Joseph Roth On the Newspapers:

 

The Literary World was one of the bright, nervous, easily smashable cultural products of the Weimar period in Germany. Its editorial policy was faddishly pro-bolshevik, but it published all kinds. One of its characteristic gambits was to ask a “rundfrage” – a question about some trending topic – to a number of literary highfliers, as well as journalists, artists, etc. For instance, the magazine would ask, what do you think about the cosmopolitan idea? And get Thomas Mann to answer. Or what is the “german spirit” and get Unamuno and Ilya Ehrenberg to answer. It is a cheap way to get some big names in the mag.

The magazine was always interested in the newspaper business. In one of their round robin questions, they asked reporters about what they hushed up.  They got interesting responses, but the most interesting, retrospectively, was from a reporter for the new, flashy tabloid, the 8 Uhr, which warned that the press of the “old world” was going to go to the dogs if they did not adapt and respond to the challenge of the American news media. Specifically, he warned against the “New York” tendency: that the reporter can say everything and only hush up one thing: his own opinion. “Perhaps the young world on the other side can be lead by the democratic principle of neutrality, but the old world is more advanced. It needs the personality behind the story, it needs to pull conclusions from the material it publishes, it needs [to show] its values.”

In 1929, the magazine asked a number of writers and journalist about their experience of the mass media – the “Tagespresse als Erlebnis”. Joseph Roth was one of the respondents. His answer is a very good, compressed meditation about the press – not in the Karl Kraus manner (Roth was very unimpressed by Kraus’s thunder) but in the manner of someone who is a familiar of the newsroom, knows how the type is set and how the proofreaders do their work. Knows, in essence, that the newspaper is a factory product, which makes a decisive difference in what the “news” is.

Joseph Roth, in the last two decades, has been amply translated. The Hotel Years contains translations of a lot of Roth’s journalism. But it doesn’t contain a translation of his response. I think I’ll translate a bit of it here.

“I read the newsper in order to hear something (or many things) about “current affairs” without forgetting for a moment the distance that divides a fact and a reported story [Nachricht]. In order to know the truth, I try to keep in mind all the approximations under which the story comes to be: for instance, the dumbness or cluelessness of the reporter on the other end of the line from the correspondent [Roth is referring here to the practice of dictating a story on the phone to the ‘reporting secretary’], the natural tendency of the newspaper to highlight “interesting” or “pointed” or “important” stories (which can, of course, be true); the gullibility of an editor who is badly paid and overworked, who is easily driven into heavyhandedness; the rigidities under which the print setter and proofreader have to work and through which simply typos can arise. After I have reflected on all these side issues, there remains little of the newspaper story worthy of notice.

If the newspaper were as immediate, as sober, as rich, as uncontrolled as reality, it could, like this, really communicate experiences. But it only gives us inexact, sieved reality – and when we say it is badly formed, we are really saying: it is falsified. Because there is no other objectivity than an artistic one. Only it can represent a state of affairs as it truly is. Any other kind of presentation is private, which means: incomplete. The correspondent on the one end and the reporter on the other are mostly not artists. Their stories, reports, descriptions are like private communications in a letter, but addressed to the public. It is not an accident that the source of the newspapers are called correspondence and correspondents. Their reports remain private letters: however much lived materials they offer us! But they even their wound the secrecy of the letter by writing for the hundreds of thousands and to to one alone – thus losing the experiential, scattering it to the wind, that finally bears it as “printed matter”.”

I like Roth’s notion that the intermediary is not a clear channel, an independent connector through which fact passes into story and story passes into information. I said that Roth was not Karl Kraus, but there is a glimmer, here, of the Viennese school. Surely we are all to ready to forget that the source of the newspaper is the letter. Although, contra Roth, letters were often, classically, round robins – not for one correspondent alone. I dream, here, of Madame de Sevigne’s letters about the trial of Fouquet, which was perhaps the first instance of an intellectual intervention into a corrupt judicial procedure in France – surely the predecessor of Zola’s J’accuse.

How to preserve the only objectivity that counts – artistic objectivity – in the age of influencers? In the death throes of the newspaper biz? A question I will leave to the Roth-fans among us.