conclusion

WALTER BENJAMIN AND JOSEPH ROTH

“[T]hen I learned that he who  ghts against the night must move its deepest darkness so that it gives out its light.” Benjamin to Herbert Belmore, 1916

On May 27, 1939, the Galician-Austrian author Joseph Roth (1894–1939) col- lapsed and died in a house for the poor in Paris after years of money prob- lems and alcohol abuse. Having left his adopted home-country Germany immediately after the Nazi’s rose to power in 1933, Roth spent the last years of his life in a manner not unlike that of the downtrodden and outcasts that he had so often sympathized with in his novels and short stories. In a ight without end, Roth was moving from hotel to hotel, from bar to bar, and witnessed the world prepare for one of the most horrible episodes in its history, how the war-mongers were democratically elected over those who continued to  ght for peace and how, in his own words, the European mind was “capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination.”1 Among Roth’s papers was found an invitation letter from the American PEN Club, devoted to granting intellectuals a way out of the turmoil that was Europe in those days and a safe entrance into the United States. As Michael Hofmann puts it, however, it is “tantalizing but ultimately impossible to imagine him taking ship to the New World, and continuing to live and to write: His world was the old one, and he’d used it all up.”2 Benjamin’s fate was in many ways similar to Roth’s. Carrying the papers that should have gotten him safely across the border with Spain and thus onwards to the United States, Benjamin and his fellow travellers were halted for unclear reasons by the authorities. Exhausted by months of physical and mental strain, Benjamin took his own life on September 27, 1940, sixteen months to the day after Roth’s death. Like Roth, he had spent the last

1 Joseph Roth, “The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind.” What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920–1933, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Granta Books, 2003), 207. 2 Michael Hofmann, “About the Author.” in Roth, What I Saw, 226. 152 conclusion years of his life in exile in Paris and, like Roth, he had grown increasingly despairing about the world-political situation, writing in the mid-thirties that “[h]umankind, which once, in Homer, was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, has now become one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.”3 In 1927, in a short book with the title The Wandering Jews, Roth had already analysed the worrisome situation of the Jews in Europe. Visiting their communities throughout the former Austrian-Hungarian Empire, Roth travelled to both the shtetls in the East and the ghettos in the West, recognized the poor conditions in which they lived their lives and foresaw the tragedy that was yet to come: “There is a historical feeling, based on plentiful experience, that the Jews will be the  rst victims in the event of a bloodbath.”4 If the main di culty of the Jews in Eastern Europe was that they had isolated themselves in their villages and thus missed the train of modernity and progress that could have made their existence less cumber- some, the dilemma of the Jews who emigrated to Western Europe was that they adjusted all too gladly to the life of the big city, frequently having to pay for the discovery of a new abode with the loss of their homeland and original culture. Those Jews who went to live in the West, that is to say, often ended up in the outskirts of society and were usually not able to bene t from the luxury of the modern world. As artisans and shopkeepers, peddlers and hawkers, instalment sellers and money-changers, they were invariably the  rst to be victimized by the ination of European currency and the rise of anti-Semitism. What Roth discovered to have remained intact in the midst of these pitiable conditions, however, is the quiet sense of determination that marks those people who manage to maintain a safe distance from the chaos that surrounds them because they keep their gaze open to the beyond. The stories that Roth brought back from his own wanderings among the Jews are, though painful and heavy with sufering, not at all devoid of both longing for salvation and hope that it will come at some point and thus testify to what he has elsewhere called ‘the blessing of the eternal Jew’ [der Segen des ewigen Juden]. In Roth’s mind, “[e]very Jew erects borders around himself. It would be a shame to give them up. Because however great the

3 SW: 4, 270. 4 Joseph Roth, The Wandering Jews, trans. Michael Hofmann (London: Granta Books, 2001), 12.