Joseph Roth - Paris

Paris

As a prominent liberal Jewish journalist, Roth left Germany when Adolf Hitler became Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933. Roth spent most of the next decade in Paris, a city he loved. His essays written in France were exuberant with delight in the city and its culture.

Shortly after Hitler's rise to power, in February 1933, Roth wrote in a prophetic letter to his friend, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig:

You will have realized by now that we are drifting towards great catastrophes. Apart from the private — our literary and financial existence is destroyed — it all leads to a new war. I won't bet a penny on our lives. They have succeeded in establishing a reign of barbarity. Do not fool yourself. Hell reigns.

From 1936 to 1938, Roth had a romantic relationship with Irmgard Keun. They worked together, traveling to various cities such as Paris, Wilna, Lemberg, Warsaw, Vienna, Salzburg, Brussels and Amsterdam.

Without intending to deny his Jewish origins, Roth considered his relationship to Catholicism very important. In the final years of his life, he may even have converted; translator Michael Hofmann states in the preface to the collection of essays Report from a Parisian Paradise that Roth "was said to have had two funerals, one Jewish, one Catholic."

His last years were difficult. He moved from hotel to hotel, drinking heavily, anxious about money and the future. Despite suffering from chronic alcoholism, Roth remained prolific until his premature death in Paris in 1939. His final novella, The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939), considered to be amongst his finest, chronicles the attempts made by an alcoholic vagrant to regain his dignity and honour a debt. His final collapse was precipitated by hearing the news that the playwright Ernst Toller had hanged himself in New York.

Joseph Roth is interred in the Thiais cemetery, south of Paris.