Here the whole sky is smoke. It connects all the towns. It hangs in a grey arc over the land that has made it and that continues to make more of it. The wind that might scatter it is choked and buried under it. The sun that might tunnel through it is deflected and buried in thick clouds. Like something not earthborn and ephemeral, it ascends, conquers celestial regions, acquires mass, spins substance out of nothing, bundles its shadow into a body and incessantly increases its specific weight. It draws new sustenance from massive chimneys. It rises, steaming, into the air. It is sacrifice, god and priest all at once. Billions of specks of dust are exhaled by it. By the mere fact of producing it, we worship it. We create it with an industry that is more than reverence. We are filled with it.
This is the image that Joseph Roth painted in ‘Smoke Joins up the Towns’ (1926), one of the vignettes from the collection, The Hotel Years : Wanderings in Europe between the Wars. Most of the entries are backward-looking and elegiac, final portraits of a Europe that was vanishing in front of his eyes. At the centre of his work was reckoning with the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, most notably captured in The Radetzky March, a story that presents ‘an extraordinary account of a world collapsing’. In his last novel, The Emperor’s Tomb, Roth spoke of the Great War as the first World War, ‘not for the usual reason, that the whole world was involved in it, but rather because as a result of it we lost a whole world, our world’.
Given that much of Roth’s writing detailed political, economic and social relations that were disappearing, what is remarkable about this piece is how prescient it was, capturing a world coming into being, one dominated by technology, by production, by extraction, by ‘externalities’.
A big city has centres, rows of streets joined up by the sense of a structure, it has history, and its checkable expansion is somehow calming. It has a periphery, a limit, a line where it stops and goes over into country. Here, though, are a dozen beginnings; and it ends a dozen times. Land wants to resume, poor, smoke-pregnant land, but along comes a wire and says: not here you don’t.
Indeed, this feels like an apt depiction of much of the modern, technological and digital world we inhabit. Trying to describe the separate cities that make up the Ruhr valley, Roth emphasised how they were tied together through industry, with smoke - literally and metaphorically - concealing differences and homogenising all. The imagery is so powerful, it captures a set of underlying dynamics we now struggle to see, even if the air is more clear.
Every small town has its focus, its edges, its development. But since they are all to be united by smoke to a single city, the separate forms and histories lose credibility, certainly function. Why? Why? Why is Essen here? Why are Duisburg, Hamborn, Oberhausen, Mülheim, Bottrop, Elberfeld, Barmen there? Why so many names, why so many mayors, so many officials for a single town?
United by smoke. In much of the developed world the air quality might have improved, but the logic is effectively the same, now we are united by cables and wires. And in the process, difference is lost, all enveloped by the same digital smoke. With it, all our cities increasingly look alike, the same retailers and brands, the same mediocre coffee and fast food the world over, only now it is environmentally friendly™.
Invariably, Roth’s vision turned backward, considering what was lost amidst all of this industrial progress.
Things have a better feeling for the future than people do. People feel historically, i.e. retrospectively. Walls, streets, wires, chimneys feel prospectively. People get in the way of progress. They hang sentimental weights on the winged feet of time. Each one wants his own church tower. In the meantime chimneys grow over the heads of church towers. The smoke eats up the sound of bells. It swaddles them in its black wool, so that they cannot be heard, much less told apart. Each city has its theatres, its monuments, its museum, its history. But none of these things has any lasting resonance. For historical or so-called cultural things live off the echo that sustains them. Here though is no room for echo and resonance. The sounds of bells live from echo, and they all fight each other, until the smoke comes along and chokes them.
No echo, no resonance, just endless memes and mashups.
Roth recognised that there were some outliers; smaller towns that had yet to succumb to industry, but he saw little space left for them in the ever-expanding empire of smoke.
What is the point of these slumbering nooks, these dreamy beauties? While there was a blue sky over them they were in their element, but now grey smoke hangs over them. They are buried under billions of dust and carbon particles. They will never experience a resurrection. Never will a pure naked sunbeam gild them. Never will a pure rain rinse them clean. Never will an actual cloud lend them shade. In all their fixity they are doomed. They were built for the ages in lasting stone, and their durable construction is the only reason they still exist now. Not because they have any force or presence. They are like old silver coins that have no value as currency.
What makes this small entry by Roth so powerful is precisely the way he captured the transition from the world disappearing to the one taking shape. A century later little has changed, we remain, ‘inhabitants of the smokeland, smoke worshippers, smoke makers, children of smoke.’ How we escape this condition and create a new world, and do so in a way that charts a course between different apolitical extremes, is increasingly the dominant challenge of our time.
Roth’s prognosis was bleak, and unfortunately acute: ‘Smoke over the world! No sky, no clouds’. And so, we are all left inhabiting ‘one grim’ city under a ‘uniform sky’. The world of smoke and wires is certainly one we continue to live in, and with. Nonetheless, I have increasingly come to recognise the vital relevance of those ‘dreamy beauties’ that endure, those ‘old silver coins’ that remain. These are powerful reminders that things can be different, other ways of living and being are possible, the world we have now is not the only option available. Even if those lost worlds will never be resurrected, new - and hopefully better - ones can be built.