Books with practical occasion elevated into the poetic sphere. Were I the publisher, that would be my motto.
There would be something else as well, which you in the house are quite rightly not keen to see, but which is generally necessary, and in books quite indispensable. That is comparison. The first chapter would be called “The Other Side of the Fence.” But the book would be on far too high a level for it to contain a “critique” of Germany. Say perhaps that the critique would be on so high a level that it would no longer count as such or read like it.
What do you say?
I would like to spend two weeks in Paris, working on this book. I trust you are not party to that German prejudice that a good book cannot be written fast. Fast is the only way I can write well. The Germans write even literary books scientifically. Their feeling is scientific. That’s why they write slowly. The slow working of someone like Flaubert is based on completely different grounds: laziness, namely. You must remember from your schooldays that it’s possible to slog away all day with the greatest laziness inside you.
During those two weeks I would write nothing for you. Then I would come to Frankfurt with my book. And not to deliver the book, but to talk to you about the coming months.
Principally about money. It matters less to me than to the publisher. Three months are up, in the course of which I should have been paid 900 marks, 300 as expenses. It might have been more “sensible” not to mention it, but it would have been craven. Frankly I am too proud to behave in such a way. Had I been in Berlin now, I would probably have called for a raise because of the inflation, even though that too is craven, and disgusting moreover. I am not in Germany now. (I almost said thank God.) And, as you know, I don’t want to go back there this year.
I see three possibilities:
1. Either the firm demands my resignation and I offer it,
2. or it gives me leave to stay,
3. or I don’t offer my resignation, and the ball is back in their court, whether I starve as an even more occasional contributor, or manage to go on living, as I have lived the past 20 years. You know I don’t demand a steady income. Even so, the third possibility would be the worst, and it would be truly stupid of me not to try and go for the second.
Nothing ties me. I am not sufficiently sentimental to believe in categories like future, family, etc. etc. But sufficiently sentimental to feel devotion to this house and this newspaper, the last vestiges of the old humanistic culture. I am being straight with you — this is entre nous. I know perfectly well I couldn’t work for any other German paper. I know none would have me. And I still couldn’t go back to Germany. It’s a tragedy, not a passing fancy. Perhaps it’s the height of “patriotism” not to stand to see the tip of a pyramid not formed by a tip, but by a shaved blockhead.1 I can’t stand to see the whole of Germany turning into a Masurian swamp. If I were there now, it would drive me crazy. Everything affects me personally. If they lock up Becher,2 it’s me that’s behind bars. I don’t know what would happen. I’m capable of shooting someone, or throwing bombs, I don’t think I’d last very long. I risk my life when I return to Germany. Physically, I can’t do it.
But do you think I can say that to the newspaper? Ever since his letter to Stahl, I’ve had a great respect for Simon. I would like to talk to him, though it’s probably too personal. He might misunderstand, because he thinks of me as unscrupulous — when all I am is shrewd. I could never tell him. I always worry he doesn’t hear half of what I say. If he has ten minutes for me, eight go on all sorts of other stuff. I worry once I’m in Frankfurt again, sniff the air in the office, which has so little in common with the rest of Germany, that the newspaper can’t see Germany, and that I’ll weaken, and go back to Berlin, and it will finish me off. Berlin is bad for my liver, I have trouble with gall production. Should I not go to Frankfurt?
Can I spend the winter in Paris then? I wouldn’t care to stay any longer than that. Can I go to some third country — Albania, maybe — and write another book? Should I forget about the 100 marks, and so free myself from Germany? Can I go to Moscow? Schotthöfer3 is back. Russia and the East are familiar to me.
I am desperate. I can’t even go to Vienna since the Jewish Socialists have started clamoring for their Anschluss. What are they after? They want Hindenburg? At the time that Emperor Franz Joseph died, I was already a “revolutionary,” but I shed tears for him. I was a one-year volunteer in a Vienna regiment, a so-called elite unit, that stood by the Kapuzinergruft as a guard of honor, and I tell you, I was crying. An epoch was buried. With the Anschluss, a culture will be put in the ground. Every European must be against the Anschluss. And only those mediocre Socialist brains don’t get it. So little difference between German Nationalist and Socialist policies! Between Jew and Christian! The various camps are united by their mediocrity more firmly than by any principle or ideal. Can’t anyone feel that an independent Austria is still a gesture toward a united Europe? Do they want to become a sort of nether Bavaria? More than German reactionaries, I hate that obtuse German efficiency, decency, honesty, the Löbe4 type, the accountant who has found his way into politics. Those people should have remained civil servants. But just because there are no politicians in Germany, the civil servants go into politics, and the idiots occupy the chancelleries, and because the prisons are overcrowded the criminals have moved into the police stations. I can’t go to Germany, I can’t!
I hope you liked my last three articles. If not, please tell me straight out. Someone who writes day and night as I do has no vanity. Nor is it vanity that is unhappy with an “appendix” to my essays. It’s the formal conscience of a journalist. There is such a thing as a typographical conscience. It insists on a preamble and won’t stand for an afterword. That would have to be in a different typeface. The newspaper is insufficiently expressive in that way. There is no smallest type size. I’ve just forgotten the name of it. Petit and leaded petit are too small. Formal technical resources allow for more expression. It’s terribly important for the paper to have a thousand faces; it has a thousand news stories. Congratulations, anyway, on the new masthead and design. Who is it who sets the paper now? The best-looking edition was the one with the French diplomatic démarche. Who set that? I like the layout of the world news as well. If only I could have that column to myself three times a week. With specifications as to layout. Would that be possible?
How are your invalids? Give them my best, I mean it. I remain, come what may, your old Joseph Roth
1. shaved blockhead: an unmistakable limning of Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934), World War I general and then elected president of Germany in 1925 and again in 1932; the man who in January 1933 gave the German chancellorship to Adolf Hitler.