On the End of the World - Softcover

Roth, Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1782274766 ISBN 13: 9781782274766

Publisher: Pushkin Press, 2019

Synopsis

In January 1933, on the very day Hitler seized power in Germany, Joseph Roth fled to Paris. There, in what he called the 'hour before the end of the world', he wrote a series of articles. The end he foresaw would soon come to pass in the full horror of Hitler's barbarism, the Second World War and most crucially for Roth, the final irreversible destruction of a pan-European consciousness. Incisive and ironic, the writing evokes Roth's bitterness, frustration and morbid despair at the coming annihilation of the free world while displaying his great nostalgia for the Habsburg Empire into which he was born and his ingrained fear of nationalism in any form.

About this title

About the Author

Will Stone, born 1966, is a poet, essayist and literary translator. His first poetry collection Glaciation (Salt, 2007), won the international Glen Dimplex Award for poetry in 2008. Shearsman Books has re-published his subsequent critically appraised collections. Will's poetry translations include To the Silenced - Selected Poems of Georg Trakl (Arc, 2005) Emile Verhaeren Poems (Arc, 2013), Georges Rodenbach Poems (Arc, 2017) and Friedrich Hölderlin's Life Poetry and Madness by Wilhelm Waiblinger (2018). Pushkin Press published his translation of Montaigne by Stefan Zweig in 2015, Messages from a Lost World - Europe on the Brink by Stefan Zweig in 2016 and The Art of the City - Rome, Florence, Venice by Georg Simmel in September 2018. Encounters and Destinies - A Farewell to Europe by Stefan Zweig and Surrender to Night - Collected Poems of Georg Trakl will be published in 2019. Will has contributed poems, translations, essays and reviews to a range of publications including The London Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator, Apollo Magazine, the RA Magazine, The White Review, Poetry Review and Agenda.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

On the End of the World

By Joseph Roth, Will Stone

Pushkin Press

Copyright © 2019 Joseph Roth
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78227-476-6

Contents

Introduction, vii, 
The Dream of a Carnival Night, 3, 
Exchange of Children, 6, 
The Death of German Literature, 9, 
The Third Reich – Agency of Hell on Earth, 12, 
National Pyromania, 15, 
God in Germany, 18, 
In Lieu of an Article, 20, 
Pitiless Combat, 24, 
Europe Is Only Possible Without the Third, 
Reich, 26, 
The Myth of the German Soul, 29, 
Requiem Mass, 33, 
Orator of Apocalypse, 36, 
Letter to a Governor, 41, 
The Vienna Prater, 43, 
The Inexpressible, 46, 
The Muzzling of German Writers, 49, 
Rest While Viewing the Demolition, 51, 
When Heroes Tremble, 54, 
In the Bistro after Midnight, 57, 
Proof of Ancestry in the Isolation Cell, 61, 
Exhibition, 64, 
A Truly Free City, 67, 
Our Homeland, our Epoch, 69, 
The Fall of Austria, 72, 
The Execution of Austria, 73, 
From the Black and Yellow Journal – 12 – 13th March 1939, 78, 
Joseph Roth in Paris – A Seasonal Chronology (1933–39), 81, 
Notes, 93, 
Biographical notes, 101, 

CHAPTER 1

The Dream of a Carnival Night

I deny the reality of the significant event which marked Germany so solemnly this week: I deny the reality of Hitler's trial.

Such events should be restored to the domain of metaphysics, something quite at home in Munich. The point in the year when this purportedly genuine trial unfolds is most fitting from my point of view. In the midst of the carnival a court assembles, it bows respectfully to the accused, to those who are blowing kisses to women in the courtroom; here justice has migrated into the barracks, here it's the accused who are doing the accusing, barbed hedgehog barriers mount a menacing guard before the entrance of the garrison court, sixty well-sharpened pencils on a mission to inform the public are poised and it is forbidden for the poor hawkers to sell braces anywhere near the public gallery. It is necessary to be blind or, what amounts to the same, to be a member of the guileless German public, in order not to notice the coexisting phenomena on show here, to not notice that this is no 'political trial' taking place here in Munich, but the dream of a carnival night.

Consequently, I remove any traces of dignity from the event this week and cast it from the elevated regions of the lofty editorial, into the nether world at 'street level'. It is not political life on show here, but spiritual decadence. This is no audience, but a spirit seance. It has taken a wrong turn and descended from the faculty of the professor of the Occult, Schrenck-Notzing, into the ministry of Emminger. I don't allow myself to be misled.

I don't allow myself to be misled – concerning the equally solemn, impartial and affecting tone with which the newspapers report this trial. For, can you not hear, my brothers, that it is the dead who are speaking? Do you not see that the court reporters are scribbling down the speeches of ghosts? Have you not noticed in the sketches of those 'sketch makers delegated to attend the court proceedings', that they are drawing the deceased? The tombs of world history are yawning open in Munich and all the corpses one thought interred are stepping out. A grotesque dream is forming – and all Germany accepts this miracle with indifference, as if it was self-evident.

An upholsterer appeared and presented himself as a 'writer', and everyone believes it. A cobbler whose gaze is now lifted above a shoe recounts his trifling biography and waxes lyrical on how this 'citizen of the world', which he still was in Braunau, only became an 'anti-Semite' in Vienna. And the German newspapers print that with relish. Then, in his special car, a general by the name of Lindström arrives, a man whose name is already engraved in the mortuary register of history, and proceeds to deliver a speech against the Pope. It had to be that particular general who in the course of his life has read nothing save a manual of military science – and even then, without benefitting from it. From the afterlife of the true banished books suddenly looms one lieutenant Röhm, and he says, 'I beg you to consider that I am an officer and can think only in those terms. At the front I was an officer of the general staff and I belong to that handful of those who "firmly believed that we were still going to be victorious".' A record of imbecility, even at the heart of the general staff! Think on, brothers, how long it has been since anyone has even given the merest thought to victory, should we not have reasoned that such men were a long time dead and buried? No, you see, they still live! They prophesy. They want to start a revolution! Oh, what a dance of death!

It seems to me that German history of the present and recent past, excretes some preservative substance with which it embalms its dead so efficiently that they can be brought back to life at carnival time and are thus able to exhibit in Munich their conception of the world. Such ceremonies should remain the private business of a closed circle devoted to the conjuring of spirits and not be mixed up with politics and the public at large. But things being what they are and because sixty court reporters take down the words of the dead, I must presume that I dreamt the article that I am writing here and its justification; that I dreamt Germany altogether; her illiterate upholsterer, my colleague who, barely has he learned to read and write in a racist alphabet book, immediately becomes a writer and political personality; her general who, instead of enrolling in the Vatican's Swiss guard, which would have sufficed, fields a campaign against the Pope; this rattling of rusty sabres, this ghoulish phosphorescence of the living dead; these journalists who morph into comedic gossip-sheet writers when they get to report the Munich trial.

That's right: I dream, and this dream of a carnival night is called Germany.

– Vorwärts, 2nd March 1924

CHAPTER 2

Exchange of Children

It is common knowledge that for some years now, France and Germany have organised what they term 'school exchanges'. Before Hitler's coming to power, they proposed the plan of a one year Franco-German school to be inaugurated (simultaneously in Berlin and Paris) in October 1933. The agency in charge of the school exchanges in Berlin was known as the 'Society for bi-national education': but from now on, that is to say under the Third Reich, this service will bear the name 'Society for school exchanges'. At the head of this re-baptized society one learns of a wholly new 'national' personality, a woman, it turns out, who adheres to the principles of the National Socialist party. The Third Reich is keen to perpetuate Franco-German school exchanges. The Berlin society for school exchanges promises 'not to indulge in politics'. (But instead of the three 'summer camps', as they are known, there would now only be one.) Almost all the qualified teaching staff who until then occupied posts in these summer schools have been dismissed. (No doubt they are Jews or at least 'Jews' as defined by racial theory.)

Needless to say these evicted teachers were in fact the most fervent adepts of 'bi-national' education. They are well known in France, where people are all too aware of their accomplishments. They are known too in Germany, and that's why they have got rid of them.

As for the organisers of the Society for School Exchanges in France, naturally they have not been stripped of their functions. And the French who, until now were preparing exchanges of children with the true friends of France, will from now on have to deal with the enemies of the French people and their children. They will have to deal with those loyal to Hitler and the Third Reich, who wrote that the French race was Negroid, Jew-ridden and racially inferior. And the unsuspecting descend- ants of this above-mentioned race are now cordially invited to assemble in the Reich's plague barracks and concentration camps. What exactly are they expected to learn there? Will they be taught the German language? By the Volkischer Beobachter? Or by Hitler perhaps? – By Goebbels or Göring?! – by the National Socialist poets?! – Woe to the generation who has to learn this low Prussian German in place of the language of Goethe! This is what the French children can be expected to learn under the Third Reich: to throw grenades, to spit on Jews, to malign Latin peoples (and thus their own nation), to respect brutality, treachery, injustice and illegality. Anyone who loves Germany, would hardly wish it to be seen by the French children in this hour of depravity and darkness. Anyone who loves France would want to safeguard these children from the dangers, of being forced to sing the Horst-Wessel song, of venerating murderers and their murderous deeds, of disdain for the cross and its deformation by the swastika, of the goose-step, of blasphemy against the name of God and all humanity! ... You cannot send your children to the plague barracks!

So great is the generosity of the French people, so strong is their faith in the indestructible eternity of the human spirit, that one is hardly surprised to see them earnestly pursue these exchanges, trusting in humanity, in the triumph of its power; believing that Germany is still Germany, that France is still France, believing that the language of the Third Reich is still German and that one is obliged to learn it and not this barbarous stuttering, mumbling low Prussian infected gibberish it has become, the Reich-patented jargon that one finds in the illustrated magazines with their ads for eau de cologne or hunting cartridges, not to mention the sinister small talk from both old and new racial converts and revolutionary sophists.

As for the German 'exchange' children, their touchingly unsuspecting eyes will for a few weeks witness a country where no cross is deformed, where no Jew is spat on or beaten to death, where no socialist or pacifist is broken in a concentration camp, a land where you can walk freely, where you don't have to march; a land where the individual is respected, and the child all but venerated. A few weeks later, once they have returned and are enrolled in the 'shock troops', the German children will learn from their masters and educators that France is a degenerate, Jew-loving, Negro-infested land – it's all there in Hitler's book, so can hardly be denied; there in black and white.

If the French children must learn German, there is a country where there are excellent speakers of that Walther von der Vogelweide German and that country is Austria. A country that was already German when the province of Brandenburg still spoke the Kashubian that today's Prussians have forgotten, without knowing the German whose august representatives they so wish to be: so, no longer Kashubian, nor German!

They should organise a Franco-Austrian exchange of children! In Austria the children of France would learn a true free German! And their tender souls would be relieved of a most grievous burden: of having seen a country where lingers the stench of murder and conflagration – an un-German country.

– Das Neue Tage-Buch (Paris), 29th July 1933

CHAPTER 3

The Death of German Literature

There is no longer any German literature, at least not here, and not for some years now, for what we call literature will soon be of the Soviet kind, that is to say an exclusively official production. We cannot count on the coming German revolution to inspire similar works to those that appeared at the birth of the Russian revolution: for that it would have to experience the same fermentation process ... and the Germans, and this is a fact, are a lot less excitable than the Russians!

It is also folly to hope that German literature can persist amongst the banned writers or those who are exiled. Those who have already arrived at a certain maturity will continue their momentum no doubt, but the others, the young, those who have lost contact with their native land before being properly formed, how can they become bona fide German writers, and even more prosaically, how can they survive at all if they are writing in German?

I must appear pessimistic but I am one of those who believe that tradition is the essential element of all literature; now the German tradition has always been a humane one, and the National Socialists, having broken with this, have suppressed the whole foundation of our artistic activity. Of course, they are of a mind to introduce another one; from now on they want it to be nourished by a national ideal. Only a traditionalist like me will raise himself against such a principle: I understand perfectly well that the Germans desire a specifically German literature, just as there is a specifically French one. But is such a thing feasible? If our literature has always been cosmopolitan, it is because we have never been a nation. If the Germans are obsessed with a 'return to the soil', it is precisely because they are nowhere near it.

The whole drama of Germany is embedded in this contradiction!

There is, for example, the delusion of the oak tree: the tree of Wotan, quite simply the national emblem ... but there are so few oaks in Germany ... far fewer than in France, for example. We know too that Germany is the land of chemical fertilizers and not a clod of earth remains natural; but none of this prevents the most common expression recurring in current literature of 'the native soil'. Those who wish to plant the roots of this literature don't appear to notice that there is some irony in wanting to do so in artificial humus!

Can we also picture ourselves arriving at the point where a work of art is created at the expense of a private life? The greatest enemy of literature is the official life: countries where they only live in public squares, like Mexico, have barely any artists or thinkers.

Already German writers have stopped belonging to themselves. They are no longer sure if, at any time of the day or night, they might have to endure the visit of some commission or other. Literature, just like love, has always been a question of nerves, so I even wonder if people of a nervous disposition could still apply themselves to one or other of these occupations.

Besides, who would one write for these days, when the population consists of employees and soldiers whom one can hardly expect to read after being on exercise from six in the morning till eight at night.

To tell the truth, writers in Germany have never held the important position they have in France: one scarcely sees any streets that bear the name of a poet ... a minor detail, no doubt, but significant enough. Of course, the Germans have always professed the highest esteem for culture, but the truth is, they are content to respect books without actually reading them. Only the Jews were ever buying them. The respect they accorded them was often combined with snobbism; but however unpleasant their attitude, it at least reflected the spirit of the nation.

It is not by some fortuitous coincidence that you see them burning books at the exact same moment as they mistreat the Jews: these are merely two separate manifestations of the nation's spiritual state.

It is no less symbolic that the control of the Fine Arts has been placed in the hands of the Minister of Propaganda!

These are not directives that will be lost on official artists! When the government judges it time to have a poem about a forest, perhaps they will be sent there on the spot, in Soviet style, a mission of twelve official poets charged with establishing a collective work within a certain time frame.

Futile to remark that not only should such a method never be permitted if we are to advance German literature, but that surely it cannot give birth to another literature until it has at least formed a new tradition.

I don't believe National Socialism will last long enough, under its present form, for such a thing to come to pass. I don't think however that we should desire its collapse, for a people cannot bear two revolutions one on top of the other, and a new upheaval will lead Germany not to a new order, but into chaos.

We must then hope that Germany survives, but that it learns. It will be a long time coming. While we wait, fortunately, there is always another Germanic people, Austria, left to safeguard the true German tradition.

– Le Mois (Paris), August 1933

CHAPTER 4

The Third Reich – Agency of Hell on Earth

For seventeen months now we have got used to the fact that, in Germany, more blood has been spilled than the printer's ink required to write about it. You might presume that the high priest of the printing press, Minister Goebbels, has on his conscience – supposing he even has one – more corpses than those journalists destined to ignore the majority of the dead. For one knows that the mission of the German press is not to divulge the facts, but to dissimulate them. Not content with peddling lies, it must also insinuate them. Far from confining itself to misleading the world – the miserable remainder of the world that still holds a public opinion – it also imposes false information with a stupefying naivety. In all the time blood has been spilt on the earth, never has a criminal with bloodstained hands ever used so much printer's ink to wash them. Since he began peddling his lies, never has a liar had so many loudspeakers at his disposition. Never since treachery existed, has a traitor been betrayed by a more criminal traitor than himself. Never has one seen traitors compete to such a degree. If the remaining part of the world has not yet sunk into the darkness of tyranny, never has it been so blinded by the infernal effulgence of lies, nor bludgeoned by the bawling to the point of having its hearing impaired. For over the centuries we've become used to lies creeping up stealthily at a slow pace. But the epochal discovery ascribed to the modern dictator must surely be the invention of the deafening lie. They presupposed, those subtle psychologists, that the bawler must profit from some credibility that the more discreet liar lacks. Since the gruesome arrival of the Third Reich, truth always climaxes in not being exposed and in contradiction to the famous proverb; the lie gets you a whole lot further. It no longer follows on the heels of truth, it precedes it. If one recognises in Goebbels a talent for genius, it is his way of making the official truth limp by lending it his clubfoot. It's not by chance that the first minister happens to limp; it's a calculated prank of history ...

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Pushkin Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1782274766
• ISBN 13: 9781782274766
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 128