Joseph Roth (1894–1939)

The Radetzky March takes its title from the musical composition authored by Johann Strauss, father of the "waltz king", Strauss, junior. It is a classic military march, that you can hear, and view conducted by Andre Rieu on YouTube. Joseph Radetzky von Radetz was an Austrian marshal of Bohemian descent who fought in the Napoleonic Wars and let the Austrian army during the first war for Italian independence in 1848-49. He died in 1858, roughly a decade before the story that Roth unfolds in the Battle of Solferino in 1869, a failed campaign against the Italians that could be said to be the second major milestone in the decline of the Dual Monarchy led by Kaiser Franz Jospeh I following its defeat by Prussia in 1866 which foreclosed the possibility of German reunification occurring under the leadership of Austria.

Decline is the theme of The Radetzky March. Although, in our times it could be said with more than a little truth that decline is a choice, in Roth's account, the decline of the empire is the result of the movement of historical processes, chiefly the rise of nationalism and the gradual breaking apart of the spiritual bonds that held together the monarchy and the empire. This decline is paralleled by the story of the quick rise and decline of the fortunes of the Trotta family. At the Battle of Solferino in 1869 the youthful Kaiser is saved from a bullet and possible death on the battlefield by a Lt. Joseph Trotta, an officer of Slovenian peasant stock. Trotta is promoted to a captaincy and is, in effect, the recipient of a battlefield promotion to the nobility, henceforth to be known as Joseph Trotta von Sipolje, Baron Trotta.

The Hero of Solferino passes from the scene early on in the story. What he leaves beside his title is a portrait painted by a friend of his son. The portrait, even more so than the march, dominates the persons of his son, a "district captain" which is basically a minor government functionary position, and the grandson, Carl Jospeh Trotta, who is groomed from early in his life for a military career for which he is unsuited. Carl Jospeh is commissioned into the cavalry despite his mediocre horsemanship. Following a fatal confrontation between his only friend in his regiment, the Jewish regimental surgeon and another officer from the nobility for which Trotta was the inadvertent cause, he transfers to a rifle regiment in a remote outpost on the Eastern frontier. Here he falls into patterns of dissolution from the usual causes, drinking, gambling and women. Eventually his debts are called in and he is forced to petition his father, the district commissioner to bail him out of his predicament. The father, unable to borrow the needed funds from any other source petitions the emperor directly. Franz Joseph, vaguely remembering the service to him by the grandfather of our scapegrace, directs that the debts be discharged, and for good measure that the holder of the debt be deported.

At a regimental celebration in the summer of 1914, the rumor of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, is circulated among the officers. Trotta sends in his resignation, but the resulting war brings him back into uniform and he meets his fate at the hands of Russian snipers while trying to retrieve water for his parched troops. The novel concludes with the parallel deaths of the Kaiser and the district commissioner in 1916.

The Radetzky March is a beautifully written, albeit melancholy metaphor for decline - of the empire, the monarchy, the Trotta family. The empire and the Trottas adhere more or less faithfully to the time-honored forms, but the protagonists become gradually aware that the substance underlying the forms have become hollowed out and that the forms are on the verge of extinction. Roth is at his best in his sketches and development of his characters. This excerpt from early in the novel provides a portrait of Carl Jospeh's father Franz, the district commissioner.

"He spoke the nasal Austrian German of higher officials and lesser nobles. It vaguely recalled distant guitars twanging in the night and also the last dainty vibrations of fading bells; it was a soft but also precise language, tender and spiteful at once. It suited the speaker's thin, bony face, his curved, narrow nose, in which the sonorous, somewhat rueful consonants seemed to be lying. His nose and mouth, when the district captain spoke, were more like wind instruments than facial features. Aside from the lips, nothing moved in his face. The dark whiskers that Herr von Trotta wore as part of his uniform, as insignia demonstrating his fealty to Franz Jospeh I, as proof of his dynastic conviction--these whiskers likewise remained immobile when Herr von Trotta und Sipolje spoke. He sat upright at the table, as if clutching reins in his hard hands. When sitting he appeared to be standing, and when rising he always surprised others with his full ramrod height. He always worse dark blue, summer and winter, Sundays and weekdays: a dark-blue jacket with gray striped trousers that lay snug on his long legs and were tautened by straps over the smooth boots. Between the second and third course he would usually get up in order to 'stretch my legs'. But it seemed more as is he wanted to show the rest of the household how to rise, stand, and walk without relinquishing immobility."

The Radetzky March is a masterpiece and a sober meditation on the problem of decline, a problem that confronts his contemporary readers as it confronted the characters of this outstanding work.… (mer)

One of my favorite authors. It’s been quite a while since I revisited Roth and I am embarrassed that this one took so long. Like so much of his work, a masterpiece of nostalgia for the hinterlands of the Hapsburg empire. A wonderful writer with a knack for the telling detail and for evoking a lost world. The story line is engaging and involved (if you’ve read Roth before, you’re likely familiar with the Trotta family) but, to my mind, as good as it is, the story takes second-place to Roth’s superb evocation of time and place and the decay of the empire. It was the last novel of his published in his lifetime and it ends, pregnantly, with the arrival of the Nazis in Vienna.… (mer)

No one writes nothing but masterpieces and this illustrates that point all too well. The story, to the extent there is one, is the life of Franz Tunda, soldier in the Austrian army. He is sent to Russia, is captured, escapes, lives for some years in Siberia until he belatedly learned the war has ended. He sets out to return to his wife, is captured by Bolsheviks, joins their cause, leaves, marries a Russian woman, leaves, gets back to Austria, finds his wife has remarried, goes to Paris to find her…. Does he love his wife and want to be reunited? Not really. Tunda doesn’t feel at home anywhere and he doesn't love anyone. He doesn’t feel at home in Austria or Russia or Germany or France. So he is constantly in flight in search of something he will never find. His life has never focused on the present because he has always been unsatisfied, living for an unknown (and maybe unknowable) something. Re-reading this, I must admit that the premise sounds better to me than the execution—and that’s the disappointment of the book. In fairness to Roth, his writing is--as always--excellent. It just never clicked for me and I can’t recommend it. (I don’t know enough about Roth’s own life to say for certain but from what I do know, his illustration of the enormous changes in the world wrought by World War One may reflect his own sense of loss, of failing to belong anywhere since the world he knew was irretrievably gone.)… (mer)