Background

Joseph Roth was born on September 2, 1894, Brody, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (currently on the territory of Lviv Oblast, Ukraine). He was a son of Nachum Roth, a trading agent, and Maria Gruebel Roth. His father became mentally ill and was institutionalized before Roth’s birth, and Roth was raised by his mother and relatives.

Education

Joseph Roth attended Baron-Hirsch-Schule in Brody, then the part of Austria, from 1901 to 1905. He spent the next eight years at Imperial-Royal Crown Prince Rudolph Gymnasium.

Then, he came to Vienna in order to start his studies at the University of Lemberg. A year later, Roth changed the university and became a student at the University of Vienna. He studied German literature till 1916 when he left the institution to enlist in the Imperial Habsburg army during the First World War. The two-year tenure in the army had a significant influence on his upcoming life.

Career

Joseph Roth served in the Imperial Habsburg army on the Eastern Front in 1916 - 1918 during the First World War. He served as an enlisted man whose primary duties were preparing dispatches and writing for military publications but later claimed that he was an officer and a prisoner of war.

Following the war Roth lacked the financial means to return to the university and began working for Viennese newspapers, becoming a leading writer of feuilletons, book and film reviews, political and social criticism, biographical sketches, and travel essays.

In 1920, he moved to Berlin and continued to work as a journalist, his socialist sympathies earned him frequent publication in the leftist newspaper Frankfurter Zeitung in the staff of which he served from 1923 to 1932. Roth’s first novel, Das Spinnennetz, was serialized in the newspaper Arbeiterzeitung in 1923, and another novel, ‘Hotel Savoy’, was published the following year.

For the next decade, Roth traveled widely as a newspaper correspondent writing from France, Soviet Union, Albania, and Poland while publishing a half-dozen novels which received little critical or popular notice. Though, one of his best-known novels, ‘Radetzkymarsch’ (‘Radetzky March’), was created during this time. It was in it where Roth’s nostalgic idealization of Emperor Franz Joseph’s rule received its clearest expression.

In 1933 Roth emigrated to Paris to escape Adolf Hitler’s rise to power. He traveled restlessly for the next six years and during this period visited the Soviet Union and France among other countries. It is thought that Roth’s observations of conditions in the Soviet Union during his travels led him to reexamine the political liberalism that marked his early works. In fact, the author spent the most part of the time in Paris, the city he loved a lot, and where he lived till the end of his life.

Achievements

• Joseph Roth is considered as one of the most remarkable novelists of in Austria. Although he was uncompromising in his opposition to such modern evils as Nazism, critics observe that positive alternatives are absent in his works. Nevertheless, Roth’s works have been highly praised for expressing the sense of rootlessness and disillusionment that pervaded much of the post-World War I European society.
  
  In addition to his short stories and contributions to various newspapers, Roth produced in total 14 novels praised for their coherence.
  
  Many of Roth’s writings have been adapted into TV movies or miniseries, including the novels Rebellion, the Legend of the Holy Drinker, the String of Pearls, the Emperor's Tomb, Rebellion, and the best-known work Radetzky March.

Works

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  • Confession of a Murderer: Told in One Night

    (In a Russian restaurant on Paris's Left Bank, Russian exi...)

    1936
  • The Silent Prophet

    (Based on his own observations during an extended stay in ...)

    1966
  • The Antichrist

    (Long out of print in English, this dizzying hybrid of nov...)

    1934
  • The Radetzky March

    (Joseph Roth's classic saga of the privileged von Trotta f...)

    1932
  • Weights and Measures

    (A haunting evocation of Eastern Europe's borderlands in t...)

    1937
  • Flight Without End

    (From the celebrated author of The Radetzky March comes th...)

    1927
  • Rebellion: A Novel

    (The English translation of Roth's volume originally publi...)

    1924
  • Hotel Savoy. Fallmerayer the Stationmaster. The Bust of the Emperor

    (The English translation of Roth's volume originally publi...)

    1924
  • Job: The Story of A Simple Man 1930
  • The ballad of the hundred days 1936

Religion

During the 1930s, Roth travelled a lot around Europe and considered a conversion to Roman Catholicism, an inclination that is reflected in his later novels.

Views

Joseph Roth’s early novels display the fictional techniques of Neue Sachlichkeit (“new objectivity”), a school of writing that advocated documentary realism as a reaction against the symbolic literary style of German Expressionism. These novels, including ‘Das Spinnennetz’, ‘Hotel Savoy’, ‘Die Rebellion’, ‘Die Flucht ohne Ende’ (Flight without End), ‘Zipper und sein Vater’, and ‘Rechts und Links’, deal with topical social and political issues, including the plight of veterans of the First World War who find it difficult to resume normal lives in a rapidly changing, decadent postwar society bereft of the traditional values for which they fought. Several of these novels are narrated from the viewpoint of a young social rebel or political revolutionary, and most exhibit Roth’s own leftist political sympathies.

With ‘Hiob: Roman eines einfachen Mannes’ of 1930 (Job: The Story of a Simple Man), Roth broke decisively with both the style and substance of his earlier works, abandoning the realism of Neue Sachlichkeit and topical subjects in favor of poetic imagination and religious or historical subjects. Set against the background of Jewish life in Eastern Europe, Job is a modern retelling of the biblical story of tested and ultimately strengthened faith.

Roth’s essays and letters from the 1930s reflect a pervasive and growing skepticism, not only with most existing social and political systems but also with the range of proffered solutions.

Other novels of this period, including ‘Tarabas: Ein Gast auf dieser Erd’ (Tarabas: A Guest on Earth), ‘Beichte eines Moerders’ (Confessions of a Murderer), and ‘Das falsche Gewicht’, reveal a preoccupation with religious, particularly Christian, themes, such as the struggle between good and evil and the virtue of penance. In addition, these novels display a tendency to view the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire of Franz Joseph as a lost ideal. Roth’s nostalgic idealization of Emperor Franz Joseph’s rule received its clearest expression in Radetzky March and its sequel.

Quotations: "My strongest experience was the War and the destruction of my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary."

Personality

Joseph Roth died in 1939, shortly after receiving the news that a friend, the dramatist Ernst Toller, had committed suicide. While some biographers believe that Roth committed suicide as the result of his grief, others attribute his death to his alcoholism and chronic poor health.

Quotes from others about the person

• Much of the critical commentary on Joseph Roth focuses on the shift in his works from political liberalism to apparent reaction, with many critics decrying his later works as nostalgic escapism. This view has been disputed by critics who contend that Roth did not idealize the Austro-Hungarian Empire but rather was its epic narrator, as well as by critics who maintain that through allegory, parallel, and allusion, Roth did address timely concerns even in his historical novels.

Connections

Joseph Roth married Friederike Reichler in 1922. By the end of the decade, she became schizophrenic that was emotionally hard for Reichler who, in addition, had to pay her longtime stints in sanatoriums. Later, she was killed for the purposes of the Nazi eugenics program.

Roth met his next companion, Andrea Manga Bell, in 1929. She was previously married to Prince of Douala in Cameroon, Alexandre Douala Manga Bell, who fled to his home country and left her with children. Roth and Bell lived together for six years and broke up because of financial issues and Roth's jealousy.

At the end of his life, the novelist had a romantic relationship with Irmgard Keun who accompanied him on his work and travels.

Father:

Nachum Roth

Mother:

Maria Gruebel Roth

late wife:

Friederike Reichler

life partner:

Andrea Manga Bell

life partner:

Irmgard Keun

Friend:

Ernst Toller

References

• The Grace of Misery: Joseph Roth and the Politics of Exile, 1919-1939 The book confronts the life and intellectual heritage of the Galician-Jewish exiled journalist and writer Joseph Roth.
  2013