A Common Reader: Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters: 1925 - 1927

A Common Reader: Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters: 1925 - 1927
Excerpt:
Michael Hoffman makes the observation that Roth “in those days was like an open knife, a mixture of prophet, revolutionary, and sociopath”. The bluntness he exhibits with his friends shows an honesty that often wanders into just being a jerk. Major topics recurring throughout these letters include
• the uncertainty of his newspaper job and his feeling of not being appreciated (not to mention the constant lack of money),
• the deterioration of German life on all fronts, although he doesn’t always feel he belongs in France,
• his assignment in Moscow,
• the care and sickness of his wife, and
• political and social movements (the percentage of names he mentions that end up becoming exiles is depressing).
...
But the firm persists in thinking of Roth as a sort of trivial chatterbox that a great newspaper can just about run to. Wrong. I don’t write “witty glosses.” I paint the portrait of the age. That ought to be the job of the great newspaper. I’m a journalist, not a reporter; I’m an author, not a leader writer. …
Spain is journalistically uninteresting. Italy is interesting, Fascism less so. I take a different position on Fascism than the newspaper. I don’t like it, but I know that one Hindenburg is worse than ten Mussolinis. We in Germany should watch our Reichswehr, our Mr. Gessler, our generals, our famous compensation program to landowners. We don’t have the right to attack a Fascist dictatorship while we ourselves are living in a far worse, secret dictatorship, complete with Fememorde[“an antrhopoligical label from the Dark ages for these political killings that appear in a list of shameful manifestation in the Weimar Republic”], paramilitary marches, murderous judges, and hangmen attorneys. My conscience would never allow me, as an oppressed German, to tell the world about oppression in Italy. It would be a rather facile bravery to report behind Mussolini’s back, and keep my head down in my homeland, and go on subsidizing the thugs of the Black Reichswehr with my taxes. …
There is so much going on in Russia, one doesn’t have to write about the Communist terror. The presence of so much new life springing up from the ruins will give me a lot of unpolitical material.....