Joseph Roth: Beichte eines Mörders. Erzählt in einer Nacht, manuscript (1936) [Confession of a Murderer. Told in One Night. (published in English in 1937)]
Joseph Roth: Beichte eines Mörders. Erzählt in einer Nacht, manuscript (1936) [Confession of a Murderer. Told in One Night. (published in English in 1937)]
Ich glaube, daß mein Roman sehr schwach ist, ich habe ihn zu schnell geschrieben. [...] Und selbst wenn, wenn er gut wäre, was hätte ich schon davon?
[I think that my novel is quite weak; I wrote it too quickly. [...] But even if it were good, what good would it do me? (ed. trans.)]
Joseph Roth to Stefan Zweig, Amsterdam, 4 May 1936
Joseph Roth had been working on his novel Confession of a Murderer since 1935. The first chapter appeared with the title Der Stammgast as an advance release in Das neue Tagebuch and was then published by the Amsterdam publishing house de Lange in 1936. The novel was written during a crisis period in Roth's life; the underlying tone of his second novel written in exile is dark. A man believes he has effectively murdered his lover and his half-brother, until it is revealed that both are still alive and he is not a murderer. In the dialogue between the main protagonist, the Russian Semyon Semyonovich Golubchik, and the other characters in the novel, Roth builds up dense descriptions of everyday life.
From page 85 onwards, the typed pages give way to a handwritten manuscript. Roth wrote his texts almost exclusively by hand, and usually in the company of others, for example at the Parisian café Le Tournon. The manuscript pages of which Roth has filled every inch with writing show how painstakingly he worked.
Stefan Zweig gives his verdict in a letter to his friend on 2 June 1936: “Your novel is excellent, precisely because you have not stretched it beyond its limits. [...] Many congratulations.”
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