The idea of the book rescued from the Nazi book-burning in 1933 comes from a true story related to me by Henning Horn in Magdeburg. His account of the banned book kept hidden by his family through the years of the Third Reich brought to mind the famous connection drawn between books and human beings by the German Jewish writer Heinrich Heine – wherever they burn books, they will end up burning human beings. Those words are written on a plaque at the site of the book-burning on Bebelplatz in Berlin, where people once stood around to watch the outlawed books being incinerated and where they now stand looking down through a glass floor showing an underground room full of empty white bookshelves to remember that event. The words continue to resonate a century later, not only because they warn us about censorship and human rights abuses, but also because they can be turned around by a single act of courage to be read as – wherever they save a book from burning, they will end up saving human beings.
The lives of Joseph Roth and his wife Friederike Roth have been drawn from various biographies and essay collections, including the work of David Bronsen, Wilhelm von Sternburg, Michael Bienert, Soma Morgenstern, Géza von Cziffra, Irmgard Keun, Volker Weidermann, Michael Hofmann and Claudio Magris, among others. Details on Friederike’s illness are taken from the case notes of psychiatric hospitals at Rekawinkel and Steinhof, now housed in the public archives of the city of Vienna. Translations from Roth’s work and other documents are my own. Details on the Second Chechen War are taken from the work of the murdered Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya. The concept of the wounded book in this novel was inspired by the German artist Christiane Wartenberg and taken from an exhibition of her work which was shown by the Haus der Brandenburgisch-Preussischen Geschichte in Potsdam in May 2019.
I would like to thank Tessa Hadley, Roddy Doyle, Sebastian Barry, Colum McCann, John Banville, Eimear McBride, Neil Jordan and Sinéad Gleeson for their generous words of encouragement. I thank my editor, Nicholas Pearson at 4th Estate, HarperCollins, for his great support since the publication of The Speckled People. Thanks to my German editors, Grusche Juncker and Regina Kammerer at Luchterhand, Random House, for giving life to this book in my mother’s language. In particular I want to thank my agents, Peter Straus in London and Petra Eggers in Berlin. Also to Stephen Edwards and Cathy King. And warmest gratitude to Reagan Arthur at Knopf. Thanks to Hans-Christian Oeser for his wise comments at an early stage and also to Joe Joyce, Terence Heron and Tim Norton for their valuable insight on certain questions that came up during the writing. Many thanks to Silvia Crompton, Marigold Atkey and all the team at 4th Estate. I appreciate the support of the Arts Council of Ireland – mo mhíle buíochas.
Mostly it’s all thanks to Mary Rose Doorly.
I keep in mind the struggle of Joseph Roth in the 1930s, when he was cut off from his reading public after his books were banned in Nazi Germany. I think of the publishers in exile who kept faith with him when he was fighting for his life as a writer. I think of the great friendship of his fellow writer Stefan Zweig, who kept him on his feet when he became destitute. Writing was his only way of being alive, Roth said of himself. It was his survival, his refuge, his identity, his only true sense of belonging in a world from which he had been expelled. I like to imagine that Joseph Roth would be happy to hold this book in his hands today and that we could raise a glass together in his favourite restaurant in Paris, where the waitress kept his manuscripts safe from the Nazis. His work and his life stand as a witness to history. Even if the rescue of one book was never enough to save the life of Friederike Roth from the fire, I hope that she has now been given a safe place in our memory.
I am also aware that a hundred years ago, as a star reporter for the Frankfurter Zeitung, Joseph Roth went on a journey through the industrial heartland of the Ruhr Valley and described the cities being joined together by smoke. And perhaps this is the ultimate proof of optimism and change, that a century later an abandoned steel-making plant covering a vast area of land near the city of Duisburg has become one of Europe’s greatest rewilding projects. With the help of volunteers, nature has been steadily reclaiming the spaces between those rusted towers and elevators and iron-ore silos with trees and wildflowers and insect life. People come at weekends to walk and cycle for many kilometres through this strange parkland. The derelict shapes cast abstract shadows. The sun going down turns the metal parts bright orange. The wind can sometimes produce the most haunting range of musical notes. Yes – like a barrel organ.