Rebellion: A Novel

Introduction

WITH THE APPEARANCE of Rebellion, we now have all of Joseph Roth’s completed novels, fifteen of them, in English translation, sixty years after his death. It has taken a dozen translators and a score of publishing houses, in Britain and America, but the intermittent, idealistic, and determined enterprise is complete, and a classic accolade has been assembled for a classic writer. One might think of a relay race—one in which the baton is neglected for the best part of forty years, between the thirties and the seventies—or the efforts of a willing, if amateurish, team of skittles players. Briefly atop this heap of literary coral, I feel a modicum of triumph, a degree of shame, and a strong sense of being at a loss. Und dann? Und dann? as my father would sometimes say, What next? What next?

REBELLION WAS Joseph Roth’s third novel. The first was The Spider’s Web, published in serial form in the Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers’ Newspaper) in 1923, but never as a book, and later repudiated by Roth. The second was Hotel Savoy, serialized in the Frankfurter Zeitung—for which Roth began to write in 1923, and which was to be his principal employer for most of his life—and published in 1924 by Die Schmiede (the Smithy), a renowned, if short-lived house in Berlin, that also brought out Kafka and Proust in the same series. Rebellion (Die Rebellion) was serialized in the German Socialist newspaper Vorwärts (Forward), and published by Die Schmiede in the same year, 1924. These three books make up Roth’s early period.

Over the next two or three years, his life and opinions changed profoundly. He wrote more and more for the bourgeois Frankfurter, and less and less for the left-wing papers to which he had first gravitated as a very young man after the war. He quickly became one of the star journalists of the period, making the Frankfurter’s name almost as much as it made his. In 1925, he was given the heady job of Paris correspondent (it was soon taken away again, but it didn’t matter, as Roth stayed on in France, and was only an occasional visitor to Germany from that time). In 1926, like many Western writers, he went to the Soviet Union, where he spent a disillusioning few months. Walter Benjamin, who also wrote for the Frankfurter, and was a little in awe of Roth, as well as a little disapproving, secured an audience with him in Moscow. It took place late one night in Roth’s hotel room, full of unobtainables to eat and drink, and Benjamin came away with the impression—overstated, but perhaps only a little—that Roth had gone to the Soviet Union a convinced Communist and was leaving it a Royalist!

Certainly, the little spate of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) novels that Roth published next—Flight Without End, Zipper and His Father, Right and Left—are already recognizably different books, moving away from politics and political action where the early books were going toward it, and resigned where the early books were up in arms. Thereafter, Roth forsook his documentary manner and his interest in contemporary themes, and discovered the past, his own and that of Austria, in what are often advertised as his great books, Job (1930) and The Radetzky March (1932), and in the string of exquisite and sad novels that he wrote in his brief but astonishingly fertile period in exile. He died in Paris on May 27, 1939.

EARLY ROTH is an unexpectedly opposite commodity. The way we think of him—largely conditioned by what he became later—is already sufficiently paradoxical and crowded (the self-styled Frenchman from the East, the Jewish Catholic, the onetime pacifist with a cavalry officer’s bearing, the newspaperman and novelist for posterity, the hardworking drinker, etc., etc.) without the addition of yet another facet: Roth the bleeding heart Socialist, red Roth, der rote Roth, his sometime early nom de plume. It is, admittedly, a bigger factor in his journalism and his other writing than it is in his novels, but one still can’t read the early books without being aware that their author was a man of certain preoccupations, beliefs, and—to put it no higher—hopes.

The Spider’s Web is set among the bigots, spies, and terrorist militias of Weimar. The hotel in Hotel Savoy has a strangely dual function as a representation of capitalism and a wonderfully atmospheric internment camp for soldiers returning from the war. And Rebellion, in its classical, Brechtian way, charts one man’s fall and another’s rise in the yeasty, nervy postwar atmosphere.

While none of the three novels could be described as agitprop, all of them portray the disillusionment of their heroes with a society for which they had risked their lives and shed their blood. For this is war, Roth wrote, we know it is, we, the sworn experts in battlefields straightaway sensed that we have come home from a small battlefield to a great one. Over time and many books, Roth’s preoccupation shifted or clarified from social justice to fate. In Rebellion, a squared circle, both are present, the one still, the other already. In a fine, no doubt sneering phrase of Walter Benjamin’s (applied not to Roth, but to Erich Kästner), the book is informed with a melancholy of the Left, linke Melancholie: a condition as fanciful and illogical as the unicorn, but then, what could be more like Roth?

Where Rebellion scores over its two predecessors is in its ferocious concentration on a single destiny. The earlier books are marked by a charming inattentiveness that was to beset Roth in many of his novels: a major new character is belatedly introduced, and practically steals the book from under the hero’s nose; such crucial things as lottery tickets, American billionaires, and dancers by the name of Stasia are all simply left dangling while the author sets off in pursuit of new prey. Early Roth—or that side of Roth—is like a manic juggler, picking up characters, incidents, objects, keeping them in the air with speed and dexterity, then distractedly letting them go as he stoops to collect different ones. This doesn’t happen in Rebellion. There is a brusque and initially disorientating switch at the beginning of chapter 7—you think a piece of a different book has got into the one you’re reading!—but that turns out to be merely the lead into what Roth’s biographer, David Bronsen, considers one of the best crux/catastrophes in the whole of the oeuvre. No, throughout Rebellion, Roth is intent on the downward path of Andreas Pum, the encounter with Herr Arnold, the equivalent rise of Andreas’s friend Willi, and his belated coming-to-consciousness as a rebel. But even here, in this diagrammatically simple story, Roth displays his ability to stretch the boundaries of his novel; in a couple of places, when Andreas becomes habituated to the darkness of his cell, and when he replays the images of his distant childhood and his work as a night watchman, it’s as though Roth makes the book go to sleep for a while, dream vividly, and wake up refreshed! The sudden breaks in tempo and level seem to give it a depth of reality that at other moments it would appear to scorn. They lend credibility, too, to the otherwise inexplicable aging of Andreas in the course of a six-week jail sentence.

This is typical of the way Rebellion manages to keep a slight edge over the typical products of the period, while seeming to resemble them entirely. One expects, maybe, from the German twenties, Roth’s Grosz-like caricatures of the lady on the tram, or the police officer at his desk; the wide array of style and diction; the switches of tense, the O Mensch addresses to the character, and the first-person plural meditations. From their midst, as by a miracle, they suddenly produced a policeman is like a moment out of a Chaplin film, while the idea of a character’s descent to the level of toilet attendant actually is the story of Fritz Murnau’s film The Last Man, which came out in the same year as Rebellion and starred one of the silent cinema’s great masters of pathos, Emil Jannings. But what is unexpected and distinctive and ‘Rothian’ in Rebellion is the lyrical cynicism with which Herr Arnold is described in chapter 7; the way that, purely through suffering, the character of Andreas Pum deepens into a third dimension; and the shocks of irony and poetry that accompany the story, in the breathtaking savagery, say, of the sentence, It may be said that that evening she was completely happy, or the pathetic resonance of the image: On Andreas’s little dish, everything was all mixed up, and a large bone stuck out of the mess like a broken rooftree from the ruins of a house.

Ingeborg Sültemeyer, the critic who has done the most to—quite literally—discover and habilitate early Roth, makes the clever point that to Andreas in Rebellion, God and State occupy reversed positions: there is something like a business contract with God, while the State is the object of faith and worship—hence Andreas’s unexpected word, heathens, for those veterans who, unlike himself, are dissatisfied and rebellious. The relationship with this deity and the great, Job-like final scene seem to be freighted with more than the misprision of a purely secular authority.

While there is no suggestion that Andreas is actually a Jew— and indeed, the casually anti-Semitic aspersion of the old man on the tram would seem to rule it out—critics have pointed out that his intimate and vexed and accusing relationship with his God is the same as, and is perhaps modeled on, that of Eastern Jews with theirs. It is this unexpected congruency that lends support to James Wood’s interesting contention that all of [Roth’s] self-defeating heroes, even if gentile, are ultimately Jewish.

Here, anyway, in its dealing with the extremity of a man’s life and his dealings with the Almighty, however constituted, Rebellion seems to look forward to The Legend of the Holy Drinker, the charmed tale that Roth completed in the weeks before his own death in 1939. It is uncanny what the two books have in common: a hero named Andreas, an unexpected reflection in a mirror, a barbershop, parrots, suits, money (coins in Rebellion, paper in the Holy Drinker), God, an individual’s destiny in a group of people similarly placed, church, a woman, prison, friendship, policemen, documents, wallets, a little girl (here Anni, there Therese), a dying confusion. It’s as though the same ingredients have been recombined to create two completely different dishes. If I may leave the reader of Rebellion with a suggestion, it is that he or she might care to go on and read The Legend of the Holy Drinker and catch a prismatically different writer to try and reconcile with der rote Roth, and briefly recapitulate a remarkable oeuvre. Alternatively, of course, he or she might read the whole of that oeuvre, now that it is possible to do