Writing is all about juggling two completely different ideas like when you’re on deck back-stitching a broken sail that the wind tore apart while you were sleeping. But today I feel so confident to do it with three—just to live up to the title which is not wanton.
One of my dear literary heroes, Joseph Roth, was a German Jew writer born in Brody in 1894, East Galitzia, in the easternmost of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, actually Ukraine. Roth began a career in Vienna as a best-paid journalist for left-wing newspapers as “Der Rote Joseph”—a play on his surname—fought in WWI and was a privileged witness of the implosion of Austria.
Later on, he relocated to Berlin and wrote for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung, and became a correspondent from France, the USSR, Albania, Poland, Italy, and of course Germany. In the meantime, he began to write novels with a melancholic nostalgia about the Habsburg Myth, like The Radetzky March. Ideologically, he went from being a stern socialist to a monarchist, an entire cycle.
Igor Stravinsky doesn’t need any introduction. But for the ones who never listened to this classical Russian composer, I would highlight one thing: he was the first to use violins like percussion, in a way that his contemporary audience considered outrageous. To describe, the well-mannered Parisians left the theater in a stampede—succès de scandale in French—when they heard The Rite of Spring. Indeed, they were terrified. But you should know that there is no real art when you don’t get stricken to the core.
And finally, Rutger Hauer, a German actor who passed away in 2019. For me, he will be always in my mind an icon of that futuristic movie called Blade Runner. Where he performed a murderous and contemplative android with a farewell proper of a Wagnerian Siegfried. Like Klaus Kinski, he did shitty movies and commercials just for the dough. But when he found the chance to shine, he nailed it.
Well then, these three juicy oranges I’m juggling now come to terms with a movie based on Joseph Roth’s swan song, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, an astonishing novella he wrote in Paris in 1939, knowing that his days were numbered because of Hitler and his antisemitism that went nuts.
Imagine one of the best German writers—who has a patron like Stefan Zweig—sinking into the hopeless emptiness of alcoholism while hearing the Nazi boots getting closer. What kind of story he could write? What else he could feverishly be scribbling in those cafés?
He drank himself to death but was always incredibly lucid.
