Joseph Roth

29:21Helen, what's extraordinary is his ability to write clear, clean copy. And I mean, for his novels as well, he's not a writer who is endlessly revising his work. No, that's fairly remarkable, although there may be things that were lost. I should perhaps say about his writing practices that when he was writing Radetsky Marsh and he was drinking quite a lot, he left chapter four in a taxi and he never got it back. So he had to write it again and it's an extremely good chapter. I mean, all of the chapters are good, but that is also remarkable in its way in terms of his working practice. But he kind of held court, you know, people gathered round him and they would not want to interrupt him.

30:13And he would say, no, on you go, on you go. And then sometimes he would just join the conversation, but he'd be writing the rest of the time. Deborah, I'm going to move us on from Rudetsky March onto a very important subject. What about women in the Rords novels and also in his life? Because we haven't mentioned it, but fairly early on he married in Vienna and that was a very, very important part of his narrative. Yes, although it's surprisingly often not commented on or commented on far too much in the wrong way. I mean, it's a difficult topic. I mean, Helen has already referred to Frau Slama.

30:51In the novels, women are never major characters. There are no main female characters in Rout, but they quite often play quite a decisive role. The power dynamics are always uneven. There are no balanced gender relations in Rout. There are no colleagues or comrades of different sexes. Either the women are much more powerful than the men somehow, or they are a long way below them. They're either protecting the men or they need protecting. There's nothing, there's no balance in between. And it's an obvious temptation to equate these literary figures with the women in Rolt's life, if I can lump them together like that.

31:27So his wife, Friedel, whom he married in 1922, was an acquaintance from a coffeehouse in Vienna, very typically for Rolt. We haven't talked about bars or coffeehouses yet, But that's where he seemed to have spent most of his life. He spent most of his life and where he did a lot of his writing as well, of course. And he learnt Friedel from one cafe table to the next. She was the daughter of a shopkeeper in Vienna's Jewish district. Very pretty, as we can see from the photos. And they married when they were both still very young. She was six years younger than him. And he does not prevent the marriage, doesn't let the marriage prevent him from living the life that he wishes to lead as a travelling journalist.

32:10The two of them basically live out of a suitcase, as far as it is. Yes and no. It quite often is said of Roth that he never had a flat, that he never had a home, that he never settled. I think that he twice shared a flat, once with Friedel and once with a later partner, Andrea Mangebel, in Berlin. So there were attempts at domesticity, but they never lasted for long and they were always very strained. And what happens to Friedel in the end? because I think this is quite important. It's an extremely sad story and it must have been very stressful and tragic for Roth himself. Friedl becomes increasingly, at first he thinks, increasingly unable to cope with the life travelling around, with moving so often, with living out of a suitcase.

32:53And then it becomes clear that she is mentally unstable and she is taken into psychiatric care, I think already from 1925, 26 onwards? I think she's not in care at that point, but by the end of the 20s, yes. Repeatedly ill and then is taken into full-time psychiatric care or is living at home but with a full-time nurse, is not really verbalising anymore, is not really eating. And she then remains in care until the end of her life, although care becomes a misnomer as under the Nazis in 1940, She is then murdered as a long-term psychiatric patient in Hertheim in Upper Austria in one of the parts of the Nazis' so-called T4 programme to kill psychiatric patients and the mentally unfit.

33:46And Rortis refers to Friedel and her illness in some of his work. In some of his... I'm not sure. I'm not sure about the work, certainly repeatedly in the letters. I'm not sure to what extent she... Well, let me take it on to John Hughes in that case and talk about Job, the story of a simple man, which is what I think where he maybe does reference Friedel. Can you tell us about this novel? Because, as I understand it, Marlene Dietrich thought it was fabulous. She did. I mean, it was actually the novel that preceded Radetsky March, as it happens and could be said to have been this artistic turning point for him, the one that allowed him to, gave him the confidence, I think, to write The Rudetsky March.

34:32So it was published in 1930. Before Rudetsky March. Came before Rudetsky March, although we've already discussed perhaps the most famous novel. But Job is perhaps a close second, certainly looking at his reputation around the world. It's a very widely read, translated, much-loved novel. Give it its full title. It's Job, the story or the novel of a simple man. And in a way, it reprises some of the things that made Rebellion a great novel. It has a sort of simplicity about it, a sort of fable-like structure. It plays loosely with the story of the book of Job. But unlike Rebellion, it's firmly set in the past.

35:11It's the first novel in which he sets the story firmly in the pre-war world in Central Europe in which he'd grown up. And it's also unusually amongst Roth's works. It's firmly set in a Jewish milieu, which is not something he did that often. So the main character, Mendel Singer, the simple man of the title, is an embodiment of the Hasidic Eastern Jews, the Ostjuden. And he's presented as a pious man, as a village teacher who lives just on the other side of the border with the Russian Empire. so just outside of the geographical limit of Galicia. And in the course of the story, he suffers misfortune after misfortune, both him personally and his family, starting with the birth of a son with disabilities, Menuhim.

36:02He then becomes alienated from his older sons and then loses them during the war. His wife, Deborah, dies and his oldest daughter, Miriam, becomes mentally ill. and the description of Miriam's sort of mental collapse and institutionalisation, writing in 1930, shortly after the same thing had happened to Friedl, is indeed, you know, very, it's a tough read. It's based on personal experience in the novel. So the novel ends with, I should say, that the other thing that haunts the character is the fact that he's abandoned the disabled son when the family moved to America, all of which results in him essentially turning his back on his Jewish identity, his faith.

36:45He rages at the God in whom he's always believed at the end of the novel. But unusually, Farood, indifferent to rebellion, he gives us a twist, a happy ending, a rather sentimental turn of events at the end. So the abandoned son, Menuhim, it turns out has miraculously recovered from his disabilities, has grown up to become a successful composer and musician, and he's on tour in America. and so the novel ends up with the two men being reunited and gives us this happy ending. Roth, I think, had some doubts about that sentiment. I was going to say, it's so unwrotly. It is very, very. It's really quite shocking.

37:21He didn't quite disown the novel but he was a bit reluctant to sort of praise it. But he was happy that it was a success because the ending was a winner for readers and as you mentioned, Marlene Dietrich, in an interview in 1931, I think, with an American film magazine, she was asked for her favourite novel And she named Job, which had just appeared in English translation. And Rort was so delighted he wrote to her to thank her. And so that's a nice little story. Helen Chambers, we've heard how he had a rather stellar career in the 1920s, certainly in the first half. But with the 1930s onwards, after the illness of his wife, his health starts to decline.

38:03He has an unreliable stream of income, no fixed abode, really, yet he remains very prolific. How does he sustain all this? Well, should we say that he left Germany in 1933 and went into exile? For obvious reasons. Because his books were being burnt. But I mean, how did he live? Well, he borrowed money. He bought, in 1927, Stefan Zweig, who was a great bestseller, major literary figure, pots of money, wrote to Josef Roth and said, I've just read Your Wandering Jews, it's wonderful. Those are his essays about the Eastern Jews, the Ostjorden. And Roth got back to him and sort of sponged off him for the rest of his life, although Zweig didn't manage to pay for all that Roth needed, although he did put him up quite often in south of France or sometimes they were in Austria, I think, sometimes they were in Ostend.

39:03But Roth, he needed the money, he got big advances, but he often didn't deliver in time. He commanded a lot of money, but he spent a lot of money and he didn't just spend it on himself. He was always giving money away, giving it away to people who were worse off than him, exiles, emigres, refugees. and he also, when he had money, he would live in smart hotels. He liked the smart hotels. He liked the Hotel Bristol in Vienna. He liked the Hotel Foyot where he ended up, well, didn't end up in Paris because, and this is part of Roth's fate, that his worlds were destroyed one after the other and this included the Hotel Foyot where he had a room which is just opposite the Jardin de Luxembourg, a fine hotel.

39:49Well, anyway, it turned out that it was not fit for purpose and it was demolished. So where he'd been living for years was demolished. Before his very eyes, he sat in the cafe across the road. But he worked. I don't know if I've answered. I mean, he drank all day and he needed to drink in order to work. And he did work at cafe tables and he needed people around him to work. He couldn't work without the people around him. Yes, so, I mean, he was drinking very heavily and nonetheless writing at the same time. I don't know about all of you, but the experience of trying to write when you've had a drink is really, I mean, for me, it just doesn't work.

40:34But he appeared to be inspired by it. Deborah, by the late 30s, he was drinking himself to death. What were the ghosts he was struggling with? Well, I mean, he was, as we said, a highly functional alcoholic, but very definitely a terminal alcoholic. And that had been clear for a long time. I mean, I sometimes wonder whether it stemmed from the war years, from the First World War, because, I mean, as we know, on both sides of the front, you know, soldiers were being plied with alcohol to make the war possible at all. I mean, that might well be part of the roots of his heavy drinking. Then later on, I think it's partly because of the lifestyle.

41:16He's having to keep deadlines. He's up late at night. He's living in hotels and bars. Drink is readily available. It's also part of the sort of journalistic camaraderie, inviting people for drinks. And then comes Friedel and the marriage and the problems and the feelings of guilt and having to earn also to support Friedel and her care. And I think that sort of underlines or cements this sort of turning to alcohol to find relief for that. And then comes National Socialism, which Roth had very early on seen coming with a clear-sightedness that's very interesting compared to others of his generation who were hoping that it wouldn't be as bad as all that.

41:57You know, it's kind of all together. It's enough to make any water and drink, perhaps. And towards the end, of course, the Nazis invade Austria. So he loses Austria. is there a sense of abandonment running through his work? I mean perhaps starting with his father. I don't want to over... As a theme in the work I think probably yes and certainly in terms of his personal life and his view of the world. Yes, I mean I think in the later years he starts to think of the old empire in near utopian terms at times And it's a way, I think, of compensating for the world that was collapsing around him. The idea that there may once have been a place, a supranational place, where national identities were somehow less important than some sort of collective identity.

42:50Because he does see nationalism as a fundamental evil. Nationalism is something he totally rejected in all its forms. He rejected Zionism as well, incidentally. He saw it as a form of nationalism. So no matter what the motivation was, he rejects nationalism. and sees it as pernicious. So two final questions for you all. But Helen, let me start with you. How appropriate is it that his final work was The Legend of the Holy Drinker? And what was that about? Was that basically him saying, this is me? Yes, and he did say as much. I mean, one's reluctant to look at biographical sort of reasons for text, but he said this.

43:35And I mean, it's the story of a tramp in Paris who was originally a coal miner in Silesia and came to Paris for work. And that's quite typical, an economic traveller, migrant, if you like. And the tramp ends up sleeping under the bridges in Paris. But one day, a well-dressed gentleman, and some people say that might have been modelled on Stefan Zweig, arrives and gives him 200 francs and says it's in gratitude at his finding conversion to the church. And the tramp takes it and says, thank you very much, I'll pay it back to you. And there are several attempts in the course of this short narrative.

44:18of, well, he drinks the money, he loses the money, people make him part with the money, and he always gets it back again. And he's always saying, I'm going to, and how he's going to pay it back is to give it to the church in Batignol where St. Thérèse is there. And she was a very modest saint with a humble life, an unshowy sort of person, but in a Catholic church. And at the very end, oh, I don't know that I want to spoil the end, but at the very end... Spoiler alert. The drunkard, who again, well, he's in a very bad state physically, but he dies and he thinks that the little saint has taken the money and he's paid it back and it's all grace has descended upon him.

45:08And he says, God, give all of us drinkers such a good and easy death. And so in the story, the man finds Grace, the drinker. But of course, Joseph Rode, in his own life, had a terrible death, did not have what he wished for himself, but he collapsed face down on the table in the cafe. He had lots of friends who didn't have money but looked after him, took him to hospital. They didn't diagnose it properly. He withdrew alcohol completely and he had terrible delirium. He had to be strapped to the bed and indeed died the very opposite kind of death from his own literary creation. Well, on that sad note, a quick fire last round, literally in half a sentence each.

46:08How well do Roth's works stand the test of time? Deborah? Surprisingly well. It's about the human cost of war and it's about individual dignity. John? Yeah, I would agree. There's something he says in one of his early Foyton articles, Going for a Walk, where he says it's only the minutiae in life that count. And it's the little details that he's captured and made permanent in his work that makes it still sort of sing today, I would say. Helen? Well, it's the human condition in bright, beautiful colours in quite short works, and I think they're wonderful. My thanks to Deborah Holmes, Helen Chambers and John Hughes.

46:51Next week, the African civilisation on the edge of the Roman Empire. That's the Garamantes. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests. And now the podcast bit where we can relax slightly. So let me, the first thing I ask is what did we miss out? Well, perhaps we could say a little bit more about Roth's own Jewishness. I mean, he had a somewhat, perhaps it's no surprise, but he had a slightly sort of contradictory sense of himself as a Jew. As Helen mentioned, he did write quite extensively about the Jewish community and the Lives of the Eastern Jews in the 1920s, and the collection of essays, The Wandering Jews, was published in 1927.

47:42But what's interesting about it, or one of the things that's interesting about it, is that he never identifies himself as a Jew. He observes the community almost as an anthropologist might, without actually mentioning that he'd grown up pretty much within that community in Galicia. As I mentioned in our main discussion, he rejected Zionism, for example. He was also quite critical of Jews who had assimilated and westernised themselves, even though he himself was very much a westernised, assimilated Jew. So it was quite contradictory. What did he say? He said he was a sort of an Eastern Jew with a Catholic brain.

48:21And there were two sides to his personality. And he did. Did he not actually at one point, if not, join the Catholic Church? He also said he was a Frenchman from the East. Yes, he had various ways of characterising himself. I mean, I might say something about his funeral. Can I say something about that? Yeah, it's a great story. So he was buried in the Cémetier Thiers, which is in the south of Paris, because nobody had enough money to put him in Per-Lachaise, where Heine was, and he really should have belonged. But at the gravesite, he was never baptised, but he went to the Catholic Church in Paris, the Austrian Catholic Church.

48:58So there was a Catholic priest officiating, and there were a lot of Eastern Jewish friends there at the gravesite. And then there was Egon Irvine Kish, the great communist, who turned up with his red communist banner and his red carnations. And then there was also a Talmudic scholar, Gottfried Stein, whom I spent a lot of time with in Paris, and he was prepared to pronounce the Kaddish, and some people wanted the Kaddish. Oh, and I've missed out the Austrian legitimist monarchist because Otto von Habsburg had sent a wreath which would have had the yellow and black ribbons on it because he wanted to restore the monarchy and he actually had fairly concrete plans to do that before things got really bad.

49:45So there were monarchist, communist, Eastern Jews and Catholics at the graveside and they were kind of, I mean, it nearly came to ugly scenes and then the chap that was going to say Kaddish was with his friend Soma Morgenstern and also an Eastern Jew. And they said, no, we won't do this here now. We'll just let it be. How dedicated was he to the Habsburg cause? He was very dedicated to the Habsburg cause and he met Otto von Habsburg, who was the heir to the throne that had kind of gone. He met him in his court in exile in Belgium and he got together with these Austrian legitimists and they had a plan to smuggle Otto von Habsburg back into Vienna in a coffin, and they had to find a dead Austrian in order to do that.

50:36And Roth thought, well, in any case, I'm going to Vienna to talk to, well, he wanted to talk to Schuschnick, who was head of the government at the time. The Austrian fascist dictator, the dictator of Austro-fascism. It was after the death of... Schuschnick was a chance before 30. It was just before the Anschluss. Yeah, Shushnik is in charge. Shushnik's in charge. But was there already a gall lighter there? No, no, no. But that was just after. That comes after. So he went in just before the Anschluss and wanted to talk to Shushnik and say, we'll get Otto von Habsburg back and this is how we're going to do it.

51:19And he had the blessing of the Habsburg monarchists. And he went to Vienna, which was a very dangerous thing for him to do. and he never got to see the highest instance. He did get to see a chief of police, I think, and the chief of police said, you better get out of here fast. And he did get out of here fast, but he was very hands-on. I mean, he wanted to... And he thought the reason he wanted to do this was he could see this as the only solution to getting rid of the Nazis. Sounds like a pretty harebrained scheme, though. Harebrained is indeed the word for it. Not entirely realistic. One of the things that really interests me is the parallels between Stefan Zweig and Josef Roth.

52:04So they sort of run alongside each other. They're very aware of each other. As you said, Zweig gave Roth quite a lot of money. But who is the better writer? Well, Josef Roth is definitely the better writer. I think there's no dispute. Well, I don't know. You might want to dispute with me. Stefan Zweig also agreed that Rort was the better writer. He always was quite willing to admit. I think the differences are very interesting. I think it's a very fruitful comparison for the literature of the time. One of the things that Zweig does that Rort doesn't, as we said, is that Zweig has heroes. Zweig has goodies and baddies and Zweig has heroes and he hero-worships.

52:47And that's not something that Rort does at all. Rort is much, much more... he's ironic in a way that Stefan Zweig seemingly can't or doesn't want to achieve. And that, of course, made Zweig a best-selling author in a way which, well, Rott did sell books, but he never earned the big books like Stefan Zweig. Rott's timing was unfortunate, though, wasn't it? I mean, in a typically kind of Rottian fashion, it's to do with chance and contingency, and Radetskymarsch could have been an immense success, but it came out just before the National Socialists took over, was it? In fact, it was published in 1932.

53:25Just at the point the royalties were coming in, in early 1933, Hitler's already taken over, Hort's in Paris in exile, and he never really seized the money that he was due. And he was one of those few people. I think his first novel, Spinnen Netz... The Spider's Web. The spider's web actually engages with Hitler himself, even though this is in 1923, 1924. 1923. Extraordinary prescience. Yes, it came out just before the Hitler Putsch, and it's a novel about... The Beer Hall Putsch. The Beer Hall Putsch, that's right, when Hitler was put in prison, and they actually finished publishing the last part of it in the newspaper days before that happened.

54:15And in Roth's novel, there's a terrorist attempt planned so that he saw very clearly what was going on from a very early time. I think it's the novel with the first explicit reference to Hitler. There isn't another work of literary fiction, an earlier work of literary fiction that names Hitler. Deborah, tell us a bit about the coffeehouse culture that we skipped over because he did spend a lot of time. Which, to be fair, he did, but many, many other newspaper men and women of the time did. You know, it was a lot... They still do in my... Yes, yes, yes, let's put that in a different tense. Yeah, but it was very much, it's partly to do with the problems of the time.

55:03It was difficult to heat your house at home, you know, in the immediate post-war period. it was a place to go where you could be sure of being warm enough to sort of move a pen on paper and it was also where you could meet and mix and keep up to date and have all of the daily newspapers at your disposal because a Viennese coffee house also today typically has a fine array of newspapers international, national newspapers And I think it's worth pointing out that in 1918-1919 Vienna was in a terrible state Vienna was literally starving There was a survey done by a children's doctor at the time that over 90 % of Viennese children were suffering malnutrition after World War I.

55:45yeah yeah i mean the same a lot of the same applies to berlin of course where he continues the same habits and the coffee houses and the bars were also places to network um so there were good career reasons for spending time you know a place like the romannisches café in berlin where he was an habitual customer it was the place to be seen it was well known that the prominent people there would prominent people would be there and so it wasn't just a place to work it It was a place to see and be seen. And, yeah, Kish was often there. And a place where someone was going to pick you up off the floor if you fell off your stool in a drunken stupor.

56:22And you mentioned that Radetsky March was unique, but he did then write a sequel. He did. The Emperor's Tomb. Yeah, 1938. What was... Why did he do that? Well, I think he did it, you know, for commercial reasons. He wanted to build on the success of Radetsky March. But after 1933, he writes quite a lot of novels, novellas, but in difficult circumstances. Not only is his lifestyle, you know, working against him, but he's working to tight deadlines. He's never quite sure, you know, where, you know, he's working with different publishing houses, all based in exile now, many of them in the Netherlands.

57:02And he's desperate, really, to just make ends meet. So the sequel, The Emperor's Tomb, Die Kapuzinogruft, it follows a sort of separate branch of the von Trotter family and tries to bring the story up to the point of the Anschluss of Austria to Nazi Germany in 1938. And it's an interesting read, and anyone that's enjoyed Radetzky Marsh should probably read it. But it isn't the same. It isn't of the same quality. It's written in the first person as well, isn't it? Which is not so common amongst his novels. He sort of rushed it as well in 1938. As events were happening in Austria, he thought, I'd better get this out quickly as well.

57:43And I think it's looked to by students of German as a kind of set text because it's got all this history in, but actually he wrote a far better novel in 1937 called Weights and Measures in English, which picks up a lot of the characters from Radetzky Marsh and indeed Mendelsinger from Heob pops up in it as well. At least the name does. And it's a story about a move from west to east and an inspector of weights and measures, an honest man who's been forced to leave the army and get out of his uniform by his wife and he's lost when he gets out of his uniform. And he has a kind of slide into, well, maybe it's sin and maybe it's grace.

58:31It's a bit hard to tell. but it's a beautiful novel that picks up a lot of his other themes and evokes the landscape back in the East again and we haven't mentioned the larks in the sky and the frogs in the swamps and the crickets chirping but he opens up this huge space that's full of life and full of animals and human beings responding to them but I would recommend Weights and Measures as a better composed novel than the Emperor's Tomb, which is historically perhaps more interesting. So, well, thank you very much. I think not only are we going to be offered tea, but Martha baked me a lemon drizzle cake for my birthday.

59:21And so we also have exceptionally lemon drizzle cake. Simon, to go with... Tea or coffee? Tea, please. I'll have a coffee, please. Coffee, please. Tea, please. In Our Time with Misha Glennie is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production. If you've got a scrolling problem, then this is the podcast for you. It's called Top Comment with me, Matt Shea. And me, Marianna Spring. We both investigate social media for a living. Whether it's disinformation, conspiracy theories, internet culture, memes. We're going to be getting behind the stuff that is popping up on your feed on this podcast.

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