The Spider's Web and Zipper and His Father

by Joseph Roth

Two novellas of rare energy and insight, The Spider's Web and Zipper and His Father are filled with Joseph Roth's surprising political foresight and compassionate sensitivity to the tremors of a world on the brink of collapse. The Spider's Web paints a chillingly realistic picture of the conspiracies of the radical right that were to undermine the Weimar Republic and pave the way for Hitler and National Socialism to take root among the disenchanted middle classes. Through the eyes of Theodor Lohse, a frustrated and disappointed veteran recently returned from the Great War, Roth shows the dark and powerful attraction of secret right-wing organizations to a man deprived of comradeship and military glory by the ennui of civilian life. Driven by anti-Semitism and an intense hatred of communism, Lohse assumes various disguises in an underground terrorist network, spreading the evil message of National Socialism through random acts of violence and intimidation. Zipper and his Father is a melancholy evocation of the seedy, unsuccessful lives of lowly clerks lounging in Viennese coffee houses and dreaming of what might have been. Roth charts the shared eccentricities and erratic progress of a father and son in the febrile world of German cinema in the late 1920s.

Genres: Fiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Joseph Roth, journalist and novelist, was born and grew up in Brody, a small town near Lemberg in East Galicia, part of the easternmost reaches of what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire and is now Ukraine. Roth was born into a Jewish family. He died in Paris after living there in exile.

http://www.josephroth.de/

Reviews

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

This bundle of two three-star novellas merits four stars as the combination provides a brilliant portrait of the Germany that would ultimately give the Nazis an electoral plurality. This was not of course what Roth was trying to do. The two works "The Spider's Web" and "Zipper and His Father" were both published in the 1920's at a time when a Nazi accession to power still appeared to be a highly unlikely possibility. Roth was simply try to portray the reaction of Germany's lower middle classes in the wake of the perceived humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles (1920).
Theodor Lohse, the protagonist of "The Spider's Web" seems very typical of the low-level Nazi operative described in books by many authors notably Robert Merle, Jonathon Littell, Stefan Zweig, and William Shirer. Lohse who enjoyed serving in the Kaiser's army is lost in post-war Weimer Germany. He cannot find work and is resentful towards the socialists, communists and Jews who he believes caused Germany's defeat. He is recruited into Royalist group that commits violence against unions.
Lohse is not a Nazi however. The Nazis are rather a competing group. The Nazis never wanted to bring the aristocrats back into power. In fact they often enjoyed humiliating them in personal meetings. Lohse is a social climber rather than a leveller. He hates Jews but is in love with the Jewish wife of his employer. Although somewhat stupid, Lohse is extremely cunning and totally unscrupulous. His talents cause him to rise in the covert Royalist organization. Ultimately, he is allowed to leave his clandestine existence. He is given a government position and a bride from the nobility.
In the movie version of "The Spider's Web" Lohse's group will ultimately merge with the Nazis. This absorption of the Royalists by the Nazis did not however take place until the 1930s well after Roth's novel was published. The movie makers were nonetheless right to view Lohse as a proto-Nazi. "The Spider's Web" is indeed an excellent work about the methods used by the anti-democratic forces present in Germany in the 1920s and the type of individuals involved with them.
"Zipper and His Father" is a much more benign work. It is about a father who is a great idiot and a son who is a little idiot. The two are petty bourgeois under-achievers who have received enough schooling to develop unrealistic expectations about their prospects in life. Both go from one career humiliation to another. At the end of the novel, the father dies while the son has found his station in life working as clown. They are both such asses it is hard to feel sorry for either even though Roth insists in the last pages that they do in fact deserve our pity.
"Zipper and His Father" is very similar to "The Spider's Web" in that the protagonists in both novels are convinced that WWI was a great humiliation and that injustice towards decent Germans prevailed in the Weimar republic. The pair of novels does much to explain what happened to Germany in the 1930s.

[Jimmy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two novellas. The Spider's Web is a chillingly told story of Theodore Lohse, a completely mediocre ex-soldier with questionable ethics who finds himself able to lie, murder, and climb his way to the top of a fascist organization. All the characters are despicable but understandable. It took me a while to get used to his writing style, often disorientingly full of gaps or filled with short sentences that don't allow the reader into the texture of the story; it's as if you're just reading a synopsis of the actual story. But oftentimes the language, though spare, is beautiful. I think it probably gets some of its power from maintaining this cold distance from the reader.

I was able to get into Zipper and His Father much more. Roth is a master of portraiture, not just of one or two people, but entire generations get distilled in his pen so that it becomes clear how whole sections of society are feeling. In Zipper, he gets much more personal than in Spider's Web, you really get to know Zipper and his father, Old Zipper; it's a devastatingly sad story that seems to be based on a real person.

Both novellas deal with young people who don't know what to do with themselves after fighting in the war, unable to reintegrate into normal life and unable to return to the war.

[mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two novellas, each about a man struggling for esteem. "Zipper and His Father" is the portrait of an extroverted and harmless petit bourgeois seen from the eyes of the best friend of his son, this friend himself without a father and thus grateful for this fun-loving substitute. But as the friend grows up and understands the desperation in the man his view changes. "The Spider's Web" details a desperate striving for fame that necessitates, in the eyes of the protagonist, a variety of nasty deeds. The setting is the rise of the Nazis in the 1930's and the story shows clearly how dangerous can be personal ambition deriving from personal emptiness.

[Pastor Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

Zipper and His Father was great. It has what is quintessentially Roth: a wistful regret for what life has become and an inability to see one's way through to a better future. That might not sound like happy reading, but he isn't a bludgeoner. His characters might lack hope, but he isn't trying to make ME unhappy with them. Instead, I get the sense that he's letting me see something human and inviting me into compassion.

(I didn't think much of The Spider's Web, which was one of Roth's first attempts at fiction.)

[Cooper Renner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two very different novellas in one volume. Spider's Web is a sharp, open-eyed look into the beginnings of Nazism. Very good to read this one in conjunction with Roth's Right and Left. Zipper and His Father is a "family" story, seen by an outsider--the strong links between a father and son, the ins and outs of family life in Vienna before and after WWI, the beginnings of the film industry in Germany.

[Arne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spider's Web - good
Zipper - better

[Sirena · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked Zipper and His Father more than The Spider's Web.