Joseph Roth: On the End of the World
A book review
What
use are my words against the guns, the loudspeakers, the murderers, the
deranged ministers, the clueless diplomats, the stupid interviewers and
journalists who interpret the voice of this world of Babel, muddied anyhow, via
the drums of Nuremberg?
In
sad resignation
Your
Joseph Roth
These
despairing words were published in Parisian journal Das Neue
Tage-Buch on the 17th October, 1934. By
that time, novelist Joseph Roth had been living in Paris for nearly twenty
months, having left Berlin for good on the 30th January, 1933,
the same day that Adolf Hitler became chancellor of
Germany. In the years leading up to his death in May 1939,
Roth battled depression, alcoholism and poverty whilst working some of his
best-known novels. He also wrote several incendiary articles
denouncing the rise of Nazism and the demise of European culture, which were
published mainly in the Pariser Tageszeitung and Das
NeueTagebuch, German language newspapers meant for the exiled
community.
The
present collection, edited and translated by Will Stone for Pushkin Press
brings together a selection of such essays but, very aptly, starts with an
earlier article from March 1924 in which Roth compares Hitler’s trial following
the unsuccessful beer hall putsch to a “carnival night”. As Roth
perspicaciously notes, these so-called judicial proceedings actually worked in
Hitler’s favour by giving him a platform for his racist ideas.
In
his later essays, Roth becomes more extreme in his attacks not only on Hitler
and his entourage, but also on the other European powers, particularly Britain
and France, who seemed blind to what was actually happening in
Germany. Roth draws a link between the regime’s disregard for
“culture” and the heinous crimes of the regime: “it is not by some
fortuitous coincidence that you see them burning books at the exact same moment
as they mistreat the Jews: these are merely to separate manifestations of the
nation’s spiritual state. It is no less symbolic that the control of
the Fine Arts has been placed in the hands of the Minister of Propaganda!”
Initially,
it seems that Roth had hopes that Austria could act as a bulwark to Hitler,
preserving Mitteleuropean culture and values without descending into Nazi
hell. Following the Anschluss however, even this hope is
shattered.
In
most of the articles, Roth sounds like a crazed Old Testament prophet, pulling
no punches and sparing no one whom he deems guilty of colluding with the Nazis
or not standing up to them. At times, his rants seem
hyperbolic. Except that we have the benefit of hindsight, and we know
that his dire warnings were, alas, spot-on. This is, of course, a
very sobering thought. Because if Roth, a down-and-out author eking
out an existence in a Paris hotel, could perceive that the “end of the world”
was nigh, surely those who could have opposed Hitler and did not, could not
claim that they could not predict where the Nazi train would
lead.
Some
of the articles provide a respite from Roth’s more aggressive
essays. “Rest while viewing the demolition” is a particularly moving
piece. Roth watches the destruction of the Foyot, the hotel where he
lived since his exile, from a bistro opposite the site. He engages
in banter with the demolition men but his heart is heavy: “Now I sit
opposite the empty space, listening to the hours pass. You lose one
homeland, then another, I say to myself. Here I sit, with my
vagabond’s staff. My feet are sore, my heart is weary, my eyes are
dry. Misery crouches beside me, ever gentler and ever greater; pain
drops by, becoming great and beneficent, horror blasts its way in, but doesn’t
scare me anymore. And that’s the most inconsolable thing of
all”.
This
collection is a stern warning that the Nazi tragedy did not happen overnight,
and that the writing on the wall was there for all to see. In
this regard, the endnotes and the timeline aligning Roth’s final years with the
rise of Hitler and the events leading to World War II is particularly helpful
in providing a context to this eye-opening read.
Paperback, 128 pages
Published May 30th 2019 by Pushkin Press
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