There are no thematic correspondences between the Heuristic Visuals in the selected reportage and novels of this period. However, in both genres Roth continues to use different variants of Heuristic Visuals to engage the reader and provide insights into modernity. In the articles dealing with the press, Roth employs visual techniques to highlight the manipulative nature of newspaper journalism, and the willingness of the majority of the public to accept a constructed and sanitized presentation of reality. One can see Roth’s Heuristic Visuals in these articles as an attempt to counteract the passivity of the modern public, and encourage them to adopt a more critical approach to their daily diet of atomized reality.
In both Flucht ohne Ende and Zipper und sein Vater, although there is a lower frequency of Heuristic Visuals than in the earlier novels, Roth employs Heuristic Visuals to convey the alienation experienced by the protagonists, Tunda and Zipper, after their return from the First World War. In both novels Roth does use Heuristic Visuals in relation to other issues, such as the Russian revolution and German Nationalism/Romanticism in Flucht ohne Ende, and the social aspirations of the bourgeoisie in Zipper und sein Vater. However, the key common theme is the inability of the Heimkehrer to reintegrate and find a place for themselves in the world. In the two portrayals Roth indicates that Tunda’s
alienation is more clearly a result of external factors, whereas Zipper’s alienation is also coupled with an active withdrawal from the world. While Tunda’s sight of the Parisian crowd is mediated through the ‘bedrohliche Fensterscheibe’, Zipper’s gaze averts itself, like the cork gun, and so prevents any clear perception and engagement with his environment.
As well as their sense of alienation, Roth also uses Heuristic Visuals to highlight the brief sense of belonging which the two men are able to experience – Tunda in the side streets of Paris, and Zipper in the coffee house. Yet, through the use of Heuristic Visuals, Roth also indicates that the harmony which Tunda and Zipper feel can only be transient – the fairytale world of the backstreets of Paris is soon superseded by the alienating harsh reality of capitalism on the Champs Elysées, and the hermetically-sealed coffee house remains only a place of refuge, and cannot conceal Zipper’s ultimate superfluousness in the society that exists outside it. The image of the small girls on the Champs Elysées, self- assured and confident, provides a stark contrast to the awkwardness and sense of detachment experienced by both Tunda and Zipper.
Thus, although Roth makes less frequent use of Heuristic Visuals in these two works, they do contain examples of how Roth’s visual technique can convey meaning to the reader. Although the influence of Neue Sachlichkeit on Roth can be seen in both these novels, as Jürgen Heizmann argues, Roth’s writing during this period does not follow the Neue Sachlichkeit tendency of attempting to produce a dispassionate photographic reproduction of reality:
Die bisherigen Betrachtungen haben aber gleichfalls gezeigt, wie sehr die Texte Roths rhetorisch durchgearbeitet, wie sehr sie doch ‘komponiert’ sind. Dieser Stilwille rührt daher, daß Roth nicht, wie die Neue Sachlichkeit fordert, die Dinge gleichgültig registriert wie ein Kamera; er schreibt nicht teilnahmslos und auch nicht tendenziös, aber in dem was er schreibt, ist ein Wertzentrum auszumachen. Denn das Ideelle wird in seinen Romanen nicht geleugnet, es ist vielmehr […] im Konkreten eingeschlossen.199
The Heimkehrer themselves may have returned from the war indifferent to the world around them, and unable to engage with their environment, but Roth’s
engagement with the world around him and his ability to convey meaning through concrete visuals continued during the late 1920s. As Bronsen notes, the
Neue Sachlichkeit movement was not consonant with Roth’s talents and proved to be somewhat of an artistic dead-end: ‘Sein Vorhaben, den “modernen Roman” im Zeichen der Neuen Sachlichkeit zu gestalten, kann Roth nur zum Teil verwirklichen, denn die Voraussetzungen hierfür stehen zu wenig im Einklang mit seinen eigentlichen Antrieben.’200 The foregoing investigation of the use of visual techniques in the relevant novels confirms this conclusion.
Chapter Four: Reportage and Fiction 1930-1932
4.1 IntroductionBetween 1930 and 1932 Roth produced his two best known novels: Hiob and
Radetzkymarsch.201 Although his previous novels had been generally well- received by the critical press, they had not enjoyed the level of commercial success which Hiob now heralded. Although these two novels mark a shift in thematic focus from the 1920s fiction (see 4.3.1), as Fritz Hackert points out, the themes of Eastern European Jewry (Hiob) and the Habsburg Empire (Radetzkymarsch) had their precursors in Roth’s non-fiction of the late 1920s.202 What was a significant change, however, is that Roth’s breakthrough as a
Romancier corresponded with a decline in the number of reportage articles, and by 1932 his journalistic output was less than half that of 1929.
In the first quarter of 1930 the bulk of Roth’s reportage appeared in the conservative Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, which he had joined after leaving the FZ in the summer of 1929. It is widely held that his move to the MNN was for financial reasons, and did not signal either a shift to the left in the politics of the paper, nor a shift to the right in Roth’s own Weltanschauung. Having written some thirty articles for the MNN, mainly on aspects of everyday culture and entertainment,203 he left the paper at the beginning of May 1930, whereupon he
reestablished contact with Benno Reifenberg at the Frankfurter Zeitung.204 By July 1930 Roth had negotiated the serialization of Hiob in the FZ, and his articles began appearing again in the feuilleton section in November of the same year.
In these last three years before the beginning of his exile in 1933, Roth continues to engage with the cultural phenomena of modernity in his journalistic writings, and his concerns with the sanitization and depersonalization of modern
201Hiob, JRW, V, 3-136. First published in Frankfurter Zeitung, 14 September to 21 October
1930. First published in book form, Berlin: Kiepenheuer, 1930. Radetzkymarsch, JRW, V, 139-
455. First published in Frankfurter Zeitung, 17 April to 9 July 1932 (Sunday, Zweites
Morgenblatt). First published in book form, Berlin: Kiepenheuer, 1932.
202See Hackert, JRW, V, 889.
203 See for example, ‘Der Primgeiger’ (JRW, III, 179-181), ‘Berliner Vergnügungsindustrie’
(JRW, III, 211-215), and ‘Der Zauberer’ (JRW, III, 164-167). 204 See Bronsen, Biographie, pp. 378-379.
life remain.205 While Roth still uses Heuristic Visuals in many of his articles on everyday culture and popular entertainment, this is not the case with regard to his journalism on the theme of writers and writing.206 What is striking is that in his reportage Roth does not respond in the same way to the economic crisis of 1929/30 and the increasing political tension in Germany as he did to the crisis years of the early twenties. There are no articles which deal with the suffering of ordinary people and the stark visuality of that suffering. This may in part be explained by his employment with the MNN, albeit that the paper did not have exclusive rights over his journalistic output. Later in September 1931 Roth does engage with the political situation and challenges the narrow concept of nationalism espoused by the right-wing in his article ‘Bekenntnis zu Deutschland’ (JRW, III, 391-395). However, here Roth employs the rational discourse of the essay – a form which he increasingly turned to during his exile years.
Although Hiob and Radetzkymarsch signal a shift away from the Zeitromane of the 1920s, and the bulk of Roth’s reportage during these years continues to focus on aspects of modernity, nevertheless there are certain thematic correspondences between some of the reportage written during this period and the novels. Three reportage articles which reflect this have been chosen for closer analysis: ‘Die Scholle’ (JRW, III, 167-169), ‘Kleine polnische Station’ (JRW, III, 291-293) and ‘Eisenbahn’ (JRW, III, 462-464).207