That, for your information, is how things stand. Mr. Reifenberg doesn’t seem to have told you. I don’t know if he has a reason for keeping his correspondence with me secret, but I don’t think so. I am writing this to put you in the picture. In any case, my trust in this Jewish firm is shaken, and nothing remains but my friendship with Reifenberg. I know he will get old and gray before he achieves anything here, and that he himself has no idea how little he has achieved. I only hope he doesn’t have a bad awakening one of these days. He is anything but careful.
Give him my regards, tell him — which is true — that friendship has compelled me to share this with you, and try to be calmer and not so nervous and fidgety when you next write,
to your old
Roth
33. To Benno Reifenberg
9 April 1926
Dear Mr. Reifenberg,
thank you very much for your long letter, which must have been as hard for you to write as mine was for me. I am terribly cast down, I can’t answer you yet, I beg you for around 8–10 days’ grace. To leave you behind in the firm is like leaving a brother on the field. Believe me! You have no idea how much I stand to lose in both personal and career terms if I have to leave Paris.
Change the title of my piece; change the content too, if you like. I came up with the title as a nod to yours. As of and by itself it’s not very good. The article isn’t very good either, by my standards. I have just now written and mailed you a good one, about Paradise.1 I hope you print it soon — or not, after all, what does it matter?
How is your heart, and how is Jan?2 Write me a personal line or two. There is nothing so cruel as having a friend in an editorial office. The friendship of the poor! You hear the chains rattle.
Be well! Paris is warm and lovely! (Won’t you come here spontaneously?) My letter was meant personally, you understood. .
Your very old
Joseph Roth, I will call myself Moses3 from now on, just so
1. Paradise: see the feuilleton “Report from a Parisian Paradise” on the pleasures of, entre autres, calvados.
2. Jan: the Reifenbergs’ son, after whom Roth almost always asks fondly.
3. Moses: a prime expression of JR’s variable identity.
34. To Benno Reifenberg
22 April 1926
Dear Mr. Reifenberg,
I’m going to give you my answer today, and beg you to forgive me for having taken longer than I said. I am ill and in bed, my handwriting won’t be distinguished, my style not very accomplished.
Let me tell you once again that leaving you and the FZ concerns me more than taking a job at Ullstein, for example. I’ll be perfectly candid, and admit to you that I’d rather not write at all, than write for another paper.
The fact that the firm wants Mr. Sieburg in Paris — that’s not for me to comment on. But sending me packing from Paris, because Mr. Sieburg doesn’t want me there, that hurt.
Mr. Sieburg is an excellent feuilleton writer. Do I therefore have to suffer because a feuilleton writer decides to try and double up as a political correspondent? You can’t write feuilletons with half a mind or one hand tied behind your back. And it’s wrong to write feuilletons on the side. It’s a bad underestimation of the whole profession. The feuilleton is just as important to the paper as its politics — and to the reader it’s even more important. The modern newspaper is made of everything else in it before it’s made of politics. The modern newspaper needs a reporter more than it needs a leader writer. I am not an encore, not a pudding, I am the main dish. Why won’t people stop kidding themselves that a fancy-pants article on the situation in Locarno will grip readers and win subscribers. If Mr. Sieburg is to write mainly feuilletons, then I don’t see why I shouldn’t equally well have remained your Paris correspondent. I won’t be gotten rid of just because it happens to suit a colleague. It’s like a curse: how can the FZ not manage to retain two such gifted journalists as Mr. Sieburg and me.
I love this paper, I serve it, I am useful to it. No one asks my opinion when it occurs to someone to have me removed from Paris. They read me with interest. Not the parliamentary reports. Not the lead articles, not the foreign bulletins. But the firm persists in thinking of Roth as a sort of trivial chatterbox that a great newspaper can just about run to. Wrong. I don’t write “witty glosses.” I paint the portrait of the age. That ought to be the job of the great newspaper. I’m a journalist, not a reporter; I’m an author, not a leader writer.
I asked for a contract. Stenographers and telephonists get contracts — I don’t. I asked for a raise. My pay is among the lowest in the company. I submit a book. It’s turned down. Since I’ve been with the FZ it seems to me, the only respect I’ve encountered has come from rival papers. It really is an art to take someone as willing, and useful, and loyal as me, and alienate him.
Of your various suggestions: Moscow, Italy, and Spain, only Moscow is an adequate replacement for Paris, though I don’t want to rule out the others. You will understand that my reputation as a journalist is paramount to me. It will be damaged by my departure from Paris, and my replacement by Mr. Sieburg. Only a series of Russian reportages can rescue my good name.
Spain is journalistically uninteresting. Italy is interesting, Fascism less so. I take a different position on Fascism than the newspaper. I don’t like it, but I know that one Hindenburg is worse than ten Mussolinis. We in Germany should watch our Reichswehr, our Mr. Gessler, our generals, our famous compensation program to landowners. We don’t have the right to attack a Fascist dictatorship while we ourselves are living in a far worse, secret dictatorship, complete with Fememorde,1 paramilitary marches, murderous judges, and hangmen attorneys. My conscience would never allow me, as an oppressed German, to tell the world about oppression in Italy. It would be a rather facile bravery to report behind Mussolini’s back, and keep my head down in my homeland, and go on subsidizing the thugs of the Black Reichswehr with my taxes. While I mounted an attack on Fascism in my feuilleton, in the political pages they might just about risk a mild whispering against Mr. Gessler. That’s cowardice, as I see it.
I propose: Russia until winter, not just Moscow, but Kiev and Odessa as well; and in the winter Spain and Italy under some other aspect.
Manfred Georg2 is going to America for the 8 Uhr Blatt. Kisch3 is going to Russia for the BZ. I can’t be seen to do any less than them. There is so much going on in Russia, one doesn’t have to write about the Communist terror. The presence of so much new life springing up from the ruins will give me a lot of unpolitical material.
Will you please ask Mr. Schotthöfer — and my greetings to him — what I need to obtain a Russian visa. My skin disease will take another 3 weeks or so to heal. Till that time, I would like some time in which to convalesce.