Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth: Chronicler of a Vanished Empire

At the Battle of Solferino in 1859, an infantry lieutenant spots a glint of light, topples the Emperor of Austria from his horse, and takes the sniper's bullet meant for his sovereign. Franz Joseph rewards him with the Order of Maria Theresa and a barony: Trotta von Sipolje. Everything that follows in *Radetzky March* — three generations of Trottas drifting quietly downward toward 1914 — proceeds from that one act of loyalty. It is the most characteristic idea Joseph Roth ever had: that the reward and the ruin arrive in the same envelope.

A Galician Childhood

Christened Moses Joseph Roth, born on 2 September 1894, he grew up in Brody, a heavily Jewish town near Lemberg in East Galicia, on the eastern rim of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He never saw his father, who vanished before he was born, and was raised by his mother and her relatives. The border is the master fact of his life. Brody sat where the Habsburg world stopped and the Russian one began, and Roth spent his career writing about people caught in exactly that position — legally somewhere, emotionally nowhere.

He began university at Lemberg in 1913 and moved the following year to Vienna, where he read philosophy and German literature. In 1916 he broke off his studies to volunteer for the Austro-Hungarian army, serving on the Eastern Front, probably in a journalistic or censorship role rather than in combat. He was twenty-four when the empire that commissioned him ceased to exist.

Der rote Joseph

Roth returned to Vienna in 1918 and went straight into newspapers, writing for the left-wing press under the byline *Der rote Joseph* — "Red Joseph," a pun on his own surname. In 1920 he moved to Berlin. He wrote for *Vorwärts*, the *Neue Berliner Zeitung*, the *Berliner Börsen-Courier* from 1921, and from 1923 for the liberal *Frankfurter Zeitung*. He was sent everywhere: France, the Soviet Union, Albania, Poland, Italy, across Germany.

This was not hack work to fund the novels. It was the main event of his adult life, and it made him rich. His translator Michael Hofmann calls him "one of the most distinguished and best-paid journalists of the period, being paid at the dream rate of one Deutschmark per line." The habits the newspaper drilled into him — brevity, physical precision, the refusal to explain a scene the reader can already see — are exactly the habits that make the novels move as fast as they do.

The Wandering Jews

In 1927 he published *The Wandering Jews*, reportage on the migration of Jews out of eastern Europe into western cities after the First World War and the Russian Revolution. It is the pivot in his work. Before it he was a novelist of the contemporary — *The Spider's Web* (1923), *Hotel Savoy* (1924), *Flight Without End* (1927), books about drifters, veterans and the wreckage of demobilisation. After it his subject narrows into a single figure: the homeless wanderer, usually a Jew or a former Habsburg subject, looking for a *Heimat* that has been abolished. *Job* (1930) made his literary reputation, which until then had lagged well behind his journalistic one.

What Radetzky March Actually Does

*Radetzky March* (1932) is the book everyone means. Its method is the opposite of dramatic: rather than staging the collapse of Austria-Hungary, Roth lets it seep. The narration is third-person and deliberately unhurried, closer to Turgenev and Tolstoy than to anything modernist, advancing by what one critic describes as impressions, episodes, motives and movements — a musical structure, scenes turning over like a gramophone record. Its most quoted line is a statement of tempo, not of plot: "That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten."

The novel's best joke is also its thesis. The ennobled Baron Trotta discovers that school history books have rewritten his rescue of the Emperor as a piece of cavalry heroics. He petitions Franz Joseph to correct it, and the Emperor refuses: an accurate account would be pedestrian, useless to Habsburg patriotism. The truth is deleted from the record instead. From that moment the family lives inside a fiction the state has authored, and the ordinary mediocrity of the later Trottas — a district commissioner who cannot speak to his son, a cavalry lieutenant undone by gambling debts and a fatal duel, dying pointlessly in the first weeks of the war — becomes the empire's biography in miniature. James Meek calls the book "a lyrical summoning of a remarkable world, the Austro-Hungarian empire, a balance between multiple ethnoses." Mario Vargas Llosa has called it the best political novel ever written.

Exile and the Last Hotels

Hitler became Chancellor on 30 January 1933 and Roth, a prominent liberal Jewish journalist, left Germany at once. He spent most of his remaining six years in Paris, a city he loved. In February 1933 he wrote to Stefan Zweig with a clarity almost nobody else managed that early: "You will have realized by now that we are drifting towards great catastrophes... They have succeeded in establishing a reign of barbarity. Do not fool yourself. Hell reigns."

His private life was already wreckage. His wife Friederike Reichler, married in 1922, developed schizophrenia in the late 1920s and was institutionalised; she was later murdered in the Nazi euthanasia programme. He lived with Andrea Manga Bell until money ran out, and from 1936 to 1938 with the novelist Irmgard Keun. He wrote *Tarabas* (1934), *The Emperor's Tomb* (1938), which carries his characters forward into the Nazi annexation of Austria, and *The Legend of the Holy Drinker* (1939), a novella about an alcoholic vagrant trying to die with his debts settled — a book whose autobiography is not remotely concealed. He moved between hotels, drank ruinously, and stayed productive. On 27 May 1939, days after learning the playwright Ernst Toller had hanged himself in New York, he died in Paris of double pneumonia complicated by delirium tremens. He was said to have had two funerals, one Jewish and one Catholic; he never renounced Judaism but regarded Catholicism as part of his identity.

Why Joseph Is Called a Genius

Vargas Llosa's verdict on *Radetzky March* as the finest political novel ever written is about as strong as such claims get. But it is worth being exact about what the gift consists of, because it is not intellectual originality. Roth advanced no theory of history. His politics moved from the socialism of "Red Joseph" to a nostalgic Habsburg monarchism many contemporaries found reactionary, and he is a principal architect of the "Habsburg myth," a body of writing that gilded a state which had been, for most of its subjects, bureaucratic and unlovely. He knew this. He wrote the myth anyway.

The genius is a matter of craft, and the craft is specific. Roth could carry an argument about history entirely inside physical detail, so that no character states the theme and no narrator editorialises. Three generations of a family, each less impressive than the last, register the death of an empire without a page of political analysis. Fifteen years of daily journalism taught him compression; the border town taught him what statelessness feels like from the inside; the combination let him write sentences of extreme simplicity that carry enormous freight. The honest counter-case is that his range is narrow, the later books circle one wound, and the melancholy shades into indulgence. The defence is that within that range nobody has done it better.

Legacy

Famous as a reporter and only belatedly famous as a novelist, Roth came close to vanishing after 1939. English translations of *Radetzky March* and of his journalism, from the 2000s onward, reversed that. He now reads as one of the essential German-language writers of the twentieth century — the man who found the form for the century's characteristic experience of losing a country while standing still.

Achievements

• Notable work: Radetzky March
• Notable work: Job
• Notable work: The Emperor's Tomb
• Educated at University of Vienna
• Worked as writer, journalist and playwright