Joseph Roth

Austrian novelist and essayist

• Born: September 2, 1894
• Birthplace: Brody, Austrian Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Ukraine)
• Died: May 27, 1939
• Place of death: Paris, France

Biography

Joseph Roth was born Moses Joseph Roth on September 2, 1894, in Brody, Austrian Galicia, which at that time was in the eastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and today is in the Ukraine. His parents were part of a large Orthodox Jewish community, not uncommon in that part of the old empire. His father, Nachum Roth, was an unsuccessful traveling businessman who died, the victim of a psychopathic disorder, in 1910. Joseph was raised by his mother, Maria (or Miriam) Roth, née Grübel, and his grandfather Jechiel Grübel, a successful draper and orthodox Jew in Brody. The boy attended the elementary school and the Royal-Imperial Crown Prince Rudolph Gymnasium in Brody, where German was the language of instruction. At home, the family spoke German, but Roth also learned Polish, Yiddish, and Ukrainian. After his graduation with honors in 1913, he attended the University of Lemberg (Lvov) for one semester and the University of Vienna from 1914 to 1916. He studied literature and began his career as a writer, publishing poetry, short stories, and essays in a Viennese newspaper. From 1916 until 1918 he served in the Austrian army.

For a number of years following World War I, Roth was concerned almost exclusively with political and social issues. Although he was essentially a conservative, at this time he embraced the socialist point of view—he even signed some of his newspaper articles “Red Joseph.” He investigated the plight of the outsider, with special interest in the fate of the eastern European Jews, the Ashkenazim. In 1924 he developed this theme in a series of novels. Like most of his fictional work, these novels appeared serially in newspapers. Hotel Savoy appeared in the distinguished Frankfurter Zeitung, and Rebellion was serialized in the Berlin newspaper Vorwärts in 1924. Both novels treat the topic of social injustice that the outsiders and victims of the war encounter in Western European society. Hotel Savoy portrays a microcosm of a society suffering decay and corruption, while Rebellion illustrates the life of a disabled war veteran who loses his organ grinder’s license and is thus another victim of capitalism.

From the mid-1920s to the late 1920s Roth traveled to eastern Europe on assignment for a newspaper. He published his major essay The Wandering Jews in 1927. The essay portrays migrating Jews who were uprooted by the war from the small Jewish towns of the east, where they had celebrated their traditions and values, to be resettled in the major metropolitan centers of Berlin, Vienna, and Paris, where they were assimilated by western Jewry. The fate of the eastern European Jew in postwar Western European society was articulated most poetically in Job. Through these journalistic and fictional writings preceding the time of the Holocaust, Roth served as an insightful and sensitive reporter on the terrible destiny awaiting the Jews of Europe.

The other major theme which preoccupied Roth for many years was the disintegration of the once-mighty Austro-Hungarian Empire. Although he had written on this topic throughout the 1920s, it was his best-known novel, Radetzky March, that provided the most eloquent statement on this theme. Initially serialized in the Frankfurter Zeitung between April 17 and July 9, 1932, the novel traces the life of Austria and Emperor Franz Joseph I from the Battle of Solferino in 1859, in which the French defeated the Austrians, until 1916, the year the emperor died. The fictional characters make up three generations of the von Trotta family. The grandfather, Lieutenant Joseph Trotta, the celebrated “hero of Solferino,” risked his life to protect the young emperor in the Battle of Solferino. In recognition for this deed, the young lieutenant, whose forefathers were peasants, is elevated to the rank of nobility. His only son, Franz von Trotta, serves the empire as an exemplary civil servant, while his only grandson, Carl Joseph, has an undistinguished career in the military.

Shortly after Roth completed this major novel, another chapter began in his life. When Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Roth left Germany for a life of wandering and exile. He traveled in various western European countries, but his last residence was Paris. He continued to be a prolific writer of fiction and essays, but because he was blacklisted as a Jew and vocal opponent of the Nazi regime in Germany, he lost the great majority of his readership. He lived in considerable poverty in a small hotel and frequented his favorite café, where he wrote and met with his many friends. He succumbed to alcohol in this period of exile and grief, his writings generally returning to the two major themes he had treated in his earlier works. He died on May 27, 1939. The inscription on his gravestone describes his work and defines his contribution to literature: Écrivain autrichien—mort à Paris en exil (Austrian writer—died in Paris in exile).

Roth belongs to a generation of writers who were virtually forgotten because of the forced exile they experienced during the Nazi period in Germany, from 1933 to 1945. That has changed, for Roth, largely through the efforts of his close friend, the writer Hermann Kesten, who has prepared several editions of his works. Radetzky March has established him as one of the important Austrian writers, while many of his other novels and essays have confirmed him as a significant source on the plight of the Eastern European Jews. He is often cited by critics and readers for the elegance of his prose writings. Scholars have shown a continuing and increasing interest in his work, and the readership, in both the English-speaking and the German-speaking world, has increased substantially over the years.

Author Works

Long Fiction:

Hotel Savoy, 1924 (English translation, 1986)

Die Rebellion, 1924 (Rebellion, 1999)

Die Flucht ohne Ende: Ein Bericht, 1927 (Flight Without End: A Report, 1977)

Das Spinnennetz, 1928 (The Spider’s Web, 1988)

Zipper und sein Vater, 1928 (Zipper and His Father, 1988)

Rechts und Links, 1929 (Right and Left, 1991)

Hiob: Roman eines einfachen Mannes, 1930 (Job: The Story of a Simple Man, 1931)

Radetzkymarsch, 1932 (Radetzky March, 1933)

Tarabas, ein Gast auf dieser Erde, 1934 (Tarabas, a Guest on Earth, 1934)

Die Hundert Tage, 1936 (Ballad of the Hundred Days, 1936)

Beichte eines Mörders, erzählt in einer Nacht, 1936 (The Confession of a Murderer, Told in One Night, 1938)

Das falsche Gewicht: Die Geschichte eines Eichmeisters, 1937 (Weights and Measures, 1982)

Die Kapuzinergruft, 1938 (The Emperor’s Tomb, 1984)

Die Geschichte von der 1002. Nacht, 1939 (The Tale of the 1002nd Night, 1998; also known as The String of Pearls)

Der stumme Prophet, 1966 (The Silent Prophet, 1979)

Perlefter, 1978

Short Fiction:

April: Die Geschichte einer Liebe, 1925 (April: The Story of a Love Affair, 2002)

Der blinde Spiegel, 1925 (The Blind Mirror, 2002)

Ein kapitel Revolution, 1929

Stationschef Fallmerayer, 1933 (Fallmerayer the Station Master, 1986)

Die Buste des Kaisers, 1934 (in French), 1964 (in German; The Bust of the Emperor, 1986)

Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker, 1939 (The Legend of the Holy Drinker, 1943)

Der Leviathan, 1940 (The Leviathan, 2002)

The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth, 2002

Nonfiction:

Reise durch Galizien, 1924

Im mittäglichen Frankreich, 1925

Der Rauch verbindet Städte, 1926

Bericht aus dem pariser Paradies, 1926

Die russische Grenze, 1926

Juden auf Wanderschaft, 1927 (The Wandering Jews, 2001)

Artikel über Albanien, 1927

Das moskauer jüdische Theater, 1928

Leningrad, 1928

Briefe aus Deutschland, 1929

Panoptikum: Gestalten und Kulissen, 1930

Brief aus dem Harz, 1930

Bekenntnis zu Deutschland, 1931

Der Antichrist, 1934 (The Antichrist, 1935)

Aus dem Tagebuch eines Schriftstellers, 1937

Über das “Dokumentarische”, 1938

Rede über den alten Kaiser, 1939

Briefe, 1911–1939, 1970 (letters)

Der neue Tag: Unbekannte politische Arbeiten, 1919 bis 1927, Wien, Berlin, Moskau, 1970

Berliner Saisonbericht: Reportagen und jouranlistische Arbeiten, 1920-1939, 1984

Joseph Roth in Berlin: Ein Lesebuch für Spaziergänger, 1996 (What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920–1933, 2002)

The White Cities: Reports from France, 1925–1939, 2004

Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, 2012

The Hotel Years, 2015

Miscellaneous:

Werke in drei Bänden, 1956 (4 volumes; Hermann Kesten, editor)

Werke: Neue erweiterte Ausgabe in vier Bänden, 1975–1976

Bibliography

Bronsen, David. “Austrian Versus Jew: The Torn Identity of Joseph Roth.” In Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook. Vol. 18. New York: The Leo Baeck Institute, 1973. The Leo Baeck Institute is trustee of Roth’s literary estate.

Browning, Barton W. “Joseph Roth’s Legende vom heiligen Trinker: Essence and Elixer.” In Protest, Form, Tradition: Essays on German Exile Literature, edited by Joseph P. Strelka. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1979. A critical study.

Gordimer, Nadine. “The Empire of Joseph Roth.” New York Review of Books 38 (December 5, 1991). Examines the social and political contexts of Roth’s work.

Manger, Philip. “The Radetzky March: Joseph Roth and the Hapsburg Myth.” In The Viennese Enlightenment, edited by Mark Francis. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985. Major chapter on Roth.

Miron, Susan. “On Joseph Roth.” Salmagundi 98/99 (Spring/Summer, 1993). Looks at the autobiographical aspects of his characters’ rootlessness and loneliness.

Rosenfeld, Sidney. “Joseph Roth.” In Major Figures of Modern Austrian Literature, edited by Donald Daviau. Riverside, Calif.: Ariadne Press, 1988. Contains a lengthy chapter on Roth.

Rosenfeld, Sidney. Understanding Joseph Roth. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001. Part of the Understanding Modern European and Latin American Literature series, this study is a particularly valuable companion to Roth’s work.

Williams, Cedric E. “Joseph Roth: A Time out of Joint.” In The Broken Eagle: The Politics of Austrian Literature from Empire to Anschluss. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1974. Places Roth in his political context. The book contains a bibliography.