History has not yet known a better reporter than Joseph Roth (1895-1939). I realized this again when reading his border reports, beautifully illustrated by Koen Broucke and exemplarily translated by Els Snick, in Between the armies. Roth travels through Central and Eastern Europe, where he experiences the aftershocks of the First World War. The society he finds there is in disarray, the borders of the dismantled Habsburg Empire have evaporated, some population groups no longer know where they belong, and of course the many Jews in that area are at the mercy of new pogroms.
Sober and with an impressionistic touch, Roth describes what he finds on his path. For example, he traveled for the newspaper in 1919 Der Neue Tag to Heanzenland, or German-Western Hungary. In one year, the republic was declared twice in that border area. And then he writes, to show how much he regrets that the Habsburg Empire has fallen into pieces: ‘Also, the political boundaries are no longer dots, stripes, lines and so on, but bullying, torture, agony, calvary, crucifixions, in one word: trials…’ In this new chaos, the German-speaking farmers fear that they will have to give up their fields to Béla Kun’s communists, who in turn are frustrated because Hungary had had to give up a large part of its territory.
In his reports from the Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1921, Roth’s sympathies lie with the Red Army. Not because he is for communism, but because the Bolsheviks, unlike the Poles, do not indulge in pogroms. When he joins their ranks, he also learns that there is a writer among them. Roth did not know that this was Isaac Babel, who had joined General Boedjonny’s cavalry as a volunteer.
According to Roth, the Poles in particular are committing war crimes, not only against their Polish farmers, who rob them of their money and livestock, but also against the Jews. For example, in his report ‘The Red Army’ you can read that they killed sixty Jewish families during their retreat from the city of Grodno: ‘According to the proven method, seventeen young men had their eyes gouged out, they cut off the breasts of women and raped young girls. ‘
In that report, Roth takes a sidestep to East Prussia. For example, on the train to Koningsbergen he witnesses an argument between two Germans. When the person with a swastika pin on his lapel and ‘at least one revolver in his pocket’ says to his opponent after the altercation: ‘I almost thought you were a Jew too’, a voice comes from a dark corner of the compartment. the voice of a true Jew: ‘Always the Jews, the Jews, can I help it that my father was a Jew?’ With such words, Roth profiles the increasingly aggressive German anti-Semitism of those days.
In ‘Police report’ he tells about a naive Ukrainian farmer who leaves his ‘two pigs, a grandfather, a gray-spotted black cat, his wife Katharina and two children’ to try his luck in Brazil. Only fifteen years later does he return home with some money in his pocket to free his family from the arbitrariness of the local nobility. But along the way he dies at a Berlin station. It is precisely that combination of humanity and cruelty that makes Roth’s work so unparalleled.