Guide to the Papers of Joseph Roth (1894-1939),
1897-1995

AR 1764

Series I: Personal, 1897?-1939.

Scope and Content:

The series contains personal items and material about Joseph Roth published during his lifetime and obituaries written after his death, including a memorial speech by Stefan Zweig. The photographs of Joseph Roth, his wife Friederike, several of their friends, and some members of Joseph Roth's family are also part of this series.

Subseries 1: General,  undated, 1918-1939.

Arrangement:

Arranged alphabetically by folder title.

Scope and Content:

This subseries contains items belonging to Joseph Roth and his wife, their business cards, two issues of the weekly Der christliche Ständestaat [The Christian State] and an inventory list of furniture. There are also several copies of Russian theater programs, mostly from Moscow, including Moscow Artistic Theatre (MKhAT). Obituaries, including a memorial speech by the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, can also be found here.

Subseries 2: Material about Joseph Roth,  1933-1939.

Arrangement:

Arranged alphabetically by language.

Scope and Content:

This subseries consists of articles published during Joseph Roth's life about him and his work. There are some interviews with Joseph Roth and reports from his visit to the Netherlands.

Subseries 3: Photos,  undated, 1897?-1939.

Arrangement:

Arranged alphabetically by folder title.

Scope and Content:

The photos of Joseph Roth, Friederike Roth and some of their relatives can be found in this subseries, which contains over one hundred snapshots. Postcards of the Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph I are also filed here.

Series II: Writings, 1922?-1939.

Arrangement:

Arranged topically by character of the work.

Scope and Content:

This series contains various manuscripts and copies by Joseph Roth and others. Both his belletristic oeuvre and his journalistic writings are here. Book reviews and several manuscripts by other authors can be found here as well. The manuscripts of his books are usually handwritten, but some typescripts are also present. A few of his works are here in their entirety, but most is fragments and parts. A number of typescripts and copies of manuscripts of Joseph Roth's newspaper articles, essays, and smaller texts can be found in the Subseries 2, and published newspaper clippings in Subseries 3. The published reviews of his books can be found in Subseries 4.

After consulting the most recent scholarship on Joseph Roth, the manuscripts were reconstructed from fragments scattered throughout the collection. That is particularly true about Beichte eines Mörders, Büste des Kaisers, and Der stumme Prophet. Portions of various sizes, but often only individual page fragments, scattered throughout the collection, were identified by researchers (mostly Fritz Hackert). During the revision of arrangement of the collection these fragments were taken out of the "archival" order and reunited with the work or filed into a separate folder.

Subseries 1: Novels,  1927-1937.

Arrangement:

Arranged alphabetically by the title of the work.

Scope and Content:

This subseries contains manuscripts of the books Joseph Roth wrote. The manuscripts Der blinde Spiegel [The Blind Mirror], Büste des Kaisers [The Bust of the Emperor], the historical essay Clemenceau [Clemenceau], Die Hundert Tage (The Ballad of the Hundred Days), and an unfinished novel called Trotzki Roman, published after the Second World War as Der stumme Prophet (The Silent Prophet), are complete or close to completeness. The manuscript Die Hundert Tage (The Ballad of the Hundred Days) contains 220 pages in Joseph Roth's own handwriting and 88 pages of the typewritten manuscript with his own corrections. The manuscript under the title Trotzki Roman, alternatively known also as Roman eines jungen Revolutionärs, can be found in three versions here. The versions "A" and "B" are in Joseph Roth's handwriting and version "C" is a typescript. The distinction between individual versions as well as the dating of the work are taken from the editorial note by Werner Lengning, published in the first edition of the "Trotzki-Roman" in 1966 Roth Joseph: Der stumme Prophet. Roman. Köln 1966: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 285 p.

However, there are substantial portions of other works, such as Clemenceau, Legende vom Trinker Andreas / Legende vom heiligen Trinker, and Kapuzinergruft. These texts are partly in Joseph Roth's handwriting, partly carbon copies of his own handwriting, and partly typewritten, with his own corrections.

Joseph Roth's handwriting is extremely small and hardly legible. Corrections in the manuscripts are numerous, sometimes every word in a page is corrected or a whole page is eliminated or rewritten. Several pages from these and other manuscripts were scattered throughout the collection. However, several literary scholars were able to identify the original texts and in this revision of the arrangement their opinion was taken into account and loose pages re-joined their original context. The notes of editors of Joseph Roth's work were left together with those loose pages, as they help to understand the structure of the work, which was left unfinished in various drafts and was published only posthumously. In addition, the critical editions of Joseph Roth's oeuvre quote the old arrangement.

Subseries 2: Articles, essays, and shorter pieces,  1915, 1922-1939.

Arrangement:

Arranged in alphabetical order by title of the text.

Scope and Content:

This subseries contains typescripts and blue carbon copies of Joseph Roth's shorter texts, newspaper articles, and essays. Occasionally a newspaper clipping is filed with the draft of the article.

Some articles depicted various jobs or occupations and were originally written for Der Wiener Tag in 1936-1937. These articles were originally filed in a folder called 'Occupations' (Berufe), which was dissolved, and all articles are now filed separately. This subseries also contains two texts that were identified as drafts of movie scripts. The folder 'Early works - Fragments' contains several texts and also a notebook.

The folder 'Various' contains a number of blue carbon copies of usually undated articles, fragments, and individual pages. Some of these texts were written after 1933, most likely in the second half of the 1930s.

Subseries 3: Published articles,  1926-1939.

Arrangement:

Arranged alphabetically by title of the newspaper and then chronologically.

Scope and Content:

This subseries contains newspaper clippings of Joseph Roth's published articles. His articles were often serialized and published in consecutive issues of the newspaper or part of bigger cycle, such as reports from Joseph Roth's trip to Russia or to the Balkans published in the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1926 and 1927, or later Schwarz-gelbes Tagebuch in Österreichische Post in 1939.

A) Frankfurter Zeitung

B) Das neue Tagebuch

C) Österreichische Post

D) Prager Tagblatt

E) Other

Subseries 4: Reviews,  1926-1940.

Arrangement:

The folders are arranged alphabetically by the title of the work.

Scope and Content:

Newspaper clippings with reviews of Joseph Roth's books can be found in this subseries, including several polemical commentaries on articles from his trips to various parts of Germany.

Subseries 5: Other,  undated.

Scope and Content:

Articles that do not immediately relate to Joseph Roth's work or life can be found in this subseries, together with several manuscripts that were written by Joseph Roth. One of these manuscripts is anonymous, the other two belonged to Ruth Jensen. A poem found in this subseries was written by Vera Meyer.

Series III: Correspondence, 1906-1939.

Arrangement:

Arranged alphabetically by name of the addressee.

Scope and Content:

This series contains correspondence to and from Joseph Roth. There are two categories of letters in this series, those from his relatives and those related to his writing, including correspondence with his French translator Blanch Gidon, his agent Berthold Fles, and correspondence with various publishing houses. The correspondence to and from his relatives consists of letters written by Joseph Roth to his in-laws Jente and Selig Reichler, letters to his cousin Paula Grübel living in Lemberg (then Lwów, Poland; now L'viv, Ukraine), and other members of the Grübel family. The letters to Paula Grübel also contain letters by Joseph Roth to her parents and sisters. They date from 1906 to 1924 and catch Joseph Roth in various periods of his life, such as a student in Brody, then in Vienna, afterwards as newly married. There are about a dozen poetic letters. Some of the letters in this folder are also written by Joseph Roth's wife Friederike Roth (Friedl). There is a copy of a sketch drawn by Beno Reifenberg of Joseph Roth in the editorial office of the Frankfurter Zeitung. Also included is a poem An meinen Freund (To My Friend) dated June 29, 1915 in Vienna. There are several empty envelops, one of them addressed to the one-year volunteer of the Habsburg Imperial and Royal Army (Einjährig-Freiwilliger) Joseph Roth from September 1917, two unidentified letters addressed to Joseph Roth, and an address book. The address book is basically empty with only six entries, Joseph Roth's autograph, and inscription 'Am zwanzigsten Mai 1920' [on the twentieth May ]. Joseph Roth usually signed his letters to family his as Muni.

The rather extensive correspondence with the French translator of Joseph Roth's works, Blanche Gidon, contains seventy six letters and cards spanning the years 1931-1939. In his letters, Joseph Roth often discussed the problems of translation, the progress of his works, some of his plans, and some personal matters. Berthold Fles was Joseph Roth's literary agent in New York. His correspondence with Joseph Roth is concerned with placing his books on the American market. The letters in this series are mostly related to American publication of the Geschichte von der 1002. Nacht [The Tale of the 1002nd Night].

Another significant portion in this series is the correspondence with publishers, mostly pertaining to international publishing rights for some of Joseph Roth's works. The rights were originally kept with the Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag. When the publishing house went out of business in 1933, all the international rights were transferred to the Swiss company Orcovente. They transferred these rights to Joseph Roth in 1934. All major European publishing houses are represented in this series.

Series IV: Grubel, Fred (Grübel, Fredrick), 1925?-1989.

Arrangement:

Arranged by folder title.

Scope and Content:

This series contains correspondence related to the estate of Joseph Roth that Fred Grubel, executive director of LBI, collected throughout the years. The material was originally arranged chronologically in two folders. In the correspondence, Fred Grubel, who was also the first cousin of Joseph Roth, together with the lawyer Caroline Birnbaum, tried to determine inheritance rights and the further destiny of the estate. Therefore, there are several documents related to the circumstances of Friederike Roth's death and last days of Joseph Roth.

There are also documents related to the reburial of Joseph Roth's corpus in 1970, including several photographs and newspaper clippings with reports on that event. The rest of the series consists of book reviews of Joseph Roth's work published after the Second World War both in Germany and the United States, popular and scholarly articles about Joseph Roth's life and work, and material of conferences and exhibitions that focused on his work. There is also a photocopy of Joseph Roth's manuscript of his novel Perlefter here.

A) Roth, Friederike 

B) Roth, Joseph 

C) Roth, Joseph - Reviews 

D) Roth, Joseph - Conferences and Exhibitions 

E) Works on Joseph Roth  

Series V: Zweig, Friderike, 1935-1957.

Arrangement:

Arranged by folder title.

Scope and Content:

The series contains correspondence related to the estate of Joseph Roth and is complementary to Series IV: Grubel, Fred. There are also several recollections on Joseph Roth, one a short note written by Friderike Zweig and an undated text by the Polish poet and Joseph Roth's friend Józef Wittlin. The correspondence with the Harvard University library is related to depositing Joseph Roth's papers there. Correspondence with Andrea Manga Bell, a former partner of Joseph Roth, relates to the manuscript of Tarabas [Tarabas].

Series VI: Addenda, 1922-1995.

Arrangement:

Arranged by folder title.

Scope and Content:

This series consists of material that was added to the collection after the inventory was drafted and the bulk of the collection organized. Most of these documents are articles on various aspects of the life and work of Joseph Roth. Programs of conferences and catalogs of exhibitions that put Joseph Roth into focus can be found here.

Part of this series consists of copies of Joseph Roth's texts, as is a photocopy of his 9-part series on the assassins of Walter Rathenau, published in the Neue Berliner Zeitung in October 1922; a reprint of Joseph Roth's poems and articles in the Arbeiter-Zeitung "Noch mehr," and the copy of a film script he wrote together with Leo Mittler.

1) Newspaper and scholarly articles 

2) Conferences, symposia, and exhibitions 

3) Other