The Spider's Web

"I’m a huge fan of Roth’s writing, not just his novels, but also his journalism. He was obviously a key figure in interwar Europe’s literary scene. He was Jewish, originally from Galicia and spent a lot of the 1920s in Germany where he worked as a journalist. In fact, he was one of the most widely known literary journalists of the 1920s, and one of the best paid. Apparently, he received the princely sum of one Mark per line, which was a lot of money in those days. The Spider’s Web was his first novel. Far more people know his nostalgic work, The Radetzky March , about the late Habsburg Empire. But I think this earlier novel, which was first serialised in a newspaper at the very beginning of the 1920s, is extremely insightful, even prophetic in a way. The main character is a man, Lieutenant Theodor Lohse, who’s a decommissioned veteran of World War I. He returns home in late 1918 to a world turned upside down. He is a nationalist. He hates Jews and he hates socialists and he also finds himself in difficult personal circumstances. His mother and sister, with whom he’s now forced to live again, don’t seem particularly pleased to see him. There’s a great line in the novel where Lohse reflects on that and realises that a dead war hero would have generated a pension for the family and that would have been much more welcome than the return of a broken man, who’s unemployed and an extra mouth to feed when there’s no money. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He looks for work and tries to get a job at his former school. He’s keen to get a job as a teacher. But the director is sceptical about returning soldiers. He suspects they’re all Communists and he refuses to give him a job. So Lohse is forced to work as the private tutor to the kids of a wealthy Jewish family. He obviously despises this because he is an anti-Semite and now has to live off handouts from Jews. He gradually gets sucked into this parallel universe of right-wing underground organisations and secret societies, with honour killings and that kind of thing. What is remarkable about it is that Roth wrote this novel before Hitler’s putsch of November 1923, his failed attempt to gain power. When the book was serialised in a newspaper, the last instalment appeared on 6 November 1923, three days before Hitler’s putsch attempt. Roth is obviously interested in this ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic milieu that is percolating. It’s still on the margins of politics but, nonetheless, it exists. It’s a very important novel in which he plays with themes that would become much more prominent in the late 1920s and early 1930s. You have a whole range of little underground sects and clubs on the political right. The right is just as fractured as the political left. Lots of these groups couldn’t stand each other. There are monarchists. That’s a relatively small group of people in the 1920s, largely diehard conservative ex-officers and aristocrats, who want the return of the Kaiser, which the vast majority of Germans do not want. The arch-conservative German Nationalist Party was partly monarchist. But you also have groups that are not fundamentally dissimilar to the Nazis, but which don’t necessarily work together with them, who are striving for some kind of right-wing dictatorship. There’s a putsch in 1920 called the Kapp Putsch, which is carried out by Freikorps soldiers and some small groups of the extreme right who want to overthrow the Weimar Republic. “Roth is obviously interested in this ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic milieu that is percolating” The putsch collapses because, for once, the Communists and the Social Democrats come together and call for a general strike, which brings public life in Germany to a complete standstill. It’s the biggest general strike in German history and the putschers are forced to give up quite quickly. That’s the historical context in which Roth becomes interested in these themes. But also, of course, as a Galician Jew and someone who thinks very nostalgically about the bygone Habsburg Empire, in which Jews had legal equality, he is very concerned about the rise of nationalism in Europe more generally. He thinks that these nationalist successor states that treat minorities rather poorly are a real threat, and this is something that influences his general work. He wrote a very powerful book called The Wandering Jews about Jewish refugees, who are basically trying to escape from all these pogroms taking place in Eastern and Central Europe in and around 1918. Many of them moved to Germany and, particularly, to Berlin to find safety. He’s very interested in their plight and that is also one of the sub-themes of The Spider’s Web in which one of the characters, the ambiguous Benjamin Lenz, hails from the city of Lodz and lives among Jewish refugees. They are not the most fully developed characters. Lohse quickly leaves his job there to join a right-wing underground organization led by Ludendorff and then re-joins the army. But Jewish characters are present throughout the novel. The Jewish population in Germany was about one per cent of the overall population. It was a relatively small, but very diverse, group. Some of them were orthodox, others not religious at all. The cliché of the far right was that they were all extremely wealthy, that they were the wire-pullers behind what was often referred to as ‘The Golden International’—capitalism. But, in reality, they were a very diverse group and there were far more poor Jews living in Germany than extremely wealthy ones. The relationship with his employers is that he despises them in private, but he is obviously reliant on that income. So, he has an ambivalent relationship with them. They are generous enough to him, but there is a clear relationship of dependency. They are the employer and he needs the money. Absolutely. It’s highly contradictory. The only thing that holds these two conspiracy stories together is a kind of chaos theory—the Jews are trying two different tacks to bring chaos to the world. One is through communism and the other is through capitalism. And, of course, the ultimate objective of that Jewish world conspiracy is to enslave Christians and to rule the world. That’s a very prominent theme in right-wing thinking. It’s interesting that simultaneously with the rise of anti-Bolshevism you had the remarkable success of the forged ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion’, which were translated into almost every language and became this massive phenomenon. They were forged by Tsarist offices and their key theme was how these ‘Elders of Zion’ were plotting to bring about Jewish world domination. They were a huge success with the German right, but also in other countries. They were first published in Russian before the war, but their international publication success story really starts afterwards, in the 1920s, despite being exposed as a hoax in 1921. It’s quite remarkable. People like Henry Ford, for example, in the United States, subsidised their translation and distribution to keep the price down, so that people would be well informed about this alleged world conspiracy. It obviously found a receptive audience."