Joseph Roth
Encyclopedia
Joseph Roth, born Moses Joseph Roth (September 2, 1894 in Brody
Brody
Brody is a city in the Lviv Oblast of western Ukraine. It is the administrative center of the Brody Raion , and is located in the valley of the upper Styr River, approximately 90 kilometres northeast of the oblast capital, Lviv...

 – May 27, 1939 in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

), was an Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n journalist and novelist, best known for his family saga Radetzky March
Radetzky March (novel)
Radetzky March by Joseph Roth chronicles the decline and fall of the Austro–Hungarian Empire via the story of the Trotta family’s elevation to the nobility...

 (1932) about the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and for his novel of Jewish life, Job (1930) as well as the seminal essay 'Juden auf Wanderschaft' (1927) translated in English as The Wandering Jews
The Wandering Jews
The Wandering Jews is a short non-fiction book by Joseph Roth about the plight of the Jews in the mid 1920s who, with other refugees and displaced persons in the aftermath of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the redrawing of national frontiers following the Treaty of Versailles,...

, a fragmented account about the Jewish migrations from eastern to western Europe in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution. In the 21st century, publications in English of Radetzky March and of collections of his journalism from Berlin
Berlin
Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

 and Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

 created a revival of interest in the author. He committed suicide through alcohol abuse in 1939.

Habsburg empire

Born to a Jewish family, Roth grew up in Brody
Brody
Brody is a city in the Lviv Oblast of western Ukraine. It is the administrative center of the Brody Raion , and is located in the valley of the upper Styr River, approximately 90 kilometres northeast of the oblast capital, Lviv...

, a small town near Lviv
Lviv
Lviv is a city in western Ukraine. The city is regarded as one of the main cultural centres of today's Ukraine and historically has also been a major Polish and Jewish cultural center, as Poles and Jews were the two main ethnicities of the city until the outbreak of World War II and the following...

 in East-Galicia, part of the easternmost reaches of what was then Austro-Hungarian empire, today Ukraine
Ukraine
Ukraine is a country in Eastern Europe. It has an area of 603,628 km², making it the second largest contiguous country on the European continent, after Russia...

. Jewish culture played an important role in the life of the town. He never saw his father who disappeared before he was born but grew up with his mother and her relatives.

After high school, Joseph Roth moved to Lviv to begin his university studies in 1913 before transferring to the University of Vienna
University of Vienna
The University of Vienna is a public university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world...

 in 1914 to study philosophy and German literature. In 1916, Roth quit his university course and volunteered to serve in the Imperial Habsburg army fighting on the Eastern Front in the First World War , "though possibly only as an army journalist or censor." This experience had a major and long-lasting influence on his life. So, too, did the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918, which marked the beginning of a pronounced sense of 'homelessness' that was to feature regularly in his work." My strongest experience was the War and the destruction of my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary."

Germany

In 1918 he returned to Vienna and wrote for left-wing papers, occasionally as red Roth ,der rote Roth. In 1920 he moved to Berlin, where he worked as a highly successful journalist for the Neue Berliner Zeitung, then from 1921 for the Berliner Börsen-Courier. In 1923 he began his association with the well-known liberal Frankfurter Zeitung
Frankfurter Zeitung
The Frankfurter Zeitung was a German language newspaper that appeared from 1856 to 1943. It emerged from a market letter that was published in Frankfurt...

, travelling widely throughout Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

 and reporting from the south of France, the USSR, Albania, Poland, Italy and Germany. "He was one of the most distinguished and best-paid journalists of the period-being paid at the dream rate of one Deutschmark per line." In 1925 he spent an influential period working in France and never again resided permanently in Berlin.

Marriage and family

Roth married Friederike (Friedl) Reichler in 1922. In the late 1920s, his wife Friederike became schizophrenic, which threw Roth into a deep crisis both emotionally and financially.

Fiction career

In 1923 Roth's first (unfinished) novel, The Spider's Web, was serialized in an Austrian newspaper. He achieved moderate success as a writer throughout the 1920s with a series of novels exploring life in post-war Europe. Only upon publication of Job and Radetzky March did he achieve real acclaim as a novelist.

From 1930, Roth's fiction became less concerned with contemporary society, with which he had become increasingly disillusioned; during this period, his work frequently evoked a melancholic nostalgia
Nostalgia
The term nostalgia describes a yearning for the past, often in idealized form.The word is a learned formation of a Greek compound, consisting of , meaning "returning home", a Homeric word, and , meaning "pain, ache"...

 for life in imperial Central Europe
Central Europe
Central Europe or alternatively Middle Europe is a region of the European continent lying between the variously defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe...

 prior to 1914. He often portrayed the fate of homeless wanderers looking for a place to live, in particular Jews and former citizens of the old Austria-Hungary, who, with the downfall of the monarchy, had lost their only possible Heimat or true home. In his later works in particular, Roth appeared to wish that the monarchy could be restored in all its old glamour, although at the start of his career he had written under the codename of "Red Joseph". His longing for a more tolerant past may be partly explained as a reaction against the nationalism
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...

 of the time, which finally culminated in National Socialism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...

.

The novel
Novel
A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

 Radetzky March (1932) and the story Die Büste des Kaisers (The Bust of the Emperor) (1935) are typical of this late phase. In the novel The Emperor's Tomb, Roth describes the fate of a cousin of the hero of Radetzky March, until Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938. Of his works which deal with Judaism
Judaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...

, the novel Job is the best-known.

Paris

On January 30, 1933, the day Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...

 became Reich Chancellor
Chancellor
Chancellor is the title of various official positions in the governments of many nations. The original chancellors were the Cancellarii of Roman courts of justice—ushers who sat at the cancelli or lattice work screens of a basilica or law court, which separated the judge and counsel from the...

, Roth, a prominent liberal Jewish journalist, left Germany. He would spend most of the next decade in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, a city he loved. His essays written in France were exuberant with delight in the city and its culture.

Shortly after Hitler's rise to power, in February 1933, Roth wrote in a prophetic letter to his friend, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig
Stefan Zweig was an Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer. At the height of his literary career, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was one of the most famous writers in the world.- Biography :...

:

"You will have realized by now that we are drifting towards great catastrophes. Apart from the private - our literary and financial existence is destroyed - it all leads to a new war. I won't bet a penny on our lives. They have succeeded in establishing a reign of barbarity. Do not fool yourself. Hell reigns."


From 1936 to 1938, Roth had a romantic relationship with Irmgard Keun
Irmgard Keun
Irmgard Keun was a German author noteworthy both for her portrayals of life in the Weimar Republic as well as the early years of the Nazi Germany era.-Biography:...

. They worked together, traveling to various cities such as Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, Wilna, Lemberg, Warsaw
Warsaw
Warsaw is the capital and largest city of Poland. It is located on the Vistula River, roughly from the Baltic Sea and from the Carpathian Mountains. Its population in 2010 was estimated at 1,716,855 residents with a greater metropolitan area of 2,631,902 residents, making Warsaw the 10th most...

, Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

, Salzburg
Salzburg
-Population development:In 1935, the population significantly increased when Salzburg absorbed adjacent municipalities. After World War II, numerous refugees found a new home in the city. New residential space was created for American soldiers of the postwar Occupation, and could be used for...

, Brussels
Brussels
Brussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...

 and Amsterdam
Amsterdam
Amsterdam is the largest city and the capital of the Netherlands. The current position of Amsterdam as capital city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands is governed by the constitution of August 24, 1815 and its successors. Amsterdam has a population of 783,364 within city limits, an urban population...

.

Without intending to deny his Jewish origins, Roth considered his relationship to Catholicism
Catholicism
Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....

 very important. In the final years of his life, he may even have converted; translator Michael Hofmann
Michael Hofmann
Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet who writes in English and a translator of texts from German.-Biography:...

 states in the preface to the collection of essays Report from a Parisian Paradise that Roth "was said to have had two funerals, one Jewish, one Catholic."

His last years were difficult - he moved from hotel to hotel, drinking heavily, anxious about money and the future. Despite suffering from chronic alcoholism
Alcoholism
Alcoholism is a broad term for problems with alcohol, and is generally used to mean compulsive and uncontrolled consumption of alcoholic beverages, usually to the detriment of the drinker's health, personal relationships, and social standing...

, Roth remained prolific until his premature death in Paris in 1939. His final novella, The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939), is amongst his finest, and chronicles the attempts made by an alcoholic vagrant to regain his dignity and honour a debt. His final collapse was precipitated by hearing the news that the playwright Ernst Toller
Ernst Toller
Ernst Toller was a left-wing German playwright, best known for his Expressionist plays and serving as President of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, for six days.- Biography :...

 had hanged himself in New York.

Joseph Roth is interred in the Thiais
Thiais
Thiais is a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the center of Paris.The name Thiais comes from Medieval Latin Theodasium or Theodaxium, meaning "estate of Theodasius", a Gallo-Roman landowner....

 cemetery to the south of Paris.

Works

  • Das Spinnennetz (The Spider's Web) (1923)
  • Hotel Savoy (Hotel Savoy) (1924)
  • Die Rebellion (The Rebellion) (1924)
  • April. Die Geschichte einer Liebe (April: The History of a Love) (1925)
  • Der blinde Spiegel (The Blind Mirror) (1925)
  • Juden auf Wanderschaft (The Wandering Jews
    The Wandering Jews
    The Wandering Jews is a short non-fiction book by Joseph Roth about the plight of the Jews in the mid 1920s who, with other refugees and displaced persons in the aftermath of the First World War, the Russian Revolution and the redrawing of national frontiers following the Treaty of Versailles,...

    ) (1927)
  • Die Flucht ohne Ende (The Flight without End) (1927)
  • Zipper und sein Vater (Zipper and His Father) (1928)
  • Rechts und links (Right and Left
    Right and Left
    Right and Left is a 1909 oil on canvas painting by the American artist Winslow Homer. It depicts a pair of Common Goldeneye ducks at the moment they are hit by a hunter's shotgun blast as they attempt to take flight...

    ) (1929)
  • Der stumme Prophet (The Silent Prophet) (1929)
  • Hiob (Job (novel)) (1930)
  • Radetzkymarsch (Radetzky March
    Radetzky March (novel)
    Radetzky March by Joseph Roth chronicles the decline and fall of the Austro–Hungarian Empire via the story of the Trotta family’s elevation to the nobility...

    ) (1932)
  • Der Antichrist (The Antichrist) (1934)
  • Tarabas (1934)
  • Die Büste des Kaisers (Le Buste de l'Empereur) (1934)
  • Beichte eines Mörders (Confession of a Murderer) (1936)
  • Das falsche Gewicht (Weights and Measures) (1937)
  • Die Kapuzinergruft (The Emperor's Tomb) (1938)
  • Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker (The Legend of the Holy Drinker) (1939)
  • Die Geschichte von der 1002. Nacht (The String of Pearls 1939)
  • Der Leviathan (The Leviathan) (1940)

  • What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933
    What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933
    What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933 is a book of impressionistic and political writings, by the German writer Joseph Roth. The writings, that cover the period of the Weimar Republic, " record the violent social and political paroxysms that constantly threatened to undo the fragile...

    , New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2002
  • Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925-1939, trans. by Michael Hoffman, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2004

External links

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