It is easiest to imagine Joseph Roth – the most elegaic writer of interwar Europe – hunched over some Stammtisch and scribbling. Whether as a young aspiring author in the newborn Austrian republic, or as the august and dazzlingly talented sot of his later years in exile, Roth appears clearest in the mind’s eye amidst the chatter and clatter of the grand cafés of Vienna and Paris, against a backdrop of marble and mirrors and polished bar-tops, drink in hand.
Roth’s output was prodigious. He was a poet, a travel writer, an essayist and a writer of short stories. His two masterpieces are his sublime novel of 20th-century Austro-Hungarian nostalgia, The Radetzky March, and his much more impressionistic novella The Emperor’s Tomb. Together they tell the long story of a minor noble family of Slovenian origin, the von Trotta, against the tragic backdrop of the slow and irreversible decline of the Habsburg empire from the middle of the 19th century. For Roth, Austria-Hungary may have been antiquated and occasionally absurd, but it preserved a civilisation at once homely and cosmopolitan which would be calamitously lost at the end of the First World War. For an Austrianised Galician Jew like Roth, the replacement of the old multi-ethnic monarchy by the petty nationalisms of interwar central Europe was an incalculable disaster. The Emperor’s Tomb ends with news of Hitler’s Anschluss in old imperial Vienna.
Keiron Pim’s Endless Flight is impressive in its broad survey of Roth’s corpus, and in its detailed evocation of both pre-war Austria and interwar Europe’s slide into the abyss. The reader glimpses a world about to be destroyed: the regional capital Lemberg (now Lviv in western Ukraine), which had not yet suffered the long calvaries of Nazi and Soviet rule, and the last flickers of fin-de-siècle Vienna, then still the capital of a sprawling, fractious empire. Pim details the ensemble of historical figures one might encounter in the Viennese cafés of 1913: authors Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, Sigmund Freud, the artist Gustav Klimt, the Zionist pioneer Theodor Herzl, or indeed a youthful Adolf Hitler, Leon Trotsky, Ioseb Dzhugashvili or Josip Broz. These were the last days of an old Europe.
Pim deftly integrates Roth’s own uneasy Jewish and Austrian identities into a wider picture of Jewish artists and intellectuals subjected to anti-Semitism in the final century of Habsburg Mitteleuropa. He quotes the composer Mahler: “I am thrice homeless: as a Bohemian among Austrians, as an Austrian among the Germans, and as a Jew throughout the entire world.” Yet Roth would come to lament this world’s passing, not least as a journalist in Germany after the war.
The First World War nevertheless presented strange opportunities. Roth joined up in 1916; he enjoyed being in uniform, and loathed military life. The Austrian armed forces furnished him with a lifetime of literary characters and scenes. An unpleasant Marek was Roth’s drill sergeant; a colonel of the same name appears as the master of Carl Joseph von Trotta’s cavalry school in The Radetzky March. Roth later lied about his wartime service, claiming to have been an officer and inventing a career as a Russian prisoner of war. Pim establishes that, on the contrary, Roth never saw action, and spent much of the war in a Galician shtetl, censoring post.
Roth’s capacity for reinventing himself must have been maddening. He is particularly confusing regarding religion. After the war, writing for Der Neue Tag in Germany, he filed many pieces under the name “Josephus”, the first-century Jew-turned-Roman. Pim presents Roth questioning his friend Géza von Cziffra, “Do you believe in God? I know he doesn’t exist, but I still believe in Him.” He was long attracted to high-society Viennese Catholicism. When he finally died of drink and pneumonia in Paris in 1939, he was given a conditional Catholic burial, Pim narrates, though Jewish friends attending wept and called for a rabbi to be fetched. Communist admirers were at the graveside, and the dispossessed Crown Prince Otto sent a wreath.
Roth probably did not die a Catholic, but is surely a canonised Austrian, European and Jewish author of the first rank. Pim’s biography gives him the attention he deserves.
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