.1 It was the last day of the exhibition, Peters made me go. Formed a dismal impression of contemporary painting, without exception. Even in the case of Beckmann, there seemed to me to be a vast gulf between him and the ancients, a kind of porosity. I think painting, even more than literature, has become impossible. Of course the gulf between Beckmann and the rest is almost as great as the one between the classical painters and Beckmann. Even so, it remains perplexing to me how I, not understanding anything about painting, will find myself physically affected by an old painting, while it takes effort of brain and imagination on my part to be moved by a good new one. Old paintings look at me, they come to me to take my hand and squeeze my heart. For a moment it crossed my mind that B. is overestimated. But probably all this is very amateurish.

Went back with Peters. Saw many fine watercolors, and felt a great deal of space in them. I had the feeling that in this inadequate period, a delicate painter like Peters is more expressive than someone more vigorous. Saw two good paintings of his that he wants to show you, shattering pictures, but as delicate as watercolors.

Will you please mail the enclosed letter to Mrs. Vallentin.2 Don’t forget.

Regards to all at home. I won’t write to you from Berlin again.

Your old

Joseph Roth

Will you send my Job to Heilbronn?!

Yes?!

1. Städel: the museum in Frankfurt.

2. Mrs. Vallentin: Antonina Vallentin (1893 Lvov–1957 Paris), wife of the politician Jules Luchaire, she kept a high-powered literary salon in Paris, and worked as an agent on JR’s behalf.

137. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel am Zoo, Berlin
8 July 1931

To Mr. Stefan Zweig, Salzburg/Austria, Kapuzinerberg

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

I think I may soon go somewhere where the air is clean to work on my novel. It has to be finished by the end of September, because after long negotiations I managed to get my advance from the Frankfurter Zeitung commuted to royalties for the serialization.1 Which means that I will receive immediate payment for articles—if I should manage to write any; but the novel still needs to be finished before October. There was no better solution possible, in view of the short time, and the limited resources of the book publishers.

That’s a terrible thing that happened to you. Of course you won’t learn from it, and that’s quite right. You won’t change any more than those people who exploit you will change. That’s all as it should be.

Perhaps we can meet over the summer, but I won’t know for another 2 weeks or so. Things need to be straightened out here first.

In haste and old cordiality

your old [Joseph Roth]

1. The Radetzky March was serialized in the FZ, beginning on 17 April 1932, before Roth had finished writing it. The book was published by Kiepenheuer in August 1932.

138. To Stefan Zweig

Frankfurt am Main
28 August 1931

To Mr. Stefan Zweig, Salzburg, Kapuzinerberg 5

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

Don’t expect to hear from me for a while. Mr. Landauer of the Kiepenheuer Verlag will call on you. I was doing badly for a long time. I seem to be doing better now. I’m working very hard. I need to write almost an article a day for the paper. I hope it doesn’t stay that way.

Write to me as before to the Englischer Hof.

Very cordially

your old Joseph Roth

139. To Stefan Zweig

Frankfurt am Main, 2
September 1931

To Mr. Stefan Zweig, Salzburg, Kapuzinerberg 5

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

thank you for yours of the 31st.

Landauer has been here since yesterday. We talked about you a lot, very warmly. He’s not paying me any more money, because of the large advance I had, and I’m just negotiating with him about the possibility of getting to finish the novel without writing more articles. I need at least 1,000 marks a month. You can hardly imagine what (even without the 1,000 marks) the prospect of financial independence means, especially for these weeks. When I heard the news,1 I felt as if I’d just gotten my exam results. I’ll let you know in a couple of days where I decide to go.

My wife has been in a state that makes it impossible for me to go to Austria.

Nor can I hide anywhere.

I have a horribly bad conscience. But if I am to finish the novel this year, then I can’t go to Vienna. It would set me back weeks. I’ve been stuck of late anyway. Maybe it will flow again next week.

Cordially,

your old Joseph Roth

1. the news: an advance on the American edition of Job.

140. To Jenny Reichler

Thursday [1931]

Dear Mother,

I was very glad to see Friedl’s handwriting is unchanged. Please don’t take anything away from her, she’s sure to notice if something’s gone missing.

Warm hugs

Your son

Happy New Year!

141. To Friedrich Traugott Gubler

[September 1931]
Request proofs!

(The Palace of Scheherazade.) by Joseph Roth

Dear friend,

this is the best thing I have written for the paper for years, it’s about Alcazar, and I want to dedicate it to you. You must decide if it’s alright to put f.t.g.1 over it. Otherwise I’ll include it in a book, with the dedication.

Am in Paris, hope to rent a furnished apartment.2 Unable to give you further personal details just now. Need money, am very sober, sensible, and content.

Did your son go to Switzerland? Please write to confirm,

your old

J.R.

Warm regards to your wife!

Foyot, rue de Tournon

1. I.e., Friedrich Traugott Gubler.

2. furnished apartment: this, for JR completely outlandish, aspiration perhaps hints at the new woman in his life (and her children), Andrea Manga Bell. See no. 143 and note.

142. To Stefan Zweig

Friday, 25 September [1931]
Paris 6e
Hotel Foyot

Dear and esteemed Mr. Stefan Zweig,

my friend Landauer has just written me that the Insel Verlag is in trouble, and is entering a partnership with the Deutschnationale Handlungsgehilfen Verband.1 He doesn’t dare mention it to you himself, and wonders if it is appropriate for me to tell you. In accordance with my principles, I have no alternative but to do so immediately. I should count myself overjoyed to share a publisher with you, for whatever reason. Please think about it.

I’m doing badly, in spite of America.

Your very old

Joseph Roth

1. The Deutschnationale Handlungsgehilfen Verband was a highly conservative commercial organization that had recently bought up the Langen-Müller Verlag in Berlin; it was rumored to be interested in buying the Insel Verlag.

143. To Friedrich Traugott Gubler

Hotel Foyot
Paris 6e
Thursday, 8 October 1931

Dear friend,

thank you so much for your letter. I hope to get the account from you one day soon. It’s very important for me, I need MONEY urgently, and I must get my finances straightened out. I’ve had nothing from America yet. America itself is probably under just as much pressure as Kiepenheuer; sometimes I’m egocentric enough to suppose that it’s me and my success that have sparked off the world financial crisis. Certainly, every one of the laws of this horrible world had to be overturned for me to have a success.

That’s how I’m living, beset with money worries, and worries too about what’s to become of my wife. She’s become more lucid of late, asks after me occasionally, and I don’t have the strength to go to Vienna. What will that do? And if my wife becomes completely lucid, do I then go back to her? My present is murky, and my future inscrutable. I have worries in all directions, sometimes I feel I have ten horses running every which way, and it’s up to me to hold them together. And I myself am just a silly horse, running away from myself.

What a fine Shakespeare review you wrote there, my friend! My, you’re a real author! I wouldn’t have made the piece on the Taunus so lyrical, though, I think lyricism needs to be masked or stifled.

Hauser’s article was an unbearable show of fresh youthfulness and civilizational insolence. Style was false too, not just putrid. Sieburg: dazzlingly masked gaucheness. Picard’s graphology as ever an honest sermon, pen in hand, a sweet, great man. (He doesn’t answer my letters.)

Your little girl will get better, just give her time, and I dreamed about your son yesterday. He was sitting on a swing that was a ship, and said: I’m on Lake Constance!

I couldn’t leave Mrs. M.B.1 At the last moment, my heart felt sore, and my conscience, which is situated somewhere in its vicinity, did too—and now I’m thinking I can make amends with the one for what I did wrong with others—and with myself, for that matter—(and she says to send you her regards, and sometimes we both say affectionate things about you together).

When will I see you next? I only want to write good and lovely things that make for greater clarity in me, and perhaps in the odd reader.

Give Simon Heinrich my best. I like him, the more I think of him.

Write to me, I like to hear from you.

Say hello to Krenek.2 Tell him he’s worthy of me.

Do you know J. P. Hebel’s Essay about the Jews?

Should be reprinted each time there’s a pogrom. It begins roughly like this: “That the Jews are scattered among the host peoples and . . . live from the sweat of their brows is well known to the Lord, and grieves him . . .”

Very cordially, your old and ever older

Joseph Roth

1. Mrs M.B.: Andrea Manga Bell (born 1900 in Hamburg). Father Cuban, mother from Hamburg. After World War I, married Manga Bell, the king of Duala (former German Cameroon, whose father had been killed by the Germans), lived with him in Versailles, but then didn’t accompany him back to Duala, but ran a women’s magazine in Berlin. Was JR’s companion from 1931 to 1936. In a further, scarcely credible twist in her story, she was convinced that her ex-husband, then a member of parliament in Cameroon, murdered their son on his arrival there. See Der Spiegel, edition of 24 August 1950.

2. Krenek: Ernst Krenek (1900–1991), composer (of the opera Jonny spielt auf) and author. Wrote for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Went into exile in the United States in 1938.

144. To Blanche Gidon (written in French)

25 October 1931

Dear Madam,1

thank you very much for your letter. I can understand you very well on the telephone, which is what matters, because I don’t say much myself. Thank you for your invitation. My amie’s illness will probably keep me from accepting it. She is alone and bedridden, and I can’t very well leave her on her own in the middle of the day. But I hope she may be up and about by Thursday, in which case I’ll send you a pneumatique. It would be nice to see Mr. Poupet2 again, and I would very much like to make Mr. Gidon’s acquaintance! Mr. Reifenberg told me a lot about you. But with my worries—too much for a single man, and for 2 years now—I am a gloomy sort of guest, upsettingly poor, and with remote and eccentric thoughts.

Please Madam, forgive me this rather hand-wringing declamation!

With best wishes

Joseph Roth

1. Blanche Gidon (born 1883), French translator. Married to Dr. Ferdinand Gidon (died 1954), well-known radiologist, who fell victim to his occupation. The Gidons were devoted friends of Roth; he met many French authors in their house in the rue des Martyrs. Mrs. Gidon was responsible for rescuing JR’s papers on his death, which were later transferred to the Leo Baeck Institute in New York by Fred Grubel, JR’s cousin. The works of his that she translated include most of what he produced in his last 6 or 8 years: The Leviathan, The Bust of the Emperor, The Triumph of Beauty, His Apostolic Majesty (stories that appeared in various newspapers and journals), The Radetzky March, The Hundred Days, Confession of a Murderer, Weights and Measures, The Emperor’s Tomb.

2. Mr. Poupet: the director of the publishing house of Plon, in Paris.

145. To Stefan Zweig

28 October 1931

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

don’t make me itemize the sorrows that are besetting me. Sick girlfriend, creditors, pharmacies, doctors, I myself am still going to the clinic twice a week on account of my eyes, I avoid people, have destroyed six completed chapters, they were rotten, now I’m rewriting them, Kiepenheuer doesn’t know.

When are you coming? When will you be finished? Do you know the rumors about the Insel Verlag are getting more insistent?1 Do you know how proud I would be if my friend Landauer were to be the steed for us both?

Very cordially, please don’t put down my silence to lack of friendly feeling,

your old Joseph Roth

1. See no. 142.

146. To Benno Reifenberg (written in French)

Hotel Foyot, Paris
[postmarked Paris,
31 October 1931]

Dear friend,1

I won’t be coming to Koslowski’s today, but I will be at the Coupole at around 10 p.m. I would like you to come because I am fond of you, my dear friend, and because I would like to see you. I am very unhappy these days, in French you can say such a thing.

All yours, as ever.

Bring the special edition of the Frankfurter Zeitung, if you will. I saw the announcement of Gerhart Hauptmann’s idiocies, and sundry others as well.

Heil, Temp et Tucho!2

Joseph Roth

1. Writing to Reifenberg in French is some suggestion of Roth’s alienation from developments in Germany (“Gerhart Hauptmann’s idiocies”), and even from his old friend and sometime employer and sort-of successor.

2. Heil, Temp et Tucho: obscure, but perhaps a boisterous toast wishing for health, wealth, and time? Like the Spanish salud y pesetas.

147. To René Schickele

Hotel Foyot, Paris
3 November 1931

Dear esteemed Master Schickele,

I have just set down your new book,1 Fischer had it sent to me. It stuns me with its strength and clarity. I needed to tell you right away. These days, I fear not that many people will tell you. You are among the last of the real writers in Germany, dear René Schickele. I have always liked and admired you, and now, at the end of three days with your book, I like and admire you doubly.

Yours aye

Joseph Roth

1. Der Wolf in der Hürde, third part of the trilogy Das Erbe am Rhein.

148. To Benno Reifenberg (written in French)

Joseph Roth
Hotel Foyot, Paris 6e
Saturday [postmarked:
Paris, 7 November 1931]

Dear friend,

I hope you’ll have the money for me today from the Frankfurter.

If not, could you help me out with 100 francs (this evening at 7 at Mahieu’s),1 to get through the terrible Sunday that is approaching, always the worst of my days?

If you can’t come to Mahieu’s in person, please leave the money with Mr. Wolfe, who seems reasonably trustworthy. Don’t you think? I’ve been full of cognac since morning.

In this state of mind and body, I haven’t managed to telephone you. Otherwise, I hope you’ve gone out sad and lonely, just as I have stayed in to drink, sad and lonely and full of literary and humanitarian duties. Always your devoted friend, and with cordial greetings for the ladies (that’s German, I know)

Joseph Roth

1. Mahieu’s: a café on the Boulevard St. Michel.

149. To Félix Bertaux

20 March [1932]

My dear friend,

I am moved by your concern. I was sick and miserable for a long time, and I’m working desperately on the Radetzky March. The material is too much, I am frail, and unable to shape it. On top of that there’s the material misery in which I’m obliged to live. Otherwise I’d have been in Paris long ago. Maybe I’ll manage to be there in early May. It’s indescribably hard to live here, for me in particular, and in every respect. Things were better for me during the war.

I embrace you and Pierre, and please greet Mrs. Bertaux humbly from me. More after the novel is done (another 2 weeks, with luck).

your old Joseph Roth

c/o Kiepenheuer Verlag

Kantstrasse 10

Charlottenburg Berlin

150. To Friedrich Traugott Gubler

Sunday

Dear friend,

your letter cheered me up. I am unhappy, confused, wholly unable to leave the four walls I’ve thrown up around me and the book, though it feels more like a mountain range in which I wander about in terror. One day, everything comes off, the next day it’s all shit. Tricky, treacherous business. I don’t even want to talk about the fact that in material terms I’m short of practically everything, I have nothing to eat unless someone asks me out, basically I don’t care. I’ve tried to take refuge in the prewar era, but it’s desperately difficult to write about when you feel the way I do. I’m very much afraid I’m a bodger. I take a few minutes off to scribble you these lines. Please remember, it’s as important to me as the book, and as my whole life, that you not forget me (you and my few friends, Picard and Reifenberg, give them both my best wishes), and not be forgetful yourself. I will devote myself entirely to you when I’m finished. Promise!

I love you all, please bear it in mind.

your J.R.

151. To Friedrich Traugott Gubler

Wednesday

My dear good friend,

I’m taking a quarter of an hour off, to reply to your kind letter right away, because I’m very worried. Your idea of getting episodes in Goethe’s life written up by various hands worries me. With all due respect for those involved, it can’t be more than something confected and “made up,” and I fear both for the subject and for those working on it. It would pain me if you and Reifenberg and Simon wound up in some distant relation to purveyors of “biography.” And as far as I’m concerned, I can on no account be involved. I don’t dare “identify myself” with anything that Goethe experienced. If I should have the honor to be involved in the whole project, then I will willingly break off my novel. Nothing would sooner induce me to break it off. But all I can write is this: how I was young, and used to walk past the Goethe statue in the Volksgarten in Vienna every day, and the pigeons cacked on its head, and I froze with respect, and took off my hat, without anyone there to see. It seems more proper to me if everyone were to write about his own personal encounter with Goethe.1

I’m working like a fiend, it’s horrible, I am incredibly afraid the novel will end up no good. I have a feeling for what is good, but whether God will give me the strength to actually make it good is something else. In two weeks a big section of the book will be set, and I’ll send you a copy.

(Request for news. What’s going on with Reifenberg?)

I see Krenek wrote about Sochaczewer.2 Why didn’t you wait for my piece? Really, please, please: can you keep all those books you’ve set aside for me till I’ve finished my novel. The thing Krenek’s writing about, “the moment where objectivity threatens to turn into penury is not far off, and soon . . . etc. etc.” I wanted to write exactly the opposite about Sochacz’s novel. Where does the optimism come from? Where, tell me? Those so-called activist bastards just get cheekier all the time. “Subjectivism” is more arrogant than ever! Can I reply to dear Ernst Krenek, with all the love I have for him through you (in spite of “the malignant rabbit”)?3

Where is your wife? Is your daughter better? Where is Picard? Are you on good terms with Reifenberg? Be good to him! He is a wonderful man. He is honorable, even if he’s not always truthful! I want to see you all again! I am desperate and poor and beset with a hundred worries that I can’t write about now.

Hugs,

your old Joseph Roth

1. There is perhaps no better instance of Roth’s superb and aggressive pure-mindedness (which was certainly the death of him as much as anything else) than this refusal to participate in such a venture, which so characterizes our “postmodern” epoch.

2. Sochaczewer: Hans Sochaczewer, brother-in-law of Arnold Zweig, an author with the Kiepenheuer Verlag.

3. “the malignant rabbit”: someone’s nickname? But whose? JR’s, FTG’s, or “Kren’s”?

152. To Annette Kolb

Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, Berlin
5 July 1932

Dear esteemed Ms. Annette Kolb,

your kind letters come chasing after one another so charmingly quickly, I barely have a chance to reply. Today your sweet photograph came—thank you so much. If I had a bed, I would hang it up over the bed, if you didn’t mind. It’s a very nice picture, suffused with a sort of Whitsun earnestness.

Practical things, now:

1. Of course Kiepenheuer would publish a book that promised to sell. But no one here speaks English—I don’t myself—and when I try, I sound like a bad imitation of an American Yid. Is it too much trouble to ask you to write out a typed summary of the book and send it to me? Some other interested parties might turn up.

2. My Radetzky March still isn’t quite set. You’ll get it right after I’ve revised the proofs, at the end of July.

3. Would you be so good as to say that to Mr. Poupet? He’ll get the book right away, as soon as he offers any sort of advance; because:

4. I can’t tell you how bad I feel. If you’d known me 12 or 13 years ago, I would just have had to tell you: as bad as 13 years ago, and you’d have understood. Today I have misfortune behind me and alongside me, gray hair, a bad liver, and I’m an incurable alcoholic (which is worse than 13 years ago).

5. Since I quite deliberately no longer look at articles of mine in print, I can’t tell you when they appeared. But the Frankfurter Zeitung office will send you whatever you ask for pretty quickly.

6. Those are all the “practical” things that come to mind.

Please drop me a line! I get the sense that [. . .] is messing you about by turning you off Ireland. But you can’t blame Jews for anything nowadays. They are pushed in the direction of “money”—and that’s the only thing they can try and cling on to. [. . .]

I kiss your dear hands

your old Joseph Roth

153. Benno Reifenberg to Joseph Roth

11 July 1932
To Mr. J. Roth, c/o Kiepenheuer Verlag, 10 Kantstrasse,
Berlin-Charlottenburg 2

Dear Roth,

The Radetzky March is the first novel I read in serial form in the paper from beginning to end. Sometimes I even waited for the Reich edition to come out, so that I could read the following installment the evening before.

I am a bit tired of the political work, and am going to Tutzing to spend 4 days with Hausenstein. Will I find you in Frankfurt? Please write and let me know

[. . .]

Your old

[Benno Reifenberg]1

1. It’s hard to imagine a more gallant letter than this, and yet—dictated; addressed to Roth at his publisher’s—it marks another stage in the decay of a friendship.

154. To Stefan Zweig

7 August 1932
Baden-Baden
c/o Fabisch, Yburgstrasse 21

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

I’m not sure that after such a long time, you don’t have the right to set this letter aside, unopened. In 4 months this is the first week—a friend has invited me, and I’m going to be here another week—that I can draw breath. The last 4 weeks, when I might perhaps have been able to do so, I was tormented by a horrible stomach catarrh, slowly getting better now. Better, but I fear probably never well. Like my eye inflammation back then, it’s just another physical expression of the catastrophic situation of my life. Imagine, my novel had started to run in the paper before it was even finished. And, so to speak with the hot breath of pursuing time on my neck—of course to paralyzing effect—I had to go on writing, revise, correct, and finally put in a flimsy ending. A Hamburg book club bought the book for August. I have to correct and revise, all at the same time, for 8 bloody hours a day and I’m completely enfeebled by it. My hands are still shaking. The whole time since I left Paris, I’ve had to spend 4-week stints with various friends and acquaintances, and you know how ghastly that is for a habitual hotel dweller like me. The publisher was paying me 5 marks a day. I’ve had to stop paying back all my most pressing debts. Which made them press me all the more. There were places I couldn’t even show my face. I owe the Frankfurter Zeitung 400 marks, I don’t have the patience to write articles any more. The only thing I’ve managed to keep up are the monthly installments for my wife’s hospitals. Kiepenheuer can only keep going as long as its Jewish bankers stay in Germany. But everything suggests they’re pulling out of Berlin. National Socialism will strike at the core of my existence—apart from the fact that the booksellers are terrorized, inasmuch as they’re not Nationalists themselves, and want nothing to do with writing that strikes them as “cosmopolitan” or western European, and so on and so forth. I’m convinced nothing will befall the cheeky chutzpah-Jews, but the conservatives will suffer—never has it been as true as now: dog will not eat dog. I bet the Hungarian Jews will end up practicing censorship in the 3rd Reich just as they do in Russia and in this fucking democracy. Too bad we lived to see it. Every janitor is a reactionary today, and mixes me up with Tucholsky,1 who is his cousin! A few weeks ago, I was talking to some Nazis about you—and it took 10 minutes before it dawned on me they had Arnold Z.2 in mind! Not that they like you any better, because you’re such an “internationalist”! They just get annoyed that someone is known all over Europe, and they detach Germany from Europe to the degree that writers with a European reputation are enemies to them, as if they’d been French. It’s so disgusting, I tell you, you can’t breathe it, never mind write it! It’s hideous to be assorted with the Left, against one’s will, against one’s being, lumped together with something like the Weltbühne. That hideous arrest of Ossietzky’s,3 when all the Jewesses drove down the Kurfürstendamm in their magnificent cars—and the poor goy paced back and forth in his cell, and Toller gave a speech outside. I was the only one (aside from H. Mann) not to participate, in my case it was out of disgust, H.M. was pressed for time. It’s meaningless, everything’s become meaningless! I have the strong sense that for me personally there is no future.

Farewell! If you’re not angry, drop a line to your old

Joseph Roth

1. Tucholsky: Kurt Tucholsky (1890–1935), editor of the Schaubühne and the Weltbühne, satirist, novelist, essayist, went into voluntary exile in Sweden in 1929, where, depressed by European politics, he died by his own hand in 1935. For some reason, Roth always loathed him, even when he was farther to the left than currently, when he seems at least in part to be blaming the Jews for having brought their imminent misfortune upon themselves by dabbling in radical politics.

2. Arnold Z: Arnold Zweig, the Communist author of Sergeant Grisha, not to be confused with Stefan Zweig, with whom he was not related.

3. Ossietzky’s: Carl von Ossietzky (1889–1938), Tucholsky’s associate on the Weltbühne. Among the first prominent victims of the Nazis, he was put in a concentration camp in 1933, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in absentia in 1935, and died in police custody in 1938. It is uncomfortable to feel JR’s rabid loathing for such a man.

155. To Benno Reifenberg

28 August [1932]

Dear Mr. Reifenberg,

you helped me out of one of the biggest calamities of my life, and I want you to know, and to remember that you not only materially alleviated my condition, but—on a human level—picked me up and in a Picardian sense improved me. Please will you tell the firm, and Dr. Heinrich Simon, that his responsiveness was a real act of nobility, which continues to honor and ennoble me, after first of all helping me. Please, promise to tell Dr. Simon. The old god will help the old paper. He’s not to despair.

So far as I know, Gubler is not in Frankfurt, so I must ask you to forgive me if I leave the ethereal heights of politics where you are now situated, to revert to the depths of the feuilleton, where you once used to publish my glittering pieces in a sort of second Morgenpost. Everything avenges itself. Now you need to pay attention, and work out with me:

I have had 350 marks in advances.

I need another 300 marks, with articles already written.

Therefore I have to write 650 lines.

Now, pay attention.

Yesterday I sent off one article for the books pages; today a piece for the Bäderblatt.

Makes perhaps 250 lines. Which means I must still write 400 lines.

I will send these within the next 3 days, all glittering pieces for the feuilleton.

But then I must have the money, so that I can pay this fucking hotel. Coming to Frankfurt for 2 days, then Switzerland.

I have to live like a dog till 20 September.

Would you kindly write back right away, so that I may be sure you’ve grasped my muddled calculations. I need to be perfectly sure of that.

Thank you very much. (Which is a stupid thing to say, but never mind.) I can see I am abusing your friendship, but console myself by thinking that behind that is our comradeship which can’t be abused.

Your old muddleheaded

Joseph Roth

156. To Ernst Krenek

Hotel Schwanen, Rapperswil am Zürichsee
as of: Englischer Hof, Frankfurt/Main
10 September 1932

Dear esteemed Mr. Ernst Krenek,

thank you for your letter and your oeuvre, both! Where may I send you the book?

One sees accounts of your plans in the papers, here and there. May God give you health, money, and luck! I think of you often. Not only, by any means, when I read something of yours in the FZ. Oh, it remains the “decentest rag.” I’m bad, I’m very bad. I can’t manage any more in the muddle of my personal life. Yes, it’s in lockstep with “public affairs.” We Austrians, eh? We have no more business here. We live and think and write in Middle High German.1 Your music is like that. I don’t know a lot about music. But, among 20 “modern” tunes that a girlfriend sang to me, I still managed to pick out yours. I wasn’t nice to you. I’m often drunk, or half-seas. Forgive me! My solidarity with you is always greater.

As far as Austria is concerned: your life there may be harder than mine in Germany. Because in Germany, I can always still pin my hopes on Austria. But when I open an Austrian newspaper, I get the impression that things there are looking pretty German. The Prussian boot, the hysterical boot, the bossy boot: mean, perverse, and decadent. It will trample all over Austria too. Down with the Anschluss! Too bad that France is our salvation. German salvation. Write me if you get a chance, tell me Austria’s not yet as bad as its newspapers. (Germany is a sight worse than its newspapers.)

Your old

Joseph Roth

1. Middle High German: Professor Brecht, with whom Roth studied in Vienna before World War I, believed in and advanced an idea of Austria not as a corrupt and negligible appendage ripe for a tacit or explicit Anschluss, “a sort of nether Bavaria,” as JR says in no. 22 (when arguing not against Nazism, but Socialism), but as an older, better form of Germany, “the land of the older form of German culture, a culture that has preserved many ancient German traits . . . a land of the soul and the spirit, full of tolerance, protean, rich and colorful, eluding definition, yes, opposed to definition, like the Middle Ages, like the life of the Catholic Church.” Bronsen, who notes that Roth was not easily influenced by others, took Brecht’s lectures to heart. Without this Austrocentric, in excelsis Austria creed in mind, it is difficult to make sense not just of JR’s tone to Krenek here, but of his overall faith in Austria, his opposition to Germany, perhaps even his late upsurge of Royalism. See, for instance, no. 210 or no. 217. Even the mystic believes in something for a reason.

157. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Schwanen
Rapperswil am Zürichsee
18 September 1932

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

I’m sending this letter by messenger, ideally I’d have wired it, to thank you for your friendly, spirited, and moving letter, and to beg you to pardon a quite unpardonable oversight on the part of my publishers. Because of course I’d set your name at the head of the list of persons due to receive “reading copies” two or three weeks ago. I also sent a slip with a personal dedication to put in the book, which has been out now these past 5 days. How your good luck message shames me. Believe me, I know all too well that my book hasn’t turned out the way it should have. Of course I can tell you exactly why and wherefore. But what would be the point? I felt it while I was writing. I didn’t write you that whole time. I know you have no fondness for wailing walls. They don’t bring luck. Any friendship with me is ruinous. I myself am a wailing wall, if not a heap of rubble. You have no idea how dark it is inside me. My dear, admired friend, you have the grace of luck and of true golden joy in the world. Your senses are open to what is right, there is something in you of Goethe’s understanding of life. Don’t forget that since my bleak childhood I’ve been groaning up at the brightness, I’m not sure if, for all your knowledge of me, you can have felt all that. Because you are lucky enough—I’ve wanted to say this to you for a long time—not to be able to see certain depths of darkness, yes, you avert your eye. You have the grace to be able to avert your eye from darknesses that would do you harm.1 (Interestingly enough, your wife was able to feel it in me, sometimes when you had lost your temper.) I know my shortcomings in this novel, how I cried to the story itself to help me, embarrassing help for my “composition,” which was rotten and deceitful of me. That’s why I tinkered away at it for so long, two years, that’s no proof of health, strength, and productivity. Yes, I must ask you for forgiveness: your critical judgment let you down when you read my Radetzky March. It’s flattering for me: it let you down because of your feeling for me. I promise you: I don’t deserve it, and it’s harmful to you. And that’s why I didn’t write to you. You’re a good person. But I didn’t want to disturb the harmony that’s a part of your goodness. You must remain happy, serene, so childishly serene in a perfectly naïve way, to be good, to be truly good. Basically, you don’t like people like me; and quite rightly: because they harm you. I first met you under other circumstances. (Believe me, it hurts me that I owe you money, for instance!—and it hurts me too that I am telling you this, I know exactly how much, I have it written down. I also know that you would otherwise give it to much more deserving individuals. I want to pay it back to you in slow installments.) I tell you all this, shamelessly. I hope you will understand. Yes, you will understand.—I want to make an end. If there weren’t such a danger that I’d be mistaken by decent people for a “Romantic” in double or triple quotation marks): I’d like to become a monk. Assuming a modicum of grace.—Physically I’m fucked. I’ve got no money. I owe enormous amounts. I can’t take on any more debt. Even the stupidest article takes me three days to write. And (entre nous) the FZ has asked me to write less. They just can’t pay me.—(Strictly, entre nous.)—Well, there’s the wailing wall again. Throw away this letter! It’ll only bring you bad luck!—From now on I’ll just write about public affairs. You must have seen the article in the Völkischer Beobachter,2 where you are named with little shits way beneath you, I’m sure you must have seen that.—Well, greetings! I’d like to see you again—and I’m a little afraid of it.—To tell you something of a “practical” nature: I’m here till 1 October.—I’d like you to confirm receipt of this letter.—I have many more things I could tell you, and can’t think of anything.—Otto Zarek’s novel is in Sport und Bild or God knows the hell where. I saw one of the installments. In person, Zarek is much more sensible than you’d suppose from that installment. It seems to me he’s allowed Berlin to get to him. Even so, I’ve asked to review the book for the FZ, because he understands a lot about human predicaments. Is it coming out in autumn? Do you happen to know? (I don’t have his address.) Plus: I’d like to ask you to confirm the safe arrival of my book. I need to know whether Kiepenheuer carries out instructions.

your very old Joseph Roth

1. darknesses that would do you harm: as often in these letters of JR’s to Zweig, he packs a catastrophic punch. Bronsen describes “the congenitally cautious and reticent Zweig, who liked to take himself for an Erasmus, but was no more than just a law-abiding citizen, in whom a plausible witness attested to ‘a weakness for anything demonic, at a safe distance.’ ” The witness is Robert Neumann, friend to Zweig and author of the wonderfully entitled Meine Freunde die Kollegen.

2. Völkischer Beobachter: (People’s Observer), the organ of the Nazi party, founded in 1920.

158. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Schwanen
Rapperswil am Zürichsee
18 September 1932

Dear, esteemed Stefan Zweig,

in my letter I forgot to tell you that I owe you a couple of scenes in my novel,1 you will know which ones they are, and that I am deeply, deeply grateful to you, for all my dissatisfaction with the book as a whole.

Cordially

your Joseph Roth

1. Scenes in my novel: the ominous gathering of crows in the trees presaging the beginning of World War I seems to have been Zweig’s idea, for one. (Roth already had geese.)

159. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Schwanen
Rapperswil am Zürichsee
23 September 1932

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

I am most reluctant, of course, to write this: Mr. Landauer (he of the Kiepenheuer Verlag) insists that I ask you both that you write about the Radetzky March yourself, and that you induce Otto Zarek, who is writing about me in the Vossische, not to “trash” me. I am so utterly dependent on the wishes of Mr. Landauer, and so utterly revolted by the whole business, the publisher, his wishes, reviews, that I tell you without beating about the bush, simply so as to be able to report back to the publisher that I have done as required. It’s disgusting, nauseating! I know you know I’m being utterly straight with you. If I were to think “sensibly,” I’d have to say Landauer is right. He means well by me. I don’t want to lie to him, or to you.—I hope it doesn’t upset our relationship. I live off Landauer, I have to write to you, and I write this pukeworthy request, and I hope you understand me . . .

your old Joseph Roth

160. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel Schwanen
Rapperswil am Zürichsee
24 September 1932

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

your kind letter of the 22nd arrived half an hour after I mailed my disgusting one to you. I am not protesting in an effort to move you! I am not complaining, believe me! I know I attract misfortune, I have gotten used to it, I don’t want you in your serenity to be affected by me. You obey other laws. You are—how many times do I have to tell you!—one of the blessed! Stay that way. Forget about me! It pains me that I once tried to attach myself to you. But I didn’t know you at that time. Believe me, won’t you! I gave you no cause to think I was playacting (not even unconsciously, not even 3 or 4 layers down).—All I know (as far as practical things go) is that I am supposed to read from my novel on the radio in Frankfurt. That’s all I know. I live by the practical measures undertaken by Landauer. I can’t live like that. I have no more strength. No strength! Possibly I am sinful, because I get through far more money than more deserving persons require. I comfort myself with the (base) thought that I have shorter to live than the deserving ones. I have no plan for the rest of my life. If the [. . .] Jewish scribblers trash me, then I have no money, Landauer has no money. I am 20,000 marks in hock to the publisher. The publisher has done a lot for me. He needs money. He doesn’t have any. Please understand that I can do nothing. I cannot live like this.

Maybe I am pampered. I can’t help that.—So far as I know, I’ll be here till 4 November. My postal address remains Englischer Hof, Frankfurt am Main. I cannot appear before you in my present condition. I’m like run butter, like ghee. At any rate I don’t want you to see me like this.—I’ll never forget you!

Cordially,

your old J.R.

161. To Blanche Gidon

Hotel Schwanen
Rapperswil am Zürichsee
25 September 1932

Dear esteemed Mrs. Gidon,

I have no “representatives” in Paris. The person who is responsible for foreign rights at Kiepenheuer is Dr. Landshoff. He is the only one who can sell translation rights to my book.1

I would be very happy if you were to translate me, and if Kiepenheuer and Plon were able to come to an agreement.

Very cordially, with many thanks and good wishes,

your old Joseph Roth

1. my book: of course and still refers to The Radetzky March.

162. To Friedrich Traugott Gubler

2 October [1932]

Dear friend,

it seems I have to write to you after all, afraid as I am that you haven’t heard from me. I feel like someone calling out into the desert, and no echo. I write and write, and I hear nothing from you.

I would like to see a statement again. I have no idea of where I stand with the paper with regard to lines and money.

I’m in urgent need of the latter. I don’t even know if I’m allowed to approach you with this silly nonsense. But I need about 100 marks a week—and I’m writing and writing, and I never see a penny. I’m in quite a good way, and not at all drunk.

Cordially

your Joseph Roth

Another article just mailed.

163. To Blanche Gidon

Hotel Englischer Hof
Frankfurt am Main
4 October 1932

Dear esteemed Madam,

thank you for all your trouble! If Plon has doubts—whether literary or financial—then he should forget the idea. I am by no means so consumed with ambition as to think my work must be translated. I have far too low an opinion of the public world, of literature, and publishers—in Germany and in France—for me to care about translation or “literary effect.” . . .

Thank you too very much for your efforts regarding Mrs. Manga Bell’s son (she says hello, and sends her best wishes). But 300 marks a month is out of the question for her. I’ve managed to find out since that the boy could get a place in the Lycée Janson for 120 a month. But there seems to be some doubt about their taking him. He doesn’t speak a word of French! On balance, though, it’s better that the son suffers, than the mother. Not merely because I’m involved with the mother; but because I think it’s a sin for mothers to lay down their lives for their sons. Mrs. M.B. gets (entre nous) nothing at all from her very rich husband. She has to earn everything herself. She is very poorly. She has, moreover, a lung infection. She has a daughter as well. How can she manage all that? The husband is a “sovereign” nobleman, and has the right, even by French law, not to pay alimony or child upkeep.

But don’t worry too much about all that! If Plon were to decide against the RM, then the only aspect of that I would find regrettable is that you wouldn’t be able to translate it! I have zero literary ambition in this plebeian literary cattle market of Paris (or Berlin).

My regards to your husband!

Ever your old

Joseph Roth

164. To Blanche Gidon

Hotel Englischer Hof
Frankfurt am Main
11 October 1932

Dear esteemed Madam,

thank you for your two kind letters. Where the Radetzky March is concerned, I’ve never doubted that publishers of all nationalities are businessmen. What annoys me is that they’re bad businessmen, and that, particularly in France, foreign books are badly paid for, badly translated, and badly sold. I care too much about words for me to be able to look on while my words are twisted and mutilated—merely because a publisher won’t give up the false vanity of continuing to bring out foreign books, nor admit that he doesn’t have deep enough pockets to do it with dignity. When I look at the revolting literary “scene”: that une heure avec,1 the quasi-Communist Nouvelle Revue Française,2 the stupid “conservative” periodicals in Paris, these snobberies and cliques, prepared to genuflect before each “novelty,” the incomprehensible Joyce,3 the latest postwar epsilon out of Germany, well: it makes me shudder! The book trade has become a matter of fashion—it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Coty4 and Poiret5 were to be the next editors of the Nouvelles Littéraires. I won’t participate in that. I won’t join in the cult of Gide either. See: in Germany everyone is unliterary. I don’t get upset if they make idiots of themselves in literary matters. But I care too much about the grand traditions of France for me to be able to bear the way they now make une heure avec with driveling idiots from all over Europe—and on the basis of paid advertisements! I’m used to German barbarity. It’s my own. I live off it. But I can’t get used to French barbarities. It’s enough to make a boche out of me, even though, God knows, I have little aptitude for that.

Now, to Mrs. Manga Bell’s son:

Thank you so much for your trouble (and Mrs. Manga Bell sends her best). She would write to you herself, only she’s bedridden. She’s been ill since the beginning of autumn, she can’t take the adjustment. But she’ll write tomorrow!

It seems to me that Mrs. Tardieu would be very good for the little black boy. The expenses, if I’ve got this right, are 900 francs all told—150 marks a month, including laundry and sundries.

Well, I’d be in favor of the little fellow’s spending the 2 months before entering school in a French household.

But if he does have to go to the Lyceum, then the money question changes:

a. School fees—or is it free?

b. Transport?

So the boy would end up costing Mrs. Manga Bell ca. 1,200–1,500 francs per month.

(My arithmetic has always been poor, but isn’t that right?) And pocket money and clothes on top of that. So two months @ 1,500 francs comes to 3,000 francs = 500 marks. Then there is Mrs. Manga Bell’s second child, a daughter, in Hamburg. The children’s guardian (in financial matters as well) is an uncle of Mrs. Manga Bell’s in Hamburg. In my estimation, we’d have to allow 10 days before she learns:

a. Whether the money is there

b. When!

Could Mrs. Tardieu wait that long?

To recapitulate: the children’s father is the Count of “Duallo and Bunanjo,” and stands under French protection.—He abandoned Mrs. Manga Bell, the mother of his children.—They were born in Paris, therefore have French nationality.—They won’t be able to stay in Germany for very long—on account of their race—and also on account of their future! (1) They are Negroes, and therefore dependent on France. (2) They are French Negroes, therefore they are French. (3) They have decent possibilities in France, because their father is a French “Negro chief.” They are respectively 12 and 11 years old: the boy 12, the girl 11. There is no suggestion of any childhood illnesses—unpredictable chance aside.

Dear Madam, please forgive the dryness of my tone here! It seems necessary to me, when dealing with practical matters. Incidentally—an instance of the strange hand of destiny in all this “practicality”: Mrs. Manga Bell’s daughter was born in the Levallois-Perret clinic.

I myself am very much concerned with the fate of the children. I love them as if they were my own.—I would adopt them, if that didn’t mean removing them from the protection of their much more powerful natural father.

And now: it’s a terrible thing to have you doing so much for me—and myself powerless to respond in kind. I can only thank you from the bottom of my heart,

Yours ever

Joseph Roth

1. une heure avec: an interview feature in the literary weekly Les Nouvelles Littéraires.

2. NRF: an imprint of Gallimard, founded by André Gide and Jean Schlumberger.

3. Joyce: James Joyce (1882–1941). As much as he disliked musty intellectualism, so JR also had it in for a sort of games-playing modern trickery.

4. Coty: François Coty, parfumier—and newspaper owner (Le Matin).

5. Poiret: François Poiret, a Parisian dressmaker and designer.

165. To Hans Natonek

Englischer Hof
Frankfurt am Main
14 October 1932

Dear Hans Natonek,1

your lovely review2 puts me to shame: firstly because I don’t entirely deserve it, and secondly because I was so slow in thanking you for your own book. Excuse my dilatoriness. Yours is a real friendship. It even overlooks flaws in my writing—even though it clearly has eyes with which to see them.

I will try to give you my sense of your book. First its shortcomings:

1. In the conception, already. You take up two intertwining themes, either one of which would have sufficed for a novel:

a. The children of a city3

b. The monster disfigured by hatred, and then cured.

This is a truly Shakespearean figure. Beside him, all the others would have had to look as small as they truly are. But if you wanted an antagonist, then you would have had to confront the hellish wickedness of Dovidal with the goodness of a saint. All the time I read your book, my fingers were itching to write in such an antagonist! Partly because of my personal feeling for the author, but more the latent charm of the material. Dovidal is bedeviled; Epp would therefore have to be blessed. (And Waisl is redundant. He needs his own story.) Remember, brevity is the soul of etc. You commit a very common German mistake that even great Germans have perpetrated—including, if you ask me, Goethe, in Faust—if it weren’t heretical to accuse such a one of failing. You packed in too much. Dovidal’s story on its own, told in detail, phase by phase, would have been enough. Do you see? Something very cold, in the way that my Job is something very warm. Forgive me for mentioning myself. The mother, the father, the sister, and Dovidal himself: complete story. Instead, you (vainly) tried to squeeze this prince of hell into something ordinary and human. You ended up underestimating your own character. You turned a metaphysical fable into a humdrum realist story.

2. You still make the huge mistake—have done since you’ve been writing books—of interpreting, of explaining, of being a know-it-all. You over-egg the pudding, you clue the reader in, you betray what is going on in your brain-cum-workshop. You offer commentaries not only where, for some external reason or other, you haven’t been able to show fully, but also where, probably without your knowing it, your construction has been brilliant. You know, I’m a clever dick as well. But I keep it under wraps. Only when you’ve won the Nobel Prize can you allow yourself to publish your work journals. You have fabulous scenes that speak for themselves. You present them with an extensive commentary. Your best scenes come ivied with commentary.—Your coarsest mistake: the final scene far too obvious. (Your fear, presumably, of lack of understanding on the reader’s part.)

3. The strong points of your novel are at the same time its flaws. Which proves to me that you’re a real writer. So I’m not just prejudiced in your favor—a relief to me. Dovidal is UNFORGETTABLE! Unforgettable the scene with the Rabitzwänden. Waisl’s first appearance. The mother. All of them unforgettable. Waisl’s marriage! Unforgettable!

4. The language is superb, but for some highly abstract remarks. A novel is not the place for abstractions. Leave that to Thomas Mann! If anything, your natural gift is too concrete at times.

And a few personal eizes:4

a. Read more of the greats and the immortals: Shakespeare, Balzac, Flaubert!

b. No Gide! No Proust! Nor anything of the sort!

c. The Bible. Homer.

d. Don’t distrust the “reader” too much!

e. Try to keep yourself clear of journalism at heart.

f. No interest in day-to-day politics. They distort. They distort the human.

g. You have sufficient means—thank God—that there’s really no need for you to write para-feuilletons! Fuck them. All they’re good for is a hat for the wife and a dress for the girlfriend.

Sorry, forgive the know-it-all tone, the superiority, and anything else that bothers you here. Listen, if you do listen, to the absolute honesty of my words.

Always cordially your old

Joseph Roth

1. Hans Natonek (1892 Prague–1963 Tucson), journalist and novelist.

2. your lovely review: of The Radetzky March.

3. Natonek’s Kinder einer Stadt, published in 1932.

4. eizes: (Yiddish) tips, advice.

166. To Friedrich Traugott Gubler

Sunday, 25 October [1932]

Dear friend,

I’m just over a bad shock. Mrs. M.B. was pretty seriously ill. I felt the chill breath of an operation. And worries, worries, and the need to suddenly honor a bond I’d given my parents-in-law. And a great swarm of little adversities, interrupting my work. Also my articles. And money—needing money! And a remittance from Kiepenheuer lost in the post, inquiries—and only then compensation. And the feeling of being pursued by demons. And doctors and pharmacists, and the smell of camphor again and again, and the bloody shimmer of the Red Cross, before me and behind me. Forgive my silence, all right, I’m going to get back to work tomorrow.

How is your daughter?

Cordially

your very old Joseph Roth

167. To Stefan Zweig

26 October 1932
Casa Bellaria
Ascona, Ticino

Dear esteemed friend,

read your book1 in two days of breathless excitement. My friendship for you can’t make me so blind—and if blind, then at least not so excited. I used to read like that when I was a boy, Karl May, Robinson Crusoe. There was material for a master, and you mastered the material. The way it tightens and tightens till the end—I got more and more breathless myself, I played along—that was how Schiller wrote history plays. My dear clever friend and Stefan Zweig. I am enraptured! You interpreter and poet! That’s really what you are.

Tell me where you are going.

At this stage, I know nothing, except that I’ll have to stay on here another 8–10 days, while Landauer sends money. Then, if sufficient, maybe Paris?

Always your loyal friend

Joseph Roth

1. your book: Marie Antoinette.

168. To Otto Forst-Battaglia

Caffè Centrale Ascona
as of: Englischer Hof
Frankfurt am Main
Ascona, 28 October 1932

Dear Doctor,1

thank you for your kindly letter. I am the son of an Austrian railway official (early retirement, died at home) and a Russian-Polish Jewess. I attended middle school (gymnasium) in Silesia, Galicia, and Vienna, and then studied German language and literature under Minor and Brecht (in Vienna). I volunteered for the front in 1916, and from 1917 to 1918 fought on the eastern front. I was made lieutenant and decorated with the Silver Cross, the Merit Cross, and the Karl Truppen Cross. My service was initially with the 21st Jaegers, then the 24th Land Reserve. The most powerful experience of my life was the war and the end of my fatherland, the only one I have ever had: the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.2 To this date I am a patriotic Austrian and love what is left of my homeland as a sort of relic.—I spent six months in a Russian prisoner of war camp, fled, and fought for two months in the Red Army, then two months flight and return home. In Vienna I began to write: first in the Arbeiterzeitung, then for the Neuer Tag (not to be confused with the Tag of today), then in the N. Wiener Journal; Flight Without End is largely autobiographical; thereafter I was a freelance reporter in Berlin, then roving reporter for the feuilleton section of the Frankfurter Zeitung [. . .] then for the Münchener Neueste Nachrichten. My first book appeared in 1923 or 1924. It was called Hotel Savoy. Since 1930, I’ve lived as a freelance author in Germany and abroad.

I want to thank you for your interest, and on this occasion for the warm notice you wrote about my novel Job.

Your humble servant

Joseph Roth

1. Doctor: Otto Forst-Battaglia (1889–1965), publicist, writer, scholar, diplomat. Ended his life as professor of Polish literature at the University of Vienna.

2. This and the following sentences are very often quoted in writing about Roth.

169. To Félix Bertaux

Hotel Englischer Hof
Frankfurt am Main
14 November 1932

Dear esteemed friend,

I’m surprised you never got my letter from Ascona. I have been back from Switzerland for just two days. I expect to be in Berlin later this month. Please give me Pierre’s address, I’ll be only too glad to look him up.

Mrs. Manga Bell won’t have money to move her son until December, and so I hope we’ll be able to see each other early in January in Paris. Perhaps I’ll even enlist the Parisian boulevards to help me forget about the dreary celebration of Christmas. So I might be in Paris as early as the 22nd. Admittedly, I’ll be short of money, and living in pretty reduced circumstances. The income from the Radetzky March won’t come through until next spring.1

I’m very glad the book means something to you. I think it’s time I thought about people “of today” once more—and I hope, come January, when I’m better, to start on a big novel set in the present. To that end I think I’ll be resurrecting my old friend Franz Tunda.2

For a week now I’ve been drinking only wine, no schnapps, because I’m unfortunately getting a cirrhosis, albeit only in the initial stages. It can still be tamed. I’ve promised to look after myself. I feel I still have something to live for.

Give my best wishes to your wife.

Ever your old and grateful

Joseph Roth

1. In view of what happened then, it never did.

2. Franz Tunda: originally from Flight Without End.

170. To Jenny Reichler

5 December 1932

Dear Mother,

my condolences on grandfather’s death. I adored him all his life, he was like a natural grandfather to me. I’m thinking of you and your pain, and hope that Friedl’s return to health may comfort us all.

I will write in more detail from Leipzig, where I am going now.

Your loyal son

171. To Stefan Zweig

Hotel-Pension Savigny
Berlin
5 December 1932

Dear esteemed Stefan Zweig,

your letter came winging its way to me yesterday—I always see your letters as somehow winged. They are as bright and agile as swallows.1 I’m not sure I’ll be able to come to Munich. You know it’s a long way from Berlin—and I’d need to go back as well, to join my girlfriend in Hamburg. Very early in the New Year, I’m bringing her son to Paris—I’ve probably told you this already. That’s a lot of silly to-ing and fro-ing—and I need to be mindful of costs as well. I’m sure you know how much it goes against the grain for me to advance arguments against a suggestion that would allow me to enjoy your dear, good, dear proximity. I will be even coarser now, because I would like to see you for just one day, soon: could you see your way to being in Berlin 2 days before the Christmas holidays? I’m sure you could easily, forgive me for putting it like that. Alternatively: do you think you could meet me somewhere in January, any day before the 10th? Again: Hamburg is probably too far and too inclement at this time? Forgive me for being unable to find more diplomatic expressions in my haste. I know you won’t mind. You know I want to see you whenever possible. Your great friendship has been lucky for me. And my great fear that it might be unlucky for you turns out not to have been justified. I really was afraid of that! I thought of all sorts of unlikely, partly ridiculous but also serious things between the two of us. Thank God! I’m so relieved! I want to get back to work at the end of January, but need to talk to you first. Three old themes are circulating in my head. My book is selling about 100 copies a day. Everything would be fine, in material terms anyway, so long as the publisher is able to enjoy a bit of success. But none of their other authors are shifting at all, including Arnold Zweig, for whom they paid the most money.2 Just between you and me, it’s a silly book too, internally and for gloomy reasons. The Jews are so stupid. It takes the even stupider anti-Semites to come up with the notion that the Jews are dangerously clever. At the end of 2,000 years, they still managed to be sympathetic—and they’re perverse enough to take themselves and their Judaism for the center of the world. Like the Neue Freie Presse really. How petty and stupid it all is—and how easily one has slipped all chains, all of them. To my regret, I no longer find myself able to solidarize myself with this form of continually self-abnegating Judaism. Arnold Zweig is a very talented chatterer. Through an aperture of precisely one and a half degrees, he proposes to take in the entire cosmos! There’s chutzpah for you! Cosmic chutzpah!—But as far as I’m concerned, I owe the publisher 22,000 marks. He’s living entirely off of what I bring in. All I have is a better conscience vis-à-vis accepting advances.—My wife—and the lasting grimness of her illness—that’s something I’d rather speak to you about. I’m unable to set it down.

Please write back by return!

Good luck with the Strauss business!3

Your old true cordial

Joseph Roth

1. See Roth’s tremendous story “Stationmaster Fallmerayer,” in Collected Stories.

2. isn’t shifting at all: Arnold Zweig’s novel De Vriendt kehrt heim.

3. Following the death of Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1929, Richard Stauss turned to Zweig for the liberetto to his Die schweigsame Frau.

172. To Albert Ehrenstein

29 December 1932

Dear Albert Ehrenstein,1

as God is my witness (though He is the only one), I’ve thought of writing to you every day since I left Ascona. But I’ve given up—had to give up—schnapps, and I spend my days sick as a dog. I have a cirrhosis in its early stages—all I can do is hope to slow its progress. I hope you’ll forgive me. 3 of my books—I don’t have copies of the others—will be sent to you sometime from the warehouse in Leipzig. I don’t have your book either! Lio2 has become a strong and stubborn critter. Mrs. Manga Bell sends you her gratitude and best wishes. She’s (rightly) fonder of the cat than of me. Write, and don’t be offended if I don’t write back. The address is: c/o Englischer Hof, Frankfurt am Main. Financially, for all the success of my novel, my situation is lousy, because the publisher can’t afford to let me stay in debt. Sick, wretched, old, lonely, pathetic—and somewhere up above strolls my name or fama, which is not at all the same as my real existence. Don’t be cross with me.—Best wishes to Mrs. Sommerfeld—

Cordially your

Joseph Roth

Would you please get my coat (plus invoice) sent to me, Jos. Roth, c/o Kiepenheuer Verlag, Kantstrasse 10, Berlin (Charlottenburg), it’s getting cold. Thanks again!

1. Albert Ehrenstein (1886 Vienna–1950 New York), poet, novelist, essayist.

2. Lio: Ehrenstein’s pet tomcat.

173. Benno Reifenberg to Joseph Roth

29 December 1932

To Mr. Joseph Roth, c/o Kiepenheuer Verlag, Berlin

Dear Mr. Roth,

I don’t hear from you. But perhaps you’d like to hear this sentence from a letter of Hausenstein’s on the Radetzky March: “The book is so lovely, that one has to cry, like Picard, when reading it; so lovely that I don’t know what other book of recent times one could set alongside it.”

Cordially your old

[Benno Reifenberg]

174. To Stefan Zweig

[Berlin] 12 January 1933

Dear, esteemed friend,

I’m going to Paris round about the 20th, don’t know yet where I’ll be staying, as the Foyot is closed, and will stay till about the 10th February. Can we meet? Returning to Berlin probably round about the 20th February.

Cordially,

your old friend Joseph Roth

175. To Blanche Gidon

Berlin, 12 January 1933

Dear, esteemed Mrs. Gidon,

About the 20th I hope to be in Paris with the little pickaninny, and talk to you and your dear husband. I don’t doubt for a second that you have translated my book1 splendidly. I am very grateful to you.

Till soon! Your humble

Joseph Roth

1. my book: The Radetzky March.

176. To Stefan Zweig

[Hamburg] 18 January 1933

Very dear and esteemed friend,

so I will be going to Paris on about the 25th, and then Switzerland, and meet you in Munich. I cannot embark on anything new without first talking to you. I require your goodness and cleverness. A couple of people on the “right,” who have heard about my “left-wing” Jewish origins, are just starting to agitate against me too. In the same right-wing journals where they praised my book, they’re now starting to attack me. The Jews and the Leftists are no better, if anything worse. Forgive a friend for blurting out something he just intuits: some of what the Right is saying against you will have been given to them by the Insel Verlag itself; just a hunch, nothing more. Be on your guard. You may be smart, but your humanity blinds you to others’ wickedness. You live on goodness and faith. Whereas I have been known to make sometimes startlingly accurate observations about evil.

Warmest best wishes!

Your old

J.R.

Please don’t be too “amused” by my meanness1 here.

1. meanness: JR is alluding to his (terribly discreet) adverting to alleged remarks by Zweig’s publisher, Anton Kippenberg, director of the Insel Verlag since 1905 and soon to become a Nazi, that he had to correct the German of his (Jewish) author Zweig.