A young Austrian-Jewish journalist's move from Vienna to Berlin in 1920 might seem, in retrospect, a poor career move. But Joseph Roth -- born in what is now Ukraine but was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire -- wrote for a Vienna newspaper, and a move to the capital of the German-speaking world would then have been the equivalent of moving to New York for a young American writer. Five years later, he moved to Paris as a correspondent for the prominent German newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung.
Unexpectedly, apparently, Roth experienced a sense of exhilarated relief upon arrival in France. Paris (and France) was everything that Germany was not -- "free, open, intellectual in the best sense, and ironic in its magnificent pathos," as he wrote to his editor in 1925. He apparently did not sense the undercurrents of French anti-Semitism that had been made obvious during the Dreyfus Affair, and were to prove still lingering during the days of the Vichy Republic.
Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France 1925-1939 is a mixed collection of Roth's short essays and letters. The section of the book entitled "In the French Midi" contains feature articles written for his Frankfurt newspaper discussing in lyrical detail the cities and their inhabitants visited while traveling through the south of France, from Lyon to the Riviera. These short articles were expanded in an even more "literary" style and language in a series of essays entitled "The White Cities," never published before Roth's death in 1939. The expanded essays made even clearer Roth's disaffection with Germany and the trends he saw developing there. The last half of the book contains newspaper articles, written both for Frankfurter Zeitung (the last dated 1932), and increasingly for German language papers in Paris, the Netherlands and Prague.
The arc of his writing from 1925 to 1939 shows the progress of his thought from an excitement about the grace and beauty of France as contrasted with the dullness and sullenness of Germany-- a contrast with his adopted home shared, of course, by American expatriates in Paris escaping their own homeland -- to an increasing alarm about developments in German life and politics even before Hitler assumed power, to his eventual realization that as a Jew and a liberal, he no longer could return to Germany. It becomes clear to him that Germany was destroying -- deliberately and methodically -- a pan-European culture that had been developing across the continent.
I won't bore you with obvious analogies to the world today.
The book is fascinating today, of course, first because he wrote from an unusual perspective about developments between the two world wars -- not so much about political events, because he wasn't a political journalist, but about cultural trends and differences among nations and between eras. But it is also worth reading because of his lyrical descriptions -- ably translated to English -- of art, architecture, street scenes, and the people he observed about him from all strata of French life.
No one who hasn't 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. Every cab driver here is wittier than any one of our authors. We really are a miserable lot. Here everyone smiles at me …. I feel at ease with everyone, even though we continually misunderstand each other when we talk about practical things, just because we understand each other so perfectly on every subtlety and nuance. … 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, every affiche is a poem, court announcements are as elegant as our best prose, cinema billboards display more imagination and psychological insight than do our contemporary novels, the soldiers are like whimsical children, the policemen witty editorial writers.
The fact that there was a German audience back home for such critical commentary reminds us that not all of post-war Germany awaited hyper-nationalistic fascism with enthusiasm.
Also interesting -- and to me unexpected -- was Roth's nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian empire -- an empire of German culture and refinement, as he viewed it, comparable in some ways to his beloved France. He hates that "German" had come to mean, in the world's eyes, "Prussian." He notes that the Austrians were speaking a refined German back when the Prussians were still speaking their own Slavic language along the shores of the Baltic Sea. Although proudly a Jew, he displays an enthusiasm for Catholicism -- not only as an offshoot of Judaism, but as a promoter of the cosmopolitan, pan-European civilization, and an antidote to a narrow and violent nationalism, that he longs for.
Roth died in Paris, probably from complications of alcoholism, in 1939. He was spared the spectacle of yet another war between France and Germany.
Roth is best known today for novels and short stories, written in his final years, that evoked the Austro-Hungarian era. His best known novel is Radetzky March (1932), described as an epic following three generations of a family during the rise and fall of the Empire. Not only have I read none of his fiction, I confess I'd never heard of Roth himself until this past week. I'm tempted to read further.
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