1920–1925
Berlin, Newspapers, Early Novels, and Marriage
JOSEPH ROTH WITH FRIEDL IN BERLIN, IN 1922
“No Eastern Jew goes to Berlin voluntarily,” Roth says in The Wandering Jews. “Who in all the world goes to Berlin voluntarily?” Not himself, for sure. But there was in the twenties in the German-speaking world no way around that often invoked “Moloch.” It had the appeal, within a relatively new federation, of an even newer center, with its score of daily newspapers putting out editions around the clock, its myriad openings in film and theater and book publishing, its evidently insatiable appetite for fresh provincial talent. Even if its streets weren’t paved with gold but with particularly unyielding paving stones, it still played the role of London in the story of Dick Whittington. (It was one of the jokes about Berlin that no one actually came from there; it understood all about outsourcing long before the word existed.)
Joseph Roth fetched up there in the summer of 1920, ready if need be, as he stylized it with his typical brio, to sleep on park benches and live on cherries. He had nothing organized, and went there on spec, and perhaps in a hurry. He had met Friedl Reichler in Vienna in the autumn of 1919, and successfully wooed her away from her fiancé (a fellow journalist, as it happens). But being—already—under no illusion about the unsteadiness of his life and prospects, and his besetting need for freedom (Brecht’s line in “Vom armen BB” might have been written for Roth: “In me you have someone on whom you can’t rely”), some honest and old-fashioned part of him (substantial, by the way: he wasn’t a principled cad like Brecht) would have conceded that he couldn’t offer stability, home, and a living to the young woman. Perhaps it was Friedl—only moderately disguised, by Roth’s standards—who was the “married woman” who threatened him (in no. 98) with losing his freedom, and for whose sake, so to speak, he upped sticks and went to Berlin (thereby breaking the engagement). Berlin, originally, was perhaps as much about personal liberty (Roth uses the phrase in no. 244, about his move to France, “La liberté PERSONNELLE”) as about professional advancement.
The professional advancement side of things went well. A writer as diligent, as versatile, as spirited, and as inspired as Roth did not want for work. By 1921, he had a regular engagement at one of the twenty dailies, the Berliner Börsen Courier, and made occasional appearances in a number of the others. (He made his debut in the Frankfurter Zeitung in January 1923.) This having “made good” elsewhere permitted him to return to Vienna in triumph (as one can imagine a man with his pride would have insisted on doing, not as a suppliant or a lucky winner) and swoop up Friedl after all. They were married in Vienna in March 1922. Roth, I think, loved Friedl and was proud of her—her sweetness, her appearance, stylish enough to pass for French—but never knew what to do with her. He kept her with him in hotels, or, on the frequent occasions when he was on the road somewhere, whether tours of provincial Germany or abroad to Russia, Albania, and Italy, he parked her somewhere alone, with just his money and his jealousy for company. No. 9 seems, touchingly and ominously, to cover many of the bases of the new existence, from the enigmatic ailment (what’s the matter with her arm?) and her curious misdating of the letter (they weren’t married in December 1921; is it that she hankers for that still to be the case?), to her anxiously trying to fit into his life, which could be no other way than the way it was, and half the time meant being alone and waiting up for him. With the benefit of hindsight, Roth almost always sounds regretful, as for instance in no. 79, a sadly ruminative but still relatively discreet letter to Stefan Zweig, whom at that stage he had yet to meet: “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.” But even before Friedl began behaving erratically in 1928, Roth could sound resentful of his marriage: if you are synesthetically minded, you can surely hear the sailor’s tattoos in no. 21, from Marseilles, in the tough bit of worldly wisdom: “It’s only in a port that you know you’re married.” It’s there in his approval of a man going to Shanghai, of meeting the (ex-Austrian) Mexican chief of police, it’s there everywhere in his fiction where being stuck somewhere with someone is doom, and the final movement of so many stories and novels is an impetuous sudden departure: in Right and Left; in the magnificent, useless last scene of Flight Without End (whose title is often used to emblematize Roth’s life) where Tunda seems briefly to have outrun all his pursuers (one pictures his life, panting in the distance with its hands on its hips); of Hotel Savoy; of “April” and “Stationmaster Fallmerayer” and “Rare and ever rarer in this world of empirical facts . . .” in which the narrator congratulates himself on not having to describe a man “duped into love by a shallow affect,” but instead one “prompted by a profound instinct to flee bourgeois existence.”
But of the (very few) letters from this time, few are personal, and really none are consciously clouded. Instead, we get an early taste of Roth with his elbows out, taking the fight to the enemy. The enemy, it has to be said, is almost invariably head office. It is a little surprising that, coming from the periphery of things as he did, nothing should have been further from Roth than awe or respect for the personalities and institutions of the center (at this stage of his life, he certainly wasn’t making a good imperial subject; the “frontiersman” in him showed itself differently). His letters are quite fearless in their bluntness, and worse in the jaunty disrespect they imply. Whether he’s putting up two fingers to the BBC, or selling himself on the sly—a contracted author—to another publisher, he seems always in a hurry, and to have little regard for the sensitivities of the persons or institutions he’s dealing with, neither the ones he’s trying to charm (“I am told you are sometimes to be found in Berlin”) nor the ones from whom he’s—perhaps not so discreetly—pursuing a disseverance: “Nor do I think the Schmiede will be overjoyed to learn of my new terms.” In a way, it’s as though he’s playing a game, or taking on a dare: to Ihering (no.10) it would be: maintain a cordial personal relationship with your boss, in case you need his support at some future time, while giving in your passionate resignation because the paper he edits is insufficiently left wing for you (make sure he feels bad about this), and also launching a noble gripe that he wasn’t paying you enough, financial and ideological reasons to receive equal weight. You have twenty minutes. Begin. And lo and behold, Roth invented the perfumed kipper.
9. Friederike Reichler1 to Paula Grübel
Berlin, 28 December 19212
half past 11 at night
Servus Paulinchen,
don’t be annoyed by the long silence. My arm got very bad, and hurt a lot. The swelling’s only just starting to go down.
Today I was unwell again—I had a terrible cough. I followed your advice, hot bath, aspirin, sweating; now I’m feeling better. Muh is at the theater, and I’m so worried about him I couldn’t stay in bed any more, and got up to write to you.
He’s terribly busy. He’s working very hard on his novel, which Frau Szajnocha will have told you about. It makes him moody, so he can’t write letters.
Please apologize for him to your father, and put in a good word for him.
How is Frau Szajnocha?
Beierle3 is still staying with us, and says hello.
Your father mentioned a jeweler by the name of Pume Torczyner. Please tell him that that’s my grandmother, my mother’s maiden name was Torczyner.
All roads lead to Brody!
Please give my best regards to your father and mother, and many kisses,
Friedl.
I can’t get hold of Galsen.
12 o’clock already, and Muh’s still not back, what do you say to that?! Shocking!!!!
1. Friederike Reichler (born 12 May 1900 in Vienna) married Roth on 5 March 1922 in Vienna. Always physically delicate, she became schizophrenic in 1929, and was put in asylums in Austria; in 1940 she was euthanized, in accordance with the prevailing practices of the Nazis. Her sweet, rather nervous tone here is ominous.
2. 1921: recte 1922, according to Bronsen.
3. Beierle: Alfred Beierle, friend of Roth’s, an actor and reciter.
10. To Herbert Ihering
Berlin, 17 September 1922
Dear Mr. Ihering,1
please don’t see this letter as a formal goodbye, nor as a polite substitute for a meeting with you, but purely as the expression of a necessity. I regret the all too short period of our collaboration, and freely admit that, while I came to the BBC2 with certain prejudices against you, I am now pleased to entertain high opinions of both your humanity and your literary effectiveness.
I am writing a farewell letter by the same post to Dr. Faktor,3 informing him that his letter occasioned, but did not cause, my resignation. I am no longer able to share the outlook of a bourgeois readership and remain their Sunday chatterbox if I am not to deny my socialism on a daily basis. It’s possible that, out of weakness, I might have repressed my convictions in return for a higher salary or more frequent recognition of my work. Only Dr. Faktor, already sapped by hard work, constant negotiations with the editorial board, and the difficulties of his own position, treated me with a smiling condescension, often doubted the truth of my protestations, smiled at this and that, and, while I am certainly aware of my own sensitivities, I am forced to conclude that I was treated in a way that was dangerously close to that extended to Herr Schönfeld and other employees of bygone days. As far as my salary was concerned, after the latest raise, it was 9,000 marks. I was allowed to write for other papers, but not to write with all my power for the BBC. The one I was permitted to do on grounds of economy, the other was frowned upon to suppress my ambitions.
I write you this, because I wouldn’t like you to form a false picture of what happened. I would be very glad to meet you in some neutral place, but am not proposing such a thing, but am content to wait for chance to bring it about, if it will.
I remain, with best wishes, your humble servant
Joseph Roth
1. Herbert Ihering (1888–1977), theater critic with the Berliner Börsen Courier, and famously an early supporter of the plays of Bertolt Brecht; later on worked at the Burgtheater in Vienna during the Third Reich, and was a theater critic again in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) after 1945. This letter is an early instance of Roth’s rhetorical power—which sometimes becomes ferocity—and his fearlessness when confronting others in authority.
2. Not the British Broadcasting Corporation, but the Berliner Börsen Courier.
3. Faktor: Dr. Emil Faktor (born in 1876 in Prague, gassed after 1941 in Lodz), feuilleton editor of the Berliner Börsen Courier, deposed under Hitler, left for Czechoslovakia in 1933.
11. Friederike Roth to Paula Grübel
Berlin, 14 July 1924
in the next few days, we are going to go to Prague and then on to Krakow. Please, will you tell me what the prices are like in Poland now, and how well we can live on rentenmarks.1
Perhaps it would even be possible for you to make a side trip to Krakow yourself? Certainly, we would like that.
Please write straightaway, because we’re only waiting for an address from you before leaving.
Then we may all go to France together in August.
Please give Frau Szajnocha our best regards, from both of us—I’ll send off a copy of Hotel Savoy2 this week.
Fräulein Idelsohn has been here. How are your parents doing?
Please congratulate Wittlin3 from us both.
Kisses from
Friedl and Muh.
1. The rentenmark was introduced in November 1923 in an effort to stabilize the German currency in the wake of runaway inflation. One rentenmark became equivalent to one trillion marks.
2. Hotel Savoy: Roth’s second novel—though the first to appear between covers—came out in 1924 from the respected Berlin firm Die Schmiede, publishers of Kafka and Proust. They went on to publish Rebellion and The Wandering Jews.
3. Jozef Wittlin married in 1924.
12. To Paula Grübel
[Berlin, 15 July 1924]
Dear Paula,
Friedl wrote you yesterday. But knowing how unreliable you are, I will repeat both her content, and her instruction to write back ASAP. I am going to Poland for work. What is the level of the Polish mark? I have 800 German marks. Can you work out the exchange? Can I live off it for 3 days in Krakow? Can you meet me there? I can barely stammer a word of Polish any more. Inform Frau von Szajnocha, Wittlin, Mayer! Then I will travel to Austria with you, and perhaps even farther afield, depending on money. Am bringing books. Looking forward very much to clapping eyes and ears on you again.
Warmest best regards ALL ROUND.
Your Mu
13. To Erich Lichtenstein
Berlin, 22 January 1925
Dear Dr. Lichtenstein,1
I am writing to you on the instructions of Dr. Max Krell.2 I seem to recall writing to you once before. By mid-February I shall have completed a novel. However, I am contractually tied to the “Schmiede.”3 I will admit to you quite openly, though with a plea for discretion, that I am not satisfied with either the promotion, the payment, or the appearance of the books. Nor do I think the Schmiede will be overjoyed to learn of my new terms. So it might very well come about that you and I will have business with one another.
At the same time, I would like to write books other than novels, books that are not covered by my contract with the Schmiede. For instance, I have long toyed with a plan to write a book of cheeky and irreverent dialogs on (in the broadest sense) “questions of the day.” I can imagine the book appearing under the title “Alfred and Edward,” or something of the sort.
I am told you are sometimes to be found in Berlin. I will be here until March, and thereafter in Paris. If you are ever in the city, I should like to be informed. In any case, I should be grateful for the kindness of an acknowledgment.
Yours sincerely,
Joseph Roth
N 35, Potsdamerstrasse 115 a. c/o Tome
1. Lichtenstein: Dr. Erich Lichtenstein (1888–1967), reviewer, publicist, and publisher. This letter is an early instance of Roth’s simoniac tendencies as an author, his self-given right to agitate, to inveigh, to two-time, and ultimately to desert publishers. (NB, such behavior on his part comfortably antedated exile and Third Reich.)
2. Max Krell worked as an editor for another publisher, the Propyläen Verlag.
3. The unfortunate “Schmiede” was where Roth’s books for a time appeared. Roth’s swagger is hard to take, and hard to like.