Slap in the middle of my lovely time in Marseille is the Social Democratic Congress. 200 Germans, 100 Austrians. The latter a nasty perversion of Germans. The Austrians look like Germans who have understood nothing. As vile as a Prussian is when he’s taking his pleasure, that’s how ghastly the Austrian is all his life. Degenerate boches.
Not that the real ones are any better. A second wave of Lombards. This time toting briefcases and sporting Schiller collars. Fat wives, heelless sandals, perms, hatless. Jews who aren’t Jews, because they have taken up the cudgels for some foreign proletariat; bourgeois who aren’t bourgeois, because they’re fighting for a foreign class. Continually steaming with activity and talk. The conference extended into the evening in the café, big groups and long tables, all to the horror of the waiters and the exotic foreigners of whom there are so many here. Nothing is so exotic as a German. No group is more eye-catching. But the Germans are social democrats to beat the band. If you don’t like Germans, you won’t like social democrats either. Half citizens, half politicians, half minds, moderate beer drinkers. Good old Stahl is here. He doesn’t have a clue about the true nature of this party of toothless dragons. He still gets excited about congresses. I’ve seen Friedrich Adler. No pistol in his briefcase any more, just checklists. Face gone flabby like dough. Once upon a time he shot Stürgkh. Beginning of the end for the monarchy. When I see Adler today, I understand Stürgkh was a martyr. Because his killer is the secretary of the Second International. They should have hanged him. One shouldn’t let heroes live.
Not one of these representatives of the proletariat goes to the old harbor quarter as I, a so-called bourgeois intellectual, do. No one threatens me. They would quite rightly beat their brains out. Eck-Troll is here. Do you know him? A queer sort of idiot. He sits in a bar for three hours, and is fleeced, and they compliment him on his French, and afterwards he tells me he has done some wonderful “studies.” He pulls a photograph from his wallet: wife and child. He shows the photo to the objects of his studies. A German journalist on the job. Stahl says: Come with me to the harbor quarter! Shall I take a pistol? What a fighter. Shame there wasn’t a cinema handy.
If you think of bluing laundry, you’ll have a sense of how blue the sea is here. The sky, on the other hand, is as pale as a sheet of paper.
There are 700 vessels in the port. I’ve half a mind to suddenly take one of them. My wife cries every day, if it weren’t for her, I’d be long gone. It’s the first time I’ve had a feeling for the presence of my wife. It’s only in a port that you know you’re married.
I had whooping cough as a grown-up as well. Look after yourself. The consequence is often swollen glands, as with me, and mumps, which is unpleasant, if harmless. Regards to mother and son. Have a look at the clipping from Le Matin2 enclosed. I give you my hands.
I remain your old
Joseph Roth
I can’t permit this letter to go without the following.
Last night they played L’Arlésienne at the opera. As in Paris, when you get a ticket, you get your “location” to go with it. As a result, no one finds his seat, because three-quarters of the audience have two. The foldaway seats are all full. The aisles are stuffed with people. Everyone is wandering about. Three ancient usherettes have been driven demented. But the people aren’t the least bit bothered. While they’re looking around, they all have smiles on their faces.
The music starts, and the foldaway seats keep clacking up and down. People are yelling. Music is a bit like sweets. A component of an evening in the theater. Music is metaphysical, and the southern Frenchman doesn’t get it. The gorgeous women are loathsome, because they won’t shut up. The musicians don’t care about the noise. They play. When there’s a quiet passage, the audience thinks it’s over, and they go wild.
The musicians go on playing through the interval, all the while they’re hammering at the set behind the curtain. The whole theater is like a country fair. Complete strangers start to tell me their life story, because they’re bored with the music. The actors are unbelievably hammy. They speak their lines in a kind of graveyard whisper. People laugh themselves silly. Which doesn’t prevent them from applauding once a speech is over. The desperate hero, resolved to take his own life, exits triumphantly, arm aloft.
Doors open and shut all the time. People pop out for a smoke. Come back, clacking of chairs. Squeaking of benches. Laughter of women. Rustling of paper.
You can’t imagine the lack of respect of the French. They obviously can’t understand that art is a form of reality. If you told them a fairy tale, I don’t think they would understand it. I should like to know how French children behave during fairy tales.
The Viennese, who are of course besotted with theater and music, turned up in their droves. They thought the continual hubbub was somehow accidental, and kept going Sssh! For two whole acts. The locals laughed at them. Eventually the Germans gave up. Halfway through the act, all the French moved forward and took their empty seats.
Every act is an interval. The whole performance is interval. The French roll around at a tragedy the way we do at a comic routine. They haven’t the least idea of art. The Germans at least show respect. It would have been good to have the Berlin police to keep order in the theater yesterday.
Inevitably, the Germans and the French are going to intermarry. They are both desperately short of what the other have.
1. Willo Uhl (1880–1925), feuilleton editor on the Frankfurter Zeitung since 1913.
2. Le Matin, conservative French newspaper.
22. To Benno Reifenberg
Hotel Beauvau, Marseille
30 August [1925]
Dear Mr. Reifenberg,
I really don’t mean to alarm you with these registered letters. They are the consequence of my morbid fear of things getting lost in the mail. I’m sure their content is in no relation to the care of their packing. The post makes a lot of money from me. I beg your pardon, and console myself with the fact that the content of this letter can’t be more displeasing to you than the fact of its being registered.
It’s not easy to write this letter. Not least because I find it immoral — tactless at the very least — to burden our personal relationship with matters of business. I don’t want to abuse the fact that I am fond of you (and you, I hope, have a liking for me) to perpetrate the unfairness of leaning on you — influencing is too certain — in your relation to me as an employee. You’ll know what I mean. True, we only know one another through work, and thanks to work. But I refuse to relegate a relationship that has outgrown the professional to the merely professional again. But what else can I do? Should I take my case to a tribunal that a tribunal won’t understand, when I know a human being? That — to my way of seeing — would mean going over your head. There is still the chance that you will preserve the distinction: on the one hand, feuilleton editor, on the other, well-disposed human being. If such a thing should seem necessary to you, I would even ask that you do so. Please don’t show me any sort of private forbearance. You can always give me advice, as if you had nothing to do with the firm.
I’m afraid you probably guess more than you know, and this introduction has been too clear. My stylistic affliction, not my personal one.
My tour will be over in the middle of September. I have enough material for a book. There too, I would like to ask your advice: I should like to write a wholly “subjective” book, in other words something completely objective. The “confession” of a young, resigned, skeptical human being, at an age where he is completely indifferent whether he sees something new to him or not, traveling somewhere. Someone with nothing of the “travel romantic” in him at all. And he sees the last vestiges of Europe, places that are innocent of the ever more apparent Americanization and Bolshevization of our continent. Think of the books of the Romantics. Take away their tools and props, both linguistic and perspectival. Replace them with the tools and props of modern irony and objectivity. Then you have the book I want to write, and feel almost compelled to write. It’s a guide to the soul of its writer, as much as of the country he’s passing through. What do you think of the idea? It’s very creative, more than a novel. I think it’s a form that would be congenial to the house. To put it in a nutshell, in a way that you don’t like, and I always do: