This is where Joseph Roth lived in 1913, when he had just arrived in Vienna from Galicia and enrolled in the registers of Vienna University under his full name, Moses Joseph Roth. The building is grey, surrounded by the drabness of the suburbs; the stairway is dark, and in the featureless courtyard is a stunted tree. Living in this building it cannot have been difficult to become a specialist in melancholy, the dominant note of Vienna and Mitteleuropa as a whole. Here is the sadness of boarding-school and barracks, the sadness of symmetry, of transience and disenchantment. In Vienna one gets the impression that people live, and have always lived, in the past, the folds of which conceal and protect even joy. It is the Lied, the song, of the “lieber Augustin”, the vagrant drunkard, who is always living his last day, who dwells in one prolonged epilogue, in the interval between sunset and dark, in a protracted, postponed farewell. This respite is the instant stolen from flight and enjoyed to the full, the art of living on the brink of nothingness as if all were as it should be.