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Joseph Roth

Article Discussion

Template:For Template:Use dmy dates Template:Short description Template:Infobox writer Moses Joseph Roth (2 September 1894 – 27 May 1939) was an Austrian-Jewish journalist and novelist, best known for his family saga Radetzky 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.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref><ref>Author biography in Radetzky March, Penguin Modern Classics, 1984.</ref> 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.

BiographyEdit

File:Student identity card photo of Joseph Roth (4923336475).jpg
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 Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine) in East 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.<ref name="About Wandering 141">Hofmann, Michael. "About the author", The Wandering Jews, Granta Books, p. 141. Template:ISBN</ref>

File:Friederike (Friedl) Roth nee Reichler, circa 1920.jpg
Friedl Reichler, c. 1920
File:Joseph and Friederike (Friedl) Roth nee Reichler horseback riding.jpg
Joseph and Friederike (left, center) horseback riding

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".<ref name="About Wandering 141" /> 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."<ref>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. {{#invoke:doi|main}}. The quotation is from a letter to Otto Forst-Battaglia, dated 28 October 1932.</ref>

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.<ref>Template:Cite magazine</ref>

In 1929 he met Andrea Manga Bell, born in Hamburg and unhappily married to Alexandre Douala Manga Bell, Prince of Douala in Cameroon. 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.<ref>Robbie Aitken, Eve Rosenhaft: Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960. Cambridge 2013, pp. 114f. Template:ISBN, 9781107435643</ref> Being a prominent liberal Jewish journalist, Roth left Germany when Adolf Hitler became Reich Chancellor on 30 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:

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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.<ref>A Timely Biography Traces Joseph Roth’s Accounts of Fascism</ref> 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 apparently was precipitated by learning that playwright Ernst Toller had hanged himself in New York on May 22.<ref name="About Wandering 142" /> Roth died on May 27 from double pneumonia, aggravated by abrupt withdrawal of alcohol that produced delirium tremens, and was buried on May 30 at the Cimetière de Thiais south of Paris.

Journalism and literary careerEdit

In 1918, Roth returned to Vienna and began writing for left-wing newspapers, signing articles published by Vorwärts as Der 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 Template:Ill 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."<ref name="About Wandering 142">Hofmann, Michael. "About the Author", The Wandering Jews, Granta Books, p. 142. Template:ISBN</ref> 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.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

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 melancholic nostalgia 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.

File:Grave-Joseph-Roth.jpg
Grave of Roth at the Cimetière de Thiais

Published worksEdit

Fiction

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Non-Fiction

  • The Wandering Jews (Juden auf Wanderschaft) (1927; reportage)
  • The Antichrist (Der Antichrist) (essay, 1934)
  • What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920–1933, trans. by Michael Hofmann, New York: W. W. Norton (2002) and London: Granta Books (2003)
  • 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)

FilmographyEdit

See alsoEdit

ReferencesEdit

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Further readingEdit

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External linksEdit

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