Joseph Roth

I’ve grown old; he has merely lived for many years.

But old age was approaching with cruel, hushed steps and sometimes in crafty disguises.

The good man believed that shortsighted people were also deaf and that their spectacles would become clearer if their ears heard more sharply.

Mass would be celebrated first by a Roman Catholic priest, then by a Greek orthodox priest. The most strenuous duties of all were the church ceremonies. He felt he had to pull himself together before God as if facing a superior. And he was old already. He could spare me any number of things! the Kaiser mused. But God is even older than I, and His decisions seem as unfathomable to me as mine seem to the soldiers in the army. And where would we be if every subordinate could criticize his superior?

He could never have put it into words, but we may say that he was unspeakably afflicted by the thought of having been a tool in the hands of misfortune.

And for the first time in his very long life he realized how hard it is to be helpless yet maintain one’s dignity. This insight struck him like a lightning bolt, shattering the pride that he had so carefully nurtured and fostered for such a long time, that he had inherited and was determined to pass down.

For years now he had been a deputy to the Imperial Council, routinely reelected by his district, beating all other candidates with the help of money, violence, and surprise attacks; a minion of the government, he despised to the parliamentary body to which he belonged. He had never given a speech and never heckled. Impious, derisive, fearless, and without qualms, Chojnicki used to say that the Kaiser was mindless and senile, the government a gang of nincompoops, the Imperial Council a gathering of gullible and grandiloquent idiots, and the national authorities venal, cowardly, and lazy. The German Austrians were waltzers and boozy crooners, the Hungarians stank, the Czechs were born bootlickers, the Ruthenians were treacherous Russians in disguise, the Croats and Slovenes, whom he called Cravats and Slobbers, were brushmakers and chestnut roasters, and the Poles, of whom he himself was one after all, were skirt chasers, hairdressers, and fashion photographers.