Joseph Roth (1894-1939) and the Dilemma of Jewish Anchorage
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Department of History and Civilization Against the Great: Joseph Roth (1894-1939) and the Dilemma of Jewish Anchorage Ilse Josepha Maria Lazaroms Thesis submitted for assessment with a view to obtaining the degree of Doctor of History and Civilization of the European University Institute Florence, 1 October 2010 EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE Department of History and Civilization Against the Great: Joseph Roth (1894-1939) and the Dilemma of Jewish Anchorage Ilse Josepha Maria Lazaroms Examining Board: Prof. Martin van Gelderen, Supervisor, European University Institute Prof. Antony Molho, European University Institute Prof. Sander L. Gilman, Emory University Prof. Raphael Gross, Frankfurt am Main / Leo Baeck Institute London © 2010, Ilse Josepha Maria Lazaroms No part of this thesis may be copied, reproduced or transmitted without prior permission of the author Table of Contents Table of Contents i Acknowledgements iii Chapter I The Lives of Man. Joseph Roth 1894-1939 Introduction & Biographical Sketch 1 Historiography 4 Main Questions 11 Responses to Catastrophe. Outline of the Thesis 15 Chapter II A Time Divided against Itself. Debates, Methods, Sources Introduction 19 Debates 20 Methods 25 Note on (Auto)Biography 33 Sources 35 Chapter III Opening up the Crypt. Nostalgia, Retrospective Belonging and the Present Introduction 43 Nostalgia, Historical Discontinuity, and the Critical Eye 45 1918 49 Vienna: a Cardboard Décor 52 Identities and Diasporas 55 The Emperor’s Tomb (1938) 61 Conclusion 69 Chapter IV The Lamentations of an “Old Jew.” Suffering and Madness Introduction 71 Exemplary Sufferers: Jews, Artists, and Righteous Men 73 Job (1930): the Creation of Mendel Singer 76 “An old Jew with a heavy heart.” Roth’s Lamentations 80 Narratives of Guilt 85 Madness 89 Justice 95 Conclusion 100 i Chapter V “All Roads lead to Brody.” Intellectual Heritage and Jewish Tradition Introduction 103 Jewish Intellectuals in Interwar Europe 105 Marginality, Money, and Embodied Observation 112 The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind (1933) 118 Brody 122 Conclusion 130 Chapter VI Prophecies of Unrest. Europe in the Claws of the Antichrist Introduction 133 The Ideological Limits of Europe 135 The Concept of Prophecy 140 The Antichrist (1934) 143 Paris: or the Quest for Universal European Values 149 God and the Jews 154 Autobiography and Contemporary Echoes 158 Conclusion 162 Chapter VII Speaking from a Jewish Void. Exilic Performance and Masquerade as Strategies of Resistance Introduction 165 The Quest for Exilic Belonging 167 Exile before Exile: pre-1933 Homelessness 169 The Logic of Itinerancy: Wandering as a Moral Imperative 172 “Words Endowed with Magic.” The Question of Linguistic Belonging 180 Out of the Void? The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1940) 188 Conclusion 193 Conclusion 195 Bibliography 199 Appendix: Joseph Roth Bibliography 215 ii Acknowledgements True to the nomadic fashion in which this thesis was written, I would like to thank my professors, colleagues, friends and family following the cities in which I have lived, worked, and resided during these last four years. Florence: I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Martin van Gelderen, for his critical comments and his ongoing encouragement and advice. I thank Professor Antony Molho for his wisdom and genuine interest in this project. Thank you, too, to Niki Koniordos, for being a rock in the midst of academic practicalities. Dr. Karin Tilmans, thank you for our colourful conversations in the Fiesole hillside. Also, I am grateful to Professor Raphael Gross and Professor Sander L. Gilman for agreeing to be my jury members; it is an honour. Finally, among the many people and characters that filled my days at the EUI, I would like to thank especially Tijl Vanneste, Florian Dennig, Alexander Lukas Krüger, Marta Grzechnik, Jorrit Rijpma, and Henning Trüper, who have become my friends. My most wondrous thank you to Admir Skodo, for whom I am, for once, at a loss for words. Budapest: I am very grateful to the History Department at Central European University for taking me in as a doctoral guest scholar for longer than the program allowed, and for making me part of an academic community in which I feel much at home. Professor Michael L. Miller, thank you for your advice, time and support. In Budapest, I found a life that has become very precious to me – charming, colourful, absurd and creative – which would not have been possible without the presence, laughter and experience of my friends Mare van den Eeden, Emily Gioielli, Ilona Dénes and Caroline Marburger. Thank you to my neighbour Gergely Szalai, and to Giles McMillan and Kalki Hellenberg for giving me my beautiful bohemian home in the VIII district. And finally, Café Eckermann, where I spent long days writing to the sound of Hungarian and coffee cup clatter. The café lasted almost as long as my PhD; sadly, it closed down at the end of June 2010. iii Vienna: I am very happy I got to know Dr. Heinz Lunzer and Victoria Lunzer- Talos, at the Dokumentationsstelle für Neure Österreichische Literatur, who welcomed me most warmly into their own highly knowledgeable and fascinating Joseph Roth world, and who were there for advice, references, stories and books. Manchester: Professor Bertrand Taithe and the editors of the European Review of History , for our meetings in the world of publishing and for making me a better editor. Paris: Dr. Stéphane Pesnel for inviting me to speak at the conference Joseph Roth en exil à Paris 1933-1939 at Musée d’art et d’histoire du Judaïsme and the École Normale Superieure at the Sorbonne in September 2009. Thank you, too, to Els Snick for her friendship and support in getting my article about Roth’s The Antichrist translated into German and published. London: Peter Owen Publishers for sending me the manuscript of the English translation of Der Antichrist before it was published, so that I could use it in this thesis. New York: Dr. Frank Mecklenburg and the archivists of the Leo Baeck Institute for supporting my research there during two very hot weeks in June 2008. Oslo: Thank you to my best friends Carsten Aniksdal and Julia Marie Doke, whose words across the seas brightened my days many times. Thank you. Utrecht, Gouda and Haarlem: A heartfelt thank you to my father, Louis Lazaroms, my mother, José Kaptein, and my sister, Maud Lazaroms, for giving me a home away from home, love across borders and unending support in the grand as well as the small matters of life. Corrie Kaptein, thank you for visiting me in all the cities I have lived. Oslo and beyond: My deepest gratitude and love to Thomas Hansen, who showed me that sometimes you have to be “your own biggest fan” in order to get your work out there, that being close to the fire is the core of creation, and that there is a melody to everything. Thank you, Thomas, for giving me the music. Budapest, September 2010 iv I The Lives of Man. Joseph Roth 1894-1939 It’s a truism that men can suffer from the burden of their time as easily as from their own failure; or they may […] suffer from the convergence of the two. Fritz Stern 1 Introduction & Biographical Sketch Joseph Roth possessed a sharply observant eye which allowed him to clearly read the signs of his times – those divided years of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe – a quality that has earned him the dubious epitaph “prophet”; a drunken prophet, as Europe’s demise into another world war went hand in hand with his own physical decline through alcoholism. Roth, his black coat draped around his shoulders, newspaper under his arm, cigarette and drink in hand while slowly moving from one hotel to another, was a border crosser, a train traveller, an observer and a hotel patriot. 2 He was a literary exile who chose an itinerant existence; a highly prolific journalist and novelist who entertained friends and acquaintances at his café table in Paris and who drank himself to death at the early age of 44. Often noted for his cosmopolitan flair, Roth received extraordinarily high book advances but spent most of his time in a perpetual financial worry; a man who, in line with his skilled journalistic eye for detail, had a great passion for the miniature universe of watches and clocks, a predilection mirrored in his miniscule and delicate handwriting. Roth was also an East European Jew from Galicia; uprooted and assimilated but not quite comfortable with shedding all his Jewish markers. In 1894, the year of his birth – on 2 September – the small town of Brody was on the easternmost edge of the Austro- Hungarian Empire and populated by Jews, Poles, Ukrainians and Russians; now it is part of the Ukraine. It was also the year of the Dreyfus affair, and the decade during which organised political antisemitism reached a peak in Austria and Germany; before, indeed, it 1 Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair. A Study in the Rise of Germanic Ideology . Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1961, p. 276. 2 Michael Hofmann once described Roth as a ‘newspaperman’, referring both to his profession as a journalist or writer of feuilletons and to the fact that newspapers are almost always present in pictures of Roth: either he is reading one, carrying one under his arm, or it is lying on the café table in front of him. 1 became an ideology. Roth’s wanderings started early on in life. He grew up in his uncle’s and grandfather’s house with his mother; his father, a grain merchant, had derailed into madness on one of his trips to Germany and disappeared into the care of a miracle rabbi while his wife was pregnant; Roth never knew his father.