Brothers Judd Top 100 of the 20th Century: Novels
I am a conservative and a Catholic, consider Austria
my fatherland, and desire the return of the
Empire.
-Joseph
Roth
It has aptly been noted that the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth was a
man at war with his times. Many of the Post World War I generation
convinced themselves that the ancient regimes and institutions had lead
Europe, particularly the naive youth of Europe, into a self-destructive
war which no one really wanted and, as a result of this determination,
declared themselves unalterably opposed to the antediluvian system.
Roth, in his multivolume, multigenerational saga of the extended von Trotta
family, more accurately diagnosed the rot in his own generation, the lack
of beliefs and values that had contributed to the unthinking descent into
war:
I lived in the cheerful, carefree company of young
aristocrats whose company, second only to that
of artists, I loved best under the old Empire.
With them I shared a skeptical frivolity, a
melancholy curiosity, a wicked insouciance, and
the pride of the doomed, all signs of the
disintegration which at that time we still did not
see coming. Above the ebullient glasses from
which we drank, invisible Death was already crossing
his bony hands. We swore without malice
and blasphemed without thought. Alone and
old, distant and omnipresent in the great and
brilliant pattern of the Empire, lived and ruled
the old Emperor, Franz Joseph. Perhaps in the
hidden depths of our souls there slumbered that
awareness which is called foreboding, the
awareness above all that the old Emperor was dying,
day by day with every day that he lived, and
with him the Monarchy--not so much our Fatherland
as our Empire; something greater, broader,
more all-embracing than a Fatherland. Our
wit and our frivolity came from hearts that were
heavy with the feeling that we were dedicated to
death, from a foolish pleasure in everything
which asserted life: from pleasure in balls, new
wine, girls food, long walks, eccentricities of
every sort, senseless escapades, self-destructive
irony, unfettered criticism: pleasure in the Prater,
in the giant Ferris wheel, in Punch and Judy shows,
masquerades, ballets, light-hearted
lovemaking in quiet boxes at the Court Opera, in
manoeuvres, which we mostly missed, and
pleasure even in those illnesses which love more
than once bestowed upon us.
And so, the specter of Death haunts these melancholy, elegiac novels,
as the Trotta family rises to the respectable lower levels of the aristocracy
after Lieutenant Joseph Trotta fortuitously intervenes at the Battle of
Solferino to save the Emperor's life. But by the time of The Emperor's
Tomb, Franz Ferdinand Trotta seeks companionship among the peasantry,
with his cousin Joseph who sells chestnuts from a cart and his friend Manes
Reisiger, a Jewish wagon driver; they seem more authentic to him than his
urban aristo circle of friends. Meanwhile, the nation careens into
the Great War, which will see Franz, Joseph and Manes defeated in battle
and shipped to a Siberian prison camp.
Upon returning home after the War, Franz says:
I felt happy. I was home again. We had
all lost position, rank and name, home and money and
esteem, past, present and future. Every morning
as we woke up, every night as we lay down to
sleep, we cursed Death who had vainly beckoned us
to his mighty banquet. And each of us envied
the dead. They were at rest beneath the soil,
and next spring violets would grow from their
bones. But we had returned home, fruitless and inconsolable,
crippled, a generation dedicated to
death, by death disdained. The verdict of
the Commission of Enquiry was without appeal. It
read: 'Found unfit for death.'
There are not a whole lot of great explicitly conservative novelists,
and it's no wonder with passages like that. What could be more harsh
than to judge a generation that sought dissipation and death as ultimately
unworthy for that death? The truth that Roth intuited--that the old
Empires, as archaic and repellent as our modern liberal sensibilities may
find them, offered a unique means for unifying diverse peoples and giving
them a common sense of purpose and destiny--is not one that folks then
or now were willing to hear. This is not to say, as Roth surely would
have, that monarchy is a desirable form of government, nor is it comparable
to democracy. However, it is hard to see any benefit that accrued
to the people of particularly Central and Eastern Europe when they simply
disposed of their monarchies after, or during, World War I.
The story of the Trottas ends, as did Roth's own life, at the dawn of
the Nazi era in Austria. Here writ large were the trends that Roth
opposed. Gone was the idea that many peoples could be ruled by a
central authority; replaced by the idea that blood and race should determine
political representation. Roth drank himself to death rather than
see this culmination of all that he feared. But not even in his worst nightmares
could he have imagined how many would be found fit for death in the coming
years.
(Reviewed:02-Mar-00)
Grade: (A+)
Websites:
Joseph Roth Links:
-Encyclopaedia
Britannica: Your search: "joseph roth"
-Joseph
Roth (1894-1939)(kirjasto)
-FEATURED
AUTHOR : Joseph Roth (NY Times Book Review)
-OBITUARY:
Joseph Roth, Author of Several Novels, Dies (NY Times, June 7, 1939)
-ESSAY: EUROPEAN DREAMS: Rediscovering Joseph Roth (JOAN ACOCELLA, 2004-01-19, The New Yorker)
-ESSAY: What He Saw, and What He Wrote: Americans will soon be able to read more of Joseph Roth (ADAM KIRSCH, January 3, 2003, Wall Street Journal)
-REVIEW
: of 'Radetzky March' (John Chamberlain, NY Times, 1933)
-REVIEW
: of 'Radetzky March,' translated by Eva Tucker (Elie Wiesel, NY Times
Book Review, 1974)
-REVIEW: of The Radetzky March (Paul Bailey, Daily Telegraph)
-REVIEW: of The Radetzky March (The Economist)
-REVIEW: of The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth (Julius Purcell, The Spectator)
-REVIEW:
Nadine Gordimer: The Empire of Joseph Roth, NY Review of Books
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS
ESSAY
The Radetzky March by Joseph
Roth, translated by Eva Tucker, and
translated by Geoffrey Dunlop
Hotel Savoy, including 'Fallmerayer
the Stationmaster' and 'The Bust of
the Emperor' by Joseph Roth
and translated by John Hoare
'The Spider's Web' and 'Zipper
and his Father' by Joseph Roth and
translated by John Hoare
The Emperor's Tomb by Joseph
Roth and translated by John Hoare
Flight Without End by Joseph
Roth and translated by David LeVay
The Silent Prophet by Joseph
Roth and translated by David Le Vay
'The Legend of the Holy
Drinker' and 'Right and Left' by Joseph Roth
and translated by Michael
Hofmann
-REVIEW:
THE TALE OF THE 1002d NIGHT By Joseph Roth Translated by Michael Hofmann
(MICHIKO KAKUTANI, NY Times)
-REVIEW:
of THE TALE OF THE 1002ND NIGHT By Joseph Roth. Translated by Michael
Hofmann (Iain Bamforth, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
of REBELLION By Joseph Roth. Translated by Michael Hofmann (Peter Filkins,
NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
REBELLION By Joseph Roth Translated by Michael Hofmann (RICHARD BERNSTEIN,
NY Times)
-REVIEW:
of Rebellion Joseph Roth trans Michael Hofmann Empire of the
infinite: All that is wicked, all that is fine. James Wood on
Joseph Roth's Rebellion (James Wood, Books Unlimited, UK Telegraph)
-REVIEW:
of HOTEL SAVOY Fallmerayer the Stationmaster. The Bust of the Emperor.
By Joseph Roth. Translated by John Hoare (Herbert Gold, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
of HOTEL SAVOY. With ''Fallmerayer the Stationmaster'' and ''The Bust
of the Emperor.'' By Joseph Roth (John Gross, NY Times)
-SHORT
REVIEW: of CONFESSION OF A MURDERER: Told in One Night. By Joseph Roth.
Translated by Desmond I. Vesey (James Snead, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW
: of The Wandering Jew by Joseph Roth (Richard Eder, NY Times)
-REVIEW
: of The Wandering Jews by Joseph Roth (David Pryce-Jones, booksonline)
-REVIEW
: of The Wandering Jews by Joseph Roth (Elena Lappin, Independent uk)
-REVIEW
: of The Wandering Jews by Joseph Roth (Julian Evans, New Statesman)
-REVIEW
: of The Wandering Jews by Joseph Roth (Michael Andre Bernstein, New
Republic)
-REVIEW: of 'What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933' by Joseph Roth (Thane Rosenbaum, Washington Post)
-REVIEW: of What I Saw Reports From Berlin, 1920-1933 By Joseph Roth (Matthew Price, SF Chronicle)
-REVIEW: of WHAT I SAW: REPORTS FROM BERLIN, 1920-33 By Joseph Roth (Jonathan Keates, Spectator)
-REVIEW: of What I Saw by Joseph Roth (Nadine Gordimer, Threepenny Review)
-REVIEW: of Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925-1939 By Joseph Roth, translated with introduction by Michael Hofmann (JILL LAURIE GOODMAN, 1/16/04, The Forward)
Book-related and General Links:
GENERAL:
-REVIEW:
of THE JEWS OF VIENNA IN THE AGE OF FRANZ JOSEPH By Robert S. Wistrich
(Leon Botstein, NY Times Book Review)
-REVIEW:
of LAST WALTZ IN VIENNA The Rise and Destruction of a Family,1842-l942.
By George Clare (Fredric Morton, NY times Book Review)
-REVIEW
ESSAY: Michael Ignatieff: The Rise and Fall of Vienna's Jews, NY Review
of Books
The Jews of Vienna in the
Age of Franz Joseph by Robert S. Wistrich
Vienna and Its Jews: The
Tragedy of Success, 1880s-1980s by George E.
Berkley
A History of Habsburg Jews,
1670-1918 by William O. McCagg, Jr.
Judentum in Wien: Sammlung
Max Berger catalog of the exhibition at the
Historisches Museum der
Stadt Wien, November 12, 1987-June 5, 1988
The Rise of Political Anti-Semitism
in Germany and Austria (revised
edition) Peter Pulzer
The Viennese: Splendor,
Twilight and Exile by Paul Hofmann
Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938:
A Cultural History by Steven Beller
-REVIEW
ESSAY: Timothy Garton Ash: Does Central Europe Exist?, NY Review of
Books
The Power of the Powerless:
Citizens Against the State in Central-Eastern
Europe by Václav
Havel, et al., introduction by Steven Lukes, and edited
by John Keane
The Anatomy of a Reticence
by Václav Havel
Antipolitics: An Essay by
George Konrád and translated from the
Hungarian by Richard E.
Allen
Letters from Prison and
Other Essays by Adam Michnik, translated by
Maya Latynski, foreword
by Czeslaw Milosz, and introduction by Jonathan
Schell
Takie czasy...Rzecz o kompromisie
by Adam Michnik
KOR: A History of the Workers'
Defense Committee in Poland,
1976-1981 by Jan Józef
Lipski, translated by Olga Amsterdamska, and
Gene M. Moore
-REVIEW:
of THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES By Robert Musil. Translated by Sophie
Wilkins and Burton Pike (Michael Hoffman, NY Times Book Review)
