Doreen Densky | Place, Space, and Pace: Intersections of Traffic and Language in Joseph Roth’s Berlin Feuilletons
With the motif of the long-term prisoner released to his home city, Joseph Roth offers the readers of his 1923 feuilleton “Der auferstandene Mensch” a defamiliarized view on traffic in Berlin. Not only does the ex-prisoner have to handle the changed face, place, space, and pace of the city, but he also needs to learn “a completely new language”.
This feuilletonistic piece serves as a point of departure to examine the relationship between mechanized forms of transportation and Roth’s journalistic and stylistic answers to these new and modern phenomena. Michel de Certeau’s “Spatial Stories” from The Practice of Everyday Life, can elucidate this connection, because locomotion is seen as a form of enunciation, analogous to speech acts if the spatial system is equated with the language system.
Insofar as Roth uses his texts as a vehicle to transport his ambivalent attitude towards Berlin to the reader, with the modern means of mass transportation and language sometimes “colliding,” two critical perspectives emerge: First, Roth’s self-reflective perspective on the feuilleton as a journalistic category comes to the fore. Opposing Karl Kraus’ polemic against this genre, Roth underlines the importance of the so-called “below the line” writings: They are capable of painting the face of time and of opening a discursive space for public debates. Second, selected feuilletonistic musings on traffic in Berlin are read closely: “Reisende mit Traglasten”, “Betrachtung über den Verkehr”, and “Fahrt an den Häusern“.
It becomes apparent that Roth playfully employs the linguistic possibilities that arise from his cynicism. Displacement and defamiliarization are both modes of identification for the Galician Jew in the metropolis as well as rhetorical strategies for one of the best-paid journalists of the Weimar-Era to (literally) come to terms with Berlin in the practice of everyday life.