On the essays shelf:
Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays
One of Acocella’s abiding interests is writers and artists caught in the middle of the downfall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That Empire was a symbol of unity to many of the people living under its auspices, and its ideal – an over-arching state that transcended sheer nationalism, a state that encompassed many peoples, many languages, and a state where the Jews had equal protection – was cherished. When the Empire collapsed (as Eddie Izzard so accurately described, “like a flan in a cupboard”), it laid bare the fault-lines of sectarian hatreds, which had been suppressed by the powerful state. And of course it is the Jews who suffered the most. They found themselves state-less. Other members of other countries could retreat into a more bloody patriotism, based on their home country, but the Jews had relied on the Empire itself to blur the boundaries. A complex and tragic time. Who mourns the fall of that Empire? It was ridiculous in many ways by the end, a rigid state devoted only to pomp and circumstance, empty ritual. You can feel that in Stefan Zweig’s Beware of Pity, a magnificent novel which has the decay of Empire in it.
I have not read any Joseph Roth. I have Acocella to thank for even putting him on my radar. Another fantastic essay about a writer observing the currents and cross-currents in Austria in the time between the World Wars, and the dismay experienced by intellectuals who could sense which way the wind was blowing. Joseph Roth strikes me as a tragic individual. He was a journalist. He grew up in a garrison town. He grew up revering the Empire, as so many of his generation did. He was a Jew, but a continental one. He had great scorn for (and fear of) the immigrant Jews from the East, fleeing the pogroms in Russia and elsewhere. He was assimilated, and assimilated Jews were often unkind to those more traditional immigrants coming into the Empire. He feared that they would ruin it for the rest of them. This is not a popular view, especially today, but it is important to see Roth in the context of when he was writing. He died in 1939, before the outbreak of the Second World War. It would be interesting to contemplate what his books would have been had he lived to see the destruction of the Jews by Germany in WWII. As it is, his books were insightful cynical books about Empire. His books are about the relationship of man to the overarching state. His masterpiece is The Radetzky March
Acocella breaks down Roth’s journey for us, so we can see the development of this writer. He lived in Berlin, he wrote pieces about the culture there. He watched the rise of anti-Semitism and saw it as lunatic, but more annoying and stupid than anything more malevolent. He distrusted nationalism. It is easy to understand why. Nationalism has never been good for Jews. He had a semi-tragic marriage to someone who was clearly mentally ill. He was a big drinker, and traveled a lot, and he would put his wife up in a hotel and lock her in while he went about his business. She finally was put into a sanatorium (and, tragically, was killed by the Nazis). Once the Empire crumbled, and once Germany began its rise, Roth started to sense the way things were going. He lived in Paris. He felt that nationalism made sense in Paris. Paris was okay with their Jews. But he yearned for Austria. He yearned for Empire. This can only be understood in the context of those terrible years. He tried to get back into Austria, and was turned away by a border guard – basically warning him: “You had better get the hell out of here.” Three days later came the Anschluss. Roth was already down and out: he had been successful in Berlin during the Weimar years, but with the rise of Nazism his reputation took a hit. His books were burned in the streets. He lost his publisher. He lost his readership. It’s just horrifying, reading all of this.
A man who did not live to see the horrors of WWII, and what nationalism, that he so dreaded, could wrought. His dream of international Jewishness, of Jews protected by a “state” that was an Empire, was dashed. All of that is in his books. He is a writer I must check out.
Here is an excerpt from Acocella’s essay.
Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays
At the same time that he was producing these essays, Roth was writing his early novels. They are as dark as the journalism, but more disturbing, because in them he seems to be writing about himself, with hatred as well as with grief. He had always been fatherless; now, with the fall of Austria-Hungary at the end of the war, he was stateless. All his nov els of the 1920s are Heimkehrerromane, stories of soldiers returning from the war, and what these men find is that there is no home for them to return to. They would have been better off if they had died. For some of them, Roth has compassion; he analyzes the religious awe in which they once held the state, and their brutal disabusement. For others, he has no pity, and he catalogues the lies they are now free to tell about themselves, and the ease with which they pledge themselves to the new gods, commercialism (“America”) and nationalism (Germany).
One of the remarkable things about Roth’s early writing is its political foresight. He was the first person to inscribe the name of Adolf Hitler in European fiction, and that was in 1923, ten years before Hitler took over Germany. But what makes his portrait of the Nazi brand of anti-Semitism so interesting is that it was done before the Holocaust, which he did not live to see. His treatment of the Jews therefore lacks the pious edgelessness of most post-Holocaust writing on the subject. In one of his novels of the 1920s – the best one, Right and Left – which opens in a little German town, he says that in this place most jokes begin, “There was once a Jew on a train,” but on the same page he narrows his eyes at Jews who ignore such jokes. In an essay of 1929, he speculates comically on why God took a special interest in the Jews: “There were so many others that were nice, malleable, and well trained: happy, balanced Greeks, adventurous Phoenicians, artful Egyptians, Assyrians with strange imaginations, northern tribes with beautiful, blond-haired, as it were, ethical primitiveness and refreshing forest smells. But none of the above! The weakest and far from loveliest of peoples was given the most dreadful curse and the most dreadful blessing” – to be God’s chosen people. As for German nationalism, he regarded it, at least in the twenties, mainly as a stink up the nose, a matter of lies and nature hikes and losers trying to gain power. He was frightened of it, but he also found it ridiculous.
If Roth had continued in this vein, he would be known to us today as a gifted minor writer, the literary equivalent of George Grosz. But in 1925 his newspaper sent him to France, and there he found a happiness he had never known before. In part, this was simply because the French were less anti-Semitic than the Germans. But also it seemed to him that in this country – which, unlike his, had not lost the war – European culture, a version of the Austrian Idea, was still going forward, and that he could be part of it. “Here everyone smiles at me,” he wrote to his editor. “I love all the women … The cattlemen with whom I eat breakfast are more aristocratic and refined than our cabinet ministers, patriotism is justified here, nationalism is a demonstration of a European conscience.” He relaxed, and began thinking not just about the postwar calamity but about history itself, and the human condition. As can be seen in Norton’s recently issued Report From a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925-1939, again translated by Hofmann, his prose now mounted to an altogether new level , stately but concrete, expansive but unwasteful. In a 1925 essay about Nîmes, he describes an evening he spent in the city’s ancient arena, where an outdoor movie theatre had been installed. Here he is, sitting in a building created by the Roman emperors, watching a movie created by Cecil B. De Mille. To compound the joke, the film is The Ten Commandments. This is the sort of situation from which, in his Berlin period, he wrung brilliant, cackling ironies. But here he just says he stopped watching the movie and looked up at the sky, at the shooting stars:
Some are large, red, and lumpy. They slowly wipe across the sky, as though they were strolling, and leave a thin, bloody trail. Others again are small, swift, and silver. They fly like bullets. Others glow like little running suns and brighten the horizon considerably for some time.
Sometimes it’s as though the heaven opened and showed us a glimpse of red-gold lining. Then the split quickly closes, and the majesty is once more hidden for good.
Though God may confide his thoughts to De Mille, he withholds them fro moth, and Roth doesn’t complain. He just arranges the elements of the vision – majesty, beauty, enigma, terror (bullets, blood) – in a shining constellation. He is moving out of satire, into tragedy.
