THIS MORNING WE HAVE FOG: London Letter November 2015
This morning we have fog.
I have always had a fondness for fog and mist, covering and
concealing, revealing half formed shapes, deformed motor cars, ghostly trees,
as if the world were lit by candlelight. English literature is replete with
wonderful descriptions of fog, Dickens, Conrad and Conan Doyle all make
use of London pea soupers, although they are in truth describing smog, a much denser
substance. One literary evocation however has always stayed with me, it comes from Jean Paul
Sartre in ‘Nausea.’
“Suppose he were
dead…this thought had occurred to me. It is just the sort of idea you get in
foggy weather…it was cold and dark. The fog was filtering in under the door, it
was going to rise slowly and envelope everything.”
Regular readers will now that I am currently reading, and reading
very slowly, ‘Swann’s Way.’
Proust is full of surprises and whilst I had
expected sharp wit I had not expected belly laughs, but his description of the
appalling Vedurins, - “we’re all pals here,”- made me laugh out loud. Great Comic
writing should always be read envisioning the writer’s straight face in mind,
this includes Wodehouse, who we may imagine gently smiling from time to time,
but never being so vulgar as to guffaw.
I have also been enjoying Joseph Roth, ‘What I
Saw: Reports from Berlin. Roth’s writing has been rescued from obscurity for an
English language audience by the tireless efforts of his translator, Michael
Hoffman. True ‘The Radetzky March’ was known and admired in Britain and the US,
a masterpiece to be set alongside Robert Musil’s ‘A Man of no Qualities’ in invoking the dying days
of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Of his other work, and Roth was prolific,
little was known. We should all be
grateful to Hoffman since Roth’s oeuvre is impressive in terms of both quantity
and quality.
 |
| Joseph Roth Born in Brody in Galicia, a region straddling Ukraine and Poland. Then Part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire |
Roth was primarily a journalist and an observer of the
world, the world of Germany, Eastern Europe and France between the wars. Though
as a Jewish journalist Roth was exiled from Germany the moment Hitler came to
power. Roth’s journalism was an art form in its own right, his short vignettes,
observational pieces or feuilletons are masterpieces of wit and perception, demonstrating
immense descriptive power. His favourite subject was the lives of the poor and marginalised,
the detritus of a civilisation destroyed by the carnage of World War 1.
Roth was very much a product of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and
he mourned it’s destruction for the rest of his life. At the beginning of the
20th Century it was axiomatic that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was,
like the Ottoman, on the verge of disintegration, and in 1918 it duly complied
with expectations.
Well you don’t know what you've got till it’s
gone and Roth was not the only one to mourn the passing of the multicultural/multi-ethnic
patchwork that, against the odds, had survived so long. More recent historiography
has begun to seriously question the narrative of the Empire’s ‘inevitable’
demise arguing that the network of states, in which you could catch a train in
Zagreb and arrive in Lvov unhindered by borders, post letters that arrived the
next day and which celebrated its diversity in the creative melting pot of
Vienna, could have evolved, indeed could be perceived as an embryonic EU. Even
those who find this notion far-fetched can hardly argue that the poisonous
release of ethnic tensions released by the Empires collapse represented unalloyed
progress.[1]
 |
| Butchering A Horse in The Street Berlin 1920 |
Citizens of the former empire washed up across the
continent, mingling with White Russians, displaced Hungarians, Germans and
other nationalities along with Jews fleeing from Russian and Ukrainian pogroms. Roth washed
up in Berlin where he became a very highly paid journalist, indeed the highest paid of the period. However Weimar
Germany proved as unstable as some of the newly created states of Eastern
Europe. Though Weimar was not destroyed by the Nazi’s, or other elements of the
far right, they merely delivered the coup de grace. Weimar was destroyed by the bourgeois class of
civil servants, judges and shopkeepers, who never gave their allegiance to a
state they conceived as being born in shame.[2]
The Weimar years have been much glamorized, not least by
the film Cabaret. The reality was a lot bleaker and it this reality that Roth
addresses in ‘What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933.’ His word picture of a
legless army invalid being pushed along the street in a cart, pushed by a dog,
is seared into my consciousness. As are his portraits of the lives he glimpses in the windows of the passing apartments glimpsed from an S Bahn carriage.
Though always he writes with wit, intelligence and insight.
“The very particular
volume in which people tell each other their news seems to generate all by
itself that acoustic chiaroscuro, a sounding murk, in which every communication
seems to lose its edges, truth projects the shadow of a lie, and a statement
seems to resemble its opposite.”
[1]
Poland and Czechoslovakia, both emerging from the wreckage of empire, contained
significant numbers of Germans unhappy about the new state of affairs, which
proved fatal in the end to both states. The coupling of Czechs and Slovaks also
proved unsustainable.
[2]
Hitler was able to give such a confident performance in court since he almost
certainly already knew that the sentence passed would be extraordinarily lenient,
(indeed would give him time to write his book).
