On the End of the World

On the End of the World by Joseph Roth.

Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1UBSQS2HU94FP?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp

I became acquainted with Joseph Roth by reading his anti-Nazi work, “The Spider's Web.” That book detailed the rise of a front-line veteran who gets involved in Volkisch politics in the early 1920s. My sense is that Roth was incorporating a lot of his personal observations into his novel and that his book had value more as a historical source that described the feeling of being alive in that era than as a work of literature (although it had its moments.)

Roth was clearly anti-Nazi. He was Jewish, which makes that an easy deduction, but he also remained something of an Austrian Monarchist. In 1933, Roth left Berlin and went to Paris in exile. This book collects various essays he wrote for the exiled German/Austrian press from 1933 to his death in early 1939.

The essays are occasional writing; they are Roth's responses to events. Roth doesn't spend a lot of time describing those events because he assumes that everyone knows what he is talking about. What the modern reader gets therefore are (a) Roth's feelings to the nightmare of Hitler and (b) often, an introduction to great events of the past that have been forgotten. For example:

“In this same Vienna Prater, a week ago, the Third Reich improvised a scene to compete with the Chamber of Horrors. A number of Jews had to ‘bite the dust'59. This heroic metaphor, which permitted the Germans to render death on the battlefield visible, appreciable, the National Socialists have borrowed for a fox-hunt, forcing the Jews to bite at the scornful grass for their own gloating pleasure. In the Prater, right next to the ‘Chamber of Horrors' and the ‘Grotto of Horrors'!

Roth, Joseph. On the End of the World (p. 44). Steerforth Press. Kindle Edition.

That really happened, lest we forget.

And, then, we move on to some fresh horror, and forget this ephemeral, brutal event.

Here is another one where Roth describes the conduct of one of the assassins of Austrian Prime Minister Dolfuss:

“The open-armed Yugoslavs might well show discouragement. But we, who have known for a long time now the heroes of the new Germany, are hardly surprised by the crime committed by the Austrian legionnaire, but rather to learn that such an individual raped a Yugoslav peasant woman and not a young male farmhand from Dravograd. This constitutes a serious break with the traditions of the SA18 and the National Socialist party in general.

Roth, Joseph. On the End of the World (p. 16). Steerforth Press. Kindle Edition.

You can see in that passage a theme he presented in The Spider's Web, namely the tendency of the SA (and Nazis, generally) toward homosexuality.

[Shhhh!!! Don't mention that....we will see if that gets past the censors, but, nonetheless, it seems to have been an accepted perspective among those who were there.]

This is an observation from 1934 that preserves the understanding that “Hitler's Pope” wasn't:

“These barbarians would equally have been capable of imagining Baldur concluding a pact with Pacelli,26 being an opponent of proletarian free thinkers. Papen being dispatched to Rome has all the air of being down to pure chance. Germany has taken its time to understand that the prohibition of freedom of thought and the persecution of the Jews was never going to allow it to pass itself off as a Christian state. When the Pope sees a photo of Hitler his preference – and with reason – is for the free thinkers. As for the Almighty, after contemplating Papen, he probably inclines more favourably towards the congenial atheist than the hypocrite. No, neither the Catholics in Austria nor those of the Saar would countenance Hitler's sudden conversion to Christianity. Even Hitler's ancestors, those Germans who claimed to fear nothing in the world but the Almighty himself, ultimately suffered a punishing defeat. What to make of these people of the Third Reich who no longer fear God, only everyone else in the world, even the Jews?!

Roth, Joseph. On the End of the World (p. 19). Steerforth Press. Kindle Edition.

Most of the essays are opaque to us. There are a few that stand out as great writing. For example, his essay on nightlife at a Parisian cafe - “In the Bistro After Midnight” - rings with authenticity in a film noir way. It is a kind of mood piece that put me there and became my favorite essay of the book, even though it offers no special historical value.

Roth also strikes out a few good aphorisms:

“Who dares, wins! He who has won three times, has no more need to dare!'

Roth, Joseph. On the End of the World (p. 55). Steerforth Press. Kindle Edition.

I should warn against mockery. There is nothing to laugh at here! Fascism is evidently in the throes of its menopause.

Roth, Joseph. On the End of the World (p. 64). Steerforth Press. Kindle Edition.

If we must state an initial truth, let us say that history is made by human beings who have only the merest glimpse of the significance of their words and their actions due to an insufficient capacity for instinct, experience and common sense.

Roth, Joseph. On the End of the World (p. 69). Steerforth Press. Kindle Edition.

We grope blindly into our histories and we are blind within our history.

Roth, Joseph. On the End of the World (p. 69). Steerforth Press. Kindle Edition.

The country whose nationality we haul around, we can leave, albeit with a wrench. But the epoch in which we were born that we can never leave, unless we happen to die.

Roth, Joseph. On the End of the World (p. 71). Steerforth Press. Kindle Edition.

Fodder for thought.