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 Prolific
political journalist and novelist, who's major work, the family
history Radetzkymarch appeared in 1932. It depicts the Habsburg
Empire of Austria-Hungary from 1859 to 1916. Roth's ambivalence
toward Western civilization led him to draw on the heritage of Eastern
European storytelling.
"I am a conservative and a Catholic, consider Austria my fatherland,
and desire the return of the Empire."
Joseph Roth was born in the German colony of Schwabendorf in Volynia,
Slovenia (formerly Galicia, Austro-Hungaria), into a Jewish family.
His father left the family before Joseph was born and died according
to Roth in a lunatic asylum in Amsterdam - actually he died in Russia.
Roth lived by turns with relatives of his father and mother.
Roth's early years are little known and his own account is not
always reliable. He attended Baron-Hirsch-Schule, Brody (1901-05),
Imperial-Royal Crown Prince Rudolph Gymnasium (1905-13), studied
literature and philosophy at the University of Lemberg (now Lviv,
Ukraine) and Vienna (1914-16). From 1916 to 1918 he served in the
Austrian army in the rifle regiment (Feldjäger). Roth claimed later
to have spent months in Russian captivity as a prisoner of war.
 After
the war Roth worked as a journalist in Vienna and in Berlin. In
the 1920s his articles showed traces of socialist conviction, although
he never became a political thinker. During his exile years he professed
Catholicism. Roth's marriage failed, his wife became mentally ill
and was confined to a hospital.
From 1923 to 1932 Roth was a correspondent for Frankfurter Zeitung,
travelling around Europe. In 1926 Roth went to the Soviet Union
and recorded his Socialist views in Der stumme Propher, which
was published posthumously in 1966. When Hitler came into power,
Roth was obliged to flee Germany and return to Vienna. In 1933 and
1937 Roth travelled in Poland on PEN lecture tour. After the assassination
of Dolfuss, he moved to Paris, where he died in a poorhouse (in
some sources in an army hospital) on May 27, 1939.
Roth started his career as a writer in the 1920s under the influence
of French and Russian psychological realism (Balzac, Stendhal, Flaubert,
Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky), but later his works embraced Viennese
Impressionism (Hofmannstahl, Schnitzler). In Hotel Savoy
(1924) Roth described a variety of hotel clientele, arranging the
stories according to the wealth and status of the figures. Die
Flucht ohne Ende (1927) traced the experiences of an Austrian
soldier who makes his way back from captivity in Siberia to the
West, and who finds himself alienated from the bourgeois world.
The protagonists of these novels belonged to the wartime generation
that found the society changed and the traditional values threatened.
Roth's best-know novel, Radetzkymarsch, portrays the latter
days of the Habsburg monarchy, its multi-ethnic equilibrium, bureaucratic
correctness, and hedonic sensuality. In the opening of the work
an Austrian army officer saves the life of the young emperor at
the battle of Solferino. Through his account of the descendants
of this hero Roth creates a Spenglerian vision of European culture
in decline and loss. The same nostalgic theme is repeating in
Roth's later novels. Its sequel, Die Kapuzinergruft, (1938),
traced the collapse of the Empire through a family, the Van Trottas.
It shows Roth responding to the National Socialist takeover in
Austria with an expression of passionate commitment for the Hapsburg
dynasty.
 Roth's
other works include Rechts und Links (1929), set in Berlin,
a disappointment for Nazis and leftists critics, Hiob (1930,
Job: The Story of a Simple Man), a modern-day analogue of the biblical
story, in which Roth paid tribute to his Jewish background. Das
falsche Gewicht (1937) depicts a weight-and measures inspector
in the borderlands of the Tsarist Empire, Die Legende vom heiligen
trinker (1939) is an ironic self-examination, in which Andreas
the drinker is suddenly charged, by a total stranger, with the task
of delivering a large sum of money to the shrine of St. Therese.
In his last novel, Die Geschichte von der 1002. Nacht (1939)
Roth examines the theme of self-deception. In the course of the
narrative, the principal figures - Baron Taittinger, the brothel
keeper Frau Matzner, and the prostitute Mizzi Schinagl - fall victim
to the rewards they have reaped from a visit to Vienna by the Persian
Shah.
For further reading: Encyclopaedia of World Literature,
ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999, vol. 3); World Authors 1900-1950,
ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmens (1996); Joseph
Roth by Rainer-Joachim Siegel (1995); Joseph Roths Fluch und Ende
by Soma Morgenstern (1994); Co-Existent Contradictions, ed. by
Helen Chambers (1991); Joseph Roth byWolfgang Müller-Funk (1989);
Ambivalence and Irony in the Works of Joseph Roth by C. Mathew
(1984); Von der Würde des Unscheinbaren by Esther Steinmann (1984);
Joseph Roth und die Tradition, ed. by D. Bronsen (1975); Joseph
Roth: Eine Biographie by David Bronsen (1974); Weit von wo by
C. Magris (1974); Lontano da dove by Claudio Magris (1971); Joseph
Roth: Leben und Werke by H. Linden (1949) - Key writers of
Vienna after WW I: Karl Kraus (1874-1936) wrote a satirical
play about the Great War, The Last Days of Mankind, 1922; Herman
Broch (1886-1951) wrote The Sleepwalkers (1932) and the prose-poem
The Death of Virgil (1946), the first volume of Robert Musil's
(1880-1942) novel The Man Without Qualities (1930-43) was immediately
hailed as a great and unusual work. Franz Werfel's (1890-1954)
Barbara; oder, Die Frömmigkeit (1929) examined the problem of
political action in its relation to the significance of religiousness,
and Elias Canetti published his first and only novel, Die Blendung,
in 1935. Joseph Roth wrote his Radetsky March (1932) in Berlin's
hotels and restaurants. Musil's favourite place in Vienna was
the Café Museum. Soma Morgenstern, the best friend of Roth, also
brought him to that café.
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