“Albania is beautiful, unhappy, and for all its current topicality, boring.” How many journalists have the gall to begin a story like this? One, long deceased, I’d wager.
His name was Joseph Roth. Born on the bleeding edge of the Habsburg’s Austro-Hungarian empire, in what is now Ukraine, he spent much of his working life in Germany observing and remarking upon the milieu of decadence and decay and, ultimately, madness between world wars. Roth composed a formidable body of fiction, but he also introduced to the English-speaking world the feuilleton, the slight piece of entertainment, gossip or criticism that he wrote by the boatload for Der Neue Tag, Prager Tagblatt, Frankfurter Zeitung, Neue Berliner Zeitung and other papers of the day. The term now has the unfortunate connotation of “soap opera,” in France particularly, but for Roth the feuilleton, dozens of which are collected and translated by Michael Hofmann in The Hotel Years, was the sine qua non of journalistic soothsaying.
Relying on senses alone—“interviews,” said Roth, “are an alibi for a journalist’s lack of ideas”—his little stories, two or three pages long at most, are a joy to read, each the equivalent of a well portioned dessert. This is literature, if not sheer poetry, in comparison to the antiseptic, matter-of-fact filler that pads the modern newspaper. He tells of churchgoers “smelling of jasmine, sex and starch”; of the fraternity man, a “slogan on two legs,” whose humdrum existence “resembles the underworld stirrings of incompletely deceased ghosts”; of a hapless stage clown whose show betrays his “fight against life, the brutal unremitting struggle against the resistance of everything in the world, the wickedness and unfittedness of things, the grotesque illogic of ordinary circumstance.” The stranger, the commoner, the invisible—Roth, with an uncommon sympathy, noticed the people swept aside by impersonal forces, by time and history, by the swastika. He noticed the profane absurdity of life, vanishing ways of being (“Will you ever be greeted like that again?”), cities “made of stacks of city, of bundles of towns” with “each street a gaping mouth.”
It’s dizzying. The scope and depth of his observations. And refreshing, to know that, in our age of insouciant narcissism, there once lived men—a man, at least—more interested in the lives of their neighbors. Roth, a Jew who owned virtually nothing and lived in hotels, was, in a sense—and despite a fatal alcoholism, an exemplary witness of Christ’s admonition to “become passers-by.” And a paragon of the responsible journalist. “What can I do,” he asked in the pages of Kölnische Zeitung, “apart from writing about individuals I meet by chance, setting down what greets my eyes and ears, and selecting from them as I see fit?”
Image: Meidner, Ludwig. Die Brennende Stadt. 1913.
Impolitic 