On 8 January 1918, two years after Franz Joseph died, the American president Woodrow Wilson addressed a joint session of the US Congress. His ostensible task was to report on the progress of peace negotiations with Germany and her allies. His real purpose was to redraw the map of the world. The fourteen points which he presented to the assembly formed the basis of three treaties which dismembered three empires. At the gracious palaces of Versailles, Trianon and Saint Germain en Laye, Wilson, the French premier Clemenceau and Lloyd George met to refine the small print. (Three months after the October Revolution, Russia was otherwise engaged.)

In less than twelve months they created five new European nations and reduced Austria, Germany and Turkey to ghosts of their former selves. Huge chunks were sliced out of Germany and ceded to the new nations of Czechoslovakia and Poland, now reborn as a republic. Hungary was surgically separated from Austria and in the process Transylvania, Croatia and Moldavia were carved off to fatten up Romania, Czechoslovakia and the brand new old Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which had not yet christened itself Yugoslavia. Several months later, while few were looking, Bukovina was transferred to Romania and most of Galicia handed over to Poland. The impact of these changes on Germany was so radical that it seems to have wiped away our memory of the simultaneous disappearance of the Habsburg Crown Lands. Joseph Roth on the other hand never forgot them.

When I made my first journey for the BBC through Eastern Europe in 1999, I interviewed the American historian Charles Ingrao. His description of the geo-political legacy of Versailles was a graphic metaphor for the vanishing trick which the allies performed on Mitteleuropa:

The twentieth century has been such a catastrophe because eliminating the Austro-Hungarian Empire was like a surgeon going in and taking out the stomach and liver and pancreas. You created a huge cavity.

One puzzling feature of this cavity is that it was almost invisible to spectators west of the Elbe. European literature groans under the weight of poetry and prose inspired by the battlefields of Northern France and Flanders. The English poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, the American novelists John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, and the German writers Eric Maria Remarque and Erich Kästner all produced legendary accounts of the slaughter of troops and civilians on the western front. Yet there were only two writers of genuine substance who concerned themselves with the impact of the Great War on the equally devastated eastern borderlands.

One was the fine journalist John Reed, who is best known for his vivid account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World. Less familiar and equally vivid is his collection of impressions of the Russian front in 1915, published under the title The War in Eastern Europe. In Bukovina and Galicia, he witnessed the chaos and collateral damage which the Russian and Austrian armies trailed behind them when they advanced and retreated three times in less than a year. He attached himself to Russian units as they retook villages and towns already pulverised by the first wave of German and Austrian troops, and he described an ill-assorted Slavic army reinforced by conscripted Cossacks and Central Asian mercenaries stumbling across the Dniester and Prutt rivers towards the Polish frontier with the West. It is by far the best account of the Great War in Eastern Europe. His picture of Czernowitz, Tarnopol and Lemberg swamped by displaced prisoners and looting soldiery is only matched by the early novels of Joseph Roth, the one great writer to draw on the eastern campaign as an inspiration for fiction.

More than half of Roth’s stories deal directly with the consequences of the war on the Russian frontier. Apart from their literary merit, they are important for several other reasons. They demonstrate how the consequences of the Great War infected the whole of the following decade and because they are fiction rather than journalism they reveal the aftereffects of war on fully fleshed-out characters.

In his first, unfinished novel, The Spider’s Web, the anti-hero Theodor Lohse drifts into fascism after he has been demobilised from the defeated German army. In Hotel Savoy Gabriel Dan and Zwonimir Pansin fetch up among the displaced migrants and refugees of a Slavic frontier town which could be Tarnopol or Lemberg three years after John Reed filed his dispatches from the battlefield. Franz Tunda begins his Flight Without End as he makes his way back from a Russian prison camp via Ukraine to Austria just as Reed did. Joseph Kargan’s revolutionary career in The Silent Prophet only takes off after he has crossed the devastated landscapes of Galicia and Germany, where ‘he had grown used to the idea of the sovereignty of certain death in Europe’. In Rebellion the hurdy-gurdy player Andreas Pum, a war hero who has lost a limb in the German retreat, carries the damage of the eastern front with him into a composite Berlin/Vienna of the early 1920s.

The legacy of war continues to influence the fiction of the 1930s. In The Bust of the Emperor, Count Morstin’s world falls apart when he returns to his estate of Lopatyny after its incorporation into Poland. At the turning point of Fallmerayer the Stationmaster, the protagonist exploits the fighting in Ukraine to escape to France with his Russian Countess. In Roth’s penultimate novel The Capuchin Crypt Franz Joseph Trotta’s world, like that of Dan, Tunda and Kargan, is terminally transformed when he returns from Russian imprisonment.

This sense of irreversible change is familiar to anyone who has read the Neue Sachlichkeit literature of Roth’s German contemporaries. Ernst Toller, Alfred Döblin and Erich Kästner all examine the social and spiritual impact of war and political upheaval on the demobilised soldiers, rootless intellectuals, bankrupt businessmen and stateless refugees known in Austria and Germany as the kriegsgeneration. However, what is unique in Roth is the pervasive sense of personal loss. His war generation is not merely damaged by the violence of total war. They are deracinated and decultured and they have no reassuring homeland to fold them in its embrace. Even when he transports them to Vienna, Berlin or Zurich they are still haunted by flashbacks of the abandoned borderlands. From the edge of the world they witness the end of their world. What was once the frontier of a stable society has become, in Charles Ingrao’s metaphor, a vacant cavity. This emptiness unites Roth’s political fiction of the 1920s and the melancholy fables of his Parisian exile. It links people without a spiritual identity and countries without a political purpose. This has tempted some commentators to see Roth’s literary career as a descending curve from engagement into escapism. Rosenfeld, for example, divides his creative output into three phases, influenced respectively by the political turmoil of the 1920s, the trauma of the rise of fascism in the early 1930s, and the despair in exile prompted first by the electoral victory of Hitler and then by the Anschluss. Once again, this is only true as far as it goes.

In his early works Roth examines the various alternatives on offer in post-war Mitteleuropa and finds them all wanting. He dismisses fascism in The Spider’s Web, revolutionary communism in Flight Without End and The Silent Prophet, and Weimar social democracy in Right and Left and Zipper and his Father. Here he shares something with his radical German contemporaries and he justifies the nickname he bestowed on himself in Frankfurt – der Rote Joseph, or ‘Red Roth’. However his ‘socialist’ phase was restless and short-lived. As the Great War retreated into memory, he began to dig deeper into the distant past for his subject matter. In Job, The Radetzky March, Weights and Measures and The Bust of the Emperor a preoccupation with Europe’s spiritual exhaustion was replaced by a growing obsession with the vanished cultures of the frontier stetls and the Empire itself. In The Capuchin Crypt, written on the eve of the Anschluss, he made one final effort to heave his own kriegsgeneration into the contemporary reality of rump Austria. When that ended in disillusion he took refuge in a kind of virtual reality. The Tale of the 1002nd Night is a bruised fairy tale set in the Austria of Johann Strauss waltzes, Dehmel confectionery, exotic foreign dignitaries and available süsse mädeln. Roth’s personal political beliefs and his fiction followed the same path. By the time of his death in Paris four months before the outbreak of the Second World War he had buried Red Roth and embraced monarchism and Catholicism. His own endless flight had begun with an exploration of geography – the social landscape of Central Europe in the years after the Great War. Now it was ending by retreating into history – the burn-out of Habsburg Vienna in its final flush of creative energy.

That is one way of describing Roth’s creative trajectory and it seems to satisfy many of his critics. However, it is not quite supported by the evidence. The Tale of the 1002nd Night was not a last escape into nostalgia. It was actually written before The Capuchin Crypt. Prompted by the shock of the Anschluss, Roth and his publisher decided to shelve The Tale of the 1002nd Night in favour of the darker, more controversial sequel to The Radetzky March. Concluding as it does with its hero adrift in a nation now fused with Nazi Germany, The Capuchin Crypt offered far greater contemporary relevance than the frivolous tale of Baron Taittinger and his girl of easy virtue Mizzi Schinagl in the Vienna of the 1880s. Roth’s publisher, by the way, was now the Dutch firm of De Gemeenschaap. His German publisher Kiepenhauer had been closed down by the Nazis and all of his books were burned along with the works of his fellow ‘decadent’ German writers Mann, Zweig and Brecht. Published in Holland for a largely expatriate readership, The Capuchin Crypt was briefly safe from the fascist censors. Needless to say it too was soon suppressed in the Netherlands along with the rest of Roth’s output when Hitler invaded the following year.

His final completed novel, the dreamy fable The Legend of the Holy Drinker, does seem to be a last attempt to escape into a more benevolent universe, but as it was published posthumously it is difficult to decide whether it was a new departure or a kind of literary therapy. Besides, chronology is never much help in deciphering Roth’s artistic purpose, particularly in his alcohol-soaked, debt-laden final years. The Capuchin Crypt is flanked by a fairy tale and a fable in much the same way as Job was followed by the quasi-epic The Radetzky March. At the end of his life Roth continued along the same parallel and conflicting paths which he trod a decade earlier. One road led outwards to the damaged world of Eastern Europe between the wars and the other inwards to his own fragile soul.

To understand what linked these divergent strands and why his evocation of a vanished world is still relevant, it helps to return to his seelenlandschaft – his spiritual geography. That is exactly what Roth himself did in his final, flawed and fascinating exploration of that world, The Capuchin Crypt.

Once again, it is better to trust the tale rather than the teller. Roth himself called the novel a sequel to The Radetzky March and claimed that it portrayed ‘the frightful death of the last corner of freedom in central Europe, the devouring of Austria by Prussia’. Both these statements are true as far as they go but The Capuchin Crypt has far more to offer than a mere tying up of the loose ends in the story of his homeland. In its own way it is as ambitious as The Radetzky March. It depicts the end of the world not once but twice – first in retrospect and again in terrible prospect. Roth had prophesied the Anschluss in the early 1920s but by the time it arrived he was too ill and too depressed to react with anything other than blank despair. It is left to readers to add their own postscript to the Trotta family saga. The German takeover of Austria only forms a grim epilogue in the final few pages of The Capuchin Crypt. The bulk of the novel is concerned with a restless and haunted scouring of what one of its characters describes as ‘Austria’s essence … not to be central but peripheral’. Like the coda to Mahler’s 6th Symphony, another Austrian masterpiece haunted by catastrophe, it revisits all his main preoccupations and grinds them to dust.

Roth puts down a marker in the first four words of the book: ‘Our name is Trotta.’ Like his first completed novel, Hotel Savoy, and unlike anything else, he wrote it in the first person. There is not even an unreliable narrator like the fictitious Joseph Roth of Flight Without End or The Silent Prophet. Then he chooses to make this first-person narrator announce himself in the plural. Like The Radetzky March, this will be the chronicle of a dynasty and this time it will be recorded from within – ‘Trotta is our name.’ Finally, even though 95 per cent of the story takes place in the past, it begins in the present tense. In other words, this will not be a retreat into history but an examination of how the past continues to poison the present. In particular, the after-effects of the Great War are still so potent that by the very end of the novel the protagonist has become a kind of zombie, a representative of the living dead:

To be obsolete among the living means something like being extra-territorial. I was extra-territorial among the living.

The choice of adjective is chilling; even more so because ‘extra-territorial’ can also be a noun and Trotta wears it as a badge of identity. Roth has returned one final time to the theme which has dominated his entire output. The Capuchin Crypt is a huge meditation on inner and outer displacement. As he revisits all the landmarks of his life and work, he argues that when it lost touch with its periphery, Austria abandoned ‘its essence’ – the multicultural equilibrium which underpinned its whole purpose.

The historical and geographical scale of the novel is even greater than The Radetzky March. At the very opening we are reminded of the ‘hero of Solferino’ who was ennobled by accidentally saving the Emperor’s life. We are briefly reintroduced to the rural Slovenian backwater of Sipolje where the Trottas originated and to Vienna during the economic boom which followed the Ausgleich with Hungary. There are even passing references to America, where the nephew of the hero of Solferino has made his pile at the turn of the twentieth century. This narrative is delivered at one remove from the past. The narrator is now Franz Joseph Trotta, the cousin of Carl Joseph, the protagonist of The Radetzky March. As Roth had killed off Carl Joseph in the battle of Krasne Busk at the end of the earlier novel he needed to invent a new central character for its sequel. However, he had other more interesting reasons for shifting forwards in time and sideways in space. In The Radetzky March Carl Joseph Trotta grows up in Vienna and Moravia and visits the more distant eastern Crown Lands almost by chance after his expulsion from the cavalry, when he joins an infantry regiment stationed at the remote edge of the Empire. His cousin Franz Joseph is much more intimately connected with the Slav periphery. He speaks Slovenian and has regular visits from his Slovene relative Joseph Branco, who also has friends and family in Galicia. Roth prepares us for this shift of focus to the Crown Lands on the novel’s second page when Franz describes his father as dreaming ‘of a Slav monarchy under the rule of the Habsburgs … a joint monarchy of Austrians, Hungarians and Slavs …’ He is both ‘a rebel and a patriot – a species which only existed under the Old Monarchy’. Unlike Carl, who has spent his entire youth trying to escape from his destiny as the Viennese scion of an ennobled family, Franz has been brought up as a ‘Slav of the Empire’.

To emphasise the Slavic aspect of the novel, Roth immediately introduces two further recurring characters – a more distant cousin from Slovenia called Joseph Branco and his friend, the Galician Jewish coachman Manes Reisiger. In their company Roth transports us to the Galician front in the Great War and to Siberian exile. The long digression which follows, describing the captivity of Trotta and his two friends, is a reworking of similar passages in Flight Without End. It is only one of many echoes of his previous stories. Roth places a grave reflection on Austria’s peripheral identity in the mouth of the Polish Count Chojnicki just as he did in The Radetzky March. This time it develops into a passionate plea for the retention of the imperial dependencies: ‘The body politic of Austria is nourished and constantly replenished from the Crown Lands.’

There are many repetitions of earlier descriptions of provincial Austria-Hungary. When Franz visits the Galician stetl of Zlotogrod (another location revived from earlier tales) he observes its similarities with Sipolje – the K and K railway station, the uniform of the stationmaster, the blonde cashier – just as Count Morstin does on his tour of duty in The Bust of the Emperor. The cashier, whose double Franz has seen in ‘Agram, Olmütz, Brünn and Keckemet’, has become almost mythological. She is a ‘latter-day Goddess of Depravity’. We pay a visit to Jadlowker’s frontier tavern from The Silent Prophet and Job where refugees ‘travel between a known past and a highly uncertain future’.

Yet everything is subtly but pointedly transformed. The cashier has been ‘given her notice by history, and short notice at that’. The tavern where ‘general confusion once prevailed’ is ‘eerily quiet’, and Kapturak the smuggler is a ‘silent shadow of his former self’. Roth has transposed his earlier melodies into a remote and discordant key. He adds a suspended cadence just to reinforce his message:

When he uses the words ‘in my opinion’, who is speaking? Is it Franz Joseph Trotta, the displaced descendant of a minor Slovene officer, or Moses Joseph Roth, the displaced author who is no longer ‘Red Roth?’ Some critics have seen this passage as proof that in his works of exile Roth was escaping from the modern world into an alternative and very conservative reality. Rosenfeld attributes his embrace of monarchism in the early 1930s to his guilt at betraying his Ostjude roots as well as his alcoholism and his depression:

Beset by misfortune and homeless as never before, the despairing Roth now turned to the past and in his crowning work, The Radetzky March, he resurrected Old Austria in order that he might mourn its passing.

No one would deny that The Radetzky March is Roth’s crowning work, but it was written immediately after the publication of Job when, despite his wife’s mental illness and his decision to abandon Austria, he was reasonably comfortable in his own skin. His involvement with the circle surrounding the Habsburg heir and his adoption of the Catholic faith came several years later. Nor is it any more accurate to describe The Capuchin Crypt as a threnody for the old Empire. It is as paradoxical as anything else in his work. Roth identifies the paradox a few lines after Franz Joseph Trotta’s reflections on the Great War, when he ‘speaks of the misunderstood and also misused power of the old Monarchy’. The narrator (whether Roth or Trotta) never denies that Austria was the author of its own disintegration. However, by juxtaposing the words ‘misused’ and ‘misunderstood’ he suggests that dismantling the Empire was also a terminal failure of perception on the part of the West. When he says later in the novel that the Crown Lands were exploited to support their careless imperial capital he also implies that this ‘misuse’ was capable of remedy. In his eyes, the treaties of Versailles, Trianon and Saint Germain led to something far more abusive. They enshrined nationalism as the guiding principle of the modern world. Once again Roth places his attack on the nation state in the mouth of the Polish Count Chojnicki:

‘I’m no patriot but I love my fellow countrymen. A whole land, a Fatherland, is something abstract. But someone from the same part of the world is something concrete.’

Chojnicki’s role in the novel is made even more disorientating by a strange narrative device. In The Radetzky March, among the disputatious Hungarian and Czech officers, he is the single rational voice. In The Capuchin Crypt Roth splits him in two. For the first two thirds of the novel we assume that this is the same character who bade farewell to Carl Joseph in 1914 as he left for the front and his appointment with an enemy’s bullet. It is only when his cousin Franz Joseph has returned to a Vienna now shrunk and humbled by defeat that we learn that Chojnicki is actually the brother of the character in The Radetzky March. Carl Joseph’s friend Xandl is now confined to the Steinhof mental hospital, where he spends his days with a ball of wool and two needles ‘knitting the Monarchy’. His brother explains that ‘as a private person he is as mad as a hatter, but where politics is concerned he is second to none.’ He then gives us an example of the Count’s political judgement, which is as close to the opinions of Joseph Roth as makes no difference:

‘Austria is neither a state, a home nor a nation. It is a religion. The church and the idiot clericals who now rule us are trying to make a so-called nation of us. Of us, who are a supra-nation, the only supra-nation which has ever existed in this world.’

By 1938 Roth was too sceptical an observer of that world to believe that the misunderstanding of the Empire and its misuse of its dependencies could ever be reconciled. The new reality ordained by Woodrow Wilson and brought into being by Hitler and Horty and Mussolini would not allow it. Just as he examined, tested and rejected all the political systems on offer in The Spider’s Web, Right and Left and The Silent Prophet, so in The Capuchin Crypt he walks away from the modernist seductions of interwar Vienna. The abstract aesthetic of Adolf Loos, the bisexual values of the Weimar intelligentsia, the chilly anger of the Neue Sachlichkeit and the worship of progress in the reborn industries of the new German Reich all wither under his blistering gaze.

Yet when he chronicles the end of his world it is not with anger but with a deep sense of loss. Count Xandl Chojnicki is one of two resonant symbols in the closing pages of the novel evoking a past beyond recall. Like the Empire itself, his description of the Crown Lands is both visionary and deranged. It is worth noting in passing that the Steinhof asylum where he is housed was the creation of the Emperor himself. Franz Joseph commissioned the great Secession architect Otto Wagner to design the hospital and decorate it with ravishing jugendstijl wrought ironwork and stained glass. Anyone able to recall the old Empire might remember that even psychiatric patients benefited from the final flowering of Habsburg culture. The second symbol is more intimate. When Trotta returns to Vienna, his wife has deserted him for a lesbian ménage with a fashionable interior designer. Without wife, without employment and purpose, he moves back into the family home and is reunited with his ageing mother. As their fortunes decline in the inflation of the 1920s, their comfortable bourgeois house is turned into a pension. His equally impoverished contemporaries move in as paying (or more frequently non-paying) guests. The one possession from their earlier life which remains is his mother’s old piano. Yet since his return from the war the piano has been soundless. His mother explains that when he left for the war a mental aberration prompted her to have all the strings removed so that she would not be able to play. It is only years later when she misunderstands an enquiry after an old friend that Trotta realises she has become profoundly deaf. She had the strings taken away when she began to fear that she would no longer know whether she was playing correctly. It is another musical metaphor. Just as Menuchim’s song in Job symbolised an old world redeeming the new, so Frau Trotta’s silent piano seems to stand for the suppression of Austria itself.

The music her son asks her to play is not by Schubert or Mozart or Beethoven but by Chopin – a Slav. This may be a coincidence but if so it is a happy one. It accords with the redemptive role that the Slav lands play throughout Roth’s work. It might also be a buried memory of another Slavic artist much admired by Roth. In Chekhov’s Three Sisters, Masha’s locked piano stands for her dysfunctional marriage. In the same way, the music that is missing from the Trotta household represents the peripheral world now severed from the Germanicised Austrian republic. Throughout The Capuchin Crypt, whenever Roth wishes to embody loss he turns to the east. While Franz Joseph Trotta recalls his first visit to Zlotogrod with the Jewish coachman Reisiger, the narrative flashes forwards to its destruction during the frontier campaign of 1915. Roth also places Trotta, Reisiger and Branco in the vanguard at the battle of Krasne-Busk, a turning point in the eastern campaign. This is also where Carl Joseph met his death in The Radetzky March. After the three friends are taken prisoner and deported to Siberia, they are protected by another survivor from an earlier novel, the Polish fur trader Baranovicz who swapped identities with Franz Tunda in Flight Without End. Earlier in the novel when Count Chojnicki rejects ‘this crazy Europe of nation states’ it is the ‘Slovenes, the Poles and Galicians from Ruthenia, the kaftan clad Jews from Boryslaw’ whom he sets up figuratively in opposition to the German world he calls the ‘Nibelungen fantasy’. He also includes ‘the horse traders from the Bacska’ and ‘the Moslems from Sarajevo’, who are certainly not Slavs but are not Germans either. He also rejects the idea that Habsburg history was forged on the medieval Alpine banks of the Rhine: ‘Austria is not to be found in the Alps, where you can find edelweiss, chamois and gentians but never a trace of the double eagle.’

If Roth is reinventing Austria in The Capuchin Crypt in order to mourn it, it is the centrifugal empire in which he grew up which he mourns and not the imperial palaces of Vienna’s Hofburg, particularly now they are under the sway of the Berlin Reichstag. In the final two pages of the novel Roth introduces one last and rather desperate symbol for the mutability of Old Austria – the hound which follows the narrator from his regular café to the last resting place of the Emperor. The Jewish café proprietor has packed up for the night and will shortly, if he is lucky, abandon an Austria now under Nazi rule. The old waiter has also been given his cards. Only a dog remains and it is made to carry a heavy metaphorical load on its back. Like the narrator it is called Franz; it is a German shepherd and it shadows the hero on his last journey to the Capuchin Crypt. Roth shows the resting place of the Habsburg dynasty being invaded by a German interloper. The weight of the Anschluss has become so oppressive that it crowds out all the other rich memories planted in the novel’s earlier chapters. There is no space left in Roth’s migrant soul for his beloved multicultural construct. The teller can no longer believe in his own tale.

Yet the novel is much more than merely a requiem for a departed society. In particular, the chapters devoted to Sipolje and Zlotogrod and the rhetoric of Count Chojnicki in either of his two incarnations propose an alternative reality which outlived the author and the Thousand Year Reich that drove him to an early grave.

 

My own search for Joseph Roth and his spiritual geography began in the palaces and cafés of imperial Vienna. The film which I made there thirty years ago was a celebration of the city in the first decade of the twentieth century when, in the words of my friend and collaborator Michael Frayn, ‘the Empire was going out with the brilliance of a star burning itself up’. It was pure chance which drew my attention away from the intellectual glitter of Klimt and Kraus and Freud and Wittgenstein to their Galician contemporary.

Even Roth himself was susceptible to that glitter. He was seduced by it just as Carl Joseph von Trotta is when he visits the capital with his ageing mistress and witnesses the Corpus Christi procession. Roth returned to Vienna’s high season in The Tale of the 1002nd Night at the same time as he was reading its last rites in The Capuchin Crypt. Seventy years later both halves of his Habsburg paradox are still with us. The philosophy and the visual art, the architecture and the music of Secession Vienna have all left their fingerprints on our own post-imperial world. So too has Austria’s centrifugal periphery, although it took half a century to reassert its claims on our attention.

I chose to follow Roth to the edge of the former Crown Lands only after three empires – Habsburg, Nazi and Soviet – had been consigned to the catafalque of history. Even then in the 1990s the nationalism hated by Count Morstin and the extra-territorial Franz Joseph Trotta still made one last-ditch attempt to impose itself on the borderlands, not least in the western half of Ukraine where Roth was born. The Orange Revolution which dragged the country away from Russian hegemony was born in the baroque squares of Lviv. As I write, the two visions which Roth explored – centripetal and centrifugal, nationalist and multicultural – are still engaged in a tug of war. Ukraine has yet to decide between its residual nationalism and its symbiosis with the Slavic continent to the east.

It is here that Roth’s reputation survives the sometimes patronising judgement of his critics. His early fiction still holds up because it reframes our perception of the Great War and its consequences. It foresees not only the rise of totalitarianism in Germany but also its mirror image in Russia. It even imagines the worst excesses of nationalism persisting beyond the defeat of both systems. When he draws back from the political turmoil of 1920s Mitteleuropa and returns to the final Habsburg years which preceded it, it is not in nostalgic retreat but in quizzical exploration. Other writers have given us sensitive depictions of stetl life – the Yiddish teller of tales Isaac Bashevis Singer and the more acerbic Israeli S. Y. Agnon. However, neither of them relates Orthodox Jewish culture to the world which surrounded it as perceptively as Roth does in Job. As for his undisputed masterpiece The Radetzky March, my own and many other readers’ entry point to his imaginative landscape, it may not have the philosophical weight of Musil but it presents the contradictions of European society on the eve of the First World War with a humanity and social reach unmatched by any other writer. If the fables and parables which he wrote in exile during the 1930s seem slight by comparison, each in its own way adds to his unique legacy as the laureate of displacement. The various threads he spins in Tarabas, Weights and Measures, Fallmerayer the Stationmaster and even Confessions of a Murderer are woven together in The Capuchin Crypt into a tapestry of the extra-territorial 1930s which still has lessons to teach us about Bosnia, Romania, Ukraine and all the other debatable lands left in limbo after what that premature prophet Francis Fukuyama termed ‘the end of history’.

History no more ended in 1989 than it did after the Kaiser’s death in1916. It continued exactly as before and in much the same places. Joseph Roth would not have been surprised to see virulent nationalism returning to Sarajevo just when the rest of the world had forgotten it. One cannot imagine him ignoring the edges of Europe just because they had slipped off the front pages of the newspapers. His abiding gift and his greatest curse was to be devoutly counter-intuitive. What could be more perverse than to apply for Austrian citizenship when Austria was on its knees and his native Galicia was being absorbed into a reborn Polish Republic? Even in the midst of inflation and political murder it was better to be supra-national than live under a mutant species of nationalism. When Austria followed the same path, he continued his restless pursuit of paradox in the Weimar Republic and Soviet Russia. The greatest irony of his life was the way in which his very despair, like that of Franz Joseph Trotta, opened his eyes to the darkness around him:

I saw myself, as I had for so long since my return from the war, as someone who was wrongly alive. I had, after all, accustomed myself for a long time to observing all the events which were described in the newspapers as ‘historic’ with the judicious eye of someone who no longer belonged to this world! I had for a long time been on indefinite leave from death. And death could interrupt my leave at any second. What did things of this world matter to me?

But they did matter and they matter to this day. They may have taken a terrible toll on Roth the man but they left Roth the writer prophetic to the very end.