JOSEPH ROTH WAS a newspaperman all his life. Of the two dozen or so photographs that exist of him, a surprising number show him holding a newspaper or reading one. He was a lifelong reader, writer, thinker, and apologist for the press, of almost whatever stripe. “But these newspapers find only vendors,” he writes of enemy — nationalist — newspapers in “Election Campaign in Berlin.” “I am their only buyer.” In a sardonic note from his early days as a journalist in Berlin, he described himself as probably the only staffer who went out on the street after his shift, to hawk the paper! When he was a star writer for the Frankfurter Zeitung, earning one deutsche mark per line (he never sold himself short!), he still thought of himself as an “orchestra member.” It was — not coincidentally — one of the great periods of German journalism. Even a selection like the present one, which can hardly have intended anything of the kind, seems to be full of references to newspapers — often aesthetic ones, on the effects of certain type designs and sizes. The note of anguish at the unceasing round of editions in Berlin in the “Kurfürstendamm” piece sounds utterly real to me; Roth had an advanced newspaper dependency, in several senses. In his life, he wrote hundreds and hundreds of articles for dozens of different papers. It was necessity and survival, but it was also more. No one who didn’t believe in the trade as a vocation could have been so consumed by it, or would have written as he did in 1926, in his peppery letter style, to his Frankfurter editor, Benno Reifenberg:
It’s not possible to write feuilletons with your left hand, and one shouldn’t allow oneself to write them on the side. That’s a serious slight to the whole form. The feuilleton is as important as politics are to the newspaper, and to the reader it’s vastly more important. The modern newspaper is formed by everything but politics. The modern newspaper needs reporters more than it needs editorial writers. I’m not a garnish, not a dessert, I’m the main course. . What people pick up the newspaper for is me. Not the parliamentary report. Not the lead article. Not the foreign news. And yet, in the editorial offices, they go around thinking of Roth as a sort of eccentric chatterbox that they can just about afford as they’re such a great newspaper. They are so mistaken. I don’t write “witty columns.” I paint the portrait of the age. That’s what great newspapers are there for. I’m not a reporter, I’m a journalist; I’m not an editorial writer, I’m a poet.
Roth was a maximalist of the short form. Even at the very end, in exile in Paris, he was still contributing to émigré newspapers, in which he was read by colleagues and by a few handfuls of like-minded readers. It is a partial, and an interested, but to my mind a perfectly respectable opinion (held to by some readers and critics at the time) that Roth’s masterpieces were not his novels but his feuilletons, in much the same way, say, that the American poet Randall Jarrell was said, by Helen Vendler and others, to have used his talent in his poems and his genius in his book reviews.
How he began is a little more mysterious. It is possible that he worked for the army newspaper in his time with the Austrian military, from 1916 to 1918. When he returned from the war in 1919, aged twenty-five, with nothing to his name but an unfinished degree, a few published poems and short stories, and his army experience — whatever it was — he settled into journalism as if to the manner born. His undated short story “Rare and ever rarer in this world of empirical facts. .,” with its ironic account of a demobilized and disoriented officer falling effortlessly into a rather inadequate career in journalism, may be a jocular reflection of what happened to Roth himself. Another, this time more swaggering, account is in his rightly celebrated letter to his publisher, Gustav Kiepenheuer, on the occasion of the latter’s fiftieth birthday, on June 10, 1930, in which Roth remarks: “[Till I reached] Vienna, where, because I was broke, I started writing for the papers. They published my nonsense. It made me a living. I became a writer.” In 1919 Roth wrote a hundred pieces for the newly founded Viennese paper Der Neue Tag. When it folded in April 1920, he moved to Berlin — home at the time to a dozen daily newspapers, and with a calmer rate of inflation than Austria’s — and his production continued practically uninterrupted, for the Neue Berliner Zeitung—12-Uhr-Blatt, the Berliner Tageblatt, the Berliner Börsen-Courier, and others. And when in January 1923, newly married, he was signed up by the Frankfurter Zeitung, and with his first novel on the way, Roth had reached the peak of personal and professional contentment.
IT IS A SIMPLIFICATION, but not much of one, to say that Roth hated Berlin but permitted it to exercise him. Its inorganic history, its manic growth spurts, its indifferent aesthetics, its centralized pomp, its sporadic veneer of modernity, its human coldness, its callous officialdom—“Berlin is freezing,” he said, “even when it’s sixty degrees”—all variously appalled him, coming from Vienna and before that from Galicia. It is not surprising that the perspectives he seeks out are those of the unfortunates, the people who fall between the cracks, the immigrants, the Jews, the released lifer (a perspective taken up again in his novel Rebellion), the homeless living, and the nameless dead. And, conversely, that those that appall him are those of organized Berlin, as a center of fun, of transport, of government, of nightlife and literary life, and of sports. His natural sympathies were always with the outcast and the underdog, and Berlin gave him plenty.
Berlin is the metropolis as villain. It was always a sort of Moloch — Potsdamer Platz was the busiest square in Europe in 1914—and, then as now, a kind of ungovernable building site. A sort of moral ugliness and chaos seem to set it apart even from other negatively portrayed cities of the time as Paris (in Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and later dubbed “manic depressive capital of the world” by Henry Miller), as New York (in Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep), as London (in Conrad’s The Secret Agent), and as Oslo (in Hamsun’s Hunger). “Who in all the world goes to Berlin voluntarily?” Roth asks in The Wandering Jews. Berlin is where people are forced to come, and then — like Geza Fürst in “Refugees from the East”—unhappily get stuck. The genetic code of its sprawl is simply abhorrent. This is not the conventional view of Berlin, which sees its size and roughness and celebrates them. That view is the one expressed by Hans Flesch von Brünningen, which was posted on the wall of an exhibition around Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s painting of Potsdamer Platz: gleeful awe, a presentiment of thrills, delirious hyperbole, a quivering response to an electromagnet of sin and careerism: