“From their midst, as by a miracle, they suddenly produced a policeman” is like a moment out of a Chaplin film, while the idea of a character’s descent to the level of toilet attendant actually is the story of Fritz Murnau’s film The Last Man, which came out in the same year as Rebellion and starred one of the silent cinema’s great masters of pathos, Emil Jannings. But what is unexpected and distinctive and ‘Rothian’ in Rebellion is the lyrical cynicism with which Herr Arnold is described in chapter 7; the way that, purely through suffering, the character of Andreas Pum deepens into a third dimension; and the shocks of irony and poetry that accompany the story, in the breathtaking savagery, say, of the sentence, “It may be said that that evening she was completely happy,” or the pathetic resonance of the image: “On Andreas’s little dish, everything was all mixed up, and a large bone stuck out of the mess like a broken rooftree from the ruins of a house.”

Ingeborg Sültemeyer, the critic who has done the most to—quite literally—discover and habilitate early Roth, makes the clever point that to Andreas in Rebellion, God and State occupy reversed positions: there is something like a business contract with God, while the State is the object of faith and worship—hence Andreas’s unexpected word, “heathens,” for those veterans who, unlike himself, are dissatisfied and rebellious. The relationship with this “deity” and the great, Job-like final scene seem to be freighted with more than the misprision of a purely secular authority.

While there is no suggestion that Andreas is actually a Jew— and indeed, the casually anti-Semitic aspersion of the old man on the tram would seem to rule it out—critics have pointed out that his intimate and vexed and accusing relationship with his “God” is the same as, and is perhaps modeled on, that of Eastern Jews with theirs. It is this unexpected congruency that lends support to James Wood’s interesting contention that “all of [Roth’s] self-defeating heroes, even if gentile, are ultimately Jewish.”

Here, anyway, in its dealing with the extremity of a man’s life and his dealings with the Almighty, however constituted, Rebellion seems to look forward to The Legend of the Holy Drinker, the charmed tale that Roth completed in the weeks before his own death in 1939. It is uncanny what the two books have in common: a hero named Andreas, an unexpected reflection in a mirror, a barbershop, parrots, suits, money (coins in Rebellion, paper in the Holy Drinker), God, an individual’s destiny in a group of people similarly placed, church, a woman, prison, friendship, policemen, documents, wallets, a little girl (here Anni, there Therese), a dying confusion. It’s as though the same ingredients have been recombined to create two completely different dishes. If I may leave the reader of Rebellion with a suggestion, it is that he or she might care to go on and read The Legend of the Holy Drinker and catch a prismatically different writer to try and reconcile with “der rote Roth,” and briefly recapitulate a remarkable oeuvre. Alternatively, of course, he or she might read the whole of that oeuvre, now that it is possible to do so.

—Michael Hofmann
February 1999

1

THE 24TH MILITARY HOSPITAL was a cluster of shacks on the edge of the city. It would have taken an able-bodied man a good half hour’s walk to reach it from the end of the tramline. The tram went into the world, the big city and life. But to the inmates of the 24th Military Hospital the tram was out of reach.

They were blind or halt. They limped. They had shattered spines. They were waiting to have limbs amputated, or had recently had them amputated. The War was in the dim and distant past. They had forgotten about squad drill, about the Sergeant Major, the Captain, the Company, the Chaplain, the Emperor’s birthday, the parade, the trenches, going over the top. They had made their own individual peace with the enemy. Now they were readying themselves for the next war: against pain, against artificial limbs, against crippledom, against hunchbacks, against sleepless nights, and against the healthy and the hale.

Only Andreas Pum was content with things as they were. He had lost a leg and been given a medal. There were many who had no medal, even though they had lost more than merely a leg. They had lost both arms or both legs. Or they would be bedridden for the rest of their lives, because there was something the matter with their spinal fluid. Andreas Pum rejoiced when he saw the sufferings of the others.

He believed in a just god. One who handed out shrapnel, amputations, and medals to the deserving. Viewed in the correct light, the loss of a leg wasn’t so very bad, and the joy of receiving a medal was considerable. An invalid might enjoy the respect of the world. An invalid with a medal could depend on that of the government.

The government is something that overlies man like the sky overlies the earth. What comes from it may be good or ill, but it cannot be other than great and all-powerful, unknowable and mysterious, even though on occasion it may be understood by an ordinary person.

Some of his comrades curse at the government. According to them, they have been treated unjustly. As if the War hadn’t been a necessity! As if its consequences were not inevitably pain, amputations, hunger, and sickness! What were they grumbling about? They had no God, no Emperor, no Fatherland.