Poet and translator Michael Hofmann in conversation with Michael March

Michael March: Who was Joseph Roth?

Michael Hofmann: Who was Joseph Roth? I'd say an Austrian journalist and novelist from the 192Os and 30s, who hailed from the far eastern realms of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the 'back and beyond' of Galicia, now in Ukraine, and in the course of his life made his way west, and finally achieved the distinction of dying in Paris in 1939, just before the war. He was the premier journalist of the period, a hotel dweller, an alcoholic, a workaholic, loved women, collected knives, collected watches, lived out of suitcases and wrote thirteen novels. Dead at forty-four.

MM: A writer who assumed many disguises in order to re-route his life, having been born, for starters, in the outreaches of Brody.

MH: His biographer says he circulated a dozen different versions of his paternity. The fact is that Roth never saw his father, who was a commercial traveller, who was away on the road when he was born, lost his mind, and never came home. Roth dreamed about him and invented versions of his own identity in order to cover that space in his life. A space resembling a garden that you may wander in and out of. It's not that he's a liar or evasive, but he just sees more possibilities.

MM: So the garden's organic?

MH: Sure it is.

MM: To disguise the unhealthy fact that he was a Jew from a poor family.

MH: It's possible. He doesn't declare himself as a Jew anywhere in his writing. I don't know whether it's because he thought it didn't need saying, or it was something he wanted to keep quiet. I don't know.

MM: He served in the Austrian army during the First World War and then he came to Vienna. What were the special effects?

MH: Whether to Vienna or Berlin, Roth was drawn westwards, along with countless others. These places ran on immigrant labour and energy. That was where their creativity came from.

MM: He stayed in Vienna, then he moved on rather impatiently to Berlin.

MH: There is this lack of fixity in Roth. In Vienna, he established himself professionally as a journalist. In Berlin, he measured himself against the German language at the heart of the German-language world. He was a transient.

MM: What were Roth's politics? He was known as "Red" Roth.

MH: Contradictory. He started off as a pacifist and a man of the left. Then he joined the army. In later life, he liked to be taken for an ex-officer. He always sympathised with poor people, with common people.

MM: Being poor and common himself.

MH: Yes, absolutely, being from a pretty obscure background. After a while, he decided that he didn't really like the West - he became nostalgic and wanted to return to the non-material values that he associated with the East. And that made him an apologist for all sorts of impalpable, sheltering things like Judaism and Catholicism, aristocracy, the officer caste - pretty much the opposite of the young firebrand of the early twenties. Very contradictory politics.

MM: Over time Roth became very fond of the Emperor and his habits. His novels reanimate a lost world, a world of vanished forms, visceral securities.

MH: It was his experience after the First World War. He disliked patriotism and nationalism. The things he preferred, the organisations he preferred, transcended nationhood: Judaism, Catholicism, the Holy Roman Empire - all the enemies of a narrow, ethnic nationalism. And there is something very decent and infectious about his belief in these ideals. The priest and the Jewish innkeeper; the Emperor and violin prodigy.

MM: What was his life like in Paris?

MH: Paris was his great hope and his huge disappointment. He went there first in 1925, hoping to become foreign correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, but they gave the job to someone else, a German Nationalist, and that was his big disappointment, though Roth more or less stayed living in Paris. After 1933, he never returned to Germany. He thought Paris was going to be heaven, and it ended up as his place of exile, the place where he was marginalised and ignored.

MM: A wandering Jew.

MH: A wandering Jew, bound up with France and drawn to Catholicism as an outsider. At the beginning, he had such a strong sense of belonging, being somewhere like Marseilles in 1925, seeing people wash up from all over the world.

MM: The Promised Land?

MH: Yes, absolutely.

MM: So what draws us to Roth?

MH: His elegant, reflective, economy of style. He writes novels, invents novels that incorporate the life of his times, peopled by characters who are unaware of themselves in what seems a quite modern way. He has a profound, structural understanding of modern life. I hope that's why we read his books.

MM: Having lived through the disintegration of old Europe and the rise of fascism, what would Roth feel today?

MH: Probably more irony than similarity.


London, July 2003