The Prophetic Vision of Joseph Roth

At Gundel’s, arguably the best restaurant in Eastern Europe, one of the specialties of the house is simply called “His Majesty’s Favorite Soup” as if there’s no need to explain what that soup contains. Visiting Budapest a few months ago, ignorant, curious and hungry but wary, I asked about the ingredients and bore the waiter’s disdain. It’s a creamy potato soup with slivers of beef tongue, a hearty bowl that Franz Joseph, the last emperor of Austria-Hungary’s Dual Monarchy, relished as his world collapsed.

But while Franz Joseph apparently enjoyed a peasant’s palate in his gilded palace, many of his subjects, including the Jewish writer Joseph Roth, were drawn to the more extravagant aspects of Vienna’s court. Though empty of any moral core, the grand fin de siecle aristocracy represented their last hope for a comprehensible universe as outside events careened out of control. Roth, born in 1894, came of age during World War I and died a few months before World War II began (the exact date, like much in his life, is in doubt). Nonetheless he left a legacy of a dozen or so short novels that bring his era, complete with its verities and anxieties, vividly back. Roth’s last published work, “The Tale of the 1002nd Night,” has just been issued in English for the first time by St. Martin’s, while most of his other fiction was republished during the 1980s by Overlook Press in a massive undertaking of cultural and historical fidelity. Together they bring to light one of the most important and unjustly lesser-known writers of the century.

Almost all of Roth’s novels take place among the minor echelons of Mitteleuropean society. In “The Radetzky March,” his most fully realized work, we follow several generations of a family ennobled after infantryman Joseph Trotta saves the emperor’s life during a battle against French troops in 1859. From that moment on, the newly minted Von Trottas enjoy the monarch’s special favor, even if they’re not precisely sure what to do with it. The son of the “hero of Solferino” becomes a stiff local bureaucrat, while the grandson, Carl Joseph, enlists in the military.

This last Von Trotta is stationed at the border between the empire and Russia, where he and his peers fritter away their hours gambling and romancing until a silly incident leads to a tragic duel. As Roth describes it, “the lieutenant saw all the somber events of his life fitting together in a somber mosaic as if manipulated by some powerful, hateful, invisible wire puller who was intent on destroying him.” Of course, that wire puller is manipulating more than Carl; that wire puller’s got the whole world in his hands. The pathetic thing is that nobody knows it. Alas, “their ears were not sharp enough to catch the whirring gears of the great hidden mills that were already grinding out the Great War.” Steeped in a dying tradition, these functionaries of the crown catch only the title song that plays at crucial moments throughout the novel like a dirge prior to a funeral.

“The Radetzky March” is, loosely, continued in “The Emperor’s Tomb,” whose protagonist is a non-titled cousin of the Von Trottas. This cross-pollination between books is a technique Roth uses frequently. Jadlowker, a tavern-keeper; Chojnicki, a cynical nobleman; and Efrussi, a banker who seems reincarnated from a jeweler with the same name in another story, pop up in several other novels, along with the emblematic strains of the march. As Balzac does in “The Human Comedy,” Roth creates a literary universe larger than the sum of its parts. His writing, like Balzac’s, is bluntly straightforward, occasionally rising to heights of lyricism in sentences like these in “The Emperor’s Tomb”: “The crickets sang inexhaustibly, and inexhaustibly sang the frogs. A great peace reigned in the world, the austere peace of autumn.” Mostly however, Roth relies for his effects on his own, and our, ironic foreknowledge of what awaits his characters.

Roth often sets novels at pivotal historical moments. For example, “The Silent Prophet” parallels the career of Leon Trotsky in its story of Friedrich Kargan, a young radical with “the conviction that one must annihilate a rotten world.” Kargan meets a Stalin-like figure called Savelli who has “the temperament of a crocodile in [a] drought.” These characters’ idealism is doomed and, worse, such absolute idealism contains the seeds of its own destruction.

Similar to Kargan but at the opposite end of the political spectrum, Theodor Lohse, the protagonist of “The Spider’s Web,” becomes involved in dense German right-wing conspiracies. Interwar Berlin is a terrifying place where “[f]oreigners were spied on, faithful dogs were put down, cab horses eaten. . . . Newspapers invented horror stories about the enemy. Officers sharpened their sabres. Students fired shots. Policemen fired shots. Small boys fired shots. It was a nation of gunfire.” Thriving amid “crimson jubilation,” Theodor is “nationalistic and self-seeking, devoid of belief and of loyalty, bloodthirsty and blinkered.” Harkening the advent of Mitteleuropean fascism, he is “the coming man.”

On top for a moment, both Kargan and Lohse are driftwood in history’s tide. Neither is entirely fleshed out because their author’s real subject--and character--is History itself, a malevolent, thanatonic deity who raises and then sinks such people. In self-imposed exile in Berlin and Paris for much of his life, Roth was in a perfect position to perceive History’s ominous currents, though he was no less caught in their sway. As Franz Tunda, his “spiritual associate” in “Flight Without End,” dreams: “Things had turned out as they always had in his life, as indeed much that is important does in the lives of others, who are deceived by the more noisy and deliberate nature of their activities into believing that an element of self-determination governs their decisions and transactions. However, they forget that over and above their own brisk exertions lies the hand of fate.”

And while left and right engage in their lethal tug of war, one group is inevitably caught in the middle, the Jews. Omnipresent in Roth’s books, especially “Job,” they pray and play the violin while pursuing mundane mercantile activities, oblivious to impending catastrophe. So they’re Russian one day, Austrian the next; so what? “Jews from the East needed no explanations.” Moreover, they were not going to receive any explanations. There has been no spookier premonition of the Holocaust than the final words of “The Spider’s Web,” written in 1923: “Somewhere, many locomotives were whistling on the tracks.”

Finally abandoning any hope of earthly salvation, Roth is left with no recourse but to flee beyond geography and politics into a more abstract, aesthetic realm where all that needs to make sense is narrative. His last books, “The Legend of the Holy Drinker,” a parable about a drunkard and his debts, and “The Tale of the 1002nd Night,” move toward the fanciful. The latter begins as an “Arabian Nights” pastiche, based on an actual visit of the shah of Persia to Vienna. It’s filled with harems, eunuchs and exotic gems and, when the shah decides that he must bed a countess he glimpses at a fe^te, the book has a plot, too.

Appalled yet obliged to indulge their guest’s royal whim, the court officers are at a loss until Baron Taittinger suggests that a substitute might fool the shah. Taittinger happens to know that one Mizzi Schinagl, a shopgirl he seduced, impregnated and tossed aside, bears an uncanny resemblance to a woman named only Countess W. This act of minor sexual trickery goes awry when the shah presents Mizzi with a valuable strand of pearls that could just as well be cursed. Her newfound wealth, rather like the Von Trottas’ title, leads to nothing but greed, betrayal and tragedy. It’s in this balance between a comedy of manners and a mournful intuition of vast historical forces that Roth writes, “At this time, the world was deeply and frivolously at peace.” Underlining the fragility of such a peace, the baron too receives his comeuppance, whereupon another character comments, “I think he lost his way in life. It happens.”

Though Roth never lost his way, he lived in a world in which all traditional ways suddenly disappeared. A Jew who grew more deeply Jewish with the years, he dabbled in Catholicism. A journalist for left-wing newspapers, he maintained royalist sympathies. Fully aware of the hollowness of Franz Joseph’s rule, he was strangely nostalgic for it. Where he placed his loyalties during his life was so uncertain that when he died in Paris, a representative of the monarchy stood beside his grave while a Communist delegate tossed in a red flower. Roth is the exemplar of the rootless, cosmopolitan wanderer with as keen a recognition of his own condition as his more febrile peers, Franz Kafka and Bruno Schultz. The latter’s poetic incandescence, the former’s hysterical martyrology and Roth’s own worldly analytical despair represent three points of a triangle that defines the diasporic imagination.

Yet what’s finally most remarkable about Roth as a writer is his prescience. Though he ostensibly looked backward from the 1930s to the 1910s and earlier, he also anticipated the 1940s and beyond. His books possess an eerie clairvoyant feel, shattering in their simplicity, exalting in their moral philosophical weight.