“Jede Freundschaft mit mir ist verderblich”: Joseph Roth und Stefan Zweig: Briefwechsel 1927–1938 ed. by Madeleine Rietra and Rainer-Joachim Siegel (review)

It must have been exhausting to be one of Joseph Roth’s correspondents. His letters would arrive with a demanding frequency, sometimes several a week. The variety of topics was great and unwieldy. Telegrams and postcards announcing plans to travel and requests—often pleading—to meet, were frequently followed by longer, polemical essays on literature, modernity, personal and professional slights and sufferings, recriminations and expressions of remorse, apologies, accusations, and requests for money: always more money! The reward for such trying exchanges were the flashes of brilliance and prescience in Roth’s letters, stylistically exhilarating and intellectually demanding. Yes, it must have been exhausting, but so worth it!

268 letters exchanged over eleven years between Roth and Stefan Zweig are documented in this new scholarly collection. That this is an unknown fraction of the letters they actually sent each other—the rest not yet found or, more likely, lost forever to war, decay, or Roth’s famously transient lifestyle—bespeaks a correspondence and friendship of great intensity. Their relationship was asymmetrical in many ways: Zweig, thirteen years older and very much the voice of bourgeois literary establishment; Roth, a well-paid and widely read feuilletonist but lacking the critical regard and fame as a novelist he thought his due. The esteem in which Roth held Zweig bordered on sycophantic, as evidenced by his typical salutations: “Sehr verehrter Herr Stefan Zweig,” “Sehr verehrter und lieber Herr Stefan Zweig,” and even “Lieber sehr lieber Herr Stefan Zweig” (36). Zweig preferred “Lieber Herr Roth,” or even just “Lieber Freund.” Roth was the pupil, the supplicant, ingratiating himself and finding validation in his friendship with the master, Zweig.

Early in their correspondence, it seems that this imbalance of status would dominate the arc of their relationship. Roth flatters and woos (“Eine Zeile von Ihnen dahin, dorthin wird mich freuen, eine Begegnung mit Ihnen wird die Erfüllung eines herzlich aufrichtigen Wunsches sein” 12), and Zweig returns the favor by playing his role as teacher. Zweig’s first letter to Roth (January 17, 1929) is an unsolicited personal and professional history: “Als junger Mensch began ich zu schreiben . . .” (14). But, having won Zweig’s confidence and respect, Roth soon turns the tables and begins to lecture the older writer: about literature, politics, and the Jewish tradition that also binds the two authors. These topics dominate Roth’s letters from the 1930s, when literary feuds gave way to accusations of naiveté, or worse, in the face of the existential threat of National Socialism. Of Thomas Mann, for example, Roth declares, “Er hat die Gnade, besser zu schreiben, als er denken kann” (133). Roth cajoles—bullies would not be too strong a word—Zweig about the latter’s reluctance to associate himself with more vocal antifascist writers in exile and Zweig’s continuing relationship with Insel Verlag in Nazi Germany: “Sie müssen entweder mit dem III. Reich Schluß machen, oder mit mir” (129). Roth’s letters are a torrent, cycling through praise, abuse, demands for money, contrition. But despite the abuse, the friendship continues. Zweig sends money, tries to help Roth financially (and to escape Europe) by interceding on his behalf with Viking Press, and frets over the excessive alcohol consumption that would eventually kill Roth. Zweig’s last letter expresses the fear that Roth is punishing him with silence (374). Ironically, it is Zweig who is mostly silent in the record of this relationship, as far more of Roth’s correspondence survives than Zweig’s own letters. This collection ultimately tells us fairly little about Zweig and much more about Roth and will therefore be of greater interest to his readers and researchers.

Roth scholarship has long been something of a second-tier enterprise in Germanistik, which matches Roth’s critical reception as a good but unimportant writer. This is too bad...