“Nostalgia for a lost past and anxiety about a homeless future are at the heart of the mature work of the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth. Reviewing Michael Hoffman’s translation of Roth’s Collected Stories for the NYRB in 2002, JM Coetzee added this:

“His birthplace had been ceded to Poland,” his translator Michael Hofmann wrote, “his country-the supranational Dual Monarchy comprising 17 nationalities-was a figment of history, and he lived off his wits, out of a couple of suitcases.” The title evokes the twin monarchy of Austria and Hungary and the music of Johann Strauss I, who composed the march in honour of a field marshal who won key battles that asserted Austrian domination of northern Italy in the 1840s, and which soon became the theme song of the empire.īut, whereas the historical novel usually celebrates the triumph of the nation-state, in The Radetzky March Roth reverses the trend, seeing in the nationalist movements that inspired the terrorists in Sarejevo and which contributed to the end of the Hapsburg Empire the force that destroyed his own heimat, his homeland. The circumstances of Roth’s birth begin to explain the vision of the novel he came to write in 1932, amidst the turmoil that had followed the collapse of the Dual Monarchy. Galicia had become part of the Austrian Empire in 1772, when Poland was dismembered it was a poor region densely populated with Ukrainians (then known as Ruthenians), Poles, and Jews. Roth’s elegiac evocation of the slow decay of a way of life that disappeared with the collapse of the multinational Habsburg Empire and its dominant class might seem unexpected from an author born to Orthodox Jewish parents who named him Moses Joseph Roth, and a man who began his journalistic career in Vienna after the First World War, writing for left-wing newspapers under the pen-name Red Roth.įor that was Roth’s own story-born in 1894 in Brody, a town on the far eastern edge of the Empire, just a few miles from the Russian border in the imperial crownland of Galicia, where two-thirds of the population were Jewish. I don’t know how I could have lived so long before reading such a marvellous book. In a brilliant passage in The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth describes how the news of that world-changing event slowly seeps into the consciousness of a drunken outdoor celebration on the far eastern margins of the Austro-Hungarian empire as a storm breaks on one sultry night in July 1914.īut that is just one of many such superb passages in The Radetzky March. Just as the our century seems likely to be defined by the act of terrorism perpetrated in New York in 2001, so was the twentieth century defined by the shots fired in Sarajevo in 1914. Gerry Cordon on Joseph Roth’s classic 1932 novel about the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire…

The radetzky march review