During the Weimar Republic, the Frankfurter Zeitung and its feuilleton enjoyed a reputation as a prestigious cultural institution. The newspaper was founded by the Jewish banker and politician Leopold Sonnemann, in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution, and maintained a strong democratic and liberal political orientation up to the early 1930s. Run until the National Socialist takeover by Sonnemann’s grandson, Heinrich Simon, the Frankfurter Zeitung sat at the vanishing point of Jewish assimilation in Germany—an international newspaper for a general bourgeois readership that published numerous prominent Jewish journalists (like Roth, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin) and was also derided as “Jewish” by antisemites. Roth published reviews, including the text presented here, and travel reports for the paper, working as its Paris correspondent from 1925 to 1926 and later as a traveling correspondent from Russia, Italy, and Poland.

This text telescopes a long and persistent debate surrounding the cultural status of the feuilleton in German letters and beyond. Does the feuilleton measure up to the tradition of “high” literature from Goethe and Schiller to Thomas Mann? This debate, along with the question of the cultural assignment of the modern writer, appeared in various forms in Weimar-era literary publications, such as Die Weltbühne, Die Neue Rundschau, and Das Tage-Buch. Here, Roth frames the debate temporally: “daily writers” (playing on the German Tagesschriftsteller and French, jour-nalist) write in newspapers for the present moment, while poets (Dichter) and the authors of books are destined for eternity. Roth’s text dovetails on the forward to Polgar’s On the Margins, which defends the concise “small forms” of feuilletons, essays, and reportage against the oft laborious, “lingering description and observation” of “long literature.” For Roth, both Kisch and Polgar exemplify the legitimacy of journalism—with its “knowledge of humans, the wisdom of life, the capacity for orientation, [and] the gift of pinning things down”—appearing in book form. The timeliness of journalism, Roth contends, is not restricted to its daily appearance.

“The Incursion of Journalists into Posterity” also demonstrates Roth’s signature wit, which many also associated with the feuilleton as form. Take, for example, the text’s metaphor of “mayflies” (Eintagsfliege, literally one-day flies) for journalists and “higher insects” for poets and authors of books. This wit often accompanied Roth’s defense of the feuilleton, as in a 1926 letter to Benno Reifenberg, his editor at the Frankfurter Zeitung. “The feuilleton is just as important to the paper as its politics—and to the reader it’s even more important,” he writes. “The modern newspaper needs a reporter more than it needs a leader writer. I am not an encore, not a pudding, I am the main dish.” It was this confluence of newspaper and book, timeliness and eternity, news and the subjectivism of style, Jewish authors and mainstream German society that defined the feuilleton during the Weimar Republic.