Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth (born Moses Joseph Roth, Brody, 1894 - Paris, 1939) was a novelist and journalist who wrote in German. Born in East Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he is now counted among the great Central European writers of the twentieth century, alongside Hermann Broch and Robert Musil. His work is read today as a portrait of a world that collapsed after the First World War.

He grew up in Brody, a small town with a large Jewish population, raised by his mother and her relatives after his father left before he was born. He studied in Lemberg and then in Vienna, where he took up philosophy and German literature without finishing his degree. He served in the Austro-Hungarian army during the war, probably in a clerical or journalistic role rather than at the front, and the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy in 1918 left him with a lasting sense of having lost his homeland.

After the war he worked as a journalist in Vienna and then in Berlin, where from 1923 he wrote for the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung, travelling across much of Europe as its correspondent. A trip to the Soviet Union in 1926 cured him of his earlier socialist sympathies. Years of personal hardship followed, as his wife developed schizophrenia and was confined to institutions from 1929, leaving him in emotional and financial crisis.

His reputation as a novelist was secured with Job (1930) and above all The Radetzky March (1932), a chronicle of the decline of the Habsburg Empire told through the Trotta family. Earlier he had written postwar novels such as Hotel Savoy and The Flight Without End, along with reportage such as The Wandering Jews. His later fiction turned more elegiac, focusing on wanderers, Jews and former subjects of the monarchy who had lost their place in the world. His style is clear and traditional, marked by irony and a rueful tenderness.

After Hitler came to power in 1933 he left Germany, and after the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss in 1934 he had to leave Austria as well. He lived in hotels and cafés across Europe, mostly in Paris, where alcoholism badly damaged his health. His books were burned in Nazi Germany. Late in life he moved towards Catholicism, a theme that surfaces in his last novel, The Emperor's Tomb. He died in Paris in 1939, shortly after the suicide of the playwright Ernst Toller.

His legacy lies in the literature of exile and in the picture of the Habsburg world he fixed on the page. The Radetzky March and other works have been adapted for film and television, and his writing continues to draw readers looking for a clear-eyed view of interwar Europe.