It was very funny to read about your brother Hans. You nailed him in your article. I think of you calmly watching him, you must have been writing the piece in your head already. What material! I’m envious of both material and execution. It’s an excellent piece in literary terms, almost a reportage, I can see you growing out of literature and becoming a proper journalist, and then Maryla will no longer be able to say “a smart journalist!”—How is she? Give her my regards! And your mother-in-law. You don’t say anything about her, or JAN. I asked specially. What’s Jan up to? How is he? Will he still recognize me? Or is he growing up too fast?
As I am myself. I won’t stay as long as I thought I would. The money hurts. I would like to save it all, and spend all of it instead. I’m going to ask for damages for all the torments of this exotic journey in the Caucasus, on mule, bus, bumpy carts, for seasickness, mountain paths, Ararat — Leopold Weiss2 rides on camelback and has his wife and child with him, and I’m dreaming of a room at the Frankfurter Hof. Oh, for running water! Hot and cold, telephone, ten bells, three lights, bathroom ensuite, fleecy towels, cars, white napkins. Hausenstein3 asks whether there might be interest in Russia for his work on Rembrandt. I can’t give him an answer at the moment, tell him it’ll be another decade before they acquire an interest in Rembrandt. How little we know about Russia. Everything we say about it is mistaken. I read Lenin and Victor Hugo alternately, political authors both, chance purchases, cheap, secondhand editions. Perhaps it shows in my articles. Lenin is a great dialectical brain, Victor Hugo a great dialectical heart, and he writes a better style. I long for Paris, I have never given up on it, ever, I am a Frenchman from the East, a Humanist, a rationalist with religion, a Catholic with a Jewish intelligence, an actual revolutionary. What an oddity! (Please excuse this outburst!)
What’s Dr. Simon up to? At this distance, he seems even stranger to me than he does in Germany. He is very much a Westerner, I think, the farther east I go, the farther west he seems to recede in my mind. The last time I saw him was in Paris, six months ago — five months — an eternity. Time is little, space is everything! I took his wife to Moulineux. How far Moulineux is from Russia. .
1. Bäderblatt: literally the “bath” or “spa” paper. A low-brow, commercial supplement that features repeatedly in Roth’s nightmares.
2. Weiss: Leopold Weiss (1900–1992), the FZ’s special correspondent in the 1920s. He converted to Islam ca. 1926.
3. Hausenstein: Wilhelm Hausenstein (1882–1957), art critic and essayist, worked for the FZ from 1917 to 1943. Later was the German ambassador in Paris.
40. To Bernard von Brentano
18 October 1926, Moscow
Dear friend,
I am back in Moscow, here for another two weeks, an airmail letter would reach me in time. In the German embassy I got an old letter of yours, with enclosure. Thank you for the feuilleton, it’s good, in places very good, but unjournalistic, by which I mean it didn’t have to be written. Journalism has little tolerance for an indirect form, i.e., the disguising of an observation or an event. Your letter attests to your needless nervousness. What you think about me is mistaken, what you think about my wife is triply mistaken. She doesn’t dislike you. At the same time as yours, I got a letter from her where she wrote about the moving way you were waiting for my articles. (I quote: “B. is incredibly moving, the way he waits for your articles.”)
It’s been a while since I felt completely well. I think I’ll leave Russia earlier than planned.
I hope you’re well.
I shake your hand. Write soon
to your Joseph Roth
41. To Benno Reifenberg
[October 1926?]
Dear Mr. Reifenberg,
unfortunately I’ve mislaid the original of my article on petroleum. I want to ask you for certain reasons to cut the sentence where I refer to workers of the Krupp dependencies. If there’s a lacuna, fill it. Please. The piece can come out after the one about the Jews, after or before, it doesn’t matter: The Street.
For some weeks now, I’ve heard nothing from my friends. Even Brentano, to whom I wrote an incredibly cordial letter, won’t answer me. I’d be sorry if things had gotten to that pass. I pride myself on not being wrong about people. Anything but that.
At this distance, everyone seems transformed anyway, all the Western men and Fräulein Weber as the prototypical Western woman. Only you remain tall and handsome, and Kracauer small and miserable. Dr. Simon, Geck, Diebold, Nassauer, Dr. Guttmann, and Rudolf Guthmann1 look like mirror images to me, they loom out of the mercury. I see a framed Geisenheyner on a desk, resting his hand on the back of an armchair, Dr. Lothar is in the corridor, I can see him on the other side of the glazed door, he has lost weight, and is looking sporty in tennis shorts. For some reason, Max Beckmann2 is often in my thoughts. His legs are stretched out in front of him as though he were sitting down, but he’s standing up. I am going slightly potty, have vivid dreams, am living in tremendous isolation, in a state of not-hearing. Snow falls and melts, the wind blows, my feet are always wet, I’ve ordered a second pair of boots and will need a new wardrobe. I now have the ability to sit somewhere for two hours, and look at all the people, near and far, I wind them up, and they process past me, part of some mechanical toy. My wife is coming ever nearer, writing me strange love letters: lots of grumpy, dissatisfied, almost angry reviews of my articles. Perhaps she means me and doesn’t know it. I must have become very sentimental. Hausentein is always turning his back on me. That offends me. You are closer to me as well, but generally chilly. Still a little objectivity. I am always on the point of giving in to you, but hesitate — a fox who’s read Plato, the older Brentano put it. You have your hand extended but won’t give it to me, your big hand. There’s tension now between you and Kracauer. He is angry with me at some level. Because I’m in Russia. Cheers!
I’m working on a novel. I work very hard on my articles, writing them slowly and entirely subjectively. Each one takes me 3–4 days. Some I’ve torn up.
My isolation is enormous, unendurable. I need a letter now and again. People, people, all day long, politicians, journalists. No women. Hence the isolation. Nothing but men is like a desert full of sand. Lots of unimportant men. I’ve just been with Scheffer, the BT’s man in Moscow. A clever fellow, but something I don’t quite like about him. He’s too evangelical. He is married: a very nice, distinguished, no longer young Russian woman. She took him because her German isn’t good enough to work him out. He took her because he knows next to no Russian, and sees her as something entirely different from what she is. And so they sleep together. How is it possible? I keep meeting foreign journalists and diplomats there. All banal! I get a lot of invitations. Don’t speak a lot of Russian, but what I do say has a Slav accent, which makes me a miracle man. I’m getting vain in my old age. Tomorrow I’m going to visit a lady from the Old World, who has turned Communist. All sorts of people turn up there, and I’m very curious.
Presumably the party season is getting going in Germany. Do you remember the time when you, Kracauer, and I went to the Christmas market together? And you went to the watchmaker?3 There is something terribly affecting about Germany when everyone goes soft, and the Jews decorate Christmas trees, and the theaters put on Christmas pantomimes.