Joseph Roth

242 Pages·2010·1.98 MB·English

by  Josepha Maria

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Department of History and Civilization

Against the Great:
Joseph Roth (1894-1939) and the Dilemma of
Jewish Anchorage

Ilse Josepha Maria Lazaroms

Thesis submitted for assessment with a view to obtaining the degree of
Doctor of History and Civilization of the European University Institute

Florence, 1 October 2010
EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE
Department of History and Civilization

Against the Great:
Joseph Roth (1894-1939) and the Dilemma of
Jewish Anchorage

Ilse Josepha Maria Lazaroms

Examining Board:

Prof. Martin van Gelderen, Supervisor, European University Institute
Prof. Antony Molho, European University Institute
Prof. Sander L. Gilman, Emory University
Prof. Raphael Gross, Frankfurt am Main / Leo Baeck Institute London

© 2010, Ilse Josepha Maria Lazaroms
No part of this thesis may be copied, reproduced or transmitted without prior permission of the author

Table of Contents

Table of Contents i

Acknowledgements iii

Chapter I The Lives of Man. Joseph Roth 1894-1939

Introduction & Biographical Sketch 1
Historiography 4
Main Questions 11
Responses to Catastrophe. Outline of the Thesis 15

Chapter II A Time Divided against Itself. Debates, Methods, Sources

Introduction 19
Debates 20
Methods 25
Note on (Auto)Biography 33
Sources 35

Chapter III Opening up the Crypt. Nostalgia, Retrospective Belonging and the Present

Introduction 43
Nostalgia, Historical Discontinuity, and the Critical Eye 45
1918 49
Vienna: a Cardboard Décor 52
Identities and Diasporas 55
The Emperor’s Tomb (1938) 61
Conclusion 69

Chapter IV The Lamentations of an “Old Jew.” Suffering and Madness

Introduction 71
Exemplary Sufferers: Jews, Artists, and Righteous Men 73
Job (1930): the Creation of Mendel Singer 76
“An old Jew with a heavy heart.” Roth’s Lamentations 80
Narratives of Guilt 85
Madness 89
Justice 95
Conclusion 100
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Chapter V “All Roads lead to Brody.” Intellectual Heritage and Jewish Tradition

Introduction 103
Jewish Intellectuals in Interwar Europe 105
Marginality, Money, and Embodied Observation 112
The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind (1933) 118
Brody 122
Conclusion 130

Chapter VI Prophecies of Unrest. Europe in the Claws of the Antichrist

Introduction 133
The Ideological Limits of Europe 135
The Concept of Prophecy 140
The Antichrist (1934) 143
Paris: or the Quest for Universal European Values 149
God and the Jews 154
Autobiography and Contemporary Echoes 158
Conclusion 162

Chapter VII Speaking from a Jewish Void. Exilic Performance and Masquerade as
Strategies of Resistance

Introduction 165
The Quest for Exilic Belonging 167
Exile before Exile: pre-1933 Homelessness 169
The Logic of Itinerancy: Wandering as a Moral Imperative 172
“Words Endowed with Magic.” The Question of Linguistic Belonging 180
Out of the Void? The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1940) 188
Conclusion 193

Conclusion 195

Bibliography 199

Appendix: Joseph Roth Bibliography 215

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Acknowledgements

True to the nomadic fashion in which this thesis was written, I would like to thank my
professors, colleagues, friends and family following the cities in which I have lived, worked,
and resided during these last four years.

Florence: I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Martin van Gelderen, for his
critical comments and his ongoing encouragement and advice. I thank Professor Antony
Molho for his wisdom and genuine interest in this project. Thank you, too, to Niki
Koniordos, for being a rock in the midst of academic practicalities. Dr. Karin Tilmans,
thank you for our colourful conversations in the Fiesole hillside. Also, I am grateful to
Professor Raphael Gross and Professor Sander L. Gilman for agreeing to be my jury
members; it is an honour. Finally, among the many people and characters that filled my
days at the EUI, I would like to thank especially Tijl Vanneste, Florian Dennig, Alexander
Lukas Krüger, Marta Grzechnik, Jorrit Rijpma, and Henning Trüper, who have become my
friends. My most wondrous thank you to Admir Skodo, for whom I am, for once, at a loss
for words.
Budapest: I am very grateful to the History Department at Central European
University for taking me in as a doctoral guest scholar for longer than the program allowed,
and for making me part of an academic community in which I feel much at home.
Professor Michael L. Miller, thank you for your advice, time and support. In Budapest, I
found a life that has become very precious to me – charming, colourful, absurd and
creative – which would not have been possible without the presence, laughter and
experience of my friends Mare van den Eeden, Emily Gioielli, Ilona Dénes and Caroline
Marburger. Thank you to my neighbour Gergely Szalai, and to Giles McMillan and Kalki
Hellenberg for giving me my beautiful bohemian home in the VIII district. And finally,
Café Eckermann, where I spent long days writing to the sound of Hungarian and coffee
cup clatter. The café lasted almost as long as my PhD; sadly, it closed down at the end of
June 2010.
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Vienna: I am very happy I got to know Dr. Heinz Lunzer and Victoria Lunzer-
Talos, at the Dokumentationsstelle für Neure Österreichische Literatur, who welcomed me
most warmly into their own highly knowledgeable and fascinating Joseph Roth world, and
who were there for advice, references, stories and books.
Manchester: Professor Bertrand Taithe and the editors of the European Review of
History, for our meetings in the world of publishing and for making me a better editor.
Paris: Dr. Stéphane Pesnel for inviting me to speak at the conference Joseph Roth en
exil à Paris 1933-1939 at Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme and the École Normale
Superieure at the Sorbonne in September 2009. Thank you, too, to Els Snick for her
friendship and support in getting my article about Roth’s The Antichrist translated into
German and published.
London: Peter Owen Publishers for sending me the manuscript of the English
translation of Der Antichrist before it was published, so that I could use it in this thesis.
New York: Dr. Frank Mecklenburg and the archivists of the Leo Baeck Institute
for supporting my research there during two very hot weeks in June 2008.
Oslo: Thank you to my best friends Carsten Aniksdal and Julia Marie Doke, whose
words across the seas brightened my days many times. Thank you.
Utrecht, Gouda and Haarlem: A heartfelt thank you to my father, Louis Lazaroms,
my mother, José Kaptein, and my sister, Maud Lazaroms, for giving me a home away from
home, love across borders and unending support in the grand as well as the small matters
of life. Corrie Kaptein, thank you for visiting me in all the cities I have lived.
Oslo and beyond: My deepest gratitude and love to Thomas Hansen, who showed
me that sometimes you have to be “your own biggest fan” in order to get your work out
there, that being close to the fire is the core of creation, and that there is a melody to
everything. Thank you, Thomas, for giving me the music.

Budapest, September 2010

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I
The Lives of Man. Joseph Roth 1894-1939

It’s a truism that men can suffer from the
burden of their time as easily as from their
own failure; or they may […] suffer from
the convergence of the two.

Fritz Stern1

Introduction & Biographical Sketch
Joseph Roth possessed a sharply observant eye which allowed him to clearly read the signs
of his times – those divided years of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe – a quality that has
earned him the dubious epitaph “prophet”; a drunken prophet, as Europe’s demise into
another world war went hand in hand with his own physical decline through alcoholism.
Roth, his black coat draped around his shoulders, newspaper under his arm, cigarette and
drink in hand while slowly moving from one hotel to another, was a border crosser, a train
traveller, an observer and a hotel patriot.2 He was a literary exile who chose an itinerant
existence; a highly prolific journalist and novelist who entertained friends and
acquaintances at his café table in Paris and who drank himself to death at the early age of
44. Often noted for his cosmopolitan flair, Roth received extraordinarily high book
advances but spent most of his time in a perpetual financial worry; a man who, in line with
his skilled journalistic eye for detail, had a great passion for the miniature universe of
watches and clocks, a predilection mirrored in his miniscule and delicate handwriting.
Roth was also an East European Jew from Galicia; uprooted and assimilated but
not quite comfortable with shedding all his Jewish markers. In 1894, the year of his birth –
on 2 September – the small town of Brody was on the easternmost edge of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire and populated by Jews, Poles, Ukrainians and Russians; now it is part of
the Ukraine. It was also the year of the Dreyfus affair, and the decade during which
organised political antisemitism reached a peak in Austria and Germany; before, indeed, it

1 Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair. A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology. Berkeley, Los Angeles,
London: University of California Press, 1961, p. 276.
2 Michael Hofmann once described Roth as a ‘newspaperman’, referring both to his profession as a journalist
or writer of feuilletons and to the fact that newspapers are almost always present in pictures of Roth: either
he is reading one, carrying one under his arm, or it is lying on the café table in front of him.
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became an ideology. Roth’s wanderings started early on in life. He grew up in his uncle’s
and grandfather’s house with his mother; his father, a grain merchant, had derailed into
madness on one of his trips to Germany and disappeared into the care of a miracle rabbi
while his wife was pregnant; Roth never knew his father. He attended the Jewish
community school from 1901 until 1905 before enrolling at the “K. K. Kronprinz Rudolf
Gymnasium” in Brody, together with Lemberg (today’s Lviv) the only two Gymnasia in
Galicia. German was spoken there until the nationalist reforms in 1906, when Polish
became its main language. On the school square, there now stands a bronze statue
commemorating Roth and four other famous alumni. From Brody, Roth moved on to
Lemberg and, in the summer of 1914, to Vienna, where, eager to become part of the
“West” – in Brody he had proudly called himself an “assimilant,” setting him apart from
the school’s many Zionists – he enrolled at the University. In Vienna, Roth met his life-
long friend Józef Wittlin, the Polish-Jewish poet and prose writer who later converted to
Catholicism. Around this time Roth published his first poems, when the war interrupted.
In 1916, he and Wittlin volunteered for military service and were stationed in Galicia. Roth
probably never saw front fighting, despite his own reports to the contrary. Details about
the war years are few, but most likely he worked as a reporter for the army newspaper. This
was the first instance of what has come to be known as Roth’s “mythomania”: his constant
urge to invent stories about himself and his past and to resort to role playing whenever the
opportunity arose. In this sense, Roth was a man of multiple lives.
After the war, Roth returned first to Brody, then to Vienna. His feuilletons
appeared in Der Neue Tag and other newspapers, and in 1920 he departed for Berlin. It is
there that he found the job that would bring him fame in literary circles and sustain him
throughout the years; as a journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung, Roth not only earned a lot
of money; the paper also sent him on many travels, and he fervently reported from
Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Russia, Albania and France. It was in France, its
southern coastal cities but in Paris, too, that Roth found the perfect antidote to the Berlin
he had come to dislike so profusely. Often he took his young wife Friederike, a Jewish girl
from Vienna whom he married in 1922, with him on his travels. In the early 1920s, Roth’s
first novels appeared in quick succession: The Spider’s Web (1923), Hotel Savoy (1924) and
Rebellion (1924), all short fragmented tales of homeless men in an urban, modern world.
The important essay The Wandering Jews appeared in 1927, as well as Flight without End.
In 1928, Roth met the man who would become his mentor, benefactor and
intellectual opponent until his death: the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig. He also published
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Zipper and his Father, followed in 1929 by Left and Right and The Silent Prophet. The late 1920s
also marked the onset of a great suffering that would last a lifetime, in the form of
Friederike’s schizophrenia. After years of insecurity about her condition, in 1929 she was
finally sent away permanently to various mental institutions, leaving Roth in great despair
and guilt about her illness. In 1930, he published Job. The Story of a Simple Man, followed,
two years later, by The Radetzky March, his most famous work. The next year, 1933, saw the
beginnings of Roth’s political exile as a result of Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor of the
Reich in January that year, and he settled permanently in Paris, where he had been spending
most of him time from the mid-1920s onwards.
The last six years of his life were spent in Parisian exile, living in Hotel Foyot and
working in the café across the street, Le Tournon. He wrote controversial essays and
feuilletons, such as 1934s The Antichrist, and established relations with the Dutch exile
publishers Allert de Lange, Querido and the Gemeenschap. He had an affair with Andrea
Manga Bell, whose two children he took under his wings; the only semblance of a family
life he ever knew. Despair about his financial situation and the loss of his wife – who, in a
terrible fate, was murdered by the Nazis as part of their “euthanasia program” in July 1940,
one year after Roth’s own death – contributed to his drinking, a habit he had developed
during the 1920s but which now took on self-destructive proportions. His literary output,
however, did not suffer, and he published Tarabas: A Guest on Earth (1934), Confession of a
Murderer (1936), Weights and Measures (1937), The Emperor’s Tomb (1938), and The Tale of the
1002nd Night (1939). The novella The Legend of the Holy Drinker and the short story The
Leviathan were published posthumously, in 1940. From 1936 to 1938, Roth found his last
female companion in the German novelist Irmgard Keun, whose novel A Child of all
Nations is said to be based on her relationship with Roth.
On May 23 1939, upon hearing of the news of Ernst Toller’s suicide in a hotel
room in New York, Roth collapsed in his Parisian café Le Tournon and was taken to
Hôpital Necker, a hospital for the poor, where he died four days later, on 27 May, in a
condition of horrible neglect. He was buried on 30 May in the Cimetière Thiais, in a south-
eastern suburb of Paris. His grave is there to this day, covered in small stones and a few
flowers.

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