Affiliation: PhD, Department of History and Civilization, European University Institute, Florence, Italy, under supervision of Professor Martin van Gelderen

Abstract

In my work, I aim to present a critical gendered analysis of the acute historicity of interwar Europe and its culture of uprootedness, as well as its implications for present debates on belonging, according to the restless itinerary of one of its inhabitants, the Austrian-Jewish journalist and writer Joseph Roth, who, in a short life (1894-1939) of constant upheaval and displacement, observed and recorded what he saw.

In a wider context, Roth's life calls for a postmodern reconfiguration of three important concepts, namely exile , Jewishness , and belonging . As concepts, they function on the level of debates within intellectual history and the history of ideas; as themes, however, they function on the level of the literary. Also, they form decisive factors in what I call the constant play/tragedy of existence, and as such they are crucial themes in the analysis of this particular historical life. In addition, the concepts of exile , Jewishness and belonging all spring from the initial aim of this work: namely, to bring to the fore the deep resonances of Roth's life and work with current questions about belonging in an utterly and ever more fragmented and globalised world. I propose to approach the concept of belonging in Roth through a study of the (representations of) women in his life.

So far, three scholars have dealt with gender issues in Roth: abjection and the dissolution of identity in Anne Fuchs ; the binary literary representations of women in Helen Chambers ; and femininity and assimilatory desire in Katja Garloff. My contribution here is a reconfiguration of the concept of belonging through representations of gender. How did the women in Roth's life influence and/or determine Roth's visions of home and belonging? Considering Roth's intense dislike for domesticity and the fact that he lived with his wife and lovers in hotels, could ‘women' perhaps be symbols of (distorted) homes? In what way do women, both literary and real, represent ‘home' in the world of Roth? Why run (in the way that the ‘border' runs in the title of my work) away to hotels? What kind of belonging do they represent? In addition to this, other important themes that run through my analysis are myth-making, self-invention and role-playing , suffering and mental illness , prophets and prophecy.

More concretely, I aim to let the biographies of Roth's wife Friederike ‘Friedl' Reichler, his lover Andrea Manga Bell, and his last companion Irmgard Keun speak back and forth to the literary representations of women in Roth's writing – what binds them is that they exist in relation to the imagination of the same man. All these women led exceptional lives: Friederike Reichler, who married Roth in 1922, was a woman of letters who suffered from schizophrenia and was murdered by the Nazi's as part of the euthanasia programme in July 1940, one year after her husband's death. Andrea Manga Bell was the daughter of a Cuban pianist father and a German mother, who married a local Cameroon chief before returning to Europe with her two children. She met Roth in 1929, and their liaison lasted until 1936. Roth then met novelist Irmgard Keun, who remained his companion until early 1938. Her novel Child of All Nations is said to be inspired by her restless hotel existence with Roth. According to Barbara Probst Solomon, both Reichler and Andrea Manga Bell were part of the new class of “intellectual women” – one worked in the documentary department of the press, while the other was a journalist for the magazine Gebrauchsgrafik . Irmgard Keun was a novelist in her own right. Their stories, with the possible exception of Keun's, remain highly understudied.

The ‘postmodern' in this reconfiguration exists in understanding belonging in the context of the ultimate fragmentation of the subject (Braidotti) and the idea of heteroglossia (Bakhtin). Ultimately, my work confronts the urgent challenge to redefine our present sense of belonging through the life and work of Joseph Roth and the lives of his wife and lovers. My work finds itself on a dynamic crossroad between historical and literary studies, Jewish studies and Gender Studies, and I hope that my PhD will result in a convincing reconfiguration of belonging in Roth and as such will be a worthy contribution to an impressive body of scholarship on Roth. Its more modest aim is a contribution to present discourses on belonging in postmodernism. Finally, I hope this work will become a highly readable publication.

Fuchs, Anne, ‘Roth's Ambivalence: The Logic of Separation in His Writings on Eastern Jewry', in Anne Fuchs, A Space of Anxiety. Dislocation and Abjection in Modern German-Jewish Literature (Amsterdamer Publikationen zur Sprache und Literatur 138). Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999, pp. 81-122.

Chambers, Helen, ‘Predators or Victims? Women in Joseph Roth's Works,' in Helen Chambers (ed.), Co-Existent Contradictions: Joseph Roth in Retrospect . Papers of the 1989 Joseph Roth Symposium at Leeds University to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary . Riverside, California: Ariadne Press, 1991, pp. 107-127.

Garloff, Katja, ‘Femininity and Assimilatory Desire in Joseph Roth', MFS Modern Fiction Studies , Volume 51, Number 2, Summer 2005, pp. 354-373.

Roth's biographer David Bronsen, in his 1974 biography entitled Joseph Roth. Eine Biografie has called him a ‘mythomaniac', testifying to Roth's tendency to invent, reinvent, re-tell and distort the facts of his life, especially those relating to his father and the circumstances of his youth. Furthermore, the recurring appearance of literary characters trading in false documents for refugees or immigrants, points to another form of identity- and role-playing.

Suffering as a human condition (of all the ‘guests on earth', Roth's expression for humanity) related to the story of Job, both the Biblical figure and Roth's 1933 novel Job. The Story of a Simple Man .

Roth's uncanny ability to see through the signs of his times has sometimes earned him the epitaph ‘prophet'; a drunken prophet, I would add here, his alcoholism being another expression of suffering.

Barbara Probst Solomon, ‘Looking for Joseph Roth', The Reading Room , No. 2, Great March Press, p. 64.

The only two scholars working on Andrea Manga Bell, Alexandra Lübcke and Stefanie Michels, approach her in the context of postcolonial studies. Their paper, to be presented at Hannover University on December 16 th 2008, is entitled ‘Germany's Black Atlantic - Alexander und Andrea Manga Bell”. It is scheduled for publication in 2009.

Braidotti, Rosi, Nomadic Subjects . Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory . New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Bakhtin, M.M., ‘Discourse of the Novel', in Michael Holquist (ed.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays . Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981.

Here, Y.H. Yerushalmi's notion of being ‘at home' in exile will be considered. See Yerushalmi, Y.H., ‘Exile and Expulsion in Jewish History', in Bernard R. Gampel, Crisis and Creativity in the Sephardic World, 1391-1648 . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 3-22.