In 2008, for the first time in ninety-four years, you could travel the thousand miles from Trieste to Lviv without a visa. During two world wars and the cold one which followed five new European nation states were born, shattered, reborn and destroyed once again. With every death and rebirth, new frontiers were drawn and new customs posts erected; new border guards put on new uniforms and new immigration documents were printed. At the turn of the new millennium these recreated nations were joined in a single political unit. Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia were welcomed into the European Union, closely followed by Slovenia and Romania. Croatia and Bosnia hammered impatiently on the door.

Waiting in the anteroom, with the encouragement of the United States and to the annoyance of Russia, was the Ukrainian homeland of Joseph Roth. The Habsburg Crown Lands, which had seemed confined to the dustbin of history after the peace settlements of Versailles and Saint Germain, were once more part of a contiguous Europe. Another treaty now ensured free passage across former frontiers. It was forged not in the aftermath of war but peacefully in a boring little town in neutral Luxembourg called Schengen. To be sure, the journey from the Adriatic to the Carpathians still has its delays and interruptions. If you wish to travel from Franz Joseph’s only seaport to the edge of Russia your train must still pass through Poland, Hungary or Romania. You are then brought up short at the Ukrainian border in the middle of the night for three passport checks and a three-hour wait while the carriage wheels are rolled out from under you and replaced by a new set. The former Soviet Union and Europe may have kissed and made up but they have not got round to reconciling their railway gauges. Nevertheless, if you are a European citizen, once your papers are returned by the boot-faced border guards, you are safe to continue to the edge of the Russian Federation without producing any other documents or paying a single penny, euro, zloty or forint.

Crossing this newly loosened Mitteleuropa in the spring of 2010, I was reminded of Count Morstin’s impressions of it in Roth’s novella. Fifty years of somnolent communism had preserved an imperial landscape which had largely disappeared west of Prague. It was still possible to see the Austro-Hungarian Empire replicated in every corner of every province. Roth’s description of it in The Bust of the Emperor is composed of tiny banal details and each one is a miniature map of the whole, like a piece of fractal geometry:

As he travelled around the centre of his multitudinous fatherland, what he responded to most were certain specific and unmistakeable manifestations that recurred in their unvarying and still colourful fashion, on every railway station, every kiosk, every public building, every school and church in the Crown Lands of the Empire. All over the policemen wore the same feathered hats or ochre helmets with golden pompoms and glittering Habsburg double eagles; all over, the wooden doors of the K and K Trafik stores were painted in black and yellow diagonals … All over there were the same coffee houses with vaulted smoky ceilings, with dark alcoves, where chess players sat hunkered like alert fowls, with bars full of multi-coloured bottles and sparkling glasses, presided over by bosomy blonde barmaids …

Morstin’s image of his lost fatherland as a ‘mansion with many doors’ is both nostalgic and oddly prophetic. During the Cold War, the idea of a single geo-political umbrella sheltering all the Central European nation states seemed both absurd and vaguely threatening. However, in 1999, when I interviewed Prince Karel Schwarzenberg, the current Czech foreign minister and great-great-great-nephew of Franz Joseph’s prime minister, his description of the European Union echoed Morstin’s words. Schwarzenberg believed that only through interdependence could the fragmented nations of Mitteleuropa avoid the horrors which followed the dismantling of the Habsburg Empire: ‘I fear that if the aspirant nations are not admitted to the EU, the fate that we prepared for them in the twentieth century will be visited on them in the twenty-first.’

There is another echo here – of a warning delivered a hundred and fifty years earlier. It may well have been a conscious echo because its author was another Schwarzenberg – the son and successor of Franz Joseph’s prime minister. In the 1880s, he warned the Czech nationalists in the Austrian parliament that Austria’s enemies would be only too happy to see the Empire decompose into its constituent parts. The small states which made up Austria-Hungary were symbiotic with Vienna. If they uncoupled, like my railway carriage at the Ukrainian border, they would be cast adrift: ‘If you and yours hate this state, what will you do with your country, which is too small to stand alone? Will you give it to Germany or to Russia, for you have no choice if you abandon the Austrian Union.’

The symbiosis between Franz Joseph’s scattered ‘peoples’ and their imperial protector is a recurrent theme in Roth’s fiction, particularly in the novels written during his years of exile. For the Trottas and Count Morstin and Captain Taittinger and all the other Austro-Hungarian bit players in his stories, the survival of the Habsburg monarchy through four centuries of European conflict and bloodshed was living proof that it was indeed greater than the sum of its parts. Roth’s vision of the Empire is spiritual as well as political. It digs down to the imperial collective memory and unearths its origins in the mission of medieval Austria to be the guardian of Christian Europe. In The Radetzky March this idea is a counterweight to his melancholy chronicle of the two final Habsburg decades. His own attitude towards it in the novel remains ambivalent – both affectionate and despairing. He portrays a family of nations defined by the very forces which are pulling it apart. One the one hand the Habsburg Empire’s strength is in its diversity. On the other that diversity is destroying it. At the climax of The Radetzky March on the eve of the Great War, Roth inserts a meditation on the nature of the Empire. To emphasise the paradox of Austria-Hungary he places his description of this uneasy compromise between nationalism and dynasticism in the mouth not of an Austrian but a Pole – Trotta’s friend Count Chojnicki:

As we speak it’s falling apart. It’s already fallen apart! An old man with not long to go, a head cold could finish him off, he keeps his throne by the simple miracle that he’s still able to sit on it. But how much longer, how much longer? The age doesn’t want us any more! The age wants us to establish autonomous nation states … Our Monarchy is founded on faith and devotion; on the belief that God has chosen the Habsburgs to reign over a certain number of Christian peoples. Our emperor is like a worldly Pope.

There is a huge amount of Habsburg symbolism packed into that short paragraph. Chojnicki links the fragility of the Empire to the physical weakness of its ruler. The only power which can override his frailty is the power of the Christian faith. The Kaiser has been chosen as the custodian of Christendom – as the Count describes him a ‘worldly Pope’. This comparison is not accidental. It harks back to the Empire’s glory days in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The historian Andrew Wheatcroft, in his study of imperial iconography The Habsburgs: Embodying Empire, describes how the dynasty coopted Christian symbolism to justify its rise from a minor Alpine family into Europe’s mightiest power. This was demonstrated in the comic opera of Austria’s celebrated triumph over the Turks at the siege of Vienna in 1683. During the conflict the Habsburg Emperor Leopold absented himself from the battlefield and victory was actually secured by Polish troops commanded by King John Sobiecki. Nevertheless, Leopold insisted on snatching the credit and commissioned a gold inscription to be placed above the gates of the city bearing the following words:

By the Sanctity and Liberality of Pope Innocent XII, by the Counsel and Industry of the August Emperor Leopold I … Happy AUSTRIA, for which God always doth wonders against the Turks and the French, arises from her Ashes and after Devastation TRIUMPHS.

When Roth chooses a Pole to describe the crisis facing the monarchy in 1914 he is both echoing Habsburg iconography and undermining it. Chojnicki invokes Catholic Austria’s manifest destiny in front of an officer corps made up of Hungarians and Czechs. This little scene is a travesty by parallel – a farcical way of showing how the multicultural kingdom has been fatally compromised by agreeing to share dominion with the Catholic nations which flank it. As Trotta’s multicultural fellow soldiers squabble among themselves, they reveal the Habsburg dream unravelling.

Roth is equally ironic when he describes Count Morstin’s affectionate tour of his homeland in The Bust of the Emperor. It is another comic riff on Habsburg symbology. The imperial emblem of the double-headed eagle, facing west towards France and east towards Ottoman Turkey, is reduced to the feathered headgear of the local police. The letters KK, which stand for the words Königlich/Kaiserlich – Imperial/Royal – are embossed not on palaces or town halls but on cafés and tobacconists. Once again, Roth simultaneously celebrates and undermines the Empire. In fact this heroic cryptogram symbolised Austria’s last and most desperate attempt to maintain its hegemony in Central Europe. The two letters were attached to every public building and private business following the historic compromise agreed between Austria and Hungary in 1867. The previous year Austria had been defeated by the Prussians at the battle of Königgrätz and suddenly Franz Joseph and his ministers were confronted with a seemingly insoluble conundrum. Austria had lost the leadership of German-speaking Europe. How was she to avoid being absorbed into a greater German state? Even if she succeeded against the power of Prussia, there was a further threat. How could she escape being eroded and bankrupted by her straggling polyglot Eastern dependencies? The solution was to give partial independence to the Hungarians and their own dependent peoples in Croatia, Slovakia and parts of Transylvania. Following this re-marriage of convenience (in German it is called the Ausgleich, or compromise) the Hungarian nobility were allowed to control taxation, domestic law and economic policy, while foreign affairs and the army were directed from Vienna’s Hofburg. By merging the Crown Lands of Austria and Hungary they could be reborn as a larger composite state. At one and the same time Austria-Hungary could be both an empire and a kingdom.

Describing this Dual Monarchy is a frustrating exercise. Part of it was made up of family possessions, lands which the Habsburgs had inherited largely through dynastic marriage. The other half was an ancient empire, jealously defended as the successor to Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire. The Habsburg family gained the imperial crown in the late Middle Ages not through marriage but by the electoral vote of the German-speaking nobility who owned most of Europe east of the Alps. They baptised themselves in grandiose language as the Heilige Romische Reich, Deutsche Nazion. According to the old schoolboy joke it was neither holy, Roman nor an empire. By the time of the Ausgleich it was not even a German nation. More than half of its subjects were Magyars and Slavs. As a result Austria-Hungary ended up with one foot in the sixteenth century and the Catholic West and the other in the nineteenth century and the Orthodox East. The identity of the Kaiser was equally schizophrenic. When he was in Vienna, he was Franz Joseph the Habsburg Emperor. When he was crowned in the ancient Magyar capital of Pozony – today’s Bratislava – he was called Ferenc Joszef, King of Hungary. The Kaiser’s multiple personality disorder was diagnosed by Roth’s fellow novelist Robert Musil. While Roth saw the Empire as a melancholy farce, Musil presented it as theatre of the absurd. At the beginning of his huge unfinished novel The Man Without Qualities – a blend of philosophy, satire and speculation – he improvised on the German pronunciation of the letters KK and re-christened the Empire Kakania. ‘Kaka’ is also the nursery word for excrement, and Musil’s Austria-Hungary was the kingdom of crap.

It is interesting to compare how Musil and Roth characterise the bi-polar monarchy. The two novelists were almost exact contemporaries, although Musil was born fourteen years earlier and survived Roth by a decade. They each chose to write about the Empire several years after it came to an end, but although they were both preoccupied with the reasons for its collapse they approach it from opposite directions. Musil’s vision is centripetal; he examines the culture of Kakania through a microscope. Roth is centrifugal; he watches the Empire fall apart from its distant margins. Musil was an engineer by training and his language is quasi-scientific. Every word is weighed and every phenomenon tested to destruction. Roth began as a popular journalist with a sideline in atmospheric travel writing and he is anything but analytical. His style is sometimes poetic and dreamlike, often dark and threatening. When Musil anatomises the Habsburg zeitgeist, he offers us a medical report:

There is just something missing in everything; though you can’t put your finger on it, as if there had been a change in the blood or in the air; a mysterious disease has eaten away the previous period’s seeds of genius, but everything sparkles with novelty and finally one has no way of knowing whether the world has really grown worse or oneself merely older.

When Roth observes the same phenomena his words are almost Gothic. He could be describing the paintings of those earlier Habsburg artists Bosch and Breughel which paper the walls of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum:

… none of the officers of his Apostolic Majesty knew that over the glass bumpers from which they drank death had already crossed his bony invisible hands.

Musil diagnoses a disease of the blood; Roth already feels the chill of the bone.

The contrast between centripetal Musil and centrifugal Roth is evident on every page. Musil has little interest in Austria-Hungary’s remote provinces. In the first two thirds of The Man Without Qualities scarcely a paragraph ventures outside Vienna. Even in the final unfinished chapters, which open with the provincial funeral of the hero Ulrich’s father, only a handful of sentences tell us that we have left Vienna and are now in a region where both German and Slav languages are spoken. For the rest of its 1,800 pages, Kakania is presented not as a grand cosmopolis, let alone a mighty kingdom but as a laboratory. On the single occasion when one of Musil’s characters reflects on the nature of the Dual Monarchy, it is like reading a mathematical treatise:

The Austrian existed only in Hungary and there as an object of dislike; at home he called himself a national of the kingdoms and lands of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy as represented in the Imperial Council, meaning that he was an Austrian plus a Hungarian minus that Hungarian …

The crisis of nationality which finally destroyed the Dual Monarchy is rarely mentioned. In Kakania, Hungarians, Poles, Czechs, Romanians, Ruthenians and South Slavs are all but invisible. Austrian Jews are even more marginalised. There is only one Jewish character in the entire book – a Galician lady’s maid called Rachel who, after the birth of her illegitimate child, is charitably taken into domestic service by a society hostess. Following her first appearance, Rachel vanishes for 300 pages and returns briefly only to spy on her employers and to be almost impregnated a second time. Jews as an ethnic group are awarded one brief and perplexing mention in the book’s unfinished second part, where Musil stages a debate about whether they should embrace their alien status or quietly assimilate. Like every other political discussion in the novel, it strolls around for a few pages and then runs into the sand. The kingdom of Kakania itself is an intellectual construct rather than a physical space. It is a metropolitan debating chamber peopled by prosperous sophisticates.

Nothing could be further from Roth’s fractured kingdom of the displaced. Few of his principal characters are native Germans. They have surnames like Pum and Dan and Pansin and Tunda. They live in Schmerinka, Zuchnow, Koropta and Zlotogrod. Vienna is a refuge or a place of passage, rarely a home. With the exception of his late novel The Tale of the 1002nd Night (published in the UK under the title The String of Pearls), the only time we witness imperial grandeur is in the short chapter in The Radetzky March where Trotta and his mistress visit the capital city during the Corpus Christi celebrations. Here the grandson of the hero of Solferino watches the annual procession with the eyes of provincial tourist and Roth suddenly reverts to the style of his own travel journalism and Feuilletons. He paints a magical urban landscape in order to contrast it with the muddy reality of the distant provinces:

The inhabitants of this city, cheerful subjects of His Apostolic Majesty, members virtually of his household, thronged the entire Ringstrasse. The whole city was like an extended court. In the arcades of the ancient palaces stood the liveried porters with their staffs of office, mighty gods among the lackeys.

The two novelists could be describing completely different empires a thousand miles apart. They each observe a world which has expended its moral capital but they come to opposite conclusions. Musil’s hollowed-out society is composed of pointless committee meetings, feverish theorising and confused political rhetoric. His characters are on a frustrated quest for something to transcend their daily lives. He is far more concerned with their inner landscape than with the real world outside the windows of their comfortable homes in Vienna’s First District or the Höhe Warte. His neurasthenic socialites have run out of spiritual steam. Their dialogue may be informed by the ideas which were being born in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century – the polemics of Karl Kraus, the psychology of Sigmund Freud and the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. However, Musil’s narrative floats above the everyday reality of a city which was experiencing poverty and prostitution on an industrial scale. In contrast, Roth’s characters live in a world of soup kitchens and strikes, revolutionary cadres and political prisons. Where Musil is detached, Roth is always engaged. While Musil observes Austria’s identity crisis only in passing, Roth picks at it like a scab. Time and again he traces it to the contradictions which lie beneath the ethnic equilibrium which Franz Joseph and his ministers struggled so hard to maintain in the decades after the Ausgleich.

This is nowhere more evident than in the tragicomic climax of The Radetzky March. As we observed earlier, it is set during the summer of 1914 at the party organised in his castle by Count Chojnicki to conclude manoeuvres in the Galician garrison where Carl Joseph Trotta has chosen to serve. The action is fuelled, as so often in Roth, by insecurity and alcohol. While the Slavs and Czechs and Hungarians bicker among themselves, an ensign arrives to announce the assassination in Sarajevo of the heir to throne. As the news penetrates their clouded brains, the party disintegrates into a screaming match:

Then Herr von Babenhausen, Master of the Horse with the Reserve, got involved …

‘Bosnia’s a long way from here. We don’t care about any rumours. I shit on rumours! We’ll learn soon enough anyway.’

‘Bravo!’ called out Baron Nagy Jenö, one of the Hussars. Even though he was indisputably descended from a Jewish grandfather in Ödenberg, and the barony had only been purchased in his father’s time, he was convinced that the Magyars were one of the most aristocratic races in the Monarchy …

First Lieutenant Kinsky, born and bred on the Moldau, claimed that the heir to the succession represented only a rather slim chance for the Monarchy …

In this scene, Roth exposes the contradictions within Franz Joseph’s multicultural experiment not by debating them but by turning them into farce. The ‘historic compromise’ which united twelve disparate ethnic groups is not a force for stability; it is a source of paralysis. The constituent parts of the Empire now cancel each other out. In a Polish castle, peopled by Germans, Czechs, Slovenes and Hungarians, Roth satirises the confusion of politicians and generals on all sides on the eve of the Great War. There is a similar passage in A. J. P. Taylor’s celebrated monograph on the origins of the conflict, War by Timetable:

Taylor’s description of Europe’s leaders stumbling myopically into battle could have been inserted into the pages of The Radetzky March. Those who dismiss Roth’s vision of the end of the Empire as a blend of sentiment and cynicism, a kind of Mahler symphony in prose, forget that the novel was written shortly after he had published some of the most trenchant political essays of the 1920s. When dealing with recent history Roth the journalist and Roth the novelist sing from the same score.

There is one further element which sets Roth apart from most of his literary contemporaries. Because he observes the Empire from its eastern edge, the Slavs and Magyars and Germans who take centre stage are joined by a supporting cast of rural Jews. If you enter Roth’s world through the gateway of The Radetzky March it is easy to overlook them. Although more than a third of the novel is set in the Empire’s most Jewish province, Galician Jews, who made up more than 30 per cent of the region’s population in 1914, are largely absent. There is one important exception. When Franz Joseph visits his frontier provinces he has a private conversation with a rabbi who prophesies that he will not live ‘to see the end of the world’. It is a touching and memorable moment but it is about the Emperor, not his interlocutor. Otherwise the only Jew featured in the novel is the trafficker and moneylender Kapturak, who is the sinister catalyst for Trotta’s drunken decline into debt and his role is functional rather than thematic. However, Jews play a much more significant role in the later works, particularly those written during his Parisian exile. Here they are largely presented retrospectively, their life and culture preserved in the aspic of Roth’s Brody childhood in the 1890s. Job and Leviathan are both set in Galician stetls at the end of the nineteenth century. They are sometimes written off as yet more sentimental fables but their surface texture is misleading. In their different way they share a great deal with the more visceral political fiction of the 1920s. Like the returning soldiers, vagabonds and political adventurers in his earlier stories, Roth’s Jews play a social as well as a narrative role. They are extra-territorial and supranational. They are as much the product of the Empire as the Hungarians, Czechs and Slovenes in The Radetzky March. They define Habsburg society by being both outside and inside it.

Their ambivalent status was another consequence of the political upheavals of 1867. When the Dual Monarchy was established, the Hofburg introduced a more liberal constitution. This was initially to satisfy the demands of the Czechs and South Slavs who mistrusted the newly empowered Hungarian nobility. A by-product of this settlement was that Habsburg Jews were no longer confined by law to the borderland stetls. They could now live and work in Vienna and Prague and Budapest and for the first time they could contribute to Austrian political life. However, unlike the Moravians or Croats or Transylvanians, they lacked a homeland, even a potential one. They were only protected by being citizens of the composite monarchy. When that collapsed, they were cut adrift. Roth describes this in his collection of essays The Wandering Jews, published three years before The Radetzky March:

Every nationality within Austria-Hungary pressed its claim on the basis of its ‘territory’. Only the Jews … had no territory of their own. In Galicia the majority of them were neither Poles nor Ruthenians. However, anti-Semitism was to be found equally among Germans and Czechs, Poles and Ruthenians, Magyars and Romanians in Transylvania. They managed to refute the proverb that says that when two quarrel, the third is always the winner. The Jews were always the third party and they always lost.

This is another prophecy and not just because it pre-echoes the fate of Austrian Jewry after the Anschluss. Jews were not alone in their post-war homelessness. All the Central European nation states created in 1918 contained linguistic and ethnic minorities squeezed uncomfortably behind new borders. Hungarian-speakers in Romania, Sudeten Germans, Slovaks and Romanians in Western Ukraine and Slovenes in Austrian Carinthia remained extra-territorial up to, during and after the Second World War. They were also ‘third parties’ and they too ‘always lost’. Jews were simply the most visible example of the newly stateless of Mitteleuropa.

Their displacement was not confined to the 1920s. It was extended and intensified in 1945 when the Russians ‘liberated’ Southern Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia and Western Ukraine. Its consequences are still with us today. In redrawing the map of Europe the Soviets cared little for people’s ethnic origins. Whole national communities were transplanted as far as Siberia and the Caucasus. In the USSR, political loyalty replaced national identity. This was equally true in those communities who remained in their homelands. The various puppet regimes installed by Stalin in Central and South-East Europe swept their national minorities under the carpet.

I witnessed this at first hand during my earlier travels through Franz Joseph’s former Crown Lands. I met Hungarian-speakers in Cluj who considered themselves marginalised by the Romanian state when it was enlarged to include Transylvania. In Bukovina I was introduced to Romanian speakers who faced discrimination when it was incorporated into Western Ukraine. The same was true of Ruthenes in Slovakia, Slovaks in the Czech lands and Roma gypsies everywhere. Most of all it festered in the composite state of former Yugoslavia, which was as much a construct under Marshal Tito in the 1950s as it had been when it was invented by Woodrow Wilson in 1918. In the South Slav lands national rivalries were put into the deep freeze for thirty-five years under communism, but when Tito died some very nasty nationalist organisms crawled out of the icebox. The principal victims were the Bosnian Moslems who, like Roth’s wandering Jews, were ‘lost third parties’ and were squeezed between Catholic Croats to the west and Orthodox Serbs to the east.

The fate of the Bosniaks closely mirrors that of the Empire’s eastern Jews. They were originally Ottoman subjects who became Habsburg citizens when Bosnia was annexed by Austria in 1908. For the next eighty years, they were passed from hand to hand as Bosnia was successively incorporated into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes after the Treaty of Trianon and then into Tito’s Yugoslavia after the Second World War. When that nation also fell apart in 1992 they were attacked by militant nationalists on every side. When I visited Bosnia after the Dayton ‘peace settlement’ of 1995, the late Marion Wenzel, director of Bosnia-Herzegovina Heritage Rescue, unconsciously echoed Roth’s thoughts in The Wandering Jews seventy years earlier:

Queer indeed to describe the wars in former Yugoslavia as a consequence of the collapse of Austria-Hungary. However, it confirms that Roth’s centrifugal vision of the Habsburg Empire as a ‘mansion with many doors’ was still valid almost a century later. Roth believed passionately that the future of Mitteleuropa was multicultural. His comfortable melting pot is in huge contrast to the centripetal Kakania which Musil evoked in the years immediately after the Treaty of Versailles. Musil could only imagine the afterlife of the Crown Lands in ethnic German terms. In his eyes, the heterogeneous Habsburg Crown Lands could never provide a model for European integration. In 1919, in an essay written well before the Kakania chapter of The Man Without Qualities, he even proposed a linguistic and cultural Anschluss between rump Austria and the now reduced Germany. He described Austria as a ‘petrified illusion’. He dismissed the concept of Austro-Hungarian culture as a myth and blamed Austria’s collapse on the failure of Habsburg multiculturalism. Only through the German language could Austria regain its cultural confidence. In the 1920s, when Austria and Germany were both briefly social democracies, there might have been some weight to his argument. After the conflagration of the Second World War it is Roth’s spacious mansion which seems prophetic and Musil’s German-speaking confederation which now looks dangerously sentimental.

When he wrote The Bust of the Emperor in the mid-1930s, Roth was flirting with the Catholic monarchism of his fellow Austrian exiles. Count Morstin’s panegyric for the old Empire, like Chojnicki’s, takes refuge in Habsburg religious iconography:

No human virtue can endure in this world, save only one; true piety. Belief can cause us no disappointment since it promises us nothing in this world. The true believer does not fail us, for he seeks no recompense on earth. If one uses the same yardstick for peoples, it implies that they seek in vain for national virtues, so called, and that these are even more questionable than human virtues. For this reason, I hate nationalism and nation states.

Roth published his novella in 1935, when the consequences of nationalism were already there for anyone with eyes to see. However, Hitler’s Reich and Stalin’s Soviet Union combined to anaesthetise cultural identity for a further half century. Roth’s multicultural model had to wait another sixty years before it could be built over the ruins of the Berlin Wall and in the ashes of the Warsaw Pact. Even then in today’s Galicia, Bukovina and Moldova the questions he asked seventy-five years ago still remain unanswered and their citizens are once more on the move. If they are lucky, they are migrant workers in the factories of Frankfurt or the cafés of Manchester or the hotels of Brussels. Roth would have recognised them as he scribbled at his stammtisch in his favourite Berlin kneipe or at the corner table at the Café Tournon. He might also have noticed the frightened scrawny girls from Moldova and Montenegro trafficked across the Schengen borders by latter-day Kapturaks with their stolen passports secreted in their attaché cases. Roth’s extra-territorials and their exploiters who made their first appearance on the top floors of Hotel Savoy in 1923 were still sitting at the bar nearly twenty years later in The Capuchin Crypt. When I checked into the Hotel Zhorzh in Lviv in 2001, the pink stucco was cracked and the silent lifts had broken down but the currency dealers were still whispering by the reception desk and stateless teenage girls with ancient eyes were still turning tricks over warm Russian champagne.

Extra-territoriality is a constant in Roth’s fiction. It is the mirror he holds up to his times and the glass in which he inspects himself. The ‘silent prophet’ Kargan, the accidental assassin Golubchik and the perpetual refugee Franz Tunda may fetch up in almost every European capital city, but each of these wanderers is rooted in the Ukrainian borderlands. They are all displaced people, alter egos of their creator, Moses Joseph Roth, the greatest shape-changer of them all.