Joseph Roth (1894–1939)
Author of The Radetzky March
About the Author
Author and journalist Joseph Roth was born on September 2, 1894. During World War I, he served in the Austro-Hungarian army from 1916 to 1918. Afterwards, he worked as a journalist in Vienna and in Berlin. His best-known works are The Radetzky March and Job. He died in Paris on May 27, 1939 and is show more buried in Thiais Cemetery. (Bowker Author Biography) Joseph Roth is the author of such classics as The Radetzky March and The Emperor's Tomb. He died in Paris in 1939. (Publisher Provided) show less
Image credit: Joseph Roth, 1918
Works by Joseph Roth
Three Novellas: The Legend of the Holy Drinker / Fallmerayer the Stationmaster / The Bust of the Emperor (2003) 45 copies
Joseph Roth, waarnemer van zijn tijd : een keuze uit zijn journalistieke werk (1919-1939) (1981) — Author — 12 copies
I cento giorni e altri racconti 8 copies
I grandi romanzi: Fuga senza fine-Giobbe-La marcia di Radetzky-La cripta dei cappuccini-La leggenda del santo bevitore.… (2012) 4 copies
Joseph Roth - Gesammelte Werke: Die Geschichte von der 1002. Nacht, Hotel Savoy, Hiob, Radetzkymarsch, Das Spinnennetz,… (2014) — Author — 3 copies
Werke in drei Bänden (Erster Band) 2 copies
Werke in drei Bänden (Dritter Band) 2 copies
Joseph Roth, 1894-1939 : Katalog einer Ausstellung gemeinsam veranstaltet vom Bundesministerium für… (1989) 2 copies
Joseph Roth journaliste: une anthologie, 1919-1926: le temps des troubles et des violences politiques, le voyage en… (2016) 2 copies
Joseph Roth Werke. Das journalistische Werk 1915-1939. Romane und Erzaehlungen 1916-1940. 6 volumes 2 copies
Aber das Leben marschiert weiter und nimmt uns mit : der Briefwechsel zwischen Joseph Roth und dem Verlag De… (1991) 2 copies
Ciudades blancas, Las 2 copies
Τυφλός Καθρέπτης 2 copies
DIE REBELLION. Fruhe romane. [Das Spinnennetz. Hotel Savoy. Die Rebellion. Die F (1984) — Author — 2 copies
O Busto do Imperador 1 copy
Jefe de estación Falmerayer 1 copy
Professor Cecil Roth 1 copy
La Rebel·lió. Tasta'm 1 copy
L'autodafé de l'esprit 1 copy
Various 1 copy
מארש-ראדצקי 1 copy
ウクライナ・ロシア紀行 1 copy
Περιπλανώμενοι Εβραίοι 1 copy
Le Parapluie 1 copy
La rebel.lio 1924 1 copy
Albania 1 copy
Le citta bianche 1 copy
Weights & Measures 1 copy
Joseph Roth, Der Leviathan 1 copy
Kapucinska grobnica 1 copy
Werke [6 Bände] 1 copy
Joseph Roth Werke - Neue erweiterte Ausgabe in vier Bänden (4 Bände komplett). (1975) — Author — 1 copy
Hiob. Roman eines einfachen Mannes von Joseph Roth: Textanalyse und Interpretation mit ausführlicher Inhaltsangabe… (2013) 1 copy
any 1 copy
Hotel Savoy / Hiob. 1 copy
Geschäft ist Geschäft, seien Sie mir privat nicht böse, ich brauche Geld : der Briefwechsel zwischen Joseph Roth und… (2005) 1 copy
L'avventuriera di Montecarlo: Scritti sul cinema (1919-1935) (Piccola biblioteca Adelphi) (Italian Edition) (2015) 1 copy
Opere 1916-1930 1 copy
Opere 1931-1939 1 copy
La ribelo romano 1 copy
Lažna mera 1 copy
Pobuna 1 copy
Roth Joseph 1 copy
Flyktningen Franz Tunda 1 copy
Veronica 2030 1 copy
Білі міста : вибране 1 copy
Associated Works
Zomeravond — Author, some editions — 23 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Roth, Joseph
- Legal name
- Roth, Moses Joseph (birth name)
- Birthdate
- 1894-09-02
- Date of death
- 1939-05-27
- Burial location
- Thiais cemetery, Paris, France
- Gender
- male
- Nationality
- Austro-Hungarian Empire (Austrian)
Austria - Country (for map)
- Austria
- Birthplace
- Brody, Galicia, Austria-Hungary
- Place of death
- Paris, France
- Places of residence
- Brody, Galicia, Ukraine
Berlin, Germany
Thiais, Paris, France
Amsterdam, Netherlands - Education
- Lviv University
University of Vienna - Occupations
- journalist
features correspondent
novelist
short story writer - Relationships
- Keun, Irmgard (lover)
Zweig, Stefan (friend)
Morgenstern, Soma (friend) - Organizations
- Imperial Habsburg army (WWI)
Frankfurter Zeitung - Short biography
- Joseph Roth was born into a Jewish family in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire and served in the Imperial army in World War I. After the war, he became a journalist and travelled widely, including making numerous trips to Russia. During this period, he wrote several novels, novellas, and volumes of short stories. He became a star correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, and in 1932 published his masterpiece, The Radetzky March. As a Jew, a leftist, and an outspoken critic of Nazism, he knew he had to flee Germany on January 30, 1933, the day the Nazis took power -- never to return. Thereafter, he lived hand-to-mouth working as a journalist alternately in Amsterdam and Paris. He died in the latter city in alcoholism and poverty in 1939.
Members
Discussions
132. Job by Joseph Roth in Backlisted Book Club (March 2022)
Group Read, June 2014: The Radetsky March in 1001 Books to read before you die (July 2014)
Reviews
One of my favorite authors. It’s been quite a while since I revisited Roth and I am embarrassed that this one took so long. Like so much of his work, a masterpiece of nostalgia for the hinterlands of the Hapsburg empire. A wonderful writer with a knack for the telling detail and for evoking a lost world. The story line is engaging and involved (if you’ve read Roth before, you’re likely familiar with the Trotta family) but, to my mind, as good as it is, the story takes second-place to Roth’s superb evocation of time and place and the decay of the empire. It was the last novel of his published in his lifetime and it ends, pregnantly, with the arrival of the Nazis in Vienna.… (more)
No one writes nothing but masterpieces and this illustrates that point all too well. The story, to the extent there is one, is the life of Franz Tunda, soldier in the Austrian army. He is sent to Russia, is captured, escapes, lives for some years in Siberia until he belatedly learned the war has ended. He sets out to return to his wife, is captured by Bolsheviks, joins their cause, leaves, marries a Russian woman, leaves, gets back to Austria, finds his wife has remarried, goes to Paris to find her…. Does he love his wife and want to be reunited? Not really. Tunda doesn’t feel at home anywhere and he doesn't love anyone. He doesn’t feel at home in Austria or Russia or Germany or France. So he is constantly in flight in search of something he will never find. His life has never focused on the present because he has always been unsatisfied, living for an unknown (and maybe unknowable) something. Re-reading this, I must admit that the premise sounds better to me than the execution—and that’s the disappointment of the book. In fairness to Roth, his writing is--as always--excellent. It just never clicked for me and I can’t recommend it. (I don’t know enough about Roth’s own life to say for certain but from what I do know, his illustration of the enormous changes in the world wrought by World War One may reflect his own sense of loss, of failing to belong anywhere since the world he knew was irretrievably gone.)… (more)
I was born in 1952. Josef Stalin was in charge in the Soviet Union but since he died in 1953, I have no memory of him. My point, however, is that I grew up/came of age during the 1960s and early 1970s when the USSR and the USA waged a Cold War and most of Eastern Europe was under Soviet sway. Move ahead several decades and in the 1990s I spent time in many of those countries—Austria and Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Romania, and in 2000 I spent three weeks in Russia and Belarus. Plus my family is Lithuanian on one side and Belarussian on the other. Also beginning in the late 1990s, I taught graduate-level courses at a law school in Chicago, including one entitled “Eastern European Business and Investment Law.” The students who took that class tended to be American lawyers who wanted (or whose clients wanted) to do business in that part of the world.
Experience taught me that most of my students knew little about that part of the world and virtually nothing about its history. So my first few lectures always discussed the history and the history of the law of that region. It was, in some ways, the most enjoyable part of the course because my background and degrees are in history and I find the history of Eastern/Central Europe to be fascinating. But, as many times as I taught the course, I never felt that I could adequately convey the enormous diversity of that part of the world or just how much it meant when worlds changed following wars. Had I read the stories in this book a few decades ago, I would have assigned them as required reading for Roth’s ability to portray precisely that diversity and the meaning of change, both on an individual and a universal level.
Move ahead a few more decades and I have just finished reading these three novellas. Roth is famous as a chronicler of the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire/monarchy. He was born in 1894 in what was then Galicia and is now Ukraine, studied philosophy and German literature in Vienna, volunteered to serve in World War One (on the Eastern Front) and witnessed first-hand the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire when he was only 24 years old. It changed his life, most of which he spent as a journalist (and novelist) before dying at the age of 44 of pneumonia. For anyone who doesn’t know much about him, I’d encourage you to read either Wikipedia or this perceptive review. (Though a bit dated, there is also an unsigned profile of him in the New Yorker magazine.) He was a fascinating man and a writer capable of brilliance.
I have read maybe half a dozen of his books, including what is usually said to be his best work, The Radetzky March. Truth be told, the book I just finished strikes me as the best of what I’ve read so far. Good as Radetzky is, I think Hotel Savoy and Bust of the Emperor are even more…intense, pithier. My book includes two unsurpassed portraits of a time and place and one curious piece that I cannot make heads nor tails of (an American idiom meaning that I cannot understand it). Hotel Savoy is the story the immediate aftermath of World War One told through the person of Gabriel Dan, a former Russian prisoner of war. Ex-soldiers and other former prisoners of war return westward in waves, stopping for a day or a lifetime in the “frontier” city of Łódź on their way (or not) to resume their lives and rejoin their families. Dan is staying at the Hotel Savoy, both a permanent and a temporary home to the wealthy and the destitute. Dan recounts all he sees, both in the streets and in the hotel, a microcosmic ship of fools. (For serious movie fans, think, perhaps, of an impossible hybrid of the 1932 “Grand Hotel” with Murnau’s 1924 “Last Laugh.”) Roth’s bleak pointillist depiction of the world reads the world brilliantly, illustrating it through a colorful cast of characters, including a wise and caring donkey. But in the last five or six pages, Roth’s tone shifts dramatically and becomes almost pure journalism—the description turning oracular; the Book of Revelation through the eyes of Joseph Roth. It is an absolute tour de force.
The next story, Fallmerayer the Stationmaster, tells us the story of Fallmerayer, a minor functionary whose life is changed one night when he rescues a Russian woman from a train accident. That simple act upends his life: he falls in love with her, enlists in the army, is sent to Russia, and abandons his family to start a new life with the Countess. I thought the story mildly interesting and the end incomprehensible. I’d be very curious to hear others’ reaction to it.
I think that the last story, The Bust of the Emperor (available here in English for free) is a stunning portrait of the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire. Roth takes his epigram from the Austrian playwright, Franz Grillparzer: “From humanity via nationality to bestiality.” The quotation is not just apt, it is perfect. The plot is simple: Count Franz Xaver Morstin is a local nobleman in the small town of Lopatyny in what is—and is not—Poland, comes to grips with the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Roth shows how and why it is not only the death of the empire but the end of a way of life, a world order, and an age. The story is heart-rendingly sensitive, capitalizing on Roth’s sharp and nuanced understanding of the world from the position of the poorest and most deprived. Page after page he shows how the growth of nationalism in the carcass of the empire portended ill for the people and the world.
I’ll let a gentleman who posts on Goodreads under the name “Pastor Ben” have the final word because he managed to say what I’m trying to in far fewer words: “I adored the middle novella, The Bust of the Emperor. I give it seven stars out of five…. It touched a nerve for me and I'm not being rational in the slightest. But don't stories do that sometimes?”… (more)
Experience taught me that most of my students knew little about that part of the world and virtually nothing about its history. So my first few lectures always discussed the history and the history of the law of that region. It was, in some ways, the most enjoyable part of the course because my background and degrees are in history and I find the history of Eastern/Central Europe to be fascinating. But, as many times as I taught the course, I never felt that I could adequately convey the enormous diversity of that part of the world or just how much it meant when worlds changed following wars. Had I read the stories in this book a few decades ago, I would have assigned them as required reading for Roth’s ability to portray precisely that diversity and the meaning of change, both on an individual and a universal level.
Move ahead a few more decades and I have just finished reading these three novellas. Roth is famous as a chronicler of the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire/monarchy. He was born in 1894 in what was then Galicia and is now Ukraine, studied philosophy and German literature in Vienna, volunteered to serve in World War One (on the Eastern Front) and witnessed first-hand the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire when he was only 24 years old. It changed his life, most of which he spent as a journalist (and novelist) before dying at the age of 44 of pneumonia. For anyone who doesn’t know much about him, I’d encourage you to read either Wikipedia or this perceptive review. (Though a bit dated, there is also an unsigned profile of him in the New Yorker magazine.) He was a fascinating man and a writer capable of brilliance.
I have read maybe half a dozen of his books, including what is usually said to be his best work, The Radetzky March. Truth be told, the book I just finished strikes me as the best of what I’ve read so far. Good as Radetzky is, I think Hotel Savoy and Bust of the Emperor are even more…intense, pithier. My book includes two unsurpassed portraits of a time and place and one curious piece that I cannot make heads nor tails of (an American idiom meaning that I cannot understand it). Hotel Savoy is the story the immediate aftermath of World War One told through the person of Gabriel Dan, a former Russian prisoner of war. Ex-soldiers and other former prisoners of war return westward in waves, stopping for a day or a lifetime in the “frontier” city of Łódź on their way (or not) to resume their lives and rejoin their families. Dan is staying at the Hotel Savoy, both a permanent and a temporary home to the wealthy and the destitute. Dan recounts all he sees, both in the streets and in the hotel, a microcosmic ship of fools. (For serious movie fans, think, perhaps, of an impossible hybrid of the 1932 “Grand Hotel” with Murnau’s 1924 “Last Laugh.”) Roth’s bleak pointillist depiction of the world reads the world brilliantly, illustrating it through a colorful cast of characters, including a wise and caring donkey. But in the last five or six pages, Roth’s tone shifts dramatically and becomes almost pure journalism—the description turning oracular; the Book of Revelation through the eyes of Joseph Roth. It is an absolute tour de force.
The next story, Fallmerayer the Stationmaster, tells us the story of Fallmerayer, a minor functionary whose life is changed one night when he rescues a Russian woman from a train accident. That simple act upends his life: he falls in love with her, enlists in the army, is sent to Russia, and abandons his family to start a new life with the Countess. I thought the story mildly interesting and the end incomprehensible. I’d be very curious to hear others’ reaction to it.
I think that the last story, The Bust of the Emperor (available here in English for free) is a stunning portrait of the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire. Roth takes his epigram from the Austrian playwright, Franz Grillparzer: “From humanity via nationality to bestiality.” The quotation is not just apt, it is perfect. The plot is simple: Count Franz Xaver Morstin is a local nobleman in the small town of Lopatyny in what is—and is not—Poland, comes to grips with the disappearance of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Roth shows how and why it is not only the death of the empire but the end of a way of life, a world order, and an age. The story is heart-rendingly sensitive, capitalizing on Roth’s sharp and nuanced understanding of the world from the position of the poorest and most deprived. Page after page he shows how the growth of nationalism in the carcass of the empire portended ill for the people and the world.
I’ll let a gentleman who posts on Goodreads under the name “Pastor Ben” have the final word because he managed to say what I’m trying to in far fewer words: “I adored the middle novella, The Bust of the Emperor. I give it seven stars out of five…. It touched a nerve for me and I'm not being rational in the slightest. But don't stories do that sometimes?”… (more)
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Awards
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Statistics
- Works
- 227
- Also by
- 11
- Members
- 10,964
- Popularity
- #2,158
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 284
- ISBNs
- 1,015
- Languages
- 27
- Favorited
- 60
- Touchstones
- 478
Decline is the theme of The Radetzky March. Although, in our times it could be said with more than a little truth that decline is a choice, in Roth's account, the decline of the empire is the result of the movement of historical processes, chiefly the rise of nationalism and the gradual breaking apart of the spiritual bonds that held together the monarchy and the empire. This decline is paralleled by the story of the quick rise and decline of the fortunes of the Trotta family. At the Battle of Solferino in 1869 the youthful Kaiser is saved from a bullet and possible death on the battlefield by a Lt. Joseph Trotta, an officer of Slovenian peasant stock. Trotta is promoted to a captaincy and is, in effect, the recipient of a battlefield promotion to the nobility, henceforth to be known as Joseph Trotta von Sipolje, Baron Trotta.
The Hero of Solferino passes from the scene early on in the story. What he leaves beside his title is a portrait painted by a friend of his son. The portrait, even more so than the march, dominates the persons of his son, a "district captain" which is basically a minor government functionary position, and the grandson, Carl Jospeh Trotta, who is groomed from early in his life for a military career for which he is unsuited. Carl Jospeh is commissioned into the cavalry despite his mediocre horsemanship. Following a fatal confrontation between his only friend in his regiment, the Jewish regimental surgeon and another officer from the nobility for which Trotta was the inadvertent cause, he transfers to a rifle regiment in a remote outpost on the Eastern frontier. Here he falls into patterns of dissolution from the usual causes, drinking, gambling and women. Eventually his debts are called in and he is forced to petition his father, the district commissioner to bail him out of his predicament. The father, unable to borrow the needed funds from any other source petitions the emperor directly. Franz Joseph, vaguely remembering the service to him by the grandfather of our scapegrace, directs that the debts be discharged, and for good measure that the holder of the debt be deported.
At a regimental celebration in the summer of 1914, the rumor of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, is circulated among the officers. Trotta sends in his resignation, but the resulting war brings him back into uniform and he meets his fate at the hands of Russian snipers while trying to retrieve water for his parched troops. The novel concludes with the parallel deaths of the Kaiser and the district commissioner in 1916.
The Radetzky March is a beautifully written, albeit melancholy metaphor for decline - of the empire, the monarchy, the Trotta family. The empire and the Trottas adhere more or less faithfully to the time-honored forms, but the protagonists become gradually aware that the substance underlying the forms have become hollowed out and that the forms are on the verge of extinction. Roth is at his best in his sketches and development of his characters. This excerpt from early in the novel provides a portrait of Carl Jospeh's father Franz, the district commissioner.
"He spoke the nasal Austrian German of higher officials and lesser nobles. It vaguely recalled distant guitars twanging in the night and also the last dainty vibrations of fading bells; it was a soft but also precise language, tender and spiteful at once. It suited the speaker's thin, bony face, his curved, narrow nose, in which the sonorous, somewhat rueful consonants seemed to be lying. His nose and mouth, when the district captain spoke, were more like wind instruments than facial features. Aside from the lips, nothing moved in his face. The dark whiskers that Herr von Trotta wore as part of his uniform, as insignia demonstrating his fealty to Franz Jospeh I, as proof of his dynastic conviction--these whiskers likewise remained immobile when Herr von Trotta und Sipolje spoke. He sat upright at the table, as if clutching reins in his hard hands. When sitting he appeared to be standing, and when rising he always surprised others with his full ramrod height. He always worse dark blue, summer and winter, Sundays and weekdays: a dark-blue jacket with gray striped trousers that lay snug on his long legs and were tautened by straps over the smooth boots. Between the second and third course he would usually get up in order to 'stretch my legs'. But it seemed more as is he wanted to show the rest of the household how to rise, stand, and walk without relinquishing immobility."
The Radetzky March is a masterpiece and a sober meditation on the problem of decline, a problem that confronts his contemporary readers as it confronted the characters of this outstanding work.… (more)