Moses Joseph Roth (2 September 1894 – 27 May 1939) was an Austrian-Jewish journalist and novelist, best known for his family sagaRadetzky March (1932), about the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his novel of Jewish life Job (1930) and his seminal essay "Juden auf Wanderschaft" (1927; translated into English as The Wandering Jews), a fragmented account of the Jewish migrations from eastern to western Europe in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution.[1][2] In the 21st century, publications in English of Radetzky March and of collections of his journalism from Berlin and Paris created a revival of interest in Roth.
Student identity card photo of Joseph Roth (ca. 1914)
Joseph Roth was born into a Jewish family and grew up in Brody (currently in Ukraine), a small town near LemberginEast Galicia, in the easternmost reaches of what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire. Jewish culture played an important role in the life of the town, which had a large Jewish population. Roth grew up with his mother and her relatives; he never saw his father, who had disappeared before he was born.[3]
Friedl Reichler, c. 1920
After secondary school, Joseph Roth moved to Lemberg to begin his university studies in 1913, before transferring to the University of Vienna in 1914 to study philosophy and German literature. In 1916, Roth broke off his university studies and volunteered to serve in the Austro-Hungarian Army on the Eastern Front, "though possibly only as an army journalist or censor".[3] This experience had a major and long-lasting influence on his life. So, too, did the collapse in 1918 of the Habsburg Empire, which marked the beginning of a pronounced sense of "homelessness" that was to feature regularly in his work. As he wrote: "My strongest experience was the War and the destruction of my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary."[4]
Roth married Friederike (Friedl) Reichler in 1922. In the late 1920s, his wife became schizophrenic, which threw Roth into a deep crisis, both emotionally and financially. She lived for years in a sanatorium and was later murdered in the Nazis' Aktion T4 programme.[5]
In 1929 he met Andrea Manga Bell, born in Hamburg and unhappily married to Alexandre Douala Manga Bell, Prince of DoualainCameroon. Her husband had returned to Cameroon while she and their children stayed in Europe. When Roth met her, she was editor of the Ullstein magazine Gebrauchsgraphik.[6]
Being a prominent liberal Jewish journalist, Roth left Germany when Adolf Hitler became ReichChancelloron30 January 1933. Andrea Manga Bell accompanied him with her children. He spent most of the next six years in Paris, a city he loved. His essays written in France display a 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:
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.[7]
The relationship with Andrea Manga Bell failed due to financial problems and Roth's jealousy. From 1936 to 1938, Roth had a romantic relationship with Irmgard Keun. They worked together, traveling to Paris, Wilna, Lemberg, Warsaw, Vienna, Salzburg, Brussels and Amsterdam.
Without denying his Jewish origins, Roth considered his relationship to Catholicism very important. In the final years of his life, he may have converted: Michael Hofmann states in the preface to the collection of essays The White Cities (also published as Report from a Parisian Paradise) that Roth "was said to have had two funerals, one Jewish, one Catholic".
In his last years, he moved from hotel to hotel, drinking heavily, and becoming increasingly anxious about money and the future. Despite suffering from chronic alcoholism, he remained prolific until his death in Paris in 1939.[8] His novella The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939) chronicles the attempts made by an alcoholic vagrant to regain his dignity and honor a debt.
Roth's final collapse was precipitated by hearing the news that the playwright Ernst Toller had hanged himself in New York.[9] Roth died from pneumonia on 27 May 1939 and was buried on 30 May at the Cimetière de Thiais, south of Paris.
In 1918, Roth returned to Vienna and began writing for left-wing newspapers, signing articles published by VorwärtsasDer rote Joseph (The red Joseph, a play on his surname, which is homophonous with German rot, "red", which is also the signalling color of communist parties in Europe). In 1920 he moved to Berlin, where he worked as a successful journalist for the Neue Berliner Zeitung [de] and, from 1921, for the Berliner Börsen-Courier. In 1923 he began his association with the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung, traveling widely throughout Europe, and reporting from the South of France, the USSR, Albania, Poland, Italy, and Germany. According to his main English translator, Michael Hofmann, "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."[9] In 1925 he spent a period working in France. He never again resided permanently in Berlin.
Roth has been referred to as one of the novelists who helped the emergence of what is nowadays called the Habsburg Myth.[10]
In 1923, Roth's first (unfinished) novel, The Spider's Web, was serialized in an Austrian newspaper. He went on to achieve moderate success as a novelist with a series of books exploring life in post-war Europe, but only upon publication of Job and Radetzky March did he achieve acclaim for his fiction rather than his journalism.
From 1930, Roth's fiction became less concerned with contemporary society, with which he had become increasingly disillusioned, and began to evoke a melancholicnostalgia for life in imperial Central Europe before 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 ("true home"). In his later works, Roth appeared to wish that the monarchy could be restored. His longing for a more tolerant past may be partly explained as a reaction against the political extremism of the time, which culminated in Germany with National Socialism. The novel Radetzky March (1932) and the story "The Bust of the Emperor" (1935) are typical of this late phase. In another novel, The Emperor's Tomb (1938), Roth describes the fate of a cousin of the hero of Radetzky March up to Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938.
The White Cities: Reports from France, 1925–39, trans. by Michael Hofmann, London: Granta Books (2004); issued in the United States as Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France, 1925–1939, New York: W. W. Norton & Company (2004)
Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters, trans. and edited by Michael Hofmann, New York: W. W. Norton (2012)
The Hotel Years, trans. and edited by Michael Hofmann, New York: New Directions (2015)
^Liukkonen, Petri. "Joseph Roth". Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 23 September 2010.
^Author biography in Radetzky March, Penguin Modern Classics, 1984.
^As quoted in: Lazaroms, Ilse Josepha (2014-10-08), "Roth, Joseph", 1914–1918-online/International Encyclopedia of the First World War. Issued by Freie Universität Berlin. doi:10.15463/ie1418.10244. The quotation is from a letter to Otto Forst-Battaglia, dated 28 October 1932.
^Robbie Aitken, Eve Rosenhaft: Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960. Cambridge 2013, pp. 114f. ISBN1107435641, 9781107435643
^38. Hell reigns. Letter of Joseph Roth to Stefan Zweig, February 1933. Hitlers Machtergreifung, edited by Josef & Ruth Becker, Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 2nd edition, Munich, Germany, 1992, p. 70. ISBN3-423-02938-2
Prang, Christoph (2010). "Semiomimesis: The influence of semiotics on the creation of literary texts. Peter Bichsel's Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch and Joseph Roth's Hotel Savoy". Semiotica. 10 (182): 375–396.
Snick, Els (2013). Waar het me slecht gaat is mijn vaderland. Joseph Roth in Nederland en België. Amsterdam: Bas Lubberhuizen. ISBN978-90-5937-3266.
Sternburg, Wilhelm von (2010). Joseph Roth. Eine Biographie (in German). Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch. ISBN978-3-462-04251-1.
Alexander Stillmark, (ed.) Joseph Roth. Der Sieg über die Zeit. (1996).
Weidermann, Volker (Carol Brown Janeway, translator), Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark. New York: Pantheon Books, 2016; Summer Before the Dark: Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, Ostend 1936. London: Pushkin Press, 2017.
Literature
