I remain, with best wishes, your humble servant
Joseph Roth
1. Herbert Ihering (1888–1977), theater critic with the Berliner Börsen Courier, and famously an early supporter of the plays of Bertolt Brecht; later on worked at the Burgtheater in Vienna during the Third Reich, and was a theater critic again in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) after 1945. This letter is an early instance of Roth’s rhetorical power — which sometimes becomes ferocity — and his fearlessness when confronting others in authority.
2. Not the British Broadcasting Corporation, but the Berliner Börsen Courier.
3. Faktor: Dr. Emil Faktor (born in 1876 in Prague, gassed after 1941 in Lodz), feuilleton editor of the Berliner Börsen Courier, deposed under Hitler, left for Czechoslovakia in 1933.
11. Friederike Roth to Paula Grübel
Berlin, 14 July 1924
in the next few days, we are going to go to Prague and then on to Krakow. Please, will you tell me what the prices are like in Poland now, and how well we can live on rentenmarks.1
Perhaps it would even be possible for you to make a side trip to Krakow yourself? Certainly, we would like that.
Please write straightaway, because we’re only waiting for an address from you before leaving.
Then we may all go to France together in August.
Please give Frau Szajnocha our best regards, from both of us — I’ll send off a copy of Hotel Savoy2 this week.
Fräulein Idelsohn has been here. How are your parents doing?
Please congratulate Wittlin3 from us both.
Kisses from
Friedl and Muh.
1. The rentenmark was introduced in November 1923 in an effort to stabilize the German currency in the wake of runaway inflation. One rentenmark became equivalent to one trillion marks.
2. Hotel Savoy: Roth’s second novel — though the first to appear between covers — came out in 1924 from the respected Berlin firm Die Schmiede, publishers of Kafka and Proust. They went on to publish Rebellion and The Wandering Jews.
3. Jozef Wittlin married in 1924.
12. To Paula Grübel
[Berlin, 15 July 1924]
Dear Paula,
Friedl wrote you yesterday. But knowing how unreliable you are, I will repeat both her content, and her instruction to write back ASAP. I am going to Poland for work. What is the level of the Polish mark? I have 800 German marks. Can you work out the exchange? Can I live off it for 3 days in Krakow? Can you meet me there? I can barely stammer a word of Polish any more. Inform Frau von Szajnocha, Wittlin, Mayer! Then I will travel to Austria with you, and perhaps even farther afield, depending on money. Am bringing books. Looking forward very much to clapping eyes and ears on you again.
Warmest best regards ALL ROUND.
Your Mu
13. To Erich Lichtenstein
Berlin, 22 January 1925
Dear Dr. Lichtenstein,1
I am writing to you on the instructions of Dr. Max Krell.2 I seem to recall writing to you once before. By mid-February I shall have completed a novel. However, I am contractually tied to the “Schmiede.”3 I will admit to you quite openly, though with a plea for discretion, that I am not satisfied with either the promotion, the payment, or the appearance of the books. Nor do I think the Schmiede will be overjoyed to learn of my new terms. So it might very well come about that you and I will have business with one another.
At the same time, I would like to write books other than novels, books that are not covered by my contract with the Schmiede. For instance, I have long toyed with a plan to write a book of cheeky and irreverent dialogs on (in the broadest sense) “questions of the day.” I can imagine the book appearing under the title “Alfred and Edward,” or something of the sort.
I am told you are sometimes to be found in Berlin. I will be here until March, and thereafter in Paris. If you are ever in the city, I should like to be informed. In any case, I should be grateful for the kindness of an acknowledgment.
Yours sincerely,
Joseph Roth
N 35, Potsdamerstrasse 115 a. c/o Tome
1. Lichtenstein: Dr. Erich Lichtenstein (1888–1967), reviewer, publicist, and publisher. This letter is an early instance of Roth’s simoniac tendencies as an author, his self-given right to agitate, to inveigh, to two-time, and ultimately to desert publishers. (NB, such behavior on his part comfortably antedated exile and Third Reich.)
2. Max Krell worked as an editor for another publisher, the Propyläen Verlag.
3. The unfortunate “Schmiede” was where Roth’s books for a time appeared. Roth’s swagger is hard to take, and hard to like.
PART III. 1925–1933: Paris, Points South and East, Disappointment, Tragedy, and Triumph
JOSEPH ROTH WITH THE TRADEMARK NEWSPAPER
France — the Midi, Paris, Marseille — marks nothing less than the appearance of grace in Roth’s life. (And for once, not — his phrase — the “grace of unhappiness.”) Something unlooked for, undreamed of, or perhaps only dreamed of, something exceeding any human measure of reason or cognition. It is one of those classic collisions between the highly intelligent and almost post-mature but somehow starved observer and the Abundant Place: other instances that come to mind involve poets: Osip Mandelstam in Georgia, and Elizabeth Bishop in Brazil. Roth for once flaps at the limits of sense — which, as witness the reproving letters to his friend and protégé Bernard von Brentano (or later to Stefan Zweig), is something he hates to do, he disdains anything incoherent, stuttering, pompous, blathering. “I feel driven to inform you personally that Paris is the capital of the world, and that you must come here,” he writes in no. 14 to his boss-cum-friend Benno Reifenberg, “Paris is Catholic in the most urbane sense of the word, but it’s also a European expression of universal Judaism.” (Reifenberg got it, and later got to be the paper’s Paris correspondent himself.) Roth’s delirium, cooled and formed, is still palpable in the beautiful series of pieces he gave the Frankfurter Zeitung (they ran between 8 September and 4 November 1925), called Im mittäglichen Frankreich, “In the French Midi,” and a projected — and sadly, rejected — book version to be called “The White Cities.” I found the white cities just as they were in my dreams,” he writes in the title piece, ending with a landscape of Matisse-like strength, serenity, and loveliness:
The sun is young and strong, the sky is lofty and deep blue, the trees dark green, ancient, and pensive. And broad white roads that have been drinking in and reflecting the sun for hundreds of years, lead to the white cities with flat roofs, which are as they are to prove that even elevation can be harmless and benign, and that you never, ever fall into the black depths.
In a life full of calamities — his father’s madness before he was even born, Friedl’s schizophrenia, the end of the Dual Monarchy, Hitler’s coming to power — the loss of the Paris correspondent’s job for the Frankfurter Zeitung seems perhaps the most gratuitously wounding of all. It is too tantalizing to imagine Roth’s life with — in the full, officially possessing sense of the word — Paris. Perhaps his critical, oppositional spirit would have asserted itself sooner or later anyway; the novelist would have shouldered his way out past the journalist. But as it was, the Frankfurter gave, and the Frankfurter took away: for Roth, the flat roofs of the white cities were to have hurtful and malign black depths below them after all. In its unwisdom (and in the financial and organizational and political nervousness and turmoil of the twenties), this Jewish-liberal institution made the Nationalist — and later Nazi — Friedrich Sieburg its Paris correspondent, reasoning that Sieburg could do reporting as well as feuilleton. Roth in 1934 made a sour little joke about Sieburg’s busily seeking God in France (it’s an expression meaning something like “high on the hog”), while the Germans had happily found Wotan at home in Germany — but his feelings toward the man were not amusing or benign. Roth — hardly nature’s idea of a docile employee anyway — never subsequently trusted the paper, but then you could argue that he had probably never previously trusted it either. In any case, who could blame him? He remained based in Paris, half out of protest, but demoted, casualized, cantankerous, and impatient to be done with newspapers.