Joseph Roth and the dialectic of nationalism

 As Stephane Pensel has pointed out, Joseph Roth seems to be a writer absolutely opposite to W.G. Sebald. Sebald wound his writing around his reading – books came to life in his demi-fiction, much as lines came to life in Paul Klee’s painting. As Klee said, an active line”, a freely drawn line, goes out for a walk. Sebald’s fiction is about taking the author, with a universe in his head, out for a walk. Roth, by contrast, often spoke about the virtues of reading little: “Please understand”, he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I don’t read. I hold with the good words of a man I otherwise don’t value, Karl Kraus, who wrote: A poet who reads is like a bartender who drinks.”

Yet there is a relation between Roth and Sebald that comes out in Sebald’s essay on the former. Sebald deals sympathetically with Roth’s notorious nostalgia for the Habsburg empire. I think Sebald, also an exile of a kind, understood the political gesture under that nostalgia. It was aimed at the onslaught of ethnic nationalism that came after the Empire’s breakup. Roth rejected both Naziism and Zionism for the same reason: the claim that the nation is founded on a privileged people. Ethnos taking the place of ethos was, to Roth, the great danger we face. Sebald gets this right, I think. Of Roth’s image of Austria – the Austro-Hungarian empire – Sebald writes:

It is an image of something that lacks any will to power, any imperialist drive, I think. This is the motive of Roth’s Austrian model, which was one of the clearly lost opportunities of history. Perhaps, as the old Herr von Maerker opines at the end of the Stummen Propheten, the opportunity had been really present in his time, “out of ... the Monarchy to make a home for all. It would have been the small prototype of a larger future world. The emphasis lies, here, not on the larger future world – for this Roth had long given up on – but rather on the „small prototype“, illuminated by the radiance of the past.”

Roth died about 85 years ago. He suffered, in his life and in his work, from the terrible virus of nationalism that was codified in Woodrow Wilson’s white supremacist doctrine of the “self-determination” of peoples, which was the guise under which the American liberal contested the American isolationist. We are presently at a dialectical inflection point in that long struggle – a president as racist as Wilson, and contrary to Wilson an advocate of autarcky, who is searching to resurrect an international of white states.

I think Roth would understand exactly how this moment, bookmarked between the mass murder in Gaza and the mass murder in Ukraine, became the station we have stopped at.