A boy from Brody
Moses Joseph Roth was born on 2 September 1894 in Brody, a town in East Galicia on the far eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, close to the Russian border; it is now in Ukraine. Brody was one of the great Jewish towns of the region, and Jews made up most of its population. His mother, Maria (Miriam) Grübel, came from a local Jewish family. His father, Nachum Roth, a grain buyer and timber dealer, left on a business trip before his son was born and never came back: he fell mentally ill and spent the rest of his life in care. Roth never met him, and as an adult he invented a string of more glamorous fathers for himself, among them a Polish count and an Austrian official.
He grew up in modest circumstances with his mother and her relatives. From 1901 he attended the Jewish community school, and from 1905 the German-language Crown Prince Rudolf Gymnasium in Brody, where he passed his final examinations with distinction in 1913. The mixture of Yiddish-speaking Jewish life, German high culture and loyalty to the old Emperor Franz Joseph that he absorbed in Brody became the raw material of his best books.
War and the end of an empire
In 1913 Roth enrolled at the University of Lemberg (now Lviv) to study German literature and philosophy, and in 1914 he transferred to the University of Vienna. He never finished his degree. In 1916 he volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army and served until 1918, mostly in Galicia and largely in press and censorship work rather than at the front.
The collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918 was the defining event of his life. Roth later wrote that his strongest experience had been the war and the destruction of his fatherland, the only one he ever had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. The multinational empire, for all its failings, had given a Jew from Galicia a place in a larger whole. The nation-states that replaced it, he felt, left people like him homeless, and homelessness became his great theme.
The best-paid pen in Weimar
Back in Vienna after the war, Roth began writing for the left-leaning paper Der neue Tag, publishing well over a hundred pieces within a year. In 1920 he moved to Berlin, where he wrote for the Neue Berliner Zeitung, the Berliner Börsen-Courier and the Social Democrats’ Vorwärts, sometimes signing himself “der rote Joseph” the red Joseph. On 5 March 1922 he married Friederike (Friedl) Reichler in Vienna.
From 1923 his main outlet was the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung, one of the most respected papers in Europe. It sent him to Paris and the South of France in 1925, to the Soviet Union in 1926, he came back disillusioned with communism, and to Albania, Poland and Italy. His feuilletons, short, sharp sketches of city streets, refugee hostels, cafés, cinemas and ordinary people, made him one of the most celebrated and best-paid journalists of the Weimar years. His English translator Michael Hofmann notes that he was paid at the dream rate of one mark per line.
Alongside the journalism he wrote fiction. His first novel, The Spider’s Web, a dark story of a resentful ex-officer drawn into the violent nationalist underground of the early Weimar Republic, was serialised in Vienna’s Arbeiter-Zeitung in 1923. Hotel Savoy and Rebellion followed in 1924, and Flight without End in 1927, books about returning soldiers, drifters and the dispossessed of post-war Europe. They earned him a moderate reputation, but for most of the 1920s it was his reporting, not his novels, that made his name. In 1928 he began a close friendship with Stefan Zweig, who would support him, financially and emotionally, for the rest of his life.
The Wandering Jews and Job
Roth’s Jewish writing grew directly out of his reporting. In 1927 he published Juden auf Wanderschaft (The Wandering Jews), a long essay on the Jews who had fled the pogroms, poverty and revolution of Eastern Europe after the First World War and were living in the backstreets of Vienna, Berlin and Paris. He wrote about them with tenderness and pride, and he was scathing about Western Jews and gentiles alike who looked down on them as an embarrassment. The book remains one of the most humane portraits of Jewish migrants of the period.
In 1930 came Hiob (Job), the novel that made him famous. Its hero, Mendel Singer, is a poor, pious Torah teacher in a small town in the Russian Empire whose life is struck by one misfortune after another; he emigrates to New York, loses almost everything, curses God, and is finally granted a quiet miracle. Written in simple, biblical prose, it was Roth’s most successful book in his lifetime and was filmed in Hollywood in 1936 as Sins of Man.
Radetzky March
Two years later Roth published Radetzkymarsch (Radetzky March, 1932), the work generally considered his masterpiece. It follows three generations of the Trotta family, whose fortunes begin when a young Slovene infantry lieutenant saves the life of Emperor Franz Joseph at the Battle of Solferino in 1859 and is ennobled for it. His grandson, a weak and unhappy cavalry officer posted to a garrison town on the Russian frontier much like Brody, drifts towards ruin as the empire itself does, until both are swept away by the First World War.
The novel is at once a satire of a rotting order and a lament for it, written with irony, compassion and extraordinary visual precision. It went through five printings between autumn 1932 and January 1933, just before Hitler came to power. Roth later continued the story with a cousin of the Trottas in Die Kapuzinergruft (The Emperor’s Tomb, 1938), which ends with the Nazi annexation of Austria.
Exile in Paris
As a well-known liberal Jewish journalist, Roth had no illusions about Nazism. He left Germany for Paris when Adolf Hitler became chancellor on 30 January 1933, and his books could no longer be published in Germany. A few weeks later he wrote his friend Stefan Zweig a letter that has become famous for its foresight: Europe was heading for catastrophe and a new war, he warned, and the Nazis had established a reign of barbarity.
In exile Roth published with Dutch firms that printed German émigré writers, and wrote for émigré and Austrian papers. He produced books at a startling rate, Tarabas (1934), Confession of a Murderer (1936), Weights and Measures (1937), The Emperor’s Tomb (1938), while campaigning, in vain, for a restoration of the Habsburgs as a bulwark against Hitler. In February 1938, weeks before the Anschluss, he travelled to Vienna on behalf of the Austrian monarchists. He moved between hotels, lived on advances and on the generosity of friends such as Zweig, and spent his days writing at a table in the Café Tournon in Paris.
Faith, love and loss
Roth’s private life was marked by grief. Around 1928 his wife Friedl was diagnosed with schizophrenia; she spent the rest of her life in institutions, and in 1940, after his death, she was murdered in the Nazi programme of killing people with mental illnesses. He blamed himself and never recovered from it. Later he lived with Andrea Manga Bell, an editor separated from her husband, a Cameroonian prince, and from 1936 to 1938 with the novelist Irmgard Keun, with whom he travelled and worked.
His religious identity was as complicated as his politics. He never denied being a Jew, and much of his finest writing is about Jews, but in his last years he was strongly drawn to Catholicism, which he associated with the old empire. Whether he formally converted is uncertain. His translator Michael Hofmann records that Roth was said to have had two funerals, one Jewish and one Catholic.
The holy drinker
Roth had long drunk heavily, and in exile alcoholism took hold of him completely. Yet he kept writing to the end. His last finished work, The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939), tells of a homeless alcoholic in Paris who is given money and tries, again and again, to repay a debt to a saint before he dies. It is often read as his self-portrait.
In May 1939 Roth learned that his friend, the playwright Ernst Toller, had hanged himself in a New York hotel. He collapsed, was taken to a Paris hospital for the poor, and died there on 27 May 1939, aged 44, of pneumonia complicated by sudden alcohol withdrawal. He was buried on 30 May in the cemetery of Thiais, south of Paris. Three months later the war he had predicted began.
Legacy
For decades after his death Roth was remembered mainly by German readers. That changed from the 1980s onwards, when new translations, above all those by Michael Hofmann, of the novels, the stories, the Berlin and Paris journalism in What I Saw and The White Cities, and the letters, brought him a large international readership. Radetzky March is now widely counted among the great European novels of the twentieth century, and Ermanno Olmi’s 1988 film of The Legend of the Holy Drinker won the Golden Lion at Venice.
Roth is read today as one of the most clear-sighted witnesses to the collapse of Central Europe: a chronicler of displaced people, a prophet of the Nazi catastrophe, and the elegist of a vanished world in which Jews and many other peoples had, for a time, lived side by side under one crown.
Sources & further reading
Joseph Roth, Wikipedia · Joseph Roth 1894–1939, LeMO, Deutsches Historisches Museum · Roth, Joseph, Deutsche Biographie (NDB) · Joseph Roth’s grim prophecy, mid-February 1933, We Refugees Archive · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.