Joseph Roth is a stunning writer and must be read. Roth’s novels are as essential to understanding the final days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and subsequent rise of the Weimar Republic, as Dickens is to understanding Victorian England or Fitzgerald is to understanding the lost generation or Kerouac is to understanding the Beats. Read his most famous work, The Radetzky March (published in 1932) or his novel about the shtel, Job(1930), or his last novel, and one of my favorite books ever, The Legend of the Holy Drinker (published the year of Roth’s death, 1939). The Legend of the Holy Drinker is a beautiful fairy tale for adults, in which the title character is an alcoholic with the heart of an angel, and the vision of one as well, but with a body wholly within the sphere of man. His desires are fulfilled during one last period of grace.
The book I read yesterday, The Emperor’s Tomb (published in 1934) is related to his greatest work, The Radetzky March. Not only are the characters of the two novels related (cousins) but in both books we are brought into a world lit by the dying light of the Hapsburg monarchy, the final days of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.
Franz Ferdinand Trotta narrates his life for us, introducing himself as a young man of the Viennese aristocracy and recalling for us his decadent life in the years before the Great War: he takes “foolish pleasure in everything which asserted life: from pleasure in balls, new wine, girls, food, long walks, eccentricities of every sort, senseless escapades, self-destructive irony, unfettered criticism:pleasure in the Prater, in the giant Ferris wheel, in Punch and Judy shows, masquerades, ballets, light-hearted lovemaking in quiet boxes at the Court Opera, in manoeuvres, which we mostly missed, and pleasure even in those illnesses which love more than once bestowed upon us.”
The war begins and Trotta does what all young men do before going off to war: he gets married. He then goes off with his country cousin and the cousin’s wild Jewish friend, leaving his more aristocratic commission in order to fight with those of the lower class, to whom he feels an honest kinship. Together the three endure capture by the Russians. They escape for a time with the help of a Jewish coachman and find refuge with a Siberian Pole fur trader, but then are sent to a prison camp in Siberia.
Trotta, a hero of neither heroic nor cowardly dimensions (he is just a man, a good man), returns to Vienna after the war to find his city changed. It is no longer alive; Vienna, now containing the tomb of the last Hapsburg emperor Franz Joseph, is itself the tomb of an old way of life. Trotta mourns the death of the emperor and of the old world: “…the Great War…is now, in my opinion, rightly called the World War, not only because the whole world was involved in it but also because, as a result of it, we each lost a world, our own world….”
Trotta is honest in assessing his future, up to the point of his optimism. He joins in with those still remaining to him a build a new life in Vienna: “We even began to love our misery in the way one loves real enemies. We wrapped ourselves round with it. We were grateful for it because this wretchedness, big brother that it was, devoured our small, particular, personal troubles. True, it overwhelmed our consolations, but our everyday cares as well….A monstrous disaster will rapidly swallow a small misfortune …[a]and so during those years we loved our monstrous wretchedness.”
Only when Trotta realizes that he himself is entombed within Vienna, does his optimism fade and a nostalgia for the old ways set in. The Germans have taken over the government and now the Empire is truly dead and gone. He is lonely for the past, for a life he did not necessarily approve of but that at least he understood: “I still belong to a palpably vanished world…”
Roth is a natural story teller, understated and seemingly straightforward until he pulls the rug out from under the reader, using both humor and agony to do so. It is then that we realize the power of his writing: he has us firmly on a lead and we follow him through the mind of our hero, accompanying him on his passage through the years. Our hope and optimism fade as his hope and optimism fade, and our dull acceptance and final resignation equal his own. We are at the end of the novel as tired and worn out as he is. We too are wiser but yet the cost of the wisdom is such a lonesome sadness that we wish ourselves back, like him, to a time full of his friends and their silly ways, back to that period of time when hope was such an unnecessary commodity that it could be ridiculed.
We are now in a period of our own history in this country where hope is a word used again. Perhaps it has been used too often lately, along with “change” but at least the future is again something to be dreamed of. Better to have a future to dream of than a past to be longed for. The challenge now is to fulfill that hope, and make good on that promise of change.
For more information about Joseph Roth and a complete list of his works, go to http://www.geocities.com/roth_online.
