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Joseph Roth

{{For|the German politician|Joseph Roth (politician)}}

{{Use dmy dates|date=May 2020}}

{{short description|Austrian novelist and journalist}}

{{Infobox writer

| name = Joseph Roth

| image = Joseph Roth (1926).jpg

| alt =

| caption = Roth in 1926

| pseudonym =

| birth_name = Moses Joseph Roth

| birth_date = {{Birth date|1894|09|02|df=y}}

| birth_place = Brody, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now in Ukraine)

| death_date = {{Death date and age|1939|05|27|1894|09|02|df=y}}

| death_place = Paris, France

| resting_place = Cimetière de Thiais

| occupation = Journalist, novelist

| language = German

| nationality = Austrian

| education =

| alma_mater = University of Vienna

| period = Interwar period

| genre =

| subject =

| movement =

| notableworks = Radetzky March, The Legend of the Holy Drinker

| spouse = Friederike (Friedl) Reichler

| partner = Irmgard Keun

| children =

| relatives =

| awards =

| signature = Joseph Roth Signature.jpg

| signature_alt =

| years_active = 1920s–1939

}}

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.{{cite web|url=http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jroth.htm |title=Joseph Roth |website=Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi) |first=Petri |last=Liukkonen |publisher=Kuusankoski Public Library |location=Finland |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100923110558/http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jroth.htm |archive-date=23 September 2010 |url-status=dead }}Author biography in Radetzky March, Penguin Modern Classics, 1984. 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.

Biography

File:Student identity card photo of Joseph Roth (4923336475).jpg

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.Hofmann, Michael. "About the author", The Wandering Jews, Granta Books, p. 141. {{ISBN|1-86207-392-9}}

File:Friederike (Friedl) Roth nee Reichler, circa 1920.jpg

File:Joseph_and_Friederike_(Friedl)_Roth_nee_Reichler_horseback_riding.jpg

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". 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."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. {{doi|10.15463/ie1418.10244}}. The quotation is from a letter to Otto Forst-Battaglia, dated 28 October 1932.

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.{{cite magazine|url=https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/01/19/european-dreams|title=European Dreams: Rediscovering Joseph Roth|magazine=The New Yorker|date=19 January 2004}}

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.Robbie Aitken, Eve Rosenhaft: Black Germany: The Making and Unmaking of a Diaspora Community, 1884–1960. Cambridge 2013, pp. 114f. {{ISBN|1107435641}}, 9781107435643

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:

{{quote|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.38. Hell reigns. Letter of Joseph Roth to Stefan Zweig, February 1933. Hitlers Machtergreifung, edited by Josef & Ruth Becker, Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 2nd edition, Munich, Germany, 1992, p. 70. {{ISBN|3-423-02938-2}}}}

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.[https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/26/books/joseph-roth-endless-flight-keiron-pim.html A Timely Biography Traces Joseph Roth’s Accounts of Fascism] 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. 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 career

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 {{ill|Das 12 Uhr Blatt|de|Das 12 Uhr Blatt|lt=Neue Berliner Zeitung}} 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."Hofmann, Michael. "About the Author", The Wandering Jews, Granta Books, p. 142. {{ISBN|1-86207-392-9}} 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 the Habsburg myth.{{cite book|chapter-url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/345783516|title=Europe's Malaise: The Long View|editor-first1=Francesco|editor-last1=Duina|editor-first2=Frédéric|editor-last2=Merand|chapter=The Habsburg Myth and the European Union|first=Helen|last=Thompson|author-link=Helen Thompson (political economist)|publisher=Emerald Group Publishing|volume=27|pages=45–66|year=2020|isbn=978-1-83909-042-4|issn=0895-9935|doi=10.1108/S0895-993520200000027005|s2cid=224991526|url=https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/323670}}

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]]

Published works

Fiction

  • The Spider's Web ({{ill|Das Spinnennetz|de}}) (1923, adapted in 1989 into a film of the same title)
  • Hotel Savoy (1924)
  • The Rebellion (Die Rebellion) (1924; some editions of the English translation call it simply Rebellion)
  • "April: The Story of a Love Affair" (April. Die Geschichte einer Liebe) (1925; in The Collected Stories)
  • "The Blind Mirror" ({{ill|Der blinde Spiegel|de}}) (1925; in The Collected Stories)
  • Flight without End (Die Flucht ohne Ende) (1927)
  • Zipper and His Father ({{ill|Zipper und sein Vater|de}}) (1928)
  • Right and Left ({{ill|Rechts und links|de}}) (1929)
  • The Silent Prophet ({{ill|Der stumme Prophet|de}}) (1929)
  • Job (Hiob) (1930)
  • Radetzky March (Radetzkymarsch) (1932; some English translations call it The Radetzky March)
  • "Fallmerayer the Stationmaster" ({{ill|Stationschef Fallmerayer|de}}) (1933; in The Collected Stories)
  • {{ill|Tarabas|de}} (1934)
  • "The Bust of the Emperor" ({{ill|Die Büste des Kaisers|de}}) (1934; in The Collected Stories)
  • Confession of a Murderer (Beichte eines Mörders) (1936)
  • The Hundred Days ({{ill|Die hundert Tage|de}}) (1936)
  • Weights and Measures ({{ill|Das falsche Gewicht|de|Das falsche Gewicht. Die Geschichte eines Eichmeisters|lt=Das falsche Gewicht}}) (1937) translation by David Le Vay forthcoming from Pushkin Press in October 2024.{{Cite web |last=Papers |first=Printed |date=2024-06-26 |title=Weights and Measures |url=https://pushkinpress.com/book/weights-and-measures/ |access-date=2024-07-04 |website=Pushkin Press |language=en-GB}}
  • The Emperor's Tomb (Die Kapuzinergruft) (1938)
  • The String of Pearls ({{ill|Die Geschichte von der 1002. Nacht|de}}) (1939)Nürnberger, Helmuth. Joseph Roth. Reinbek, Hamburg, 1981, p. 152. {{ISBN|3-499-50301-8}}
  • The Legend of the Holy Drinker ({{ill|Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker|de}}) (1939)
  • "The Leviathan" ({{ill|The Leviathan (novel)|de|Der Leviathan (Joseph Roth)|lt=Der Leviathan}}) (1940; in The Collected Stories)
  • The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth, trans. by Michael Hofmann, New York: W. W. Norton (2003)

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)

Filmography

See also

References

{{Reflist}}

Further reading

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  • {{cite book|last=Brinkmann|first=Tobias|title=Between Borders: The Great Jewish Migration from Eastern Europe|place=New York|publisher=Oxford University Press|year=2024|isbn=978-01-9765-5658|ref=none}}
  • {{cite journal | last1 = Giffuni | first1 = Cathe | year = 1991 | title = Joseph Roth: An English Bibliography | journal = Bulletin of Bibliography | volume = 48 | issue = 1| pages = 27–32|ref=none}}
  • Michael Hofmann, trans. and ed., Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012).
  • {{cite book|last=Lazaroms|first=Ilse Josepha|title=The Grace of Misery: Joseph Roth and the Politics of Exile, 1919–1939|place=Leiden and Boston|publisher=Brill|year=2013|isbn=978-90-0423-4857|ref=none}}
  • {{cite book|last=Mauthner|first=Martin|title=German Writers in French Exile, 1933–1940|place=London|publisher=Vallentine Mitchell|year=2007|isbn=978-0-85303-540-4|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/germanwritersinf0000maut|ref=none}}
  • {{cite book|last=Pim|first=Keiron|title=Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth|location=London|publisher=Granta Books|year=2022|isbn=9781783785100 |ref=none}}
  • {{Cite journal | last = Prang | first = Christoph | title = Semiomimesis: The influence of semiotics on the creation of literary texts. Peter Bichsel's Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch and Joseph Roth's Hotel Savoy| journal = Semiotica | volume = 10 | issue = 182 | pages = 375–396| year = 2010|ref=none}}
  • {{cite book|last=Snick|first=Els|title=Waar het me slecht gaat is mijn vaderland. Joseph Roth in Nederland en België|place=Amsterdam|publisher=Bas Lubberhuizen|year=2013|isbn=978-90-5937-3266|ref=none}}
  • {{cite book|last=Sternburg|first=Wilhelm von|title=Joseph Roth. Eine Biographie|place=Cologne|publisher=Kiepenheuer & Witsch|year=2010|language=de|isbn=978-3-462-04251-1|ref=none}}
  • Alexander Stillmark, (ed.) Joseph Roth. Der Sieg über die Zeit. (1996).
  • Weidermann, Volker (Carol Brown Janeway, translator), Ostend: Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth, and the Summer Before the Dark. New York: Pantheon Books, 2016; Summer Before the Dark: Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, Ostend 1936. London: Pushkin Press, 2017.

{{div col end}}

External links

{{Commons category|Joseph Roth}}

  • [https://web.archive.org/web/20000824090037/http://geocities.com/roth_online/index.html JRO – Joseph Roth Online]
  • [http://www.lbi.org/digibaeck/results/?qtype=pid&term=121485 Joseph Roth Collection] at the Leo Baeck Institute
  • {{Internet Archive author |sname=Joseph Roth |sopt=t}}
  • {{Librivox author |id=768}}

{{Joseph Roth|state=expanded}}

{{German literature}}

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Category:1894 births

Category:1939 deaths

Category:People from Brody

Category:Frankfurter Zeitung people

Category:Writers from Vienna

Category:University of Vienna alumni

Category:Austro-Hungarian military personnel of World War I

Category:Austrian historical novelists

Category:Austrian monarchists

Category:Jews from Austria-Hungary

Category:Writers from Austria-Hungary

Category:Jews from Galicia (Eastern Europe)

Category:Jewish novelists

Category:Exilliteratur writers

Category:20th-century Austrian male writers

Category:20th-century Austrian journalists

Category:Polish-language writers

Category:20th-century Austrian Jews