Joseph Roth was a literary maverick; an outsider, rootless and restless, the definitive witness to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Dead at 44, Roth had watched as the central European world he knew fell apart and turned upside down. No one could match the Austrian-Jewish journalist and novelist’s gift for observing the smallest gesture or the mood of the moment.
Roth was shrewd and astute. Yet if there is a single quality that explains his genius, it is his refined fury. This is evident in his novels but particularly in his virtuoso journalism. Unlucky in life, he has been most fortunate in death in having a translator who has championed his work (some 14 books to date) and who understands its prevailing sorrow.
Poet Michael Hofmann most brilliantly conveys the fury that makes Roth special. This wonderful collection of 64 pieces, or feuilletons – vivid snapshots rich in human insight complete with date of publication – testify to Roth's objective of "saying true things on half a page". But he could do better than that: he told truths in a sentence and his observations linger.
Roth the journalist was hot property. Newspaper editors put up with the crazy sideshow of his struggle with alcohol and basic existence, his poverty, his personal chaos and his petulance because, quite simply, no one was as good at what he did.
Readers of the outstanding collections What I Saw – Reports from Berlin 1920-33 (published in Amsterdam in 1996 before appearing in Hofmann's English translation in 2003) and The White Cities – Reports from France 1925-1939 (1990/2004) will know what to expect: more gold dust. Roth's tone is candid and always logical, rarely shocked.
Vintage study
There is a vintage study on industrial smoke and also his views on secrecy in Albania. Neither bitter nor censorious, Roth is always, for all his irony and directness, humane as he writes touchingly of a drug-addicted prostitute he watches in court:
“Rose Gentschow has the beguiling expression of the incurable vice girl. It comes from the faraway sins of dreams. . . . Rose Gentschow has remained slender and light. She has never known the everyday worries of the middle class that make one fat and heavy. She lives in consuming passion. But also in consuming poverty. Sometimes she has to earn money to buy her beloved morphine. . . . On no fewer than fifteen occasions she has tried to escape her fate. . . . She cries a lot. She tries to hide her face. Then she dries eyes and tears with a fist. The childish movement is charming. Little girls dry their tears with their fists.”
Reportage as art
Roth saw reportage as an art and, in his hands, it was. Born to Jewish parents in 1894 in Brody, Galicia (then on the extreme edges of the sprawling Hapsburg Empire, now in the Ukraine), Roth never saw his father. Raised by his mother and her family, he was a clever boy who eventually ended up at the University of Vienna. He did serve in the Austro-Hungarian army in some capacity, possibly not as a front-line soldier, and it marked him.
Roth’s vision was shaped by lamentation, an awareness of loss so powerful that he engages readers with a vice-like grip tempered by poetic imagery.
The Hotel Years says it all: Roth lived in hotels scattered about a battered Europe, and he nurtured a peculiar affinity for these theatres of daily experience. For him, they were home, his only sanctuary in the quest for a vanished homeland, the empire, that once defeated was gone forever. The hotel lobby, be it grand or modest, was a stage populated by extraordinary individuals – the staff.
In The Old Waiter (1929), he writes that the man is so old "that he is known all over the hotel as "the old man" . . . and he himself probably only intermittently recollects his name, which has fallen into disuse over many years." The piece describes a man so ancient that he barely moves: "every day his walk has grown a little slower – till at the end of forty years finally it has becomes a glacial shuffle."
As he moved about from city to city, from Berlin to Vienna to Prague to Paris, Roth assembled a number of boltholes where he was known, and where he had his rituals. His soap at whatever sink he placed it rendered the room familiar. His loneliness is ambivalent: “I am a stranger in this town. That’s why I am so at home here.”
Displacement is his theme: in one of the hotels, possibly in Marseilles, he notes that the male telephonist is Italian: “The waiter is from Upper Austria. The porter is a Frenchman from Provence. The receptionist is from Normandy. The head waiter is a Bavarian. The chambermaid is Swiss. The valet is Dutch. The manager is Levantine; and for years I’ve suspected the cook of being Czech. The guests come from all over the world.”
Throughout the pieces, Roth describes people; their vulnerability and their complacency. He is a natural chronicler who is also a romantic, aware of the past buried in the grim present. A traveller in children’s toys strikes him as “someone who should be travelling in sacred relics”.
The Great War haunts him. Visiting Sarajevo in 1927, he surveys the city, resenting its peace, “the butterflies on the stones in the Turkish cemetery”. For him, it all seems wrong: “ . . . the War began here, the world was destroyed, and Sarajevo has survived. It shouldn’t be a city, it should be a monument to the terrible memory.” Fittingly, Roth’s earliest memory was the loss of his cradle – just as his enduring tragedy was the death of the empire and the culture he loved.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent
