This selection of Joseph Roth’s non-fiction, previously unpublished in English and translated with his usual vigour and skill by the poet Michael Hofmann, is a generous introduction to Roth’s fugitive body of work. The exile par excellence, “Roth was equal parts novelist and journalist,” Hofmann writes in his preface. “He wrote himself a perfect dumbbell.”
The question for anyone who has read Roth’s letters, is how on earth he managed to keep that dumbbell aloft for as long as he did. Beset by terrible financial problems and responsible for his psychologically troubled wife’s medical care, Roth’s life was a whirlwind of last-minute deadlines, unashamed begging letters, and blistering bust-ups with publishers, fellow authors and a series of long-suffering newspaper editors. And Roth was above all a newspaper-man, with a production rate for a variety of German-language journals that must have seen him writing at least an article a day for twenty years. His favoured form was the very European feuilleton, a combination of place- or character-sketch with light literary or political criticism, of no more than a page or so. The Hotel Years gathers together work from 1919 to 1939, from his first post-war forays into journalism, up to the year of his suicide. Organised part-geographically and part-thematically, these essays and sketches provide one of the most spirited and tonally accurate portraits of interwar Europe available, a vanished although eerily proximate time of desperate cynicism and hysterical dictatorship. This was a continent utterly shaken by the trauma of the war gone by, and living in dread of the war that was about to happen; to us a quaint world of concierges and commercial hotels, of trams and porters and platform tickets, but also a world where grotesque strongmen like Mussolini and Ahmed Zogu (later King Zog I of Albania) could seize power practically unopposed.
Wandering through this battered continent are the exiles and the dispossessed, from down on their luck White Russian counts to the polyglot hotel staff amongst whom Roth spent so much of his time. His pen-portraits of these tragicomic characters, the flotsam and jetsam of interwar Europe, are never less than respectful though; the hotel receptionist, who receives instructions “as though he were hearing a petition”, or the German train conductor in whose illicit eating of some lost-property chocolates Roth can discern the whole collapse of the German character in the face of economic hardship. Written in a penetrating third-person, with a perspective that sees through all their defensive layers, Roth in these sketches is still too self-aware not to count himself implicitly amongst them.
Roth travelled widely in the employ of his newspapers, and the sketches of Germany, Austria, Italy and Albania collected here are a devastating, empathetic portrait of a continent drowning under the tide of a coarse and aggressive nationalism. In the Albanian sketches, perhaps the only pieces where Roth seems to have got carried away by a need to provide local colour, the Zogu dictatorship is seen as pitiful and ridiculous, but no less dangerous for that. With irony and controlled rage, he powerfully indicts the oppression of life in Mussolini’s Italy, where Fascist surveillance laws are sufficient to “completely destroy” the freedoms of the individual citizen. His real ire is reserved of course for Nazi Germany, and it was with uncanny prescience that he seemed to recognise the dangers from Nazism when it was still mostly a bierstube street gang.
There was a deeper source for Roth’s hatred of nationalism than the distaste of the fastidious liberal-humanist. A former subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Roth watched his homeland, “the only one I ever knew”, collapse in the face of military defeat and nationalist revolution. Consciously over-valorising the past, his essay on the long-lived Emperor Franz Joseph is an elegy for a hierarchical structure that was capacious enough to be a kind of freedom; from being a citizen of a multiethnic, multinational empire, he became just another wanderer amongst a sea of isolated, mutually antagonistic statelets. In his sketch of the former Austro-Hungarian city of Bruck-Kiralyhida, now separated into Bruck and Kiralyhida, the loss of the hyphen is for Roth the loss of “a bridge”, which made all the other differences between them seem negligible.
It’s tempting to see Roth as a tragic figure, but he was a humane and generous writer, who wrote without illusions. Expertly curated by Michael Hofmann, The Hotel Years is a wonderfully illustrative example of that humanity and generosity, and of that penetrating insight.
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