Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters
Translated and Edited by Michael
Hofmann
(Norton, 552 pages, $39.95)
History, like earthquakes, has a way of surprising us with
unexpected aftershocks. Last July, nearly a century after the fall
of the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, Archduke Otto von Hapsburg
(1912–2011), the son of the last Emperor, was interred in the crypt
of his ancestors at Vienna’s ancient Capuchin Church. Blue blood
aside, Archduke Otto, though exiled from Austria as a child when
the monarchy ended in 1918, was a man of considerable distinction
in his own right. An accomplished scholar, an outspoken
anti-fascist and anti-communist, and a European visionary—whom I
had the privilege of meeting along with two of his charming
daughters—he also served for decades as a member, and sometime
President, of the European Parliament, elected from the Bavarian
side of the Austro-German border…so near yet so far from his
homeland.
Archduke Otto’s death at 98, after such a long, distinguished
life, most of it spent in honorable exile, triggered a delayed,
almost seismic outpouring of grief and reverence in Austria. I
would like to believe that it also summoned up the shade of a
certain Austrian novelist, a tormented, quixotic son of that
tormented, quixotic old empire—and, in his time, an ardent
supporter of Otto von Hapsburg. But more about that novelist in a
moment.
The funeral ceremonies for Archduke Otto included a massive
state funeral procession and requiem mass at St. Stephan’s
Cathedral. Besides distinguished foreign delegations and assorted
relatives from other European royal houses, thousands of ordinary
Austrians (and descendants of subjects from Hungary, Croatia,
Slovenia, Galicia, Bohemia, Lombardy, and many another former
Hapsburg domain) swelled the winding cortege. As well as the
dignitaries and the formal military honor guard, there were dozens
of formations of veterans, student societies, civic and religious
organizations, and period-uniformed units of volunteers marching
behind the banners of long-gone Kaiserlich-Königlich
(Imperial-and-Royal) regiments that had fought under the Double
Eagle on battlefields the length and breadth of Europe during the
642 years between Rudolf von Hapsburg’s setting up shop in Vienna
in 1276 and the abdication of Otto’s father, Kaiser Karl, in
1918.
But the culmination of all these colorful obsequies was a
starkly simple ritual—the same last ceremony that had accompanied
members of the Imperial family to their tombs across the centuries
of Hapsburg rule and one that, now that Otto von Hapsburg has been
laid to rest, will never occur again:
At the portal of the Capuchin Church, a member of the funeral
procession strikes the closed door with his staff. Behind the door
a monk asks who seeks entry. The functionary replies: “Otto von
Hapsburg” and proceeds to recite the latter’s long list of
imperial, royal, grand ducal and other hereditary titles. From
behind the door, the monk answers, “We know him not.” Again, the
functionary strikes the door with his staff , this time listing
Otto von Hapsburg’s many personal achievements, public positions,
and honors. And, again, the monk replies, “We know him not.” For a
third time, the door is struck and the monk asks who seeks entry.
The answer is much shorter this time: “Otto, a poor dead sinner.”
“As such,” the monk responds, “he may enter.” The door opens and
the last Imperial heir is laid to rest, like his ancestors, not as
one of the mighty of the earth but as a simple child of God.
In 1916, when 86-year-old Kaiser Franz Joseph—Otto’s great
uncle—died after a reign of nearly six decades, the same simple
ceremony took place. One of the witnesses was the above-mentioned
novelist, a young ethnic Jew (but observant Catholic) from Galicia,
part of Poland then ruled by the Hapsburgs: “At the time that
Emperor Franz Joseph died,” he would recall in a letter written to
a colleague nine years later, “I was already a ‘revolutionary,’ but
I shed tears for him. I was a one-year volunteer in a Vienna
regiment, a so-called elite unit, that stood by the
Kapuzinergruft as a guard of honor, and I tell you, I was
crying . An epoch was buried.” In a later letter to another
correspondent he would declare that: “The most powerful experience
of my life was the war and the end of my fatherland, the only one I
ever had: the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.”
THE WEEPING HONOR GUARD’S NAME was Joseph Roth and, like
thousands of other talented, ambitious provincials from every
corner of the Empire—many of them, like Roth, Jewish—he had been
drawn to Vienna, which was then a world-class center of living
rather than past art, intellect, philosophy, and science, seeking
an education and a career. While relatively few English language
readers are familiar with his work today, before his premature
death in 1939 at age 44, he would distinguish himself as one of the
foremost European journalists and feuilletonists of the
inter-war years. Journalists are still with us, but the
feuilleton is now pretty much a lost art. As defined by
Merriam-Webster’s it is “a short literary composition often having
a familiar tone and reminiscent content.” Writing good
feuilletons requires wide-ranging interests, the ability
to amuse as well as to inform, and a way of making the reader feel
he is part of a conversation with the writer, not merely the
recipient of an impersonal dispatch. Roth was a master of the form,
which also explains why—unlike so many good reporters—he was
capable of writing novels of genuine merit rather than topical
potboilers exploiting current events.
His masterpiece, The Radetzky March, is to
Austria-Hungary what Giuseppe Di Lampedusa’s The Leopard
is to Risorgimento Italy, what Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace
is to Napoleonic-era Russia, and what Margaret Mitchell’s Gone
With the Wind is to the Civil War–era American South: a
tour-de-force of a time and place that analyzes the causes and
effects of great events by filtering them through the everyday
experiences of a skillfully drawn and engagingly presented cast of
servants and masters, kings and commoners, whores and heroines—in
Roth’s case, always with a delightfully Viennese mix of superficial
cynicism and underlying affection.
In conception, execution, and in the depth of sympathetic
understanding behind all of its jibes, jokes, and sarcasms, The
Radetzky March is a great novel with a timeless, universal
appeal. Knowing this makes the short, overwhelmingly sad life of
its creator compelling reading in its own right, and
editor/translator Michael Hofmann provides just the right amount of
linking commentary and annotation to give each of the 457 letters
in this collection of Roth’s peripatetic correspondence context and
continuity. If too many of the letters are concerned with shop talk
and Roth’s increasingly desperate circumstances after first Germany
and then Austria fall to the Nazis, they also contain frequent
sparks of his humor and incisive intellect. In the midst of a
thinly disguised begging letter to one of his publishing friends
written in 1931, he deftly dispatches two literary duds and praises
one worthy in a few sentences:
Hauser’s article was an unbearable show of fresh youthfulness
and civilizational insolence. Style was false too, not just putrid.
Sieburg: dazzlingly masked gaucheness. Picard’s graphology as ever
an honest sermon, pen in hand, a sweet, great man.
What a lot of firepower to pack into 37 hastily scrawled
words!
Roth died penniless in a bleak Parisian hospital ward. The
authorities wrote pneumonia on his death certificate but friends
who visited him saw a wasted wreck, wracked with delirium
tremens and strapped to his bed. All the more reason to
respect and marvel at the thousands of pages of first-class
journalism and occasionally brilliant fiction—novels like The
Radetzky March, The Emperor’s Tomb, The Tale of
the 1002nd Night, and Job (the saga of a modern
wandering Jew).
As editor Michael Hofmann points out, even at his most abject or
quixotic, there is something heroic about “this grievously
disappointed and multiply broken man [who] somehow continued to
align himself toward the true and the beautiful in his articles,
and the beautiful and true in his books; [who] long past having
anything himself…went on helping others—a tailor, a charwoman, a
doctor, a fellow veteran stuck in Switzerland…even as he seemed to
lapse into unreality…”?
