The year was 1913. You have to realize what Berlin meant to us back then in Vienna. It was everything to us, really. For us, Berlin was crazy, debauched, metropolitan, anonymous, gargantuan, futuristic. It was literary and political and artistic (the city for painters). In short: an infernal cesspool and paradise in one. Together with a friend of mine I climbed the Glorietta Hill behind Vienna. It was nighttime. To the north, the sky was aglow. “That’s Berlin,” I said. That was where we would have to go.
Roth, one might surmise, felt somewhat similar in 1920 when he arrived, prepared, if need be, to live on cherries and sleep on park benches. Berlin, then, was where he was based until 1925, when he moved to Paris, although he remained a frequent visitor until the Nazis took power in 1933. However, only once (and only for a few months) did he and his wife have anywhere to call home; the rest of the time they stayed in hotels or with friends. This was admittedly a lifelong propensity of Roth’s, but in the case of Berlin it perhaps lends a little further chill and exposure to his views. Anyway, the city became the altar on which his spontaneous humanity, his left-leaning politics, and his belief in progress were sacrificed.
HIS STORY OF disillusion and antipathy might promise to make for dreary reading, but in fact one’s experience of these pieces is utterly unlike that. Not only is writing (and writing for immediate publication even more) a terrific discipline — Roth said the only way he understood the world at all was when he was holding a pen in his hand and had to write about it — more, the particular form, the feuilleton, in the hands of a master like Roth, seems to be a counterform. Inversion, reversal, subversiveness seem to be built into it. What is small is inevitably made to seem vast, and vast things are shrunk into a witty perspective. (Such subjects as the waxworks and the small-scale model of Solomon’s temple are obviously quintessential Roth; but no less, perhaps, is the very large department store.) “Saying true things on half a page” was his working definition of the feuilleton, nothing more restrictive than that. It seems, in Randall Jarrell’s tremendous phrase, “professionally surprising,” so much observation, mobility, and unexpectedness inhere in it.
One proceeds by indirection: not Palestine but Grenadierstrasse; not the celebration of Berlin nightlife but a melancholy, serious, and Marxist analysis of mass-produced “fun”; not the successful and much-touted American film comedy but the potency of the cheap music playing beforehand; not nostalgia but the Gleisdreieck; nowhere celebrated but the little oasis called the Schiller Park, “a park in exile”; the six-day races, yes, but also the chauffeurs freezing outside. In this form Roth identifies and liberates unlooked for qualities in Berlin and the Weimar Republic: the sadness of Ebert’s death and the unexpected decency of the mourning public; the shattering glory of technical accomplishments; the sternly unglamorous — Isherwood! — tawdriness of crooks and whores. Partly it is his position — he seems prepared to go anywhere, talk to anyone, write about anything, in the most exhilarating way — partly it is the unpredictability of the direction he will take. This, the East German poet Heinz Czechowski reminded me in his own fine selection of Roth’s occasional writing, called Orte (places), comes down to “interest,” Interesse in German, inter plus esse, being between, in the midst, in the thick of things. And that, too, is the best word for Roth, and for Roth in Berlin — curving around past people’s front rooms on the S-Bahn, talking to a czarist colonel, composing a memorial for Red Richard.
Michael Hofmann
London, December 2001
Part I. What I Saw
1. Going for a Walk (1921)
What I see, what I see. What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality. A horse, harnessed to a cab, staring with lowered head into its nose bag, not knowing that horses originally came into the world without cabs; a small boy playing with marbles on the pavement — he watches the purposeful bustle of the grownups all around him, and, himself full of the delights of idleness has no inkling that he already represents the acme of creation, but instead yearns to be grown up; a policeman who fancies himself as the still point at the center of a whirlpool of activity, and the pillar of authority — enemy to the street, and placed there to supervise it and accept its tribute in the form of good order.
I see a girl, framed in an open window, who is a part of the wall and yearns to be freed from its embrace, which is all she knows of the world. A man, pressed into the shadows of a public square, collecting bits of paper and cigarette butts. An advertising kiosk placed at the head of a street, like its epigram, with a little weathervane on it to proclaim which way the wind is blowing down that particular street. A fat man in a cream-colored jacket, smoking a cigar, he looks like a grease spot in human form on this summer’s day. A café terrace planted with colorful ladies, waiting to be plucked. White-jacketed waiters, navy blue porters, newspaper sellers, a hotel, an elevator boy, a Negro.
What I see is the old man with the tin trumpet on the Kurfürstendamm. He is a beggar whose plight draws all the more attention to itself for being inaudible. Sometimes the falsetto of the little tin trumpet is stronger and more powerful than the entire Kurfürstendamm. And the motion of a waiter on the café terrace, swishing at a fly, has more content in it than the lives of all the customers on the café terrace. The fly gets away, and the waiter is disappointed. Why so much hostility to a fly, O waiter? A war cripple who finds a nail file. Someone, a lady, has lost the nail file in the place where he happens to sit down. Of course the beggar starts filing his nails — what else is he to do? The coincidence that has left the nail file in his possession and the trifling movement of filing his nails are enough to lift him about a thousand social classes, symbolically speaking. A dog running after a ball, then stopping in front of it, static now and inanimate — unable to grasp how some stupid, brainless rubber thing only a moment ago could have been so lively and spirited — is the hero of a momentary drama. It’s only the minutiae of life that are important.
Strolling around on a May morning, what do I care about the vast issues of world history as expressed in newspaper editorials? Or even the fate of some individual, a potential tragic hero, someone who has lost his wife or come into an inheritance or cheated on his wife or in one way or another makes some lofty appeal to us? Confronted with the truly microscopic, all loftiness is hopeless, completely meaningless. The diminutive of the parts is more impressive than the monumentality of the whole. I no longer have any use for the sweeping gestures of heroes on the global stage. I’m going for a walk.
Seeing an advertising kiosk on which facts such as, for instance, Manoli cigarettes are blazoned out as if they were an ultimatum or a memento mori, I completely lose my patience. An ultimatum is just as inconsequential as a cigarette, because it’s expressed in exactly the same way. Whatever is heralded or touted can only be of little weight or consequence. And it seems to me there is nothing these days that is not heralded. Therein lies its greatness. Typography, to us, has become the arbiter of perspective and value. The most important, the less important, and the unimportant only appear to be important, less important, unimportant. It’s their image that tells us their worth, not their being. The event of the week is whatever — in print, in gesture, in sweeping arm movements — has been declared the event of the week. Nothing is, everything claims to be. But in the face of the sunshine that spreads ruthlessly over walls, streets, railway tracks, beams in at the window, beams out of windows in myriad reflections, anything puffed up and inessential can have no being. In the end (led astray as I am by print, by the presence of typography as an adjudicator of value) I come to believe that everything we take seriously — the ultimatum, the Manoli cigarettes — is unimportant.