3. Wolf von Dewall (1882–1959) joined the staff of the FZ in 1916, correspondent in London and Ankara; after the war freelance journalist in Stuttgart.
4. Friedrich Sieburg (1893–1964), author, poet, essayist, translator. Correspondent for the FZ from 1923 to 1942. After 1942 press attaché in Paris for the Nazi envoy Abetz. From 1948 to 1955 co-editor of the magazine Die Gegenwart; after 1956, literary editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. It was probably the greatest disappointment of JR’s life that he was passed over for the Paris job in favor of Sieburg in 1925–26.
5. Kurt Lachmann, journalist. Went into exile in 1933. After the war, was a correspondent for U.S. News & World Report in Bonn.
6. Fritz Naphtali (1888–1961), business editor of the FZ from 1921 to 1927.
7. Artur Feiler (1879–1943), business editor from 1903 to 1909, domestic political editor from 1910 to 1930.
8. BT: the Berliner Tageblatt.
9. Dr. Bernhard Diebold (1886–1945), theater critic for the FZ, who in 1934 returned to his native Switzerland.
10. Dr. Rudolf Geck (d. 1936), feuilleton editor on the FZ; at the paper since 1898. Credited with first having brought JR to the FZ.
11. Erich Lasswitz (1880–1959), technical director and writer for the FZ from 1918 to 1943. Roth sometimes strikes one as the only Indian, among this collective of chiefs, and less able to make his way than he proudly/overweeningly thinks.
27. To Bernard von Brentano
[undated]
Dear friend,
you fell for the fool’s mate, because you were working on the false assumption that the Schmiede was going to be even more stupid than it actually was. I read the carbon of your letter, there’s nothing in it but my address. You shouldn’t have even started talking to those idiots. Now it’s finished. We’ll have to just let them write. I don’t care. I’m past the stage where I would give them anything of mine — even if it was the last thing I wrote in German. Please tell me, more precisely, what your conversation with them was. That’s not a reproach to you, but a lesson. You haven’t yet got that Jewish cunning, with which it’s possible to keep an entire country at bay. But you might need to have it one day. Above all, learn to speak less.
If you’re doing badly, so am I. I want to send my wife to Paris, while I go on my German tour. I’m going to be spending some 3 or 4 weeks in the Ruhrgebiet,1 and probably go to Paris once that’s done. I’m skint. I can’t get by, never mind how much I earn. Germany is making me ill. Every day I feel more hatred, and I could choke on my own contempt. Even the language is loathsome to me. A country’s provinces give it away like nothing else. The fake elegance, the loud voices, the yahoos, the silence, the respect, the impertinence. There is a sort of unfreedom in these people that is worse than the subordination in front of a sergeant major. I understand that the rest of Germany kowtows to Prussia. It has one method: to distract people from their lack of inner freedom by external impositions. The way you make your toothache better by slapping your face.
I saw Dr. Simon. We concluded a sort of truce. He admitted he was slightly afraid or wary of me. I suspect that hasn’t entirely vanished. We were somewhat reconciled. We talked about your brother.2 He made a very good impression, albeit still a “Catholic-Jesuitical” one. Simon feels a degree of suspicion of him too. Suspicion will always accompany admiration in him. I understand it very well, and let it pass, having encountered it a thousand times myself.
My dear friend, I’m becoming more and more solitary.3 More manifest in the details of life, in matters of taste, food, clothing, restaurants, and pleasures than in questions of principle or philosophy. Sometimes I catch an echo of it from Reifenberg. Even my wife is withdrawing from me, for all her love. She is normal, and I am what you’d have to call insane. She doesn’t react as I do, with vehemence, with trembling, she’s less sensitive to atmosphere, she is sensible and straightforward. Anything and everything is capable of provoking me. The conversation at another table, a look, a dress, a walk. It’s really not “normal.” I’m afraid I’m going to have to forswear society, and break off all ties. I no longer believe anything I’m told. I see through a magnifying glass. I peel the skins off people and things to see their hidden secrets — after that, you really can’t believe anything. I know, before the object of my scrutiny knows, how it will adapt, how it will evolve, what it will do next. It might change utterly. But my knowledge of it is such that it will do exactly what I think it will do. If it occurs to me that someone will do something vicious or low, he goes and does it. I am becoming dangerous to ordinary decent people because of my knowledge of them.
It makes for an atrocious life. It precludes all of love and most of friendship. My mistrust kills all warmth, as bleach kills most germs. I no longer understand the forms of human intercourse. A harmless conversation chokes me. I am incapable of speaking an innocent word. I don’t understand how people utter banalities. How they manage to sing. How they manage to play charades. If only the traditional forms still applied! But the new informality in Germany kills everything. I can’t participate. All I can do is talk very cleverly with other very clever people. I am starting to hate decency, where — as is so often the case — it’s paired with limited intelligence. The merely decent are beginning to hate me back. It can’t go on. It can’t go on.
My novel is coming along.
I got an invitation to join Döblin’s group.4 I will accept it in a noncommittal way, out of politeness. I don’t want any ties to German writers. Not one of them feels as radically as I do. Read my essay on Döblin. I think it will offend him. I can’t help it. Ask him about it sometime.
Say hello to Dr. Simon. I wrote to Guttmann yesterday.
Write me at the office. I am leaving this week. If I get enough money, I’ll look you up in Berlin. Otherwise I’ll be there in about three weeks.
Your old friend
I’m off.
1. Ruhrgebiet: the industrial sector in western Germany. From 1923 to 1925, it was under the occupation of the French, exasperated by the German nonpayment of reparations (this was during the time of the inflation). Roth wrote a series of reportages from there. See also no. 29.
2. brother: Heinrich von Brentano (1904–1964). German foreign minister from 1955 to 1961.
3. more and more solitary: cf. the dangerously detached Franz Tunda, the hero of Roth’s 1927 novel, Flight Without End, which is also the novel that is described as “coming along.”
4. group: the “Gruppe 1925,” a Marxist discussion club, whose secretary was Rudolf Walter Leonhard, and whose members included Johannes R. Becher, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Ehrenstein, Egon Erwin Kisch, Kurt Tucholsky, and Alfred Döblin. Not a natural or congenial habitat for Roth.
28. To Bernard von Brentano
[undated]
Dear friend,
thank you so much for your letter. I wish you would always write with such detail and clarity. Today I got your piece on the blown-up building. It’s not outstanding, but it is journalism. In such pieces I miss information. The number of workers, the buildings on either side, the neighborhood and its social setting.
Your visit to Frankfurt will probably encounter difficulties. I haven’t discussed it with Reifenberg yet.
Nor can I tell you whether I’m coming to Berlin or not.