- Person
- Joseph Roth
- Lived
- 1894–1939
- Field
- Novelist & journalist
- From
- Austrian
The story
Joseph Roth was born in 1894 into a Jewish family in Brody, a small town in Galicia on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1916 he broke off his university studies in Vienna and volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army. He later wrote that his strongest experience was the war and the destruction of his fatherland, the only one he ever had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The empire's collapse in 1918 left him with a deep sense of homelessness that runs through his work.
From 1930 his fiction turned away from contemporary society, with which he had grown disillusioned, and towards a melancholy nostalgia for Central Europe before 1914. That loss became the subject of his masterpiece. Radetzky March, named after Johann Strauss the elder's famous military march, was published in 1932. It follows three generations of the Trotta family, beginning with a young officer who saves the emperor's life at the Battle of Solferino, whose fortunes rise and fall with the empire they serve.
Germany's Neue Deutsche Biographie notes that Roth focused less on the politics of the empire's collapse than on how people's strength of character and integrity gave way. The book was an immediate success: five printings appeared between autumn 1932 and January 1933. Together with Job, it finally brought him acclaim as a novelist rather than only as a journalist. Within weeks of the last of those printings, Hitler came to power and Roth left Germany for exile. In 2003 the critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki included the novel in his canon of the most important German-language novels, and Mario Vargas Llosa has called it the best political novel ever written.
Roth later followed the story into the 1930s in The Emperor's Tomb (1938), which traces the fate of a cousin of the hero up to Germany's annexation of Austria. Radetzky March was adapted for television in 1965 and again in Axel Corti's 1994 miniseries starring Max von Sydow and Charlotte Rampling.
Translated into English as early as 1933, and again by Joachim Neugroschel in 1995 and Michael Hofmann in 2003, the novel helped spark a revival of interest in Roth in the twenty-first century. It remains one of the great European novels, helping readers understand the world that was lost when Central Europe's old multi-ethnic empire collapsed.
Why it matters
Radetzky March remains one of the great European novels, showing readers the human cost of the collapse of Central Europe's old multi-ethnic empire.
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 wrote against fascism from exileJoseph Roth warned against fascism in Germany and Italy in the 1920s and, after 1933, wrote fiercely anti-fascist articles from exile in Paris.
- 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
- Joseph Roth Wikipedia
- Roth, Moses Joseph Neue Deutsche Biographie
- Radetzky March Wikipedia
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.