Joseph Roth: Report to the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom (presumably August 1938)
Joseph Roth: Report to the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom (presumably August 1938)
The writer and journalist Joseph Roth corresponds from his exile in Paris about the completion of his work Die Kapuzinergruft [The Emperor's Tomb, 1938, published in English in 1984]. Roth was one of the first scholars of the German Academy in Exile, each of whom received a monthly working scholarship of 30 dollars.
From 1933 on, he wrote some bitter satire and polemics in various journals, including harsh criticism of Gottfried Benn who had previously declared his allegiance to Nazism in his text Der neue Staat und die Intellektuellen. Roth published a series of treatises against Nazism and numerous literary essays. In his report to the American Guild, Roth describes himself as a “vocal opponent of every dictatorship” and as an “employee of anti-dictatorial and anti-Nazi newspapers”.
In a letter to the American Guild dated some years later on 9 May 1939, Roth criticised the questionnaire process and the lateness of payments. He did not get to fulfil his intention of writing an article about the Guild in a major French or British newspaper. He died on 27 May 1939.
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