Here is what happened to Joseph Roth’s marriage.
In his novel about a Jewish family emigrating to America, he writes about his wife’s mental collapse. He calls her Miriam. She lay in a wide, white bed. Her hair was loose, black and shining across the white pillows. Her face was red, her dark eyes had bright-red rims.
She began to laugh. Her laughter lasted a couple of minutes. It sounded like the clear ringing of relentless sirens in train stations, like the beating of a thousand brass rods on thin crystal glasses. Suddenly the laughing stopped. Then Miriam began to sob. She pushed back the covers and her bare legs were kicking, her feet hitting the soft bed, becoming more and more urgent and regular, while her fists swung through the air in the same steady rhythm.
He describes the doctor arriving. His voice issuing the ominous words – she is insane. They hold her down while the doctor administers an injection – soon she will be quiet.
She is tied to a stretcher and taken away.
At the asylum, through the glass door separating the waiting room from the corridor, he describes seeing patients in blue striped robes being led past two by two. First the women, he writes, then the men. Occasionally one of them will throw a wild, contorted, worried, menacing face through the glass into the waiting room. He finds himself looking away in rotation at the floor, at the door handle, at the magazines on the table. In that moment of separation, handing her over into the care of the nurses to join those patients in their blue gowns, he is left staring in grief at a vase full of golden flowers.
To her parents in Vienna he writes – don’t let Friedl read this book. It would not be good for her.
To his friend and fellow author Stefan Zweig he writes – I am terribly sad. So cut off from humanity.
To her parents – if Friedl happens to talk about me, whatever she says, good or bad, true or made up, the details should be related to me at all costs. Don’t say she’s wrong, that’s nonsense. Listen to everything. Please. Promise.
Friedl, thank God, he writes, appears not to be suffering from dementia. She probably has hysterical psychosis. If it weren’t for the fact that she is so intelligent and acutely sensitive, the whole thing might have been over within a few weeks. But she is obsessing over a small detail, can find no way out, and, in despair at this, it seems, is losing her mind.
Her heart is sound, she can drink good strong coffee.
Her weight must go back up to fifty-five kilos again. If she can tolerate liver and will take it, give her liver, as much as possible, and slightly underdone.
At the sanatorium outside Vienna, she has come under the care of Dr Maria Diridl.
She sits in the consultation room, staring into the distance. Her eyes bear a catatonic expression, the eyelids drooping, half closed over. Her hair has had to be cut short because she tends to pull it out in big clumps. She remains listless, refusing to answer questions. At times she complains about ‘degradations’ – having to take a bath, being told to eat, being told to sleep. She has been refusing her food, leaving most of it on the plate. Her weight is down to thirty-two kilos, she has to be ‘spoon-fed’ on some days. At lunchtime she threw her food on the floor and picked it up with her hands to bring it to her mouth.
Doctor Maria is patient with her.
Frieda, why don’t you tell me what happened.
She stays mute, hurting herself again, bending her legs back underneath her body to make them disappear. This has already resulted in a malformation or fusion of the knee joints which prevents her from walking properly. Doctors tried to correct it surgically under general anaesthetic, but she goes back to this slow self-harming as though she wants to have no legs at all.
Frieda, you were married for ten years.
It’s none of your business.
Your husband is a writer.
Frieda looks up and smiles.
The visitors are waiting for me outside, she says. They have nice legs and nice hands, but they have no heads.
Was it a happy marriage?
Russia is the biggest swine of all, she says.
She begins making faces. Grimacing and laughing out loud. She suddenly shrieks and starts reciting lines of poetry, linking a variety of remembered verse together in a long stream that makes no sense. She throws in bits of Goethe with Schubert’s Winter Journey. Lines of Rilke followed by lines of Heine. Shouting literary junk around her at the walls, defending herself with these powerful words and saying there are people watching her – Christian eyes and Jewish eyes staring at her.
Doctor Maria waits for her to calm down.
Frieda, tell me about your wedding day.
In a coherent moment, she begins to speak about herself unguarded.
I was on my own, she says. In Paris, in Marseilles, one of those cities. He was away on assignment for the newspaper and I was left with his manuscripts and the voices of people in the next room and the smell of liver in the curtains and the different languages in the streets and nothing to do but talk to the violinist and ask him to hold me.
You met somebody?
It was a comfort.
Did you have an affair?
I told my husband when he came back. I confessed everything.
She is crying now.
It’s alright, Frieda. You were lonely. It was a mistake. You told him what happened.
The baby, she says. I had to abort.
You were pregnant?
We had no children. He’s infertile. He’s told the whole world that he can’t have children. It was not possible for me to have the baby. Are you in your right mind? Keep a baby in a hotel bedroom and go on travelling, what kind of mother would I be?
Doctor Maria holds her hand.
It’s alright, Frieda. Everything will be fine.
Doctor Maria has many more questions. Was it one of those backstreet abortions? Was it done in the hotel bedroom? Did he come back from one of his assignments and find her lying on the floor in a pool of blood?
By now, she has dropped back into her silence again, staring out the window, waving her hands around. She cannot sit still and begins pacing up and down the room.
Doctor Maria puts it all down succinctly in the case notes – she has been ill for one and a half years. Married for ten years. Seems to have stepped outside her marriage. Marriage apparently happy, though she had a brief affair one and a half years ago, resulting in a tragic decline in her self-esteem, all of which she revealed to her husband in a big confession. Abortus. The marriage remained childless.
When the nurses come to take her back to her room, she bares her breasts and shouts – guess what I have between my legs. As they guide her out of the consultation room, she turns to point at one of the nurses and says to Doctor Maria – you should take a photograph of that woman’s arse. It would be interesting. And insert a pencil.
She shrieks and laughs as they lead her along the corridor. She refuses her medication and has to be held down. She lies on the bed, covering her face with the blanket. She sleeps for a long time and refuses to eat. At night she sits up for hours in a comatose state with her knees pulled back in pain underneath her.
She likes it in the sewing room. Always sits in the same place. Calm and polite. She has made a shirt with no buttons. Says her visitors waiting outside should be sent to Germany, maybe they can smuggle back some stockings.
On 11 May 1933 she is officially declared a ward of court – voll entmündigt. She has lost the ability to speak for herself.