With Joseph Roth, you begin—and end—with the prose. The great delight of this Austrian novelist, who wrote in the 1920s and 1930s, lies in his strange, nimble, curling sentences, which are always skewing into the most unexpected metaphors. It is rare to find luminous powers of realism and narrative clarity so finely combined with a high poetic temperature. Joseph Brodsky said that there is a poem on every page of Roth, and certainly Roth’s almost nervous fondness for metaphor recalls the image-blessed, image-sick prose of another poet, Osip Mandelstam, sooner than that of any novelist.
Like Mandelstam’s, Roth’s details and images are often not primarily visual, in the usual Flaubertian sense. He isn’t especially interested in describing the exact color or shade of a man’s mustache and then likening it, say, to rolled filaments of copper (though he is perfectly capable of writing this way). Instead, he comes at his images from behind, or sideways, and then climbs toward something at once magical and a little abstract. In The Emperor’s Tomb (1938), he pictures a businessman talking about his prospects in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the First World War: “As he spoke he stroked both sides of his mutton-chop whiskers as if he wished to caress
simultaneously both halves of the monarchy [i.e., Austria and Hungary].”
This level of magical abstraction can be found in all of Roth’s novels, from the earliest, The Spider’s Web (1923), to his last published work, The Tale of the 1002nd. Night (1939). The Spider’s Web is a generally rather crude and flat book, but Roth’s next novel, Hotel Savoy (1924), suggests the power of the more mature writer. It tells the story of Gabriel Dan, who has spent three years in a Siberian POW camp and who has ended up in an unnamed Eastern European town as a resident of the enormous Hotel Savoy, which is full of the refugees of war—Poles, Germans, Russians, Serbians, and Croats. This early book already shows a deep command of simile and metaphor. “My room—one of the cheapest—is on the sixth floor, number 703. I like the number—I am superstitious about them—for the zero in the middle is like a lady flanked by two gentlemen, one older and one younger.” Dickens, and more acutely Gogol, may have influenced Roth, but probably the strongest impression was made by Viennese journalism, in particular the practice and perfection of the feuilleton, or short literary article. Feuilletons were brief sketches, sometimes arguments but often exquisite descriptive snatches. Karl Kraus was an earlier master of the form; in the 1920s, when Roth started writing them, Alfred Polgar was the most celebrated exponent. Walter Benjamin called Polgar “the German master of the small form.” In 1935, writing in honor of Polgar’s sixtieth birthday, Roth said that he considered himself Polgar’s pupil: “He polishes the ordinary until it becomes extraordinary … I have learned this verbal carefulness from him.”
The brevity of the feuilleton put every sentence under pressure, packing it with twice the usual energy. Polgar, in one of his pieces, describes a man’s cane in very Rothian style: “A small walking-stick made out of rhinoceros hide danced between his fingers. It was a woolly light-yellow in colour and looked like a pole of thickened honey.” These articles—Benjamin’s essays are stylistic cousins—often
proceed in a pretty shuffle, as if each sentence were a new beginning. The writing is essentially aphoristic, even when not obviously so, because each sentence attains the status of aphorism. Kraus described the aphorism as both half the truth and one and a half times the truth, and this might also stand as a description of metaphor, certainly of metaphor as it appears in Roth’s work, where the similes are both magically untrue and magically more than true.
Roth, in effect, novelized the techniques of the feuilleton, producing fictions that behave as if they are always about to end, and which therefore always include one more superb phrase before the deferred closure. His books are highly patterned, but each sentence is a discrete explosion. There is, for example, the disagreeable Lord von Winternigg in Roth’s greatest novel, The Radetzky March (1932), who rides through the garrison town in his barouche: “Small, ancient and pitiful, a little yellow oldster with a tiny wizened face in a huge yellow blanket … he drove through the brimming summer like a wretched bit of winter.” Or, from the same novel, this passing scene-setter: “It was getting dark. The evening fell vehemently into the street.” Or again, from the same novel, the description of the peasant Onufrij, and his effort to write his name: “The beads of sweat grew on his low brow like transparent crystal boils … These boils ran, ran down like tears wept by Onufrij’s brain.” And from The Emperor’s Tomb: “All little stations in all little provincial towns looked alike throughout the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Small and painted yellow, they were like cats lying in the snow in winter and in the sun in summer.” Or: “The lonely lantern which stood before it reminded one of an orphan vainly trying to smile through its tears.” From Flight Without End (1927): “It was an icy night, so cold that at first I thought even a shout must freeze the instant it was uttered, and so never reach the person called.” Or: “The lady’s smoothly shaved legs lay side by side like two similarly clad sisters, both in silk sheaths.” Or: The waiters “moved about like gardeners; when they poured coffee and milk into the cups, it was as if they were watering
white flower-beds. Trees and kiosks stood on the kerbs, almost as if the trees were selling newspapers.” From Right and Left (1929): “In the gloaming, only the silver birches in the little wood opposite would shimmer, standing amongst the other trees like slips of days among ancient nights.”
Joseph Roth was born in 1894 on the rim of the Hapsburg empire in Brody, Austrian Galicia, which is now part of Ukraine. Until David Bronsen established the facts in his German-language biography (an English translation is in progress), the record of Roth’s life was an evocative smudge, a rumor worthy of the shadowy border town in which he was born—a town about which, in different versions, he writes repeatedly in his fiction.
Brody had a sizable Jewish population, but it appears that in later life Roth would conceal his Jewishness, claiming that his father, a businessman from Galicia called Nachum, had been an Austrian government official, and even, on one occasion, a Polish count. Such fantasies may have had their origin in Viennese anti-Semitism, or more likely in Roth’s conservative romanticism, and his almost naive love of the Austro-Hungarian military. It was no doubt easier to invent a fictitious father once the real one had disappeared: while Joseph was still a boy, Nachum went mad and was locked away in a German asylum. As readers are bound to notice, Roth’s fiction is painfully concerned with the relationship of son and father, with absent or useless fathers and damaged, aimless sons. The rawest treatment of this theme is in Zipper and His Father (1928), the portrait of a young man, Arnold Zipper, who is spiritually ruined by his service on the front during the First World War, and by his father’s thoughtless support for that war.
The Radetzky March is Roth’s deepest consideration of fathers and sons. The novel’s formal beauty flows from its dynastic current, which irrigates the very structure of the book. We begin with Captain Joseph Trotta, who inadvertently saved the young Emperor Franz Joseph’s life at the battle of Solferino in 1859. Thanks to this,
the captain is ennobled and the doomed, quixotic Trotta line established, each generation less heroic, but more absurdly quixotic, than its predecessor. Baron Trotta’s son, Franz, is only a dutiful district captain in a garrison town in Austrian Silesia; but Franz’s son, Lieutenant Carl Joseph Trotta, who is the novel’s real protagonist, is more spectacularly unhappy—first in the cavalry, from which he discharges himself, and then in the infantry, where he dies a foolish death during the First World War.
Hanging like a golden cloud over Lieutenant Trotta’s head is the reputation of his grandfather, “the hero of Solferino.” Young Trotta can never match this heroism, not least because it was accidental; part of his affliction is precisely that he strives to emulate a quality that was, originally, not the product of striving. Roth beautifully expands this into a larger celebration and critique of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: Lieutenant Trotta comes to represent an entire generation of enfeebled young men, living off the recessive heroism of an earlier imperial age and unable to achieve by force of will what was once achieved by instinct. What remains changeless, however, is the Emperor Franz Joseph himself, who ascended to the throne in 1848 and reigned until his death in 1916. The emperor is the omnipresent yet absent father of all the empire’s inhabitants; in a sense, he is both father and grandfather to Lieutenant Trotta, because his long reign has spanned the generations. The emperor, of course, is the true hero of Solferino, under whose heroic reputation Trotta lives and fails. Whenever Trotta sees, in a café, the standard portrait of the emperor “in the sparkling white uniform,” it merges in his memory with an old family portrait of his grandfather. The Trotta and Hapsburg dynasties are one, a conflation which, characteristically, Roth both idealizes and mocks.
History marked Joseph Roth’s life at least twice, viciously. First came the assassination of the emperor’s nephew Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914. This, followed by Franz Joseph’s death in 1916, started the unraveling of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In at least half of Roth’s thirteen novels comes the inevitable, saberlike sentence, or a version of it, cutting the narrative in two: “One Sunday, a hot summer’s day, the Crown Prince was shot in Sarajevo.” Then there was the Anschluss. The news of the German occupation in 1938 precipitated a collapse of morale in Roth, who was exiled in Paris at the time, and drinking heavily. He died fourteen months later, in May 1939. Nevertheless, he was able to make the Anschluss the dramatic epilogue of The Emperor’s Tomb, which is a kind of sequel to The Radetzky March, extending the story of the Trotta family (via a cousin of Lieutenant Carl Joseph) from 1914 to 1938.
So Roth lived through light and then twilight and then darkness, seeing his beloved empire mutate into a neglected and unmonarchical Austria and finally disappear into Hitler’s pouch. The empire was already on the verge of dissolution when Roth became a student at the University of Vienna in the summer of 1914. He joined up in 1916 and a year later was sent to the Galician front. He returned from the war with tales of capture by the Russians and a forced march across Siberia, a history he awards Franz Tunda in Flight Without End, and Gabriel Dan in Hotel Savoy. But he probably never saw combat, serving instead in the army’s press office. During the next ten years, living on and off in Berlin, he wrote the novels which would make him unpopular with the Nazis: in particular Flight Without End, which tells the story of a man who returns from the war and grows steadily more disenchanted with the confident rise of German “culture”; and Right and Left, which logs the growth of fascism in Germany during the 1920s.
Roth fled to Paris in 1933, a year after The Radetzky March had made him celebrated. There he marinated himself in drink and in the impossibility of his romantic nostalgia. His solution to the advance of the Nazis seems to have been a proposal to restore the Hapsburg monarchy. He “renounced” his Jewishness in 1935, calling himself a Catholic. He died in 1939, apparently attended, at his deathbed, by a
priest, a rabbi, and a representative of the league for the restoration of the Hapsburgs.
For the citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, especially those who, like Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, were of a nostalgic and idealizing cast, Sarajevo was momentous not because it precipitated the First World War, but because the First World War precipitated the collapse of the adored Hapsburg empire, the impossible archipelago of different countries and races that, like a child’s cartographic fantasy, stretched northward from Vienna to take in Prague, eastward to include Moravia, Silesia, and some of what is now Poland, and southward from Vienna to include Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, which it annexed in 1908. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was, of course, the nineteenth-century incarnation of the earlier Holy Roman Empire; it was the pampered child of more than five hundred years of historical privilege, looked after since 1848 by its spiritual father and commander in chief, the Emperor Franz Joseph, who ruled until his death in 1916. Two years later, the empire had disappeared, and the Hapsburg dynasty faded out of history into historiography, and out of succession into the little monthly coups of the society gossip pages.
Roth is the great elegist of that empire; Robert Musil its great analyst; Kafka its dark allegorist. Roth’s most characteristic novels are portraits of men who, either infatuated with the empire or merely unthinkingly dependent on it, are disappointed by it in some way or another, and who subsequently lose their way, or fall into aimlessness and finally despair. Generally, this hero will have left the embrace of the Austrian army, which stands in for the empire, either because the First World War has just ended or because he has been discharged in cloudy circumstances (like Baron Taittinger in The Tale
of the 1002nd Night). In die course of the novel, this hero may travel either to the rim of empire (the border districts) or to the center (to Vienna). In the border towns, among Cossacks and Jews, the hero may fight in the Great War, may die (as Lieutenant Trotta does in 1916, in The Radetzky March), or may be captured by the Russians and sent to Siberia (as Trotta’s cousin is in The Emperor’s Tomb, and Franz Tunda is in Flight Without End). If he survives, he must return to hollow postwar Vienna, like poor, aimless Arnold Zipper in Zipper and His Father, or like Andreas Pum, the protagonist of Rebellion, Roth’s third novel.
Roth’s novels delight in, insist on, the uniformity of the empire and its livery in all its varied lands; they enact a kind of fictive imperialism of their own, imposing the same conditions on different characters in different books. In Roth’s novels, Sunday lunch in the empire is always noodle soup, brisket of beef, and cherry dumplings. In spring, the laburnums flower and the new sunlight makes the silverware in the Vienna coffeehouses sparkle. The governmental officers are mustachioed and upright, like waxworks. In the border districts, there is always a Hotel Bristol, where the hero puts up for a while, and a tavern where Russians pay their entire savings to cross into the empire. The larks trill, the frogs croak, and everywhere can be seen the portrait of the beloved emperor, and everywhere can be heard bands playing evocative martial tunes, first and foremost “The Radetzky March.”
But even at their most nostalgic, his novels also exaggerate and mock the presence of the empire in its citizens’ lives. If Roth loved the empire because it imposed an imperial uniformity on so many different peoples, it is also seen in his books as a kind of tyranny, almost a totalitarianism, so that Roth and Kafka have more in common than might at first seem to be the case. His novels so insist on the empire that they end up gesturing toward the impossibility of realizing it. Roth’s elegy suggests to the reader not simply that the empire is dead and gone but that it could never, in reality, have equaled
the absurd dreams Roth cherished of it. Roth, one feels, was elegiac for the empire even when the empire existed, because it was not alive enough for his idea of it. Thus his novels, which were all, of course, written after the collapse of the empire, are elegies twice over: in a sense, they are elegies for an original feeling of elegy.
So it is that Roth’s greatest novels squeeze, simultaneously, comedy and romanticism from their depiction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The romanticism is comedy, because the unwieldy human diversity of the empire is both magnificent and absurd. In The Emperor’s Tomb, published in 1938, Roth has his hero, Franz Ferdinand Trotta, describe the extraordinary human resources of the empire:
The brilliant variety of the Imperial Capital and Residence [i.e., Vienna] was quite visibly fed … by the tragic love which the Crown Lands bore to Austria: tragic, because forever unrequited. The gypsies of the Puszta, the Huzulen of Subcarpathia, the Jewish coachmen of Galicia, my own kin the Slovene chestnut roasters of Sipolje, the Swabian tobacco growers from the Bacska, the horse breeders of the Steppes, the Osman Sibersna, the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the horse traders from the Hanakel in Moravia, the weavers from the Erzgebirge, the millers and coal dealers of Podolia: all these were the open-handed providers of Austria; and the poorer they were, the more generous. So much trouble and so much pain so freely offered up as though it were a matter of course and in the natural order of things, so as to ensure that the centre of the Monarchy should be universally acclaimed as the home of grace, happiness and genius.
This is Roth, in high nostalgia, in 1938, after the Nazis had occupied Austria. But there is something terribly unstable about the passage (“and the poorer they were, the more generous”) and this seems intentional, as if it should be difficult for the reader to tell if Roth is entirely in earnest: what empire could possibly be such a utopia? Roth relishes the strange, crooked proper names (the Osman Sibersna, the coal dealers of Podolia), which he rolls on the tongue like a
lyric poet listing the proper names of flowers (saxifrage, amaranths, myrtles). The nouns become almost abstract, lift out of reference and hover in the unaccountable, where they cannot be verified or really known: where is Podolia?
When Roth is at his most extravagant, his very extravagance is a form of sad irony. This is supremely true of The Radetzky March, which is full of magnificently romantic, despairing prose. At one marvelous moment, for instance, Lieutenant Trotta takes his mistress to Vienna to see the annual Corpus Christi procession, in which the different regiments of the vast empire parade before the Viennese:
The light-blue breeches of the infantry were radiant. Like the serious embodiment of ballistic science, the coffee-brown artillerists marched past. The blood-red fezzes on the heads of the azure Bosnians burned in the sun like tiny bonfires lit by Islam in honour of His Apostolic Majesty [i.e., the emperor]. In black lacquered carriages sat the gold-decked Knights of the Golden Fleece and the black-clad red-cheeked municipal councillors … And the lieutenant’s heart stood still yet pounded fiercely—a challenge to medical science. Over the slow strains of the anthem, the cheers fluttered like small white flags amid huge banners painted with coats of arms.
“The blood-red fezzes on the heads of the azure Bosnians burned in the sun like tiny bonfires lit by Islam in honour of His Apostolic Majesty.” One reads this glorious passage as Roth intends us to, in the spirit one feels Roth wrote it in, which is childish wonderment. This is a dream, in which even metaphor is co-opted by the empire, and red hats become oblatory fires for Franz Joseph. This combination of the childishly romantic and the surreally ironic or comic, of realism and excess, innocence and sophistication, gives Roth’s writing a paradoxical air. It is at once modern and old-fashioned. His gifted translator, Michael Hofmann, has noted how many different textures can be found in a Roth novel: “the caricatures of Grosz, the semi-abstract gorgeousness of Klimt, and the freewheeling, homemade,
modern inventions of Paul Klee.” To which I would only add the streaming, ruddy fullness of Ilya Repin, the Repin of those famous large canvases of soldiers eating and laughing. Which means, in novelistic terms (more or less): Tolstoy (and perhaps also Babel). Here, for example, in a rich, streaming passage, Roth celebrates the horsemanship of the Cossacks, who are found on the edges of the empire:
In the vast plain between the two border forests, the Austrian and the Russian, the sotnias of the borderland Cossacks, uniformed winds in military formations, raced around on the mercuric ponies of their homeland steppes, swinging their lances over their tall fur caps like lightning streaks on long wooden poles—coquettish lightning with dainty pennons. On the soft, springy, swampy ground, the clatter of hooves could barely be heard … It was as if the Cossacks were soaring over the meadows … With their strong yellow horse teeth, the saddled Cossacks, in mid-gallop, lifted their red-and-blue handkerchiefs from the ground, their bodies, suddenly felled, ducked under the horses’ bellies, while the legs in the reflective boots still squeezed the animals’ flanks. Other riders flung their lances high into the air, and the weapons whirled and obediently dropped back into the horsemen’s raised fists — they returned like living falcons into their masters’ hands. Still other riders, with torsoes crouching horizontal along the horses’ backs, human mouths fraternally pressing against animal mouths, leaped through wondrously small rounds of iron hoops that could have girded a small keg.
In such passages, there is no greater modern writer than Joseph Roth (Babel, whom he resembles, lacks his scope), none more appealing in his capacity to combine the novelistic and the poetic, to blend lusty, undamaged realism with sparkling powers of metaphor and simile.
If there is something a little sickly in Roth’s love of the empire, Roth’s characteristic hero is a little sickly too—sick with love for empire but also made sick by empire. And Thomas Mann, a considerable influence on Roth, had shown that a fictional hero who has been made sick by the epoch he lives in — like Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain — can be used by the novelist to offer a critique of the sickness of that epoch.
This is the case with Rebellion, written in 1924, when the thirty-year-old Roth still considered himself something of a leftist. The story is fabular. Andreas Pum has come back from the war without a leg. He is a simple, loyal subject of the empire who unquestioningly believes that the government will provide him with a pension and a small job for life. Things go well for him at first. The authorities do indeed issue Andreas with a permit to play a barrel organ, and Andreas spends his days churning out sentimental songs and patriotic marches for appreciative crowds. He finds a kindly war widow to marry. But a chance incident inverts his life: he becomes involved in a scuffle with a wealthy industrialist and assaults a policeman who intervenes. His organ permit is taken away, and he is imprisoned.
Andreas’s time inside is only six weeks, but they are fateful weeks. During this period, he ages terribly and turns into a silent rebel, mentally siding with those malcontents, Communists, angry war veterans, and other agitators he had always previously despised and disdainfully called “heathens.” On his release, Andreas feels that life has become a prison. The old empire he had always believed in has steamrolled over him. One of the novel’s recurring symbols is the lavish official summons that Andreas receives, with its imperial eagle stamped on it; Andreas has become nothing but the prey of the empire. Rebellion ends mordantly: Andreas can only find work as a lavatory attendant at one of the Vienna cafés now run by his successful friend Willi, and Roth tells us that Andreas has “decided that he
would like to be a revolutionary,” like the firebrands he reads about “in the newspapers that the café supplied him with.” But at the café lavatory all his newspapers are “generally a couple of days old by that stage, and the news he got was no longer news when he chopped the newspaper into rectangles and hung them on nails in tidy packages. Willi was constantly telling him to economize on expensive toilet tissue.” In other words, the gentlemen of the empire wipe their asses on such revolutionaries, and by extension on such mental revolutionaries as Andreas.
Andreas is more rebellious than Lieutenant Trotta in The Radetzky March, or Arnold Zipper in Zipper and His Father, or Baron Taittinger in The Tale of the 1002nd Night, who are all curiously indifferent to their aimlessness, but no less defeated than them. Roth’s heroes are victims of the Hapsburg empire, contaminated by what they so love, which is the paternal security and presence of the empire. Baron Taittinger, who is discharged from the army for dishonorable conduct, drifts without purpose and then kills himself. “I think he lost his way in life,” a colleague memorializes. “A man can lose his way!” A friend describes Arnold Zipper as having fallen into “indifference, melancholy, indecision, weakness, and lack of critical faculty,” and blames this collapse on Arnold’s father, and his father’s entire generation: “All our fathers are responsible for our bad luck. Our fathers belong to the generation that made the war.”
But really, it is the empire that is being blamed, and the great father-of-all, Franz Joseph. In Hotel Savoy, Gabriel Dan notices that all the other hotel residents, who, like him, are refugees of the empire, blame the hotel for their misfortune and stasis: “Every piece of bad luck came to them through this hotel and they believed that Savoy was the name of their misfortune.” Like the Austrian army, the Hotel Savoy is one of Roth’s microcosms of the empire. It is the empire that is really “the name of their misfortune.”
But why does the empire so disappoint its citizens? Partly because, like Roth’s, their love of it is desperate and uncontainable. And partly because, as Roth’s novels so delicately suggest, the empire
is not quite a reality, is not itself quite containable. Not only love for it but comprehension of it will always exceed the reality. Robert Musil writes about this in The Man Without Qualities when he praises the empire as a place that allowed its citizens “inner space,” partly because it did not really exist. The empire, writes Musil, is “only just, as it were, acquiescing in its own existence. In it one was negatively free, constantly aware of the inadequate grounds for one’s own existence.”
Roth seems to have cherished the “inadequate grounds” of the existence of the empire. His novels delight in the fact that the empire was functionally inefficient—the Austrian army, for instance, was famously feeble—but efficient at glamour; in other words, he loved the rhetoric of empire, and loved that the empire was first and foremost a rhetoric. There is a constant sense in his fiction that such a fantastic assemblage of different peoples could only really be magical, fictional—as if it could only really exist for the novel (those blood-red fezzes). Roth enjoys the empire as a fictional form, as something analogous to the novel itself. For Roth, and for his heroes, the empire is too magical for life, but not too magical for the novel.
And his novels, correspondingly, are not just about the empire; they enact it symbolically, using an empire of signs to create the closed world of his novels, and to insist on its dreamlike inescapability. Roth’s imagery pulls its comedy and its magic from this insistence. There is the man already encountered, in The Emperor’s Tomb, who is seen rubbing both sides of his whiskers, “as if he wished to caress simultaneously both halves of the monarchy.” In The Radetzky March, Roth makes sympathetic fun of Trotta’s father, the dutiful district captain, when he describes how thin and gaunt he has become. The district captain resembles “one of the exotic birds at the Schönbrunn Zoo—creatures that constitute Nature’s attempt to replicate the Hapsburg physiognomy within the animal kingdom.” And in Zipper and His Father, the regulars sit in a Vienna café as if it were “a besieged garrison in a castle.”
Roth uses this unreal world, in which everything interlocks for the glory of the empire, both to elegize a lost time of uniformity and security and, more interestingly, to so exaggerate the uniformity of the empire that a kind of disappointment and mockery of it must result. For how can such imperial intrusion—in which the very birds in the zoo have taken on the Hapsburg physiognomy, and even a café is like a garrison—not verge on the totalitarian or tyrannous, as Andreas Pum discovers? For instance, one of Roth’s finest achievements in The Radetzky March is the evocation of the slow, eternal repetitions of routine in the empire. There is a marvelous description of Sunday lunch as Trotta recalls it, with the local town band playing “The Radetzky March” outside the dining room windows, and the Trotta family consuming brisket of beef and cherry dumplings, a meal which never varies, on any Sunday of the year. But the book is also a devastating portrait of the inertia of the habitual, and of the oppression of uniformity, and all the best comedy in the novel flows from this apprehension. After all, that café in Vienna may well resemble a “garrison” to its deluded patrons but it is into just such a coffeehouse that a man will stride, as at the end of The Emperor’s Tomb, to announce that the city has been occupied by the Germans. Roth’s characters are made the more vulnerable to history by their refusal of it. Above all, they are people who are acted on; the empire is their fare and the source of their infantilization, inasmuch as they have handed over their volition to the great present-absent father, Franz Joseph. The army is the imperial institution which manages this childhood. Lieutenant Trotta, gazing up in cafés at the portrait of the supreme commander in chief, is the most pathetic example. When Baron Taittinger, in The Tale of the 1002nd Night, is discharged from the cavalry, he is at a loss, and Roth has a lovely phrase about how Taittinger must act as if he were a newly recruited civilian. In Roth’s fiction, to be discharged from the army is like being “sent down” from the empire.
These ironies and comedies enliven and complicate Roth’s conservatism.
Roth sees that Lieutenant Trotta in The Radetzky March thinks he is conserving his patrimony by honoring his grandfather’s name and joining the army. But Roth lets us also see that Trotta is letting that patrimony congeal by not extending it. Roth describes Gabriel Dan as having “fallen prey” to the Hotel Savoy, and elsewhere in that book a character remarks: “A man lays his head on a block—it is a Jewish destiny.” Seen in this light, and despite Roth’s difficult relations with his own Jewishness, all of his self-defeating heroes, even the gentiles, are ultimately Jewish.
Because the empire is everything to Roth’s characters, they tend to convert everything, even metaphysics, into the terms of the empire; they make a religion of the Hapsburgs. This is constantly hinted at in Rebellion: “Then he remembered he didn’t have his permit anymore. All at once he felt he was alive, but without any authority to live. He was nothing anymore!” So reflects Andreas when his organ-grinder’s permit is taken away. It is the empire that gives him authority to exist, that tells him what to do and promises to look after him. In Roth’s novels, marching orders are more than merely figurative. They are everything. But at some critical moment in a life, they will not be enough.
The empire is a religion in Roth’s novels, the God that failed, and it fails its citizens rather as God may fail His more desperate believers, by being indescribable, by being too much. This religion produces both devotion and a secular rebellion against that religion. Roth’s wish fulfillment sows the seeds of its own disappointment, and this frustration is shared with his embattled fictional heroes, who are epic heroes in a mere age of the novel, junior Don Quixotes, all, as it were, going at life with inappropriate weaponry. It might be said that Roth’s novels are war novels without any real war in them. Again one thinks of Kafka, and not just because in Rebellion Andreas is promised in prison that a shadowy “Director” will help him to gain an early release. Kafka once famously said that “there is infinite hope, but not for us.” In Roth’s sad comic world, there is an infinite empire, but not for us.