Joseph Roth Biography and List of Works

Prolific political journalist and novelist, who's major work, the family history Radetzkymarch appeared in 1932. It depicts the Habsburg Empire of Austria-Hungary from 1859 to 1916. Roth's ambivalence toward Western civilization led him to draw on the heritage of Eastern European storytelling.

"I am a conservative and a Catholic, consider Austria my fatherland, and desire the return of the Empire."

Joseph Roth was born in the German colony of Schwabendorf in Volynia, Slovenia (formerly Galicia, Austro-Hungaria), into a Jewish family. His 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.

Roth's early years are little known and his own account is not always reliable. He attended Baron-Hirsch-Schule, Brody (1901-05), Imperial-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 he served in the Austrian army in the rifle regiment (Feldjäger). Roth claimed later to have spent months in Russian captivity as a prisoner of war.

After the war Roth worked as a journalist in Vienna and in Berlin. 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 failed, his wife became mentally ill and was confined to a hospital.

From 1923 to 1932 Roth was a correspondent for Frankfurter Zeitung, travelling around Europe. In 1926 Roth went to the Soviet Union and recorded his Socialist views in Der stumme Propher, which was published posthumously in 1966. When Hitler came into power, Roth was obliged to flee Germany and return to Vienna. In 1933 and 1937 Roth travelled in Poland on PEN lecture tour. After the assassination of Dolfuss, he moved to Paris, where he died in a poorhouse (in some sources in an army hospital) on May 27, 1939.

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 embraced Viennese Impressionism (Hofmannstahl, Schnitzler). In Hotel Savoy (1924) Roth described a variety of hotel clientele, arranging the stories according to the wealth and status of the figures. Die Flucht ohne Ende (1927) traced the experiences of an Austrian soldier who makes his way back from captivity in Siberia to the 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, portrays the latter days of the Habsburg monarchy, its multi-ethnic equilibrium, bureaucratic correctness, and hedonic sensuality. 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), traced the collapse of the Empire through a 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.

Roth's other works include Rechts und Links (1929), set in Berlin, a disappointment for Nazis and leftists critics, Hiob (1930, Job: The Story of a Simple Man), a modern-day analogue of the biblical story, in which Roth paid tribute to his Jewish background. Das falsche Gewicht (1937) depicts a weight-and measures inspector in the borderlands of the Tsarist Empire, Die Legende vom heiligen trinker (1939) is an ironic self-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. In his last novel, Die Geschichte von der 1002. Nacht (1939) Roth examines the theme of self-deception. 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 from a visit to Vienna by the Persian Shah.

For further reading: Encyclopaedia of World Literature, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3); World Authors 1900-1950, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); 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); 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 favourite place in Vienna was the Café Museum. Soma Morgenstern, the best friend of Roth, also brought him to that café.

Hotel Savoy, (1924)