Rainbow-Colored Soap Bubbles

The Hotel Years by Joseph Roth

It was on January 28, 1800 that the first feuilleton appeared in the great French newspaper, Journal des débats. Literally “a leaf” or “a scrap of paper”, the new supplement quickly distinguished itself in France as a highly popular chronicle of the latest non-political news—that of art, literature, music, theatre, gossip, and fashion. The “The Talk of the Town” section in The New Yorker magazine is a contemporary version of the same.

Admired and practiced as a form by writers as varied as Heinrich Heine, Theodor Herzl, Marcel Proust, Isaac Babel, Peter Altenberg, Arthur Schnitzler, Ilya Ehrenberg, and Walter Benjamin, it found a particularly worthy muse in the Viennese writer and drunkard, Joseph Roth. Best known for his novels Radetsky March and The Emperor’s Tomb, Roth spent the better part of his adult life living in hotels and cafés where he passed the time reading, eavesdropping, and generally surveying the world around him. I am a hotel citizen,” he once wrote, “a hotel patriot.” Indeed it was in hotels and cafés that Roth developed his particular vision as a writer, working daily to capture what he witnessed, to sketch what he called “the portrait of an age”, an age—that doomed if glittering interregnum between the wars—which for Roth stretched roughly from his return from the War in 1919 to his death from alcoholism in Paris in 1939. 

  

It is in Roth’s feuilletons, writes translator Michael Hofmann in his illuminating introduction to the collection, “…with his variable thoughts on exile, on monarchy, on literature, on the military, on nations, on east and West, that he regales us. He is capable of hanging a set of political opinions on a quirk of facial hair styling (‘a large blond mustache that went out into a couple of butcher’s hooks’) and of turning a manicure into a threat (‘a hand with flashing pink nails dangled over the chairback’); of inferring the state of the nation from a chance observation (‘the railway conductor wolfing chocolates), and of shrinking another nation into a natty synecdoche (‘on the right a mosque, on the left a rudimentary café terrace where guests bake and fezzes talk’). He has at times a wonderfully simple, radical imagination…”

It then was largely in the troubled years between the wars, when Roth lived in Vienna and Paris, when he traveled  through Germany, Galicia, Poland, Albania, Italy, and the USSR, that he wrote these many feuilletons, what he himself called his “rainbow-colored soap bubbles”. Indeed their variety and lightness are striking, though such a characterization fails to do justice to what, in many of the pieces, is a startling moral-political clarity. 

Here, by way of example, are a few selections from the book, the first and third but the opening paragraphs, the second one complete:

Arrival in the Hotel

The hotel that I love like a fatherland is situated in one of the great port cities of Europe, and the heavy gold Antiqua letters in which its banal name is spelled out (shining across the roofs of the gently banked houses) are in my eye metal flags, metal bannerets that instead of fluttering blink out their greeting. Other men may return to hearth and home, and wife and child; I celebrate my return to lobby and chandelier, porter and chambermaid—and between us we put on such a consummate performance that the notion of merely checking into a hotel doesn’t even raise its head. The look with which the doorman welcomes me is more than a father’s embrace. As  though he actually were my father, he discreetly pays my taxi out of his own waistcoat pocket, saving me form having to think about it. The receptionist emerges from his glass booth with a smile as wide as his bow is deep. My arrival seems to delight him so much that his back imparts friendliness to his mouth, and the professional and the human are mingled in his greeting. He would be ashamed to greet me with a registration form; so deeply does he understand the way I see such a  legal requirement as a personal insult. He will fill in my details himself, later on, when I am installed my room, even though he has no idea here I have come from. He will write out some name or other, some place he thinks deserving of having been visited by me. He is a greater authority on my personal data than I am. Probably over the years namesakes of mine have stayed in the hotel. But he doesn’t know their details, and they seem a little suspicious to him, as if they were unlawful borrowers of my name. The lift-boy takes my suitcases one under each arm. Probably it’s the way an angel spreads his wings. No one asks me how long I plan on staying, an hour or a year, my fatherland is happy either way…

                                                                                                         Frankfurter Zeitung, 9 January 1929

Spring

I am woken by the sound of carpets being beaten overhead. The muffled thudding  provokes my neighbor’s canary, and he cheep and twitters and warbles like a bird song imitator. In the yard a window flies open, a second, a third: the whole building seems to be tearing off its windows.

     A ray of sunshine splashes in my violet inkwell. The bronze maiden on my desk protects her bosoms from the intrusive beam and sweetly tans.

     A hurdy-gurdy is playing in the yard. The streams of melody burst through, melting and freed.

                 From these and other signs, one notices eventually that it is spring.

     On the Kurfürstendamm the cafes put out spring awnings, the ladies have new wardrobes, the gentlemen natty yellow twittering gloves. In side streets the children  play with shiny buttons and marbles. The blue-bedizened sky checks its reflection in the brass shaving bowl outside the barber’s shop.

     Everyone is freshly varnished and ”please don’t touch”. Slips of girls wander about on the asphalt in sheer stockings and new boots looking like costumed willow trees.

     In the afternoon I sit in the window and think that Sunday is on it sway. To Grunewald, for instance.

                 After six or still later, a girl in purple rings the doorbell. Love is like that.

                                                                                                   Freie Deutsche Bühne, 16 June 1921

  

The Third Reich, a Dependence of Hell on Earth

After seventeen moths, we are now sued to the fact that in Germany more blood is spilled than the newspapers use printers’ ink to report on it. Probably Goebbels, the overlord of German printers’ ink, has more dead bodies on the conscience he doesn’t have , than he has journalists to do his bidding, which is to silence the great number of these deaths. For we know now that the task of the German press is not to publicize events but to silence them; not only to spread lies but to suggest them; not just to mislead world opinion—the pathetic remnant of the world that still has an opinion—but also to impart false news on it with a baffling naïvieté. Not since this earth frit had blood spilled on it has there been a murderer who has washed his bloodstained hands in as much printers’ ink. Not since lies were first told in this world has a liar has so many powerful loudspeakers at his disposal. Not since betrayal was first perpetrated  in this world was a traitor by another, greater traitor: has there been such a contest between traitors. And, alas, never has the part of the world that has not yet sunk into the night of dictatorships been so dazzled by the hellish glow of lies, or so deafened and dulled by the screaming of so many lies. For hundreds of years, we have been accustomed too lies going around on tiptoe. The epoch-making discovery of modern dictatorships is the invention of the loud lie, based on the psychologically correct assumption that people will believe a shout when they doubt speech. Since the onset of the Third Reich the lie, in spite of the saying, has walked on long legs. It no longer follows on the heels of the truth, it races on ahead of it. If Goebbels is to be credited with a stroke of genius, then surely it is this: he has caused official truth to walk with the limp he has himself. The officially sanctioned German truth has been given its own club foot. It is no fluke but a knowing joke on the part of history that the first German minister of propaganda has a limp…

                                                                                                    Pariser Tageblatt, 6 July 1934

 

Peter Adam Nash