Joseph Roth | |
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.jpg) Roth in 1926 | |
| Born | Moses Joseph Roth (1894-09-02)2 September 1894 |
| Died | 27 May 1939(1939-05-27) (aged 44) Paris, France |
| Resting place | Cimetière de Thiais |
| Occupation | Journalist,novelist |
| Language | German |
| Education | University of Lemberg University of Vienna |
| Period | Interwar period |
| Years active | 1920s–1939 |
| Notable works | Radetzky March,The Legend of the Holy Drinker |
| Spouse | Friederike (Friedl) Reichler |
| Partner | Irmgard Keun |
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Moses Joseph Roth (Austrian German:[roːt]; 2 September 1894 – 27 May 1939) was anAustrian journalist and novelist, best known for hisfamily sagaRadetzky March (1932), about the decline and fall of theAustro-Hungarian Empire, his novel of Jewish lifeJob (1930) and his seminal essay "Juden auf Wanderschaft" (1927; translated into English asThe Wandering Jews), a fragmented account of the Jewish migrations from eastern to western Europe in the aftermath ofWorld War I and theRussian Revolution.[1][2] In the 21st century, publications in English ofRadetzky March and of collections of his journalism from Berlin and Paris created a revival of interest in Roth.
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Joseph Roth was born into aJewish family and grew up inBrody (currently in Ukraine), a small town nearLemberg (nowLviv, Ukraine) inEast Galicia, in the easternmost reaches of what was then theAustro-Hungarian empire.Jewish culture played an important role in the life of the town, whichhad 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]
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After secondary school, Joseph Roth moved to Lemberg to begin his university studies in 1913, before transferring to theUniversity of Vienna in 1914 to study philosophy andGerman literature. In 1916, Roth broke off his university studies and volunteered to serve in theAustro-Hungarian Army on theEastern 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 theHabsburg 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 becameschizophrenic, 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 toAlexandre Douala Manga Bell, Prince ofDouala inCameroon. Her husband had returned to Cameroon while she and their children stayed in Europe. When Roth met her, she was editor of the Ullstein magazineGebrauchsgraphik.[6]Being a prominent liberal Jewish journalist, Roth left Germany whenAdolf Hitler becameReichChancellor on30 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 writerStefan 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 withIrmgard Keun. They worked together, traveling to Paris,Wilna,Lemberg, Warsaw, Vienna, Salzburg, Brussels and Amsterdam.
Without denying his Jewish origins, Roth considered his relationship toCatholicism 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 asReport 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 chronicalcoholism, he remained prolific until his death in Paris in 1939.[8] His novellaThe 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 playwrightErnst Toller had hanged himself in New York on 22 May.[9] Roth died on 27 May from double pneumonia, aggravated by abrupt withdrawal of alcohol that produceddelirium tremens, and was buried on 30 May at theCimetière de Thiais south of Paris.
In 1918, Roth returned to Vienna and began writing forleft-wing newspapers, signing articles published byVorwärts asDer rote Joseph (The red Joseph, a play on his surname, which is homophonous with Germanrot, "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 theNeue Berliner Zeitung [de] and, from 1921, for theBerliner Börsen-Courier. In 1923 he began his association with the liberalFrankfurter 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 oneDeutschmark 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 theHabsburg 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 ofJob andRadetzky 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 amelancholicnostalgia for life in imperialCentral 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 possibleHeimat ("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 withNational Socialism. The novelRadetzky 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 ofRadetzky March up to Germany'sannexation of Austria in 1938.
Fiction
Non-Fiction
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