pacifism and humanism of, 250
suicide of second wife and, 479
works of, 140, 141, 158, 174, 180, 183, 224, 293, 294, 309, 311–13, 322, 324
ABOUT THE JOSEPH ROTH ARCHIVES
AT THE LEO BAECK INSTITUTE
Since its founding in 1955, the Leo Baeck Institute (www.lbi.org) in New York has become the premier research library and archive devoted exclusively to documenting the history of German-speaking Jewry. Its role in preserving the literary legacy of Joseph Roth is particularly noteworthy and not surprising, since one of the first directors of LBI was Fred Grubel, a cousin of Joseph Roth. It was through this connection that LBI archives became the repository for a large number of his manuscripts and notes, including fragments of his novels from the 1920s and 1930s:
The manuscripts Der blinde Spiegel (The Blind Mirror), Büste des Kaisers (The Bust of the Emperor), the historical essay Clemenceau (Clemenceau), Die Hundert Tage (The Ballad of the Hundred Days), and an unfinished novel called Trotzki Roman, published after the Second World War as Der stumme Prophet (The Silent Prophet), are complete or close to completeness. The manuscript Die Hundert Tage (The Ballad of the Hundred Days) contains 220 pages in Joseph Roth’s own handwriting and 898 pages of the typewritten manuscript with his own corrections. The manuscript under the title Trotzki Roman, alternatively known also as Roman eines jungen Revolutionärs, can also be found here.
In addition, there are substantial portions of other works, such as Clemenceau, Legende von Trinker Andreas / Legende vom heiligen Trinker, and Kapuzinergruft. These texts are partly in Joseph Roth’s handwriting, partly carbon copies of his own handwriting, and partly typewritten with his own corrections.
Aside from the manuscripts of novels and longer works, there are articles, essays, and shorter pieces written between 1915 and the end of his life in 1939, newspaper articles published between 1926 and 1939, and a number of critical reviews of his works. The LBI Roth collections also contain correspondence and documents concerning his estate and rights to his works (compiled by his cousin Fred Grubel) as well as materials regarding scholarly works about Joseph Roth, academic conferences, and exhibits.
The photographs for Joseph Roth have all been provided from the Leo Baeck Institute archives.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Michael Hofmann, the son of the German novelist Gert Hofmann, was born in 1957 in Freiburg. At the age of four he moved to England, where he has lived off and on ever since. After studying English at Cambridge and comparative literature on his own, he moved to London in 1983. He has published poems and reviews widely in England and in the United States, where he now teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville.
In addition to six books of poems (a Selected Poems appeared with Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2009), he has edited the anthology Twentieth-Century German Poetry, translated a selection of the leading contemporary German poet Durs Grünbein called Ashes for Breakfast, and prepared a volume of Gottfried Benn’s poems called Impromptus (all FSG and Faber & Faber); and brought out a selected poems of Günter Eich, called Angina Days (Princeton University Press). A selection of Hofmann’s critical pieces was published by Faber as Behind the Lines. Another, with the provisional title Critical Book, is on the way, as is a new book of poems entitled One Lark, One Horse.
Michael Hofmann has translated over fifty works of German prose (from authors including Thomas Bernhard, Bertolt Brecht, Elias Canetti, Hans Fallada, Gert Hofmann, Franz Kafka, Irmgard Keun, Ernst Jünger, Herta Müller, Wolfgang Koeppen, and Wim Wenders). The present volume is his tenth translation from Joseph Roth, whom he first translated in 1988; he won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize for The Tale of the 1002nd Night in 1998 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for Rebellion in 2000. For other translations he was awarded the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize (twice). He is a Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joseph Roth was born Moses Joseph Roth to Jewish parents on 2 September 1894, in Brody in Galicia, in the extreme east of the then Habsburg Empire; he died on 27 May 1939, in Paris. He never saw his father — who disappeared before he was born and later died insane — but grew up with his mother and her relatives. After completing school in Brody, he matriculated at the University of Lemberg (variously Lvov or Lviv), before transferring to the University of Vienna in 1914. He served for a year or two with the Austro-Hungarian Army on the eastern front — though possibly only as an army journalist or censor. Later he was to write, “My strongest experience was the War and the destruction of my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.”
In 1918 he returned to Vienna, where he began writing for left-wing papers, occasionally as “Red Roth,” “der rote Roth.” In 1920 he moved to Berlin, and in 1923 he began his distinguished association with the Frankfurter Zeitung. In the following years he traveled throughout Europe, filing copy for the Frankfurter from the south of France, the USSR, Albania, Germany, Poland, and Italy. He was one of the most distinguished and best-paid journalists of the period — being paid at the dream rate of one deutsche mark per line. Some of his pieces were collected under the title of one of them, The Panopticum on Sunday (1928), while some of his reportage from the Soviet Union went into The Wandering Jews. His gifts of style and perception could, on occasion, overwhelm his subjects, but he was a journalist of singular compassion. He observed and warned of the rising Nazi scene in Germany (Hitler actually appears by name in Roth’s first novel, in 1923), and his 1926 visit to the USSR disabused him of most — but not quite all — of his sympathy for Communism.
When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, Roth immediately severed all his ties with the country. He lived in Paris — where he had been based for some years — but also in Amsterdam, Ostend, and the south of France, and wrote for émigré publications. His royalist politics were mainly a mask for his pessimism; his last article was called “Goethe’s Oak at Buchenwald.” His final years were difficult; he moved from hotel to hotel, drinking heavily, worried about money and the future. What precipitated his final collapse was hearing the news that the playwright Ernst Toller had hanged himself in New York. An invitation from the American PEN Club (the organization that had brought Thomas Mann and many others to the States) was found among Roth’s papers. It is tantalizing but ultimately impossible to imagine him taking a ship to the New World, and continuing to live and to write: His world was the old one, and he’d used it all up.
Roth’s fiction came into being alongside his journalism, and in the same way: at café tables, at odd hours and all hours, peripatetically, chaotically, charmedly. His first novel,