Here I am, stored inside a piece of hand luggage, being carried through the departure lounge at JFK airport. The owner of the bag is a young woman by the name of Lena Knecht. She is getting on a flight to Europe. Bringing me home, so to speak. Back to Berlin, the city in which I was written. Where I was first printed by a small publishing house almost a hundred years ago, in 1924. Where I was rescued from the fire on the night of the book-burning in May 1933. The city from which my author fled the day Hitler came to power.
My homeless author. My restless, refugee, itinerant, stateless writer on the run. Living out of a suitcase. Fleeing for his life.
His name – Joseph Roth.
The title – Rebellion.
I was born –
I came to life – between the wars. During the Weimar Republic – what they call the waiting room between the First World War and the Second World War. Between what was first thought to be the fields of honour and later became the fields of shame. A time of orphans and child poverty. Women running the cities while men were left behind on the battlefield. Defeated men who came back missing limbs and needed help to bring beer to their lips. Men with nightmares of decomposing hands emerging from the trenches. Cold winters they called God’s fist sweeping across from the East. And hunger in the blank expression of a tram conductor munching on a box of chocolates left behind by a passenger after the cinema.
A time of hardship and glamour. A time of revolution. Emancipation, cabaret – love and art without rules.
Everybody was in a club. Everybody wanted to belong to groups and social federations – chess clubs, dancing clubs, dog-breeding clubs, stamp-collecting clubs, orchid-growing clubs. Women’s fraternities. Gentlemen’s fraternities. Hunting clubs. Drinking clubs. Laughing clubs. Prankster clubs in which members challenged each other to look stupid and eat too much, or reward a passing pedestrian for permission to pour a bottle of wine into the pocket of his trousers.
Everybody was in a league or a trade union. The League of Blinded Warriors. The Association of Newspaper Vendors. The Central Association of German Watchmakers. The League of German Butchers. The League of German Brewers. The League of German Canteen Leaseholders.
Everybody was against something. Everybody had a manifesto. Right and Left. A time of envy and grievance and clubs with closed membership. When a book was no longer safe. When Hitler was already busy plotting to eliminate me and my author, and his people.
What does time mean to a book?
A book has all the time in the world. My shelf life is infinite. My second-hand value is modest. Some devoted collector might pick me up for a few dollars on eBay and keep me like a species gone into extinction. Rebellion – I have been reprinted many times. Translated into many languages. Scholars can find me in most libraries. Twice I was turned into a movie.
But here I am in person, first edition, slightly bashed up and faded. Readable as ever. A short novel about a barrel organ player who lost his leg in the First World War. The cover image shows the silhouette figure of a man with a wooden leg raising his crutch in anger at his own shadow.
Lena, my present owner, has the habit of throwing things into her bag in a congested heap – passport, purse, mobile phone, make-up, medical things, a frayed toy duck she’s had since childhood, along with a partially eaten pastry. Here I am, living in a dark sack with these fellow travellers, all hoping to be brought into the light of day when her blind hand comes diving down.
Mostly it’s her phone she picks out. How can a book compete with such an intelligent piece of equipment? It contains her whole life. All her private details, her photographs, her passwords, her intimate messages. It knows her mind and shapes her decisions. It does everything a book used to do. It behaves like an unfinished novel, constantly in progress, guessing her worst fears and her wildest dreams.
Her father was German, but he didn’t speak the language to her. He was a baker from East Germany who arrived in the USA after the Berlin Wall came down and denied his mother tongue, didn’t want to be known as German. His eyebrows were often covered in flour. He came home from work with white eyelashes. And white floury hands that gave him the appearance of a ghost, alive and moving, his inner being left behind in a country that no longer existed. Her parents became uncoupled when she was around twelve. Her mother went back to live in Ireland and Lena stayed with her father in a two-roomed apartment in a suburb of Philadelphia that smelled of yeast. Where I was kept in a bookcase by the door, unread, unborrowed, until I was handed over to Lena one evening when her father was dying of cancer. In a slow voice that held on to the accent of a lost country, he made her promise to take care of me.
Look after this book like a little brother, he said.
Is the past more childish than the present? Does history need to be kept safe like part of the family?
I have been defaced a little. Some annotations were written into the margins by my original owner, a Jewish professor of German literature at the Humboldt University in Berlin. His name was David Glückstein. He drew a map on a blank page at the back. It’s more like a diagram – half-map, half-illustration. No specific location given. It shows a bridge crossing a stream. A path with an oak tree and a bench underneath. There is a forest to one side of the path and some farm buildings on the other. The shadows cast by the farm buildings have been sketched in as though you’d have to arrive there at the same time of day to recognize the place. It’s a private memory, drawn to remember a day on which the professor stood in the company of the woman he loved, and buried something precious under a sundial to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.
Needless to say, the map has nothing to do with me. It’s not part of the original publication. The sole purpose of a book is to live another day and tell the story ascribed to it by the author. In my case, the story of a man with a barrel organ who is down on his luck.
It could be said that I am lucky to be alive. On the night of the fire in Berlin, with a large crowd of spectators gathered on the opera house square to watch books being burned to death, I somehow managed to escape. While all those human stories were being disfigured by the flames and dispatched as smoke and charred remnants into the night sky above the State Library, the professor looked into the future and handed me over to a young student for safekeeping. The student was Lena Knecht’s grandfather. He kept me hidden inside his coat. That’s how I was rescued and passed down through the family into Lena’s possession, why she is now on a flight back to Berlin to find out where that map leads to.