The Hotel Years

1. A Man Reads the Paper

The expression on the face of the newspaper reader is serious, sometimes tending to grim, occasionally dissolving in smiling hilarity. While his slightly bulbous pupils in their sharp oval spectacles slalom down the page, dreamy fingers play on the café table and perform a silent trill that looks like a form of grief — as though the fingertips were feeling for invisible crumbs to pick up.

The newspaper reader has a long, well-trimmed shovel beard that covers the feuilleton page while he attends to the political news. Half-obscured by the beard, in sumptuous purple splendour, shimmers a bow tie whose knot I am unable to see, except when the newspaper reader thoughtfully strokes his Adam’s apple.

I can see what is engaging the newspaper reader’s attention: the recent sensational reports from Budapest. They have been given a bold headline. They are presented in a fluffy, tempting, positively beguiling layout, in numerous little paragraphs, each one of which has its own alluring subtitle. Like all news, they give themselves away before they can be transmitted: and they give away more than they can possibly keep.

It is impossible to see them as anything but sensationalist. They are about the passing of false bills, but they don’t tell the whole story. They are scrupulously accurate and yet still they withhold a few details. They describe the character of the counterfeiter, but they don’t know his name. They refer to “well-placed sources”, but where and how they are placed they don’t say. Of course, it’s the things you’re not told that arouse your interest. The gaps in the news are the interesting bits.

So what happens now in the newspaper reader? How will he react to what he has not read? Is he pleased to learn about the false bills, or upset, or is he even from Budapest himself? Surely he may be numbered among the great horde of the morally indignant, who feel vicarious anger at any news of criminality. All the fuses that were slowly burning in him reach the point at which they cause an explosion. Not visibly, of course. Heavens, no! But one that is contained in itself, more an implosion…

In any case, it may be seen that the reports are toying with his delicate soul, even while he imagines he is toying with the news. If he weren’t so utterly bespectacled, it might almost be that the news is reading him. Perhaps he imagines his mind is toying with these half-reported things, filling them out. But these special reports take it out of him. A leader’s shallow scoop would do him in. Everything there is so agleam with shiny common sense that the reader can’t but be dazzled.

Now he stands up, the reader, fully in the picture, older, wiser and possibly sadder. With his left hand he smoothes away any unevennesses that may have occurred in his beard and changes his glasses. (For an instant he has shy little mousy eyes.) Then he snaps open a coffin containing a different pair, and heads outside, equipped for the street.

The feuilleton remained covered. He leaves it to less manly natures than his own.

But if it should happen that one day, quietly, out of boredom, he should read it, then he would not like it one little bit. Because what I write is not to his taste…

Frankfurter Zeitung, 11 January 1926