That’s what I propose. I hope the company won’t need to think twice, this time. I’d like a speedy answer.
With best wishes I remain
Your old
Joseph Roth
1. Fememorde: “Vehmic murderers”—an anthropological label from the Dark Ages for these political killings that appear in a list of shameful manifestations in the Weimar Republic.
2. Manfred Georg (1893–1965), journalist and writer. Left Germany in 1933 for Prague, then 1938 to New York, where he founded and edited the German-language progressive Jewish weekly Der Aufbau.
3. Kisch: Egon Erwin Kisch (1885–1948), the so-called rasender Reporter (roving or racing or raving reporter), one of the most prominent journalists of the time, and possessor of a suitably adventurous life.
35. To Benno Reifenberg
Café de la Régence
Paris, 29 April 1926
Dear Mr. Reifenberg,
thank you for your letter, and your kind words on my “Paradise.”1 Entirely undeserved. There was so much more that might have been said, and my feuilleton covers only a small part of Paradise. Tomorrow, I’ll send you a couple of book reviews, and in the coming days a feuilleton on the preacher Samson.
I will answer your official letter tomorrow, officially, and for the firm. I have a few counterproposals, details that might mitigate my defeat, our defeat, if the company agrees to them. Thank Picard.2 I’m going to see him tomorrow. It’s too bad I can’t go to Ullstein for 1,500 a month, and write for Monty Jacobs3 instead of Benno Reifenberg. I would have to close my eyes and think of journalism, or else write for the Frankfurter Generalanzeiger. Even that is better than Ullstein. Plus I’ve suddenly come down with something “very nasty,” a serious skin condition. For a while it looked “like syphilis,” the blood test hasn’t been done yet. I am completely covered with red boils, I can only go out after dark, can’t shake hands, I’m completely slathered with sulfur, and stink to match. You wouldn’t so much as spit at me, in spite of being my friend, because in addition to being good and distinguished, you are sensitive. This illness lasts for 4–5 weeks apparently, or it may do, dermatology is learning from me, and claims it is an illness associated with hair loss, and — in me, imagine — the END OF PUBERTY! It’s God’s revenge, praise be to Jehovah. I already have a mattress grave, and must leave Paris. Please will you see that I get paid, it’s the end of the month already. My money for May. I’m writing a separate letter to the firm and to Mr. Nassauer. Regards to him! Is he better? Why does the firm ignore my appeals if it cares what happens to me?. .
I am miserable, industrious, poor, and abandoned. It’s a cold spring this year. I’m itching all over. I have to stay up and work at night to keep from scratching myself, and in the day I’m wretched. The doctor tells me it may start to improve tomorrow. I’ll be relieved once my extremities are in the clear again. At least it’s not infectious. I’m proud of that.
Who is Professor Salomon4 from Frankfurt? He’s been in Paris, telling everyone (telling Valeska Gert)5 that I have the most modern style of any journalist around.
This letter will — I know — make you disgusted with me, but you should fight the feeling, that’s what friendship is. Of the two of us, things are easier for me, because you are certainly a finer, handsomer — what a comparative — human being than your wretched old Moses Joseph Roth
I thought Kracauer’s umbrella piece was delightful up until the last 2 paragraphs. The style of the evening edition is still not right: too small.
1. This is the feuilleton “Report from a Parisian Paradise.” It is interesting that JR wrote it as he did, under threat of imminent dismissal.
2. Picard: Max Picard (1888–1965), doctor and cultural philosopher.
3. Monty Jacobs (1875–1945), editor of the feuilleton section of the Vossische Zeitung from 1910 to 1934, when he went into exile in London.
4. Professor Gottfried Salomon (1892–1964) was a sociologist at the University of Frankfurt.
5. Valeska Gert (1892–1978) was a “grotesque dancer.”
36. To the Frankfurter Zeitung
Paris, 2 June 1926
Dear Sirs,
I hear that you of your kindness are deliberating as to where I should send my next dispatches from, and are tending to favor America against Russia. I don’t think you are seriously afraid that I might convert to Bolshevism, but your line of thinking may be that the so-called New World would be inappropriate to my habitually satirical mode, and that I would be condemned either to supply optimistic reports in an access of youthful enthusiasm, or to clam up entirely.
I am grateful to be the subject of so much consideration. However, I would be sorry if you concluded that my specific gifts would incline me to ironize Western institutions, customs, and habits, following the doubtful successes of the Russian revolution.
On the contrary: I am (perhaps unfortunately) wholly incapable of allowing any enthusiasm in me more space than my skepticism. I ask that you not infer from this “negative attitude” that I would substitute the deficiencies of one world view for those of another. I don’t believe in the perfection of bourgeois democracy, but I don’t doubt for a second the narrowness of a proletarian dictatorship. On the contrary, I believe in the terrible existence of a sort of “petty working class” if you’ll allow the phrase, a species that would be still less inclined to allow me the freedom I require than its bourgeois cousins.
I am carrying none of the ideological baggage of the sort that most literary visitors to Russia have carried with them in the last few years. Unlike them, as a consequence of my birth and my knowledge of the country, I am immunized to what goes by “Russian mysticism” or “the great Russian soul,” and the like. I am too well aware — as western Europeans are apt to forget — that the Russians were not invented by Dostoyevsky. I am quite unsentimental about the country, and about the Soviet project.
On this occasion let me admit — not to burden you with a full-blown confession — that my relationship to Catholicism and the Church is not at all as one might imagine, on the basis of a fleeting knowledge of my person, my essays, and even my books. That fact alone guarantees a certain distance, when it comes to things in Russia. Things that, incidentally, concern us more nearly than things in America. I get the impression that a certain useful calm has set in there, useful in the sense that people may finally be coming to terms with the recent past. I get a sense of things being about to change therefore in Russia, while America in a year’s time will still be America, if not more so.
Since I report on actual conditions, depicting daily life rather than expressing opinions, the danger that I might be unable to send objective reports from Russia is not very great. Even in countries without censorship, my criticism was more to be found between the lines than on the surface of my pieces.
I will be greatly obliged to you if you were to see these depositions as a basis on which to make your decision.
Yours respectfully
Joseph Roth
37. To Benno Reifenberg
30 August 1926
Dear Mr. Reifenberg,
I am writing to you from the deck of a mail steamer on the Volga. I plan to stop in Astrakhan for a couple of days. I hope this finds you back in Frankfurt, having enjoyed your vacation. I shall be sending my first pieces to the paper from here, and would like you to read them as they come in. I know you won’t read them after others have. I have been unable to write anything till now. I was overwhelmed, famished, continually shaking. It’s taken me two months. If one were to set foot on a different star, things couldn’t be more different or more strange.