- Person
- Joseph Roth
- Lived
- 1894–1939
- Field
- Novelist & journalist
- From
- Austrian
The story
Long before Hitler came to power, Joseph Roth saw the danger of the far right. Born in 1894 into a Jewish family in Brody, in Austrian Galicia, he had become one of the best-known German-language journalists of the 1920s, travelling across Europe as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Germany's Neue Deutsche Biographie notes that he set the dark picture of the growing political right against bright impressions of life in France, as in his 1925 series of articles on the south of France, and that his warnings about fascism in Germany and Italy brought him into conflict with his own newspaper.
A five-month journey through the Soviet Union in 1926 left him disillusioned as well, and his hopes for democratic development in Europe faded. His early novels examined the generation that came home broken from the First World War, unable to cope with economic competition and open to the lure of far-right agitators.
When Hitler became Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933, Roth, a prominent liberal Jewish journalist, left Germany at once. By February he was in Paris, writing to Stefan Zweig that everything was heading towards a new war. In exile he wrote radically anti-fascist texts for German-language newspapers and magazines published in France and Austria, including the Paris exile daily Pariser Tageszeitung and, from 1935, the Austrian journal Der christliche Ständestaat. He quickly became an active voice of the German exile literature movement. In a letter to Klaus Mann, editor of an exile magazine, he insisted that émigré publications had a political duty and should not waste attention on writers who had prepared the way for barbarism.
Roth believed that Austria's independence had to be defended against Nazi Germany, and he came to see a restored Habsburg monarchy as the best way to secure it. In February 1938, shortly before Germany annexed Austria, he made a last visit to Vienna on behalf of the Austrian legitimists. That year he also published The Emperor's Tomb, which follows a member of the Trotta family up to the annexation.
The We Refugees Archive describes him as a committed opponent of National Socialism. He kept writing until his death in a Paris hospital for the poor on 27 May 1939, a few months before war broke out, leaving a body of journalism that still shows how clearly a writer could see the threat while others hesitated.
Why it matters
Roth used his pen to resist Nazism and fascism at a time when speaking out meant exile and poverty.
About Joseph Roth
Galician-born novelist and star reporter whose Radetzky March and Job mourned the lost Habsburg world and the Jewish life of the East, written from exile and despair.
More about Joseph Roth
- Almost all of Joseph Roth's novels were filmedNearly all of Joseph Roth's novels were adapted for film or television, including Ermanno Olmi's The Legend of the Holy Drinker.
- Joseph Roth's Radetzky March told an empire's fallJoseph Roth's 1932 novel Radetzky March traced the decline of Austria-Hungary through one family and went through five printings in a few months.
- Joseph Roth helped fellow refugees in ParisIn exile in Paris after 1933, Joseph Roth helped aid refugees, including through the Entraide Autrichienne, while writing against Nazism.
- Joseph Roth's novel Job portrayed a simple Jewish manJoseph Roth’s 1930 novel Job, about Mendel Singer’s search for God, made him famous as a novelist and was filmed in Hollywood in 1936.
- Joseph Roth preserved the vanished world of Eastern JewsGermany's national biography calls Joseph Roth one of the most important portrayers of Eastern European Jewish life, a world later largely destroyed.
Sources
- Roth, Moses Joseph Neue Deutsche Biographie
- Joseph Roth Lebendiges Museum Online, Deutsches Historisches Museum
- Joseph Roth on the "Politics of Literary Emigration" We Refugees Archive
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.