30. To Benno Reifenberg
Paris, 29 March 1926
Dear friend,
at last, spring has come to France, and our meteorological soothsayer, the abbé Gabriel, is said to have predicted fine weather for Easter. Come and visit, there are plenty of things we can do! We can take the boat to Sèvres, past the irrigated fields of Asnières, and Sèvres-Ville d’Avray, where Gambetta died and Balzac lived. We can visit the grand, famous, and now verdant park at St. Cloud, more of an aristocratic wood, really, stand on the plateau from where one can look over the whole of Paris, the cheerful squirming of its chimneys, and the stately, dignified, and happy dance of its towers. Would you like to go to Versailles, Malmaison, St. Germain? Would you like to see the old cathedral of St. Denis? Wherever you go, you will find the earth drenched with history, a cultivated nature that, with proud grace, has yielded to human wishes; humane landscapes, endowed with common sense; paths that seem to know themselves where they are going; hills that seem to know their own height; valleys that can dally with you.
There will be many people too. Charabancs take inquisitive Englishmen all around the outskirts of Paris, travelers of the kind we are familiar with, who need to feel they have understood something to enjoy it, and can’t in any case enjoy it without taking a photograph of it. It might be an idea, therefore, to head out to Normandy, by way of Rouen. It’s really not far! If we’re at the St. Lazare Station at ten o’clock on Good Friday morning, we can lunch in Rouen at noon, with a view of the cathedral, the lean singing central tower of Rouen Cathedral, the old medieval city, whose bells are very powerful and very distant, and whose streets and lanes are of a bright and cheerful narrowness, of the sort one finds only in French towns.
And two hours after that, we’d find ourselves in Le Havre, the second-biggest port in France. We’d tour the old harbor together, where the little bars are: where the carousels turn, and the dance halls are packed, and where you can win — or lose — a lot of money. Then we can go on a walking tour of Normandy. People will stop and stare. Because in this country, no one goes anywhere on foot, even though the roads are as fine and smooth as parquet floors. The livestock will be grazing in the fields. Every hour, we will hear the chimes of Lisieux, Honfleur, and Pont-l’Evèque. By night, the searchlights of Le Havre stroke the dark countryside like silver hands. And always, the song of the sea.
I think we’ll go to Deauville, the very ritzy, still empty, and in any case boring spa town. From there, there’s a direct express to Paris. Four hours.
There, doesn’t that sound good to you? Come, and come soon!1
Your Joseph Roth
1. Reifenberg had this letter printed — see no. 33—in the Easter supplement of the FZ, on April 4, 1926; it is included in Report from a Parisian Paradise.
31. Benno Reifenberg to Joseph Roth
Frankfurter Zeitung, editorial
Frankfurt am Main, 7 April 1926
Dear Mr. Roth,
I have much to thank you for, Le Sourire1 and the American magazine; for your punctual Easter letter which I took personally, even though I went ahead and printed it in the newspaper; for your continuing work on the Ruhrgebiet, and the “private lives of workers”; and now for your reportage from the battlefields. I would put it to you that you change the title from “Don’t Forget the Battlefields” to: St. Quentin, Perronne, La Maisonnette.2 That gives the piece a geographical title that is a continuation of my Champagne. Hermann Wendel is writing on Verdun. In any case, I don’t think the title “Don’t Forget the Battlefields” is a great loss.
Dear Mr. Roth, I won’t have to tell you that your departure from our newspaper is the gravest blow I have experienced in the course of these early years. I was simply counting on you. I need the work of men of my generation with whom I can communicate effortlessly, with whom I share ideas that I have grown up with. I would see it as a defeat if your name were now to appear in Berlin newspapers. I have said as much to the firm, and ask that you believe me when I tell you that the firm shares my view, and is very concerned to reach a solid understanding with you. If you think the suggestion that you go to Italy was a refuge, a pis aller, then you are right inasmuch as the firm is really in a tricky position with you. When they took on Mautner, they did give you a fairly firm guarantee of Paris. Then, through the physical incapacity of Mautner, which emerged only later, it was forced to take on Dr. Sieburg. It’s not altogether that they don’t want to send Dr. Sieburg, a noted feuilletonist, as you yourself concede, together with you to Paris. But the firm wants to keep you on at the newspaper, and your name to appear in it, come what may. Given the pithy way that you write, the dateline or subject matter of your pieces is always a secondary concern. If therefore Italy does not agree with you, I have been asked to put the following proposal to you: the firm is ready to send you as a feuilleton correspondent to Moscow, and is also prepared to send you to Spain for a time. True, we have an elderly correspondent in Spain, but he writes little or nothing any more, and we have little sense of contemporary Spain. This last proposal comes from Mr. Schotthöfer. The proposal relating to Moscow may be more attractive to you. There is, admittedly, the question whether your knowledge of Russian is good enough. You personally, Schotthöfer insists, would not only experience no difficulties, you would be received with great warmth. I still cling to the idea of Italy as the best suggestion. The problem of Mussolini and Fascism is internationally acute, and it will be a question of identifying the national component of Fascism. To date, we have heard far too little from Italy.
I would like to add (and Brentano will bear me out) that Sieburg is very unhappy about the way that he and you have by force of circumstance been turned into rivals. To my mind, Sieburg is very frail, and uncertainty has made him adept. I don’t quite trust him on the surface, but I do truly believe that among the few genuine sentiments he is capable of is the desire to get along with people of your stamp.
I now must ask you to let me know your decision soon. Sieburg starts in Paris on 1 May. It would be ideal if you could keep us supplied with occasional short pieces and news stories throughout April. We are rather too insular, and have nothing about France in the newspaper. Yesterday we ran a report that 350,000 French war veterans demonstrated for Locarno, we should have been able to offer a little background on such a story.
I wish you well, and remain with warm greetings and in expectation of a speedy reply your Reifenberg
1. Le Sourire: a Paris-based humorous paper.
2. St. Quentin, Peronne, Maisonnette: see Report from a Parisian Paradise.
32. To Bernard von Brentano
8 April 1926
Dear friend,
you write me bafflingly unclear and ill-conceived letters. I worry about you. You are in a bad way, I know, Frankfurt and the firm are to blame. But you must be stronger than your surroundings at all times; remember that.
Don’t worry about a hotel or spa. There are plenty of rooms, it’s enough if you write me 4–5 days before you come, no earlier, no later. Most likely you have different standards than I do where hotels are concerned, but you can always move. There are plenty of quiet places on the map, some in Brittany come to mind, which Professor Hensard told me about. Just see that you get here!
As far as my position is concerned, you are entirely mistaken. You think I fear having Sieburg in Paris as a rival, whereas the situation is that the firm is compelling me to leave Paris. They won’t let me stay there. I informed Reifenberg of my decision to stay in Paris, and leave the paper. Now the publisher proposes Italy, Spain, or Moscow, doesn’t seem to be that shaken about my departure. I’m not keen to go to Ullstein, though I could. Stahl would like to have me. I don’t want to surrender to the firm that has treated me badly. I don’t want to turn down Moscow just like that either. I am thinking my position through very carefully.