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.