Joseph Roth - On the End of the World

When Joseph Roth stepped off the train in Paris on 30th January 1933, having symbolically departed Berlin at the exact moment Hitler assumed power, he could presumably not have known that he was entering the city which would shelter him for the next six years and where, even beyond a miserable death following depression, alcoholism, physical debilitation and penury, he would remain in perpetuity. Or then again perhaps he did perceive something of this. For Roth had always been drawn to la douce France ever since his travels to the Midi and Paris in the twenties, captured so eloquently and movingly in a series of articles, or reportage, gathered under the title The White Cities. To Roth, Paris was the commanding crucible responsible for this ripple effect of desirous landscapes, a veritable paradise on earth, and his rapture on arrival echoes that of a series of other Mitteleuropa exiles who wound up there during that intellectually febrile period. In May 1925, Roth stood in Paris for the first time and penned the following lines to his friend Reifenberg, editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung. I feel compelled to inform you in person that Paris is the capital of the world and that you must come here. No one who hasnt been here can claim to be more than half human or any sort of European. It is free, open, intellectual in the best sense and ironic in its magnificent pathos.

Roth would never return to Germany, now the lair of the beast, and would make only fleeting appearances in Austria before the hatch of the Anschluss came down in 1938 and darkness prevailed. The remainder of his time in these years would be spent either in Paris or on various extended sojourns to the Low Countries, primarily Holland where his only publishing life lines, the houses Allert de Lange, Querido and, latterly, De Gemeenschap, were located. In fact Roth spent extended periods in Amsterdam and later in Brussels, where, like many a literary exile before him, he found life cheaper and less mentally devouring than Paris. Its odd then that articles on Roth in the English language often fail to mention these countries, as if there were a Belgian black hole, if not a Dutch one. It is commonly assumed that the years between his leaving Germany in 1933 and his death in Paris on 27th May 1939 were purely Parisian, where his extended residence at the venerable Htel Foyot off the Luxembourg Gardens and his table at the Caf Tournon opposite have become the stuff of legend.

Yet observing the chronology of Roth in these years, we see that, like his close friend and virtual patron Stefan Zweig, himself exiled from Salzburg to London, he was ever on the move, whether for brokering publishing contracts abroad, seeking a new environment in which to complete a work, or merely taking up invitations from exiled friends. Famously, in the summer of 1936, Roth travels to Ostend, the prestigious Queen of the northern resorts, on the invitation of a holidaying Zweig and his circle. A telling picture exists of this reunion. At a caf table showing empty glasses, the tall, dapper Zweig appears relaxed, leaning in protectively towards Roth, who in contrast seems small, pressed hard up against the table and exuding a grouchy air, like a defeated gambler waiting for his next futile hand. Unlike Zweig, who was financially secure, Roth was perennially on his beam-ends and usually had to borrow the money for his travel costs and even his meals and clothing. But whatever the current postulations from the respective Zweig and Roth camps, it cannot be doubted that, for Roth, Zweig proved a crucial mainstay in terms of financial underpinning, mutually valued fraternal kinship, tactful counsel and as chief mediator in his undying quest for publishing opportunities outside Germany. These two close friends, whose powerful relationship has recently been dissected as never before, trod a deeply felt but sometimes uncomfortable path due to Roths compulsively, prickly well intentioned criticism of Zweigs writings and the mutual exasperation of two friends of the same vocation and Jewish faith, pinioned by fate at the same point in history, yet with striking contrasts in their situations. For example after meeting his publisher in Amsterdam in autumn 1938, Roth only manages to make it back to Paris by borrowing money for the train ticket from his hotel. Again and again he is obliged to resort to Zweig for handouts. This living on the edge progressively worsened during the 1930s since the regular income Roth received from prestigious German newspapers, in which his articles once appeared, had long vanished. Not only this but his German readership and publishing framework had disintegrated with the arrival of the Nazis, his hitherto published works were among the first to be seized and reduced to ashes in the book burning purges of 1933.

To make matters worse, Roths wife Friederike Reichler had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and was incarcerated in the Steinhof mental institution in Vienna. This constituted an added burden emotionally, financially and morally. His natural sense of responsibility to his wifes welfare and the eventual outcome of her situation could now only be met at a distance. In the end the Nazis resolved this situation, in their customary fashion, just a year after Roths own demise. So, for Roth, a deep repugnance for Hitler and his regime and mounting despair at its dread evolution was exacerbated and, in a sense, distilled into the need for writerly response by this ongoing slew of personal demands and burdens which had sunk their claws deep and hung from him like so many predators weakening and eventually bringing down their prey through sheer exhaustion. Roth was only too aware that the Nazis and their sprawling nihilistic apparatus, the preposterous theatricality yet terrifying reality of their deaths head cult, had fatally compromised the infrastructure of his life.

However, Roth was still alive and out of the madhouse that Germany now was and he could still write, he could still articulate his feelings for his tormentors who like slaughtermen had merely tossed the soul of his cherished Austria onto the pyre,

Roth continued to produce novels and seek their publication, even though his publishing prospects were precarious and ever in danger of being snuffed out altogether. He yearned to be translated into other languages and secure untapped readerships as Zweig had done, but Roth lacked the feting of a country such as Brazil or any other land of the future and was resigned to parleying with a clutch of Dutch publishers who had become increasingly exasperated with his idiosyncratic behaviour. I am known only in the Dutch language! he complained bitterly to Zweig. Alongside the novels, Roth wrote articles about the situation in Germany and Austria, both in an attempt to warn and inform those peoples and countries he viewed as next in line for Hitlers special treatment, to expose the hypocrisy and narrowly focused, blinkered positions of those who thought they had the measure of the man from Braunau, and most of all to let rip and assuage his own pent-up fury and outrage at the loss of his European domain. These articles were regularly published in a handful of German language papers that served the exiled community, principally the Pariser Tageszeitung and Das Neue-Tagebuch.

Roth realised the danger of Hitlers dark theatre early, and his name appears in a work dating from 1923. For this reason I chose to include the first article in this collection The Dream of a Carnival Night, published in 1924, a decade before Roths exile, in the wake of Hitlers show trial for the 1923 Putsch. This serious though quirky and enjoyable assault sets the standard for the even more bristling articles to come, a decade later. From the outset Roth is witness to the hazardous folly and farce that characterizes both the Nazi mentality and their duped victims, the general public. Roth simply states I deny the reality of Hitlers trial and then proceeds to dismantle the whole absurd theatrical indulgence. For Roth the Hitler trial is unreality, a grotesque dream, a ship of fools crewed by corpse-like mannequins. The speeches are uttered by ghosts and the court sketchers are kept busy drawing the deceased.