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Joseph Roth (1894-1939) |
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Prolific political journalist and novelist, whose major work, the family history Radetzkymarch appeared in 1932. It depicted the Habsburg empire Austria-Hungary from 1859 to 1916. Joseph Roth saw admiringly the old empire as a cosmopolitan world and its decline a sad chapter in European history. His ambivalence toward Western civilization led him increasingly to draw on the heritage of Eastern European storytelling. "The Eastern Jew looks to the West with a longing that it really doesn't merit. To the Eastern Jew, the West signifies freedom, justice, civilization, and the possibility to work and develop his talents. The West exports engineers, automobiles, books, and poems to the East. It sends propaganda soaps and hygiene, useful and elevating things, all of them beguiling and come-hitherish to the East. To the Eastern Jew, Germany, for example, remains the land of Goethe and Schiller, of the German poets, with whom every keen Jewish youth is far more conversant than our own swastika'd secondary school pupils." (from The Wandering Jews, translated by Michael Hofmann, 1999; original German language title Juden auf Wanderschaft, 1922) Joseph Roth was born Moses Joseph Roth in the
German colony of
Schwabendorf in Volynia (Austro-Hungarian Empire), into a Jewish
family. His father-in-law was an installment seller in Vienna, his
uncle a tailor, and his grandfather a rabbi. Roth's father left the
family before Joseph was born and died according to Roth in a lunatic
asylum in Amsterdam – actually he died in Russia. Roth lived by
turns with relatives of his father and mother. He never embraced
Jewishness as an element of identity: "My Jewishness never appeared as
anything else to me but an accidental quality, like, say, my blond
mustache," he wrote in july 1935 in a
letter to his lifelong friend Stefan Zweig. (Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, translated and edited by Michael Hofmann, 2012, p. 411) Roth's early years are little known and his own account is not
always reliable. He attended Baron-Hirsch-Schule, Brody (1901-05),
Impererial-Royal Crown Prince Rudolph Gymnasium (1905-13), studied
literature and philosophy at the University of Lemberg (now Lviv,
Ukraine) and Vienna (1914-16). From 1916 to 1918 Roth served in the
Austrian army in the rifle regiment (Feldjäger) – he probably had
a desk job. Roth claimed later to have spent months in Russian
captivity as a prisoner of war. The Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy,
with its 15 official languages, collapsed in the war, but Roth did not
lose his adoration of the vanished empire. "... we all lost a world,
our world," he once said. (The Good European: Essays and Arguments by Iain Bamforth, 2006, p. 40) After the war Roth worked as a journalist in Vienna, where
he published his first feuilletons, and moved in 1920 to Berlin,
which he described as "an aimlessly sprawling stone emblem for the
sorry aimless of our national existence!" (What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933, translated by Michael Hofmann, 2004, p. 126) In the 1920s his articles
showed traces of socialist conviction, although he never became a
political thinker. During his exile years he professed Catholicism. Roth's marriage to Friederike Reichler (1900-1940) failed, his wife
became mentally ill and was confined to a hospital in 1928. Roth lived with his mistress, the Cuban Andrea Manga Bell and her two children, in Berlin. She
followed him to France and then to Switzerland, where they met Klaus
Mann. "Joseph Roth (very drunk, pro-monarchist and nuts) with the
lovely Negro," Mann noted in his diary. (Love in a Time of Hate: Art and Passion in the Shadow of War, 1929-39 by Florian Illies, 2023, p. 166) For a long time, drinking did not affect the quality of Roth's writing; alcohol, along with rootlessness, was an important theme. His characters drink; alcohol giving them a means to cope with life and boredom. Roth's friend saw his alcoholism as a slow form of suicide. (see 'Drinking in Joseph Roth's Novels and Tales' by Edward Mornin, in The International Fiction Review, 6, No. 1, 1979) From 1923 to 1932 Roth was a correspondent for Frankfurter
Zeitung, travelling around Europe. Some of his widely read
articles from this period were collected in The Wandering Jews (1927).
In 1926 Roth went to the Soviet Union and recorded his resigned
Socialist views in Der stumme Propher (The
Silent Prophet), which was published posthumously in 1966. As a
novelist Roth had his first success with Hiob
(1930, Job: The Story of a Simple Man), a modern-day analogy of the
biblical story, in which Roth paid his tribute to his Jewish
background. When Hitler
came into power, Roth was obliged to flee Germany and return to Vienna,
where he lived in shabby hotels. He had already mentioned Hitler by
name in his first novel, Das Spinnennetz
(1967, The Spider’s
Web). "Let me say it loud and clear: The European mind is
capitulating," he stated in 'The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind' (1933).
(What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933, translated by Michael Hofmann, 2004, p. 207) Roth wrote for emigre publications, and drank even harder than before.
In 1933 and 1937 Roth travelled in Poland on PEN lecture tour. His
liaison with Andrea Manga Bell ended in 1936 and he formed a new
relatioship with the German émigré writer Irmgard Keun. While staying in Ostend, Belgium, in 1936, Roth urged his lifelong friend Stefan Zweig to join him there: "We can help each other in our work, and I think could both use such help – let's bring back the old days of Job!" Zweig wrote to a friend that Roth's novels are getting worse. After the assassination of Dolfuss, Roth moved to Paris, where he died of delirium tremensis and pneumonia in a poorhouse (in some sources in Hôpital Necker) on May 27, 1939. Roth's French translator, Blache Gidon, kept his early manuscripts safe during the war years. Friederike Reichler perished in a Nazi euthanasia programme in 1940. "Joseph Roth was an enigmatic figure in his life more than in his work. Though Jewish, he rarely spoke about his Jewishness. Plagued by poverty, he admired aristocracy. Though extremely gifted, his truly deserved recognition came to him only posthumously." (Elie Wiesel on Joseph Roth, in a review of Radetzky March, New York Times, Nov. 3, 1974) Roth started his career as a writer in the 1920s under the
influence of French and Russian psychological realism (Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky),
but later his works became nearer Viennese Impressionism (Hofmannstahl, Schnitzler).
In Hotel Savoy (1924,
Hotel Savoy) Roth described a variety of hotel clientele, arranging the
stories according to the wealth and status of the figures. Die
Rebellion
(1924, Rebellion) was a story of Andreas Pum who has lost a leg in
battle. "He believed in a just god. One who handed out shrapnel,
amputations, and medals to the deserving. Viewed in the correct light,
the loss of a leg wasn't so very bad, and the joy of receiving a medal
was considerable. An invalid might enjoy the respect of the world. An
invalid with a medal could depend on that of the government." He plays
the barrel organ on street corners. After a rebellion his marriage is
ruined and Pum finds himself in jail. Die Flucht ohne Ende (1927, The Flight Without End) traced the experiences of an Austrian soldier who makes his way back from captivity in Siberia to West, and who finds himself alienated from the bourgeois world. The protagonists of these novels belonged to the wartime generation that found the society changed and the traditional values threatened. Roth's best-know novel, Radetzkymarsch, portraits the
latter
days of Habsburg monarch, its multiethnic equilibrium
and bureaucratic machinery. In the opening of the work an Austrian
army officer saves the life of the young emperor at the battle of
Solferino. Through his account of the descendants of this hero Roth
creates a Spenglerian vision of European culture in decline and loss.
The same nostalgic theme is repeating in Roth's later novels. Its
sequel, Die Kapuzinergruft,
(1938, The Emperor's Tomb), traced
the collapse of the Empire through an account of a whole family, the
Van Trottas. It shows Roth responding to the National Socialist
takeover in Austria with an expression of passionate commitment for the
Hapsburg dynasty. Reflecting the author's own experiences, the
narrator in the short story 'The Bust of the Emperer (1935) says: "Oh,
there once was a fatherland, a real one, which is to say one for
orphaned nationals, the only possible fatherland! And that was the old
monarchy. Now I am a homeless man who has lost the true home of the
eternal wanderer." (The Grace of Misery: Joseph Roth and the Politics of Exile, 1919-1939 by Ilse Josepha Lazaroms, 2013, p. 144) Roth's other works include Rechts und Links (1929),
set in Berlin, a disappointment for Nazis and leftists critics. Das
falsche Gewicht (1937, Weights and Measures) depicted a
weight-and measures inspector in the borderlands of the Tsarist Empire,
Die Legende vom heiligen trinker (1939,
The Legend of the Holy Drinker) was an self-ironic examination, in
which Andreas the drinker is suddenly charged, by a total stranger,
with the task of delivering a large sum of money to the shrine of St.
Therese. "He was one of the most prodigious drinkers of his time," said
Hermann Kesten of his friend Joseph Roth. (Drunk the Night Before: An Anatomy of Intoxication by Marty Roth, 2005, p. 125) In his last novel, Die Geschichte von der 1002. Nacht
(1939,
The Tale of the 1002nd Night) Roth examined the theme of
self-deception. The Shah-in-Shah, the great ruler and overlord of all
the lands of Persia, feels sick and in 1873 decides to visit Vienna,
saying that "Muslims have been there once before, many years ago." His
Chief Eunuch, Patominos, corrects him: "Sire, they were unfortunately
unable to enter the city. Had they done so, St. Stephen's Cathedral
would have not a cross, but a crescent moon on top of it!" In the
course of the narrative, the principal figures – Baron Taittinger, the
brothel keeper Frau Matzner, and the prostitute Mizzi Schinagl –
fall victim to the rewards they have reaped the Shah. He has slept with
Mizzi and sends her a string of pearls. She ends in prison and
Taittinger shoots himself. Juden auf Wanderschaft (1927, The
Wandering Jews) was a fragmented account about the Jewish migrations
from eastern to western Europe in the aftermath of World War I and the
Russian Revolution. The
final section was written in the Soviet Union, where Roth toured in
1926. "I suspect that the Jewish proletarian is worse off than any
other. I had my most depressing experience during a tour of the Jewish
quarter of Odessa, known as the Moldovanka." (Ibid., p. 109) The German critic Walter Jens has called Juden auf Wanderschaft
as the best book on its subject in German, but the English translation
by Michael Hofmann did not appear until 2001. Roth wrote in 1937 a new
preface for his work, acknowledging temporality of the period of peace
and shelter. For further reading: Fremd in dieser Welt: Zeitkritik und Menschenbild des jüdisch-österreichischen Schriftstellers Joseph Roth by Lothar Pikulik (2019); The Quest for Redemption: Central European Jewish Thought in Joseph Roth's Works by Rares G. Piloiu (2018); Wandering Jew: the Search for Joseph Roth by Dennis Marks (2016); Irony's Antics: Walser, Kafka, Roth and the German Comic Tradition by Erica Weitzman (2015); Joseph Roth's March into History: from the Early Novels to Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft by Kati Tonkin (2008); Facing Modernity: Fragmentation, Culture and Identity in Joseph Roth's Writing in the 1920's by Jon Hughes (2006) ; Understanding Joseph Roth by Sidney Rosenfeld (2001); Joseph Roth by Rainer-Joachim Siegel (1995); Joseph Roths Fluch und Ende by Soma Morgenstern (1994); Co-Existent Contradictions, ed. by Helen Chambers (1991); Joseph Roth byWolfgang Müller-Funk (1989); Ambivalence and Irony in the Works of Joseph Roth by C. Mathew (1984); Von der Würde des Unscheinbaren by Esther Steinmann (1984); 'Roth, Joseph' by V.La rev. N.R. [Victor Lange; Neal Rendreman], in Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, edited by Jean-Albert Bédé and William B. Edgerton (1980); Joseph Roth und die Tradition, ed. by D. Bronsen (1975); Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie by David Bronsen (1974); Weit von wo by C. Magris (1974); Lontano da dove by Claudio Magris (1971); Joseph Roth: Leben und Werke by H. Linden (1949) - Key writers of Vienna after WW I: Karl Kraus (1874-1936) wrote a satirical play about the Great War, The Last Days of Mankind, 1922; Herman Broch (1886-1951) wrote The Sleepwalkers (1932) and the prose-poem The Death of Virgil (1946), the first volume of Robert Musil's (1880-1942) novel The Man Without Qualities (1930-43) was immediately hailed as a great and unusual work. Franz Werfel's (1890-1954) Barbara; oder, Die Frömmigkeit (1929) examined the problem of political action in its relation to the significance of religiousness, and Elias Canetti published his first and only novel, Die Blendung, in 1935. Joseph Roth wrote his Radetsky March (1932) in Berlin's hotels and restaurants. Musil's favorite place in Vienna was Café Museum. Soma Morgenstern, the best friend of Roth, also brought him to that café. SELECTED WORKS:
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