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Marching into History:
From the Early Novels of Joseph Roth to
Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft
Kati Tonkin
B.A. (Hons), M.A. (Dist.)
This thesis is presented for the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy of
The
University
of
Western
Australia
School of Humanities
German and European Studies
February 2005
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my gratitude to the Österreichischer Austauschdienst for an
Österreich-Stipendium and to the University of Western Australia for a Fay Gale
Fellowship. These two awards enabled me to spend the period September 2001 to
February 2002 in Vienna conducting the initial research for this thesis.
Emeritus Professor Leslie Bodi gave me the benefit of his expertise in Austrian
literature and culture in stimulating conversations over a period of several years. I
am indebted to him also for providing me with many contacts in Vienna whose
assistance in the early stages of my research was invaluable.
In Vienna I was fortunate to meet with a number of scholars who have written on
the work of Joseph Roth. I would like to thank Professor Moritz Csáky of the
Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften; Professor Wendelin SchmidtDengler from the Universität Wien; and Dr. Heinz Lunzer, director of the
Literaturhaus Wien for their interest in my project and their academic advice. Dr.
Lutz Musner kindly enabled me to attend lectures at the Internationales
Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften of which he is the director.
My supervisor, colleague and friend Associate Professor Peter Morgan has been a
wonderful mentor and an inspiration since I first attended his classes as an
undergraduate. I have greatly appreciated, enjoyed and benefited from our
supervision meetings over the years, and I cannot thank him enough for his
unfailing support and encouragement while I have been combining work and
study.
My family and friends have supported and encouraged me throughout and I am
thankful for their confidence, their understanding and their patience. In particular,
I would like to thank Barbara Tonkin for helpful comments on drafts and for her
constant support, Annette Harres for proof reading the final draft, and Ian
Gollagher, for everything.
Abstract
This thesis takes as its starting point the consensus among scholars and
interpreters of Joseph Roth’s work that his writing can be divided into two
periods: an early “socialist” phase and a later “monarchist” phase. In opposition to
this view, a reading of Roth’s novels is put forward in which his desire to make
sense of post-Habsburg Central Europe provides the underlying logic, thus
reconciling his early novels with Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft. The
first chapter addresses the common contention that the transformation in Roth’s
work is the result of a deep identity crisis. An alternative reading of the relevance
of Roth’s identity to his work is offered: namely, that Roth’s conviction that
identity is multivalent explains his rejection of both nationalism and other
“solutions” to the problems of post-war Europe, a sentiment that finds expression
in his early novels. The interpretation of these novels, which represent Roth’s
early attempts to give literary form to contemporary reality, is the focus of the
second chapter of the thesis. In the third chapter Radetzkymarsch is analyzed as a
historical novel in the terms first proposed by Georg Lukács, as a novel which
facilitates the understanding of the present through the portrayal of the past.
Paradoxically, it is the historical form that most effectively captures and
illuminates the complex reality of Roth’s contemporary times. The fourth and
final chapter demonstrates that Die Kapuzinergruft is not simply an inferior sequel
to Radetzkymarsch, a nostalgic evocation of an idealized lost Habsburg world and
condemnation of the 1930s present, but rather continues the dialogue between
past and present begun in Radetzkymarsch. In this novel, written before and in the
immediate aftermath of the Anschluß of Austria to Nazi Germany, it is not Roth
but his narrator who takes flight from reality, behaviour that Roth condemns as
leading to the repetition of mistakes from the past and the failure to prevent the
ultimate political catastrophe.
Contents
Introduction ........................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1: Identity and Ideology ...................................................................... 19
A Central European Experience ..................................................................... 19
Post-War Alienation ....................................................................................... 24
Identity and the Nation ................................................................................... 32
Identity and Nationalism in Juden auf Wanderschaft .................................... 34
“Die süße Freiheit, nichts mehr darzustellen als mich selbst” ....................... 53
Chapter 2: The Early Novels.............................................................................. 55
“Der rote Joseph”?.......................................................................................... 55
Socialism and the Early Novels...................................................................... 58
The Reactionary Mentality and its Origins: Das Spinnennetz........................ 61
Inequality and the Socialist Revolution: Hotel Savoy .................................... 93
History as Repetition: Die Rebellion............................................................ 108
Coda: From the Early Novels to Radetzkymarsch........................................ 121
Chapter 3: Radetzkymarsch as Historical Novel............................................. 124
Form and Truth............................................................................................. 126
Truth and Fiction in the Historical Novel..................................................... 130
“Er war Slowene”: Identity – Myth – Generational Patterns ....................... 136
“Man lebte im Schatten des Großvaters!”: The Crisis of Carl Joseph ......... 145
The March: “Einmal in der Woche, am Sonntag, war Österreich” .............. 161
Behind the Supranational Myth: What is “Österreich”? .............................. 174
The False Opposition between “dazumal” and “heutzutage”....................... 192
Chapter 4: Die Kapuzinergruft and the Confrontation with History ........... 196
“[Ich] sehe […] mich genötigt”: Monarchist out of Necessity..................... 199
The Dialogue between Past and Present in Die Kapuzinergruft .................. 206
Conclusion.......................................................................................................... 230
Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 237
Introduction
Critics have never been able to reconcile Roth's early writing with his most
famous novel, Radetzkymarsch, and its sequel Die Kapuzinergruft.1 According to
the widely accepted periodic-thematic divisions of Roth’s work, the early fiction
is grouped under the rubric “socialist” and the later works are interpreted as
manifestations of the idealizing nostalgia of an alcoholic monarchist with a
decreasing grip on reality.2 This categorization can be traced back to Roth’s friend
Hermann Kesten, who published the first collection of Roth’s works in 1956:
In den fünfzehn Jahren, da er Bücher veröffentlichte, ward Roth aus einem
skeptischen, zuweilen pessimistischen Moralisten ein legitimistischer
Katholik, aus einem Linksradikalen ein Rechtskonservativer, aus einem
Mitarbeiter sozialdemokratischer Blätter ein Inspirator sozialdoktrinärer
Zeitschriften, aus einem ‘Frontsoldaten’ ein ‘österreichischer Leutnant’, aus
einem Neuerer ein Erbe, aus einem witzigen Spötter ein frommer Prediger.3
Kesten’s dualistic assessment of Roth’s writing was adopted and developed by
Ingeborg Sültemeyer in the late 1960s in the first major study of Roth’s early
work,4 before which very little critical attention was paid to the early novels.5 As
a result Roth was viewed as a conservative writer.6 Since Sültemeyer’s ground1
2
3
4
5
6
All references to Roth’s fiction and journalism are to Joseph Roth, Werke, 6 vols, vols. 1-3,
Das journalistische Werk, ed. Klaus Westermann; vols 4-6, Romane und Erzählungen, ed.
Fritz Hackert (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989-91). Roman numerals indicate the volume
and Arabic numerals indicate the page number.
The terms “socialist” and “monarchist” are used in this study to refer to the conventional
reading of Roth’s work as consisting of two antithetical phases.
Hermann Kesten, “Joseph Roth,” Wort in der Zeit 9 (1959): 6.
Ingeborg Sültemeyer, Das Frühwerk Joseph Roths 1915-1926. Studien und Texte (Wien;
Freiburg; Basel: Herder, 1976). This monograph is the book-version of Sültemeyer’s
dissertation of 1969.
Sültemeyer outlines the few studies in which the early work had been discussed before the
completion of her dissertation in 1969: Sültemeyer, Das Frühwerk 16-17.
Wolf R. Marchand, Joseph Roth und völkisch-nationalistische Wertbegriffe. Untersuchungen
zur politisch-weltanschaulichen Entwicklung Roths und ihrer Auswirkung auf sein Werk
(Bonn: Bouvier, 1974) 1; Klaus Zelewitz, “Joseph Roth: Zweimal politische Illusion,” in
Joseph Roth: Werk und Wirkung, ed. Bernd M. Kraske (Bonn: Bouvier, 1988), 101. SchmidtDengler notes that in the 1950s and 1960s Roth appears in literary histories largely as the
author of one novel, Radetzkymarsch: Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler, “Auf der Wanderschaft:
Das Frühwerk Joseph Roths in den Literaturgeschichten,” in Co-existent Contradictions:
Joseph Roth in Retrospect. Papers of the 1989 Joseph Roth Symposium at Leeds University to
commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death, ed. Helen Chambers (Riverside, CA: Ariadne
Press, 1991), 18. Sültemeyer published a large number of articles omitted from the original
three-volume Werkausgabe (1956) in Sültemeyer, Das Frühwerk and Ingeborg Sültemeyer,
ed., Joseph Roth: Der Neue Tag: Unbekannte politische Arbeiten 1919 bis 1927. Wien, Berlin,
Moskau (Köln; Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1970).
1
Introduction
breaking study, Roth’s early works of fiction and journalism have been the subject
of greater scholarly interest, with a majority of critics concurring with Sültemeyer
that the early work in general is characterised by a leftist political engagement
which is strikingly absent from later texts.
There is less agreement, however, on what exactly constitutes Roth’s “early
work” and where to locate the turning point. For Sültemeyer the salient
characteristic of the early period is Roth’s commitment to socialism, which ended
quite abruptly in 1926, his journey that year to the USSR having left him
disillusioned with socialism as a solution to the problems of post-war Europe.7
This political commitment, she contends, had been the driving force not only of
his early journalism, but also of his first three novels Das Spinnennetz (1923),
Hotel Savoy (1924) and Die Rebellion (1924), which are remarkable more for
their prescient and perceptive analysis of the contemporary political situation than
for their literary quality. Once he had turned his back on socialism, Sültemeyer
argues, a new period in his output began:
Die politisch-aufklärerischen Interessen des Journalisten, die bis zu diesem
Zeitpunkt dominierten, treten von nun an zurück; für die folgende Schaffensperiode wird der künstlerische Ehrgeiz des Romanciers bestimmend.8
While subsequent studies have endorsed Sültemeyer’s classification of the early
work as socialist, if with some qualifications,9 the Jewish novel Hiob: Roman
eines einfachen Mannes (1930) is more commonly cited as marking the point at
which Roth finally broke from his early political engagement, taking flight from
the problems of the present into the nostalgically recreated lost worlds of the
shtetl and the Habsburg Empire.10 According to this classification, the novels
7
8
9
10
Sültemeyer concedes that Roth’s enthusiasm for the socialist project had begun to wane
somewhat earlier, but his experiences in Russia in 1926 turned what had been political
resignation into complete rejection of socialist ideology: Sültemeyer, Das Frühwerk 92.
Sültemeyer, Das Frühwerk 13.
These will be discussed in Chapter 2 of the thesis.
See, for example, Ritchie Robertson, “Roth’s Hiob and the Traditions of Ghetto Fiction,” in
Co-existent Contradictions: Joseph Roth in Retrospect. Papers of the 1989 Joseph Roth
Symposium at Leeds University to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death, ed. Helen
Chambers (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1991), 185; Claudio Magris, Der habsburgische
Mythos in der österreichischen Literatur (Salzburg: Otto Müller Verlag, 1966) 261; Werner
Sieg, Zwischen Anarchismus und Fiktion. Eine Untersuchung zum Werk Joseph Roth (Bonn:
Bouvier, 1974) 10; Bernd Hüppauf, “Josef Roth: Hiob. Der Mythos des Skeptikers,” in Joseph
2
Introduction
published between 1927 and 1929 – Die Flucht ohne Ende (1927), Zipper und
sein Vater (1928), Rechts und Links (1929) – are included in the early work, while
the novels from Hiob to Die Kapuzinergruft11 comprise the late work.12 However,
although a majority of critics agree that with the publication of Hiob and
Radetzkymarsch “ein neuer Roth [trat] vor die Öffentlichkeit”,13 the change in the
writer is acknowledged to have begun earlier:
Seine ‘Wandlung’ läßt sich zwar einige Jahre zurückverfolgen und ist oft mit
seiner Reise in die Sowjetunion (1926) in Zusammenhang gebracht worden,
gewinnt jedoch konkrete literarische und für die Öffentlichkeit sichtbare
Form erst mit dem Erscheinen Hiobs.14
If critics who consider Hiob to mark “der Umschlagpunkt in der Wende vom
‘sozialistischen’ Autor der Neuen Sachlichkeit zum konservativen, teils
reaktionären
sensiblen
Stilisten
und
Legenden-
und
Mythenschöpfer”15
nonetheless agree with Sültemeyer that this transformation began in 1926, what
does this mean for the classification of novels published between Die Rebellion
and Hiob? Scholars have suggested or implied that Roth’s work of the 1920s – the
“early” work – must itself be divided into two phases. They variously nominate
192416 or 192717 as the turning point or locate it somewhere between these years.
11
12
13
14
15
16
Roth: Werk und Wirkung, ed. Bernd M. Kraske (Bonn: Bouvier, 1988), 25; and Ward Hughes
Powell, “Joseph Roth, Ironic Primitivist,” Monatshefte 53, no. 3 (1961): 116.
Although Die Geschichte von der 1002. Nacht was not published until 1939, it was completed
before Die Kapuzinergruft, which must therefore be regarded as Roth’s last novel.
Variations on the definition of the work from 1930 can be found in Ritchie Robertson, “1918:
This year of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire marks a crucial historical and
symbolic change for Joseph Roth,” in Yale Companion to Jewish Writing and Thought in
German Culture 1096-1996, ed. Jack David Zipes and Sander L. Gilman (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1997); Ian Reifowitz, “Nationalism, Modernity and Multinational Austria in
the Works of Joseph Roth,” in Austria in Literature, ed. Donald G. Daviau, Studies in
Austrian Literature, Culture and Thought (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 2000); and Sidney
Rosenfeld, Understanding Joseph Roth (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001).
Robertson separates Hiob and Radetzkymarsch from “the fiction of Roth’s ‘Catholicizing’
phase”: Robertson, “1918,” 357. Reifowitz divides the work from 1927 into two phases, 192732, in which “Roth presented an insightful and relatively balanced picture [of] Austria’s
strengths and weaknesses”, and 1933-39, in which the “nuanced portrait of Austria
transformed into an idealized version of a multinational paradise that barely resembled the
reality of the past”: Reifowitz, “Nationalism, Modernity,” 120. Rosenfeld divides the period
from 1930 to 1939 into three phases based on the themes of the novels: Rosenfeld,
Understanding 39f.
Hüppauf, “Mythos des Skeptikers,” 25.
Sonnleitner’s article on Roth’s “frühe Romane” deals only with the novels published in 1923
and 1924. Schweikert and Bance nominate 1924 as the year when Roth’s political engagement
suddenly ceased: Uwe Schweikert, “‘Der rote Joseph’: Politik und Feuilleton beim frühen
3
Introduction
In all cases this subdivision sees Sültemeyer’s grouping of the first three novels
retained, while those of 1927-29 are treated separately,18 these later novels
sometimes being referred to as a “späte[s] Frühwerk”.19 The very fact that Roth
published no novels between Die Rebellion in 1924 and Die Flucht ohne Ende in
1927 indicates a break in his literary output, suggesting a natural division between
the novels of the early and those of the late 1920s. The present study
acknowledges this break and concludes the analysis of the early work with Roth’s
third novel, Die Rebellion.
While the timing of the turning point in Roth’s work has been the subject of some
disagreement, the existence of a fundamental thematic and ideological disjunction
between the novels of the 1920s and those of the 1930s has rarely been
challenged. Scholars who have attempted to establish parallels between the early
and later work have for the most part contended or implied that Roth was always a
conservative at heart. Roth’s biographer David Bronsen, for example, while
largely endorsing the dualistic view of Roth’s development as a writer,20 asserts
that “der legitimistische Roth [hätte] einen großen Teil der Feuilletons schreiben
können, die er als ‘Sozialist’ für Linkszeitungen schrieb”.21 Similarly, C.E.
Williams argues that “Roth’s socialism was largely emotional and to some extent
opportunistic”22 and that his subsequent “espousal of monarchism did not involve
17
18
19
20
21
22
Joseph Roth (1919-1926),” in Joseph Roth. Text + Kritik Sonderband, ed. Heinz Ludwig
Arnold (München: edition text + kritik, 1974), 54; A.F. Bance, “In My End is My Beginning.
Joseph Roth’s Die Rebellion and Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker,” in Studies in Modern
Austrian Literature (Glasgow: Scottish Papers in Germanic Studies, 1981), 36.
Zelewitz proposes both 1924 and 1927 as turning points in Roth’s work: Zelewitz, “Zweimal
politische Illusion,” 105-08. Reifowitz nominates 1927 as a turning point because it was in
this year that “Roth first began to discuss the Dual Monarchy in his fictional works and
essays”: Reifowitz, “Nationalism, Modernity,” 120.
See, for example, Helmut Famira-Parcsetich, Die Erzählsituation in den Romanen Joseph
Roths (Bern; Frankfurt/M: Herbert Lang & Cie, 1971); and Rosenfeld, Understanding.
Scheible uses this phrase of Zipper und sein Vater: Hartmut Scheible, Joseph Roth. Mit einem
Essay über Gustave Flaubert (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1971) 13.
“Aus dem Revolutionär wurde ein Reaktionär”: David Bronsen, Joseph Roth. Eine Biographie
(Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1974) 513.
Bronsen, Biographie 513. Bronsen goes on to point out that many of the topics of Roth’s
journalism are constant from the 1920s to the late 1930s, for example militarism and National
Socialism.
C.E. Williams, The Broken Eagle: The Politics of Austrian Literature from Empire to
Anschluß (London: Paul Elek, 1974) 96.
4
Introduction
any radical transformation of his social and cultural values.”23 At base, he implies,
Roth’s values were always traditional and conservative, his early cultural and
political criticism being “in the first place an attack on the dehumanising
tendencies of urban industrial society, on capitalism, on the decadence of modern
culture and on the moral bankruptcy of the age” – all “consistent with left-wing
sympathies, but equally […] commonplaces of the right-wing ideologies of the
period.”24 Wolf Marchand’s study rests on this same contention,25 and Claudio
Magris has similarly argued “daß schon in den ersten polemisierenden Romanen
die
Elemente
der
traditionalistischen
und
antisäkularistischen
Polemik
vorkommen, auf der die spätere konservative Position gründet.”26
By contrast, Thorsten Jürgens maintains that the social criticism that is usually
only considered characteristic of the early period is in fact evident throughout
Roth’s work: “Roth [hat] bis zum Ende seines Lebens die gesellschaftlichen
Entwicklungen und Zustände der Zeit verfolgt und sie in seinen Werken als
Thema verwendet oder auf sie reagiert.”27 Jürgens unequivocally rejects the
suggestion that Hiob represents a turning point in Roth’s work, but at the same
time he partially adopts the interpretation of the later novels as attempting “[eine]
Wiederbelebung und Würdigung alter Werte der Habsburger Welt”.28 For him the
novels from Radetzkymarsch onwards evidence a two-fold intention: “jetzt gehen
humanistisch-sozialistische
Gesellschaftskritik
und
Konservatismus,
sich
gegenseitig befruchtend, vereint den Weg in die Vergangenheit, da die Gegenwart
blockiert zu sein scheint.”29 That none of these attempts to reconcile the
seemingly antithetical early and late work of Joseph Roth by suggesting an
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
Williams, The Broken Eagle 100.
Marchand, Wertbegriffe .
Claudio Magris, Weit von wo. Verlorene Welt des Ostjudentums, trans. Jutta Prasse (Wien:
Europa, 1974) 16. Magris also attempts a reconciliation of Roth’s work in his study of the
Habsburg Myth, in which he claims that the early novels are “ein negativer, indirekter Weg
um des Dichters Bindung an die habsburgische Welt zu bezeugen. Nihilismus und
Pessimismus sind die Reaktion auf den Zusammenbruch”: Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos
257.
Thorsten Jürgens, Gesellschaftskritische Aspekte in Joseph Roths Romanen (Leiden:
Universitaire pers, 1977) 3.
Jürgens, Gesellschaftskritische Aspekte 4.
Jürgens, Gesellschaftskritische Aspekte 4-5.
5
Introduction
underlying continuity in his political outlook has been considered convincing is
evident in the continuing prevalence of the dualistic view of Roth’s work.
While most critics do not attempt to reconcile the two generally recognized
phases of Roth’s work, many seek to account for the disparity between the two
periods with reference to an identity crisis allegedly triggered by the collapse of
the multi-national Habsburg Empire and exacerbated by the rise of National
Socialism. Robbed of his German identity by the Nazis, so the argument runs,
Roth searched in vain for a Heimat, “for rootedness in a national and cultural
identity”.30 He was a Jew in search of a fatherland,31 a “doppelter Außenseiter”32
and “heimatloser Ostjude”33 who felt compelled to lose himself in a fictive and
utopian world in which ethnic and national groups lived side by side in harmony
with one another.34 Critics cite Roth’s alcoholism, his nomadic lifestyle35 and his
tendency to fabricate aspects of his own history36 as evidence of an acute and
ongoing identity crisis, which is read into his literature in order to explain his
metamorphosis from revolutionary socialist to anti-modern monarchist.37 Yet this
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
Rosenfeld, Understanding 12.
David Bronsen, “Der Jude auf der Suche nach dem Vaterland. Joseph Roths Verhältnis zur
habsburgischen Monarchie,” Wiener Tagebuch 8 (1979). See also David Bronsen, “Austrian
versus Jew. The Torn Identity of Joseph Roth,” Leo-Baeck-Institute Year Book 18 (1973).
Katharina Ochse, Joseph Roths Auseinandersetzung mit dem Antisemitismus (Würzburg:
Königshausen + Neumann, 1999) 100. Ochse’s description refers to Roth’s situation as an
Eastern Jew in Germany, which meant that he was faced with the hostility of both antiSemites and assimilated German Jews. She also calls him an “Außenseiter unter
Außenseitern”: Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 40.
Marcel Reich-Ranicki, “Kakanien als Wille und Vorstellung,” Die Zeit, 7 December 1973.
Elsewhere Reich-Ranicki has referred to Roth as “[e]in Ostjude auf der Suche nach einer
Heimat”: Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Joseph Roth. Vortrag zur Eröffnung der Ausstellung “Joseph
Roth 1894-1939” in der Deutschen Bibliothek 29. März 1979 (Frankfurt/M.: BuchhändlerVereinigung GmbH, 1979) 11.
Rosenfeld’s pronouncement is typical: “[Radetzkymarsch] became an elegy for a lost paradise,
which had never existed in the way his longing for a rooted life led him to describe it. In its
pages, his own inner conflicts are resolved in the twilight glow of a humane vision, to which
he gave the name Austria”: Rosenfeld, Understanding 55.
Bronsen calls Roth “der ewige Nomade und unstete Bohemien”: Bronsen, Biographie 516.
David Bronsen’s description of Roth as a “Mythomane” is often cited in support of the
identity-crisis theory: Bronsen, Biographie 13.
Among the many critics who have written about Roth’s identity crisis and drawn connections
between his work and his search for identity are Bronsen, “Austrian versus Jew,” and
Bronsen, “Der Jude,” ; Martha Wörsching, “Misogyny and the Myth of Masculinity in Joseph
Roth’s Radetzkymarsch,” in Gender and Politics in Austrian Fiction, ed. Ritchie Robertson
and Edward Timms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996); Moritz Csáky, “Der
Zerfall Österreichs mit seiner Geschichte. Die Lebenswelt von Joseph Roth,” Limes 13 (1990);
Rosenfeld, Understanding; and Hüppauf, “Mythos des Skeptikers”. Herzog’s claim that
6
Introduction
recourse to biographical hermeneutics masks as much as it elucidates. The present
study seeks to demonstrate an underlying logic in the development from the early
novels of 1923 and 1924 to the so-called “Österreich-Romane”38 Radetzkymarsch
(1932) and Die Kapuzinergruft (1938). It will be argued that in all five of these
novels Roth uses literature in comparable ways. He experiments with different
forms as a means of understanding historical processes, specifically the problems
created by the historical fact of the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in Central
Europe. The “Österreich” novels do not represent a flight from the present;
instead, Roth turns to history in a conscious attempt to understand the present.
In the first chapter of the thesis, the theory that Roth experienced an identity crisis
which explains his change in focus from the post-war present to a mythical
Habsburg past is addressed and refuted. In spite of the considerable challenges to
his identity posed by German ethnic nationalism and anti-Semitism in 1920s
Austria and Germany, Roth remains convinced that identity is multivalent, and
this conviction informs the entire body of his work. An analysis of Roth’s essay
Juden auf Wanderschaft in the second half of the chapter demonstrates that his
rejection of both nationalism and Zionism as solutions to the disorder created by
the collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918 stems from his belief in the
multifaceted nature of individual identity and the importance of individual selfdetermination. His appreciation of the complexity of identity and his rejection of
both identity ascription and ideology in this essay, written during the transitional
phase of his work, is one of the threads which links the early novels with
Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft.
The second chapter analyses Roth’s novels of 1923 and 1924 as early attempts to
make sense of a chaotic and radically changed Central Europe through literature.
38
Roth’s work can be explained “aus dem doppelten Verlust” of the Habsburg Monarchy and his
Heimat in Galicia is similar: Andreas Herzog, “‘Der Segen des ewigen Juden.’ Zur ‘jüdischen’
Identität Joseph Roths,” in Habsburger Aporien? Geisteshaltungen und Lebenskonzepte in der
multinationalen Literatur der Habsburger Monarchie, ed. Eva Reichmann, Bielefelder
Schriften zu Linguistik und Literaturwissenschaft 9 (Bielefeld: Aisthesis-Verlag, 1998), 113.
Howes writes that Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft “are frequently categorized as
‘Österreich-Romane’, works of nostalgia for the lost Empire that originate in Roth’s late, socalled classical, period”: Geoffrey C. Howes, “Joseph Roth's Kapuzinergruft as a Document of
1938,” in Austrian Writers and the Anschluß: Understanding the Past - Overcoming the Past,
ed. Donald G. Daviau (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1991), 157.
7
Introduction
These novels reflect Roth’s preoccupation with the often bewildering and
unsettling experience of everyday life in the early post-war years. Roth was
already an accomplished journalist by this time but his first novels “wirken hastig,
ungeduldig, kurzatmig”, as Ulrich Greiner has commented.39 The fragmentary
impression created by these novels is almost certainly to some extent intended: in
a review of Hans Natonek’s Geld regiert die Welt Roth expressed approval of
what he called the “gesprengte[...] oder gebrochene[...] Form des Romans”,40
arguing that it was the only form which could represent the times accurately:
O tempora, o homines! Fragmente sind alle: die Gestalten und ihre Darstellungen, die Zeit und ihre Zeitbilder. […] Die fragmentarische Form des
Berichts entspricht vollkommen der fragmentarischen Gestalt. (III, 268-69)
The
disjointed
structure
and
curiously
incomplete
or
underdeveloped
characterization in Roth’s early novels seem on one level an appropriate response
to and reflection of a world in which there appeared suddenly to be “less ordering
vision, less coherence and comprehension, less certainty”.41 Yet while it might be
argued that with the fragmentary form Roth is attempting “der veränderten
Realität auch formal gerecht zu werden”,42 these novels must also be seen as not
entirely successful experiments with form. In his early fiction Roth is struggling
to find a form which will give adequate expression to the problems he observes in
German-speaking Central Europe, a form he finally finds with the historical novel
Radetzkymarsch.
39
40
41
42
Ulrich Greiner, “Joseph Roth,” in Österreichische Porträts. Leben und Werk bedeutender
Persönlichkeiten von Maria Theresia bis Ingeborg Bachmann, ed. Jochen Jung (Salzburg;
Wien: Rezidenz-Verlag, 1985), 360. Nürnberger writes of Das Spinnennetz in similar terms:
“So deutlich wie die künstlerischen Schwächen des Romans […] ist der Scharfblick des
Autors für seine Zeit. […] Die Ausführung ist sprunghaft, die Charakteristik wirkt erdacht und
kraftlos”: Helmuth Nürnberger, Joseph Roth. Mit Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten
(Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1999) 63. See also Peter Wilhelm Jansen, “Weltbezug und
Erzählhaltung. Eine Untersuchung zum Erzählwerk und zur dichterischen Existenz Joseph
Roths” (Ph.D, Freiburg, 1958) 45; and Bronsen, Biographie 239.
Joseph Roth, “Die gesprengte Romanform”, Die Literarische Welt, 12.12.1930 (III, 267).
Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped
Our World View (London: Pimlico, 1996) 388.
Johann Sonnleitner, “Macht, Identität und Verwandlung. Joseph Roths frühe Romane,” in Coexistent Contradictions: Joseph Roth in Retrospect. Papers of the 1989 Joseph Roth
Symposium at Leeds University to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death, ed. Helen
Chambers (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1991), 171.
8
Introduction
In searching for form in the early novels, Roth examines various possible
solutions to the chaos he observes – ethnic nationalism, socialism, American
capitalism, individual withdrawal from political and social engagement – but finds
none of them to be satisfactory. As an assimilated Jew who grew up in the multiethnic Habsburg province of Galicia, Roth was sceptical of both ethnic
nationalism and Zionism, as the first chapter of the thesis will demonstrate. In the
early novels he extends this scepticism to other modes of thought which aim at
absolute or total solutions. His deep pessimism about the future is reflected in the
apocalyptic imagery which features in each of these novels, yet in each case the
apocalypse is not fully realized. Roth ultimately rejects apocalyptic endings
because, as he well realized, such endings were a symptom of contemporary
problems rather than a constructive response: as a Central European Jew he would
ultimately look to history as the only answer to the questions of the times.
Roth’s rejection of the apocalyptic paradigm is indicative of his insistence on the
importance of continuing to engage with political and social questions, despite his
pessimism about the future development of Europe. His deep concern about the
retreat from reason and aversion to politics he found among many intellectuals in
the Weimar Republic43 is expressed in a 1924 review of Heinrich Mann’s Die
Diktatur der Vernunft.44 Roth writes of the imperative of political engagement for
the German writer of the present day, citing Mann as an exemplar, and pens a
harsh polemic against the unpolitical German writer. Comparing intellectuals of
the Weimar Republic with those of bygone eras, he comments that since Goethe
poets in Germany have considered it their duty not to be politically engaged but to
undertake a “Reise nach Italien”, both literal and metaphoric:
Immer war es eine vorgetäuschte ‘innere Notwendigkeit’, die verwerflichen,
unwürdigen Zustände des nationalen, politischen, sozialen Diesseits zu
vergessen und von den heiteren Himmeln anderer Zonen das sogenannte
‘innere Gleichgewicht’ zu entlehnen. Ach, wie leicht erhielt man das innere
Gleichgewicht! Es wurde wenigstens niemals hörbar erschüttert. (II, 59)
43
44
On the widespread rejection of politics and reason in the Weimar Republic, see Peter Gay,
Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968) 70-96.
Joseph Roth, “Der tapfere Dichter”, Vorwärts 20.2.1924 (II, 59-61).
9
Introduction
Roth prophesies a time when the Weimar Republic will have fallen due to the
failure of writers to defend it, and warns that then it will be far too late for these
intellectuals to turn their attention to its fate:
In einigen Jahren, wenn die Republik eine Legende geworden, wird sie ihnen
das gegebene ‘distanzierte’ Thema geworden sein. Denn ihr Blick ist so auf
die Nachwelt gerichtet, daß sie an dem Untergang der Mitwelt schuldig
werden. (II, 61)
Roth’s early novels, written in the same period as this review, are set in the
present and are clearly socially and politically engaged. That he began to set his
novels in the past should not, however, be understood as an expression of his own
desire to undertake a “Reise nach Italian”, as Wörsching contends,45 but should be
seen as representing only a change of emphasis. In the early novels Roth
repeatedly suggests a historical continuity between past and present, despite the
apparent radical break represented by the war, the revolution, and the dissolution
of the Empire. In turning to the Habsburg Empire with Radetzkymarsch Roth is
not seeking to create a utopian ideal, as has been generally argued, but is
attempting to make sense of the present through an exploration of the past.
Chapter 3 therefore analyses Radetzkymarsch as a historical novel in the terms
proposed by Georg Lukács, who argues that the portrayal of the past aids in
achieving “a real understanding for the problems of contemporary society”.46
While Lukács subordinated his view of history to a Marxist scheme in which the
final stage would be that of the classless society, his insight into the structure of
the historical novel remains valid and valuable. The interpretation of
Radetzkymarsch as a historical novel in Lukács’s sense aims at refuting the more
common view that in this novel the present is relevant only as a catalyst to Roth’s
“flight from reality”:47
45
46
47
Wörsching explicitly charges Roth with having described his own subsequent position in the
1924 article: Martha Wörsching, “Die rückwärts gewandte Utopie. Sozialpsychologische
Anmerkungen zu Joseph Roths Roman Radetzkymarsch,” in Joseph Roth. Text + Kritik
Sonderband, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (München: edition text + kritik, 1974), 90.
Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin
Press, 1962) 231.
Wagner takes a slightly different view of the relevance of the present, arguing that Roth holds
his idealized image of the past “verklärend” up to his immediate present: Margarete Wagner,
“Abgrenzungen und Entgrenzungen in Joseph Roths Radetzkymarsch,” Stimulus. Mitteilungen
der Österreichischen Gesellschaft für Germanistik 1, no. 2 (2002): 187. However, while this
10
Introduction
[T]he political circumstances of the early 1930s, along with the calamities of
his personal life, […] led Roth to take flight from the present and seek solace
in a subjectively transfigured past.48
Hilde Spiel, Roth’s compatriot and herself a writer, declares that with
Radetzkymarsch the reporter Roth finally became a poet (“Dichter”), but at the
same time he was also already
auf dem Weg zu einem rührend gegenwartsfremden Monarchismus, [er]
flüchtete […] in diese Anschauung vor der Oligarchie der Sowjetunion wie
vor der faschistischen Drohung und trank sich allmählich in die rückwärtsgewandte Utopie hinein.49
While few have expressed it quite as poetically as Spiel, a majority of critics share
her view of Radetzkymarsch as both a great work of literature and a nostalgic
elegy to an idealized lost world.50 Scholars routinely employ the expression
“rückwärts gewandte Utopie”,51 or a similar formulation52 to express the same
48
49
50
51
interpretation suggests that Roth is not completely turning his back on the present and fleeing
into the (idealized) past, it still implies an absence of connection between the past and the
present in Roth’s eyes.
Rosenfeld, Understanding 47. See also Hartmut Scheible, “Joseph Roths Flucht aus der
Geschichte,” in Joseph Roth. Text + Kritik Sonderband, ed. Heinz Ludwig Arnold (München:
edition text + kritik, 1974), 57; John Pizer, “‘Last Austrians’ in ‘Turn of the Century’ Works
by Franz Grillparzer, Joseph Roth and Alfred Kolleritsch,” The German Quarterly 74 (2001):
8; Alan Menhennet, “Flight of a Broken Eagle. Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch,” New German
Studies 11 (1983): 47; Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos 258; Alfred Doppler, “Historische
Ereignisse im österreichischen Roman. J. Roth Radetzkymarsch - H. v. Doderer Die Dämonen
- G. Saiko Der Mann im Schilf,” in Geschichte in der österreichischen Literatur des 19. und
20. Jahrhunderts (Wien: Hirt, 1970), 75; Wörsching, “Radetzkymarsch,” 99.
Hilde Spiel, “Eine Welt voller Enkel,” in Romane von gestern - heute gelesen, ed. Marcel
Reich-Ranicki (Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer, 1989), 357. Spiel seems to imply here that the
process of withdrawal from reality was only beginning when Roth published Radetzkymarsch,
yet she then claims that in the last eight or nine years of his life – i.e. from 1930 or 1931 –
Roth was “nur noch Legitimist.” Subsequently she argues that he was well aware of the
impossibility of a restoration of the monarchy, and knowingly took flight from reality: Spiel,
“Eine Welt voller Enkel,” 358.
I refer here to criticism of Roth’s work since he was rediscovered in the 1950s. As Fritz
Hackert notes, despite Roth’s own preface to the newspaper serialization of the novel, which
is generally understood as a declaration of love to the Empire, contemporary critics did not
read the novel as a nostalgic idealization: “Eine nostalgische Verklärung der k.u.k.-Monarchie
in dem Roman zu erblicken konnte keinem Zeitgenossen gelingen”: Fritz Hackert,
“Nachwort” (V, 892).
See, for example, Reich-Ranicki, “Kakanien”; Reich-Ranicki, Vortrag 17; Csáky, “Der Zerfall
Österreichs,” 14; Zoran Konstantinovic, “Joseph Roth und die Südslawen: Blickpunkte und
Rezeptionsmerkmale,” in Joseph Roth. Interpretation Rezeption Kritik, ed. Michael Kessler
and Fritz Hackert (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1990), 181; Wörsching, “Radetzkymarsch,”;
Dieter Kessler, “Überdauern im ewigen Untergang. Die gottgegebene, in Gott aufgehobene
Auflösung der Habsburgermonarchie in Joseph Roths Utopie Radetzkymarsch. Ist Österreich
eine Nothwendigkeit?,” Zeitschrift für Germanistik. N.F 3 (1995); Matthias Hansen,
“Rechtspolitik und Linkskultur. Exilpositionen von Joseph Roth und Arnold Schönberg,” Sinn
und Form 36, no. 1 (1984): 146.
11
Introduction
idea: thus the Habsburg Empire portrayed in Radetzkymarsch has been called a
“utopian construct”,53 “an imaginary world of [Roth’s] own making”,54 a “utopian
vision of what might have been”,55 “a promised land”,56 a “lost paradise”,57
“Roth’s own nostalgic wish dream”.58 What exactly is meant by these variations
on a utopian theme is, however, far from clear. On the face of it, the idea of a
backward-turned utopia is a paradox: utopias imagine the future, not the past; they
draw us onward, impelling us forward to a better tomorrow. Utopias typically
depict a harmonious and just society which offers freedom from danger, injustice,
physical and mental want, insecurity, and negative human passions such as anger,
envy and hatred. A utopia that imagines not the future but the past in these terms
connotes political and social conservatism, regressiveness, even reaction.
Yet few critics who employ the term utopia or one of its synonyms actually
interpret Radetzkymarsch as an unmitigated idealization of the Habsburg Empire.
Those who do, such as Martha Wörsching and Wolf Marchand, certainly view the
novel as regressive in its ideology. Wörsching’s feminist reading of the novel
explains “the gendered nature” of Roth’s text as “a particular type of masculinity
as ideology”:59
Roth’s ‘backward-looking utopia’ […] turns out to be a place inhabited by
men only, being ‘cleansed’ of women; in this patriarchal mythology, women
are dismissed in the asides or dealt with as exasperations, as diversions from
the straight path towards male individual autonomy.60
Wörsching explicitly rejects the possibility of interpreting Radetzkymarsch as a
historical novel about the decline of the Empire, declaring that it is instead “a
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
Pazi refers to Roth’s “nach rückwärts gewandten Wunschvorstellungen”: Margarita Pazi,
“Exil-Bewußtsein und Heimat-Illusionen bei Joseph Roth,” in Wider den Faschismus:
Exilliteratur als Geschichte, ed. Sigrid Bauschinger and Susan L. Cocalis (Tübingen; Basel:
Francke, 1993), 188.
Wörsching, “Misogyny,” 119.
David Bronsen, “The Jew in Search of a Fatherland: The Relationship of Joseph Roth to the
Habsburg Monarchy,” The Germanic Review 54 (1979): 59.
Bronsen, “The Jew,” 59.
Curt Sanger, “The Figure of the Non-hero in the Austrian Novels of Joseph Roth,” Modern
Austrian Literature 4, no. 2 (1969): 37.
12
Introduction
utopian construct of ‘life praxis’ which, in [Roth’s] view, is the only avenue left
for the artist (male) genius”.61 The world Roth idealizes in his reconstruction of
the Habsburg past embraces “the legacy of archetypal patriarchs”,62 male
individuation being achieved through the control and subordination of women.63
This interpretation relies heavily on a psychoanalytic reading of the author’s life
in which Wörsching argues that Roth’s “mythology of masculinity” is an
expression of a desperate desire to belong64 which stemmed from his problematic
identity as a Jewish man65 and his struggle to free himself from dependence on his
mother and mother-figures.66
Wolf Marchand goes even further than Wörsching, declaring that the past that is
uncritically idealized by Roth is prior to the Habsburg Empire actually depicted:
Der Radetzkymarsch ist ganz und gar ein sehnsüchtiges Beschwören der
verlorenen bäuerlichen Herkunft. Der Untergang der Trottas und des Reiches
ist eine Folge der Entwurzelung, Entartung, des verlorenen Zusammenhangs
mit elementaren, vorrationalen Urwerten. Aus dem beständigen Bewußtsein
der Trottas und vor allem Carl Josephs, diesen Zusammenhang verloren zu
haben, konstituiert sich der Roman.67
The patriarchal and arcadian utopias which Wörsching’s and Marchand’s
interpretations respectively identify are politically and socially regressive and thus
consistent with the connotations of the phrase backward-turned utopia. However,
when other critics employ this term in the analysis of Radetzkymarsch, the
necessary implication that the novel is informed by a regressive ideology is often
undercut by the critics’ conclusion that the novel is not simply a nostalgic paean
to an idealized lost world, but contains a measure of criticism of the world
portrayed.68
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
Wörsching, “Misogyny,” 119, 130.
Marchand, Wertbegriffe 199.
See, for example, Menhennet, “Flight of a Broken Eagle,”; Bruce Thompson, “‘Schlecht
kommen wir beide dabei nicht weg!’ Joseph Roth’s satire on the Emperor Franz Joseph in his
novel Radetzkymarsch,” Neophilologus 81 (1997); Reifowitz, “Nationalism, Modernity”.
13
Introduction
A similar paradox is evident in the association of Roth with the Habsburg Myth,
from which the concept of Radetzkymarsch as a backward-turned utopia probably
derives.69 The term Habsburg Myth was coined by the Italian Habsburg scholar
Claudio Magris, whose enormously influential doctoral thesis on the subject was
published as Il Mito Absburgico nella letteratura austriaca moderna in 1963.70
Magris argues that when the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed in 1918,
intellectuals and writers saw the foundations of their lives and their culture
destroyed. They were unable to cope with the demands of a vastly changed
political climate, and looking back remembered Habsburg Austria
[als] eine glückliche und harmonische Zeit, als geordnetes und märchenhaftes
Mitteleuropa […], in dem die Zeit nicht so schnell verging und in dem man
es nicht so eilig hatte, Dinge und Empfindungen zu vergessen. In ihrer
Erinnerung wurde dieses Österreich zu einem ‘goldenen Zeitalter der
Sicherheit’.71
While these writers were often aware of the shortcomings of this “world of
yesterday”, it became in their memory an “ideal fatherland” which had preserved
virtues absent from the new world: a sense of decency and correctness, respect
and peace, and even a zest for life.72 Magris contends that the metamorphosis of
the Empire in the imagination and writings of such intellectuals characterizes a
large part of Austrian literature written after 1918.73 The emotional remembering
of the world of yesterday is combined with a partly conscious, partly unconscious
process of sublimation of a concrete society into a picturesque, secure and ordered
fairytale world.74
69
70
71
72
73
74
Cf. Schmidt-Dengler: “Wenn ich recht sehe, schleicht sich bei Magris ein Terminus ein, mit
dem Roth zuvor nicht so intensiv belegt worden war, nämlich der des Mythos”: SchmidtDengler, “Auf der Wanderschaft,” 23.
Claudio Magris, Il Mito Absburgico nella letteratura austriaca moderna (Torino: Giulio
Einaudi, 1963). The German translation was published three years later: Magris, Der
habsburgische Mythos.
Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos 7. The quotation is from Stefan Zweig’s Die Welt von
gestern, written in 1940-41 (Gütersloh, 1960) 14.
Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos 8.
Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos 8. The origins of the myth lie much further back, in the
early years of the nineteenth century, “als die Monarchie noch eine große Macht war, sich
aber schon dem Untergang näherte. Und mit herannahendem Ende treten [seine Motive]
immer deutlicher hervor”: Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos 21.
Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos 9. For a critique of Magris’s thesis, see Walter Weiss,
“Österreichische Literatur – eine Gefangene des habsburgischen Mythos?” Deutsche
Vierteljahrsschrift für Literatur und Geistesgeschichte 43 (1969).
14
Introduction
Magris declares that an ironic tone and intent do not necessarily preclude an
author from falling prey to the transfiguring Habsburg Myth, citing Robert
Musil’s Mann ohne Eigenschaften as a case in point.75 He differentiates between
merely ironic depictions, which still perpetuate the Habsburg Myth, and texts
which attempt to demythologize the past and unmask some of the more celebrated
values of the Habsburg tradition.76 Choosing Roth as one of six case studies of
writers who maintain the Habsburg Myth after the First World War,77 Magris
writes that Radetzkymarsch perpetuates the myth without becoming an empty
glorification of a lost world. It is, he argues,
ganz einfach ein Roman, der jene Welt begriffen hat. Die Sympathien oder
Antipathien des Menschen Roth zählen dabei nicht; wichtig ist, daß Roth die
Auflösung des habsburgischen Mitteleuropa verstanden hat und ihm nun
nicht – wie angenommen wurde – eine Elegie, sondern ein Epos widmete.78
Significantly, however, he implicitly contradicts his own conclusion earlier in the
study when he writes that the spectre of Nazism intensified the yearning of writers
for Habsburg times, increasing national tensions heightening the supranational
element of the myth in particular:
In der Tat entstehen die schwärmerischesten, leidenschaftlichsten Beschreibungen dieser Welt zu einer Zeit, da der Nazismus an Boden gewinnt oder
sich schon festgesetzt hat, und sind größtenteils jüdischen Schriftstellern, wie
Werfel oder Roth, zu verdanken.79
Magris’s endnote cites both Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft as examples
of these “effusive” portraits.80 This same contradiction – Magris’s interpretation
of Radetzkymarsch as dispassionate epic on the one hand and effusive elegy on
the other81 – characterizes much of the criticism of Radetzkymarsch as a
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos 9-10, 278f.
Magris cites Ödon von Horváth’s Geschichten aus dem Wienerwald (1931) as a text which
does not perpetuate the myth: Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos 244.
Magris states that the myth is brought to its zenith after the collapse of the Empire, and that
for modern generations the reality of the Habsburg Empire has been almost completely
superseded by the myth, “so daß die Donaumonarchie nun mehr das Reich Werfels, Roths
oder Musils, als jenes der Staatsmänner Berchtold und Tisza ist”: Magris, Der habsburgische
Mythos 239.
Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos 243-44.
Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos 342, note 10.
In a subsequent monograph on Roth Magris contends that the author “[rückt] das
Habsburgerreich in eine verklärte übergeschichtliche Dimension”: Magris, Weit von wo 15.
15
Introduction
backward-turned utopia and accounts for some of the lack of clarity in the use and
meaning of the term.
Whatever else it implies, the description of Roth’s novel as a utopia signifies the
creation of a world both ideal and unreal, a world which by definition does not,
and did not, exist. By contrast, the interpretation offered in the third chapter of
this thesis argues that far from presenting an idealized version of the last half
century of Habsburg rule Roth sets out to expose the Habsburg Myth, and in so
doing reveals the very real connections between the structures and norms of this
period and the rampant nationalism of his own time. In this sense Radetzkymarsch
conforms entirely to Lukács’s model of the historical novel: it represents the
disintegration of the Habsburg Empire not in terms of grand historical events, but
rather in terms of the lives of everyday figures and, by revealing the past as
“prehistory” of the present, contributes to an understanding of Roth’s own time.
A central element of my interpretation of Radetzkymarsch in these terms is the
close analysis of what Sarah Fraiman has called Roth’s “schwankende
Erzählhaltung”,82 a narrative stance which is also relevant to the other novels
under consideration in this study. Roth’s first person narrators Gabriel Dan (Hotel
Savoy) and Franz Ferdinand Trotta (Die Kapuzinergruft) are unreliable, and
careful attention must be paid to contradictions within the narrative and between
the narrator’s words and his actions. In the case of the third person narratives Das
Spinnennetz, Die Rebellion and especially Radetzkymarsch, the reader has to
contend with an omniscient narrator who makes comments which, upon closer
inspection, cannot always or necessarily be taken at face value.83 The narrator is
elusive, oscillating almost imperceptibly between a distanced point-of-view –
often with ironic undertones – and the perspective of the characters, whereby the
narrator sometimes identifies with this perspective and sometimes maintains
ironic distance. Roth makes frequent use, particularly in Radetzkymarsch, of
erlebte Rede,84 a technique which obscures the narrative perspective, making it
82
83
84
Sarah Fraiman, “Joseph Roth: Dichter des Offenen,” Bulletin des Leo Baeck Instituts 76
(1987): 41.
Cf. Fraiman, “Dichter des Offenen,” 35.
See Werner Hoffmeister, “‘Eine ganz bestimmte Art von Sympathie’: Erzählhaltung und
Gedankenschilderung im Radetzkymarsch,” in Joseph Roth und die Tradition, ed. David
16
Introduction
unclear whether a particular statement or thought should be attributed to the
character or to the narrator.85 In grammatical terms there is no difference between
erlebte Rede and the form of the omniscient narrator: third person and past tense
characterize both.86 But erlebte Rede gives expression to the subjective thoughts
of the character87 and allows for the creation of an ironic and critical distance
between the narrator and the character, while the overall sympathetic narrative
stance is seemingly retained.88 The interpretation of a given passage as erlebte
Rede depends on context and on a wide variety of linguistic indicators, “die den
objektiven Berichtton aufheben und dem Bericht eine subjektive, expressive oder
emotionale Note geben.”89 Much of Roth’s criticism of the Habsburg Monarchy is
revealed through passages of erlebte Rede, and thus it is unsurprising that readers
who overlook this aspect of narrative technique come to a one-sided interpretation
of the novel as a nostalgic evocation of an idealized past.90
While many of the critics who view Radetzkymarsch in these terms acknowledge
that Roth expresses some criticism of the world portrayed in this novel, they are
virtually unanimous in their assessment of its sequel, Die Kapuzinergruft, as
presenting an idealized vision of the fallen Habsburg Monarchy which is entirely
untempered by critical undertones. Roth’s final novel is generally interpreted in
85
86
87
88
89
90
Bronsen (Darmstadt: Agora, 1975). Hoffmeister defines the term erlebte Rede in Werner
Hoffmeister, Studien zur erlebten Rede bei Thomas Mann und Robert Musil (The Hague:
Mouton, 1965) 11-44. The German terminology is retained here because there is no adequate
English translation. Although erlebte Rede is often translated as interior monologue, it is a
stylistic form which may be part of an interior monologue but is “eine ihrem Ursprung und
Wesen nach eigenständige sprachliche Form der Rede- oder Gedankenwiedergabe”:
Hoffmeister, Studien zur erlebten Rede 8. Hoffmeister distinguishes between three forms of
rendering speech and thought in narrative: direct speech, indirect speech and erlebte Rede:
Hoffmeister, Studien zur erlebten Rede 12.
Fraiman, “Dichter des Offenen,” 41.
Hoffmeister, Studien zur erlebten Rede 30. The construction of erlebte Rede is highly
individual from case to case. Nevertheless Hoffmeister argues that there are certain
similarities that can be discerned. He attempts a typology on pages 33-44, whereby he
stresses: “Meistens wirken mehrere [sprachliche] Indizien zusammen, um den Eindruck des
Gedachten oder Gesprochenen im Leser zu erwecken. Immer aber ist die Situation, der
Erzählzusammenhang für die Beurteilung der erlebten Rede entscheidend”: Hoffmeister,
Studien zur erlebten Rede 33.
Cf. Fraiman, who warns against assuming that the narrator shares the characters’ perspective
and that “Interpretationen, die sich allein auf inhaltliche Momente stützen, können fehlgehen”:
17
Introduction
the light of his avowed monarchism at this time, with little or no attempt made to
differentiate between the fictional text and Roth’s journalistic interventions on
behalf of the heir to the Habsburg throne. Thus Dollenmayer, for example, asserts
that in Die Kapuzinergruft “Roth has become an unabashed apologist for the
Habsburgs”,91 and Williams goes so far as to label the novel propaganda.92 In
contrast to these interpretations, I argue in the fourth and final chapter of this
thesis that Roth does not idealize the past, instead continuing the dialogue
between past and present begun in the historical novel Radetzkymarsch six years
earlier. Once again using literature to make sense of historical processes, Roth
reveals strong parallels between the failure of Austrians to prevent the collapse of
the Habsburg Monarchy in the past and their failure in 1938 to prevent the
political catastrophe of the Anschluß. Rather than sharing the naïve nostalgia of
his protagonist and narrator Franz Ferdinand, Roth condemns the fictional
character’s apathy and his refusal to engage with reality, thus echoing his 1924
condemnation of the political and moral negligence of German intellectuals.
While the early novels are set entirely in the post-war present and Die
Kapuzinergruft bridges past and present, it is with the historical novel
Radetzkymarsch that Roth finds the form with which he can best give literary
expression to contemporary reality. Here he recognizes that the understanding of
the present can be achieved only through insight into how we have become who
we are. This thesis demonstrates that what links Roth’s early novels with
Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft is the author’s ongoing concern with the
state of post-war German-speaking Central Europe. Far from being an attempt to
erase “die Spuren zur Gegenwart”,93 Roth’s “march into history” reveals the
present in all its complexity.
91
92
93
David Dollenmayer, “History as Fiction: The Kaiser in Joseph Roth's Radetzkymarsch,”
Modern Language Studies 16 (1986): 309.
Williams, The Broken Eagle 108 Menhennet cites and concurs with Williams’s assessment:
Menhennet, “Flight of a Broken Eagle,” 61.
Wörsching, “Radetzkymarsch,” 95.
18
Chapter 1
“Hinter dem Zaun”94
Identity and Ideology
Ich bin ein Franzose aus dem Osten, ein
Humanist, ein Rationalist mit Religion, ein
Katholik mit jüdischem Gehirn, ein wirklicher
Revolutionär.95
A Central European Experience
Since the rediscovery of Roth’s early work critics have identified two seemingly
antithetical points of view in his novels and hence have had to grapple with the
problem of how to explain the differences. The most common response has been
to point to a deep sense of personal crisis which saw Roth take flight from an
increasingly unbearable reality from the late 1920s. Most recently, John Heath has
drawn a parallel between Radetzkymarsch, which he reads as “symptomatic of its
author’s lamenting the loss of order in post-war confusion” and Roth’s life, which
he calls “episodic, a nomadic journey from hotel to hotel across Europe”.96 Moritz
Csáky supports the thesis of a radical change in Roth’s outlook triggered by an
identity crisis, but where other critics simply locate the origins of this crisis in the
historical events of the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the rise of National
Socialism, Csáky presents a more differentiated analysis, arguing that Roth’s
response to these events was determined by a specifically Central European
historical consciousness.97 The particular character of Central Europe, with its
dense patchwork of peoples, languages and cultures,98 had developed over
centuries of cross-cultural contact and acculturation.99 Yet the very same
94
95
96
97
98
99
Joseph Roth, “Die weißen Städte” (II, 453). This series was not published during Roth’s
lifetime, but Klaus Westermann, editor of Roth’s journalism in the Werkausgabe, concludes
that it was written in 1925 after Roth’s return from France (II, 1005).
Letter to Benno Reifenberg, 1.10.1926, Joseph Roth: Briefe 1911-1939, ed. Hermann Kesten
(Köln; Berlin: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1970) 98.
John Heath, “The Legacy of the Baroque in the Novels of Joseph Roth,” Forum for Modern
Language Studies 40, no. 3 (2004): 337.
Csáky, “Der Zerfall Österreichs,” passim.
For a comprehensive account of the nationalities of the Habsburg Monarchy in its last seventy
years of existence see Valeria Heuberger, Unter dem Doppeladler: Die Nationalitäten der
Habsburger Monarchie 1848-1918 (Wien; München: Verlag Christian Brandstätter, 1997).
Csáky, “Der Zerfall Österreichs,” 9.
19
Chapter 1: Identity and Ideology
conditions which gave this region its unity and its inhabitants a common
overarching identity had also bred national chauvinism and xenophobia.100 The
fall of the Habsburg Empire and the creation of nation-states was the end of a
process of the privileging of one element of identity over another which was well
underway by the first half of the nineteenth century.101 Nevertheless, the sudden
change in borders and ethnic composition of what was left of Austria after 1919102
necessitated a denial or at least a partial suppression of a history of ethnic and
cultural diversity and of an “Österreichbewußtsein”, the existence of which had
been unquestionably accepted just a few years earlier.103 This “Zerfall mit der
Geschichte”104 triggered “eine Identitätskrise, die sich sowohl im öffentlichen,
politischen Leben, als auch in einer Orientierungslosigkeit von Einzelindividuen
manifestierte.”105
Roth, then, was not alone in his identity crisis. On the contrary, in his multifaceted
identity as an assimilated German-speaking Eastern Jew106 he was typical of what
Csáky calls “eine durch einen Prozess von Akkulturation zustandegekommene
Intelligenz”.107 This intelligentsia had a heightened consciousness of the ethnic,
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
Csáky, “Der Zerfall Österreichs,” 9. Csáky is referring here to the linguistic nationalism which
swept through Central and Eastern Europe in the nineteenth century.
Clemenceau famously said: “L’Autriche, c’est ce qui reste” (“Austria is what is left over”):
quoted in Edward Timms, “Citizenship and ‘Heimatrecht’ after the Treaty of Saint-Germain,”
in The Habsburg Legacy: National Identity in Historical Perspective, ed. Ritchie Robertson
and Edward Timms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 159.
Csáky quotes at length from Alfred Berger’s 1910 discussion of “österreichischer
Patriotismus” in Buch der Heimat vol. 1 (Berlin 1910) 38-39: Csáky, “Der Zerfall
Österreichs,” 10-11.
With this phrase, used several times in his article, Csáky evokes Broch’s “Zerfall der Werte”.
“During and after the era of Emancipation and Assimilation many Eastern European Jews
championed the ideals of acculturation and assimilation and embraced the German language
as their medium for realizing their aspirations of becoming citizens with equal rights and equal
social status”: Dagmar C.G. Lorenz, “Separate Reality, Separate Nations? Austria in the
Works of Jewish and Non-Jewish Authors,” in Austria in Literature, ed. Donald G. Daviau,
Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture and Thought (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 2000),
132. Assimilation to this German linguistic culture was achieved through Bildung: Steven
Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867-1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989) 148. See also Steven Beller, “A Tale of Two Cities: Herzl's Vienna;
Hitler's Vienna,” in Vienna: The World of Yesterday, 1889-1914, ed. Stephen Eric Bronner
and F. Peter Wagner (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1997), 260. On the concept of Bildung in
German culture see Georg Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur: Glanz und Elend eines deutschen
Deutungsmusters (Frankfurt/M.; Leipzig: Insel, 1994).
20
linguistic and cultural plurality of the region and consequently was affected
intensely by the fall of the Empire and the creation of new nation-states:108
Österreich war für diese [Intelligenz] ein Überbegriff gewesen, in welchem
all die verschiedenen Identitäten zusammengefaßt schienen, Österreich
repräsentierte ein mitteleuropäisches Bewußtsein, das nun par force zerstört
und in nationale Bewußtseinsinhalte aufgeteilt wurde. Hier in diesem
politischen und soziokulturellen Kontext liegt wohl ein wesentlicher Zugang
zu einer Deutung der Gedankenwelt von Joseph Roth.109
Csáky understands all of Roth’s work to be part of an ongoing search for identity,
for a way out of his identity crisis, which was both individual and symptomatic of
his time and place in Central European history. Yet if the crisis which Roth was
experiencing was typical, then it may equally be argued that he was no more
uncertain of his identity than any other person in the highly uncertain times in
which he lived.110 Uncertainty about identity is one of the characteristics of the
inter-war era from Thomas Mann to Hermann Broch. The capacity of the identity
crisis theory to explain Roth’s metamorphosis from socialist to monarchist is
thereby undermined. Csáky demonstrates that Roth’s outlook was informed by a
specifically Central European historical consciousness and his multifaceted
identity as an Eastern European Jew assimilated to the German culture. However,
on the basis of this argument it is possible to draw a different conclusion from that
arrived at by Csáky: namely, the driving force behind Roth’s work is not an acute
identity crisis triggered by nationalism and the dissolution of the Habsburg
Empire, but a deep distrust of nationalism and other ideologies based on a firmly
held conviction, drawn from experience, that identity is plural and cannot be
reduced to a single element. Sensitized as a Galician Jew to reject both
nationalism and Zionism as solutions to the problems of post-war Central Europe,
108
109
110
Details from Bronsen’s biography indicate that Roth was certainly typical of the Habsburg
intelligentsia described by Csáky: his formative years were spent in the plurality of cultures
and languages characteristic of the eastern parts of the Habsburg realm. German, Ukrainian,
Polish and Yiddish were all widely spoken in Brody. As a young man Roth was fluent in
German, competent in Yiddish and Polish, familiar with Ukrainian and could read Russian. He
learned Hebrew in primary school and retained enough to be able to translate Hebrew prayers
thirty-five years later: Bronsen, Biographie 120-22.
For Csáky, it was not even primarily a Jewish problem but a problem of the German-speaking
Habsburg intelligentsia. On the predominance of Jews at this time in fields ranging from
music through science to literature and philosophy see Beller, Vienna and the Jews.
21
Roth also comes to reject socialism as a similarly absolute solution – already in
his early, so-called “socialist” novels.111
From the late eighteenth century, modernizing Jews in the Habsburg Empire
adopted German language and culture.112 Roth identified from an early age with
the German cultural world of Goethe and Schiller,113 and as a Galician schoolboy
assimilated eagerly into the German culture, eschewing the Orthodox ways of his
maternal grandfather.114 But his German identity was cultural, not ethnic: for the
majority of assimilated Jews in the Habsburg Empire in fact, cultural
identification could not mean ethnic identification, and Galician or Bohemian
Jews “might be German by culture, but they were not members of the German
‘Volk’.”115 This distinction can be confusing for readers from a Western European
or Anglo-Saxon tradition because the terms ethnic, cultural and national have
distinct connotations in relation to Central Europe which are absent from the
Western European and Anglo-Saxon context. The Hungarian historian István
Bibó provides perhaps the most penetrating analysis of the differences in his study
of the problems inherent in the political order created in Central Europe in
111
112
113
114
115
Cf. Herzog, who writes that Roth’s Jewish identity consists “in einer multiplen Existenz […],
die sich der Identifizierung mit einem Vaterland, einem ideologischen System, einer
Konfession, aber auch einer Idee konsequent verweigert”: Herzog, “Der Segen,” 115.
From the late nineteenth century, rising Magyar, Czech and Polish nationalism created a
situation in which the majority of Jews in Hungary and some in Bohemia and Galicia came to
identify with the Magyar, Czech and Polish cultures respectively: Marsha L. Rozenblit, “The
Dilemma of Identity: The Impact of the First World War on Habsburg Jewry,” in The
Habsburg Legacy: National Identity in Historical Perspective, ed. Ritchie Robertson and
Edward Timms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 144. Roth’s family, however,
had already assimilated to German culture in his mother’s generation.
This identification continued, despite the ascendancy of the Nazis. In a letter to Stefan Zweig
dated 22 March 1933, Roth declared: “Unsere Ahnen sind Goethe Lessing Herder nicht
minder als Abraham Isaac und Jacob”: Briefe 257. Cf. Bronsen, Biographie 81.
As a teenager Roth declared: “Ich bin Assimilant! […] kein polnischer Assimilant, sondern
ein österreichischer”: Bronsen, Biographie 82. The use of the word “österreichisch” prior to
World War I signified “an Austrian of German culture”: Rosenfeld, Understanding 7. In the
1930s Roth became aware of German as a “pluricentric language” (Clyne), and began to
emphasize differences between a German-German and an Austrian-German language and
identity. He declared in 1937/38: “Die geistige Herkunft der österreichischen Sprache ist eine
andere als ihre klangliche”: Joseph Roth, “Das alte Österreich”, in Berliner Saisonberichte:
Unbekannte Reportages und journalistische Arbeiten 1920-1939, edited by Klaus Westermann
(Köln, 1984): 427; cited in Csáky, “Der Zerfall Österreichs,” 12.
Rozenblit, “Dilemma of Identity,” 144. Bibó explains the crucial difference between the
Western European idea of a people (French peuple), with its emphasis on democratic
representation, and the German Volk, which in Central and Eastern Europe emphasized the
people’s role as the bearer of national characteristics: István Bibó, Die Misere der
osteuropäischen Kleinstaaterei, trans. Béla Rásky (Frankfurt/M.: Neue Kritik, 1992) 18.
22
1919.116 Bibó explains that when modern democratic nationalism spread through
Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, there was little doubt in Northern and
Western Europe that the territory which was the basis of the democratic
nationalist claim was the state which already existed, France and Britain being the
model cases.117 In Central Europe, by contrast, nationalism as a political and
ideological movement arose in a context in which there was no pre-existing
political entity to which the people (the “nation”) could lay claim: Hungarians,
Poles, Czechs and others experienced their national awakening under foreign –
predominantly Habsburg – rule. These nations were defined by reference to
language and to cultural aspirations and historical memories rather than to state
boundaries, and thus a particular form of nationalism – Sprachnationalismus or
linguistic nationalism – arose.118 The historical fact of the Habsburg Empire, that
is, led to the specifically Central European development of the nation as “[die]
Gesamtheit der eine bestimmte Sprache sprechenden Menschen”.119 Roth, then,
felt a sense of belonging to a German nation which was defined by reference not
to political or ethnic boundaries, but to language and culture. He did not reject the
concept of the nation as a socio-cultural entity, but he emphatically rejected
nationalism as a doctrine privileging one nation over others and attaching territory
to national status because this was incompatible with the reality of ethnic plurality
in Central Europe. The supranational structure of the Habsburg Monarchy had
allowed Jews such as Roth to construct a political identity which was not national
and which co-existed with cultural and ethnic identifications:
The very fact that Austria was not a nation-state meant that loyalty to the
state was not coterminous with any particular national identity. Jews could
claim Austrian political identity, German (or Czech or Polish) cultural
116
117
118
119
Bibó, Die Misere. The text was first published in Hungarian in 1946. While the German title
refers to Eastern Europe, Bibó’s focus is the nations of Central Europe which were under
Habsburg control until 1918.
Bibó, Die Misere 14. Nations in Western Europe did not come into being where people
speaking the same language decided to create a state; rather, the modern idea of the nation is a
political concept: “Ausgangspunkt ist ein staatlicher Rahmen, den das Volk kraft der
demokratisierten nationalen Massenemotionen in seinen Besitz nehmen und in seinem Besitz
wissen möchte”: Bibó, Die Misere 19.
Bibó, Die Misere 17.
Bibó, Die Misere 92. Further complicating the picture was the fact that where a nation could
refer to a historical kingdom as conferring on it a right to national recognition (Bibó, Die
Misere 18) – as could Bohemia, Hungary and Poland – the boundaries of the historical
structure did not coincide with linguistic boundaries: See Bibó, Die Misere 24-37.
23
identity and Jewish ethnic identity all at the same time.120
The progress of the German-speaking countries towards an exclusivist and
chauvinist nationalism left Roth deeply agitated, not only because its primary
target of exclusion was the German-speaking Jewish Bildungsbürgertum, but also
because such an ideology did not allow for the multiplicity of identities in which
he felt at home due to the formative influence of the Central European historical
consciousness. If we shift the focus of analysis to Roth’s distrust of ideologies,
based on his formative experiences in Habsburg Central Europe, we are forced to
address the lack of unity in his work in a new way, rather than viewing it as the
symptom of an identity crisis. The present study looks behind the contradictions
to find an overarching unity in Roth’s ongoing search for answers to the problems
he observes in the post-Habsburg order, problems which for him are a result of the
foundation of this new order on the nationalist idea. Although Central European
commentators have argued that it was the failure to apply the Wilsonian principle
of national self-determination consistently in the division of the Habsburg Empire,
rather than the principle itself, which led to instability and discontent after World
War I,121 for Roth, the privileging of one element of identity – the national – over
all others lay at the root of all post-war problems.
Post-War Alienation
From the moment he returned from the First World War Roth felt himself to be a
stranger:
120
121
Rozenblit, “Dilemma of Identity,” 145. Rozenblit describes Jewish identity as ethnic rather
than religious because although the Jews were not considered a separate nationality by the
Habsburg authorities, “they functioned as a separate ethnic group, and many of them espoused
a full-blown national identity”. Zionists argued that the Jews were a nation and should be
counted as one of the nationalities of the Monarchy, ultra-Orthodox Jews saw the Jews as a
nation in exile awaiting the advent of the Messiah who would return them to Israel, and
“[e]ven liberal or integrationist Jews […] who officially defined the Jews as a religious
confession and had adopted German, Czech or Magyar culture, acknowledged an ethnic
dimension to Jewish identity”: Rozenblit, “Dilemma of Identity,” 144.
Bibó demonstrates that where linguistic and ethnic boundaries did not coincide with historical
boundaries, the historical boundaries were given precedence, largely due to Western
incomprehension of the peculiarities of the Central European situation: Bibó, Die Misere 94f.,
104f. The assignment of areas of Bohemia with German-speaking majorities to
Czechoslovakia by Treaty of Saint-Germain, is an example of the infringements of the
Wilsonian principle which occurred during the division of the former Empire: Timms,
“Citizenship and ‘Heimatrecht’,” 159.
24
Dann kehrte ich heim und erkannte, daß ich inzwischen ein neues
Heimatrecht erworben hatte: zu Hause war ich ‘draußen’, in dem großen
Reich des Todes. Die Heimat war eng und arm, verworren und verwirrend –
und das Glück, nicht gefallen zu sein, verwandelte sich mit einem Schlag in
das Unglück, zu Hause fremd geworden zu sein.122
On one level these words give expression to the universal experience of the
returned soldier, whose existential confrontation with death and the depths of the
human soul renders a simple reintegration into society impossible. On another
level, and more specifically, they evoke the situation of those returning not to the
multi-national Habsburg Empire they had left, but to the new nation-states of
Central Europe. For Roth, this change in political organization precipitated a loss
of the breadth of identifications which were possible under the Habsburg
structure. As Edward Timms explains,
[f]or formerly subject peoples, Czechs and Slovaks, Poles and Slovenes, the
acquisition of a new nationality may have been a matter for rejoicing.123 But
the proclamation of the successor states plunged the widely scattered
German-speaking communities of the Habsburg crown into confusion. Were
inhabitants of Lemberg or Czernowitz, who had traditionally owed allegiance
to Vienna, now to be defined as Poles, Romanians or Ukrainians? Or could
they reassert their identity as German-Austrians?124
This question was resolved in a formal sense at least by the 1919 Treaty of SaintGermain. Article 80 of the Treaty “made it possible for members of Germanspeaking minorities living in remote areas of the former Habsburg Empire to
obtain Austrian citizenship by ‘option’” provided they “‘[spoke] the same
language and belong[ed] to the same race’ as the majority of the Austrian
population.”125 Although the criterion of ‘race’ was designed to prevent a mass
migration of Eastern Jews126 to the territorially reduced Austria, it was never
122
123
124
125
126
“Warum reise ich gerne” Frankfurter Zeitung Beilage “Für die Frau” (7.6.1929) 4; cited in:
Schulte, “Soma Morgenstern”, Soma Morgenstern, Joseph Roths Flucht und Ende.
Erinnerungen, ed. Ingolf Schulte (Lüneburg: zu Klampen, 1994) 322.
In fact, even for these “formerly subject peoples” the question of belonging was not always
resolved in favour of the ethnic nation-state: in the Carinthian plebiscite held on 10 October
1920 almost half of the votes supporting the incorporation of “Zone A”(in southern Carinthia)
in the new Austrian Republic were cast by Slovenes: Erwin Steinböck, Kärnten, in Erika
Weinzierl and Kurt Skalnik, eds, Osterreich 1918-1938. Geschichte der Ersten Republik, vol.
2 (Graz; Wien; Köln: Styria, 1983): 808-811; cited in Klaus Zelewitz, “Beim Lesen von Roths
Romanen Radetzkymarsch und Die Kapuzinergruft. Warum sind die Trottas Slowenen?,”
Zagreber Germanistische Beiträge 2 (1993): 104.
Timms, “Citizenship and ‘Heimatrecht’,” 159-60.
Timms, “Citizenship and ‘Heimatrecht’,” 161.
The term Ostjude was not widely used until the First World War “when writers began to
bemoan the Ostjudengefahr (threat) or Ostjudenfrage (problem)”: Jack Wertheimer,
25
clearly defined and was initially interpreted rather liberally, allowing assimilated
German-speaking Jews from the eastern provinces to opt for Austrian
citizenship.127
Having assimilated to the German rather than the Polish culture of his youth,128
Galician-born Roth opted for Austrian citizenship. This deceptively simple
statement belies a substantially more complicated process. According to Soma
Morgenstern, when Roth opted for Austrian citizenship in 1919, the Christian
Socialists who governed the eighth district of Vienna where he resided refused to
grant Jews from the former eastern provinces Austrian citizenship.129 Towards the
end of 1921, while Roth was still attempting to obtain Austrian citizenship,
Interior Minister Leopold Waber introduced what became known as the
Wabersche Optionspraxis, a measure which made it impossible for any further
Eastern Jews to opt for Austrian citizenship.130 This practice was based on a
decision by the Verwaltungsgerichtshof (Austrian Administrative Court) on 9
June 1921, which had interpreted the phrase in Article 80 “speak the same
language and belong to the same race” in terms that excluded German-speaking
127
128
129
130
Unwelcome Strangers: East European Jews in Imperial Germany (New York; Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987) 6. In this context the term implied not just the country of origin of the
migrants but also a host of stereotypes, including cultural inferiority, poverty, lack of hygiene
and religious orthodoxy: Monika S. Schmid, “Persecution and Identity Conflicts: The Case of
German Jews,” in Us and Others: Social Identities Across Languages, Discourses and
Cultures, ed. Anna Duszak (Amsterdam; Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2002), 343. This
study follows Wertheimer in using the term “Eastern Jews” to refer to subjects of the Russian
Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy and the Rumanian state. The term does not imply a
uniform identity.
Although Eastern Jews most commonly assimilated to the German culture, in late nineteenth
and early twentieth century Galicia Jews increasingly assimilated to the Polish culture. Until
1867 the language of instruction at all Galician Gymnasien was German, but by 1900 only
four German language schools remained: Heuberger, Unter dem Doppeladler 58. By 1905
Roth’s K.K. Kronprinz Rudolf-Gymnasium in Brody was one of only two German Gymnasien
in Galicia, and his year was the last for which the language of instruction was totally German:
Bronsen, Biographie 80.
Morgenstern, Flucht und Ende 41-42. Morgenstern’s account conflicts in some respects with
Timms’s, which is supported by documents held in the Leo Baeck Institute, New York.
Morgenstern asserts that because of the Christian Socialists’ hardline stance, Roth was a
Polish citizen from 1919 until 1928. However, Roth’s Austrian citizenship paper, dated 8 June
1921, is reproduced in Timms, “Citizenship and ‘Heimatrecht’,” 163.
He was supported by other großdeutsch members of the coalition government: Heinrich
Benedikt, Geschichte der Republik Österreich (Vienna, 1954) 386; cited in Timms,
“Citizenship and ‘Heimatrecht’,” 162.
26
Jews.131 Timms notes that but for the more liberal interpretation of this article
prior to the decision of the Verwaltungsgerichtshof, “that most Austrian of authors
[Joseph Roth] would have been Polish”132 by citizenship, and asks: “can it be a
coincidence that Roth’s declaration of citizenship is dated 8 June 1921 – or did
some helpful official backdate the document in order to circumvent that Court
decision?”133
Even though Roth and many other Eastern Jews in his position obtained Austrian
citizenship by 1921, the ambiguous legal status afforded them by the option
clause rendered them in effect second-class citizens. In a process known as der
Schub (“getting the push”), citizens whose Heimatrecht (right of domicile) was
not within the borders of the Austrian Republic could be deported to their original
place of domicile if convicted of a criminal offence. Even the remote possibility
of deportation made a significant minority of the population of inter-war Austria –
many of whom were Jews – feel vulnerable.134 The insecurity of Eastern Jews in
the First Republic was heightened by constant challenges to their right to Austrian
citizenship by the anti-Semitic press,135 by politicians who promoted the cause of
a united Greater Germany, and finally, after the Anschluß, by the Nazi
administration which in 1939 declared citizenship obtained under Article 80 of the
Treaty of Saint-Germain invalid, thus depriving large numbers of Austrian Jews
of their citizenship and rights to protection under the constitution.136
In 1923 a new question appeared on the official Austrian census forms which
further unsettled Austria’s Jewish citizens. Asking for the respondent’s
Rassenzugehörigkeit, it represented a significant step in the direction of making
citizenship dependent on race, although Article 63 of the Treaty of Saint-Germain
131
132
133
134
135
136
Jonny Moser, “Die Katastrophe der Juden in Österreich”, Studia Judaica Austriaca 5 (1977)
91-92; cited in Timms, “Citizenship and ‘Heimatrecht’,” 162.
Hans-Joachim Seeler, Die Staatsangehörigkeit Österreichs (Frankfurt, 1957) 48, 159; cited in
27
limited the extent of discrimination against ethnic minorities.137 The idea of the
Jews as a race, however, was not new. Although in the late Habsburg Empire
nationality had been defined in terms of language, not race,138 and the Jews had
been recognized officially not as a nationality but as a religion,139 anti-Semitism
was rife. From the late 1870s “cultural” anti-Semitism was superseded by “racial”
anti-Semitism,140 and by the early 1880s it was “no longer a petty bureaucratic
annoyance or an endemic but harmless instinct, but something which was to
destroy the whole fabric of assimilation.”141
The typical response of German-speaking Jews to the appearance of modern racial
anti-Semitism, which unlike earlier cultural anti-Semitism denied the possiblity
that the Jewish individual might “overcome ‘the Jew’ in himself” through
assimilation and possibly conversion to Christianity,142 was to “take stock of their
Jewishness” and to recognize the limits of assimilation.143 Faced with increasing
antipathy and the seeming impossibility of complete assimilation in the anti-
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
Timms, “Citizenship and ‘Heimatrecht’,” 162. Under this article the Austrian government
guaranteed “complete protection of life and liberty to all inhabitants of Austria without
distinction of birth, nationality, race or religion”.
The concepts Volksstamm (ethnic group) and Volkszugehörigkeit (ethnic attribution or
allegiance) were used during the late Habsburg Empire by constitutional reformers attempting
to resolve conflicting national interests, but the terms were not yet associated with a discourse
of inclusion and exclusion: Timms, “Citizenship and ‘Heimatrecht’,” 162.
According to Heuberger, Yiddish was not recognized as an official language (and therefore
the Yiddish-speaking Jews not as a nationality) because the authorities viewed it as a
“Lokalsprache”, a dialect of German which was only used in the East: Heuberger, Unter dem
Doppeladler 57.
Beller explains the process by which “cultural” anti-Semitism developed into “racial” antiSemitism from the late 1870s: Beller, Vienna and the Jews 190f. Schmid specifically locates
the emergence of this “new type” of anti-Semitism, which was no longer based on purely
religious foundations (the Jews as the “murderers of Christ”), in the economic crisis of the late
1870s. “At the same time, as theories of evolution, inheritance, and ‘race’ became the
prominent object of the natural sciences, this economically motivated anti-Semitism also
acquired a racist component”: Schmid, “Persecution,” 344.
Beller, Vienna and the Jews 190. Hatred of the Jews in Central European culture dates back to
the Middle Ages. Even after they gained full rights in 1867, there was a virtual ban on
professing Jews in the higher bureaucracy, the army and the diplomatic service in what Beller
terms an “unofficial official religious antisemitism”: Beller, Vienna and the Jews 188-89.
In cultural anti-Semitism “Jewishness was a psychological quality, it was there to be
overcome. If one really wanted to be German, there was no obvious barrier to this”: Beller,
Vienna and the Jews 191.
Marsha L. Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 1867-1914: Assimilation and Identity (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1983) 147.
28
Semitic environment of pre-war Vienna,144 assimilated Jews rediscovered their
Jewishness.145 Many Jews who had converted to Christianity returned to Judaism,
either “because antisemitism made them realize the ineffectiveness of conversion
or simply as a point of honor in the face of attack.”146 Rozenblit cites the famous
example of composer Arnold Schönberg, “who slowly reaffirmed his Jewish
identity in response to the hostility he perceived around him,” finally converting
back to Judaism in 1933 when Hitler became German Chancellor.147
Roth first encountered anti-Semitism in pre-war Vienna, and the experience had a
profound effect on him, as it did on so many of his contemporaries. Growing up in
Galician Brody, Roth had had little reason to reflect on his Jewishness and had not
experienced the sort of pressures which might have induced him to convert to
Christianity.148 Brody was very much a Jewish town: at 72% it had the highest
proportion of Jews of any Galician town (and perhaps the highest in the whole of
the Habsburg Empire),149 most of the mayors were Jews, and a majority of streets
were named after Jews.150 When Roth arrived in the Habsburg capital to study at
the university in 1913, Jews comprised 6% of the Viennese population.151 Just
sixty years earlier, however, very few Jews had resided in Vienna.152 Their former
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
Rozenblit, Jews of Vienna, 146. On Viennese anti-Semitism see also Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers
Wien: Lehrjahre eines Diktators (München: Piper, 2000); and Peter G.J. Pulzer, The Rise of
Political Anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria (New York: John Wiley, 1964).
Hamann views the rediscovery and embracing of their Jewish roots by assimilated Jews such
as Arthur Schnitzler and Theodor Herzl as one of two contrasting reactions to the appearance
of racial anti-Semitism in Vienna; the other reaction was existential crisis and self-hate,
typified by Otto Weiniger and Arthur Trebitsch: Hamann, Hitlers Wien 485-86.
Rozenblit, Jews of Vienna, 145.
Rozenblit, Jews of Vienna, 145. Johnston’s account differs slightly from Rozenblit’s: “Born in
Vienna of middle-class Jewish parents and raised a Catholic, Schönberg converted to
Protestantism in 1902, only to be received back into Judaism in 1935”: William M. Johnston,
The Austrian Mind. An Intellectual and Social History 1848-1938 (Berkeley, Los Angeles;
London: University of Califonia Press, 1983) 138.
If Roth ever converted to Christianity – a point of some contention – it was not until the
1930s. Bronsen describes in detail the arguments of Roth’s friends and associates before his
funeral over whether Roth should be buried according to Catholic or Jewish rites: Bronsen,
Biographie 600-01. See also Rosenfeld, Understanding 90.
This figure, from 1900, is cited in Bronsen, Biographie 53.
Census of 1910; cited in Rozenblit, Jews of Vienna, 17. At this time the Viennese Jewish
community was the largest in Western or Central Europe, numbering almost 200,000:
Rozenblit, Jews of Vienna, 16. The Viennese Jewish community experienced spectacular
growth once residential restrictions were lifted after the 1848 revolution, with most Jewish
29
virtual absence made their sudden presence as a sizable minority all the more
visible and added fuel to the anti-Semitic fire. At the University of Vienna, Roth
discovered that the lectures of Jewish professors were routinely boycotted by
German nationalist (völkisch) students, who also regularly prevented Jews from
entering the university.153 These blatant acts of anti-Semitism, together with the
fact that Jews from Galicia constituted the most recent wave of Jewish migrants154
and were thus despised more than all others, forced Roth to reflect for the first
time on his Jewish identity, which “singled him out as undesirable.”155
Berlin: Alienation Compounded
If Roth had felt an outsider in pre-war Vienna, this experience was intensified in
post-war Berlin, where he lived and worked as a journalist from 1920.156 Gustav
Mahler once lamented “I am thrice homeless […]. As a native of Bohemia in
Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the whole
world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.”157 As a German-speaking
Galician Jew in Berlin, Roth too was an outsider three times; as a Jew from the
East, his sense of exclusion was even more keenly felt.158 As he remarked to
Irmgard Keun in 1937 after a final visit to Galicia,
Je westlicher der Herkunftsort des Juden, desto mehr Juden gibt es, auf die er
herabschaut. Der Frankfurter Jude verachtet den Berliner Juden, der Berliner
Jude verachtet den Wiener Juden; der Wiener Jude verachtet den Warschauer
Juden. Dann kommen noch die Juden ganz dahinten aus Galizien, auf die sie
153
154
155
156
157
158
migrants arriving from the provinces of Galicia, Bohemia and Moravia and from Hungary:
Bronsen, “The Jew,” 56. On anti-Semitism at the university see Pulzer, Political AntiSemitism 251-57; Bronsen, Biographie 149-51.
Rozenblit, Jews of Vienna, 21. Rozenblit describes three waves of Jewish migration to Vienna:
the Czech wave of the 1850s and 1860s, the Hungarian wave of the 1870s and 1880s, and the
Galician wave, which occurred in the final decades before the First World War: Rozenblit,
Jews of Vienna, 21.
Bronsen, “The Jew,” 56.
Roth spent most of the period 1920-1925 in Berlin, with several breaks: Bronsen, Biographie
209. Cf. Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 100.
Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, trans. Basil Creighton, 3rd ed. (London:
John Murray, 1973) 109.
Joseph Gottfarstein, an Eastern European Jew Roth met in Parisian exile in 1934, said of
Roth’s feeling of displacement from his Eastern Jewish roots: “Roth war aus seinem
Lebenselement herausgerissen. Da er seinem eigenen Volk nicht angehörte, war ihm das
Leben ein zwei- und dreifaches Exil”: Joseph Gottfarstein, quoted in Bronsen, Biographie
550.
30
alle herabschauen, und dorther bin ich, der letzte aller Juden.159
Assimilated Jews in Germany viewed themselves as Germans by nationality and
Jewish by religion: they were not first and foremost Jews but “German citizens of
the Mosaic Persuasion”.160 The leading spokesman of the Centralverein deutscher
Staasbürger jüdischen Glaubens, Eugen Fuchs, wrote in 1919:
We are Germans of Jewish faith and ethnicity for whom Deutschtum is
nation and people, Judaism faith and ethnicity, divided from the Germans by
means of faith and ethnicity but not by Volk. We are German nationals, not
Jewish, only a Jewish religious community and not a Jewish Volk, at least in
Germany.161
German Jews believed they had earned their emancipation and status through selfbetterment or Bildung; their hostility towards Eastern Jews was motivated by the
fear that the immigrants would “revive an image of the Jew that natives had
worked so hard to obliterate.”162 Roth was an assimilated Jew and not the target of
159
160
161
162
Joseph Roth, quoted in an interview by David Bronsen with Irmgard Keun, writer and
companion to Joseph Roth: Bronsen, Biographie 43. The prejudice of German Jews against
Galician Jews in particular was already well established by the mid-nineteenth century: Steven
E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German
Jewish Consciousness, 1800-1923 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1982) 16.
Wertheimer characterizes the response of German Jews in Imperial Germany to Eastern
Jewish immigrants as one of hostility: Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers 143-51. Aschheim
argues that the response of German Jews to their Eastern co-religionists was more ambivalent,
both in Imperial and in Weimar Germany: Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers.
Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers 160. It is in part because of this self-understanding that
many German Jews failed to recognize the rising threat of German nationalism for all Jews:
“The majority of German Jews were inclined toward a liberal, assimilationist interpretation of
the Jewish question. The modern ‘Jewish Question’ existed only insofar as the Ostjuden had
penetrated into Western Europe, impeded local Jewish assimilation, kept alive the memory of
‘the Jew’, and made accusations of ineradicable differences between the Jews and their host
nations credible”: Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers 78. Even in the face of a spate of antiJewish outbreaks in 1923, only the Zionists recognized that anti-Semitism in the Weimar
Republic was directed not only at Eastern Jewish immigrants but also at assimilated German
Jewry: Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers 244-45. When the Nazis came to power in 1933,
German Jewish opinion “was torn between the pessimists, who expected to lose their
citizenship while remaining otherwise unmolested, and the optimists, who anticipated little or
no change in their status due to the moderating influence of the non-Nazi right”: Donald L.
Niewyk, The Jews in Weimar Germany (Baton Rouge; London: Louisiana State University
Press, 1980) 82, paraphrasing Heinemann Stern, Warum hassen sie uns eigentlich? Jüdisches
Leben zwischen den Kriegen (Düsseldorf, 1970) 179-80. Niewyk notes that this analysis may
be applied to the entire period of Hitler’s rise to power.
Eugen Fuchs, “Was nun?” NJM 3, no. 7-8 (10-25 January 1919); quoted in translation in
Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers 218.
Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers 160. See also Schmid, “Persecution,” 343. Hamann
describes the same reaction of established, assimilated Jews in Vienna to Orthodox Eastern
Jews: “[Die Wiener Juden] hatten alles getan, um nicht als Juden aufzufallen, um sich
anzupassen und ganz dazuzugehören. […] Nun, da sie im Zeichen des Rassenantisemitismus
plötzlich auf eine Stufe gestellt wurden mit den zerlumpten Glaubensbrüdern aus dem Osten,
sahen sie sich in ihrer schwer erkämpften Existenz bedroht”: Hamann, Hitlers Wien 482-83.
31
German-Jewish disdain, yet he was also not a Westjude, and his words to Irmgard
Keun reveal the extent to which he identified and sympathized with the plight of
unassimilated Galician Jews in post-war Germany and Austria.
Identity and the Nation
Roth’s sense of being an outsider in 1920s Berlin stems not from his Eastern
Jewishness per se, but from the challenge to his identity posed by German
nationalism and anti-Semitism.163 Having spent his formative years in the
plurality of cultures characteristic of the eastern parts of the Habsburg realm,
Roth’s experience of individual identity contrasted starkly with an ideology which
insisted that German and Jewish identity were mutually exclusive.164 A unique,
centuries-long process of cross-cultural encounters and acculturation in the
Habsburg Empire had led to a blurring of boundaries between different
nationalities, and the predominance of multiple identities, or a multipolarity of
individual and collective identities.165 Pressure to fix collective identity on the
basis of a loyalty to one language and culture – a construct, contradicted by the
reality of multiple loyalties166 – did not, of course, arise suddenly with the
collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the foundation of nation-states, but had been
growing since the failed 1848 revolutions. The persistence of the Monarchy,
however, had allowed at least the fiction of the supranational state to be
maintained until 1918. This fiction was replaced by another with the creation of
163
164
165
166
On anti-Semitic stereotypes in the Weimar Republic and their impact on Roth see Ochse,
Auseinandersetzung 16-29.
The particular experience of Jews was summed up by Erich Stern, a German Jew in French
exile in the 1930s: “der Jude sei dadurch gekennzeichnet, daß er mehr und immer noch
anderes sei als nur Jude, daß sein Leben gleichsam aus zwei Quellen gespeist werde, der
jüdischen und einer anderen; seine gesamte Existenz sei von einem Dualismus durchtränkt,
von dem er nicht los komme, sofern er unter anderen Völkern lebe”: Erich Stern, Die
Emigration als psychologiches Problem (Paris, 1937) 94; cited in Bronsen, Biographie 494.
Csáky writes that this multiplicity of identities was reflected on a practical level in the high
proportion of the population which spoke two or more languages with (near) equal
competency – the mother tongue of an individual was often not one language but several:
Moritz Csáky, “Ambivalenz des kulturellen Erbes: Zentraleuropa,” in Ambivalenz des
kulturellen Erbes. Vielfachcodierung des historischen Gedächtnisses, ed. Moritz Csáky and
Klaus Zeyringer (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2000), 40. Csáky does not suggest that the
acculturation processes he describes precluded stereotyping and other forms of boundary
setting between people who felt themselves to belong to a particular ethnic group or “national
culture”.
Csáky, “Ambivalenz,” 41.
32
nation-states out of the ruins of the Empire: the fiction of the ethnic nationstate.167
Roth’s antipathy toward the fixing of collective and individual identity finds its
first clear expression in “Die weißen Städte”, a series of journalistic impressions
inspired by his travels through the south of France in 1925. Here, Roth realized he
had been living “hinter dem Zaun […]. Denn uns umgibt ein Zaun, uns
Menschen, die wir zur deutschen Welt sprechen.” (II, 453) The stakes of this
metaphoric fence are Begriff and Nomenklatur (terminology and nomenclature),
which for the Germans are sacred and immutable (II, 453). In France, Roth
discovers another world, in which people are not concerned to fix things
according to clear categories, once and for all, and for him this brings liberation:
Ich kenne die süße Freiheit, nichts mehr darzustellen als mich selbst. Ich
repräsentiere nicht, ich übertreibe nicht, ich verleugne nicht. Ich falle
trotzdem nicht auf. Es ist in Deutschland fast unmöglich, nicht aufzufallen,
wenn ich nichts spiele, wenn ich nichts verleugne und nichts übertreibe.
Zwischen diesen zwei Arten zu erscheinen, habe ich die traurige Wahl. Denn
ich muß auch, wenn ich keinen Typus, keine Gattung, kein Geschlecht, keine
Nation, keinen Stamm, keine Rasse repräsentiere, dennoch etwas zu
repräsentieren suchen. Wir sind gezwungen, ‘Farbe zu bekennen’, und nicht
etwa eine beliebige, sondern eine aus der offiziellen Farbenskala: sonst sind
wir ‘ohne Gesinnung’. (II, 453-54)
In Germany Roth feels pressured not only to declare his political convictions, but
also either to deny his Jewishness or to exaggerate his German identity, and both
of these options leave him feeling robbed of his individuality. France gives him
the freedom to determine his own identity,168 while Germany169 is suspicious of
all that is not strictly definable or able to be categorized:
Es ist das Kennzeichen der engen Welt, daß sie das Undefinierbare
verdächtigt. Es ist das Kennzeichen der weiten, daß sie mich gewähren läßt.
Auch sie hat für mich noch keine Bezeichnung gefunden. Aber nennt sie
mich so oder anders, so ist immer noch ein freier Raum zwischen der
Bezeichnung und dem Begriff, den sie deckt, denn die Welt nimmt nicht alles
wörtlich. Wir aber nehmen sie beim Wort und nicht ‘bei der Sache’, weil wir
167
168
169
For Bibó this outcome was a result of the failure of the victors of World War I to apply the
principle of ethnic self-determination when the linguistic and ethnic boundaries of some
nations were different from their historical boundaries (notably in the case of the Czechs, the
Hungarians and the Poles): Bibó, Die Misere 92-94.
While Roth’s view of France is undoubtedly idealized, his subjective contrast of France and
Germany reveals much about his rejection of identity ascription.
With the phrase “uns Menschen, die wir zur deutschen Welt sprechen” (II, 453) Roth implies
not only Germany but also Germans in Austria, Czechoslovakia and so on.
33
die Namen mit den Dingen verwechseln. (II, 454)
Significantly, Roth does not become himself for the first time “hinter dem Zaun”
in France; rather he finds he can once again be himself: “Hinter dem Zaun gewann
ich mich selbst wieder.” (II, 453) The place where he last had this freedom was
the place of his childhood – Brody:
Ich habe die weißen Städte so wiedergefunden, wie ich sie in den Träumen
gesehn hatte. Wenn man nur die Träume seiner Kindheit findet, ist man
wieder ein Kind.
Das zu hoffen, hatte ich nicht gewagt. Denn unwiederbringlich weit lag die
Kindheit hinter mir, durch einen Weltbrand getrennt, durch eine brennende
Welt. Sie war selbst nicht mehr als ein Traum. Sie war ausgelöscht aus dem
Leben; verstorbene und begrabene, nicht entschwundene Jahre. (II, 454)
As a child in Brody, before the “Weltbrand” of the First World War, Roth had not
been forced to question the different facets of his identity. The questioning began
in pre-war Vienna, when he was confronted by the harsh reality of an increasingly
racial anti-Semitism. In post-war Central Europe, where nationalism is rife, Roth
perceives himself to be threatened with the loss of the freedom to be himself,
where being himself means professing (or rather living) a multiplicity of
identities, or simply not being compelled to profess a single identity “aus der
offiziellen Farbenskala”.170
Identity and Nationalism in Juden auf Wanderschaft
The link between Roth’s multifaceted identity as an assimilated German Jew from
Habsburg Galicia and his rejection of nationalism emerges strongly in Juden auf
Wanderschaft (1927), a long essay written during the transitional phase between
the early Zeitromane and later Habsburg novels. In comparison with the general
body of Roth’s work, the bitter polemic of this text is striking.171 It is also marked
by ambivalence and contradictions, and a schematic opposition between West and
170
171
Roth’s response to this threat in both his writing and his interactions with friends, colleagues
and strangers was steadfastly to refuse to be ascribed a single and unchangeable identity. Cf.
Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 45. The most obvious manifestation of this refusal was his
proclivity – well documented in Bronsen’s biography – for spreading contradictory accounts
of every imaginable aspect of his life.
Cf. Mark H. Gelber, “Juden auf Wanderschaft und die Rhetorik der Ost-West-Debatte im
Werk Joseph Roths,” in Joseph Roth. Interpretation Rezeption Kritik, ed. Michael Kessler and
Fritz Hackert (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1990), 127.
34
East which lacks nuance and subtlety.172 Despite these shortcomings, however,
the essay is important because it reveals the links between Roth’s deep distrust of
nationalism as an ideology of exclusion and a conviction based on personal
experience that identity is fundamentally multivalent and individual. These issues
and their interconnections are central to both the early fiction and the Habsburg
novels, Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft.
The text operates at several different levels. Most obviously it is an accolade to
the Eastern Jews, whom Roth seeks to defend against the anti-Semitism of both
Western Europeans and Westjuden – assimilated Jews in the cities of Western
Europe. Roth announces his solidarity with both Eastern Jews and Slavs in the
opening sentences of the Vorwort, in which he aggressively states that the text is
not written for those Western Europeans, “die aus der Tatsache, daß sie bei Luft
und Wasserklosett aufgewachsen sind, das Recht ableiten, über rumänische Läuse,
galizische Wanzen, russische Flöhe schlechte Witze vorzubringen” (II, 827). Nor
is it intended for Western Jews, “die ihre eigenen, durch einen Zufall der Baracke
entronnenen Väter oder Urväter verleugnen.” (II, 827) From the outset, then, the
writer’s sympathies are unambiguous. Yet Roth’s aim in this foreword is not so
much to limit the readership of the essay as to make the implicit explicit and thus
proclaim the polemical intent of the text.173 The narrator openly rejects
objectivity,174 because objectivity is an illusion and an ideological weapon used
by particular social groups to maintain their dominant positions: the Eastern Jew
thinks differently and quickly becomes a victim of the paradigm of Western
rationality.175
Assimilation and Loss of Identity
The essay is, however, much more than an attempt to counter the negative
stereotypes of Eastern Jews gaining currency in Western and Central Europe in
the 1920s. It is an exploration by the author of his roots in Eastern Judaism and of
the question of assimilation and identity maintenance. This second aspect of the
172
173
174
175
Robertson, “1918,” 357.
Cf. Gelber, “Ost-West-Debatte,” 127.
“Dieses Buch verzichtet auf die ‘objektiven’ Leser […]” (II, 827).
Cf. Gelber, “Ost-West-Debatte,” 128.
35
text is obscured by the deliberately elusive narrative voice.176 Bronsen maintains
that Juden auf Wanderschaft reads “als sei sie von einem Westeuropäer
geschrieben, der jedoch die menschlicheren Eigenschaften bei den Juden des
Ostens findet und sich auch ihrer Sache annimmt”.177 Indeed, the narrator often
includes himself in statements about Western Europeans, commenting, for
example: “Die Emigranten assimilieren sich – leider! – nicht zu langsam, wie man
ihnen vorwirft, sondern viel zu rasch an unseren traurigen Lebensbedingungen”
(II, 832, emphasis added). Yet at other points in the text, the narrator’s
identification – or at least his desire to identify – with the Eastern Jews he is
describing may be discerned, for instance in his expression of regret that as an
outsider he is excluded from a celebration (II, 851). The narrator also occasionally
reveals that he knows more about the Eastern Jews than the “Fremder”, to whom,
for example, all prayer houses appear the same (II, 841). This comment suggests
that the narrator is not the Western European he at other times appears to be.178
Gelber argues persuasively that this elusive narrative voice is part of Roth’s
rhetorical strategy, whereby the author divides the narrator into a Western and an
Eastern part: the “westliche[r] Teil des Ichs” functions to validate the harsh
criticism which is expressed of Western ways by including the Western reader in
the narrator’s point of view; the function of the “ostjüdische[s] Ich[…]” is to
convey the authentic experience of the East and express an emotional and
sympathetic identification with the Eastern Jews.179 Over and above this function
as a rhetorical device, the narrator’s ability to speak from both points of view is an
implicit rejection by Roth of the stereotypical dichotomy of Eastern and Western
Jewry, the idea that Eastern Jews and German Jews were “radically
antithetical”.180 Roth’s rejection of this stereotype, which had been in place since
176
177
178
179
180
Cf. Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 118.
Bronsen, Biographie 158. Bronsen comments further: “Roth […] steht der Mentalität der
Ostjuden sympathisierend gegenüber, wenn er auch nicht mit ihnen identifiziert werden
möchte”: Bronsen, Biographie 79. This interpretation is not supported by the text.
Ochse describes the narrator as “jemand, der im Osten wie im Westen fremd und heimisch
zugleich ist”: Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 118.
Gelber, “Ost-West-Debatte,” 129.
On this stereotype see Steven E. Aschheim, “The East European Jew and German Jewish
Identity,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 1 (1984): 4. This was a relatively new idea which
arose in the context of the Enlightenment: “local and regional differences between Jews had
always existed but in the pre-emancipation era they were of little structural difference when
36
the late nineteenth century,181 stems from his own sense of doubleness and
ambivalence as an Eastern Jew “of a very specific kind”.182 His enquiry into
Eastern Jewish identity “in der Heimat und in der Fremde” (II, 839) in Juden auf
Wanderschaft must be read in this context as an exploration also of his own
identity and belonging. It is an attempt to articulate his sense of the problems
inherent in any artificial separation of the complexly intertwined components of
individual identity.
A substantial part of the essay focuses on Eastern Jewish immigrants in Vienna,
Berlin and Paris, comparing their struggles with assimilation and loss of identity.
In Vienna, the assimilation of the Eastern Jews begins with a forced
simplification, falsification and reduction of their identity, symbolized by their
names and the pressure to change them:
Christen haben verständliche, europäische Namen. Juden haben
unverständliche und jüdische. Nicht genug daran: sie haben zwei und drei
durch ein false oder ein recte verbundene Familiennamen. Man weiß
niemals, wie sie heißen. Ihre Eltern sind nur vom Rabbiner getraut worden.
Diese Ehe hat keine gesetzliche Gültigkeit. Hieß der Mann Weinstock und
die Frau Abramofsky, so heißen die Kinder dieser Ehe: Weinstock recte
Abramofsky oder auch Abramofsky false Weinstock. Der Sohn wurde auf
den jüdischen Vornamen Leib Nachman getauft. Weil dieser Name aber
schwierig ist und einen aufreizenden Klang haben könnte, nennt sich der
Sohn Leo. Er heißt also: Leib Nachman genannt Leo Abramofsky false
Weinstock.
Solche Namen bereiten der Polizei Schwierigkeiten. Die Polizei liebt keine
Schwierigkeiten. (II, 859)
The complexity of the Eastern Jew’s name symbolizes the multifaceted nature of
identity which is embraced by Jewish customs and traditions but frowned upon by
181
182
compared with the overall similarities: Jews everywhere were bound by a common sociopolitical condition and linked by a shared system of beliefs and attachments. […] From about
the 1780’s on, Jewish historical development was characterized by a profound fragmentation.
On the one hand, Enlightenment and emancipation in the West; on the other, the continuation
of political disenfranchisement and traditional Jewish culture in Eastern Europe.”
“With the appearance in 1876 of [Karl Emil Franzos’s] Aus Halbasien, all the contours of the
stereotype were clearly defined. A thoroughly acculturated German Jewry had created the
stereotype of the Eastern Jew as its mirror opposite. Both the ‘German’ Jew and the ‘Ostjude’
were products of a ‘modernized’ perspective: their polarity formed part of the same dialectic”:
Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers 31.
Aschheim uses this phrase in relation to Karl Emil Franzos who, like Roth, was born in
Eastern Galicia but was raised in a Germanophile household: “This was hardly a typical shtetl
upbringing, and Franzos was always an outsider in relation to the ghetto”: Aschheim, Brothers
and Strangers 27. Roth’s maternal grandfather was an Orthodox Jew and cloth trader, but his
mother’s generation was assimilated to speak German and no longer spoke Yiddish:
37
the Austrian police. Because he is not accepted with his complex identity and lack
of papers, the Eastern Jew is forced to invent a new identity:
Man schickt ihn also zurück, einmal, zweimal, dreimal. Bis der Jude gemerkt
hat, daß ihm nichts anderes übrigbleibt, als falsche Daten anzugeben, damit
sie wie ehrliche aussehen. Bei einem Namen zu bleiben, der vielleicht nicht
sein eigener, aber doch ein zweifelloser, glaubwürdiger Namen (sic) ist. Die
Polizei hat den Ostjuden auf die gute Idee gebracht, seine echten, wahren,
aber verworrenen Verhältnisse durch erlogene, aber ordentliche zu
kaschieren. (II, 859)
While the name itself is unimportant to the Eastern Jew, as Roth subsequently
reveals (II, 883), this pressure to invent a ‘simple’, one-dimensional name to
replace a complicated, ‘fremd’ and multifaceted – but real and true – name
symbolizes the beginning of a loss of identity through assimilation to a western
civic Ordnung.
The loss of identity which occurs through assimilation is reflected for Roth in the
absence of soldarity shown by assimilated Viennese Jews with new arrivals.
Eastern Jews who have already successfully assimilated want nothing to do with
their compatriots:
Niemand nimmt sich ihrer an. Ihre Vettern und Glaubensgenossen, die im
ersten Bezirk in den Redaktionen sitzen, sind ‘schon’ Wiener, und wollen
nicht mit Ostjuden verwandt sein oder gar verwechselt werden. (II, 858)
Roth’s polemic appears to be at odds with the findings of Brigitte Hamann, who
claims that the Viennese Jewish community did everything possible to help new
arrivals to acculturate, giving them clothing and establishing soup kitchens and
hostels.183 Yet the difference is one of interpretation, not fact. Roth’s central point
is that the assimilated Jews do not want to be reminded of their origins, or for the
visibility of the “Kaftanjuden” to remind the Viennese Christians that the
assimilated Jews are also Jews, and potentially inflame the increasingly racial
anti-Semitism. Hamann puts a more positive interpretation on the conduct and
motivation of the Jewish community, but acknowledges that the aim was to
183
Hamann, Hitlers Wien 483.
38
encourage the immigrants to assimilate as quickly as possible so that they would
not be so conspicuous:184
Vor allem sorgten sich die Wiener Juden um die ostjüdischen Hausierer, die
in Luegers Stadt besonderes Ärgernis erregten. Konferenzen über das ‘Übel’
des ‘Wanderbettels’ und die ‘Handelehs’ wurden abgehalten und Strategien
beraten, um die Assimilierung zu fördern. Aber je großzügiger die Wiener
Juden waren, desto mehr Bedürftige kamen. Und je mehr Ostjuden ankamen,
desto größer wurde die Angst vor einem weiteren Anwachsen des
Antisemitismus.185
In Roth’s less favourable interpretation, the Viennese Jews do not want the
Eastern Jews merely to assimilate but to erase all visible traces of their Jewish
identity.
Whatever the motivation of Viennese Jews, Hamann writes that many of the
Eastern Jews chose not to assimilate, seeing themselves as Jews in exile, the
keepers of true Judaism, and persisting in their customs and rituals, their language
and their traditional clothing.186 She simplifies into a dichotomy of assimilation or
non-assimilation a dialectical process which Roth explores in its complexities. For
even if the immigrants themselves do not assimilate, he observes, instead settling
in Leopoldstadt187 and becoming hawkers, they see to it that the next generation
does assimilate:188
Er wird seine Kinder in die Mittelschule schicken, wenn sie begabt sind, und
Gott will, daß sie begabt sind. Der Sohn wird einmal ein berühmter
Rechtsanwalt sein, aber der Vater, der so lange hausieren mußte, wird weiter
hausieren wollen. Manchmal fügt es sich, daß die Urenkel des Hausierers
christlich-soziale Antisemiten sind. Es hat sich schon oft so gefügt. (II, 861)
The intentionally polemical implication is that the logical endpoint of assimilation
is anti-Semitism, a negation of Jewish identity indeed.
184
185
186
187
188
The same was true of (non-Zionist) Jewish communities in both Imperial and Weimar
Germany: see Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers 155; and Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers
220.
Hamann, Hitlers Wien 483, citing Klaus Hödl, Als Bettler in die Leopoldstadt (Wien, 1994):
39. Dr. Karl Lueger, leader of the openly anti-Semitic and German nationalist
Christlichsoziale Partei, was the Mayor of Vienna from 1897 until 1910.
Leopoldstadt, the second district (Bezirk) of Vienna, was the site of the seventeenth-century
Jewish ghetto; in late Habsburg times it was home to the largest concentration of Jews of any
single district: Rozenblit, Jews of Vienna, 76.
Wertheimer describes the same gradual process of assimilation by generations in Germany:
Wertheimer, Unwelcome Strangers 156-57.
39
Roth’s criticism of Berlin and thus of German society is more clear-cut and
harsher than his criticism of Vienna. In the German capital, assimilation and
consequently loss of identity occurs even faster than in Vienna: “Berlin gleicht die
Verschiedenheiten aus und ertötet Eigenheiten” (II, 867). Whatever efforts the
Eastern Jews make to maintain something of their distinctiveness in Berlin they
are doomed to failure. So, for example, the attempt to create a Jewish ghetto:
Der Versuch, diese Berliner langweilige, so gut wie möglich saubergehaltene
Straße in ein Getto umzuwandeln, ist immer wieder stark. Immer wieder ist
Berlin stärker. Die Einwohner kämpfen einen vergeblichen Kampf. Sie
wollen sich breitmachen? Berlin drückt sie zusammen. (II, 867)
Nationalism and Loss of Identity
If the consequence of assimilation to German and Austrian culture is a loss of
Jewish identity, then what is the solution for Jews facing anti-Semitism and
discrimination? In the final section of the original 1927 text189 Roth rejects the
Zionist solution, arguing that nationalism in any form suppresses individuality. In
this section, which focuses on the situation of the Jews in Soviet Russia, Roth
observes that the Soviet Union is “das einzige Land in Europa, in dem der AntiSemitismus verpönt ist, wenn er auch nicht aufgehört hat” (II, 887), and that the
Jews have gained a great deal in terms of freedom from persecution. But the
Revolution has been unable to find an answer to the Jewish question because it
has failed to ask the most important question, namely whether the Jews are a
nation like any other, or whether they are
eine Religionsgemeinschaft, eine Stammesgemeinschaft oder nur eine
geistige Einheit […]; ob es möglich ist, ein Volk, das sich durch die
Jahrtausende nur durch seine Religion und die Ausnahmestellung in Europa
erhalten hat, unabhängig von seiner Religion als ‘Volk’ zu betrachten; ob in
diesem besonderen Fall eine Trennung von Kirche und Nationalität möglich
ist; ob es möglich ist, aus Menschen mit ererbten geistigen Interessen Bauern
zu machen; aus stark geprägten Individualitäten Individuen mit
Massenpsychologie. (II, 889)
Roth’s implicit answer is that the spiritual and intellectual unity of the Jews which
has existed for thousands of years has far greater value and authenticity than the
nation. The nation is for Roth both an artificial construct190 and a corruptor of
189
190
The “Nachwort” is dated June 1937 (II, 892).
“[…] weil schon der Wille von einigen Millionen Menschen genügt, eine ‘Nation’ zu bilden,
selbst, wenn sie früher nicht bestanden haben sollte” (II, 830).
40
individuality. The unity of the nation differs from the spiritual and intellectual
unity which existed for thousands of years in that its particular brand of oneness
destroys individuality which previously had been able to thrive within the bonds
of community. Becoming a nation or a national minority in a conscious sense
changes the essence of the Jews’ culture, their identity, no less than does
assimilation to the culture of the Wirtsvölker.191
Roth’s conviction that nationalism suppresses individuality must be seen in the
light of his personal experience of the late Habsburg Empire to be properly
understood. From 1870, government attempts to address the discontent of the
nationalities led to the splitting of institutions along ethnic lines and the
mandatory ethnic attribution of persons.192 While these processes may have been
well-intentioned – “pacification through separation was the guiding idea”193 –
Gerald Stourzh argues that the consequences were deplorable:
The individual person increasingly became absorbed by the group – the
‘Volksstamm’, the nationality or nation. The notion of ‘citizen’ paled, while
the notion of ‘member’ of an ethnic group grew stronger. The ‘Staatsbürger’
was about to give way to the ‘Volksbürger’.194
As long as equality of the various nationalities and ethnic groups was
constitutionally guaranteed this situation was regrettable, but not sinister. But
when ethnic attribution began to be decided not by personal declaration but by
public authorities on the basis of “objective” factors such as surname, place of
191
192
193
194
This term, which was common usage in the inter-war period, can be rendered only
inadequately in English by the word “landlords”. The connotations of the term in the context
of the time are explained by Ochse: “Das herrschende Machtbewußtsein drückt sich in der
metaphorischen Selbstbeschreibung als ‘Wirtsvolk’ und der Charakterisierung jüdischer
Autoren als ‘Gäste’ aus. Als Wirt ist man der Herr im Haus, d.h. im Land. Gäste halten sich
nur für eine beschränkte Zeit in diesem Land auf und haben sich den Vorschriften des Wirts
zu unterwerfen”: Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 15-16.
Gerald Stourzh, “Ethnic Attribution in Late Imperial Austria: Good Intentions, Evil
Consequences,” in The Habsburg Legacy: National Identity in Historical Perspective, ed.
Ritchie Robertson and Edward Timms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 81.
Ethnic attribution is defined at the beginning of the article: “individual citizens by legislative
enactment were supposed to be attributed, in certain cases or for certain functions, to one or
another of the nationalities living within a province, and […] when in doubt, one had to devise
a method of finding out who was to be attributed to one nationality or another, and according
to which criteria”: Stourzh, “Ethnic Attribution,” 68.
Stourzh, “Ethnic Attribution,” 81.
41
birth, and language spoken by parents,195 the potential for these authorities to
make decisions against the will and to the subjective disadvantage of the
individual was given.196 The path from here to National Socialism was a relatively
short one:
The growing tendency to stress the sense of belonging to the ethnic group at
the expense of the sense of citizenship turned even more sinister when ethnic
attribution was taken away from the will and choice of individual persons
and transferred to the decision of public authorities on the basis of so-called
‘objective evidence’. Thus ethnic attribution could become a trap for many
[…]. For the Jews of Central Europe, once the National Socialists took over,
this trap was to become deadly.197
National Socialism, as “die Ideologie vom Vorrang des Kollektivsubjekts auf
Kosten von jeglichem Individuellen”,198 did not suddenly appear out of nowhere
but developed from the historical context of the relatively late flowering of
nationalism in Central Europe. This was a form of nationalism that privileged the
collective over the individual. It is this experience of nationalism that leads Roth
to reject all forms of it, including Jewish nationalism, as denying the free agency
of the individual.
Heimat and Nation
According to Roth, nationalist (“nationale”) Jews, like assimilated Jews, are
heimatlos (II, 831), because Heimat cannot be found in a place, and still less in a
so-called community of blood. Indeed Roth implies that it is only when they have
lost any real connection to their culture that people feel the need to declare
themselves part of a nation bound by blood:
Sogar Menschen, die weder mit der Sprache noch mit der Kultur, noch mit
der Religion ihrer Väter viel gemein haben, bekennen sich, kraft ihres Blutes
195
196
197
198
Stourzh cites the case of a German-speaking Moravian grocer who wanted to send his
daughter to a German school. Upon being questioned by the authorities as to his national/
ethnic attribution he said that he felt himself to be German and even belonged to a German
association. He admitted having inscribed himself in the Czech voting register in the past, but
explained that his motives had been economic, not national: he had been afraid of a potential
boycott by Czech customers. The case went all the way to the Administrative Court in Vienna,
the highest court of appeal, which upheld the local authority’s decision that Mr Lehar was
Czech and must send his daughter to a Czech school against his will: Stourzh, “Ethnic
Attribution,” 77-78.
Theodor W. Adorno, “Auf die Frage: Was ist deutsch,” in Gesammelte Schriften, Band 10.2,
ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 691.
42
und ihres Willens, zur ‘jüdischen Nation’. (II, 830)199
In thus opposing Heimat and Nation, effectively declaring them mutually
exclusive, Roth launches a somewhat oblique but nevertheless pointed attack on
radical German nationalism and racial anti-Semitism, which used the term Heimat
synonymously with Nation and Vaterland, tying it to a particular territory to
which the nation bound by blood has exclusive rights, rather than recognizing
“daß die Erde allen gehört, die ihre Pflicht ihr gegenüber erfüllen” (II, 830).200
The concept Heimat first became value-laden in nineteenth century popular
literature, which responded to the uncertainty created by rapidly changing social
conditions201 by presenting Heimat as a symbol for “heile Welt”, a place in which
the old values and order were still valid.202 “Heimatliebe und Heimattreue,
Heimaterde und Erdverbundenheit” represented positive values, “Heimatlossein
oder überhaupt Fremdsein”, negative values.203 German nationalist propaganda in
the First World War drew on this opposition of Heimat and Fremde to promote
defence of Volk and Vaterland.204 Heimatliteratur was ideologized in the
199
200
201
202
203
204
Since, according to Roth, the “national idea” is Western European in origin (II, 834), it
follows that this statement applies not only to the “Jewish nation” but Western nations as well:
the nation is a construct, or in Benedict Anderson’s words, an “imagined community”: see
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 1991).
The reader recalls this belief, which is attributed to the Eastern Jews and judged correct by the
narrator (“mit Recht”), several pages later and recognizes the irony when the narrator suggests
that the nationalism of the various Austrian nationalities was a result of the incompetence of
the Austrian Parliament: “Jede österreichische Nation berief sich auf die ‘Erde’, die ihr
gehörte.” (II, 835)
Karlheinz Rossbacher, Heimatkunstbewegung und Heimatroman. Zu einer Literatursoziologie
der Jahrhundertwende (Stuttgart: Klett, 1975) 65.
Jürgen Hein, “Heimat in der Literatur und Heimatliteratur,” in Identität und Entfremdung.
Beiträge zum Literaturunterricht, ed. Josef Billen (Bochum: Kamp, 1979), 122-24. See also:
Michael Wegener, “Die Heimat und die Dichtkunst. Zum Heimatroman,” in Trivialliteratur.
Aufsätze, ed. Gerhard Schmidt-Henkel et al. (Berlin: Literarisches Colloquium, 1964), 63.
Before it acquired these connotations, Heimat in literature presented a critical reflection of the
real world in the form of a locus amoenus, an idealized counter-world. It was an important
motif in the work of writers from throughout the German-speaking areas of central Europe
such as Hölderlin, Eichendorff, Heine and Keller: see Renate Böschenstein-Schäfer, Idylle,
Realienbücher für Germanisten (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1967).
Wegener, “Zum Heimatroman,” 53. According to Wegener, this presentation of Heimat as an
absolute value is the primary defining characteristic of Heimatliteratur: Wegener, “Zum
Heimatroman,” 53.
Kramer writes that a systematically produced identification with and emotional attachment to
Heimat was used in German nationalist propaganda during the First World War “um den
imperialistischen Charakter des Krieges durch die Behauptung zu verschleiern, es gehe darum,
die Heimat zu verteidigen”: Dieter Kramer, “Die politische und ökonomische
Funktionalisierung von ‘Heimat’ im deutschen Imperialismus und Faschismus,” Diskurs 3, no.
3/4 (1973): 16.
43
Heimatkunstbewegung of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and
became increasingly associated with ‘fundamentalist’ Blut-und-Boden attitudes
towards ‘homelands’ claimed by Germans, gaining strong racist and ultimately
Nazi overtones.205 Juden auf Wanderschaft was written at a time when Blut-undBoden ideologists were drawing upon the Heimat–Fremde opposition to incite
anti-Semitism:
Die völkische Formel ‘Blut und Boden’, die bereits August Winnig 1926 als
Verbindung des Symbolwertes ‘Blut’ für Rasse und ‘Boden’ für Bauerntum
verwendet hatte, wurde […] zu einem integralen Bestandteil der NSIdeologie. Indem sie einen quasi-biologischen Zusammenhang zwischen der
Bevölkerung und dem Territorium herstellte, lieferte sie mit der
Rassentheorie und dem Antisemitismus gleichzeitig eine Möglichkeit der
Selbstwertsteigerung und des Abreagierens an einem imaginären Feind.206
Roth challenges the equation of Heimat and Nation and the validity of both
concepts. This challenge is not explicitly expressed, but instead emerges
gradually, and by implication. Roth draws a contrast between the nations and
nationalities of the former Habsburg Empire on the one hand, which each claimed
their own “Scholle”,207 and the Jews on the other, who were unable to lay claim to
a particular territory:
Nur die Juden konnten sich auf keinen eigenen Boden (‘Scholle’ sagt man in
diesem Fall) berufen. Sie waren in Galizien in ihrer Mehrheit weder Polen
noch Ruthenen. Der Anti-Semitismus aber lebte sowohl bei Deutschen als
auch bei Tschechen, sowohl bei den Polen als auch bei den Ruthenen, sowohl
bei den Magyaren als auch bei den Rumänen in Siebenbürgen. Die Juden
widerlegten das Sprichwort, das da sagt, der dritte gewänne, wenn zwei sich
stritten. Die Juden waren der dritte, der immer verlor. (II, 835)
By using the word “Scholle” in this context, Roth encourages the reader to
associate the nationalism of the Habsburg peoples with the rhetoric of right-wing
nationalists in the post-war context, who claim an almost biological connection
205
206
207
The highly political Blut-und-Boden literature “stellte die letzte Stufe dar im Niedergang der
deutschen Heimatliteratur, sie lag jedoch nur in der Konsequenz ihrer Entwicklung”:
Wegener, “Zum Heimatroman,” 62.
Kramer, “Funktionalisierung von ‘Heimat’,” 18.
Roth blames this development on mismanagement by the Austrian parliament (II, 834). He
also holds the government responsible for the emergence of modern Zionism, which he views
as an almost inevitable response to the nationalism of the other peoples (II, 856).
44
with the soil (the Heimat) and deny the right of those not part of the biologicallydefined nation – in particular the Jews – to co-exist in that space.208
In their insistence on being nations and vying for their own “Scholle”, the
nationalities of the former Habsburg Empire are also implicitly contrasted with
the people of the Orient who are described earlier in the same paragraph:
Nur im Orient leben noch Menschen, die sich um ihre ‘Nationalität’, das
heißt Zugehörigkeit zu einer ‘Nation’ nach westeuropäischen Begriffen, nicht
kümmern. Sie sprechen mehrere Sprachen und sind ein Produkt mehrerer
Rassenmischungen, und ihr Vaterland ist dort, wo man sie zwangsweise in
eine militärische Formation einreiht. Die kaukasischen Armenier waren lange
Zeit weder Russen noch Armenier, sie waren eben Mohammedaner und
Kaukasier, und sie lieferten den russischen Zaren die treuesten Leibgarden.
Der nationale Gedanke ist ein westlicher. (II, 834)
The concept of the “Scholle” and the xenophobia with which it is associated is
conspicuously absent from this description; in its place are images that evoke
connotations of co-existence. People who do not see themselves as part of a
nation are depicted as speaking many languages and having a multipolar identity
– both religious (Mohammedaner) and cultural or regional (Kaukasier).209
For Roth it is a virtue not to be a nation, and he argues that the focus of some
Jews on “nationale Rechte” obscures much more important questions, such as
whether the Jews are in fact more than a “nation” in the sense understood in
Europe, “und ob sie nicht einen Anspruch auf viel Wichtigeres aufgeben, wenn sie
den auf ‘nationale Rechte’ erheben” (II, 835):
208
209
In another piece of journalism Roth exposes the misuse of the term “Scholle” by politicians
and cultural and literary historians in a biting satire: “Sie verwenden die Scholle gerne zu
Propagandazwecken, sie ist ihnen ein bequemes symbolisch-polemisches Mittel, die
schwierigen Definitionen der Begriffe: Natur- und Erdnähe zu umgehen”: Joseph Roth, “Die
Scholle”, Münchener Neueste Nachrichten, 29.1.1930 (III, 167).
Roth’s reasoning in this section is somewhat contradictory: on the one hand he insists that the
nation is a modern Western concept (II, 834) and an artificial construct (he repeats this charge
in “Der Segen des Ewigen Juden”, Die Wahrheit (Prag), 30.8.1934 (III, 531); in keeping with
this claim, the peoples he idealizes because they are not concerned to declare themselves
nations are pre-modern ethnic enclaves in the Imperial setting – the Slav-Russian Empire.
Despite occasional outbreaks of violence, communities seemed to be able to co-exist in the
pre-modern situation; with the advent of the modern nation-state, which demanded absolute
ethnic identification, this co-existence was no longer possible. On the other hand, Roth claims
that the Jews have “[d]ie Epoche der ‘Nationalgeschichte’ und ‘Vaterlandskunde’ […] schon
hinter sich” (II, 835), and asks why they should want back what they had three thousand years
ago: “Wollen sie es noch einmal? Beneiden sie die europäischen Staaten?” (II, 835-36) The
nation is thus criticized as both a modern concept and an archaic one.
45
[E]s ist gewiß nicht der Sinn der Welt, aus ‘Nationen’ zu bestehen und aus
Vaterländern, die, selbst wenn sie wirklich nur ihre kulturelle Eigenart
bewahren wollten, noch immer nicht das Recht hätten, auch nur ein einziges
Menschenleben zu opfern. […] Und in dem ganzen tausendjährigen Jammer,
in dem die Juden leben, hatten sie nur den einen Trost: nämlich den, ein
solches Vaterland nicht zu besitzen. Wenn es jemals eine gerechte
Geschichte geben wird, so wird sie es den Juden hoch anrechnen, daß sie die
Vernunft bewahren durften, weil sie kein ‘Vaterland’ besaßen in einer Zeit,
in der sie ganze Welt sich dem patriotischen Wahnsinn hingab. (II, 837)
Not claiming to be a nation, the lack of a fatherland or a Heimat – all of these are
positives for Roth. Nations and fatherlands fight wars, demand “Opfer für
materielle Interessen” (II, 837). They do not enable a people to maintain its
culture or its identity. What does, is a sense of history – an intangible but very real
connection with the past: “Die Ostjuden haben nirgends eine Heimat, aber Gräber
auf jedem Friedhof.” (II, 831) Through the graves of their dead their connection to
the history of their culture remains alive.210
Roth’s Solution: “Auf Wanderschaft”
Having rejected Heimat as a category of identification and a value due to its
connection with the nationalism he condemns in such absolute terms, Roth finds
that the only alternative is to embrace the condition of being permanently “auf
Wanderschaft”. With the title of this essay Roth consciously draws on the
Christian legend of the Wandering Jew,211 condemned perpetually to wander the
earth because of his repudiation of Christ, and in the course of the essay he gives
the deeply anti-Semitic legend a positive construction.212 First, however, he
recalls the Exodus of Moses and the Israelites from Egypt:
In dieser Gegend wird alles improvisiert: der Tempel durch die
Zusammenkunft, der Handel durch das Stehenbleiben in der Straßenmitte. Es
ist immer noch der Auszug aus Ägypten, der schon Jahrtausende anhält. Man
muß immer auf dem Sprung sein, alles mit sich führen, das Brot und eine
210
211
212
Cf. Roth, “Die Scholle” (III, 167-69). In this article Roth satirizes the idea that people belong
to a particular “Scholle”, as if they were trees rather than people. He writes: “Die heimatlosen
Völker, die durch den Willen der Geschichte ihr eigenes Land verloren haben, fühlen sich in
allen Ländern heimisch, in denen ihre Ahnen begraben sind.” (III, 168-69) The Jews have
realized that it is not the earth or place itself that is important, it is the connection with one’s
history and culture.
The German term is “der Ewige Jude”, but there can be little doubt that Roth meant the title
Juden auf Wanderschaft to evoke associations with the anti-Semitic legend. The forced
“Wandern” of the Jews is evoked many times in the text, and the author’s less ambiguously
titled essay of 1934 “Der Segen des Ewigen Juden” ends with the words: “Das Wandern ist
kein Fluch, sondern ein Segen.” (III, 532)
Cf. Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 121.
46
Zwiebel in der Tasche, in der anderen die Gebetriemen. Wer weiß, ob man in
der nächsten Stunde nicht schon wieder wandern muß. (II, 869)
The context is the description of the situation of the Eastern Jews in Berlin – the
capital of Prussia and the former German Reich and thus a symbol of aggressive
German nationalism; the state of permanent exile evoked here in the reference to
the Exodus has the expected negative connotations of tangible threat, forced flight
and fear. Yet at the same time the collective memory of the Exodus is a memory
of “the deliverance from Egyptian bondage and the acquisition of liberty in the
wilderness.”213 These positive associations of perpetual wandering are
foregrounded in the context of Paris in Roth’s essay. In this section of the text,
which is evidently influenced by the liberation Roth experienced when he
travelled to France two years earlier, the author implies that it is far better to be
continually “auf Wanderschaft” than to have one’s individuality restricted by an
ascribed and narrowly-defined identity. In Roth’s depiction, Jews in Paris have
the freedom to be themselves. Anti-Semitism does exist in Paris – it is ubiquitous
– but the Eastern Jew, who is used to a much harsher form, can live with the
French variety. Jews have religious, cultural and national freedoms in France, and
this encourages assimilation. Significantly, while Roth condemns Jewish
assimilation to Western culture in general (II, 832), in the specific case of Paris
his judgement is much less severe, more differentiated:214
Die Folge dieses Entgegenkommens ist, daß sie Französisch lernen, daß ihre
Kinder kein Jiddisch mehr sprechen. Sie verstehen es gerade noch. Es hat
mich belustigt, in den Straßen des Pariser Judenviertels die Eltern Jiddisch,
die Kinder französisch sprechen zu hören. Auf jiddische Fragen erfolgen
französische Antworten. Diese Kinder sind begabt. Sie werden es in
Frankreich zu etwas bringen, wenn Gott will. Und Gott will es, wie mir
scheint. (II, 873)
Where in the Viennese context Roth associated assimilation with loss of identity,
symbolized in the exchange of the Jew’s real name with a false one (II, 859), in
the Parisian context even the inability of the second and third generation to speak
213
214
Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources of National Identity (Oxford; New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003) 61.
Riemen overlooks the nuances in Roth’s depiction when he writes: “Den emanzipierten und
assimilierten Westjuden, wie sie in Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris leben, gilt seine Verachtung”:
Alfred Riemen, “Judentum – Kirche – Habsburg. Joseph Roths antinationalistische
Vorstellungen der dreißiger Jahre,” in “In Spuren gehen…” Festschrift für Helmut
Koopmann, ed. Andrea Bartl (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998), 380.
47
Yiddish is not portrayed negatively. A visit to a Yiddish theatre in Paris reveals
that this loss of native tongue does not entail a loss of identity. The play portrays a
Jewish family which wishes to emigrate to America from its Russian village. The
third act sees them in America, “reich geworden und protzig, und im Begriff, ihre
alte Heimat zu vergessen und die alten Freunde aus der Heimat, die nach Amerika
kommen” (II, 875). During the Russian-Yiddish songs and dances not only the
actors but also the audience cry, and the narrator comments:
Hätten nur jene [die Darsteller] geweint, es wäre kitschig gewesen. Aber als
diese [die Zuschauer] weinten, wurde es schmerzlich. Juden sind leicht
gerührt – das wußte ich. Aber ich wußte nicht, daß ein Heimweh sie rühren
könnte. (II, 875)
The emotional outpouring implies a deep connection of the Jews to their culture,
despite assimilation and their loss of their mother tongue Yiddish.215 The
community continues to exist and has apparently lost nothing of its ability to
communicate:
Es war eine so innige, beinahe private Beziehung von der Bühne zum
Zuschauer. […] Der Regisseur trat vor und kündigte die nächsten Programmwechsel an. Nicht durch Zeitung, nicht durch Plakate. Mündlich. Von
Mensch zu Mensch. […] Er sprach unmittelbar und witzig. Seinen Witz
verstand man. Ahnte beinahe voraus. Erwitterte die Pointe. (II, 875)
Just why the maintenance of Jewish identity is possible despite assimilation in
Paris is explored by Roth through the tale of the Jewish clown from Radziwillow,
a town on the former Russian-Austrian border. The clown came from a family of
musicians and was the only one of the family who was able to leave the shtetl and
study music in the west, in Vienna. He assimilated, becoming a successful
musican, but realized that he was not true to himself when he was playing
Beethoven in a concert hall in the west: “Ich bin immer ein Clown in dieser Welt,
auch wenn man ernste Referate über mich bringt und Herren von den Zeitungen
mit Brillen in den ersten Reihen sitzen.” (II, 875) Yet he could not now return to
Radziwillow and play at Jewish weddings as his family had always done,
presumably because the years spent in the west and experience accumulated had
added another dimension to his identity. So he became a musical clown in a Parisbased circus, and in so doing he realized was not denying the tradition of his
215
At the beginning of this story Roth indicates that assimilated Jews are in the audience: “Die
jungen jüdischen Frauen sprachen nur Französisch. Sie waren pariserisch elegant.” (II, 874)
48
forefathers, but being “was sie hätten sein sollen” (II, 876) – free. The Jewish
clown from Radziwillow is free to be simply who he is, without having to explain
or justify himself to others: “‘Ich spiele Zieh- und Mundharmonika und
Saxophon, und es freut mich, daß die Leute gar nicht wissen, daß ich Beethoven
spielen kann. Ich bin ein Jud aus Radziwillow.’” (II, 876) What he chooses to
reveal publicly of his identity does not negate other aspects.
The clown’s decision is not, as Ochse contends, simply a rejection of the
Orthodox way of life and “ein deutliches Bekenntnis zur Assimilation”.216
Whenever he is playing in a new city the clown seeks out Jews from Radziwillow
and he always finds two or three: “‘Wir reden miteinander. In Paris leben auch
einige. Sind sie nicht aus Radziwillow, so sind sie aus Dubno. Und sind sie nicht
aus Dubno, so sind sie aus Kischinew.’” (II, 876) His decision to become a
musical clown in Paris must be read as an affirmation of a sense of belonging to
the culture of the Jews while still being part of a wider society: “‘In Paris leben
die Juden frei. Ich bin ein Patriot, ich hab’ ein jüdisches Herz.’” (II, 876) For
Gelber the significance of the clown’s statement lies in its role in underlining the
sympathetic link between the narrator and the Eastern Jews: “die im westlichen
Sinne illogische Reihenfolge der Sätze […], die angeblich für Ostjuden so
charakteristisch sei”, is mirrored (or rather anticipated) by the narrator’s own use
of this pattern elsewhere,217 creating “eine komplementäre ostjüdische Rhetorik in
der Sprache des Verfassers”.218 While Gelber’s argument is compelling, his
interpretation fails to recognize the significance of the statement’s content: the
lack of contradiction in the clown’s dual loyalty. His Jewish identity – his
“jüdisches Herz” – is not submerged in the French nation, his loyalty to the
society in which he lives being expressed in patriotism, rather than cultural
identification.
216
217
218
Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 129. Ochse does not account for the clown’s continued
declaration that he is “ein Jud aus Radziwillow”.
“In Berlin freut man sich nicht. Aber in Paris herrscht die Freude. Paris ist demokratisch. Der
Deutsche ist menschlich.” (II, 872)
Gelber, “Ost-West-Debatte,” 129.
49
The clown’s freedom of movement is a metaphor for self-determination, the
freedom to define his own identity, for himself and nobody else.219 That this
freedom should be not the exception but the rule, and that it is ethnic German
nationalism that prevents this from being the case, is implied in the contrast
between the clown’s experience and the experience of Eastern Jews in Vienna and
Berlin. Roth’s aversion to the levelling of identity that he observed in Berlin (II,
867) recalls John Stuart Mill’s warning in his famous essay “On Liberty” (1859)
about the threat posed to individual liberty by the increasing powers of
government and society over the individual. In the context of growing
nationalism, industrialism and militarism throughout Europe Mill “stressed the
importance, to man and society, of promoting spontaneity and a large variety of
types of character, and of giving to human nature full freedom to expand itself in
innumerable and conflicting directions.”220 With his portrait of the clown from
Radziwillow Roth implies the continuing primacy of individual liberty in the selfdefinition of the French nation, while in German-speaking Central Europe the
individual has become subsumed by the nation.221
The parallel Roth draws between freedom of movement and self-determination is
expressed more directly in two articles published in 1930 and 1934,222 in which he
argues that it is unnatural for human beings to bind themselves to one place. The
desire to be buried in one’s own homeland appears ridiculous in Roth’s tale of the
traveller who takes “ein bißchen heimatliche Erde in einem Säckchen” along on
his travels in case he should meet his death away from home, so that his “lebloser
Schädel auf dem gleichen Acker gebettet werde, dem er einmal entsprossen ist”
(III, 168). Roth exposes the folly of this behaviour through a potent metaphor: “Es
219
220
221
222
Roth’s rejection of the “American solution” to the Jewish problem of discrimination, which
saw large numbers of Eastern Jews emigrate to the United States, is expressed in terms of a
loss of freedom. Roth describes how Eastern Jews are quarantined on arrival: “Durch die
Gitter seines Kerkers sieht er die Freiheitsstatue, und er weiß nicht, ob er oder die Freiheit
eingesperrt ist.” (II, 885) In the land of freedom there is no freedom: the fate of Jews in
America is to assimilate and become Americans, thus surrendering their own identity.
Hans Kohn, Prophets and Peoples: Studies in Nineteenth Century Nationalism (New York:
MacMillan, 1946) 24.
Herzog’s claim that Roth accuses the Jews who have emigrated to the “westlichen Gettos” of
Vienna, Berlin and Paris of having fallen prey to the “Versprechen einer falschen Freiheit” is
too undifferentiated, since it fails to note the contrast between the Jewish experience in France
on the one hand and Germany and Austria on the other: Herzog, “Der Segen,” 117.
Roth, “Die Scholle” (III, 167-69); and “Der Segen des Ewigen Juden” (III, 527-32).
50
ist also manchmal, als wären die Menschen, obwohl sie Füße zum Wandern
haben, dennoch den Bäumen ähnlich, in einem bestimmten Teil der Erde
unsichtbar, unerklärbar verwurzelt.” (III, 168)
The same metaphor appears in the later, lengthier article, a discussion piece
entitled “Der Segen des Ewigen Juden.”223 In this article Roth once again voices
his criticism of Jewish nationalism and Zionism, declaring that the Jewish people
have existed for longer than the concept of the nation, a fact which they seem to
have forgotten since they left the ghetto. He excuses the Zionists up to a point,
because Zionism is an understandable, even necessary response to the chauvinism
of modern nations (III, 531); but the response is not adequate, he argues, because
in becoming a nation themselves, they are denying the essence of their identity as
a people:
Sie waren über die Welt verstreut worden, um Gottes Namen zu verbreiten.
Sie haben indessen Gott selbst vergessen und müssen sich nun wieder in eine
geographisch beschränkte Nationalität zurückziehen. (III, 531)
For Roth, this return or “Heimkehr” of the Jews to a geographically-limited
nationality in Zionism is more tragic than their original Dispersion, since there is
greater honour to be had in simply being a human being than in having a
fatherland:224
Und vielleicht liegt darin auch einer der Gründe des Antisemitismus: Es ist
der Neid der Gefangenen, denen die Freien ein Greuel sind. Die Häftlinge
machen aus der Not eine Tugend und erklären, ihre Zelle sei das Paradies.
Der Mensch ist kein Baum. Es ist eine törichte Art der Deutschen, ihre
Heroen zu degradieren, indem sie diese mit den bekannten Eichenbäumen
vergleichen. Ein Mensch ist eben keine Eiche. Die Eiche ist gefangen, und
der Mensch ist frei. Ja, ein Mensch, der sich bei Gewitter unter eine Eiche
stellt, gerät in Gefahr, vom Blitz erschlagen zu werden. Beine und Füße hat
Gott dem Menschen gegeben, damit er wandere über die Erde, die sein ist.
Das Wandern ist kein Fluch, sondern ein Segen. (III, 532)
223
224
The piece, in which among other things Roth criticized German Jews for what he called their
pathological behaviour in continuing to insist on their belonging to the German nation and
differentiating between Germans and Nazis (III, 528), provoked many indignant responses;
those published by Die Wahrheit are reproduced in (III, 533-47). Even the editors of Die
Wahrheit found it necessary to distance themselves from Roth’s opinions in this regard: “Wir
glauben […], daß hier der gleiche Fehler gegenüber den Deutschen begangen wird, den die
Deutschen des Dritten Reiches gegenüber den Juden begehen.” (III, 547)
“Weshalb schämt sich jedermann, wenn man ihm vorwirft, daß er eigentlich kein Vaterland
habe? Ist es denn nicht ehrenvoller, ein Mensch (oder ein Christ) zu sein als ein Deutscher, ein
Franzose, ein Engländer?” (III, 532)
51
It is better to be condemned to perpetual migration but free rather than to belong
to a nation and have a fatherland, and thereby lose the freedom which is the
essence of being human. Similarly, in Juden auf Wanderschaft Roth implies that
in reacting to the chauvinism of other nations by declaring themselves a nation,
Jews have lost something of their humanity: “Sie waren immer Menschen im Exil
gewesen. Jetzt wurden sie eine Nation im Exil.” (II, 835)
In the middle of “Der Segen des Ewigen Juden” Roth describes the Jews as “das
Volk der Bücher” and claims that they have made the mistake of judging the
Germans by their books:
Sie sahen in den Deutschen die Nation Lessings, Herders, Goethes. Ist es nun
im allgemeinen eine höchst strittige Frage, ob die Nationen ein Recht haben,
auf ‘ihre’ Genies stolz zu sein, so ist es doch in Deutschland sehr deutlich zu
sehen, erschreckend deutlich, daß seine Genies und Talente wie arme
Verirrte oder Verbannte aussehn, vom Vaterland mißachtet und das
Vaterland geringschätzend. Das deutsche Genie fühlt sich keineswegs in
Deutschland zu Hause. (III, 529)
When he then insists on the freedom that not belonging to a nation entails, the
freedom of being a human being that is negated by being locked in the cell of the
nation, Roth is echoing a long-standing suspicion of the nation in the German
tradition, a suspicion expressed in the celebrated distich of Goethe and Schiller in
which politics and humanity are incompatible for the Germans:
Zur Nation euch zu bilden, ihr hoffet es, Deutsche, vergebens;
Bildet, ihr könnt es, dafür freier zu Menschen euch aus!225
No matter how bitterly he opposed and condemned Germany, Roth always made a
distinction between Nazi Germany and the German culture represented by Goethe
and Schiller. In 1935, he wrote to Stefan Zweig: “Ich leide auch jetzt nicht
darunter, daß ich deutsch denke und schreibe, sondern darunter, daß 40 Millionen
mitten in Europa Barbaren sind.”226 Clearly distinguishing between the heritage of
Goethe and Schiller and the national chauvinism of Germans in the Weimar
Republic, he claimed in Juden auf Wanderschaft that the Eastern Jew, not the
German nationalist, was the true keeper of this heritage: “Dem Ostjuden ist
Deutschland […] immer noch das Land Goethes und Schillers, der deutschen
225
226
Goethes Werke (Weimar: Böhlau, 1887-1919) (Weimarer Ausgabe) I, 5, 218.
Letter to Stefan Zweig, 24.7.1935, Briefe 418.
52
Dichter, die jeder lernbegierige jüdische Jüngling besser kennt als unser
hakenkreuzlerischer Gymnasiast” (II, 828). The legacy of Goethe and Schiller was
for Roth above all the freedom of the individual and openness to the world
expressed in Goethe and Schiller’s exhortation to the German people, as Stefan
Zweig recalled at Roth’s funeral:
Auch Joseph Roths innerstes Verlangen war von Kindheit an, der deutschen
Sprache zu dienen und in ihr den großen Ideen, die vordem Deutschlands
Ehre waren, dem Weltbürgertum und der Freiheit des Geistes.227
“Die süße Freiheit, nichts mehr darzustellen als mich selbst”228
Roth rejects nationalism as a solution to the problems of post-war Central Europe
because it inhibits the free expression of individual identity. Growing up in the
ethnic and linguistic pluralism of turn-of-the-century Central Europe, Roth
inevitably experienced identity as multifaceted, his Jewishness and Germanness
existing side by side with the Slavic influence characteristic of the eastern
provinces of the Habsburg Empire. Drawn from personal experience, his
conception of identity as something both individual and multivalent was anathema
in the post-war climate of chauvinist German nationalism. This experience of
being at odds with the prevailing ideology led to a preoccupation with questions
of nationalism and identity ascription which finds expression in much of Roth’s
work, from the early novels to Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft.
Roth’s rejection of ethnic nationalism is characteristic: he consistently resists the
appeal of any ideology or solution which purports to provide a total answer. The
next chapter of this study demonstrates that Roth’s early novels do not support the
assertion that he believed a solution to the problems of post-war Europe to lie in
“eine sozialistische Veränderung der Verhältnisse”.229 Focussing on Central
Europe in the early post-war period, Roth’s first three novels are representations
of “einer Krisenzeit und einer Zeit des Umbruchs”, in which the characters “in
ihrer Desorientierung […] der Zeit, in der sie leben, gleichen.”230 Roth’s refusal to
227
228
229
230
Stefan Zweig, Europäisches Erbe (Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer, 1960) 253-54.
Roth, “Die weißen Städte” (II, 453).
Klaus Amann, “Die verlorene Generation in Joseph Roths frühen Romanen,” Literatur und
Kritik 247/248 (1990): 333.
53
succumb in these novels to a simplistic solution in order to achieve some form of
literary resolution is an early indication that he would continue to seek the
appropriate literary form with which to understand his time in its diversity. In Das
Spinnennetz, as in the essay Juden auf Wanderschaft, the ethnic nationalist
solution is the target of Roth’s criticism. In Hotel Savoy, the socialist revolution is
implicitly rejected as a solution, while political apathy and fatalism also come
under fire. In the last of the early novels, Die Rebellion, Roth turns his attention to
the question of individual responsibility for the perpetuation of social injustice.
Once again he rejects absolutist forms of thinking, this time through a figure who,
despite his forced realization of the social injustice which characterizes his
society, is unable to overcome his authoritarian socialization and fails to rebel
against this injustice.
54
Chapter 2
“Die Welt ist irrsinnig”231
The Early Novels: Das Spinnennetz, Hotel Savoy, Die Rebellion
… eine unübersichtlich endlose Furcht, wie man
sie vor Katastrophen empfindet, die nicht
eintreffen wollen, und deren Ausbruch eine
Erlösung wäre.232
“Der rote Joseph”?
When Roth returned to Vienna after the war in December 1918, it was to a place
in which everything seemed radically altered. Vienna had suffered little physical
damage in the war, but in both material and spiritual terms it was a vastly
different place from the pre-war Imperial capital: “auch ihre Seele schien
verworren und krank nach den langen Kriegsjahren und dem chirurgischen
Eingriff, der ihr die territorialen Glieder abgeschnitten hatte.”233 Newspaper
headlines sounded an almost constant alarm with reports of strikes, rapid inflation
and coal and food shortages.234 At this time Roth was just embarking on what
would become a brilliant career as a journalist.235 Employed by Der Neue Tag
from April 1919 until the newspaper’s collapse a year later,236 he responded to the
chaos of early post-war Vienna in a series of feuilletons under the rubric “Wiener
Symptome”. He favoured the detail of everyday life over the big issues of state
politics,237 penning minutely observed reflections on the hardship and misery of
ordinary people in post-war Vienna, the black market, food shortages, and the fate
of invalided returned servicemen, the unemployed and the homeless.238 After
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
Joseph Roth, “Das Haus der 100 Vernünftigen”, Frankfurter Zeitung, 17.2.1923 (I, 931).
Roth, Die Rebellion (IV, 251).
Bronsen, Biographie 193. On the economic and social situation in the first Austrian Republic
see also Ernst Bruckmüller, Sozialgeschichte Österreichs (Wien: Verlag für Geschichte und
Politik, 2001) 372-74, 402-17.
Roth became the most highly-paid journalist in the Weimar Republic, earning a guaranteed
monthly salary of 1000 Marks at the Frankfurter Zeitung from 1927 (an issue of the paper at
that time cost 10 or 20 Pfennig): Klaus Westermann, “Nachwort” (II, 1028).
Klaus Westermann, “Nachwort” (I, 1111).
Schweikert judges these early articles to be largely unpolitical, although Roth’s perspective,
with its focus on the concerns and problems of the little people, is “stark aufs Sozialkritische
hin ausgerichtet”: Schweikert, “‘Der rote Joseph’,” 43.
55
Chapter 2: The Early Novels
moving to Berlin in June 1920, Roth continued to focus the bulk of his journalism
on the fate of the little people he observed around him.239 Together these early
articles capture “das Antlitz der Zeit”,240 giving the modern reader an insight into
the uncertainties and the privation of post-war life in Germany and Austria.241
Published in 1923 and 1924, Roth’s early novels are similarly focussed on the
social problems besetting contemporary Central Europe. These novels were
characterized by Ingeborg Sültemeyer as “socialist”,242 a label which has for the
most part been accepted by subsequent critics, although its appropriateness has
not gone unchallenged. Already two years before the book publication of
Sültemeyer’s doctoral dissertation Uwe Schweikert argued that the young Roth
was not a political writer, that throughout the period 1919 to 1924 he maintained a
predilection for “[d]ie bürgerlich subjektivistische Form des Feuilletons”,243 and
that a certain “latent conservatism” was manifest in even his early journalism.244
More recently, Katharina Ochse has observed that Roth published a number of
quite conservative articles during this supposedly socialist period.245 Indeed, while
many of the newspapers in which Roth published between 1919 and 1926
displayed left-wing sympathies, they were by no means exclusively left-leaning.
From 1920 until 1922, for example, Roth was employed by the conservative
Berliner Börsen-Courier. When he resigned, he explained in a letter to his
239
240
241
242
243
244
Westermann, “Nachwort” 1112.
“Das Antlitz der Zeit” is the title of Roth’s programmatic article from 1920, in which he
outlines the duty of a journalist to represent the times as they are, in all their ugliness, rather
than to present “das geschminkte, frisierte, stilisierte Antlitz der Zeit”: Joseph Roth, “Das
Antlitz der Zeit”, Der Neue Tag, 1.1.1920 (I, 214).
Klaus Westermann, editor of Roth’s journalism in the six-volume Werkausgabe, describes it
in glowing terms: “[…] so brilliant und wortgewaltig, so betroffen und engagiert, so
weitsichtig und klug”: Westermann, “Nachwort” 1109.
Sültemeyer, Das Frühwerk passim. In the preface to an edited volume of Roth’s early political
journalism Sültemeyer writes: “Roths politischer Standpunkt zu dieser Zeit kann in der Nähe
des linken Flügels der ‘Sozialistischen Partei Österreichs’ vermutet werden”: Sültemeyer, ed.,
Der Neue Tag 13.
Bance similarly notes that Roth “kept up a steady stream of conventional Feuilleton-style
articles for […] bourgeois newspapers right through his ‘activist’ years”: Bance, “In My End
is My Beginning,” 36.
Schweikert, “‘Der rote Joseph’,” 54. Although he concedes that Roth sympathized with the
socialist movement to a certain extent, Schweikert refutes Sültemeyer’s central thesis: “Von
1919 bis 1924 stand der rote Joseph […] der sozialistischen Bewegung zumindest nahe. […]
Ein politischer Publizist freilich war er nicht”: Schweikert, “‘Der rote Joseph’,” 53-54.
56
colleague Herbert Ihering that it was a matter of principle: “Ich kann wahrhaftig
nicht mehr die Rücksichten auf ein bürgerliches Publikum teilen und dessen
Sonntagsplauderer bleiben, wenn ich nicht täglich meinen Sozialismus verleugnen
will.”246 Sültemeyer quotes this statement as evidence of a strong commitment to
socialism;247 yet in the same letter Roth admits that he would perhaps have stayed
at the Börsen-Courier had it not been for a salary he believed to be
incommensurate with his talent and a failure by the newspaper to accord his work
proper recognition.248
Despite the lack of solid evidence of Roth’s socialism and the concomitant
existence of numerous indications to the contrary, most scholars since the 1970s
have embraced Sültemeyer’s interpretation of the early work as “socialist”,249
albeit increasingly with the qualification that Roth’s socialism was less
ideological than emotional,250 “more a matter of human sympathy with the
disadvantaged and exploited than one of practical engagement”.251 The utility and
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 46. Sültemeyer claims that the mainly apolitical articles published
in the Frankfurter Zeitung are not representative of Roth’s political interests at this time:
Letter to Herbert Ihering, 17.9.1922, Briefe 40.
Briefe 40. While acknowledging that these other considerations played a role in Roth’s
decision to resign, Sültemeyer insists on the significance of his statement of principle:
“Festzuhalten bleibt aber, daß er als ‘die Ursache meiner Kündigung’ sein Bekenntnis zum
Sozialismus nennt”: Sültemeyer, Das Frühwerk 65. It is difficult to believe, however, that this
statement was not just another example of the “Selbststilisierung” which Schweikert
demonstrates to be characteristic of Roth’s letters: Schweikert, “‘Der rote Joseph’,” 40, 42.
Scheible surmises that the political atmosphere of the 1960s and 1970s was largely
responsible for the fact that Roth’s “socialism” was not questioned, “obwohl dafür eigentlich
nicht viel mehr sprach als vereinzelte vage Äußerungen des Autors und die Unterschrift ‘Der
Rote Joseph’ unter einigen Artikeln”: Hartmut Scheible, “Joseph Roths Reise durch
Geschichte und Revolution. Das Europa der Nachkriegszeit: Deutschland, Frankreich,
Sowjetunion,” in Joseph Roth. Interpretation Rezeption Kritik, ed. Michael Kessler and Fritz
Hackert (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1990), 308.
Hansen refers to Roth’s “Gefühlssozialismus”: Hansen, “Rechtspolitik und Linkskultur,” 144.
Schweikert had already hinted at this interpretation when he declared the lack of “[…] eine
einzige Bezugnahme auf einen der Theoretiker des Sozialismus” to be indicative of Roth’s
aversion to theory of any description, pointing out that in all likelihood Roth had not even read
any of the theory: Schweikert, “‘Der rote Joseph’,” 45. In the same year, Bronson wrote in his
Roth biography: “der Sozialismus [war] bei ihm eine humanitäre Angelegenheit, ohne die
Absicherung eines Dogmas”: Bronsen, Biographie 513. See also Williams, The Broken Eagle
96.
Rosenfeld, Understanding 11. See also: Klaus Westermann, Joseph Roth. Journalist: Eine
Karriere, 1915-1939 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1987) 108; Robertson, “1918,” 356; Hans-Albert
Walter, “Joseph Roths Widersprüche. Zu seinen Briefen 1911-1939,” Merkur 25, no. 8
57
aptness of the label “socialist” are, however, questionable. Roth himself abhorred
labels and delighted in making it difficult for his readers to categorize him.252
Even his use of the pseudonym der rote Joseph for a number of the articles he
published in Vorwärts – cited by Sültemeyer and others as further proof of his
socialism253 – was surely ironic: given the paper’s status as the mouthpiece of the
Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands it was hardly necessary for Roth to
specify his credentials.254 Had he nonetheless believed it to be necessary, would
he not have appended this signature to all of his Vorwärts articles, instead of
alternating it with his full name, his initials J.R., and Josephus, the pseudonym he
had already used frequently at Der Neue Tag?255 Moreover, if his intention was to
make an open declaration of his political sympathies, why did he use the
pseudonym only in Vorwärts and in none of the other newspapers in which he
published at this time? It appears likely that der rote Joseph was just one more of
the myriad myths of the “Mythomane” who oriented himself according to what
seemed most likely to appear plausible or welcome to his listener or audience.256
Socialism and the Early Novels
If socialism is a questionable model of interpretation for Roth’s early journalism,
it is even more more problematic to use it in relation to the novels of this period.
Indeed, as Klaus Amann has commented, it is misleading:
Es hat durchaus den Anschein, als ob die rezeptionsgeschichtlich bedeutsame
Entdeckung des journalistischen Frühwerks und die damit zusammenhängende Punzierung Roths als ‘Sozialist’ zu einer Situation geführt hat, in
252
253
254
255
256
(1971): 799; Hüppauf, “Mythos des Skeptikers,” 25-26. Sieg, on the other hand, writes of “die
eindeutigen revolutionären Aussagen der frühen Werke”: Sieg, Anarchismus und Fiktion 10.
Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 46.
Sültemeyer, Das Frühwerk 65; Marchand, Wertbegriffe 65; Robert Cohen, “Männerwelt,
Gewalt, Weimarer Republik. Rechstextremisten im Frühwerk Joseph Roths und in Ernst
Ottwalts Ruhe und Ordnung,” Modern Austrian Literature 30 (1997): 48. All of these
commentators take Roth’s use of the pseudonym at face value.
Sültemeyer herself acknowledges this fact, but maintains her assertion than the pseudonym is
proof of Roth’s commitment to socialism: Sültemeyer, Das Frühwerk 65.
Ochse cites the use of the pseudonym Josephus as one of the strategies Roth employed to
avoid being pigeonholed. For Christian readers, the latinized form of Roth’s first name hints at
“Kirche, Bibel und Wissenschaft des Mittelalters”: Klaus Westermann, Joseph Roth,
Journalist. Eine Karriere 1915-1939 (Bonn, 1987) 25; cited in Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 45.
At the same time, Ochse argues, Jewish readers would be reminded of the Jewish historian
Flavius Josephus: Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 45.
Cf. Scheible, “Reise,” 308; Dietmar Goltschnigg, “Zeit-, Ideologie- und Sprachkritik in Joseph
Roths Essayistik,” Literatur und Kritik, no. 243/244 (1990): 133.
58
der das schriftstellerische Werk Roths permanent unter politischen
Beweiszwang gerät.257
Critics do Roth an injustice, Amann argues, if they admonish him for failing in his
early fictional texts in one way or another to realize socialist aims,258 because
Roth explicitly and vehemently rejected the legitimacy of literature as a vehicle
for “Lösungsvorschläge und Realpolitik”.259 Certainly, the reflection of the
contemporary social and political climate in Roth’s early Zeitromane is not in
itself sufficient to create a socialist text. Extra-textual evidence offered by
Sültemeyer in support of her thesis, such as the initial publication of Das
Spinnennetz in the socialist Viennese Arbeiterzeitung,260 provides at best tenuous
evidence of the writer’s political views:261 Roth was often short of money and for
a time262 agreed for a handsome fee263 to write for the Münchener Neueste
Nachrichten, a newspaper whose quality and politics he had only a few years
previously fiercely decried.264
The novels themselves provide little evidence of Roth’s alleged socialist
commitment, and none of the texts proffers a socialist solution to the
contemporary problems portrayed. Indeed, Roth at times appears to be at pains to
refute socialist ideology: thus in Das Spinnennetz, for example, he exposes the
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
Amann, “Die verlorene Generation,” 330. Sonnleitner likewise notes that the secondary
literature has been guilty of imposing a political interpretation on the early novels by
identifying characters which supposedly express Roth’s political views: Sonnleitner, “Macht,
Identität,” 169-70.
The various such criticisms that have been made by scholars are summarized at the beginning
of Amann’s article: Amann, “Die verlorene Generation,” 325.
Amann, “Die verlorene Generation,” 326.
Sültemeyer, Das Frühwerk 105. Williams similarly interprets Roth’s decision to publish his
first novel in this newspaper as “a political gesture”: Williams, The Broken Eagle 95.
Bronsen reports that it was the first time Roth had published anything in this newspaper and
cites the announcement of the novel in the newspaper, which introduced Roth as a German
writer, as evidence that Roth was not well known to the editors: Bronsen, Biographie 236.
1929-30. Approximately 30 feuilletons by Roth appeared in the nationalist Munich newspaper
in this period: Bronsen, Biographie 379.
He reportedly received a monthly fee of 2000 Marks, for which he was required to write only
two articles per month: Bronsen, Biographie 279.
In 1925 Roth had devoted an entire article to a critique of this newspaper and the Hamburger
Fremdenblatt, asserting: “In einem Lande, in dem Zeitungen von der Qualität und Gesinnung
der Münchener Neuesten Nachrichten erscheinen, kann es Schriftstellern von Qualität und
Gesinnung nicht gut ergehn”: “100 000 Mark für einen Roman”, Der Drache 6.1.1925 (II,
320-23).
59
violent potential of the left with the planned attack on the Siegessäule.265
Subsequently, when the clash between the striking workers and right-wing forces
leads to a pogrom on the Jews, Roth suggests that the proletariat might not be on
the side of the Jews: “Da offen bleibt, wer mit der Attacke auf die Juden beginnt
bzw. daran beteiligt ist, kommen rechte wie linke Demonstrationsteilnehmer als
Initiatoren des Pogroms in Frage.”266 Marchand’s claim that Roth views society in
the early novels “wenig differenziert in zwei Blöcke gespalten, die sich feindlich
gegenüberstehen und denen Gut und Böse, Schwarz und Weiß streng zugeordnet
wird”267 must therefore be refuted. While Roth’s most bitter and explicit criticism
is reserved for the extreme right-wing nationalists, he is not uncritical of the left.
His interest in and sympathy with the socially and economically disadvantaged
characters is often plain, but the common thread linking these diverse novels is
not socialist engagement but a rejection of any ideology or doctrine as a solution
to contemporary problems. As Sonnleitner has argued, the political quality of
Roth’s novels does not consist in the making of ideological statements:
Politisch ist Roth in seiner Prosa nicht dort, wo sich scheinbar ‘Aussagen’
aus dem Text herauspräparieren lassen, sondern in der exakten analytischen
Erfassung und Beschreibung der Psychosen der in der Monarchie
sozialisierten Heimkehrergeneration.268
To the extent that Roth is engaging with and drawing attention to the problems of
post-war Europe his early novels may be termed political. But the later novels
Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft are equally political in this sense, in that
Roth’s underlying motivation is a desire to understand and reveal the sources of
contemporary social and political problems.269
265
266
267
268
269
For Ochse this is one of many examples of Roth’s strategy in this novel of blurring the
boundaries between two apparently diametrically opposed camps, whether nationalists and
socialists or Jews and anti-Semites: see Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 61, 77-78.
Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 75. That Roth was realistic in his suspicion of the potential for
anti-Semitic violence among the left is reflected in the fact that on 5 November 1923, one day
after the final instalment of Roth’s novel, there was an outbreak of violence due to a sudden
increase in the price of bread: “‘Besonders schwere Ausschreitungen ereigneten sich um die
Mittagszeit im Scheunenviertel, wo jugendliche Erwerblose […] systematisch die […]
jüdischen Geschäfte zu plündern begannen. Jüdische Straßenpassanten wurden von der Menge
angegriffen und ausgeraubt’”: “Plünderungen in Berlin”, Arbeiter-Zeitung (Wien), 6.11.1923;
quoted in Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 76.
Sonnleitner, “Macht, Identität,” 184.
Sieg’s interpretation of the early novels as political and the novels from Hiob (1930) as
apolitical is more typical: Sieg, Anarchismus und Fiktion 10.
60
The Reactionary Mentality and its Origins: Das Spinnennetz
A little more than a year before the publication of Das Spinnennetz, the antiSemitic murder of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau prompted Roth to consider
whether the currency of radical right sentiments in the young Weimar Republic
could be attributed to particular methods of upbringing and socialization.270
Examining the faces on the wanted posters around Berlin, Roth expresses surprise
at the “spießbürgerliche[...] Harmlosigkeit dieser Antlitze” (I, 838). Expecting to
find a “Physiognomie”,271 some features that would reflect the murderers’
criminality, Roth finds instead “einen Typus” (I, 838), and his description of this
type corresponds closely to the subsequent portrayal of Theodor Lohse, the
protagonist of Das Spinnennetz. The “cultivation” of this type in cadet schools
and sports clubs, writes Roth in “Prosa der Verschwörung”, has made him
compliant and submissive,272 and has bred a particular kind of determination and
single-mindedness:
Im Auge liest man die Entschlossenheit, an der Bildung des Kinns zweifellos
Energie. Aber es ist die Entschlossenheit des zum Gehorchen Bereiten, nicht
des initiativ Greifenden. Es ist die Energie des Befohlenen, nicht des
Befehlshabers. (I, 838)
The danger posed by this personality type lies in the fact that in Weimar Germany
he is not the exception but the rule: he is “der Durchschnittsmensch” (I, 839).
Lacking individuality and the capacity to think for himself,273 this type of person
willingly subordinates himself to a narrow ideology: “Die Individualität macht
270
271
272
273
Joseph Roth, “Prosa der Verschwörung: Eine unpolitische Betrachtung”, Berliner BörsenCourier, 16.7.1922 (I, 838-40). See also “Die Dreizehn”, Neue Berliner Zeitung – 12-UhrBlatt 4.10.1922 (I, 872-74); “Nationalismus im Abort”, Vorwärts 9.12.1922 (I, 900-01).
With the use of the word “Physiognomie” Roth was very probably also satirizing the prevalent
belief in a “Jewish physiognomy”. The satire is more elaborate in an article published in 1919,
in which after the annexation of Deutschösterreich to the United States headless anti-Semites
are found and the Ostjuden are able to get their revenge “indem sie jedem Antisemiten einen
prononciert jüdischen Kopf verkauften, so daß man schließlich Arier von Semiten äußerlich
nicht mehr unterscheiden konnte”: “Deutschösterreich 1930”, Der Neue Tag 5.10.1919 (I,
150-51).
“Er ist der Typus des Menschen, der in Kadettanstalten und Sportvereinen gezüchtet wird:
brauchbar, lenksam, und wenn man ihm eine begrenzte Selbständigkeit zugesteht,
verantwortungsvoll auf beschränkte Dauer, zuverlässig, wenn seinem einfachen Gehirn die
Knappheit des Auftrages entgegenkommt, umsichtig für einen Augenblick der Tat.” (I, 83839).
“Er ist also von seiner Idee überzeugt und kennt nicht ihre Dimensionen. Er weiß nicht, ob sie
groß oder klein ist – sie kann nicht klein genug sein, um seinen Gesichtskreis nicht
auszufüllen. Er kennt den Befehl und dessen Ziel. Die Zusammenhänge erkennt er nicht.” (I,
838).
61
sich eine Idee zunutze oder verbündet sich mit ihr – der Durchschnittsmensch
ordnet sich sogar der Phrase unter und geht in ihr auf.” (I, 839) The implications
of the prevalence of this “Typus” in German society are explored in more detail in
Das Spinnennetz, in which Roth extrapolates from the reality he observes in 1923
into the near future, positing a possible trajectory for a person drawn to the radical
right and exposing the dangers inherent in the ethnic nationalist solution to the
problems of post-war Germany. Just as in “Prosa der Verschwörung” Roth finds a
strong link between the militarism of pre-Weimar institutions and attitudes of
extreme nationalism, anti-Semitism and violence in the Weimar Republic, the
origins of Theodor Lohse’s reactionary mentality are demonstrated to lie in his
socialization in Wilhelmine Germany.
Lohse is an unexceptional individual: he hails from the Kleinbürgertum,274 served
as a lieutenant during the war, and is now a student of law and private tutor for the
son of a wealthy Jewish jeweller. But like Diederich Heßling in Heinrich Mann’s
Der Untertan (1918), who provided the model for Roth’s protagonist,275 Theodor
is remarkable not as an individual but as a representative figure: he exemplifies a
whole generation, an entire caste of people whose dangerous potential stems from
the culture of obedience and order in which they were raised.276 Roth’s interest in
Theodor Lohse, then, is clearly circumscribed: what is the psychology of the
individual who has been socialized in the Kleinbürgertum of pre-war Germany
and is faced with the sudden loss of all known structures? How will such an
individual react in the current climate? What are the potential outcomes for
society? The inexorable descent of this individual into reaction, anti-Semitism and
violence is the focus of Roth’s investigation.
274
275
276
The significance of Lohse’s membership of this class is implied by its signalling in the first
sentence of the novel, which informs the reader that Lohse’s father was a customs auditor with
the railways and former sergeant (IV, 65).
Cf. Frank Trommler, “Joseph Roth und die Neue Sachlichkeit,” in Joseph Roth und die
Tradition, ed. David Bronsen (Darmstadt: Agora, 1975), 281-82.
In his “Berliner Bilderbuch” Roth explains the evolution of the völkisch mentality as the result
of a simple multiplication: “deutsche Politik mal deutscher Volkserziehung mal
kleinbürgerlicher Weltanschauung”: Der Drache 29.4.1924 (II, 107). Sebastian Haffner, in his
posthumously published memoirs, draws similar conclusions about the roots of Nazism in the
pre-WWI social environment: Sebastian Haffner, Geschichte eines Deutschen. Die
Erinnerungen 1914-1933 (Stuttgart; München: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2000).
62
Theodor Lohse: The Authoritarian Personality
The narration of Theodor’s story begins at the point where the loss of established
structures has just taken place: “Ein Jahr später war Theodor nicht mehr Leutnant,
sondern Hörer der Rechte und Hauslehrer beim Juwelier Efrussi.” (IV, 65) The
novel is set entirely in the chaotic confusion of the early post-war present, yet the
importance of the past in the events depicted is signalled in the first sentence:
“Theodor wuchs im Hause seines Vaters heran, des Bahnzollrevisors und
gewesenen Wachtmeisters Wilhelm Lohse.” (IV, 65) That Theodor is “his father’s
son” – in the sense that he is a product of his upbringing and education – is
implied in this first sentence and underscored in the remainder of the first chapter,
in which the outlines of his personality are sketched.
Roth’s typed portrayal of Theodor Lohse anticipates the findings of research
conducted two decades later – in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power and the
Second World War – into the “authoritarian personality”.277 A number of traits
were identified by the researchers as being typical of the “potentially fascistic
individual”,
including
conventionality,
authoritarian
submissiveness
and
aggressiveness, superstition, destructiveness, a preoccupation with power
relations and toughness, and projectivity.278 Within this overall personality type279
277
278
279
Theodor W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality, ed. Max Horkheimer and Samuel
H. Flowerman, Abridged ed., Studies in Prejudice (New York; London: Norton, 1982). This
collaborative US-based study was begun in 1943, its scope broadened with the addition of
Adorno to the team in 1944, and its findings first published in 1950. The major hypothesis of
the research was “that the political, economic and social convictions of an individual often
form a broad and coherent pattern, as if bound together by a ‘mentality’ or ‘spirit’, and that
this pattern is an expression of deep-lying trends in his personality. The major concern was
with the potentially fascistic individual, one whose structure is such as to render him
particularly susceptible to anti-democratic propaganda”: Adorno et al., Authoritarian
Personality 1.
The theory and methodology behind the construction of the “Fascism (F) scale”, designed to
measure “antidemocratic potential”, is described in Chapter V of the study: R. Nevitt Sanford,
T.W. Adorno, Else Frenkel-Brunswik, and Daniel J. Levinson, “The Measurement of Implicit
Antidemocratic Trends”, in Adorno et al., Authoritarian Personality 151-208. The traits or
“variables” cited above are briefly defined on page 157.
Adorno directly addresses the criticisms directed at the psychological practice of constructing
typologies. While accepting that some such criticisms express a “humane impulse, directed
against that kind of subsumption of individuals under pre-established classes which has been
consummated in Nazi Germany, where the labeling of live human beings, independently of
their specific qualities, resulted in decisions about their life and death”, he argues that it is
potentially dangerous to deny that societies produce different “types” of persons: “Only by
identifying stereotypical traits in modern humans, and not by denying their existence, can the
pernicious tendency towards all-pervasive classification and subsumption be challenged”:
T.W. Adorno, “Types and Syndromes”, in Adorno et al., Authoritarian Personality 347-49.
63
several “subsyndromes” were distinguished in which one trait was noticeably
more prominent than others.280 The “authoritarian” subsyndrome, which Adorno
identified as most typical of the potentially fascist personality,281 is characterized
by an emphasis on authoritarian aggression and concomitant submissiveness and
is driven by the fear of being weak.282 It is this syndrome which most closely
resembles Roth’s portrayal of Theodor Lohse, whose compulsive submission to
authority competes with a desperate drive to attain power, who projects his own
desire for omnipotence onto those he holds responsible for the destruction of his
world, the Jews,283 and whose self-perception oscillates between a self-pitying,
bitter impotence and a narcissistic self-importance which often bears little relation
to external reality and is easily shaken.
Adorno explains the development of the “authoritarian” syndrome within a
psychoanalytic paradigm as the complex result of a sado-masochistic resolution of
the Oedipus complex.284 By contrast, Roth’s primary interest in Das Spinnennetz
is not in the psychological origins of the behaviour he depicts but is directed at
what Adorno terms “the objective element of prejudice”: the culture in which the
individual has been socialized. Economic and social conditions form part of this
“objective element”, but it also includes
opinions, ideas, attitudes, and behavior which appear to be the individual’s
but which have originated neither in his autonomous thinking nor in his selfsufficient psychological development but are due to his belonging to our
culture.285
According to Adorno it is the interaction between this “objective” element and the
“subjective” element (the psychological responses) that produces the potentially
280
281
282
283
284
285
Adorno, “Types and Syndromes,” 353. In this twelfth chapter of the study, Adorno identifies
syndromes and subsyndromes on the basis of results of both high and low scorers on the “F
scale”: Adorno, “Types and Syndromes,” 346-85.
The potentially fascist individual in this study was an individual who scored highly on what
the researchers called the “F scale” (Fascism scale) – a questionnaire designed to identify antidemocratic modes of thinking.
Adorno, “Types and Syndromes,” 355.
Ochse provides a detailed analysis of Lohse’s anti-Semitism as projection in this sense: Ochse,
Auseinandersetzung 63-74.
Adorno, “Types and Syndromes,” 361-64.
64
fascist character.286 Adorno stresses that while the focus of his team’s research is
on psychological determinants of the fascist mentality, this mentality is “largely
fomented by the objective spirit of our society”.287 Thus Adorno’s findings may
be seen as complementary to Roth’s novel: while Adorno’s typology explains the
subjective or psychological elements of the authoritarian personality, Roth’s
depiction of Theodor Lohse within the context of his society reveals the cultural
and social factors which have given rise to this type of personality in the specific
context of 1920s Germany.288 His portrayal of Lohse’s rise to power shows
remarkable prescience and insight into the potential threat to the fledgling
Republic represented by seemingly inconsequential figures such as Lohse – or
Hitler:289
Der Romanverlauf offenbart die politische Sprengkraft im politisch scheinbar
bedeutungslosen Kleinbürgertum und warnt auf eindrückliche Weise, die
Gefahren zu unterschätzen, die von ‘Kleinen’ wie Lohse einer ist, der
Republik drohen.290
That Theodor is a product of his upbringing and education is indicated through
repeated references to his schooling. From the outset, the narrator connects
Theodor’s inability to adapt to his new situation after the war with an educational
philosophy which trained conformity rather than independent thought and
initiative. Theodor was second in his class not because of any actual ability but
286
287
288
289
290
Adorno, “Types and Syndromes,” 352. Adorno continues: “Whereas different individuals
react differently, according to their psychological make-up, to the ubiquitous cultural stimuli
of prejudice, the objective element of prejudice cannot be neglected if we want to understand
the attitudes of individuals or psychological groups.”
In the conclusion to the study, the authors state that their findings are “strictly limited to the
psychological aspects of the more general problem of prejudice. Historical factors or [social
and] economic forces operating in our society to promote or to diminish ethnic prejudice are
clearly beyond the scope of our investigation”: Adorno et al., Authoritarian Personality 476. It
is the historical and social processes and forces within German culture that are the focus of
Roth’s investigation.
Hitler is expressly named in the novel as “eine Gefahr”. (IV, 103) Theodor is envious of
Hitler’s power and influence, and his envy drives him forward. (IV, 103-04) In his journalism,
too, Roth repeatedly pointed to Hitler as a danger – as early as 1924: “Geträumter
Wochenbericht”, Vorwärts, 2.3.1924 (II, 70-72); “Berliner Bilderbuch” (II, 92-129).
Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 60. Roth suggests that it is precisely his feeling of insignificance
that drives Lohse. The first chapter ends with a significant passage of erlebte Rede expressing
his sense of impotence in civilian life and his determination to overcome it: “Niemals erreichte
er [Frau Efrussi], wie wollte er es? Glühend war sein Wunsch. Aber erloschen der Glaube an
seine Kraft zu erobern, da er nicht mehr Leutnant war. […] Oh, glaubten sie, er wäre harmlos
und ungefährlich? Sie sollten sehen. Alle sollten es sehen! Bald wird er aus seinem ruhmlosen
Winkel treten, ein Sieger, nicht mehr gefangen in der Zeit, nicht mehr unter das Joch seiner
Tage gedrückt. Es schmetterten helle Fanfaren irgendwo am Horizont.” (IV, 69-70)
65
due to a combination of fear, persistence and zeal, which caused him to learn
stories by rote until he could see the pages of the book in his head as if it were
open before his eyes (IV, 66). This type of schooling breeds people who cannot
think for themselves:291 “Nur das auswendig Gelernte, dessen Klang schon fertig
und ein dutzendmal lautlos geformt in seinen Ohren, seiner Kehle lag, konnte
[Theodor] sprechen.”292 (IV, 66) Confronted with a situation in which the rules
seem suddenly to have changed, a person like Theodor is unable to adapt and feels
threatened and insecure:
In der Armee nur war er glücklich. Was man ihm sagte, mußte er glauben,
und die andern mußten es, wenn er selbst sprach.293 Theodor wäre gern sein
Leben lang bei der Armee geblieben.
Anders war das Leben in Zivil, grausam, voller Tücke in unbekannten
Winkeln. Gab man sich Mühe, sie hatte keine Richtung, Kräfte
verschwendete man an Ungewisses, es war ein unaufhörliches Aufbauen von
Kartenhäusern, die ein geheimnisvoller Windzug umblies. (IV, 66-67)
In the army Lohse had felt secure: structures and rules were clear and
unambiguous, independent thought and decision making were not required, and
Lohse and his fellow lieutenants were relieved of any responsibility for their
actions by their superior in the military hierarchy.294 Discharged from the army,
and with the collapse of the old order, Theodor has lost his raison d’être – so
great was the dependence of his identity on his role in the army.295 He feels
291
292
293
294
295
Karl Mannheim judged that the authoritarian educational philosophy in Germany destroyed
the capacity for experimental and creative thought which is crucial in a rapidly changing
world: Diagnose unserer Zeit. Gedanken eines Soziologen (Zürich: Europaverlag, 1951) 65;
cited in Sonnleitner, “Macht, Identität,” 174.
The same image appears in the feuilleton “Die Dreizehn” in the description of one of
Rathenau’s assassins: “Ein völkischer Knappe, halbgebildet, mit auswendig gelerntem
Lebenslauf, ihn wie in der Offiziersschule leiernd” (I, 873).
Adorno and his colleagues demonstrate that this seemingly contradictory desire to both have
and submit to authority is typical of the “power complex” exhibited by potentially fascist
individuals, “for the reason that the actual role of the individual seems to be less important
than his concern that leader-follower relations shall obtain. One solution which such an
individual often achieves is that of alignment with power figures, an arrangement by which he
is able to gratify both his need for power and his need to submit. He hopes that by submitting
to power he can participate in it. […] The same pattern of gratification can be obtained by
acting in the role of ‘the lieutenant’ or by functioning in a middle position in some clearly
structured hierarchy where there is always somebody above and somebody below”: Sanford et
al., “The Measurement,” 166-167.
Cf. Sonnleitner, “Macht, Identität,” 173.
Cf. Hughes, who writes of Lohse and subsequent Roth characters who found contentment in
army life: “The function of the army for these socially incompetent men is clear: it provided a
sense of wholeness and belonging they lack in civilian life”: Jon Hughes, “Violence,
Masculinity and Self: Killing in Joseph Roth's 1920s Fiction,” German Life and Letters 53,
no. 2 (2000): 218.
66
superfluous, “wie ein Zeiger ohne Zifferblatt; wie ein Magnet, der weit und breit
keine Eisensplitter findet; wie ein Magnetnadel, die ihren Kurs vergessen”.296
In depicting Theodor’s education and the character traits it encouraged, Roth may
have drawn on his own experience of the Habsburg education system, which he
described in an article for Der Neue Tag in similar terms:
Von acht bis neun Rechnen, von neun bis zehn Deutsch, von zehn bis elf – –
wie wurde unsere Kindheit in die Fachschublade eines Stundenplanes
gezwängt, unser Leben abgeteilt, unsere unschuldige Freude auf zehn
Minuten Pause zwischen zwei Folterstunden rationiert! […] So wurde die
Schule zum Marterort, jeder (sic) Freiheitsregung zum Vergehen, Lüge und
Heuchelei mit Einsern in ‘Sitten’ belohnt, Tartüfferie und Scheinheiligkeit
großgezogen. Aus jenen Schulen ging ein Geschlecht von Verbitterten und
Verkümmerten, Minderwertigen und Blindgehorsamen, Unselbständigen und
Willkürmenschen, Pfeifendeckeln und Husarenleutnants hervor. Und selten,
sehr selten waren die Freien. Die Schule war eine Art Kaserne. Der
Unterricht alten Stils bestand aus geistigen Gelenksübungen. Und
‘Kopfnicken’ war die wichtigste.297
When he published this article in 1920, Roth had some faith in the possibility of
real reform and a different kind of future. He expressed confidence that the
educational reforms then being trialled in so-called “Versuchsklassen” in Austria
would produce entirely different individuals from the blindly obedient
authoritarian or “Willkürmenschen” created by the Imperial system,
ein Geschlecht […], das fern von hirnverbrannter Ideologie und hohlem
Kitsch, haßwütigem Nationalismus und sklavischer Götzenverehrung, mitten
im Tag stehend, Grenzen überbrückend und weltvereinigend, die
Emporentwicklung der Menschheit sichern wird.298
Just three years later this almost effusive optimism and faith in the possibility of
the positive progress of humanity had vanished. Faced in Berlin with what Peter
296
297
298
This description of the feelings of superfluity experienced by returned soldiers comes from
Roth’s feuilleton “Der Herr Offizier”, Vorwärts 15.7.1922 (I, 836). The former officer feels at
home only in the former officers’ club, in which time seems to have stood still, everything is
as it always was, and the walls “bewahren jeden Besucher vor den Schallwellen der
Gegenwart.” The final sentence of this feuilleton suggests the connection between the
reactionary mentality of the former officer and chauvinist nationalism which is further
developed in Das Spinnennetz: “Und sein Monokel vermittelt beharrlich schwarzweißroten
Sehstoff der Vergangenheit dem zufriedenen Auge”: (I, 837). This colour symbolism also
plays an important role in Radetzkymarsch, discussed in Chapter 3.
Joseph Roth, “‘Versuchsklassen’”, Der Neue Tag 21.3.1920, (I, 261-62). The article assesses
in positive terms the educational reform program introduced by Otto Glöckel, a leading figure
of the Austrian Social Democratic Party’s left-wing.
Joseph Roth, “‘Versuchsklassen’”, Der Neue Tag 21.3.1920 (I, 263-64).
67
Gay has called a widespread “love affair with unreason and death”299 and “hunger
for wholeness”,300 encompassing the desire for belonging in an “organic”
Gemeinschaft and the rejection of the fledgling democracy of the Weimar
Republic, Roth realized that the increasing appeal of a rapidly growing antiSemitic radical right was attributable not so much to the contemporary social
conditions of a chaotic Weimar Germany – though these certainly played a role –
as to the culture of pre-war Wilhelmine Germany.
Roth makes quite clear that the source of Theodor’s problems and his attraction to
violence is not the much-maligned Republic.301 The detailed descriptions of
Theodor’s childhood environment stand in marked contrast to the relatively
sketchy details of the difficulties he faces in the present. The plight of an
anonymous mass of workers punctuates the novel, but Theodor has little contact
with them,302 and of his personal situation the reader learns only that the money
he earns as private tutor to the young Efrussi is the basis of his material existence,
“[d]enn bei der Technischen Nothilfe, zu deren Mitgliedern er zählte, gab es
selten Arbeit, und die seltene war hart und mäßig bezahlt.” (I, 65)303 That the
narrator does not dwell on his economic difficulties suggests that the current state
299
300
301
302
Gay, Weimar Culture 82.
This is the title of the fourth chapter of Gay’s book on the Weimar Republic: Gay, Weimar
Culture 82. It refers to a widespread desire for the “organic” Gemeinschaft and rejection of the
fragmented and seemingly chaotic existence of the Weimar Republic. Gay notes that
Ferdinand Tönnies’s classic work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, which was first published in
1887, “made its fortune in the Weimar Republic, with its invidious contrast between the
authentic, organic harmony of community and the materialistic fragmentation of business
society”: Gay, Weimar Culture 80.
Attacks on both the Weimar Republic and the Austrian Republic came particularly from the
reactionary right. Karl Kraus parodied the simplistic arguments of such groups in his
magazine Die Fackel: “Denn sie, die in Sehnsucht nach den Zeiten lebt, die sie dumm
gemacht haben, vermag den kürzesten Gedankengang nicht mehr zurückzulegen. Etwa so: Die
Monarchie hat uns den Krieg gebracht, der Krieg den Ruin, der Ruin die Republik. Nein, sie
gewahrt nur die Gleichzeitigkeit von Republik und Ruin: die Republik hat uns den Ruin
gebracht”: Karl Kraus, “Gespenster”, Die Fackel (514-518, July 1919) 23; quoted in
In Chapter XVII Theodor comes face to face with these workers when he attends their
meetings for a week. A long description of the wretched men, women and children through
Theodor’s eyes is followed by neutral commentary from the narrator, which is given an ironic
undertone by Benjamin Lenz’s derisive comment: “Er liebte sie nicht. Er fürchtete sich vor
ihnen, Theodor Lohse. Seine eigene Furcht haßte er. ‘Herr Leutnant Lohse’, sagte Benjamin
Lenz, ‘das ist das deutsche Volk, für das Sie zu arbeiten glauben. Die Offiziere in den Kasinos
sind nicht das Volk.’” (IV, 115)
68
of affairs is only a catalyst for Theodor’s descent into violence, intrigue and
destruction;304 the revolution which Theodor curses is, like the Jews and the
Socialists, merely a scapegoat305 for feelings of inadequacy which do not in fact
spring from his sudden loss of social and economic standing, but originate further
back in childhood.306
Time and again the narrator draws parallels between Theodor’s actions in the
present and his behaviour as a child, implying that the seeds of the present lie
deep in the past. The foolish act of writing to General Ludendorff is linked with
Theodor’s efforts at school to be entrusted with various tasks by the Principal (IV,
78). Later, when Theodor begins to speculate on the stockmarket, the narrator
relates his first successful business venture as a schoolboy, when he made a profit
on a wreath for a classmate who had recently died (IV, 105). These are the acts of
an individual, but by repeatedly juxtaposing Lohse’s actions in the present with
incidents which occurred while he was at school Roth reminds the reader that
Theodor is a product of his schooling and thus representative of at least his own
generation in his responses:
Er hatte nicht geahnt, wie schwer es ihm kommen würde. Niemand half ihm.
Er sollte anfangen. Es war, als weidete man sich an seiner Qual.
Und es ist genauso wie einmal – lang war es her – in der Schule, wenn er
anderes sagen soll als auswendig Gelerntes. (IV, 112)
The switch to the present tense indicates – as often in this novel – the salience of
the school experience in Theodor’s consciousness,307 and thus the underlying
cause of Theodor’s descent into violence is revealed to be a personality structure
303
304
305
306
That food is scarce may be inferred from the remark that Theodor receives legumes once a
week from the reserve officers’ economic association, which he then shares with his mother
and sisters.
Marchand’s claim that the protagonist is “das Bild eines gegen seine soziale Deklassierung,
seine wirtschaftliche Abhängigkeit aufgrund geistiger Unzulänglichkeit und politischer
Verblendung revoltierenden rechtsradikalen Reaktionärs” does not address the underlying
reasons for Theodor’s reaction: see Marchand, Wertbegriffe 44.
On this scapegoat function of anti-Semitism and its dependence on the anti-Semite’s own
pyschological needs rather than on the nature of the object (“the Jews”) see T.W. Adorno,
“Prejudice in the Interview Material”, in Adorno et al., Authoritarian Personality 297-345.
Jon Hughes seems to underestimate the importance Roth accords the role of childhood
socialization in creating men like Lohse when he argues that the violent personality structure
is the result of “a dangerous cocktail of military training, front-line combat experence, and
social and political instability”: Hughes, “Violence,” 229.
69
which has its roots in Theodor’s upbringing in Wilhelmine German culture and
society.
Having been thus socialized, and after the loss of the security he found in the
army, Theodor is incapable of functioning as an individual: “Das Gruppendenken
ist ihm […] die einzige Möglichkeit, relativ unproblematisch zu existieren.”308 As
Jon Hughes has observed, in this regard Lohse is
entirely typical of the men of the early fascist movement in Germany, many
of whom continued the army lifestyle as members of ‘Freikorps’ units,
mercenary groupings, and paramilitary organizations such as the nascent
SA.309
This “Gruppendenken” is characteristic of the authoritarian personality as
delineated by Adorno and his colleagues. Subjects who scored highly on the
Fascism (F) scale also tended to score highly on the Ethnocentrism (E) scale,310
where ethnocentrism entails “a pervasive and rigid ingroup–outgroup distinction”
and involves
stereotyped negative imagery and hostile attitudes regarding outgroups,
stereotyped positive imagery and submissive attitudes regarding ingroups,
and a hierarchical, authoritarian view of group interaction in which ingroups
are rightly dominant, outgroups subordinate.311
Lohse is drawn to the right-wing secret organization because of his attachment to
the old order represented by the Prince in whose regiment he served,312 and by his
hatred of “Sozialisten und Juden” (IV, 66). His ethnocentrism is thus linked to the
past and shown to be a result of the “cultural climate of prejudice” (Adorno) in
307
308
309
310
311
312
The use of the present tense to underscore the immediacy, potency or significance of a
particular experience for an individual character is a hallmark of Roth’s writing.
Hughes, “Violence,” 220. Roth’s depiction of Lohse’s feelings of loss and his response to this
experience appears both representative and prescient: accustomed to violence by a war which
gave them “a sense of community for which they afterward yearned”, this generation of men
provided the leading figures of both the conservative revolution and National Socialism:
Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism. Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the
Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) 23.
Sanford et al., “The Measurement,” 208.
Daniel J. Levinson, “The Study of Ethnocentric Ideology”, in Adorno et al., Authoritarian
Personality 150.
Here Roth recognizes the potential for right-wing sympathies among veterans of the First
World War who saw the values they had fought for being destroyed by the revolution. The
road from the Freikorps, who fought against the revolution, to the Nazi Stormtroopers was not
a long one, as Sebastian Haffner notes: Haffner, Geschichte eines Deutschen 37.
70
which he has been raised. His anti-Semitism originates from the influence of his
father well prior to the revolution:313
Oft hatte der Vater Lohse seine Töchter vor dem Verkehr mit jungen Juden in
der Tanzstunde gewarnt. Beispiele gibt es, Beispiele! Ihm selbst, dem
Bahnzollrevisor Lohse, passierte es mindestens zweimal im Monat, daß ihn
Juden aus Posen, welche die schlimmsten sind, zu bestechen versuchten. (IV,
67).314
Now suffering from a tremendous loss of economic and social status after the war,
Theodor reaches back to this learned prejudice in order to rationalize his current
woes and find a cause outside of himself and his ingroup. Anti-Semitism
functions as a device for orientation in a world from which Theodor feels
suddenly alienated:315
Alle hatten es leicht, am leichtesten die Glasers und Efrussis: Der wurde
Primus und der Juwelier und jener Sohn des reichen Juweliers. Nur in der
Armee waren sie nichts geworden, selten Sergeanten. Dort siegte
Gerechtigkeit über Schwindel. Denn alles war Schwindel, Glasers Wissen
unredlich erworben wie das Geld des Juweliers. Es ging nicht mit rechten
Dingen zu, wenn der Soldat Grünbaum einen Urlaub erhielt und wenn
Efrussi ein Geschäft machte. Erschwindelt war die Revolution, der Kaiser
betrogen, der General genarrt, die Republik ein jüdisches Geschäft. (IV,
67)316
In holding the Jews responsible for a conspiracy which has resulted in the collapse
of his world, Theodor aligns himself with power figures from the old regime – the
Emperor, General Ludendorff – thus bolstering his weakened sense of self
through narcissistic association and avoiding the need for rational self-criticism
and an examination of the real reasons for his current situation and his lack of
success. As Adorno explains, for the highly prejudiced or ethnocentric, the Jew is
313
314
315
316
For an account of late nineteenth century anti-Semitism in Germany and Austria-Hungary,
including a discussion of what distinguished it from earlier forms of anti-Semitism, see H.H.
Ben-Sasson, ed., A History of the Jewish People (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1976)
870-78, especially 875f. Ben-Sasson details the systematic discrimination against Jews which
occurred under Bismarck, particularly after Wilhelm II ascended the throne. Anti-Semitism
became an essential part of the ruling ideology, with publications such as Chamberlain’s
scientifically unfounded Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1878) exercising a profound
influence on the German intelligentsia: Ben-Sasson, ed., A History 877.
The reference to “Juden aus Posen, welche die schlimmsten sind” suggests the hierarchy of
anti-Semitism which Roth addresses in detail in Juden auf Wanderschaft, according to which
the further east the Jew’s origins, the more virulent is the prejudice against him.
Cf. Adorno, “Prejudice,” 300.
Lohse’s thinking here, and in particular his denigration of the Republic as “ein jüdisches
Geschäft”, is typical of anti-Semitic clichés popular in Weimar Germany. Cf. Ochse,
Auseinandersetzung 66.
71
extremely stereotyped, his “otherness” seemingly providing a simple formula for
explaining the alienation of society: “Charging the Jews with all existing evils
seems to penetrate the darkness of reality like a searchlight and to allow for quick
and all-comprising orientation.”317 The less such anti-Semitic imagery is related to
actual experience or exposed to reality, the more effectively it functions as an
imagined panacea.318 Thus Theodor’s certainty increases the more his actual and
conscious experience of Jews retreats into the realms of unpleasant memory.
Reading pamphlets “in denen Zusammenhänge zwischen Sozialismus, Juden,
Franzosen und Russen aufgedeckt wurden” fuels his imagination:
Er glaubte nicht nur, was er gelesen hatte, er kombinierte aus dem gelesenen
Material neue Tatsachen und entwickelte sie im Nationalen Beobachter.
Seitdem er gedruckt wurde, steigerte sich seine Sicherheit, und wenn er die
Feder in die Hand nahm, zweifelte er nicht mehr an der Richtigkeit dessen,
was er vorsichtig anzudeuten sich vorgenommen hatte. Las er noch einmal
das Manuskript, war er sicher und strich schwächende Worte, jedes
‘vielleicht’ und jedes ‘wahrscheinlich’. Er schrieb die Aufsätze eines
Mannes, der hinter die Kulissen geblickt hat. (IV, 85)
Meanwhile, he rewrites the history of his personal interaction with Jews in order
to make it comply with his newfound certainty. The memory of his impotent
fantasies about the beautiful Frau Efrussi (IV, 68-69) is transformed, with
Theodor now thinking of her “wie ein ganz großer Mann einer kleinen Frau aus
anderen Kreisen gedenkt, die ein kleines Abenteuer abgegeben hätte” (IV, 86).
Similarly, his former employer Efrussi, whose gentle generosity had been the
basis of Theodor’s material existence (IV, 65), becomes an object of hatred:
Er beneidete den Juden Efrussi nicht, aber er haßte ihn und seine Sippe,
seinen Stolz und die Art, wie er ihn, den Hauslehrer zuletzt behandelt hatte.
Jetzt erinnerte sich Theodor, daß er im Efrussischen Hause eine schüchterne
Haltung eingenommen hatte, eine dumme Angst hatte ihn damals noch
beherrscht, und die Schuld daran schob er den Juden zu. Wie überhaupt die
Juden seine langjährige Erfolglosigkeit verursacht hatten und ihn an der
schnellen Eroberung der Welt hinderten. In der Schule war es der
Vorzugsschüler Glaser, andere Juden – er wußte sie nicht zu nennen – kamen
später. Sie waren, wie alle Welt wußte, furchtbar, weil sie Macht besaßen.
Aber auch häßlich und abscheulich, überall, wo sie auftauchten, in der Bahn,
auf der Straße, im Theater. (IV, 86)
The reader knows that during Theodor’s final meeting with his former employer
Efrussi offered his son’s tutor a raise, and then, accepting Theodor’s resignation,
317
318
Adorno, “Prejudice,” 311.
Adorno, “Prejudice,” 311.
72
insisted that he accept full pay for the month although they were only in the third
week. He did not even react in kind when confronted with Theodor’s anti-Semitic
taunt (IV, 76). The reality of this meeting, however, is suppressed by a
reconstructed memory that sits more comfortably with Theodor’s prejudice,
which prejudice is then extended to all other Jews who are all the more easily
stereotyped since they are nameless and faceless.319
Theodor’s anti-Semitism, then, arises from the complex interplay of his feelings
of disorientation after the sudden loss of all structures within which he had known
and been proud of his place, his inability to adapt to the changed situation due the
authoritarian nature of his upbringing and schooling, and the widespread
acceptance of anti-Semitism not only in the Kleinbürgertum from which Theodor
hails, but also in academic circles320 and the military.321 Its prevalence even in the
upper echelons of society is suggested in Efrussi’s admission that he not only
reads the nationalist newspapers but advertises his business in the Deutsche
Zeitung. (IV, 76)
319
320
321
Ochse demonstrates that Theodor’s anti-Semitism in fact has little to do with “the Jews”:
“Lohse setzt den Krieg fort und macht jeden zum Juden, wenn es seiner Karriere dient”. Thus
when Günther is killed because of his supposed betrayal of the secret organization, the
members sing a song in which the words “Verräter” and “Judenbrut” are used synonymously
(IV, 89). Subsequently the striking Polish (non-Jewish) workers are denounced in the same
song (IV, 99): Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 70-71.
This is indicated in an ironic passage of erlebte Rede (signalled by the words “[k]luge Köpfe”:
this type of language is characteristic of Theodor’s authoritarian thinking): “Theodor sah das
alles selbst, und die Meinung der anderen verstärkte seine Eindrücke. Kluge Köpfe, wie
Wilhelm Tiedemann, Professor Koethe, der Dozent Bastelmann, der Physiker Loranz, der
Rassenforscher Mannheim, behaupteten und bewiesen die Schädlichkeit der jüdischen Rasse
an den Vortragsabenden des Vereins deutscher Rechtshörer und in ihren Büchern, die in der
Lesehalle der ‘Germania’ ausgestellt waren.” (IV, 67) See Herf, Reactionary Modernism 2425, on the importance of such clubs for the playing out of the conservative revolution, which
although it distanced itself from both National Socialism and Hitler, “did much to pave his
road to power”: Gordon Craig, Germany: 1866-1945 (New York, 1980) 486-87; cited in Herf,
Reactionary Modernism 21.
“Nun hatten sie [die Juden] die Armee vernichtet, nun beherrschten sie den Staat, sie erfanden
den Sozialismus, die Vaterlandslosigkeit, die Liebe für den Feind. Es stand in den Weisen von
Zion – das Buch bekamen alle Mitglieder des Reserveoffiziersverbandes zu den
Hülsenfrüchten am Freitag –, daß sie die Weltherrschaft erstrebten.” (IV, 67) In a feuilleton
published a year after Das Spinnennetz Roth speculated with bitter prescience about the
influence of this propaganda on the highest eschelons of society: “Es ist wahrscheinlich die
Privatlektüre vieler Richter. Es beeinflußt jedenfalls die öffentliche Gerechtigkeit in
Deutschland. Seine Grundsätze werden vielleicht die Abfassung des neuen bürgerlichen
Gesetzbuches unterstützen. Hitler hat es angekündigt”: Roth, “Berliner Bilderbuch” (II, 9596).
73
Combatting Anti-Semitism
The pervasiveness of anti-Semitism in Roth’s depiction of Weimar German
society raises the question of whether the author sees any hope that it might be
overcome. Ochse has demonstrated that Roth’s portrayal of Jewish figures in the
novel, and in particular their various strategies of dealing with anti-Semitism,
reveals his pessimism about the possibilty of either escaping or combatting the
increasingly virulent prejudice through assimilation.322 While the Christian
convert Goldscheider aids Lohse’s ascent to power only indirectly and without
knowledge of his true identity, Efrussi, Trebitsch and Pisk all give him their
support in full knowledge of his chauvinist anti-Semitism, each for his own
reasons.323 These characters represent different strategies for dealing with antiSemitism. Goldscheider “steht für den zum Christentum konvertierten, links
engagierten, intellektuellen und wirklichkeitsfernen Juden”.324 Efrussi is the
successful, assimilated Jew who attempts to protect himself from anti-Semitism
through money and political conformity.325 Dr. Trebitsch hides his Jewishness and
engages in anti-Semitic activity himself as the author of political pamphlets for
the secret organization: he represents the phenomenon of Jewish self-hate
epitomized by his namesake, Arthur Trebitsch, and more famously by Otto
Weininger.326 The unequivocally negative portrayal of Dr. Trebitsch is indicative
of Roth’s condemnation of this response to anti-Semitism.327 Similarly critical is
Roth’s portrayal of the Jewish journalist Pisk, who has internalized anti-Jewish
stereotypes,328 attempts to conceal his Eastern Jewish heritage329 by wearing a
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 82-83. The term Jewish self-hate was coined by the Zionist
philosopher Theodor Lessing and describes the desire to kill “the Jew within” as a reaction to
anti-Semitism: Niewyk, Jews in Weimar Germany 127. On the phenomenon of “Jewish selfhate” see Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers 74-75 and 224-25 On the contributions of
Weininger and Trebitsch to theories of race see Hamann, Hitlers Wien 325-33.
Trebitsch’s flight to America with the organization’s funds seems to confirm the stereotype of
the Jew as traitor. As Ochse argues, however, this confirmation is neutralized by the
simultaneous discrediting of anti-Semitic Jews: Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 84.
He attempts to hide his “abstehendes Ohr” (IV, 122) – a stereotypical Jewish feature – by
always wearing a hat: see Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 85. This character is reminiscent of Dr.
Jadassohn in Heinrich Mann’s Der Untertan.
The name Pisk is Yiddish and means “dog’s snout”: Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 84.
74
monocle – the symbol of conservative-nationalist sentiment – and ensures that
Lohse’s name appears in anti-revolutionary Jewish newspapers. Like Trebitsch,
he is guilty of betraying other Jews for his own gain.
If Roth is pessimistic about the possibility of Jews overcoming anti-Semitism
through assimilation and conformity – and indeed condemns the conduct of Jews
like Trebitsch and Pisk – what is his view of organized attempts to combat the
extreme nationalism of Lohse’s organization, of which anti-Semitism is just one
expression? The infiltration and betrayal of the Communists by Lohse on
Trebitsch’s orders suggests not only that the radical left is just as prepared to
resort to violence as the radical right, but also that the Communists are hopelessly
incompetent, unable to recognize an imposter in Lohse, despite his ignorance of
the difference between the Socialist Party and the Communists (IV, 81). But it is
the episode at the Lukscha estate which most clearly reveals Roth’s pessimistic
assessment of the ability of the left to rally the masses in the face of competition
from the nationalist right. Sent to Pomerania with fifty men from the Technische
Nothilfe to support the notoriously brutal landowner, Freiherr von Köckwitz, in
his annual stand-off with striking workers, Theodor finds common cause with the
old baron, in whom he sees “das Bild eines der letzten deutschen Adeligen, denen
in der neuen Zeit der Untergang drohte.” (IV, 101) At first Theodor and his
“Roßbach-Leute” are treated just like the baron’s ordinary workers: they sleep in
the barn, take up the work abandoned by the striking workers and receive only
barley broth and black bread twice daily to eat (IV, 98). They are hungry and
aggrieved, and the reader might expect a community of interest to develop
between the striking workers and Theodor’s men. Here Roth exposes the fallacy
of the socialist belief in the solidarity of the working classes, demonstrating how
easily such a potential unity can be undermined by the appeal to nationalism. The
wealthy baron’s ill-treatment of his workers fuses capitalist exploitation with a
chauvinist German nationalism that appeals to Theodor:
[Der Freiherr] sprach mit Theodor. Schimpfte auf die Arbeiter. Sie waren
Polacken. Kein Tropfen deutschen Blutes, Juden verführten sie. In dieser
Gegend lebten überhaupt Juden, Polacken, rotes Gesindel. Es war zum
Niederknallen. (IV, 99)
75
The baron’s words demarcate zones of inclusion and exclusion along the lines of a
Volksgemeinschaft that excludes Jews, Slavs and the Left. Theodor’s implied
inclusion in the baron’s community restores the self-assurance he gained upon
being admitted to the secret organization, significantly referred to as a
“Gemeinschaft” (IV, 74). Belonging to the community of the powerful – the
potentially powerful German nation represented by the baron – is a far more
attractive option to Theodor than belonging to the community of the weak and
oppressed – the socialist collective which would transcend the boundaries of race
and ethnicity. Angry that he has been sent to Pomerania, and seeing in it a
conspiracy to have his name forgotten, Theodor ensures this does not happen by
inciting a confrontation with the Polish workers whom he orders to be shot down,
aiding the baron in the process and being celebrated as a hero in the nationalist
press. Roth’s sympathy with the workers in this conflict is evident in his portrayal
of the two sides, in which Theodor’s men have been supplied with an arsenal of
firearms by the notoriously brutal baron while the workers have only stones and
sticks.330 Yet what emerges more strongly than Roth’s concern for the workers –
which might otherwise be understood as evidence of his socialist convictions – is
his pessimism at the future of the socialist project and his early identification of
the greater potential appeal of extreme nationalists in the climate of crisis of the
early 1920s. This potential is the continuation of a pre-war pattern of the
encouragement
of
nationalism
among
the
socially
and
economically
disadvantaged by the ruling classes to whose hegemony socialism posed a threat.
As Otto Bauer wryly noted in 1907:
What greater chance of success could the ruling classes in the German
Empire have in diverting the eyes of the masses away from social questions
than by calling on them to liberate their German brothers in Austria, to
realize the idea, cherished by every German, of German unity?331
Roth’s pessimism already at this time – at the alleged height of his socialist
conviction – about the Left’s ability to generate support against anti-Republican,
anti-Jewish radical nationalist forces was shared by Sebastian Haffner, for whom
330
The repeated juxtapostion of Theodor’s men with the workers underlines their opposition and
Roth’s sympathy with the latter: “[Die Roßbach-Leute] arbeiteten weniger. Sie exerzierten.
Sie rückten mit Gewehren aus. Die Arbeiter hungerten. Ihre Kinder bekamen dünne Hälse und
große Köpfe.” (IV, 99-100)
76
the end of the Rathenau era in 1922 proved “daß nichts, was die Linke tut,
klappt”.332 Instead of mobilizing the hundreds of thousands who took to the streets
at the time of Rathenau’s funeral against the reactionary, right-wing forces
responsible for his murder, the Socialist government entreated people to maintain
order and discipline, a serious failure which Haffner claims led to their fall from
power and the institution of a right-wing government just a few months later.333
Roth goes further than Haffner in suggesting that the state is motivated by the
same chauvinist nationalism as Theodor and the baron. The representatives of the
state collude in the maintentance of the baron’s power at the expense of his Polish
workers: the police arrive too late to prevent the bloodshed and then drink beer
among the bodies of the dead workers (IV, 100); the swastika worn by the young
examining magistrate signals his political sympathies (IV, 100); and a case
brought against one of the surviving workers is dealt with within half an hour with
predictable results: “Der Landarbeiter bekam acht Monate Zuchthaus. Der
Staatsanwalt saß am Abend mit Theodor Lohse und dem Freiherrn im ‘Kaiserhof’
bei einer Flasche Wein.” (IV, 102) Thus Roth suggests state collusion in the
exploitation of the poor and the “other” – “Juden, Polacken, rotes Gesindl” (IV,
99) – by the rich and German,334 and sympathy at the highest levels with the racist
nationalism of right-wing movements such as the nascent NSDAP, which in its
first party programme of 1920 envisioned the renewal of the German nation
through the unity of a racially pure Volksgemeinschaft.335 The National Socialists’
programme contained “a mixture of nationalistic, pan-German, racist, antiSemitic, anti-Marxist and anti-liberal ideas” which appealed not only to the
331
332
333
334
335
Otto Bauer, The Question of Nationalities and Social Democracy, trans. Joseph O'Donnell
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) 399.
Haffner, Geschichte eines Deutschen 52.
Similarly, it is hinted earlier in the novel that members of security forces are involved in antiSemitic agitation when Efrussi calls Major Pauli from the commandant’s headquarters after
Theodor resigns his position. Efrussi complains: “‘Ihre Agitation geht zu weit!’”, whereupon
the major apologizes (IV, 76). The apology is an odd response, unless “Ihre/ihre,” ambiguous
in this context, is understood to mean not “their” (the nationalist organizations’, the antiSemites’) but your (Major Pauli’s) agitation.
The criterion of racial purity was categorically stated in the 1920 programme: John Hiden,
Republican and Fascist Germany. Themes and Variations in the History of Weimar and the
Third Reich 1918-1945 (London; New York: Longman, 1996) 185.
77
völkisch right, but also to sections of the conservative parliamentary parties.336
Roth’s depiction of the incident at the Lukscha estate is prescient: in the post-war
climate of insecurity in the Weimar Republic, class proved a much less potent
source of identification than race and nation.337
The Ecstatic Loss of Individuality
The loss of individuality implied in German nationalism is indicated first in
Theodor’s inability to function as an individual and his pathological need to
identify with a powerful organization or Gemeinschaft. It is given symbolic
expression in the lynching of Günther and Theodor’s subsequent murder of
Klitsche. Theodor is transported by the sight of Günther’s blood back to the
battlefields:
Unendliches rauschendes Rot umgab Theodor. Im Felde hatte er dieses Rot
gesehen und gehört, es schrie, es brüllte wie aus tausend Kehlen, es flackerte,
flammte wie tausend Feuersbrünste, rot waren die Bäume, rot war der gelbe
Sand, rot die braunen Nadeln auf dem Boden, rot der scharfgezackte Himmel
zwischen den Tannen, in grellgelbem Rot spielte der Sonnenschein zwischen
den Stämmen. (IV, 91)
The image is one of sudden and ecstatic surrender to a primitive bloodlust. As
everything around Theodor seems to turn red and purple, the “Rot” itself becomes
animate and takes control:
Aus Theodors Innerem kam das rauschende Rot, es erfüllte ihn, schlug aus
ihm, aber es machte ihn leicht, und sein Kopf schien zu schweben, als wäre
er mit Luft gefüllt. Es war wie ein leichter, roter Jubel, ein Triumph, der ihn
hob, ein beschwingtes Rauschen, Tod der schweren Gedanken, Befreiung der
verborgenen, begraben gewesenen Seele. (IV, 91, emphasis added)
Theodor’s ecstasy is reminiscent of Freud’s “oceanic feeling”, in which the
surrender of individuality and agency is experienced as a oneness with the
universe. The “Rot” and the “roter Jubel” are the subjects of the verbs erfüllen,
schlagen, machen, heben and they act upon Theodor as well as through him,
336
337
“Although rooted in the pre-war period, these values exercised a more potent attraction after
the experience of war and defeat. Regeneration of Germandom, the rejection of the Versailles
Treaty and the union of all Germans in a ‘Greater Germany’ figured prominently in the party
programme”: Hiden, Republican and Fascist Germany 69.
The National Socialists very early sought to neutralize the class issue, declaring that “class
divisions, as exacerbated by Marxism, would be not so much eliminated as overcome by the
stronger ties of blood and race”: Hiden, Republican and Fascist Germany 185.
78
seemingly absolving him from responsibility for his actions338 just as he was
released from any responsibility in war by the simple fact that he was following
orders. Yet he is not altogether absolved since the overpowering irrational force
emanates from within Theodor himself. The sight of blood triggers a primitive,
aggressive instinct in Lohse which “frees” his soul from heavy thoughts; it is the
sudden and terrifying liberation of an innate barbarism from the constraints of
civilization. The veneer of civilization, Roth suggests, is thin, and in the following
description of the consequence of instinct set free, inanimate objects gain agency
and Lohse becomes a passive instrument of the irrational:
Klitsche glitt aus, fiel nieder, stöhnte einmal. Die Beilpicke stand noch eine
Weile in der Luft mit aufwärtsragendem Stiel, als wäre sie lebendig, und
wankte seitwärts. Theodor griff sie auf. Er ahmte Klitsche nach, erhob die
Beilpicke und ließ sie niedersausen. Klitsches Schädel krachte ein wenig.
Weißgrauer und blutiger Brei quoll aus seiner Stirn. Irgendwo hackte wieder
der unermüdliche Specht, zwitscherte der schüchterne Vogel, stieg der
schwere Dunst aus dem Waldboden.
Mit leichten Schritten ging Theodor durch den Wald, mürbe Zweige krachten
unter seinen Füßen, leicht war er wie eine der hundert tänzelnden Mücken.
(IV, 91)
The paradoxically passive nature of this most aggressive of acts reflects the
twofold pleasure in submission and aggression that is characteristic of the
authoritarian personality.339 It recalls Roth’s judgement that the products of the
authoritarian model of education characteristic of both the German and the
Habsburg Empires, in which the most important of the “geistige[...]
Gelenksübungen” was an acquiescent nodding, were equally capable of both blind
obedience and the arbitrary use of force (Willkür) (I, 262). Significantly, in a
passage which features a tirelessly hammering woodpecker and a shy twittering
bird, Theodor is compared not with one of these individual creatures but with
“eine der hundert tänzelnden Mücken”. This metaphoric regression of humanity to
the level of insects is the converse of the fervent and optimistic belief Roth
338
339
The “tendency to shift responsibility from within the individual onto outside forces beyong
one’s control”, referred to as “superstitiousness”, is identified with the authoritarian
personality: Sanford et al., “The Measurement,” 165.
The compulsive, irrational destructiveness of Lohse’s behaviour at this point brings him closer
to the sub-syndrome of the “Tough Guy”, whose superego, according to Adorno, has been
“completely crippled through the outcome of the Oedipus conflict, by means of a retrogression
to the omnipotence fantasy of very early infancy. These individuals […] have not been
moulded at all by civilization.” Adorno associates with this type “those who do the ‘dirty
work’ of a fascist movement”: Adorno, “Types and Syndromes,” 365.
79
expressed in his article of three years earlier that a differently educated generation
would ensure “die Emporentwicklung der Menschheit” (I, 264), and is evidence
of the author’s increasing pessimism about the state of German society. Theodor
is the unthinking man who, as the leader he seems destined to become, will lead a
regression rather than progression of humanity.
“Seine Idee hieß: Benjamin Lenz”:340 Individuality versus Ideology
In the fifteenth chapter of the novel a character appears for the first time who
appears to be the antithesis of Theodor Lohse: the Eastern Jew Benjamin Lenz.
Yet although the reader wants to see in Lenz a positive counterpart to Lohse, he is
an ambiguous figure and has been a source of difficulties for critics.341 From the
moment he is introduced as one of the “unzuverlässige[...] und verdächtige[...]
Spitzeln, die Theodor abgeschafft hatte” (IV, 110), his double dealing and trickery
are emphasized, rendering a positive reading of his character difficult. Very few
critics have addressed the problematic aspects of Lenz’s characterization;342 those
who have tend to dismiss his portrayal as a weakness of the novel.343 This
tendency in the secondary literature is reflected in the film version of the novel
directed by Bernhard Wicki, in which Lenz is reduced to a purely positive foil to
Lohse.344
340
341
342
343
344
Roth, Das Spinnennetz (IV, 110).
Lenz thus forms a stark contrast to the other Jewish figures, discussed above, who are all
easily recognizable as “types” and have a clearly representative function.
Sültemeyer barely touches on Lenz, noting only that he acts in his own interests and becomes
the main figure in Lohse’s life and a second protagonist alongside Lohse from Chapter
XXVII: Sültemeyer, Das Frühwerk 111; Magris does not address the problematic aspects of
this character: Magris, Weit von wo.
See, for example, Jansen, “Weltbezug und Erzählhaltung” 45. Wolf Marchand interprets the
figure of Lenz as a parody of right-wing propaganda concerning “Die Weisen von Zion”, but a
parody Marchand feels ultimately fails: Marchand, Wertbegriffe 45-47, 64-65. He also
contends that in his embodiment of the absolute opposite of Theodor Lohse, Lenz is “nichts
anderes als ein verführerisches Vehikel der poetischen Realitätsflucht”: Marchand,
Wertbegriffe 65. By contrast, Sonnleitner argues that Lenz, like the other characters and the
novel as a whole, was intended by Roth to appear fragmentary: Sonnleitner, “Macht,
Identität,” 171. Sonnleitner’s interpretation has merit, but does not go far enough towards a
full interpretation of Lenz.
Wolfgang Kirchner, “Lenz und Lohse oder der Januskopf,” in Schauplatz Spinnennetz. Texte,
Bilder und Dokumente zum Film Das Spinnennetz von Bernhard Wicki (Ed. Jürgen Haase)
(Berlin: 1989) 20; cited in Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 87.
80
Katharina Ochse is one of the few critics to address the question of Lenz’s
perplexing characterization. She maintains that the ambiguity in Lenz’s character
is intended as part of Roth’s strategy of denying the validity of any categorization
of capabilities or characteristics as specifically ‘Jewish’ or specifically
‘German’.345 Ochse argues that in the portrayal of both Lenz and Lohse Roth
blurs the boundaries between prevailing stereotypical representations of Jews and
Germans, thereby exposing as a false construct the antithesis which anti-Semites
claim exists between Jews and Germans.346 This interpretation certainly squares
with Roth’s resistance to the pressure to subscribe to a single identity or ideology,
to be German or Jew, and Ochse’s argument is compelling in respect to Lohse,
whom she sees as acquiring precisely the characteristics he hates and fears in
Jews. Certain descriptions of Theodor are typical of clichés about Jews which
were popular at the time Das Spinnennetz was written. We are told, for instance,
that Lohse loved money even as a child (IV, 105), and we see him engage in
behaviours which according to anti-Semitic propaganda are typically Jewish: he
pretends to be somebody he is not when he takes on the persona of Friedrich
Trattner, and he reproduces others’ work as his own.347
Schließlich wird er, der nichts mehr fürchtet, als des Verrats bezichtigt zu
werden, zum ‘Judas’, einmal an Efrussi, der ihn immer korrekt behandelt hat,
dann deutlicher noch an dem zu einer Jesusfigur stilisierten Goldscheider, an
Günther, seinem Kriegskameraden, und schließlich auch noch an der
Geheimorganisation, deren Aufmarschpläne er an den Gegner verrät.348
Even Lohse’s desire for absolute power turns back on anti-Semites one of the
central tenets of anti-Semitic propaganda since the publication of Die Protokolle
der Weisen von Zion at the turn of the nineteenth century – that of a Jewish
conspiracy of world domination.349 By having Lohse unconsciously mimic
345
346
347
348
349
“Die vielfältigen Grenzverwischungen sind zu verstehen als Reaktion auf die Festschreibung
bestimmter Eigenschaften und Fähigkeiten als spezifisch ‘jüdisch’ bzw. spezifisch ‘deutsch’”:
Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 77-78.
Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 78. Ochse is playing on the similarity between the German word
for Jew (Jude) and the name Judas, noting that while five men named Judas appear in the
bible, in Christian cultures the name is only associated with Judas Ischariot, and is
synonymous with betrayal.
Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 78. On the often projective nature of this particular stereotype see
Adorno, “Prejudice,” 304-07.
81
supposedly Jewish characteristics, Roth inverts the accusation commonly made
against Jews that they try to imitate Germans.350
However, while it may be argued that Lohse ‘becomes’ a Jew (“d.h. so, wie sich
Anti-Semiten einen Juden vorstellen”351), Ochse’s assertion that Lenz becomes an
anti-Semite and comes to represent everything he hates about Europe is less
convincing. It hinges on a particular interpretation of the central but ambiguous
statement: “Seine Idee hieß: Benjamin Lenz.” (IV, 110) Ochse understands this
line to mean that Benjamin Lenz is egocentric and therefore no different from
Theodor Lohse and the Europe he despises: “Ist er nicht selber schon, wider
Willen und paradoxerweise aus Gegenwehr, europäisiert in Egozentrik, kühlem
Kalkulieren, sorgfältigen Kultivieren seiner Aversionen?”352 Seen in this light, the
role of Benjamin Lenz in the novel is to mirror Theodor Lohse – not as a positive
contrast to the thoroughly unlikeable Lohse, but as part of Roth’s strategy to
oppose the thinking in rigid and absolute categories.
What is missing in Ochse’s interpretation is a consideration of Lenz’s “Idee” in
the socio-historical context of Germany in the 1920s. In his seminal study of
Weimar culture Peter Gay reveals the paradoxical intellectual propinquity of such
ideologically diverse writers and thinkers as Martin Heidegger and Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, Oswald Spengler and Walther Rathenau.353 Each of these men
gave expression to what Friedrich Meinecke identified as a “deep yearning for the
inner unity and harmony of all laws of life and events in life [which] remains a
powerful force in the German spirit”.354 Spengler’s political pamphlet
Preußentum und Sozialismus (1919), a diatribe against the Weimar Republic and
a call to “liberate German socialism from Marx”, is just one expression of this
idea:
Power belongs to the whole. The individual serves it. The whole is sovereign.
The king is only the first servant of his state. Everyone is given his place.
350
351
352
353
354
Gay, Weimar Culture 80f.
Friedrich Meinecke, Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte (1924) 490; cited in
82
There are commands and obedience. This, since the eighteenth century, has
been authoritarian – autoritativer – socialism, in essence illiberal and antidemocratic – that is, if we think of English liberalism and French democracy.
[…] Together, Prussianism and socialism stand against the England within
us, against the world view which has penetrated the whole existence of our
people, paralyzed it, and robbed it of its soul.355
In Spengler’s thought there is no room for the Western European ideal of
individual liberty: the individual is valuable only as part of an organic national
whole. Gay identifies certain parallels between Spengler’s unambiguously
reactionary pamphlet and an abstract and elusive essay by the Austrian writer
Hugo von Hofmannsthal which point to a certain unity of thought in Weimar
intellectual circles at this time which transcended categories of Left and Right. In
“Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation”, an address delivered at the
University of Munich in 1927, Hofmannsthal argued that the source of Germany’s
troubles lay in its failure to be “a cultural organism in which spirit and life,
literature and politics, the educated and the uneducated, might join in common
possession of cultural goods, in a living tradition that all could enjoy.”356 Yet he
found hope in the seekers and prophets who “seek, not freedom, but connection”
and have realized that “life becomes livable only through valid connections”, and
that “scattered worthless individuals” must become “the core of the nation”.357
There is little to separate Hofmannsthal’s idealization of the community and
deprecation of the individual from Spengler’s authoritarian socialism other than
the former’s more poetic, less military language. Gay comments that
Hofmannsthal was fortunate that he died in 1929 – before he could see “the
consequences to which fatigue with freedom and the denigration of individuality
would lead.”358
Germans in the 1920s were “highly susceptible to the myth of national sacrifice as
a sacrifice of individuality”.359 Theodor Lohse is the type of person who needs to
355
356
357
358
359
Oswald Spengler, Preußentum und Sozialismus (1919); quoted in Gay, Weimar Culture 86.
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, “Das Schrifttum als geistiger Raum der Nation” (1927); quoted in
Bernd Weisbrod, “Violence and Sacrifice: Imagining the Nation in Weimar Germany,” in The
Third Reich Betwen Vision and Reality. New Perspectives on German History 1918-1945, ed.
Hans Mommsen (Oxford; New York: Berg, 2001), 16.
83
be part of a hierarchically structured group in order to function and defines
himself in terms of his role within this group rather than as an individual: “Ich,
Theodor Lohse, bin Mitglied einer geheimen Organisation” (IV, 77); “ich,
Theodor Lohse, ein Gefährdeter, aber ein Gefährlicher, mehr als ein Leutnant,
mehr als ein Sieger auf trabendem Roß, zwischen grüßenden Spalieren, Retter des
Vaterlandes vielleicht” (IV, 75). His ambitions have titles: “Er wollte Führer sein,
Abgeordneter, Minister, Diktator” (IV, 93). Titles and roles mark the stations of
his career: he is “der Leutnant Theodor Lohse” (IV, 65); “ein Hauslehrer mit
gescheiterten Hoffnungen” (IV, 68); “der Genosse Trattner” (IV, 80); “ein
Student, Leutnant der Reserve” (IV, 100); “ein Held in Uniform, ein Berühmter”
(IV, 129); “Chef des Sicherheitswesens” (IV, 137); “Einer der führenden Männer
[…]. Warum nicht: der führende Mann?” (IV, 144).
In stark contrast to Lohse, Lenz opposes the mentality of the group – any group –
and his identity and values are elusive:
Seine Idee hieß: Benjamin Lenz. Er haßte Europa, Christentum, Juden,
Monarchen, Republiken, Philosophie, Parteien, Ideale, Nationen. Er diente
den Gewalten, um ihre Schwäche, ihre Bosheit, ihre Tücke, ihre
Verwundbarkeit zu studieren. Er betrog sie mehr, als er ihnen nützte. Er
haßte die europäische Dummheit. Seine Klugheit haßte. Er war klüger als
Politiker, Journalisten und alles, was Gewalt hatte und Mittel zur Macht. Er
probte seine Kraft an ihnen. Er verriet die Organisationen an die politischen
Gegner; den französischen Gesandtschaften verriet er Gelogenes, Wahres
durcheinander; er freute sich an dem gläubigen Gesicht des Betrogenen, der
aus den falschen Tatsachen Kraft zu neuer Grausamkeit schöpfte; über das
dumme Erstaunen eingebildeter Diplomaten, kindischer, zahnloser
Geheimräte, bestialischer Hakenkreuzler; freute sich, daß sie ihn nicht
erkannten. Er irrte sich selten. (IV, 110-11)
Europe, Christianity, Jews, monarchists, republics, parties and nations: these are
all groups which by their very nature exclude some in order to include others, and
which demand the acknowledgement of certain truths and values to the exclusion
of others. Lenz’s hatred of groups and ideologies makes sense only if read against
the backdrop of the “hunger for wholeness” that Gay describes as pervasive in
Weimar Germany. Seen in this context, the statement “Seine Idee hieß: Benjamin
Lenz” is a positive assertion of individuality in a claustrophobic climate of selfsacrifice where individuality is increasingly devalued. That Lenz does not
discriminate between ideologies of the left and right, religious and secular,
appears reasonable in the light of Lohse’s sometimes wavering commitment to the
84
ideology of the right, despite its absolute character. Theodor needs the goal
provided by an ideology to direct his life and thoughts, but is willing to change his
allegiance as soon as he suspects a greater benefit to himself elsewhere. Thus,
while supposedly committed to the right-wing secret organisation, he thinks:
“Nationalsozialismus war ein Wort wie andere. Es bedingt nicht Gesinnung.” (IV,
102) And not much later: “Was war Sozialismus? Ein Wort. Man muß nicht daran
glauben. Woran glaubte er heute? Drüben war er wertvoll. Die anderen breiteten
die Arme aus. Er kannte die Kulissen.” (IV, 109) The marked irony in this
exposure of the interchangeable nature of ideological content underscores Roth’s
unequivocal rejection not just of conservative and right-wing ideologies, but of
ideology in any form.
Bartsch has identified Ideologieskepsis as one of the central characteristics of
Habsburg Austrian literature in the nineteenth century, characteristics which he
contends continued to define Austrian literature in the changed circumstances of
the twentieth century.360 This scepticism was born of the political situation of the
late Habsburg Monarchy, in which any change, every alternative ideology, had the
potential to destroy the terminally ailing state. German-speaking writers and
intellectuals had suddenly recognized this potential in 1848, when revolution had
threatened to destroy more than its liberal supporters had bargained for;361 the
resulting fear of change as threatening the very fabric of life in the monarchy led
to the state of inertia and stagnation in the political sphere implied in the term
Fortwursteln:362
Jede Reform, jede kleinste Änderung im politischen und sozialen Bereich
drohte das labile Staatsgefüge zu zerstören. Die Folge war jene politische
Statik, ein scheinbar apolitisches Verhalten, das vielfach als typisch
360
361
362
K. Bartsch, “Literatur aus Österreich = ‘Österreichische’ Literatur? Zum Problem ihrer
eigenständigen Identität,” in Studies in Modern Austrian Literature, ed. B. Murdoch and M.
Ward (Glasgow: Scottish Papers in Germanic Studies, 1981), 8. The other characteristic
named by Bartsch is “die rückwärtsgewandte Utopie einer universalistischen Ordnung”,
whether this order is defended or criticized by the writer: Bartsch, “Literatur aus Österreich,”
7.
Bartsch, “Literatur aus Österreich,” 4.
This term, which translates roughly as “muddling along” was coined by Eduard Taafe, Prime
Minister (Kaiserminister) from 1879-93, and refers to his system of governance: Johnston,
The Austrian Mind 50. On the inertia of the bureaucracy under Franz Joseph see Johnston, The
Austrian Mind 45-75. On Taafe’s system of Fortwursteln and its implications for the state see
also A.J.P. Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 1809-1918: A History of the Austrian Empire
and Austria-Hungary (London: Penguin, 1990) 169-82, especially 169-72.
85
österreichisch und auch als Merkmal der österreichischen Literatur
angesehen wird. Österreich wurde, so könnte man überspitzt formulieren, im
19. Jahrhundert nicht regiert, sondern bloß verwaltet.363
Bartsch cites Ödön von Horváth as a prime example of a post-Habsburg author
who carries on the tradition of Ideologieskepsis in the inter-war period. In his
depiction of the contemporary socio-historical situation in plays such as
Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald, Horváth “entlarvt das falsche, in den
Faschismus führende Bewußtsein des Kleinbürgertums”.364 Exacly what Bartsch
means by the “ideologieskeptische Position” taken by Horváth becomes clear in
his comparison of the Austrian with German playwright Bertolt Brecht. Both
writers believed reality to be historically and culturally determined and man-made
rather than naturally given, but Horváth lacked what Bartsch calls Brecht’s
“‘aufklärerische[r]’ Optimismus”:
Brecht demonstriert die Misere bestehender Verhältnisse und versucht sein
Publikum zu überzeugen, daß eine Verbesserung der Lebensumstände
möglich sei, wenn die Gesellschaftsordnung grundlegend umgewälzt
würde.365
Brecht offers a Marxist solution to the problems bedevilling contemporary
society. Horváth explores similar contemporary problems, but his focus is on
“verkitschtes und realitätsfremdes Denken” in the individual, and he offers no
concrete solution, aiming instead at the viewer’s insight into self and society.366
Bartsch names Roth as typical of the literature of the Habsburg myth, which for
him stands in contradistinction to the Ideologieskepsis of Horváth.367 Since Roth’s
early novels are all set in the post-Habsburg present, it may be assumed that
Bartsch is referring to Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft, the texts most
frequently cited as exemplars of the Habsburg myth.368 He does not, however,
363
364
365
366
367
368
Bartsch implies, presumably unintentionally, that the whole of Roth’s fiction is under the spell
of the Habsburg myth when he cites him as one of several authors who are “bezogen auf die
habsburgische Vergangenheit Österreichs und mehr oder weniger kritisch geleitet von der
alten Vorstellung einer ewigen Ordnung”: Bartsch, “Literatur aus Österreich,” 9. The extent to
which the later novels exemplify the Habsburg myth will be addressed in the third and fourth
chapters of this study.
86
distinguish between these and Roth’s early novels, which exhibit the same
scepticism about ideology that Bartsch identifies in Horváth, a scepticism which,
as Hüppauf has demonstrated, also has its roots “im frühbürgerlichen
französischen Humanismus, in dessen Zentrum Freiheit und Selbstbestimmung
des einzelnen stehen.”369 Roth does not believe that any ideology can provide a
solution to the problems of the chaotic post-war world in part because ideologies
inhibit the freedom of the individual, as his rejection of Begriff and Nomenklatur
in “Die weißen Städte” attests. Like Horváth in his Geschichten aus dem Wiener
Wald, Roth shows in Das Spinnennetz “daß die Verführung des in seinem
Bewußtseinshorizont sehr beschränkten Kleinbürgers durch radikale Ideologien in
die politische Katastrophe münden [muss].”370
Roth’s scepticism about ideologies is embodied in Benjamin Lenz’s rejection of
all grand ideas and groups bound by a belief system.371 Yet Roth does not present
Lenz as a simple positive foil to Lohse, the type of person who retains his
individuality and free will in juxtaposition with the type who is attracted to
ideology and willingly surrenders his individuality. Instead, he creates in Lenz a
complex individual who not only betrays everyone to anyone, but who in his
anarchism is ultimately quite sinister, and himself actively hastens the
catastrophe. As Ochse comments,
gleich, wie man Benjamin Lenz deutet, sein Verhalten angesichts des
Antisemitismus ist nicht übertragbar. Letztlich verneint der Roman die
Möglichkeit, als Jude ungefährdet und gleichbereichtig (sic) in Deutschland
zu leben.372
The end of the novel, which sees Lenz send his brother Lazar to Paris and say that
he perhaps will follow (IV, 145-46), does indicate that it will not be safe for them
in Germany. However, the ultimate reason for the danger is left unclear. While
369
370
371
372
Hüppauf, “Mythos des Skeptikers,” 36. Hüppauf’s reading differs from mine in that he argues
that it is not until Hiob that Roth gives literary expression to this scepticism: Hüppauf,
“Mythos des Skeptikers,” 30f.
Cf. Sonnleitner on Lenz’s hatred of Europe, Christendom, etc.: “Abgrundtiefe Skepsis gegen
Ideologien und Heilslehren, gegen abstrakte Begriffe, die Angst vor dem Umschlagen von
Aufklärung in Mythologie, das zwanzig Jahre später Horkheimer und Adorno analysierten,
sind in diesem vorerst befremdenen Programm enthalten”: Sonnleitner, “Macht, Identität,”
177.
87
Benjamin’s life appears to be in immediate peril because his spying has been
discovered by Theodor, Benjamin himself has been directly involved in the plot
for the second of November, and his brother, a chemist, has been developing a
new explosive:
‘Woran arbeitest du?’
‘An einem Gas.’
‘Sprengstoff?’
‘Ja!’ sagte Lazar.
‘Für Europa’, sagte Benjamin.
Und Lazar lachte. Alles verstand Lazar. Was war Benjamin dagegen? Ein
kleiner Intrigant.
Aber dieser junge Bruder mit den sanften, golden schimmernden Augen ließ
den ganzen Weltteil in die Luft fliegen. (IV, 145)
This conclusion to the novel, which implicates Lenz in an imminent apocalypse,
leads Marchand to assert that what began as a “klarsichtiges, anklagendes und
aufdeckendes Buch” with a socialist message became lost at the halfway point
with the introduction of Lenz, who is responsible “für den Untergang, den zu
verhindern oder wenigstens einen Beitrag zu einem Versuch dazu zu liefern, Roth
als seine moralische und politische Aufgabe empfand”.373 Yet to make this claim
is to impose on the author an intention to write a novel with a socialist “message”,
to provide a “solution” which might prevent the disaster he saw coming,374 when
his actual intention was to explore and understand the society in which he was
living and to draw attention to what was happening. This was the role of the
writer as Roth saw it, as he explained in “Schweigen im Dichterwald”, a polemic
directed at German writers which was published in the same year as Das
Spinnennetz.375 Marchand criticizes Roth for opposing the irrationalism of
Theodor Lohse not with rationalism but with “ein ins Mythische übersteigerter
373
374
375
Marchand, Wertbegriffe 65. Marchand further cites Roth’s desire to include “die linke Position
der Arbeiter und [seine] Parteinahme für die Unterdrückten und Notleidenden” as adding to
the confusion caused by the second half of the novel: Marchand, Wertbegriffe 44, 59.
Marchand asserts that he does not mean to demand from Roth “ein Rezept oder eine
Kampfanleitung”, yet this is exactly what he implies: see Marchand, Wertbegriffe 65-66. In
his critique of Hotel Savoy he similarly chastizes Roth for not providing a socialist solution,
instead simply implying that “man müsse nur die Armen reich, die Hungernden satt machen –
und schon seien alle Probleme gelöst”: Marchand, Wertbegriffe 80.
In this piece Roth criticizes German writers for their silence “über alle Dinge, die
Deutschlands Wohl und Wehe [betreffen], die Arbeit, das Brot und den Tod seines Volkes,
[…] über die barbarischen Formen des öffentlichen Lebens”: Joseph Roth, “Schweigen im
Dichterwald”, Prager Tageblatt, 16.11.1923 (I, 1068). He does not suggest that they should
advocate solutions, just that they have a duty to break their silence.
88
Irrationalismus”.376 Marchand’s criticism would be valid if Roth were advocating
Lenz’s strategy for combatting the irrational, but he does not. The portrayal of
Lenz’s “radikale[r] und asoziale[r] Vernichtsungswille[...]”377 serves a quite
different purpose and must be seen in the context of the ubiquity of apocalyptic
thought in post-World War I Germany.
Apocalypse but no Redemption
The decades between the outbreak of the First World War and the aftermath of the
Second have been described as “an Age of Catastrophe”.378 In Weimar Germany,
which was suffering under the multiple burdens of reparations, hyperinflation,
political instability, and the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty, the sense of
crisis was acute. Sebastian Haffner, in his personal account of the period 19141933, characterizes the atmosphere in Germany towards the end of 1923 – the
year in which Das Spinnennetz was written – as apocalyptic:379
Kein Volk der Welt hat etwas erlebt, was dem deutschen ‘1923’-Erlebnis
entspricht. Den Weltkrieg haben alle erlebt, die meisten auch Revolutionen,
soziale Krisen, Streiks, Vermögensumschichtungen, Geldentwertungen. Aber
keins die phantastische, groteske Übersteigerung von alledem auf einmal, die
1923 in Deutschland stattfand. Keins diesen gigantischen karnevalistischen
Totentanz, dieses nicht endende blutig-groteske Saturnalienfest, in dem nicht
nur das Geld, in dem alle Werte entwertet wurden.380
This devaluation of values, the questioning of morality and an “epochal
consciousness of the end”381 was strongly reflected in the literature and
philosophy of the early 1920s, manifest in images of apocalypse and redemption.
Thomas Mann recalled that “just after the First World War the Germans, unlike
the French, had little better to do than to dream of apocalypses,”382 a recollection
which highlights the uniqueness of the German post-war experience. Klaus
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
Marchand, Wertbegriffe 66. For a similar interpretation of Lenz see Magris, Weit von wo 228.
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York:
Pantheon, 1994) 6.
David Roberts, “The Sense of an Ending. Apocalyptic Perspectives in the 20th-century
German Novel,” Orbis Litterarum 32 (1977): 147. Roberts refers to the period 1914-1945 as
“the apocalyptic epoch”: Roberts, “The Sense of an Ending,” 157.
Thomas Mann, Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus (Amsterdam, 1949); cited in Anson
Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe. German Intellectuals between Apocalypse and
Enlightenment (Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press, 1997) 10.
89
Vondung, in his comprehensive study of apocalyptic literature in Germany,
likewise argues that while the First World War was experienced in almost all
participating countries as an apocalyptic event, in Germany the artistic expression
of this experience was much more extensive.383 Vondung demonstrates that this
was not just a post-war phenomenon but had a long tradition in Germany,
stretching back to the birth of German nationalism in the Napoleonic Wars.
Indeed, Vondung uncovers “eine grundsätzliche Neigung zu apokalyptischer
Weltsicht” in the political movements and ideologies which have determined the
course of Germany history over the past two centuries, including not only
National Socialism but also movements and ideologies which can be described as
“socialist” in direction.384 German art and literature have long shown a fascination
with the apocalypse, drawing on the biblical paradigm with its dualistic vision of
the old world which is corrupt and evil and the new which is pure and good:385
Die Literatur ist voll von apokalyptischen Visionen; sie entfalteten sich in
den Liedern der Befreiungskriege gegen Napoleon wie in den Gedichten des
Ersten Weltkriegs, in Wagners Götterdämmerung wie in den Dramen des
Expressionismus, in Romanen des Fin de siècle wie in denen der zwanziger
Jahre.386
The dominant characteristic of both the archetypal apocalypse and modern
apocalyptic texts is the stark dualism between the old and new worlds: “Stets kam
es der Apokalypse letztlich auf diese neue Welt an; die Apokalypse war eine
Erlösungsvision.”387 The dualism in apocalyptic texts is qualitative: the old world
is deficient, full of misery, pain and death, and the new world is “vollkommen,
eine Welt des Glücks, der Freude und des Lebens.”388 Further,
[d]er Dualismus bestimmt das Gefüge der Handlung und wirkt sich zeitlich
aus: Er konstituiert ein ‘Vorher’ und ‘Nachher’, zwischen dem es keine
Vermittlung, sondern nur den radikalen Umschlag der ‘Wandlung’ gibt, die
383
384
385
386
387
388
Klaus Vondung, Die Apokalypse in Deutschland (München: DTV, 1988) 13-14. See also
Weisbrod, who remarks that in the 1920s “[t]he German mind was obsessed with the Great
War”: Weisbrod, “Violence and Sacrifice,” 5.
Vondung, Apokalypse 10-11.
Vondung, Apokalypse 22.
Vondung, Apokalypse 11. See also Roberts, “The Sense of an Ending,” 141.
Vondung, Apokalypse 22. See also Gerschom Scholem, “Towards an Understanding of the
Messianic Idea in Judaism,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism. And Other Essays on Jewish
Spirituality (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971), 6.
90
umfassende Erneuerung durch Vernichtung des Alten.389
This dualism, which is present in the texts analyzed by Vondung and which
according to him only disappears in the nuclear age when the apocalypse becomes
total and final, signifying the “Untergang der Menschheit, das Ende der Welt”,390
is absent from Roth’s novel, indeed from all three of the early novels, which are
linked by their apocalyptic imagery. What does the absence of an
“Erlösungsvision” in these texts signify?
As seen through Benjamin’s eyes, “das junge Europa” (IV, 117) is ripe for the
apocalypse:
Rings um Benjamin verkümmerten die Wachsenden und wurden nicht reif;
haßten die Gereiften einander; verdorrten die Guten und die Güte;
vertrockneten die Säuglinge; Greise wurden in den Straßen zertreten; Frauen
verkauften ihre kranken Leiber; Bettler protzten mit ihrem Gebrest, Reiche
mit ihren Banknoten; geschminkte Jünglinge verdienten auf der Straße;
Arbeiter schlichen mit krankem Schattenschritt zur Arbeit wie längst
Gestorbene, die den Fluch ihres irdischen Tagewerkes weiterschleppen
müssen, andere betranken sich, heulten wahnsinnigen Jubel in den Straßen,
letzte Jauchzer vor dem Untergang […] (IV, 116)
There is no “Erlösungsvision” in the text to counter this portrayal of utter moral
decay. Vondung argues that where a belief in the possibility of a better world to
replace the corrupt world of the present is lacking, both history and present
suffering (which only derives meaning from the prospect of redemption) are
rendered meaningless: “Eine große Leere entsteht, und es droht der Sturz in die
Verzweiflung.”391 In Das Spinnennetz, Lenz himself shows no signs of despair,
working actively to accelerate the approaching apocalypse,392 and his paradoxical
simultaneous feelings of love and hatred are indicative of his exultation:
Oh, wie liebte sie393 Benjamin Lenz! Wie durfte er sie hassen und ihren Haß
nähren und großzüchten! Er sah den grausamen Lebendigen und roch den
Moder voraus. Benjamin wartet, sie werden ihm anheimfallen. Sie werden
einander zerfleischen, er wird es erleben. (IV, 117)
389
390
391
392
393
“An ‘seinem Tag’ mußte in ganz Europa der schlummernde Wahnsinn zum Ausbruch
gekommen sein. Also vergrößerte er Verwirrung, steigerte Freude am Blut, Lust am Töten,
verriet einen an den anderen, beide dem dritten und diesen auch. […] Er arbeitete für seinen
Tag.” (IV, 111)
“sie” here refers to both “die Zeit” and “die Menschen”.
91
However, while Lenz appears untouched by any sense of desolation, the text itself
ends with a devastating lack of hope. The only hint in the novel of the new world
which will dawn to replace the old after its destruction is in Benjamin’s surname,
a poetic word for spring.394 In a feuilleton published in the same year as Das
Spinnennetz, Roth uses the word “Lenz” and draws the attention to the life-giving
associations of this season: “Der Frühling, auch ‘Lenz’ genannt, ist die schönste
Jahreszeit, die Saison der Kuckuckskonzerte und des Lerchengesanges, der
grünen Welt- und Wiesenkostüme und der göttlichen Blütenfabrikation.”395 Roth
refers in this text to “die bekannte Auferstehung der Natur”, but only to ironically
juxtapose this poetic image with the reality of widespread poverty and the
injustice of the gulf between rich and poor:
Die Sonne, ein radikal sozialistischer Leuchtkörper, eines der wenigen
Objekte dieser Welt, deren private Ausbeutung deshalb noch nicht gelungen
ist, weil es keine Groß-Himmels-Grundbesitzer gibt, diese Sonne nimmt sich
die Freiheit, allen Menschen gleich zu leuchten und die dürre Haut des
Hungernden ebenso zu wärmen wie den fetten Bauch des Satten. […]
Auch am Kurfürstendamm offenbart sich der Anbruch des Frühlings: Die
Bettler enthüllen ihre Gebrechen und vornehmen Spaziergänger ihre
Frühlingstoiletten. (I, 961-62)
Spring is thus “die schönste Jahreszeit” only for the wealthy, and Roth implicitly
criticizes German writers for not concerning themselves with these inequities
when he refers to the fact that they make a living from singing hymns to the
beauty of nature.396
Just as he begins this piece evoking the traditional connotations of spring as new
life only to negate them by exposing the reality which lies beneath the surface, in
Das Spinnennetz Roth uses Benjamin Lenz’s name in conjunction with the
apocalyptic imagery in the text not to suggest that a new and better world will
indeed replace the corrupt one he has portrayed, but to negate this possibility:
Ja, es kam der Frühling. Man fühlte ihn schon auf den Straßen, in der Mitte
schmolz der Schnee, und an den Rändern bedeckte ihn eine graue Kruste.
394
395
396
Cf. Ochse, who also explains the biblical connotations of the name Benjamin and concludes:
“Die Kombination der Namen ‘Benjamin’ und ‘Lenz’ betont die Bedeutung ihres Trägers als
Figur der Zukunft, als Hoffnungsträger”: Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 89.
Joseph Roth, “Der Frühling, die schönste Jahreszeit. Eine Hausarbeit”, Vorwärts, 24.3.1923 (I,
961).
“Es ereignet sich, von Lyrikern in Reimen begrüßt, die bekannte Auferstehung der Natur […].
die ‘linden Lüfte’, von denen die deutschen Dichter leben.” (I, 961).
92
Aber die Hungrigen, die Entwichenen, die geflüchteten Häftlinge und die
Arbeiter, die noch vor der Verhaftung die Flucht aus ihrer Heimat ergriffen
hatten und in der großen Stadt unerkannt zu verschwinden hofften, die
Frauen, deren Männer getötet waren, die jüdischen Emigranten aus dem
Osten, die jede Eisenbahn meiden mußten – sie fühlten den Frühling wie ein
dreifaches Weh. Mit dem singenden Frost des Winters hatten sie sich
befreundet, mit dem knisternden Schnee, seinen zärtlichen Flocken, aber den
scharfen Wind, der in sich die kommenden Regen des Aprils trug, der die
Kleider zerbiß und in die Poren der Haut drang, ertrugen sie nicht.
Nieder fielen sie in den Straßen, und das Fieber schüttelte sie, mit
klappernden Kiefern erwarteten sie die letzte Stunde, und dann lagen sie starr
auf den Straßen, und mitleidige Flüchtlinge, die später kamen, begruben die
Leichen in den Feldern, des Nachts, wenn die Bauern es nicht sahen.
Wie ein lächelnder Mörder ging der Frühling durch Deutschland. […] (IV,
142-43)
With any hope of a new world to replace the old thus negated, Lenz represents
Roth’s recognition of the ambivalence of the apocalypticism which was so
prevalent in post-war Germany: it protests against injustice, oppression and
human suffering and yet its consequences can be deadly. Despite his
condemnation of the contemporary state of Germany, Roth cannot commit
himself to the apocalyptic vision due to this central paradox. His rejection of the
paradigm accounts for both the ambiguity of Lenz as a foil to Lohse and the open
end to the novel. The only glimmer of hope is expressed in the final line: “Viele
Lokomotiven pfiffen irgendwo auf Geleisen.” (IV, 146) This image suggests that
while all might be lost in Germany, perhaps elsewhere – in the France Roth was
soon to venerate in “Die weißen Städte” – refuge might be sought from the
barbarism of Germany. That this is a faint hope is reflected in the fact that
Benjamin has referred to his brother’s explosives as being intended “[f]ür Europa”
(IV, 145).
Inequality and the Socialist Revolution: Hotel Savoy
Roth’s concern with the apocalypticism which is so prevalent in 1920s Germany
is also evident in his second novel, Hotel Savoy, but this time he turns his
attention to the apocalyptic impulse inherent in the idea of socialist revolution.
More than any other text, this novel shows Roth’s scepticism about socialism as a
solution to the problems of social and economic inequality facing Central Europe,
problems which are given symbolic expression in the hotel of the novel’s title:
Wie die Welt war dieses Hotel Savoy, mächtigen Glanz strahlte es nach
außen, Pracht sprühte aus sieben Stockwerken, aber Armut wohnte drin in
93
Gottesnähe, was oben stand, lag unten, begraben in luftigen Gräbern, und die
Gräber schichteten sich auf den behaglichen Zimmern der Satten, die unten
saßen, in Ruhe und Wohligkeit, unbeschwert von den leichtgezimmerten
Särgen. (IV, 168)
In what seems to be a “Bild eines umgekehrten Sozialgefälles”,397 the inhabitants
are housed hierarchically on the hotel’s seven floors: the affluent live on the three
lower floors and the poorer on the higher levels, with the poorest on the top floor
next to the laundry where the air is so bad that the inhabitants die at a young age.
This paradoxical arrangement is consistent with the numerous other contradictions
and incongruities of the novel, from Ignatz “der Liftboy, ein älterer Mann” (IV,
150) to Gabriel Dan, a Heimkehrer who is unable to leave the Hotel Savoy, to the
hotel itself which is “ein reicher Palast und ein Gefängnis” (IV, 236).398 It is,
however, only a “scheinhafte[...] Umkehr der Verhältnisse”:399 the rich are still
rich, the poor still poor. But the very fact that the unexpected vertical arrangement
of the hotel does not reflect a real reversal of class relations is significant in itself:
it suggests that although the war and its chaotic aftermath seem quite literally to
have turned everything upside down, appearances are deceptive and the chaos
simply masks a continuity in social and economic inequity from pre-war times.400
The mistaken belief that the present represents something quite different from the
past is reflected in the narrator Gabriel’s sense that as he floats up in the lift
towards his room he has left the misery and privation of the past behind: “Ich […]
werfe Bitterkeit, Armut, Wanderung, Heimatlosigkeit, Hunger, Vergangenheit des
Bettlers hinunter – tief, woher es mich, den Emporschwebenden, nimmermehr
erreichen kann.” (IV, 150) His impression is false, as he subsequently discovers:
he has not left poverty and hunger in the past at all – it accompanies him to his
sixth floor room and is even worse on the seventh where Stasia is about to forfeit
her third suitcase to Ignatz (IV, 168) and the Santschin family lives in abject
poverty next to the laundry. In this novel, then, as in Das Spinnennetz, Roth
challenges the view that the war marks a break dividing the present from a very
397
398
399
400
Gotthart Wunberg, “Joseph Roths Roman Hotel Savoy (1924) im Kontext der Zwanziger
Jahre,” in Joseph Roth. Interpretation Rezeption Kritik, ed. Michael Kessler and Fritz Hackert
(Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1990), 454.
Wunberg, “Hotel Savoy,” 454, 459.
Wunberg, “Hotel Savoy,” 454.
The clocks which show different times on each floor of the hotel are a metaphor for times
which seem so different, but in reality are not. (IV, 152)
94
different past.401 As he put it in a feuilleton written towards the end of 1919,
although the first year after the war was referred to as “das Jahr der Erneuerung”,
it is at most a case of “Neuerungen”, without any real change:
Erneuerung! Erneuerung! Wo, frage ich, seht Ihr Erneuerung? Ist das
Erneuerung, wenn die Burgmusik um die Mittagsstunde statt zur Burg zum
Staatsamt für Heerwesen zieht? Wenn ein Minister Staatssekretär heißt?
Wenn der Briefträger nicht ‘Diener’ mehr, sondern ‘Unterbeamter’ ist? Reißt
ihm doch die Knechtseligkeit aus seiner armen, gemarterten Brust, und er
mag heißen, wie er will, er wird kein Diener sein! Gebt dem armseligen Hirn
des Staatssekretärs Weitsichtigkeit und Vernunft und laßt ihn nur Minister
heißen!402
The fact that inequality and poverty are not new but are a manifestation of the
continuity between past and present is reflected in Gabriel’s memory of his
father’s resentment towards his rich uncle Phöbus who is, as Abel Glanz remarks,
“ein reicher Mann mit einem kleinen Herzen” (IV, 171):
Den Namen Phöbus hatte jedes Famlienmitglied mit Respekt genannt, es
war, als hätte man wirklich vom Sonnengott gesprochen; nur mein Vater
sprach immer von ‘Phöbus, dem Lump’ – weil er angeblich mit der Mitgift
der Mutter Geschäfte gemacht hatte. (IV, 154)
Gabriel’s visits to his uncle to request money for his journey home mirror in
reverse his uncle’s visits to Gabriel’s family before the war. In both cases the
visitor lives in a hotel and comes to drink tea with the family, and in both cases
the wealthy uncle distinguishes himself by his lack of generosity, crying poor and
giving as little as possible – then a few coins (IV, 155), now an old suit which his
wife, not he, offers to Gabriel and which Phöbus does not even remember
possessing, so many suits does he own (IV, 159). Gabriel’s financial difficulties
have been exacerbated by the war but his family was already suffering, as the
reference to his father having died “im Siechenhaus” indicates (IV, 158). The
lines of continuity between past and present are given metaphoric expression in
Gabriel’s words to Henry Bloomfield, who has been visiting his father’s grave:
401
402
By contrast, Jürgens argues that Roth only begins to understand that despite the war and the
revolution there has been no “Zäsur” with Die Rebellion; both Das Spinnennetz and Hotel
Savoy, he contends, are concerned solely with the present: Jürgens, Gesellschaftskritische
Aspekte 23-24.
Joseph Roth, “Das Jahr der Erneuerung”, Der Neue Tag, 12.11.1919 (I, 172). Such changes in
appearance and name rather than substance are encapsulated in the novel in the mysterious
and invisible hotel owner Kaleguropulos, who in reality is the ostensible lift-boy Ignatz. The
new Republic of Austria, Roth is saying, is a Republic in name only. Nothing has really
changed; gross inequity persists.
95
“‘Das Leben hängt so sichtbar mit dem Tod zusammen und der Lebendige mit
seinen Toten. Es ist kein Ende da, kein Abbruch – immer Fortsetzung und
Anknüpfung.’” (IV, 227) It is an idea to which Roth will return in
Radetzkymarsch as he tries to understand how the present developed from the
past, and which in Hotel Savoy is even reflected in Gabriel’s apparently arbitrary
switching between the present and past tenses in his narration.
“Man wartete also auf Bloomfield”:403 Waiting and Inaction
For Gabriel the first glimpse of the Hotel Savoy promises
Wasser, Seife, englisches Klosett, Lift, Stubenmädchen in weißen Hauben,
freundlichblinkende Nachtgeschirre wie köstliche Überraschungen in
braungetäfelten Kästchen; elektrische Lampen, aus rosa und grünen
Schirmen erblühend wie aus Kelchen; schrillende Klingeln, die einem
Daumendruck gehorchen; und Betten, daunengepolsterte, schwellend und
freudig bereit, den Körper aufzunehmen. (IV, 149)
Having discovered that his initial impression was only partly true and that this
hotel, which had seemed to him “[e]uropäischer als alle anderen Gasthöfe des
Ostens” (IV, 149), does not extend the same level of comfort to all its inhabitants,
Gabriel encounters real and widespread poverty on the streets outside:
Glanz führte mich durch unbekannte Gäßchen, an Höfen vorbei,
verwahrlosten Gehöften, freien Plätzen, auf denen Schutt und Mist lagerte,
Schweine grunzten, mit kotigen Mäulern Atzung suchend. Grüne
Fliegenschwärme summten um Haufen dunkelbraunen Menschenkotes. Die
Stadt hatte keine Kanäle, es stank aus allen Häusern, und Glanz prophezeite
plötzlich Regen aus allerlei Gerüchen. (IV, 171)
Roth’s intention to call attention to the miserable circumstances in which the poor
live is unmistakable in this and other similar passages of the novel. Yet he wants
to do more than simply highlight social suffering. His main concern is to address
the reaction of various types of people to the situation with which they are faced.
While Wunberg considers resignation to be “die Grundstimmung von Roths
Roman”,404 in fact Roth differentiates between three types of response to the
problems of poverty and suffering – and finds all wanting: resignation and
inaction coupled with a messianic belief in fate (the townspeople); apolitical
apathy (Gabriel); and revolutionary socialism (Zwonimir Pansin).
403
404
Roth, Hotel Savoy (IV, 207).
Wunberg, “Hotel Savoy,” 455.
96
Some people, like Taddeus Montag, are simply resigned to their suffering:
Nun bin ich schon ein paar Wochen hier, und neben mir hungerte Taddeus
Montag, und niemals schrie er. Die Menschen sind stumm, stummer als die
Fische, früher einmal riefen sie noch, wenn ihnen etwas weh tat, aber im
Laufe der Zeit gewöhnten sie sich das Rufen ab. (IV, 221)
Yet although they seem resigned, many are also waiting for salvation. Indeed, the
overwhelming impression the reader of Hotel Savoy forms is that everybody in
the town is waiting: “[sie] warten darauf, daß es weitergeht, besser wird, oder
Bloomfield kommt, der die Situation mit einem Schlag verändert.” 405 Gabriel first
hears of the impending visit of Henry Bloomfield from Hirsch Fisch, the lottery
dreamer:406 “‘Haben Sie das Neueste gehört: Bloomfield kommt!’ […]
Bloomfield ist ein Kind dieser Stadt, Milliardär in Amerika. Die ganze Stadt ruft:
Bloomfield kommt!’” (IV, 165) While the wealthy industrialists and business men
hope that they will be able to do business with Bloomfield and thus increase their
own wealth, the rest of the town’s population is hoping for an easing of their
misery. Bloomfield’s coming promises salvation: “Wenn er kam, bewilligte er
alle Forderungen, die Erde bekam ein neues Gesicht.” (IV, 207-08) Before his
arrival, then, Bloomfield, the Eastern Jewish emigrant turned American capitalist,
has all the attributes of a messiah, an almost supernatural saviour or redeemer.407
So high are people’s expectations that a blanket of inertia and inaction descends
on the town:
Man erwartet Bloomfield überall: Im Waisenhaus ist ein Schornstein
eingestürzt, man richtet ihn nicht, weil Bloomfield jedes Jahr etwas für das
Waisenhaus gibt. Kranke Juden gehn nicht zum Arzt, weil Bloomfield die
Rechnung bezahlen soll. Am Friedhof hat man eine Erdsenkung bemerkt,
zwei Kaufleute sind abgebrannt, die Kaufleute stehen in der Gasse mit ihren
Warenballen, es fällt ihnen nicht ein, die Läden zu reparieren – womit sollten
405
406
407
Wunberg, “Hotel Savoy,” 456. Wunberg shows how Roth’s novel in this respect is typical of
the literature of the 1920s and 1930s, citing Lion Feuchtwanger’s trilogy Der Wartesaal and
Erich Käster’s Fabian, in which the hero describes his situation before the First World War
with the sentence “Ich saß im großen Wartesaal, und der hieß Europa”: quoted in Wunberg,
“Hotel Savoy,” 457.
The lottery motif itself is evidence of the widespread belief in fate and chance.
Vondung details the origins of messianism in Judaism after the political defeat of Israel: “Wen
man sich unter diesem Messias vorstellte, ist nicht immer ganz klar; ursprünglich dachte man
wohl an einen politischen Führer oder König, der das davidische Königtum erneuern würde,
doch im Laufe der Zeit nahm der Messias mehr und mehr die Züge eines übernatürlichen
Erlösers an”: Vondung, Apokalypse 39. On the prevalence of messianism among Jewish
thinkers before and in the wake of the First World War see Rabinbach, Shadow of Catastrophe
30-34.
97
sie zu Bloomfield gehen? Die ganze Welt wartet auf Bloomfield. (IV, 208)
Here Roth’s criticism is unmistakable: in putting their faith in a messianic figure,
people are failing to take responsibility for themselves in the present, potentially
exacerbating their problems. Roth’s criticism of messianism in this novel runs
parallel to his condemnation of apocalypticism in Das Spinnennetz, a fact
reflected in names which promise more than they deliver – indeed deliver the
opposite of what they appear to promise: just as Benjamin Lenz was linked with a
murderous spring, Henry Bloomfield, whose name (Blumenfeld) bears
connotations of hope and new life, has not come to bring new life but to visit his
father’s grave (IV, 227). Bloomfield receives countless requests for help while in
the town but gives money to none of them (IV, 223),408 and at the first signs of
danger he disappears as suddenly as he arrived (IV, 238). The repair work that
people have postponed in anticipation of Bloomfield’s coming is a metaphor for
the concrete problems of the present which require urgent attention and should not
be deferred in the hope that some Erlöser-figure will take responsibility and put
things right. That Bloomfield turns out to be a false messiah409 suggests that any
such hope is illusory, and messianism amounts to deferring indefinitely the
necessary confrontation with the problems of the present. As Rabinbach explains,
“[t]he messianic idea implie[s] the radical rejection of any sort of quotidian
politics combined with a characteristically apocalyptic attitude, which often
incorporate[s] an antipolitics in extremis.”410
The Political Consequences of the Apolitical Gabriel Dan
Gabriel Dan is the first-person narrator of Hotel Savoy: it is through his eyes that
the reader experiences the poverty of the town outside the hotel and the disparity
between rich and poor inside it. For Sonnleitner Gabriel is a positive figure,
408
409
410
The cinema and the “Juxgegenstände” factory are founded without money from Bloomfield
(IV, 219-20, 223). As Gabriel points out, neither of these new businesses will help the poor
workers: “Die Juxgegenstände waren für die Herrschaften, und ein Spielzeug taugte keinem
Arbeiter. Bei den Knallerbsen und brennenden Fröschen und im Kino könnten sie den Neuner
vergessen, aber den Hunger nicht.” (IV, 236)
Cf. Wunberg, “Hotel Savoy,” 453.
Rabinbach, Shadow of Catastrophe 29.
98
whose flexibility in casting off and assuming identities411 renders him the
diametric opposite of the fascist Theodor Lohse from Das Spinnennetz or the
authoritarian Andreas Pum in Die Rebellion, with his “Bedürfnis nach
Unterordnung”:412 “[Gabriels] Überlebenskunst besteht darin, seine sozialen
Identitäten wegzuwerfen, um sich zu bewahren.”413 This assessment accords with
Gabriel’s self-portrait:
So vieles kann man in sich saugen und dennoch unverändert an Körper, Gang
und Gehaben bleiben. Aus Millionen Gefäßen schlürfen, niemals satt sein,
wie ein Regenbogen in allen Farben schillern, dennoch immer ein
Regenbogen sein, von der gleichen Farbenskala.
Im Hotel Savoy konnte ich mit einem Hemd anlangen und es verlassen als
der Gebieter von zwanzig Koffern – und immer noch der Gabriel Dan sein.
(IV, 150)
However, the reader must be wary of accepting Gabriel’s narration at face value
since it is marred by contradictions. Gabriel does appear to be capable of adapting
to the changing circumstances – certainly an advantage in the chaos of post-war
Europe – but he also demonstrates a weakness of character and a susceptibility to
superstition and fatalism to match that of the town’s inhabitants. He admits as
much when Stasia advises him to buy a lottery ticket from Hirsch Fisch, the man
who claims to dream the lottery numbers before they are drawn: “Ich lache, weil
ich mich schäme, den Wunderglauben zuzugeben, dem ich leicht verfalle. Aber
ich bin entschlossen, ein Los zu kaufen, wenn Fisch mir etwas anbieten würde.”
(IV, 164) It is through the contradictions between Gabriel’s words and his actions
that Roth’s criticism of his narrator emerges, as a man whose passivity and
reliance on chance undermines his basic humanity.
Gabriel registers the social injustice around him but does nothing.414 The fact that
insight does not lead to action for Gabriel is demonstrated in his chance meeting
411
412
413
414
Sonnleitner quotes from the first page of the novel: “Ich freue mich, wieder ein altes Leben
abzustreifen wie so oft in diesen Jahren. Ich sehe den Soldaten, den Mörder, den fast
Gemordeten, den Auferstandenen, den Gefesselten, den Wanderer.” (IV, 149)
Cf. Sültemeyer: “Bei ihm handelt es sich um einen Menschen, der soziale Mißstände bewußt
registriert, politisch jedoch völlig desinteressiert und passiv bleibt”: Sültemeyer, Das
Frühwerk 119.
99
with Bloomfield at the cemetery, which reveals to him the real reason for the
Jewish emigrant’s visit:
Henry Bloomfield kam seinen toten Vater Jechiel Blumenfeld besuchen. Er
kam, um ihm zu danken für die Milliarden, für die Begabung, für das Leben,
für alles, was er geerbt hatte. Henry Bloomfield kam nicht, um ein Kino zu
gründen oder eine Fabrik für Juxgegenstände. Alle Menschen glauben, er
käme des Geldes oder der Fabriken wegen. (IV, 227)
Despite his realization that Bloomfield has not come for the reasons people
believe, Gabriel continues to work as Bloomfield’s secretary, interviewing people
from the upper levels of the hotel (IV, 228-29).
Gabriel consistently fails to act on his insight, whether on a personal or political
level. Despite his attraction to Stasia and affinity for Santschin (a Russian Jew
like Gabriel’s parents), Gabriel does nothing to help, although he claims a sense
of community with them: “Gewiß, ich lebe in einer Gemeinschaft, ihr Leid ist
mein Leid, ihre Armut ist meine Armut.” (IV, 194)415 His reaction to the
discovery that Stasia has had to pawn three suitcases to Ignatz because she cannot
pay her hotel bill is indicative of the limits of his empathy:
Auf ihrem Nachtkästchen lag eine Rechnung. Sie war ansehnlich; wenn ich
sie bezahlen wollte, hätte sie mehr als die Hälfte meiner Barschaft
verschlungen. […]
Stasia begnügt sich mit zwei Kleidern. Drei Koffer hat sie verpfändet. Ich
beschließe, einen Koffer zu kaufen, und ich denke, daß es gut wäre, das Hotel
Savoy zu verlassen. (IV, 168)
It is possible that Gabriel intends to buy another suitcase for Stasia in order that
she might retrieve one of her own from Ignatz. It is equally possible, however,
that he is only thinking of his own potential financial difficulties, especially
considering the use of the subjunctive in the first part of the quotation, which
indicates that he does not in fact have the slightest intention of paying Stasia’s
bill. The end of the chapter, in which Gabriel decides that he no longer likes the
hotel, confirms that he has been thinking only of himself:
Ich gehöre zu den hoch Begrabenen. Wohne ich nicht im sechsten
Stockwerke nur? Nicht acht, nicht zehn, nicht zwanzig? Wie hoch kann man
noch fallen? In den Himmel, in endliche Seligkeit?
‘Sie sind so weit von hier’, sagt Stasia.
415
As Sültemeyer has observed, this “Geständnis kommt unvermittelt und sehr eilig” after
Zwonimir’s criticism of Gabriel’s apathy and is thus suspect: Sültemeyer, Das Frühwerk 118.
100
‘Verzeihen Sie’, bitte ich, ihre Stimme hat mich gerührt. (IV, 168)
His assertion that Stasia’s voice has moved him conflicts with the obvious selfcentredness of his reflection.
This passage also provides an example of Gabriel’s ostensible decisiveness which
is rarely acted upon: he decides to buy a suitcase and thinks that it would be good
to leave the hotel, but he does neither. This inconsistency is typical of Gabriel,
who repeatedly uses phrases such as “Ich war entschlossen” (IV, 149) and “Ich
beschloß” (IV, 152, 155, 157) but fails to put his decisions into action, and asserts
that he is going to leave the Hotel Savoy and the town but fails to do so (IV, 162,
183, 187, 195, 216, 217, 218). Finally, Gabriel excuses himself for his failure to
form a relationship with Stasia, although it was clear that each of them was
interested:
Ich bin kein Eroberer und kein Anbeter. Wenn sich mir etwas gibt, nehme ich
es und bin dankbar dafür. Aber Stasia bot sich mir nicht. Sie wollte belagert
werden. […]
Ich kümmerte mich zuviel um das Hotel Savoy und um die Menschen, um
fremde Schicksale und zuwenig um mein eigenes. Hier stand eine schöne
Frau und wartete auf ein gutes Wort, und ich sagte es nicht, wie ein
verstockter Schulknabe. (IV, 231)
Even this admission of fault contains inconsistencies and contradictions: Gabriel
is indeed interested in the people around him, but in the sense that he is
inquisitive, not because he is particularly concerned. Sültemeyer’s conclusion in
this regard is apt: “Er interessiert sich für vieles, aber er engagiert sich für
nichts.”416 Furthermore, immediately after expressing a sense of regret and
responsibility towards Stasia he blames her for his obstinacy and retracts his
regret:
Ich war verstockt. Mir war, als ob Stasia schuld wäre an meiner langen
Einsamkeit, und sie konnte es ja gar nicht wissen. Ich warf ihr vor, daß sie
keine Seherin war. (IV, 231)
A pattern emerges: despite his insight into Bloomfield’s real motivation for
visiting the town, Gabriel continues to perform a job which is superfluous and
will not help any of Bloomfield’s supplicants; despite his insight into Stasia’s
416
101
reticence, he fails to act and blames her for his own intransigence and inertia.
Similarly, despite registering the poverty and social injustice which surrounds
him, he fails to do anything about it, thus indirectly supporting “die unsoziale
Willkür und den politischen Einfluß der Fabrikbesitzer.”417 What Sonnleitner
interprets as flexibility – the ability to cast off social identities and adapt – can
also be interpreted as indolence: the attitude that it is easier to just accept things as
they are and go with the flow than to make decisions and act on them. He is like
the other Heimkehrer, whom he describes as being “herangespült wie bestimmte
Fische zu bestimmten Jahreszeiten.” (IV, 202) Gabriel might be “auf der Flucht
vor [seiner] Instrumentalisierung durch die Macht”,418 but his apolitical passivity
has real political consequences.419
“Ich will hier eine Revolution machen”:420 Zwonimir’s Revolution
Sültemeyer contends that Roth’s criticism of Gabriel’s political indifference stems
from the revolutionary situation of the immediate post-war period, in which
“politische
Aktivität
[wird]
mit
einem
Kampf
gegen
die
bestehende
unmenschliche Ordnung gleichgesetzt. Daher verhält sich der ‘Unpolitische’
letztlich reaktionär.”421 In recognizing Roth’s condemnation of Gabriel’s inaction,
however, she implies that the author condones the revolutionary activities of
Zwonimir Pansin, “der im Gegensatz zu Gabriel willensstark und tatkräftig ist.”422
Yet Roth is just as critical of Zwonimir’s revolution as he is of Gabriel’s apathy: it
achieves nothing but death and destruction:423 at the end of the novel the hotel has
burned down and Neuner’s house has been destroyed, but Neuner has escaped
with his family (IV, 240) and Zwonimir appears to have died in the fire. 424
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
Sonnleitner, “Macht, Identität,” 184. Sonnleitner includes Benjamin Lenz in this assessment.
Cf. Sültemeyer, Das Frühwerk 120.
Roth, Hotel Savoy (IV, 193).
Sültemeyer, Das Frühwerk 117. Wunberg similarly points to Zwonimir as “das Gegenstück zu
Gabriel”: “Er läßt sich nicht treiben, er nimmt die ungerechten sozialen Zustände nicht hin, er
handelt”: Wunberg, “Hotel Savoy,” 451.
Cf. Koester: “Es ist eine sinnlos anarchistische Aktion, die keine Lösung in Aussicht stellt”:
Rudolf Koester, Joseph Roth (Berlin: Colloquium, 1982) 35.
Cf. Wunberg, “Hotel Savoy,” 451.
102
In Das Spinnennetz Roth had already drawn a parallel between the violent
potential of the radical right and that of revolutionaries and had been critical of
both. In Hotel Savoy, he critically examines the motives behind left-wing
revolutionary violence through Zwonimir, “ein Revolutionär von Geburt” (IV,
191). Readers who accept Gabriel’s portrayal of his friend must form a positive
impression of this man of action. Gabriel expresses approval of and even
admiration for Zwonimir, declaring “Ich bewundere Zwonimirs Fähigkeiten.” (IV,
195)425 However, Roth subtly indicates that the reader should be wary of placing
too much confidence in Gabriel’s depiction through passages in which Zwonimir
appears as a larger-than-life character:
Er hat eine gesunde Konstitution, geht spät schlafen und erwacht mit dem
Morgenwind. Bauernblut rollt in seinem Körper, er besitzt keine Uhr und
weiß immer die Stunde genau, fühlt Regen und Sonne voraus, riecht entfernte
Brände und hat Ahnungen und Träume. (IV, 194-95)
Here, Gabriel’s admiration of a man who is very much his opposite leads him to
embellish his description of his friend’s virtues. The description calls to mind the
educated middle-class’s romanticization of the peasantry. Gabriel’s veneration of
his friend’s “Ahnungen und Träume”, which implies that the dreams have an
almost supernatural or mystical quality, is satirized through the account of the
content of Zwonimir’s dreams: he dreams that his father has been buried and of a
cow dying. Zwonimir’s response to these dreams is to cry – when he has time at
the end of the day. That he himself does not believe the dreams is reflected in his
rejection of Gabriel’s suggestion that they leave so that he can see his father and
no longer have bad dreams. The dreams themselves are nothing unusual; they
only become so in Gabriel’s eyes.
Roth’s critique of Zwonimir emerges as Gabriel’s narration reveals Zwonimir’s
motivation for inciting revolutionary violence. From the moment he declares his
intention to “make” a revolution in the town, it appears that he is more interested
in the revolution than in its outcome and views the strike as a useful catalyst:
Zwonimir wollte nicht weitergehn. Er wollte hierbleiben; Ihm gefiel der
Streik. ‘Ich will hier eine Revolution machen’, sagte Zwonimir, so einfach,
als sagte er: Ich will hier einen Brief schreiben.
425
Subsequently Gabriel admits even to envying Zwonimir: “Er ist ein gesunder Mensch. Ich
beneide ihn.” (IV, 199)
103
Ich erfahre, daß Zwonimir Agitator ist, aus Liebe zur Unruhe. Er ist ein
Wirrkopf, aber ehrlich, und er glaubt an seine Revolution. (IV, 193)
Sültemeyer argues that by portraying Zwonimir’s revolutionary zeal as a private
whim, Gabriel relieves himself of the need to take any action or even a position in
relation to political questions: “Die Revolution ist ‘seine Revolution’, die Laune
eines ‘Wirrkopfs’.”426 However, while Sültemeyer’s exposure of Gabriel’s
motives is apt, her implication that Zwonimir’s motives are noble is problematic.
It is necessary to her interpretation of the early novels as “socialist”, but it is not
supported by the text. Zwonimir claims a sense of solidarity with the workers, but
his behaviour is full of contradictions and, at the end, it really does appear that he
has incited the revolution “aus Liebe zur Unruhe”.
The inconsistency between Zwonimir’s declared political sympathies and his
actual beliefs is revealed in his response to Gabriel’s story of the Santschins:
Ich zeige ihm den siebenten Stock und den Dunst der Waschküche und
erzähle ihm von Santschin und dem Esel am Grab. Diese Geschichte gefällt
ihm am besten, Santschin tut ihm gar nicht leid, über den Esel lacht er, des
Nachts, während er sich auskleidet. (IV, 196)
Zwonimir does not care about Santschin’s death from the bad air of the laundry,
but he later uses it to incite the wrath of the workers and Heimkehrer:
Mein Freund Zwonimir geht in die Baracken, denn er liebt Aufregung und
Unruhe und vergrößert sie. Er erzählt den Hungernden von den Reichen,
schimpft auf den Fabrikanten Neuner und erzählt von den nackten Mädchen
in der Bar des Hotels Savoy.
Du übertreibst ja’, sage ich zu Zwonimir.
‘Das muß man tun, sonst glauben sie einem nichts’, sagt er.
Er erzählt vom Tod Santschins so, als wäre er dabeigewesen.
Er hat eine Kraft zu schildern, der Atem des wahrhaftigen Lebens geht von
seinen Reden aus. (IV, 204)
Once more, Gabriel has only admiration for his friend, but Zwonimir’s moving
tale of Santschin’s terrible death rings hollow given his earlier lack of concern. In
truth he is guilty of instrumentalizing the misery of others for his own ends, even
his own amusement. His proposal to kill Bloomfield is not motivated by any
misplaced belief that it will somehow ease the plight of the poor but is a whim, as
426
104
he explains to Gabriel: “‘So zum Spaß, das ist ja keine geschäftliche Idee, und sie
hat auch keinen Zweck.’” (IV, 225)
Zwonimir acts contrary to socialist principles when he enters into a foreign
currency deal with Kanner. The fact that he dresses in “eine[...] russische[...]
Militärbluse” (IV, 196) for the occasion further highlights the contradiction
between Zwonimir’s principles and his actions. The lack of respect he shows for
Kanner, Alexander and the regular bar guests (IV, 197) is amusing but has no real
effect, since he is seen to do business with Kanner. He declares the Savoy to be
“‘[e]in herrliches Hotel’” (IV, 199) and does not protest against the treatment of
the naked women, instead enjoying the spectacle and giving them cake crumbs,
like a latter-day Marie-Antoinette:
Der Fabrikant Neuner fand keine Lust an Tonka, die nackten Mädchen
kamen zutraulich an unsern Tisch und pickten Zwonimir aus der Hand. Er
fütterte sie mit Gebäck, zerbröckeltem Kuchen und ließ sie an verschiedenen
Schnapsgläsern nippen. (IV, 197)
According to Gabriel’s depiction, the revolution comes from the East like a
natural and unstoppable force: “Sie kommt aus dem Osten – und keine Zeitung
und kein Militär kann sie aufhalten.” (IV, 236) Perhaps nothing and nobody can
stop it, but Zwonimir does his best to inflame it, goading the Heimkehrer into
action:
‘Das Hotel Savoy […] ist ein reicher Palast und ein Gefängnis. Unten
wohnen in schönen, weiten Zimmern die Reichen, die Freunde Neuners, des
Fabirkanten, und oben die armen Hunde, die ihre Zimmer nicht bezahlen
können und Ignatz die Koffer verpfänden. […]
Wir haben alle schon lange Jahre nicht in so schönen, weichen Betten
gelegen wie die Herrschaften im Parterre des Hotels Savoy.
Wir haben alle schon lange nicht so schöne, nackte Mädchen gesehn wie die
Herren unten in der Bar des Hotels Savoy.
Diese Stadt ist ein Grab der armen Leute. Die Arbeiter des Fabrikanten
Neuner schlucken den Staub der Borsten, und alle sterben im fünfzigsten Jahr
ihres Lebens.’
‘Pfui!’ schreien die Heimkehrer. (IV, 236)
All of this is true – except that Zwonimir himself is staying at this hotel and has
certainly seen the beautiful naked girls every evening in the bar where he has
socialized with the wealthy industrialists. With his portrayal of Zwonimir Roth is
criticizing the leaders of socialist revolutionary movements who themselves do
105
not live the life of workers and can have little understanding of their real
suffering.
The socialist utopia is also a form of apocalypse, justifying violent revolution with
a vision of post-revolutionary socialist perfection – redemption. As Vondung
explains,
[d]er Erste Weltkrieg verschärfte die Erfahrungen der Gewalt, der Not und
des Hungers; der ‘Geist der [sozialistischen] Utopie’ gewann dadurch
zusätzlich apokalyptische Dynamik, die nach dem Ende des Krieges voll zum
Ausbruch kam.427
The fixation on the revolution and the “Zustand der Vollkommenheit” which
would follow it often impeded socialists from accurately gauging political
realities and acting appropriately.428 This shortcoming is revealed in the text
through the juxtaposition of Zwonimir’s incitement of the Heimkehrer to violence
with the typhoid outbreak which causes the closure of the soup kitchen: “Also
bekamen die Hungrigen keine Suppe mehr.” (IV, 237) The implication is that
instead of instigating the revolution, people like Zwonimir should concentrate on
concrete efforts to help the poor. Furthermore, it seems that Zwonimir’s
motivation for inciting the Heimkehrer to attack the hotel is that he will then not
have to pay his bill: “Wir wissen, daß wir das Hotel Savoy nicht mehr
wiedersehn. Zwonimir lächelt schlau: ‘Unser Zimmer ist nicht bezahlt!’” (IV,
240)
The violence of the revolution achieves nothing but the death of innocent people.
That Zwonimir has at no time had any clear idea of what should follow is
indicated in his abstract utopia of America, itself another contradiction of his
supposedly socialist principles:429
Er liebte Amerika. Wenn eine Menage gut war, sagte er: Amerika! Wenn
eine Stellung schön ausgebaut war, sagte er: Amerika! Von einem ‘feinen’
Oberleutnant sagte er: Amerika. Und weil ich gut schoß, nannte er meine
Treffer: Amerika. (IV, 192)
427
428
429
By contrast, Wunberg argues that Zwonimir “als einziger durchschaut alles.” But he agrees
that Zwonimir’s revolution has no positive effect: “Aber selbst Zwonimir wird nicht mehr
erreichen, als daß ein Hotel brennt, ein Aufstand einen ungewissen Augang nimmt und daß er
selbst dabei auf der Strecke bleibt.”: Wunberg, “Hotel Savoy,” 451.
106
After the hotel has burned to the ground the abstract utopia has become the
Rumanian Jew Abel Glanz’s concrete goal of emigration, implying that Europe is
no longer safe, or at least that there is no good reason to stay: “Abel Glanz
beginnt: ‘Wenn ich zu meinem Onkel nach New York komme – –’ Amerika,
denke ich, hätte Zwonimir gesagt, nur: Amerika.” (IV, 242)
These words give the novel its inconclusive conclusion. Roth’s scepticism about
the redemptive possibilities of the socialist revolution is reflected in the fact that
Zwonimir’s revolution achieves nothing: Neuner has escaped, this signifying that
no damage has been inflicted on capitalist society,430 and Zwonimir has
disappeared – presumably he has either died in the fire, as Gabriel believes, or
fled the town.431 Like Benjamin Lenz in Das Spinnennetz, Zwonimir is thus guilty
of apocalypticism for its own sake. Once again there is no sense at the end of the
novel that anything better will follow, a fact underscored by Gabriel’s decision to
resume his homeward journey, since he has been unable to force himself to do so
while he has seen a reason (or found an excuse) to remain in the town. His
question to Abel Glanz, “‘Wissen Sie, daß Ignatz eigentlich Kaleguropulos war?’”
(IV, 242) indicates that what was keeping him there was simply his curiosity, in
particular about the mysterious and invisible owner of the hotel.432 The fact that
Gabriel is now moving again could be taken as a positive sign, since a lack of
movement – the suitcases locked up by Ignatz – has been associated with a lack of
freedom and the power of self-determination. However, Gabriel still lacks any
direction or decision: rather than waiting for a train which will take him to
Vienna, his original goal, he is travelling “in einem langsamen Zug mit
südslawischen Heimkehrern.” (IV, 242)
430
431
432
Cf. Williams, The Broken Eagle 96.
Although the last memory Gabriel has of Zwonimir has him shouting “‘Vorwärts!’” (IV, 240),
the episode at the train station has shown that it is typical of Zwonimir to command but not
actively take part. His self-preservation instinct seems too well developed for him to have died
in the fire.
Cf. Sültemeyer, who points out that when the hotel is in flames, Gabriel is distracted by a
voice calling Kaleguropulos’s name: “Seine Aufmerksamkeit gilt wiederum nicht den
revolutionären Vorgängen. Er muß seine persönliche Neugier stillen”: Sültemeyer, Das
Frühwerk 119.
107
History as Repetition: Die Rebellion
The apocalyptic motif appears once again in Roth’s third novel, Die Rebellion, a
bitter and pessimistic protest at the social injustice which characterizes post-war
Austria. The relevance of the apocalypse to Roth’s investigation of Viennese
society in the immediate aftermath of the war is signalled in the second chapter,
when invalids at the military hospital experience “eine unübersichtlich endlose
Furcht, wie man sie vor Katastrophen empfindet, die nicht eintreffen wollen und
deren Ausbruch eine Erlösung wäre.” (IV, 251) This fear is triggered by the sight
of the trembling Bossi, who “hielt alle in der Erwartung seines bald erfolgenden
Zusammenbruchs und brach dennoch nicht nieder.” (IV, 250-51) The apocalyptic
associations here evoked are transferred to the protagonist Andreas Pum when he
too begins to tremble (IV, 252), and are realized at the end of the novel in an
ironic conflation of the story of Job and the Day of Judgement, as Andreas,
powerless to rebel against the unjust structures of his society, rebels against God
in death.
Judgement Day is integral to the apocalypse: it precedes the ushering in of the
new ideal world, and “implies the destruction of the present world or of the
powers that dominate it.”433 Standing between the old, corrupt world and the new,
ideal world, Judgement Day implies progress. In Die Rebellion, however, the
apocalyptic vision competes with images of history as endless repetition. David
Roberts identifies this “mutual interference of telos and repetition” as central to a
number of novels published between 1914 and 1945 and argues that it “reflects an
ongoing question mark behind the need to give meaning to contemporary
history.”434 Roberts does not discuss Die Rebellion,435 but the observations he
makes are relevant to Roth’s novel, in which the futility of one man’s rebellion is
mirrored by the impotence implied in the cyclical view of history.
433
434
435
Roberts, “The Sense of an Ending,” 141. This quotation is part of a definition provided by
Roberts of eschatology, or the doctrine of last things; apocalypticism is one form of
eschatology, the others being messianism and millenarianism. Roberts does not provide the
source of the definition he quotes.
Roberts, “The Sense of an Ending,” 143.
The novels Roberts analyzes are: Heinrich Mann, Der Untertan and Die Jugend und
Vollendung des Henri Quatre; Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg and Doktor Faustus; Hermann
Broch, Die Schlafwandler and Elias Canetti, Die Blendung.
108
Ordnung versus Freedom
The necessity of the rebellion of the individual against the senseless dictates of an
unjust society is implied towards the end of Hotel Savoy:
Es ging ihnen schlecht, den Menschen. Das Schicksal bereiteten sie sich
selbst und glaubten, es käme von Gott. Sie waren gefangen in
Überlieferungen, ihr Herz hing an tausend Fäden, und ihre Hände spannen
sich selbst die Fäden. Auf allen Wegen ihres Lebens standen die
Verbotstafeln ihres Gottes, ihrer Polizei, ihrer Könige, ihres Standes. Hier
durften sie nicht weitergehn und dort nicht bleiben. Und nachdem sie so ein
paar Jahrzehnte gezappelt, geirrt hatten und ratlos gewesen, starben sie im
Bett und hinterließen ihre Elend ihren Nachkommen. (IV, 220)
The meaning of this passage hinges on the opposition of Ordnung and freedom or
self-determination. Roth does not deny that the lives of the poor are wretched, but
here he urges them to recognize the extent to which they are in control of their
own destiny, in the sense that in conforming to the dictates of an unjust societal
order, they are partly responsible for reproducing that order. Their lack of freedom
is thus to some extent self-incurred. Waiting for salvation is not a solution to their
problems and neither is the socialist revolution which will bring only chaos and
destruction.
This opposition of Ordnung and freedom and the role of the individual in
perpetuating his own disadvantage are the central focus of Die Rebellion. The lack
of freedom and self-determination of war invalids such as Andreas is signalled in
the opening paragraph:
Die Baracken des Kriegsspitals Numero XXIV lagen am Rande der Stadt.
Von der Endstation der Straßenbahn bis zum Krankenhaus hätte ein
Gesunder eine halbe Stunde rüstig wandern müssen. Die Straßenbahn führte
in die Welt, in die große Stadt, in das Leben. Aber die Insassen des
Kriegsspitals Numero XXIV konnten die Endstation der Straßenbahn nicht
erreichen. (IV, 245)
The inability of the invalids to reach the terminus of the tram that would take
them into the city is a metaphor for their exclusion from the benefits of society.
For Andreas Pum, the lack of freedom symbolized by his amputated leg is linked
with his acceptance of the prevailing Ordnung. He is an authoritarian character
like Theodor Lohse but, rather than desiring power, he is content to be “ihr
109
gehorsamer Untertan […] und dadurch mit ihr in Beziehung zu stehen.”436 He has
a naïve faith in the benevolence and the infallibility of the government, and “[ist]
mit dem Lauf der Dinge zufrieden,” (IV, 245) satisfied with the special place in
society to which he erroneously believes his medal entitles him: “Ein Invalider
durfte auf die Achtung der Welt rechnen. Ein ausgezeichneter Invalider auf die
der Regierung.” (IV, 245)
That Andreas is mistaken in his understanding of society and his place in it is
suggested by his simplistic and muddled conflation of God and the government:
Er glaubte an einen gerechten Gott. Dieser verteilte Rückenmarkschüsse,
Amputationen, aber auch Auszeichnungen nach Verdienst. […]
Die Regierung ist etwas, das über den Menschen liegt wie der Himmel über
der Erde. Was von ihr kommt, kann gut oder böse sein, aber immer ist es
groß und übermächtig, unerforscht und unerforschbar, wenn auch manchmal
für gewöhnliche Menschen verständlich. (IV, 245)
For Sültemeyer this passage indicates “daß Pums Verhältnis zur Wirklichkeit, zur
Regierung ein gläubiges ist, aber das zu Gott ein kalkulierendes”,437 and she
argues that religious questions are as important as social criticism in this novel, an
early indication of Roth’s interest in religious issues, which intensified in the last
twelve years of his life.438 Andreas is conceived by Roth not only as a victim of
society, she contends, but as “ein Mensch, in dem sich eine neue Einstellung zu
Gott entwickelt.”439 However, as Sültemeyer concedes, nowhere else in his early
work does Roth grapple with religious questions. This of itself suggests that the
religious motif in Die Rebellion should not be interpreted as a self-contained
theme of the novel, as Sonnleitner has convincingly argued.440 The fusion and
confusion of God and government in Andreas’s mind reflects Roth’s “Einsicht in
die herrschaftssichernde und -stabilisierende Funktion der Kirche und der
Klerus.”441 Church and State are for Andreas simply “die Konkretisierungen der
436
437
438
439
440
441
Ingeborg Sültemeyer, “Eine stille Entwicklung. Gedanken zum Roman Die Rebellion,” in
Joseph Roth und die Tradition, ed. David Bronsen (Darmstadt: Agora, 1975), 261.
Sültemeyer, “Die Rebellion,” 258-59.
Sültemeyer, “Die Rebellion,” 271.
110
Macht, die seine ‘inner standards’ bestimmt.”442 That the language Andreas uses
to articulate his understanding of God and the government is inverted is indicative
of his inability to view and assess rationally his society and his place within it.
In part this inability is deliberate: Andreas wants his world to be simple and
uncomplicated, and he creates a dualistic picture of it in order to relieve himself of
the need to think:
Andreas Pum war sehr froh, daß ihm die ‘Heiden’ eingefallen waren. Das
Wort genügte ihm, es befriedigte seine kreisenden Fragen und gab Antwort
auf viele Rätsel. Es enthob ihn der Verpflichtung, weiter nachdenken und
sich mit der Erforschung der anderen abquälen zu müssen. (IV, 246)
The heathens are those who criticize the government: “Sie hatten keinen Gott,
keinen Kaiser, kein Vaterland. Sie waren wohl Heiden. ‘Heiden’ ist der beste
Ausdruck für Leute, die sich gegen alles wehren, was von der Regierung kommt.”
(IV, 246) In the rigidity of his idea of the world, Andreas is one of Roth’s
“Menschen im Spinnennetz, die vollkommen in einer bestimmten Denkweise,
einer Ideologie, aufgehen, ohne ihre Fixierung überhaupt zu merken”.443 His
dualistic conception of society is so strong that not even the disappointment of his
expectations or the coming of the revolution can shake it more than temporarily:
Die Prothese kam nicht. Statt ihrer kam die Unordnung, der Untergang, die
Revolution. Andreas Pum beruhigte sich erst zwei Wochen später, nachdem
er aus den Zeitungen, den Vorgängen, den Reden der Menschen entnommen
hatte, daß auch in Republiken Regierungen über die Schicksale des Landes
walteten. (IV, 250)
Within the Ordnung of the capitalist society of the fledgling Austrian Republic
Andreas’s misconception of his freedom of action is reflected in his delusion that
he is an artist, free to play whatever melody he wishes whenever and wherever he
chooses:
Es kam so, daß er sein Instrument nicht wie ein mechanisches und sein Spiel
als ein Virtuosentum betrachtete. Denn die Sehnsucht, die Bangigkeit, die
Trauer seiner Seele legte er in die Hand, welche die Kurbel drehte, und er
glaubte, nach Wunsch und Stimmung, stärker und leiser, gefühlvoller oder
kriegerischer spielen zu können. […] Andreas Pum war ein echter Musikant.
442
443
Sieg argues that in Roth’s work there are only a few types of people, and that they may be
categorized according to the strength of their attachment to particular ideologies. At the two
extremes are “die Menschen im Spinnennetz” and “die Anarchisten”: Sieg, Anarchismus und
Fiktion 11 and passim.
111
(IV, 254-55)
In fact his barrel-organ can play only eight tunes which were selected by the
manufacturers (IV, 253),444 and his licence to play the instrument, which for him
signifies his comparable standing with the authorities and his freedom granted by
these authorities to play when and where he chooses,445 is in effect a licence to
beg, which relieves the authorities of the need to provide for him. Thus what for
the simple-minded Andreas is a mark of his social standing is for the reader a
symbol of social injustice.
The Ordnung of the class society to which Andreas is almost pathologically
devoted is also subscribed to by other characters in the novel, from the business
man Herr Arnold who has inherited “einen ausgeprägten Sinn für Ordnung” from
his forebears (IV, 273), to the director of the prison,446 and even the petty criminal
Willi, whose motto is “Ordnung muß sein” (IV, 256, 260, 321) and who is
cunning enough to have found a way to turn society’s love of order to his
advantage by taking over the organization of “sämtlicher Garderoben, Herrenund Damentoiletten”, as he tells the “Kaffeehausverwaltungen” (IV, 320). The
arbitrary character of this Ordnung, which is so willingly accepted as part of the
natural order by Andreas, one of its victims, is revealed in the satirical depiction
of Andreas’s living arrangement with the Ordnung-loving Willi:
[Willi] blieb den ganzen Tag zu Hause und ließ Andreas nicht vor dem
Anbruch der Nacht ins Zimmer. Das begründete er immer mit dem Wort:
‘Ordnung muß sein!’ […] Andreas Pum hatte eine Schlafstelle, aber keine
Wohnung. Es ist so in der Welt eingerichtet, daß jeder nur das genießen darf,
was er bezahlen kann.
Auch Andreas war mit dieser Ordnung zufrieden und kam pünktlich nach
Anbruch der Dämmerung. […] Willi lieferte manchmal die Wurst. Denn es
ereignete sich nicht selten, daß Willi […] sich vor das Delikatessenhaus
begab, an dessen Tür die prallen Würste wie Gehenkte an einem Nagel
hingen. Mehr aus Übermut als aus Lust am Diebstahl schnitt Willi dann zwei
oder drei Würste ab. Ihn lockten Gefahren und Freude an der eigenen
Geschicklichkeit. Man hätte es außerdem als Sünde bezeichnen können,
444
445
446
Cf. Bance, “In My End is My Beginning,” 37.
“Wir sind sozusagen der Behörde gleichgestellt, dank unserer Lizenz. Wir sind von der
Regierung ermächtigt zu spielen, wo und wann es uns gefällt.” (IV, 253)
“In diesem Augenblick entdeckte der Herr Direktor, daß der Kübel, in dem Andreas seine
Bedürfnisse zu verrichten hatte, nicht neben dem Fenster, sondern in der Nähe der Bank stand,
und weil der Herr Direktor die Ordnung fast genauso liebte wie die Menschlichkeit, sagte er
streng: ‘Ihre Pflichten aber dürfen Sie nicht vernachlässigen!’ Und genauso wie Willi fügte er
hinzu: ‘Ordnung muß sein!’” (IV, 315)
112
wenn er das Angebot des Schicksals ausgeschlagen hätte. Andreas ahnte
etwas von der Herkunft dieser Würste. Einmal fragte er, woher sie stammten.
‘Iß und schweig’, sagte Willi, ‘Ordnung muß sein.’
Es verstieß glücklicherweise nicht gegen die Ordnung, wenn sich Andreas,
während er sein Abendessen verdaute, der Betrachtung der Malereien am
Leierkasten hingab. (IV, 256)
Willi’s Ordnung is no more natural than that depicted on Andreas’s barrel-organ,
which shows “eine Verzauberung menschlicher Wesen durch ein böses Weib”
(IV, 255) and which has become natural for Andreas through repeated exposure:
Andreas hatte niemals an die Möglichkeit solcher Ereignisse in der
wirklichen Welt gedacht. Weil er aber das Bildnis häufig betrachten mußte,
wurde es ihm vertraut und glaubhaft wie irgendein anderer täglich
genossener Anblick. Es war fast nichts mehr Märchenhaftes an solche einer
Verzauberung. (IV, 255)
The order of this society, in which each person can access only what he can pay
for and to which Andreas so willingly and without the slightest reservation
submits, is arbitrary and dictated by those with power and influence. It only seems
natural to Andreas because he knows no other order.
The Fallacy of Fate
The acceptance of the order of society as given and natural as well as “unerforscht
und unerforschbar” (IV, 245) entails a fatalistic view of life to which Andreas
subscribes and which the narrator appears to support but subsequently
undermines. Andreas interprets the coincidence that on the day on which he meets
the widow Katharina Blumich he also receives far more money than on a usual
day’s busking as a sign: “Es war kein Zweifel mehr: Das Glück war zugleich mit
der Witwe Blumich in sein Leben getreten.” (IV, 263) It is not luck that leads to
Andreas’s marriage, however, but calculation on the part of the widow who
accepts the preventable death of her husband the brush factory worker from lung
cancer447 as fated and God’s will,448 but who also leaves as little as possible in life
to chance and deliberately chooses Andreas over the police inspector Vinzenz
447
448
Gustav Blumich’s death was preventable insofar as the fact that he developed lung cancer
implies that the factory owner had not taken adequate safety measures. What is only implied
in Die Rebellion is made explicit by Roth elsewhere, namely in Radetzkymarsch, as well as in
Roth’s journalism.
“Daß er später lungenkrank wurde, weil er Borstenarbeiter war, war Gottes Wille. Gegen das
Schicksal kann man nichts unternehmen […].” (IV, 265)
113
Topp: “die Vernunft gebot einen Vogel mit bereits gestutztem Gefieder, der leicht
zu halten war und keiner aufregenden Disziplin mehr bedurfte.” (IV, 265)
Andreas believes Katharina’s choice of him is due to his good fortune, but also
that this good fortune is well deserved:
Was war er doch für ein Glückspilz! Dergleichen Dinge geschahen nicht alle
Tage, es waren keine gewöhnlichen Dinge, es waren Wunder. […].
Aber Andreas war rein an Körper und Seele, wie geimpft gegen Sünden und
Leiden durch das Leben gegangen, ein gehorsamer Sohn seines Vaters und
später ein gern gehorchender Untergebener seiner Vorgesetzten. Er schielte
nicht nach den Gütern der Reichen. […] Dafür belohnte ihn das Schicksal mit
einem musterhaften Weibe. Jeder ist seines Glückes Schmied. Er verdiente
das Gute. Nichts fällt einem so in den Schoß. Rebellen denken so. Sie
täuschen sich. Sie fallen immer herein. (IV, 267-68)
At the end of this sixth chapter of the novel, the narrator, still seemingly
identifying with Andreas’s point of view and interpretation of events, indicates
that Andreas could have lived “in dieser vollendeten Harmonie mit den irdischen
und göttlichen Gesetzen” for as many years as he was fated to live,449 had it not
been for a chance meeting with a stranger, who came into his life in order to
destroy it,
nicht mit dem Willen zum Bösesein, sondern von der Blindheit des Zufalls
dazu gezwungen, ein unwissendes Mittel in der Hand des Teufels, der
manchmal die göttliche Regierung unterbricht, ohne daß wir es ahnen; so daß
wir noch in der tröstlichen Gewißheit, daß ein Gott über uns wacht, unsere
stummen Gebete zu ihm hinaufsenden – und uns wundern, wenn sie nicht
erhört werden. (IV, 272)
The use of the third person plural wir implies a harmony between the narrator’s
and Andreas’s point of view, but the final line of the passage betrays a whisker of
doubt on the part of the narrator, suggesting that all is not as it seems to Andreas.
Nevertheless, it seems as if the narrator is still identifying with Andreas’s
fatalistic point of view at the end of the following chapter, after the reasons for
Herr Arnold’s petulance on this day have been portrayed:
Hätte der Herr Arnold, wozu er wohl in der Lage gewesen wäre, ein Auto
genommen, um heimzukommen, er wäre der letzten Aufregung dieses
furchtbaren Tages entronnen und sein Weg hätte sich nicht unheilvoll mit
jenem des Leierkastenmannes Andreas Pum gekreuzt. So aber richtet es ein
tückisches Geschick ein: daß wir zugrunde gehen nicht durch unsere Schuld
449
“Mit dieser Verachtung im Herzen hätte Andreas Pum alle die langen oder kurzen Jahre leben
können, die ihm vom Schicksal zugedacht waren […].” (IV, 272, emphasis added)
114
und ohne daß wir einen Zusammenhang ahnen; durch das blinde Wüten eines
fremden Mannes, dessen Vorleben wir nicht kennen, an dessen Unglück wir
unschuldig sind und dessen Weltanschauung wir sogar teilen. Er gerade ist
nun das Instrument in der vernichtenden Hand des Schicksals. (IV, 280)
However, although the narrator appears to be endorsing a belief in fate, the
remark that Herr Arnold would have been in a position to take a car rather than
the tram hints that this very belief is about to be tested and exposed as a fallacy,
and that Andreas’s “fate” has little to do with chance and everything to do with
the structure of the society in which he lives.450 It is due to chance that Andreas
and Herr Arnold each take the unusal step of travelling by tram on this day, and it
is due to chance that on this very day Herr Arnold has had the unpleasant
experience of having “die milde Ordnung seines Lebens” (IV, 273) upset,451 but it
is not due to chance or fate that this accidental meeting and the altercation which
follows results in Andreas’s imprisonment, as Andreas himself comes to
recognize.
Due to his rigidly dualistic worldview, Andreas is forced to consider himself a
heathen once he is imprisoned: “Ein Heide ist jetzt Andreas selbst. Er ist verhaftet
worden. Man hat ihm die Lizenz genommen. Er ist, ohne Schuld, ein Heide
geworden. Würde er sonst im Arrest sitzen?” (IV, 300) A fellow prisoner reveals
that Andreas has done everything wrong as a result of his lack of knowledge
about the way the world works,452 and as Andreas thinks to himself that he wants
to be imprisoned for life, the narrator’s commentary reveals that everything that
has happened to Andreas after his chance altercation with Herr Arnold has
happened as a result of his place within the structures of society:
Man ist auch so ein Gefangener, Andreas Pum! Wie Fangeisen liegen die
Gesetze auf den Wegen, die wir Armen gehen. Und wenn wir auch eine
Lizenz haben, so lauern doch die Polizisten in den Winkeln. Wir sind immer
gefangen und in der Gewalt des Staates, der Zweibeinigen, der Polizei, der
Herren auf den Plattformen der Straßenbahn, der Frauen und der Eselskäufer.
(IV, 302)
450
451
452
Cf. Bance, “In My End is My Beginning,” 38.
Although Arnold’s unpleasant experience with Luigi Bernotat, the fiancé of his secretary, is a
result of his own imprudence, Arnold believes it is “eine Schuld dieser Zeit; dieser
entsetzlichen Gegenwart, deren Tendenzen dahin gingen, diverse Ordnungen zu zerstören. In
welchem Zeitalter der Weltgeschichte wäre es sonst möglich gewesen, daß ein kleines
Büromädchen ihren Verlobten zu ihrem Brotgeber schickte?” (IV, 278-79)
“‘Du bist sehr dumm’, sagte der Heisere. ‘Du hast alles ganz falsch gemacht. Ich hätte den
Herrn verklagt. Man muß sich nur auskennen.’” (IV, 302)
115
As a result of his sudden and utterly unexpected transformation into one of the
heathens, Andreas is forced to question a worldview he has until this point never
doubted, and thus the world seems new to him: “Als Andreas die Straße betrat,
glaubte er, die Welt wäre neu angestrichen und renoviert, und er fühlte sich nicht
mehr in ihr zu Hause”. (IV, 302) In his own, simple-minded way he begins to
recognize that his “fate” is related to the structure of capitalist society when he
sees a postal car with an advertisement for cigarettes on its sides:453
Es war der Wagen des Wahnsinns. Der saß im Innern zwischen vier
knallgelben und rotbemalten Wänden, und sein Atem wehte verderblich aus
dem kleinen Gitterfenster. Wie merkwürdig, daß ich jetzt erst die
Zusammenhänge sehe, denkt Andreas. (IV, 303)
Once in his prison cell, Andreas learns to think for himself for the first time. He
recognizes that he has lived for forty-five years “in Blindheit […], ohne sich
selbst und die Welt zu kennen” and is described as “neugeboren[...]” (IV, 307).
He realizes that his belief “[a]n Gott, an die Gerechtigkeit, an die Regierung” (IV,
307) has been misplaced:
[D]ie Welt erwies sich eines Tages nicht so einfach, wie er sie in seiner
frommen Einfalt gesehen hatte. Die Regierung war nicht gerecht. […]
Offenbar geschah es, daß sie sogar einen Raubmörder auszeichnete, da sie
doch Andreas, den Frommen, ins Gefängnis schloß, obwohl er sie verehrte.
So ähnlich handelte Gott: er irrte sich. War Gott noch Gott, wenn er sich
irrte? (IV, 308)
In his newfound state of curiosity about the operations of the world Andreas finds
a piece of newspaper in the yard of the prison, and this scrap of paper, which
details the engagements, births and deaths of upper class society, reveals to him
“das Geheimnis der Welt” (IV, 309):
Er glaubte zu wissen,
Verlobten, Geborenen
gedruckt, daß Herr
Behandlung und ohne
(IV, 310)
daß er in der Zelle saß, weil er keinen von diesen
und Verstorbenen kannte. Weshalb stand es nicht
Andreas Pum, Lizenzinhaber, nach ungerechter
gehört zu werden, zu sechs Wochen verurteilt war?
Despite the simplistic nature of Andreas’s conclusions, there is undeniable truth in
the connections he now sees between his place in society and the fact that he has
been imprisoned. It is due to his misconception of his social standing that Andreas
453
It is not surprising that this part of the novel has (mis)led commentators to label it socialist.
However, as in the earlier novels, Roth does not proffer a socialist solution, and the exposure
116
first expects Herr Arnold to make way for him,454 then fails to show the conductor
his licence,455 and finally alienates the police officer, whom he imagines to be a
kindred spirit “kraft seiner Lizenz, seiner Weltanschauung und seines Ordens”
(IV, 284):
‘Holen Sie erst den da runter!’ – und [Andreas] zeigte auf den Herrn Arnold.
Dadurch hatte Andreas jede Sympathie der Polizei von vornherein verwirkt.
Denn der Mann, der sich der größten Autorität der Straßenmenge erfreut,
liebt es nicht, untergeordneten Menschen – und untergeordnet sind alle
Menschen – zu gehorchen, auch wenn sie tausendmal recht haben sollten.
(IV, 284)
The working-class conductor sympathizes with Herr Arnold because he has read
in the bourgeois press of malingerers456 and supposes Andreas to be one, and
because Herr Arnold’s face reminds him of a council official and of a colleague
who lost his job after being rude to such an official. The other passengers in the
tram support Herr Arnold because his cry “Bolschewik!” reminds them of what
they have lost through the revolution: “Es war ihnen, als hätte vorn ein Mitglied
ihrer Familie um Hilfe gerufen, als es den Schrei: Bolschewik! ausstieß.” (IV,
283)457 Thus Andreas finds himself in prison not because of fate but because the
society in which he lives is full of injustice and inequity.
“als wäre seine […] Freiheit noch ein Kerker”:458 Freedom and Unfreedom
Paradoxically, it is within the confines of his cell that Andreas first experiences a
measure of freedom – the freedom that comes of beginning to think for himself.
454
455
456
457
of social injustice serves a different purpose, as will be shown.
“Seine Krücke, sein militärischer Anzug, den er an Wochentagen trug, und sein blankes Kreuz
sprachen zu dem Gewissen der Leute […]. In der Straßenbahn begegnete Andreas Pum immer
zuvorkommenden Gesichtern.” (IV, 281)
“Erstens war ein Schafner kein Polizeiorgan, zweitens dünkte er sich selbst mehr als ein
Schaffner, und drittens hätte man den Herrn Arnold zuerst um eine Legitimation fragen
müssen.” (IV, 283-84)
“Der Schaffner […] überlegte einen Augenblick, wer von den beiden wohl recht haben
mochte, und er entsann sich eines Zeitungsartikels, aus dem zu erfahren war, daß die
Simulaten geriebene Kerle seien und daß man durch Bettelei unter Umständen viele tausende
im Tag verdiene.” (IV, 283)
Sieg points out that the Kleinbürger display a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived threat to their
Ordnung: “die kleinen Leute in der Straßenbahn [sehen] beim Wort Bolschewik einen Gegner
ihrer Welt, ihres Besitzes, ja ihres Lebens (Bolschewik = Raubmörder) vor sich. Inwiefern
Andreas mit dem Bild, das sie sich von ihm machen, übereinstimmt, wird nicht mehr
kontrolliert. Das Reizwort ‘Bolschewik’ genügt. Denn der Bolschewik steht außerhalb der
eigenen Ordnung, da verzichtet man auch auf eine genaue Untersuchung der erhobenen
Vorwürfe”: Sieg, Anarchismus und Fiktion 22.
117
Andreas experiences a belated individuation, signified in the change of his
thinking from wir to ich. Immediately after the incident on the tram, Andreas’s
maladroit reflections on the reasons for his ill fortune, related by the narrator in
erlebte Rede, are expressed in the first person plural, signifying an inability to
conceive of himself as an individual:459
Weshalb straft [Gott] uns mit plötzlicher Ungnade? Wir haben nichts
verbrochen und nicht einmal in Gedanken gesündigt. Im Gegenteil: Wir
waren immer fromm und ihm ergeben, den wir gar nicht kannten, und priesen
ihn unsere Lippen auch nicht alle Tage, so lebten wir doch zufrieden und
ohne frevelhafte Empörung in der Brust als bescheidene Glieder der
Weltordnung, die er geschaffen. (IV, 290)
In prison, Andreas realizes that in his naïve and simple-minded submissiveness he
has allowed himself to be deceived by his parents, his teachers, his superiors in
the military and the newspapers, and now, separating himself from those whom he
has obeyed since childhood, he experiences himself for the first time as an
individual, as his mute dialogue with the birds that come to his cell window
reveals:
Ich beugte mich den Gesetzen meines Landes, weil ich glaubte, eine größere
Vernunft als die meinige hätte sie ersonnen, und eine große Gerechtigkeit
führte sie aus im Namen des Herrn, der die Welt erschaffen. Ach! daß ich
länger als vier Jahrzehnte leben mußte, um einzusehen, daß ich blind
gewesen war im Lichte der Freiheit, und daß ich erst sehen lernte in der
Dunkelheit des Kerkers! (IV, 316)
His recognition of the absurdity of the prison Ordnung which forbids him to feed
the birds at the windows because no prisoner has ever asked to do so before,
represents a wider recognition of the absurd Ordnung of his society. That the
individual cannot be free within what is an inhumane society is expressed in
Andreas’s equation of Ordnung with prison: “Seht! ich möchte euch von meinem
Brot geben, aber die Ordnung verbietet es. So nennen die Menschen den Kerker.
Wißt ihr, was Ordnung ist, kleine Vögel?” (IV, 316)
However, despite his insight, Andreas’s desire to clear his name in another court
hearing (IV, 311) suggests that ultimately he will be unable to break free from the
458
459
Roth, Die Rebellion (IV, 317).
Sieg interprets the same manner of speaking in Herr Arnold as signifying his inability to
conceive of an Ordnung other than his own: “Die eigene Meinung wird zur Meinung einer
Allgemeinheit”: Sieg, Anarchismus und Fiktion 17.
118
constraints of the ideology to which he has subscribed his whole life. Once he is
released from prison, he shows himself to be no more free from society’s dictates
than before, although he sees himself as rebelling “gegen die ungeschriebenen und
dennoch heiligen Gesetze der irdischen und der Bahnordnung” (IV, 317) when he
buys a second class ticket and fixes the well-dressed passengers with his
“trotziger Blick” (IV, 317). The shock of discovering that his worldview was so
utterly false has made him prematurely old, and he is “unfähig, ein neues Leben
zu beginnen” (IV, 318). Despite his decision to remain “am Leben, um zu
rebellieren: gegen die Welt, die Behörden, gegen die Regierung und gegen Gott”
(IV, 318), Andreas reconciles himself with society’s Ordnung once again,460
allowing himself to be exploited by Willi as a toilet attendant, indeed becoming
all the more submissive because of the aristocratic name Willi has appropriated:
Erschüttert von der neuen Herrlichkeit, begann er, fast zu glauben, daß Willi
ein wirklicher Herr von Klinckowström war. So nannte er ihn bei diesem
Namen, von dessen Glanz auch etwas auf denjenigen fiel, der ihn aussprach.
(IV, 322)
Far from rebelling against the dictates of the class society, Andreas automatically
reverts to his meek demeanour in the face of someone who is ostensibly of a
higher class. Any rebellion remains private, restricted to taking silent pleasure in
the parrot Ignatz’s apparent abhorrence of the national anthem and military
marches (IV, 324). The futility of a rebellion that remains mute and inward-turned
is reflected in Andreas’s words to the pacifist parrot:
Ja, ja, Ignatz, wir sind Rebellen, wir beide. Leider kann es uns nichts nützen.
Denn ich bin ein alter Krüppel, und du bist ein ohnmächtiger Vogel, und wir
können die Welt nicht ändern. (IV, 324)
Incapable of truly rebelling in this life, he begins to think about the possibility of
reincarnation, deciding he will return as a revolutionary, “der kühne Reden führt
und mit Mord und Brand das Land überzieht, um die verletzte Gerechtigkeit zu
sühnen.” (IV, 326) The naïvité of Andreas’s idea of a revolutionary underscores
his impotence in the face of an uncaring and unjust society. Furthermore, the
460
Cf. Rudolf: “Den entscheidenden Schritt vom Wollen zur Tat vollzieht er nicht”: Helmut
Rudolf, “Joseph Roths humanistisches Wollen. Bemerkungen zu dem Roman Die Rebellion,”
NFT (Német Filológiai Tanulmányok. Arbeiten zur deutschen Philologie) 5 (1970): 114.
119
image recalls Zwonimir’s apocalyptic revolution from Hotel Savoy, which Roth
indicated was no solution.
The Day of Judgement and the Repetition of History
The final chapter of Die Rebellion depicts the last day of Andreas’s life as the Day
of Judgement. At the end of the previous chapter Andreas receives a judicial
summons and rehearses his speech: “‘Hoher Gerichtshof’, wollte er sagen. ‘Ich
bin ein Opfer dieser Verhältnisse, die Sie selbst geschaffen haben. Verurteilen Sie
mich. Ich gestehe, daß ich ein Rebell bin.’” (IV, 327) Yet, in the next chapter, his
rebellion is not directed at the representatives of society but at God. In an ironic
inversion of the Day of Judgement, it is not God who pronounces judgement upon
humanity but Andreas Pum who pronounces judgement on and rejects God,
blaming Him for the injustice of society. Sültemeyer reads this final chapter of the
novel as proof that “[d]er geheime, letzte ungelöste Konflikt ist ein religiöser,”461
but her interpretation is not convincing.462 Andreas’s delirious confounding of the
temporal and spiritual realms at the point of death is entirely consistent with his
earlier confusion of the two spheres (IV, 245), signifying that despite his
experiences, he has failed truly to comprehend that it is societies and individuals
who create and maintain injustice and inequity. To direct his rebellion at God is to
affirm a fatalistic belief in the powerlessness of individuals.
Directed as it is at the wrong authority, Andreas’s rebellion cannot be other than
ineffectual. The futility of his personal rebellion is heightened in Roth’s evocation
of the Day of Judgement. This is the apocalyptic moment of Die Rebellion, but,
just as in Hotel Savoy and Das Spinnennetz there is no indication that a better
world will follow the destruction of the corrupt world, in this novel there is no
suggestion that the Day of Judgement will pave the way to an ideal world.
Throughout the novel there are references to the idea of history as repetition, from
Katharina’s taking of husbands (Gustav, Andreas, Vinzenz Topp) to Arnold’s life
returning to normal after his altercation with Andreas (IV, 289) to the rhythmic
change of seasons: the novel begins and ends in April (IV, 246, 327) and the
461
462
Cf. Sonnleitner, “Macht, Identität,” 180.
120
changing of the seasons from spring to summer (IV, 257), summer to autumn (IV,
265), autumn to winter (IV, 289) and winter back to spring (IV, 311, 319)
suggests a cyclical pattern of history which serves to undermine the teleological
view implied in the evocation of the Day of Judgement. The final image of the
novel further underscores Roth’s pessmism about the possibility of change:
Andreas’s one-legged body has been delivered to the Anatomical Institute of the
University where, ironically, it will serve medical science:
Ehe man die Leiche in den Seziersaal trug, kam Willi, um Abschied zu
nehmen. Er wollte gerade anfangen zu weinen. Da fiel ihm schnell das Lied
ein, das er immer zu pfeifen pflegte.
Und pfeifend ging er, einen Greis für die Toilette suchen. (IV, 332)
The positive progress of history implied in the endeavours of medical science is
undercut by the recognition that in this society devoid of humane values Andreas
is entirely replaceable.
Coda: From the Early Novels to Radetzkymarsch
Roth’s motivation in the early novels is the desire to understand and reveal the
sources of contemporary social and political problems, not to provide solutions.
Indeed, in evoking an apocalypse without redemption in all three novels he
betrays a distinct lack of optimism that a solution will be found, since the “sense
of an ending” which is the apocalypse usually “implies its complement, the hope
of a new world which will emerge from the catastrophe”.463 That Roth stops short
of an apocalyptic ending indicates his scepticism regarding ideologies and
doctrines which purport to provide a total solution: a lesser novelist would have
succumbed to the temptation of a literary resolution. And yet all three novels
“[haben] etwas Unfertiges, Unausgeführtes”, as Greiner points out.464 This is
indicative of Roth’s struggle at this stage in his career as a novelist to find a form
which would give adequate expression to an exploration of the problems of
contemporary Central Europe. The fact that after publishing his first three novels
463
464
Greiner, “Joseph Roth,” 360.
121
within less than a year465 Roth did not publish another novel for three years466 is
further evidence that he had reached an impasse.
The three novels of the transitional period between the early work and Hiob – Die
Flucht ohne Ende (1927), Zipper und sein Vater (1928) and Rechts und Links
(1929) – are more fully formed than the earlier novels but they still lack the
mastery of Radetzkymarsch. Zipper und sein Vater in particular can be seen as a
step towards the historical form Roth would find with Radetzkymarsch. In Zipper
Roth broadens his view from the present onto the past, seeking, as he writes in the
signed “Brief des Autors an Arnold Zipper” with which the novel concludes, “an
zwei
Menschen
die
Verschiedenheiten
und
die
Ähnlichkeiten
zweier
Generationen so darzustellen, daß diese Darstellung nicht mehr als der private
Bericht über zwei private Leben gelten kann.” (IV, 606) Before this letter, the
final chapter of the novel centres on a conversation between Roth467 and Eduard
P., a mysterious figure who frequents the same coffee house as Roth and his
friend Arnold Zipper. The conversation “develops into a discussion on the art of
the novel and in particular the narrative possibilities of a novel on Arnold
Zipper.”468 P. remembers Roth having once said “‘[e]s sei Aufgabe des Autors
abzuschreiben, was er sehe.’” (IV, 601) This conception of the novelist implies a
concentration on the world immediately perceived – the contemporary world –
and concords to a great extent with Roth’s method in the early novels.469 But in
the intervening years it seems that Roth has had a change of heart. After P. has
465
466
467
468
469
Das Spinnennetz was first published in serial form in the Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung in
October and November 1923; Hotel Savoy in the Frankfurter Zeitung in February and March
1924; Die Rebellion in Vorwärts in July and August 1924: Sültemeyer, Das Frühwerk 155.
Between Die Rebellion (1924) and Die Flucht ohne Ende (1927) Roth published only two
short Erzählungen: “April: Die Geschichte einer Liebe” and “Der blinde Spiegel” (both 1925).
His journalistic output during this time was prolific.
In this novel, as in Die Flucht ohne Ende, Roth names himself as the first person narrator. The
novel begins with the word “Ich” and ends with Roth’s signature.
Rosenfeld, Understanding 30. I disagree with Rosenfeld’s assessment, however, that this
discussion “can be read as a demonstration of the aesthetic tenets of [die Neue Sachlichkeit].”
Rather, it reveals Roth’s view of the limits of this literary movement, which will be discussed
in detail at the beginning of the next chapter.
P.’s words can also be read as expressing Roth’s criticism of the Neue Sachlichkeit movement,
but I do not agree with Scheible that Roth’s previous novel, Die Flucht ohne Ende, “war ganz
im Stil der Neuen Sachlichkeit konzipiert gewesen”, and that therefore the words of Eduard P.
are an ironic reference to Roth’s own “frühere Ästhetik”: Scheible, Joseph Roth 16.
122
told the story of Arnold’s life since his wife left him in Monte Carlo, concluding
with the exclamation “‘Das ist der Roman!’” (IV, 602), Roth replies:
‘Ich sehe […] nichts Romanhaftes darin. Selbst wenn ich das Leben Arnolds
schreiben würde, wäre es kein Roman in diesem Sinn. […] Ich würde ihn
auch nicht gesondert von seinem Vater behandeln können.’ (IV, 602-03)
Roth has realized that it is not possible to make sense of the present without
writing about the past, and it is for this reason, not in order to take flight from
reality, that he turns to the portrayal of the Habsburg Empire in Radetzkymarsch.
123
Chapter 3
“… in Wahrheit … umgewandelte Realität”470
Radetzkymarsch as Historical Novel
Ich kenne, glaube ich, die Welt nur, wenn ich
schreibe, und, wenn ich die Feder weglege, bin
ich verloren.471
1930 is generally held to mark Roth’s final break from a critical engagement with
the problems of the present and his turn to an escapist recreation of the lost worlds
of the Habsburg Empire and the shtetl. In the same year as he published Hiob and
began work on Radetzkymarsch,472 Roth penned a lengthy critical essay on the
relationship between form and content in narrative: “Schluß mit der ‘Neuen
Sachlichkeit’!” This essay is a diatribe against the literary movement Neue
Sachlichkeit, which Roth considers responsible for the poverty of writing in
contemporary German. Roth “rejects the then widely accepted claim of the writerreporter to objectivity, and with it the tenet of Neue Sachlichkeit that genuine
literature must be documentary.”473 The formless, artless texts pretending to be
literature claim to be eye-witness accounts and therefore to represent “reality”, yet
they are far removed from being able to represent “life as it is”:
[Die] ‘dokumentarische[...]’ Mitteilung […], die ‘das Leben’ selbst zu
bezeugen scheint, ist weit entfernt, nicht nur von der ‘inneren’ oder höheren
Wahrheit’, sondern auch von der Kraft der Wirklichkeit. Und erst das
‘Kunstwerk’ ist ‘echt wie das Leben’. (III, 156)
Both writers and readers are labouring under the delusion that facts and details
suffice to produce a true account of a given event, when these are merely the raw
material. It is artistic language which gives form to the raw material, enabling the
event to be authentically conveyed: “Die Zeugenaussage, also die Mitteilung, ist
eine Auskunft über das Ereignis. Der Bericht gibt das Ereignis selbst wieder. Ja,
er ist selbst das Ereignis.” (III, 155)
470
471
472
473
Joseph Roth, “Schluß mit der ‘Neuen Sachlichkeit’!”, Die Literarische Welt 17. and 24.1.1930
(III, 157).
Bronsen, Biographie 392 Bronsen reports that none of his books took Roth as long to write as
Radetzkymarsch, on which he worked for two years: Bronsen, Biographie 395.
124
Chapter 3: Radetzkymarsch
In an earlier essay entitled “Selbstverriß”, a response to criticism of his most
recent novel Rechts und Links, Roth argued that readers had learned from the
nineteenth-century realist epic to measure the quality of a literary text by the raw
material which had provided the author with his model:
Beschreibt ein Autor also zum Beispiel die Zeit der Inflation, so will der
Leser, der die Inflation so genau kennt, diese auch im Buch wiederfinden. In
meinem Roman aber findet er eine oder gar keine. Das Rohmaterial sinkt also
in meinen Büchern zur Bedeutungslosigkeit einer Illustration. Einzig
bedeutend ist die Welt, die ich aus meinem sprachlichen Material gestalte
(ebenso wie ein Maler mit Farben malt).474
These two essays, both written just months before Roth began working on
Radetzkymarsch, give the reader an insight into the writer’s thinking at this time
about the purpose of his fictional creations, and how best to achieve this purpose
through the form of the text.475 Despite a plethora of studies emphasizing the
documentary character of Radetzkymarsch,476 the author’s extensive preparatory
research on Habsburg court ceremonial, the ranks and uniforms of the Imperial
Army and the “Kanzleideutsch” of the bureaucrats477 was not an end in itself but
part of the “raw material”, which was “less important than the patterning and
structuring of the narrative”,478 since it is through these that the writer achieves his
goal: the creation of poetic truth.479 It is imperative the writer have a detailed
knowledge of everyday life,
nicht damit er sie detailtreu benütze, sondern damit er sie beliebig und
schöpferisch verändere. […] Der Erzähler ist ein Beobachter und ein
Sachverständiger. Sein Werk ist niemals von der Realität gelöst, sondern in
Wahrheit (durch das Mittel der Sprache) umgewandelte Realität. (III, 157)
474
475
476
477
478
479
Joseph Roth, “Selbstverriss”, Die Literarische Welt, 22.11.1929 (III, 131).
By contrast, Rosenfeld interprets the essays as a sign of “the artistic crisis in which Roth
found himself” during the late 1920s: Rosenfeld, Understanding 35.
See, for example, Fritz Hackert, Kulturpessimismus und Erzählform. Studien zu Joseph Roths
Leben und Werk (Bern: Peter Lang, 1967) 85-88; Kessler, “Überdauern im ewigen
Untergang”.
Bronsen, Biographie 394. Bronsen reports that Radetzkymarsch was the only novel for which
Roth conducted any preparatory research.
Ian Foster, “Joseph Roth's Radetzkymarsch as a Historical Novel,” in Travellers in Time and
Space – Reisende durch Zeit und Raum: The German Historical Novel – Der deutschsprachige historische Roman, ed. Osman Durrani and Julian Preece, Amsterdamer Beiträge
zur neueren Germanistik (Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2001), 362.
In “Schluß mit der ‘Neuen’ Sachlichkeit’!” Roth writes that truth is “das Kennzeichen und das
Ziel des künstlerischen Berichts” (III, 156).
125
Form and Truth
The discrepancy between truth and reality is raised as a theme in the opening
pages of Radetzkymarsch and becomes a leitmotif, even before the narrator
bestows upon the Hero of Solferino the ironic title “Ritter der Wahrheit”.480 The
novel begins with a description of the Battle of Solferino at which the young
Lieutenant Joseph Trotta saves the life of the Emperor Franz Joseph. The
description of the emotions behind the reflex response which saves the Emperor
reveals a tangled web of conflicting experiences of reality, belief and truth:
Trotta fühlte sein Herz im Halse. Die Angst vor der unausdenkbaren, der
grenzenlosen Katastrophe, die ihn selbst, das Regiment, die Armee, den
Staat, die ganze Welt vernichten würde, jagte glühende Fröste durch seinen
Körper. Seine Knie zitterten. Und der ewige Groll des subalternen
Frontoffiziers gegen die hohen Herren des Generalstabs, die keine Ahnung
von der bitteren Praxis hatten, diktierte dem Leutnant jene Handlung, die
seinen Namen unauslöschlich in die Geschichte seines Regiments einprägte.
(V, 140)
Lieutenant Trotta’s fear reflects his identification with the order represented by
the Emperor. However, the enumeration of all that would be destroyed by the
killing of the Emperor, beginning with himself and culminating in the whole
world, also betrays a discrepancy between his belief system – an absolute truth to
him but in fact an impossible ideal – and the reality of interrelations it masks. The
Lieutenant is motivated to act by the resentment he feels towards superior officers
whose authority is not underpinned by any experience of the reality of frontline
military service.481 Although Trotta’s world-view would not allow him to admit it,
the Emperor himself is implied in this resentment: the “Allerhöchste[…]
Kriegsherr[…]”, as he is referred to on the same page, knows so little about the
reality of the battlefront that he would make himself a target by raising a field
glass to his eyes. The passage thus reveals that what is real is not founded on any
truth, and what is perceived as true has no basis in reality.482
480
481
482
Foster has also noted the irony in this title which expresses “the gulf between [Trotta’s]
actions on the battlefield and their representation as a heroic feat in the pages of a ‘Lesebuch’
for public consumption”: Foster, “Radetzkymarsch,” 364.
At the time of the historical Battle of Solferino the higher staff positions were still held by
archdukes, a practice which excluded abler professional officers and produced inferior
commanders-in-chief. Reform was introduced after the defeat of Königgrätz in 1867:
Johnston, The Austrian Mind 51.
Reidel-Schrewe comes to a similar conclusion: “Wirklichkeit beruht nicht auf Wahrheit,
sondern ist lediglich die angenommene und autonom gewordene Vorstellung von Wahrheit. In
126
These contradictions acquire further significance as they are mirrored in the form
of the opening pages. The style of the narration is initially matter-of-fact: the
sentences are with few exceptions short and have a staccato quality:
In der Schlacht bei Solferino befehligte er als Leutnant der Infanterie einen
Zug. Seit einer halben Stunde war das Gefecht im Gange. Drei Schritte vor
sich sah er die weißen Rücken seiner Soldaten. Die erste Reihe seines Zuges
kniete, die zweite stand. Heiter waren alle und sicher des Sieges. (V, 139)
The narrator relates the events as if he were reading from a succinct military
report of the battle and the incident. The reader is distanced from the protagonist,
Lieutenant Joseph Trotta, gaining no insight into his thoughts or feelings, except
immediately before he saves the life of his Emperor. At this point the narration
suddenly departs from the detached style. Two significantly longer and more
evocative sentences convey the Lieutenant’s fear and resentment and give the
impression that time has momentarily slowed down for him.483 The striking
difference between these two sentences and the remainder of the report –
heightened by the juxtaposition with the clipped reference to Trotta’s physical
reaction (“Seine Knie zitterten”) – indicates to the reader that we have for a brief
moment entered the consciousness of the character.
The prior succinct, dispassionate style returns for the description of the
Lieutenant’s heroic actions, and the report concludes in the same matter-of-fact
manner with the decoration of the Lieutenant and his elevation to the nobility:
Trotta wurde nach vier Wochen gesund. Als er in seine südungarische
Garnison zurückkehrte, besaß er den Rang eines Hauptmanns, die höchste
aller Auszeichnungen: den Maria-Theresien-Orden und den Adel. Er hieß
von nun ab: Hauptmann Joseph Trotta von Sipolje. (V, 141)
While the military style appears quite appropriate to the material, the brevity of
these last lines in particular belies the import of the changes for the young
Slovene returning to his garrison in southern Hungary. The mention of the MariaTheresa-Order, a decoration established by the Empress to reward deeds of valour
dieser Diskrepanz zwischen der unrealistischen Wahrheitsvorstellung der Höhergestellten […]
und Trottas am Ideal orientierter Auffassung vom Ordnungszusammenhang der Welt liegt der
Keim für die Angst und den Groll, die Trotta zum Handeln zwingen”: Ursula Reidel-Schrewe,
“Im Niemandsland zwischen Indikativ und Konjunktiv. Joseph Roths Radetzkymarsch,”
Modern Austrian Literature 24 (1991): 67.
127
performed on a soldier’s own initiative,484 is ironically juxtaposed with the
pronouncement of Trotta’s new name in the manner of an imperial edict, implying
an absence of any choice on the part of the individual. Trotta’s lack of agency in
the events which follow his reflex act of heroism is at once underscored in the
detailed description of his difficulty coming to terms with the new rank and title
assigned to him, a description which contrasts in style with what has preceded it:
Als hätte man ihm sein eigenes Leben gegen ein fremdes, neues, in einer
Werkstatt angefertigtes vertauscht, wiederholte er sich jede Nacht vor dem
Einschlafen und jeden Morgen nach dem Erwachen seinen neuen Rang und
seinen neuen Stand, trat vor den Spiegel und bestätigte sich, daß sein
Angesicht das alte war. Zwischen der linkischen Vertraulichkeit, mit der
seine Kameraden den Abstand zu überwinden versuchten, den das
unbegreifliche Schicksal plötzlich zwischen ihn und sie gelegt hatte, und
seinen eigenen vergeblichen Bemühungen, aller Welt mit der gewohnten
Unbefangenheit entgegenzutreten, schien der geadelte Hauptmann Trotta das
Gleichgewicht zu verlieren, und ihm war, als wäre er von nun ab sein Leben
lang verurteilt, in fremden Stiefeln auf einem glatten Boden zu wandeln, von
unheimlichen Reden verfolgt und von scheuen Blicken erwartet. (V, 141)
This description of the young man’s bewilderment and his struggle to come to
terms with this unexpected transformation is vivid and appears much more real
and immediate to the reader than the preceding factual account of the actual
events at Solferino, which is almost alienating in its clinical detachment and
certainly does not bring the events to life. The contrast in style and effect is
precisely that explicated by Roth in his denunciation of Neue Sachlichkeit in
literature – it mirrors the opposition between “Dokument” and “Kunstwerk” in
that essay. Yet this is no mere repetition of ideas, the addition of a postscript to
his essay by an author reiterating his rejection of Neue Sachlichkeit. Rather, Roth
signals here his intention to strive for truth (“Wahrheit”) in his depiction of the
last decades of the Habsburg Empire rather than factual detail.
A factual account does not always convey truth, and conversely there may be
much truth in fiction, a point Roth is anxious his readers should appreciate. In this
first chapter the reader is told not once but several times that there is no record of
the story of the Trotta family, this repetition underscoring the fact that the family
483
484
The passage is quoted in full on the previous page of this study. The two sentences in question
begin “Die Angst […]” and “Und der ewige Groll […]”.
128
is invented.485 We are informed in the first paragraph that Joseph Trotta saw to it
“daß ihn die späteren Zeiten aus dem Gedächtnis verloren” (V, 139); later in the
chapter we learn that his insistence on truth is the reason that he lived the rest of
his life as “der unbekannte Träger früh verschollenen Ruhms” (V, 149); and we
are reminded of this fact several times in the remainder of the narrative. On one
such
occasion
we
also
learn
that
when
Joseph
Trotta’s
son,
the
Bezirkshauptmann,486 manages to break “das eiserne und das goldene Gesetz des
Zeremoniells” and be granted an audience with the Emperor, his name is not
recorded – a highly unusual occurrence:
So wie der Name des Helden von Solferino in den Geschichtsbüchern oder in
den Lesebüchern für österreichische Volks- und Bürgerschulen nicht mehr
gefunden werden konnte, ebenso fehlt der Name des Sohnes des Helden von
Solferino in den Protokollen Montenuovos. Außer Montenuovo selbst und
dem jüngst verstorbenen Diener Franz Josephs weiß kein Mensch in der Welt
mehr, daß der Bezirkshauptmann Franz Freiherr von Trotta eines Morgens
vom Kaiser empfangen worden ist, und zwar knapp vor der Abfahrt nach
Ischl. (V, 402)487
In Ian Foster’s apposite words, “[t]he narratorial game in these redundant
explanations is a little like that of the storyteller who begins the tale with the
words ‘I’m going to tell you a true story which never happened.’”488 Roth is keen
for the reader to remember that the Trotta family is a fictional construct because
Radetzkymarsch is not about historical fact, but about truth in history, a point
playfully underscored when the elderly, forgetful Emperor asks his servant why
the name Trotta should be familiar to him:
‘Sagen Sie mal: Kennen Sie den Namen Trotta?’
Der Kasier hatte eigentlich du zu seinem Diener sagen wollen, wie er es oft
tat, aber es handelte sich diesmal um die Weltgeschichte, und er hatte sogar
Respekt vor jenen, die er um historische Ereignisse fragte. (V, 341-42)
485
486
487
488
Cf. Foster, “Radetzkymarsch,” 367.
The German term Bezirkshauptmann is retained in this study for two reasons: firstly, it has no
exact equivalent in English, and secondly (and more importantly), the title is an integral part
of the characterization of this figure, its use (in preference to the character’s name) signifying
his complete identification with his “Amt”, his inability to differentiate between his public and
private selves. After Maria Theresa succeeded to the throne in 1740 and created the
bureaucratic system which enabled the Empire to continue as a Great Power, the
Bezirkshauptmann “was the corner-stone of the Empire”: Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 18.
Just as we are repeatedly reminded of the Hero of Solferino’s absence from the history books,
there is a subsequent reference to “[die] in den Protokollen niemals verzeichnete Audienz
Herrn von Trottas beim Kaiser” a few pages later (V, 405).
Foster, “Radetzkymarsch,” 367.
129
The Trottas are not a real family, Roth is saying, and the events described are not
part of world history, yet in his depiction of this family’s fate the reader will find
much truth – truth about the last decades of the Habsburg Empire.489 In this sense
Radetzkymarsch can be described as a historical novel.
Truth and Fiction in the Historical Novel
Hartmut Scheible cites the passage depicting the Bezirkshauptmann’s audience
with the Emperor as evidence that Radetzkymarsch is “kein historischer
Roman”.490 He argues that Roth is careful not to allow the reader any possibility
of verifying the historical accuracy of the events described – the meeting of the
Bezirkshauptmann with the Kaiser, or the heroic act of his father:
[E]s ist, als öffnete hier, wo das Zusammentreffen von Romanwirklichkeit
und historischer Wirklichkeit unumgänglich ist, sich für einen Augenblick
lang eine Spalte in der historischen Zeit, um sich nach Beendigung der
Audienz spurlos wieder zu schließen.491
Scheible adds that the narrator’s comment that Franz Joseph’s servant – the only
person who would have been able to verify the meeting – has recently died is a
warning to the reader not even to attempt such a positivistic reading.492 For
Scheible the narrator’s actions demonstrate that Roth intended his analysis of the
last decades of the Monarchy to be independent of any real historical events,
die gerade dadurch, daß sie scheinbar unumstößlich ‘wahr’ sind, historisch
belegbar, ihre eigene Kontingenz verdecken und dadurch unwahrer werden
als fingierte, aber der inneren Wahrheit des Werkes und der Historie
entsprechende Geschehnisse.493
Yet the fact that Roth was at pains to avoid the portrayal of actual historical
events does not necessitate the conclusion Scheible draws: that Radetzkymarsch is
not a historical novel.494 Not even Roth’s own remark two years after the
489
490
491
492
493
494
By contrast, within Roth’s fictional world the account of the incident at Solferino contained in
the reader makes claims to history yet, embellished almost beyond recognition, is neither
historically accurate nor reflects a greater truth, rather is intended as propaganda for young
and impressionable minds.
Scheible, Joseph Roth 149.
As Roberts explains, in this genre fact is secondary to the demands of the fictional form: “fact
is at the service of fiction in its domain […] the historical novel is not falsifiable by an appeal
130
publication of Radetzkymarsch that he was now for the first time writing “einen
historischen Roman”495 suffices to prove Scheible’s contention,496 since the
meaning of this statement depends very much on what one understands by the
term historical novel. What Roth describes in 1934 as his first and last endeavour
to write something historical497 refers to the attempt to write a novel centred on a
historical personage – Napoleon – and consisting of the reconstruction of actual
events. Roth’s comment on such a pursuit is that it is “unwürdig, einfach
unwürdig,
festgelegte
Ereignisse
noch
einmal
formen
zu
wollen”.498
Radetzkymarsch is quite a different undertaking, however, with the historical
figure Franz Joseph playing a relatively minor role beside the fictional
protagonists and, as we have seen, the narrator taking care that the reader not
forget that there is no record of the Trottas’ meetings with the Emperor – they,
their deeds and their interactions with the historical Franz Joseph are products of
the writer’s imagination.
Several critics have contended contra Scheible that Radetzkymarsch is indeed a
historical novel, in very different senses. For Menhennet, it is a historical novel in
the sense that “it is imbued with a strong sense of time, not only as transience, but
also as permanence. A primary element in its structure is the recurrent theme of
conflict and change between the generations, with the continuing reign of a single
monarch as a kind of temporal counterpoint”.499 Ian Foster focuses not on the
relationship of the novel to “history per se”, but on “notions of historical and
fictional truthfulness”, in part by revealing Roth’s self-conscious use of clichés
from the Zeitroman about the Habsburg Army. His conclusion is that the novel
495
496
497
498
499
to evidence”: David Roberts, “The Modern German Historical Novel: An Introduction,” in
The Modern German Historical Novel: Paradigms, Problems, Perspectives, ed. David Roberts
and Philip Thomson (New York; Oxford: Berg, 1991), 1.
Letter to Carl Seelig, 11.11.1934, Briefe 394. Fritz Hackert surmises that Roth is referring to
his Napoleon novel Die Hundert Tage and notes that Roth saw this novel as something
completely different in kind from Radetzkymarsch: Hackert, Kulturpessimismus 87.
Scheible cites this letter in partial support of his contention that Radetzkymarsch is not a
historical novel: Scheible, Joseph Roth 146. He argues his claim is further supported by the
text, in that the narrator clearly blocks any attempt to synchronize the reality of the novel
(“Romanwirklichkeit”) with the historical reality: Scheible, Joseph Roth 146-47.
“Das ist das erste und das letzte Mal, daß ich etwas ‘Historisches’ mache”: undated letter to
René Schickele, cited in Hackert, Kulturpessimismus 87.
Undated letter to René Schickele, cited in Hackert, Kulturpessimismus 87.
131
“occupies a position at the boundaries of the historical novel”.500 Doppler
differentiates between the historical novel as Unterhaltungsliteratur and what he
calls the legitimate form of the historical novel, which achieves the portrayal of
“poetische Wahrheit”.501 Radetzkymarsch succeeds as a historical novel, he
argues, because although some aspects of the portrayal of the historical Habsburg
Monarchy would be questioned by historians, Roth has achieved “eine ästhetische
Wirklichkeit […], eine epische Metapher, deren Grundbedeutung den Wert einer
historischen Quelle hat.”502
All of these critics pick up on important aspects of the novel, but none of them
goes far enough. Radetzkymarsch is not a historical novel in the sense that
Scheible understands the term – as a record of chronological time, a precise
reproduction of historical events based on fact, which keeps the reader at a
distance rather than drawing him into a narrative world503 – but a historical novel
in the terms proposed by Georg Lukács, for whom this genre is a created and
mediated form characterized by a very particular authorial intent:
What matters […] in the historical novel is not the re-telling of great
historical events, but […] that we should re-experience the social and human
motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical
reality. And it is a law of literary portrayal which first appears paradoxical,
but then quite obvious, that in order to bring out these social and human
motives of behaviour, the outwardly insignificant events, the smaller (from
without) relationships are better suited than the great monumental dramas of
world history.504
Despite its theoretical biases,505 in particular with respect to the choice of texts,
Lukács’s analysis of the historical novel from Walter Scott to Romain Rolland
500
501
502
503
504
505
Foster, “Radetzkymarsch,” 357, 369.
Doppler, “Historische Ereignisse,” 73-74.
Doppler, “Historische Ereignisse,” 80-81.
“Der Leser soll nicht, distanziert, einen historischen Roman lesen, sondern er soll
hineingezogen werden in die Handlung […]”: Scheible, Joseph Roth 147.
Lukács, Historical Novel 42. As Agnes Heller notes in an essay on Lukács’s Historical Novel,
the author’s freedom of portrayal is considerably greater if the protagonists of the historical
novel are fictitious rather than the actual historical protagonists: Ágnes Heller, “History and
the Historical Novel in Lukács,” in The Modern German Historical Novel: Paradigms,
Problems and Perspectives, ed. David Roberts and Philip Thomson (New York; Oxford: Berg,
1991), 28.
Lukács’s study has been criticized for its ideological bias and resultant failings. See, for
example, Maike Oergel, “‘Wie es wirklich wurde’: The Modern Need for Historical Fiction,
or the Inevitability of the Historical Novel,” in Travellers in Time and Space – Reisende durch
Zeit und Raum: The German Historical Novel – Der deutschsprachige historische Roman, ed.
132
remains a standard work on the subject, and his observations on the genre offer a
fresh approach to understanding Roth’s most famous novel in connection with his
early work.
The protagonist of a Lukács historical novel is not a great historical personage but
a “decent, average” man, typical of his time and representative of his class and
nation.506 A number of Roth scholars have recognized the compliance of
Radetzkymarsch with this formal element of Lukács’s historical novel.507 Thus the
non-fictional Emperor Franz Joseph plays only a small (if significant) role in
Roth’s novel, while the protagonists are both fictional and representative of
ordinary, if privileged, members of Franz Joseph’s Empire. Lukács himself drew
attention to this aspect of Radetzkymarsch in a 1939 review of the novel:
Seine handelnden Personen sind mittelmäßige Beamte und Offiziere. […]
Die epische Begabung Roths besteht in dem Vermögen, außergewöhnliche
Situationen zu erfinden, dank deren das Mittelmäßige, ohne seine
Mittelmäßigkeit zu verlieren, eine künstlerische Bedeutung erreicht.508
Lukács does not explicitly refer to Radetzkymarsch as a historical novel in his
review, an omission which is on one level surprising, since much of what he
writes suggests that the novel fulfils the criteria he had delineated just two years
earlier. Apart from noting the “mediocrity” of Roth’s protagonists,509 Lukács
writes that the author succeeds in portraying through them the social background
and psychology of the demise of the Empire:
506
507
508
509
Osman Durrani and Julian Preece, Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik
(Amsterdam; New York: Rodopi, 2001), 435-36; Paul Michael Lützeler, “Georg Lukács and
the Historical Novel of the Restoration Period,” in The Modern German Historical Novel:
Paradigms, Problems and Perspectives, ed. David Roberts and Philip Thomson (New York;
Oxford: Berg, 1991); Heller, “History and the Historical Novel”.
The historical novel begins for Lukács with Walter Scott, of whose protagonists Lukács
writes: “The ‘hero’ of a Scott novel is always a more or less mediocre, average English
gentleman. […] That he builds his novels round a “middling”, merely correct and never heroic
‘hero’ is the clearest proof of Scott’s exceptional and revolutionary epic gifts […]”: Lukács,
Historical Novel 33.
See, for example, Hackert, Kulturpessimismus 85; Klaus-Detlef Müller, “Joseph Roth:
Radetzkymarsch. Ein historischer Roman,” in Interpretationen. Romane des 20. Jahrhunderts
(Stuttgart: Reclam, 1993), 299; Dollenmayer, “History as Fiction,” 302. The present study
seeks to deepen the analysis beyond this formal element of Lukács’s theory.
Georg Lukács, “Radetzkymarsch,” in Hackert, Kulturpessimismus 149. The review was
originally published in Russian in Literaturnaja gazeta, Moscow, 15.8.1939; the German
translation by Maria Enberg appears in Hackert, Kulturpessimismus 147-51.
For Klaus-Detlef Müller this fact alone suffices to demonstrate that Lukács considered
Radetzkymarsch to be a historical novel: Müller, “Radetzkymarsch,” 299.
133
Indem er die persönlichen Schicksale seiner Helden schildert, dringt er mit
einer Tiefe und Realistik in deren Psychologie ein, daß hinter ihren
persönlichen Handlungen und Erlebnissen der ganze soziale Hintergrund
zum Vorschein kommt und die Psychologie der Untergangsperiode des
Reiches hervortritt.510
In his study of the historical novel Lukács wrote in similar terms of Walter Scott:
Scott endeavours to portray the struggles and antagonisms of history by
means of characters who, in their psychology and destiny, always represent
social trends and historical forces. […] [His] greatness lies in his capacity to
give living human embodiment to historical-social types.511
It seems likely that the Marxist critic refrained from calling Radetzkymarsch a
historical novel because of what he identifies as “ideological weaknesses” in the
text, principally the discontent of the oppressed classes as a factor in the collapse
of the Empire: “Dieser anscheinende Faktor des heranreifenden Zusammenbruchs
dient bei Roth bestenfalls als Hintergrund, keinesfalls aber als Haupttriebfeder der
Handlung.”512 Lukács could forgive the “sober, conservative petty aristocrat”513
Scott his political views, for history had not yet reached a point where the writer
and intellectual must recognize the necessity and inevitability of communism.
Since Roth was writing in the 1930s, however, he could not be forgiven for
resisting a socialist solution to his novel, and for this reason Lukács cannot
classify Radetzkymarsch as a historical novel. Nevertheless, he calls
Radetzkymarsch
ein bedeutender Roman, in dem die wichtigsten sozialen Faktoren des
Untergangs eine abgeschlossene künstlerische Verkörperung in den
Einzelschicksalen der dargestellten Personen des Romans gefunden haben.514
Lukács’s critique of Roth is ideological. However, his recognition of the
relationship between past and present in the historical novel remains valid and
applicable to Radetzkymarsch. Indeed, Lukács argues that the great artistic merit
of the novel is strongly connected with, if not determined by, the
“ideologische[...] Schwäche” of the author, the fact that, according to Lukács,
Roth’s heart was on the side of the declining monarchy:
510
511
512
513
514
Lukács, “Radetzkymarsch,” 148.
Lukács, Historical Novel 34-35.
Lukács, “Radetzkymarsch,” 147.
Lukács, Historical Novel 54.
Lukács, “Radetzkymarsch”, 147.
134
Hätte Roth nicht seine Illusionen, so hätte es ihm kaum gelingen können, so
tief in die Welt seiner Beamten und Offiziere hineinzublicken und so voll
und ganz und wahrhaftig den Prozeß ihres sittlichen und sozialen Verfalls
darzustellen.515
It is this ability to convey the reality or the truth of the past that constitutes the
central distinguishing feature of the historical novel for Lukács; such a novel
reflects a belief or feeling that “a real understanding for the problems of
contemporary society can only grow out of an understanding of the society’s
prehistory and formative history.”516 In a statement that recalls Roth’s arguments
in “Schluß mit der ‘Neuen Sachlichkeit’!”, Lukács writes that art is uniquely
suited to the analysis of such problems, since, unlike history, philosophy and other
disciplines, art is capable of expressing the totality, the absolute meaning of the
relative. A historical or philosophical reflection of reality must admit its relativity,
for if it claims absolutely to reproduce “the infinity of objective reality, it is
inevitably falsified and distorts the picture.” In literature, on the other hand, the
relative, incomplete image is able “to appear like life itself, indeed in a more
heightened, intense and alive form than in objective reality.”517 Quoting Balzac,
Lukács argues that
nothing betrays the incompetence of the author more than the heaping-up of
facts […]. Talent flourishes where the causes which produce the facts are
portrayed in the secrets of the human heart, whose motions are neglected by
the historians.518
The historical novel, then, is capable of presenting a complete picture, a “feeling
of the totality of life” 519 where analytic discourse fails, and therefore it is capable
of capturing and illuminating the relationship of the present to the past, the
“prehistory” of contemporary problems.520
515
516
517
518
519
520
Lukács, “Radetzkymarsch,” 148. Again there is a parallel with Lukács’s assessment of Scott:
“there is a certain contradiction here between Scott’s directly political views and his artistic
world picture. He too, like so many great realists, such as Balzac or Tolstoy, became a great
realist despite his own political and social views”: Lukács, Historical Novel 54.
Lukács, Historical Novel 91-92.
Lukács, Historical Novel 42; emphasis added.
Cf. Oergel, “‘Wie es wirklich wurde’,” 440.
135
This characteristic of the historical novel, essential to Lukács’s conception of this
genre, is not mentioned in Hackert’s or Dollenmayer’s analysis of
Radetzkymarsch as a historical novel,521 and is alluded to only obliquely at the
end of Müller’s study.522 It is my contention, however, that it is a defining feature
of Radetzkymarsch as a historical novel. While Lukács himself would not have
accepted Radetzkymarsch as a historical novel because of his commitment to a
Marxist view of history, the novel does conform to his criteria, in particular this
recognition of the past as a concrete step to the present, and it is in this tangible
relationship of the past to the present that the connection between Roth’s early
works and the “Österreich” novels can be found.523 Faced with the problems of a
chaotic post-war Central Europe, Roth in his early novels attempted to understand
these problems directly by representing the contemporary situation and
extrapolating what he saw as possible, even likely paths of development in the
near future. To an extent previously unrecognized, Roth’s concern with the
problems of the post-Habsburg order, which was so clear in his early novels,
remains in Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft, in which he looks back to the
Habsburg Empire in an effort to understand the roots of contemporary problems.
“Er war Slowene”:524 Identity – Myth – Generational Patterns
It is often said that Radetzkymarsch is the story of three generations,525 yet the
elder Trotta dies at the end of the first chapter, appearing thereafter only in the
portrait which hangs in his son’s house and haunts his grandson. It is not Joseph
Trotta himself but the legend of the Hero of Solferino whose presence is felt
521
522
523
524
525
Hackert, Kulturpessimismus; Dollenmayer, “History as Fiction”.
At the end of his article, Müller suggests that Roth saw National Socialism as “eine zweite,
nunmehr definitive Endzeit: das Ende des Humanismus und aller seiner Traditionen, denen er
sich noch stärker verbunden fühlte als seiner jüdischen Herkunft”: Müller, “Radetzkymarsch,”
318.
The relationship to the present for Lukács “does not consist in alluding to contemporary
events […] but in bringing the past to life as the prehistory of the present, in giving poetic life
to those historical, social and human forces which […] have made our present-day life what it
is and as we experience it”: Lukács, Historical Novel 53.
Roth, Radetzkymarsch (V, 139).
See, for example, François Derré, “Militärerziehung und Vater-Sohnkonflikt in
österreichischer Sicht,” Modern Austrian Literature 7 (1974): 52; Hansjürgen Böning, Joseph
Roths Radetzkymarsch. Thematik, Struktur, Sprache (München: W. Fink, 1968) 78; Rosenfeld,
Understanding 5; Peter Branscombe, “Symbolik in Radetzkymarsch,” in Joseph Roth. Der
Sieg über die Zeit. Londoner Symposium, ed. Alexander Stillmark, Stuttgarter Arbeiten zur
Germanistik (Stuttgart: Heinz, 1996), 103.
136
through the remainder of the text.526 The novel may more accurately be described
as the story of the grandson, Carl Joseph,527 beginning with the annual summer
visit home of the fifteen-year-old cavalry cadet in the second chapter and ending
with his death soon after the outbreak of war in the final chapter.528 This is not to
deny the significance of the first chapter, which portrays the events at Solferino
and their aftermath; the consequences of its omission in Michael Kehlmann’s
1965 film version529 show just how critical it is to the reader’s interpretation of
the remainder of the novel.530 Its primary purpose is not, however, to explain the
genesis of the ennobled branch of the Trotta family but to introduce the major
themes of the novel; in this sense it may be viewed as an extended prologue.531
Three linked themes are raised in this opening chapter: identity, myth and
generational patterns; together they underpin the text as a historical novel,
revealing the “different and specific form”532 taken by contemporary problems in
the last half-century of Habsburg rule.
526
527
528
529
530
531
532
This invalidates Boning’s argument that the elder Trotta can be considered a hero or
protagonist of the novel because he remains for both the characters and reader “lebendig, weil
sich die Personen […] immer wieder ehrfürchtig an ihn erinnern”: Böning, Radetzkymarsch
78.
The story of Carl Joseph’s father, the Bezirkshauptmann, is told primarily in chapters X
(Jacques’s death and the Bezirkshauptmann’s ensuing crisis of consciousness), XI (his visit to
Carl Joseph’s garrison and confrontation with the approaching “Untergang seiner Welt”), XVI
(his return to W., relinquishment of control over his son and awareness of the changed times),
XVIII (his “Bittgang” to the Emperor on behalf of his son), and the epilogue (the effect of
Carl Joseph’s death, the death of the Emperor and then his own death). The
Bezirkshauptmann’s crisis of consciousness and its resolution in death functions to shed light
on the identity struggle of his son.
The deaths of the Emperor and the Bezirkshauptmann are narrated in the epilogue,
underscoring the fact that the novel proper is the story of Carl Joseph.
Michael Kehlmann, “Radetzkymarsch. Fernsehfilm in 2 Teilen nach dem gleichnamigen
Roman von Joseph Roth,” (Austria: 1965).
Müller demonstrates that the omission of the first chapter from the film results in a
falsification of the author’s intent: “Damit fehlt dem Betrachter der Maßstab für die
historische Einschätzung einer Lebenslüge, die für den begrenzten Fortbestand der Ordnung
symptomatisch ist”: Klaus-Detlef Müller, “Michael Kehlmanns Verfilmung von Joseph Roths
Roman Radetzkymarsch,” in Joseph Roth. Interpretation Rezeption Kritik, ed. Michael Kessler
and Fritz Hackert (Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1990), 229.
This reading of the novel’s structure is supported by the fact that Roth did not originally
intend to begin the novel with the Battle of Solferino; rather, he intended it to span the period
from 1890 to 1914: Letter to Stefan Zweig, 20.11.1930, Briefe 188. Cf. Bronsen, Biographie
392.
137
Identity
As discussed in the first chapter of this study, at the heart of Roth’s anxiety after
the division of the conquered Habsburg Empire into nation-states was the postwar upsurge in chauvinist ethno-linguistic nationalism in both Germany and
German-Austria (Deutschösterreich). Believing that each individual’s identity
was both intricate and mutable, Roth was highly distrustful of an ideology which
demanded absolute allegiance to one language, one culture, one people, and which
sought to categorize people according to a biologically defined and onedimensional nationality. Although in his preface to the newspaper serialization of
Radetzkymarsch Roth claimed the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy had enabled him
to be “ein Patriot und ein Weltbürger zugleich […], ein Österreicher und ein
Deutscher unter allen österreichischen Völkern”,533 the restriction of the free
formation of identity in the former Empire emerges as a major theme of the novel,
suggesting that this preface belongs within the fiction. This interpretation is
supported by Roth’s claim in the preface to have known the Trotta family,534 a
claim given the lie by the author’s game of truth and fiction described above.535
The third sentence of the novel appears to be a simple statement of the Hero of
Solferino’s ethnic identity: “Er war Slowene” (V, 139). Yet the simplicity of this
statement is ironic: Joseph Trotta’s identity is anything but simple, as the reader
soon learns. Catapulted into the lower nobility as a result of his actions at the
Battle of Solferino, Trotta not only receives a new rank and title, but is
simultaneously deprived of his former life and feels as if he has been sentenced to
walk for the rest of his life “in fremden Stiefeln auf einem glatten Boden” (V,
141). This image of life in another man’s boots is a potent one, signifying a new
way of life and an identity in which Trotta will never feel entirely comfortable.
His new identity – as a member of the German-speaking Austrian minor nobility –
appears false to Trotta, as if it has been “in einer Werkstatt angefertigt[…]” (V,
141), which implies that his pre-Solferino Slovene identity was authentic by
comparison.
533
534
535
“Vorwort zu meinem Roman: Der Radetzkymarsch” (V, 874).
Roth, “Vorwort” 875.
Roth’s claim to personal knowledge of his protagonists was by now familiar to readers of Die
Flucht ohne Ende and Zipper und sein Vater.
138
Perhaps it was authentic, in the sense that he felt heimisch in it – but was it
Slovene, as we are led to believe in the third sentence of the novel? What does the
word “Slovene” signify in the context of the multi-ethnic Habsburg Empire in
1859? In the nineteenth century, nationality in the Empire was determined with
reference to language, but the definition of language in census statistics changed
over time. In the 1846 census, the test used was native tongue (Muttersprache).536
After 1848, however, local administrations began to conduct censuses, which
were an important tool in the national struggles of the second half of the century;
these
censuses
defined
language
as
the
“language
usually
used”
(Umgangssprache).537 After the Ausgleich of 1867 this latter definition of
language as the criterion for determining Volkszugehörigkeit (ethnic or national
belonging) was enshrined in law.538 Joseph Trotta is described as a Slovene in the
context of the Battle of Solferino of 1859, a time when the definition of
Volkszugehörigkeit on the basis of language was in transition from Muttersprache
to Umgangssprache. The deceptively simple statement “Er war Slowene” at the
beginning of the novel thus raises more questions than it answers and signals that
the issue of language and identity will be central to the novel.
Given the statement “Er war Slowene”, we might expect Slovene to be Joseph
Trotta’s Umgangssprache or at least his Muttersprache, but it is neither. His
grandfather was a Slovene peasant in Sipolje, the village from which the family
hails, but his father left the land and became a paymaster and later sergeant in the
gendarmerie stationed on the Empire’s southern border (V, 141). As the first
generation to have left the land, Joseph’s father still speaks Slovene as well as
German, but the young lieutenant, having grown up in the town where his father
was stationed and been educated in a cadet school (V, 142) in which the language
of instruction was German, has only a fragmentary and passive knowledge of the
536
537
538
“The census of 1846 was taken by Imperial officials without national allegiance, though no
doubt with unconscious German prejudices: having no propaganda purpose, it took the test of
‘mother tongue’, and therefore gave something like a historical picture”: Taylor, The
Habsburg Monarchy 284.
Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 284-85. Taylor notes that while the figures were unreliable
in the disputed areas and in the towns merely represented the dominant culture, “the census
gives a generally fair picture of the national balance in the countryside, where the figures
represent the nationality of unawakened peasants.”
139
language of his forebears: “Vor fünf Jahren noch hatte [der Vater] zu seinem Sohn
slowenisch gesprochen, obwohl der Junge nur ein paar Worte verstand und nicht
ein einziges selbst hervorbrachte.” (V, 143) Joseph’s father speaks to him “im
harten Deutsch der Armee-Slawen” (V, 143), but Slovene is expressly referred to
as the father’s Muttersprache in a manner which also implies that it is not the
son’s Muttersprache:
Heute aber mochte dem Alten der Gebrauch seiner Muttersprache von dem
so weit durch die Gnade des Schicksals und des Kaisers entrückten Sohn als
eine gewagte Zutraulichkeit erscheinen, während der Hauptmann auf die
Lippen des Vaters achtete, um den ersten slowenischen Laut zu begrüßen,
wie etwas vertraut Fernes und verloren Heimisches.(V, 143).
Thus Slovene is neither Captain Trotta’s Muttersprache nor his Umgangssprache;
he speaks German, and the loss of the language of his forebears implies the loss
not only of Slovene nationality, but also of Slovene identity.539 In sociological
terms, by refusing to speak Slovene with his son, the father is symbolically
excluding him from Slovene identity, or preventing him from having recourse to
this identity:540 “[L]osgelöst war der Hauptmann Trotta von dem langen Zug
seiner bäuerlichen slawischen Vorfahren. Ein neues Geschlecht brach mit ihm
an.” (V, 144)
Captain Trotta experiences this severance from his forebears as a sudden loss
caused by his elevation in the military: “Es ist tatsächlich aus! dachte der
Hauptmann Trotta. Getrennt von ihm war der Vater durch einen schweren Berg
militärischer Grade.” (V, 143-44) Yet his military promotion and elevation to the
nobility is only the last nail in the coffin of his former Slovene identity (to
paraphrase a recurring metaphor from the novel541); the process of estrangement
539
540
541
Language is typically one of the most powerful core values of ethnic identity, and thus
language loss will lead to loss of identity or exclusion from the group: Joshua Fishman,
“Language and Ethnicity,” in Language, Ethnicity and Intergroup Relations, ed. Howard
Giles, European Monographs in Social Psychology 13. (London: Academic Press, 1977), 25.
“[I]ngroup speech […] can serve as a symbol of ethnic identity and cultural solidarity;
language is often the major embodiment of this ethnicity. It is used for reminding the group
about its cultural heritage, for transmitting group feelings, and for excluding members of the
outgroup from its internal transactions”: Howard Giles, Richard Y. Bourhis, and Donald M.
Taylor, “Towards a Theory of Language in Ethnic Group Relations,” in Language, Ethnicity
and Intergroup Relations, ed. Howard Giles (London: Academic Press, 1977), 307.
The metaphor is used of Demant’s father, of Demant and of Carl Joseph: “Die Uniformen, die
des Unteroffiziers, die des Postoffizianten Demant, hingen noch nebeneinander im Schrank
[…]. Sie sahen aus wie Mumien, und sooft der Schrank geöffnet wurde, glaubte der Sohn,
140
began long before. In this first chapter we are told that the grace of the Emperor
(V, 143) is not the beginning but the end of the process of identity loss and
alienation. As the story of the next two generations of Trottas gradually unfolds
we learn that at the root of this loss of identity are the complex structures of the
Empire. Although it was ostensibly a supranational organization in which “to be
Austrian was to be free of national feeling”,542 the monarchy recognized German
as the language of culture, and its bureaucrats, while they were not German
nationalists, “never supposed that the Empire could be anything other than a
German state.”543 The role of the monarchy and of two of the pillars of the Empire
– the bureaucracy and the army544 – in the rise of nationalism that contributed to
its fall is explored as the novel progresses.
The Habsburg Myth
The second theme raised in the opening chapter of the novel is the “Habsburg
Myth”, or the discrepancy between appearance and reality, Schein and Sein which
pervades the Empire, symbolized by “die riesigen Schatten, von geringen
Gegenständen an die kahlen, blaugetünchten Wände geworfen” (V, 142). With
time, Captain Trotta grows used to his changed circumstances and even comes to
feel at home (heimisch) in his rank, station and fame, fully expecting that his sons
and grandsons will become soldiers, and that he himself will one day die in battle.
His world is shaken to its foundations for a second time, however, when his
young son’s first school reader reminds him that his identity as Captain Trotta is
an artificial creation of his Emperor maintained, it transpires, by a falsified
account of the events at Solferino: he has become part of the Habsburg Myth.545
The Captain’s fury at the rewriting of history for the consumption of young
readers is shared by neither his wife nor his chess partner, the lawyer. When a
542
543
544
545
zwei Leichen seines seligen Vaters nebeneinander zu sehn.” (V, 212) “Der Leutnant hängte
den Säbel [Demants] in den Schrank. […] Trotta schloß den Kasten; er schloß einen Sarg.”
(V, 254) “Der Koffer stand noch offen, die militärische Persönlichkeit Trottas lag drinnen,
eine vorschriftsmäßig zusammengefaltete Leiche.” (V, 432)
Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 25.
The three “pillars” of the Empire were “[das] stehende[...] Heer der Soldaten, [das]
sitzende[...] Heer der Bureaukraten und [das] kniende[...] Heer der Geistlichen”: E. Bagger,
Franz Joseph (Zürich; Leipzig; Wien, 1927); quoted in Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos
23.
Cf. Müller, “Radetzkymarsch,” 303.
141
protest to the Minister for Culture and Education is dismissed with the assurance
that the “adjustment” to the facts has occurred in the name of the best possible
pedagogical goals, and even the Emperor seems to find nothing improper in his
ministers’ decisions, the disillusioned Captain Trotta resigns his post in the army
and retires to his father-in-law’s estate in Bohemia.
The amusing account of the Knight of Truth’s valiant battle against the “Lüge” in
the school reader masks a sinister reality: the institutionalization of lies and their
acceptance by the population as part of the fabric of life in the Empire: “Es wird
viel gelogen” (V, 148), as the Emperor confirms. Trotta’s wife and the lawyer
consider the distortion of events for the reader harmless, each of them justifying it
with the explanation “es ist für Kinder” (V, 146), but the lawyer’s statement “Die
richtige Wahrheit erfahren sie dann später!” (V, 146) ironically reveals the
problem inherent in their attitude: there may be big lies and little lies, but there are
no degrees of truth. The fairy tales and fables contained in the same school reader
are not factual, but neither do they pretend to be, in contrast to the account of the
Battle of Solferino. And unlike the story of this battle, they are not propaganda
designed to encourage the development of patriotic feeling (V, 148), but
communicate to children a deeper truth. Driven from the paradise of his simple
faith in Emperor and virtue, truth and justice, Trotta may have recognized, the
narrator notes, “daß die Schlauheit den Bestand der Welt sicherte, die Kraft der
Gesetze und den Glanz der Majestäten.” (V, 149) Whether or not Trotta himself
has recognized it, Roth through his narrator is certainly making an unflattering
observation about the mechanisms of power in the Empire, while exposing the
myth-making machinery that underpins it.546
The discrepancy between what is said, written or believed and what is true is not
restricted to the depiction of historical events in school readers but extends
throughout society and manifests in the gap between professed morality or codes
of behaviour and what actually happens behind closed doors. The connection
between this state of affairs and the mythologizing practices of the Empire is
546
Cf. Philip Manger, “The Radetzky March: Joseph Roth and the Habsburg Myth,” in The
Viennese Enlightenment, ed. Mark Francis (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 48.
142
indicated when Captain Trotta storms away from his conversation with the
lawyer:
Er ging in die Kaserne, überraschte den diensthabenden Offizier, Leutnant
Amerling, mit einem Fräulein in der Schreibstube des Rechnungsoffiziers,
visitierte selbst die Wachen, ließ den Feldwebel holen, bestellte den
Unteroffizier vom Dienst zum Rapport, ließ die Kompanie antreten und
befahl Gewehrübungen im Hof. (V, 146-47)
The fact that Trotta does not react to finding the duty lieutenant with a young
woman in the paymaster’s office, but does order soldiers absent from his snap
rifle drill to report the next day, indicates that although officially army rules
would not tolerate a lieutenant entertaining a young woman while on duty (and
certainly not in the paymaster’s office!), there is tacit acceptance that such things
occur, and that one does not speak of them. The Knight of Truth himself, then, the
“grimmiger Feind jeder Lüge” (V, 144) is involved in a web of deception of
which he is apparently unaware. Furthermore, he is so bound up in the social
structures of the Empire that even he in effect lies (by omission) in order to
maintain appearances, never speaking with his wife of his family background or
inviting his father to visit because he feels “daß die Tochter des älteren
Staatsbeamtengeschlechts ein verlegener Hochmut von einem slowenischen
Wachtmeister trennen würde.” (V, 150)
Despite being enmeshed in the structures of his society, however, Baron Trotta is
indeed the paragon of truth when compared with his fellow citizens who believe
the falsification of history is perfectly acceptable. When he dies, the Knight of
Truth is buried according to his wishes near his father, and little more remains of
him, the narrator remarks, than a simple military headstone with the carved epithet
“Der Held von Solferino”, faded glory, and the portrait painted by his son’s
friend. Symbolically, what is buried is the truth and what survives is the myth of
the Hero and the portrait representing this myth,547 which later engages the
imagination of his grandson, determining to a certain extent the path of Carl
Joseph’s unhappy life.
547
The suggestion that the Hero of Solferino’s glory has faded is undercut by the letter of
condolence the Baron’s son receives from the Kaiser that same week, in which it is twice
mentioned that his father’s services will be forever remembered; in other words, the myth will
live on.
143
Generational Patterns: Linking Past and Present
Along with the myth, a further intangible legacy of the Hero of Solferino is
suggested in the opening chapter by the letters exchanged between the Baron and
his son:
Zweimal im Monat empfing [der Baron] gehorsame Briefe seines Kindes.
Einmal im Monat antwortete er in zwei kurzen Sätzen, auf kleinen,
sparsamen Zetteln, den Respekträndern, die er von den erhaltenen Briefen
abgetrennt hatte. (V, 152)
For five years as a lieutenant in the army, Joseph Trotta wrote to his father every
second week:
Wie Urlaubsscheine und Dienstzettel glichen die Briefe einander,
geschrieben auf gelblichen und holzfaserigen Oktavbogen, die Anrede
‘Lieber Vater!’ links, vier Finger Abstand vom oberen Rand und zwei vom
seitlichen, beginnend mit der kurzen Mitteilung vom Wohlergehen des
Schreibers, fortfahrend mit der Hoffnung auf das des Empfängers und
abgeschlossen von der steten, in einen neuen Absatz gefaßten und rechts
unten im diagonalen Abstand zur Anrede hingemalten Wendung: ‘In
Ehrfurcht Ihr treuer und dankbarer Sohn Joseph Trotta, Leutnant.’ (V, 142)
The rigidity reflected in the meticulous sameness of the letters is a mark of Joseph
Trotta’s personality, and this behaviour is replicated and amplified by his son, the
young boy whose obedient letters arrive like clockwork and who grows up to
become the punctilious and assiduous Bezirkshauptmann in Moravia, and later his
grandson, who is damaged by this legacy but unable to transcend it.548 Just as this
behaviour is passed down from one generation to the next, the myth of the Hero
of Solferino will shape the course of his grandson Carl Joseph’s life. This
determining effect of the past on the present is expressed in the metaphor with
which the first chapter closes:
Also geht ein Bauer im Frühling über den Acker – und später, im Sommer,
ist die Spur seiner Schritte überweht vom Segen des Weizens, den er gesät
hat. (V, 155)
This metaphor also expresses Roth’s conviction that while contemporary Central
Europe looks very different from the pre-war Austro-Hungarian and German
Empires, there is an underlying causal relationship between past and present. In
548
François Derré describes the letter-writing motif in both Roth and Franz Werfel as “Symbol
eines Mechanismus, der mit der Zucht des Militärlebens zusammenhängt und jeden Ausdruck
irgendwelcher echten Gefühle, Haß oder Liebe, ausschließt”: Derré, “Militärerziehung,” 53.
144
concrete terms, 1918 may have brought radical changes to the territory, form of
government and ethnic composition of Austria, but the exclusive linguistic and
cultural (and increasingly biological) German nationalism is a legacy of past
structures and norms of behaviour.
“Man lebte im Schatten des Großvaters!”:549 The Crisis of Carl Joseph
The first chapter closes with this multivalent metaphor of the farmer sowing seed
which will in time become wheat billowing in the fields. The remainder of the
novel charts the intensifying existential crisis of the representative of the third and
last generation of the Trotta family, the futility of whose desperate desire for a
viable identity in a world in a terminal state of decline is reflected in the pervasive
“Untergangsstimmung” and the frequent evocation of death and decay. The
articulation of the crisis of consciousness or “Zerfall der Werte” (Broch) which
led to the collapse of the traditional hierarchical order in the First World War is a
characteristic feature of the modern German novel. The typical protagonist of
such novels is the isolated individual who is unable to reconcile self and society.
But where other modern novels of the early twentieth century, such as Thomas
Mann’s Der Zauberberg (1924), Hermann Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf (1927) and
Robert Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (1930), focus on the condition of
alienation, Radetzkymarsch focuses on the process.550 The progressive alienation
of the protagonist Carl Joseph both mirrors and illuminates the decline of the
Habsburg Empire, a place and an idea which failed to be “eine Heimat aller”551
and contained within its structures the seeds of contemporary German
nationalism. By revealing an unconscious German bias in the idea of
“Österreich”, Roth constructs Radetzkymarsch as a historical novel in Lukács’s
sense, “giving poetic life to those historical, social and human forces”552 which
have led to the Central Europe of Roth’s own time.
549
550
551
552
“[Bei Castorp, Harry Haller und Ulrich ist] die Isolierung bereits vollzogen, dargestellt in
continuum wird ein Bewußtsein in seiner Auseinandersetzung mit diesem Zustand. Im
Radetzkymarsch dagegen ist der sich vollziehende Prozeß der Isolierung der eigentliche
Darstellungsgegenstand”: Reidel-Schrewe, “Im Niemandsland,” 60.
Joseph Roth, Der stumme Prophet (IV, 922).
145
Carl Joseph’s Summery Idyll
The reader’s introduction to Carl Joseph occurs in an idyllic setting: it is summer
and the sky is always blue, old chestnut trees cast their wide cool shadows right
into the middle of the road, larks trill and the military band plays the Radetzky
March to the visible delight of the listeners. This is the setting in which the third
generation of the von Trotta family is introduced:
Der fünfzehnjährige Sohn der Bezirkshauptmanns, Carl Joseph von Trotta,
Schüler der Kavalleriekadettenschule in Mährisch-Weißkirchen, empfand
seine Geburtsstadt als einen sommerlichen Ort; sie war die Heimat des
Sommers wie seine eigene. (V, 157)
The use of the verb empfinden invites the reader’s cautious scepticism, suggesting
that the reality of Carl Joseph’s native town is perhaps quite different from his
subjective and limited experience of it. The foregoing depiction of the town is
thereby thrown into doubt, and the categorical opening sentence of the chapter –
“Es gab im ganzen Machtbereich der Division keine schönere Militärkapelle als
die des Infanterieregiments Nr. X in der kleinen Bezirksstadt W. in Mähren” (V,
156) – which seemed to require the reader’s acceptance of it as a statement of fact,
suddenly cannot be said unequivocally to represent the narrator’s perspective, but
may express the feelings of the pensive band audience or Carl Joseph himself. The
narrator is elusive, but a number of seemingly incidental remarks serve to
undermine the otherwise idyllic description and suggest a reality which differs
from the summery idyll depicted: the Kapellmeister’s view that his colleagues’
habit of not conducting the first march is “ein deutliches Anzeichen des
Untergangs der kaiserlichen und königlichen Monarchie” (V, 156), and the
description of Herr von Winternigg as “ein kümmerliches Stück von Winter”
driving through “den satten Sommer” (V, 157) indicate to the reader open to the
incongruities in the text that caution is advisable: all may not be as it seems.
In this same chapter we learn that Carl Joseph’s identity, like his father’s, is based
on
an
unquestioning
identification
with
Emperor
and
Empire.
The
Bezirkshauptmann speaks in “das nasale österreichische Deutsch der höheren
Beamten und des kleinen Adels” (V, 163), and his muttonchop whiskers are
described as part of his uniform, “ein Abzeichen, das seine Zugehörigkeit zu der
Dienerschaft Franz Josephs des Ersten beweisen sollte, als einen Beweis seiner
146
dynastischen Gesinnung” (V, 163). His loyalty to a supranational, not a German,
Austria is reflected in his repeated reprimanding of Fräulein Hirschwitz, who
spent many years living in Germany and speaks hochdeutsch (V, 162). Carl
Joseph for his part identifies unconditionally with the Habsburg dynasty with the
eagerness of a child and an exaggerated awareness of his status as son of one of
his Majesty’s officials:
Jeden Sonntag spielte [die Militärkapelle] um die Mittagszeit vor dem
Amtshaus des Bezirkshauptmanns, der in diesem Städtchen keinen
Geringeren vertrat als Seine Majestät den Kaiser. Carl Joseph stand
verborgen hinter dem dichten Weinlaub des Balkons und nahm das Spiel der
Militärkapelle wie eine Huldigung entgegen. Er fühlte sich ein wenig den
Habsburgern verwandt, deren Macht sein Vater hier repräsentierte und
verteidigte und für die er einmal selbst ausziehen sollte, in den Krieg und in
den Tod. Er kannte die Namen aller Mitglieder des Allerhöchsten Hauses. Er
liebte sie alle aufrichtig, mit einem kindlich ergebenen Herzen, vor allen
andern den Kaiser, der gütig war und groß, erhaben und gerecht, unendlich
fern und sehr nahe und den Offizieren der Armee besonders zugetan. Am
besten starb man für ihn bei Militärmusik, am leichtesten beim
Radetzkymarsch. (V, 160)
The narrator slips in and out of erlebte Rede, the shift into Carl Joseph’s thoughts
being signalled by the use of the phrase “Seine Majestät den Kaiser” rather than
simply “den Kaiser”.553 The use of erlebte Rede here lends an ironic note to Carl
Joseph’s childlike devotion and the fantasy of a heroic death inspired by the
strains of the Radetzky March.554 The naïveté of his beliefs is underscored by the
phrase “mit einem kindlich ergebenen Herzen”, which reminds the reader that his
grandfather, the Hero of Solferino, was “[v]ertrieben […] aus dem Paradies der
einfachen Gläubigkeit an Kaiser und Tugend, Wahrheit und Recht” (V, 149) and
appeared to grow old very suddenly when he discovered that machinations and
myth-production were responsible for maintaining “den Bestand der Welt […],
die Kraft der Gesetze und den Glanz der Majestäten.” (V, 149) Carl Joseph’s
553
554
The Bezirkshauptmann is very particular about the words he uses to refer to the Emperor: “Bei
feierlichen Anlässen sagte man: Seine Majestät. Im gewöhnlichen Leben sagte man: der
Kaiser.” (V, 286). The control he exercises over his son and the repeated indications in the
novel that Carl Joseph unconsciously mimics his father allow the assumption that Carl Joseph
also refers to the Emperor as “Seine Majestät” on solemn occasions, such as when he is
thinking about his relationship to the Emperor and duty to die for him. A further indication
that this paragraph consists largely of the reported thoughts and fantasies of the character is
the first sentence of the following paragraph: “Jacques stand hinter seinem [Carl Josephs]
Rücken und räusperte sich.” (V, 160)
Hoffmeister points particularly to the “Häufung der auf den Kaiser bezogenen Adjektive
‘gütig … groß … erhaben … gerecht’” and the sharp irony of the final sentence as revealing
147
naïve faith in his Emperor, and by implication the Empire, is at this stage still
intact, but Roth’s irony – most barbed in the last sentence of the quoted passage –
presages its disintegration.
“‘Erzählen Sie vom Großvater, Jacques!’”555 Searching for Truth
Carl Joseph is a military cadet, destined by his family name to have a successful
career in the army and, he believes, to die a glorious and heroic death protecting
Emperor and Empire. Cadet school and military life is a topos of the Austrian
novel, and was a favourite subject of retired soldiers turned writers in the former
Empire.556 Many of these writers expressed nostalgic longing for the good old
times.557 Military life, from cadet school onward, appears in the memory of
writers such as Karl Baron Torresani and Franz Karl Ginzkey as
die geistige Heimat, der Zufluchtsort vor allen Gefahren der Außenwelt. Das
Bewußtsein, zu der mächtigsten Stütze des Kaiserreichs zu gehören, erhöht
und umgibt von einem Glorienschein das allzumenschliche Gefühl der
Geborgenheit.558
By contrast, the military in Radetzkymarsch is unable to provide Carl Joseph with
this
sense
of
Heimat
or
belonging
familiar
to
readers
of
other
“Kasernenromane”:559
Nach Generationen, die hingebungsvoll dem Staat dienten, des Kaisers Rock
mit Stolz und ohne Vorbehalte trugen, treten Menschen auf, die dieses
555
556
557
558
559
the critical undertone inherent in the erlebte Rede in this passage: Hoffmeister,
“Erzählhaltung,” 168.
Derré, “Militärerziehung,” 51.
Such unambiguously nostalgic and transfiguring texts stem for the most part from lesser
writers. In the work of a writer of the calibre of Ferdinand von Saar, military life appears in a
rather more bleak light. Derré cites von Saar’s Leutnant Burda, Ginevra, Schloß Kostenitz and
Außer Dienst as examples: Derré, “Militärerziehung,” 56, note 5.
Derré, “Militärerziehung,” 52. Torresani wrote in the 1890s, Ginskey in the 1920s, and
therefore their nostalgia has different roots: “Bei Torresani ist es die übliche Wehmut wegen
der dahingegangenen Jugend, bei Ginzkey spürt man die aus den damaligen Zeitläuften
entsprungene Trauer um eine untergegangene Welt”: Derré, “Militärerziehung,” 52. See also
Foster, “Radetzkymarsch,” 358-60.
Robert Musil’s often-quoted dismissal of Radetzkymarsch as “ein sehr hübsch geschriebener
Kasernenroman” (Morgenstern, Flucht und Ende 82) is a misreading and underestimation of
the novel. Foster discusses Roth’s self-conscious use of genre clichés from pre-1914 Austrian
fiction on the Habsburg Army, demonstrating the contribution of these clichés to Roth’s
exploration of notions of historical and fictional truthfulness: Foster, “Radetzkymarsch”.
148
Dasein als Zwang empfinden und ihm widerstreben.560
The process of estrangement from the life Carl Joseph’s father has chosen for him
is gradual and the fifteen-year-old cadet has not yet begun to question it, but the
depiction of his first sexual encounter with Frau Slama intimates symbolically that
Carl Joseph’s entry into adulthood marks the onset of an internal struggle between
the dictates of his upbringing and Beruf and those of his soul:
Er hatte Angst, sich umzuwenden. Auf einmal lagen ihre beiden
schimmernden Ärmel an seinem Hals, und ihr Gesicht lastete auf seinen
Haaren. Er rührte sich nicht. Aber sein Herz klopfte laut, ein großer Sturm
brach in ihm aus, krampfhaft zurückgehalten vom erstarrten Körper und den
festen Knöpfen der Uniform. (V, 166)
The reader has learned during Carl Joseph’s examination that although his riding
has improved from the “Schande” (V, 158) it was the previous year, the cavalry
cadet does not ride well, signifying that he is not called to the Beruf his father has
chosen for him. His “erstarrte[r] Körper” recalls the passage just a few pages
earlier in which the Bezirkshauptmann is described in similar terms several times:
Außer den Lippen bewegte sich nichts in diesem Gesicht. […] Aufrecht saß
er am Tisch, als hielte er Zügel in den harten Händen. Wenn er saß, sah es
aus, als stünde er, und wenn er sich erhob, überraschte immer wieder seine
kerzengrade Größe. […] Zwischen dem zweiten und dritten Gang pflegte er
aufzustehen, um sich ‘Bewegung zu machen.’ Aber es war eher, als wollte er
seinen Hausgenossen vorführen, wie man sich erhebt, steht und wandelt,
ohne die Reglosigkeit aufzugeben. (V, 163)
Together with the military training he receives at cadet school, Carl Joseph’s
regimented Erziehung by his exacting father, so vividly evoked in the portrayal of
the excruciating examination to which his father subjects him earlier in this
chapter, is designed to produce an obedient and unquestioning servant of his
superiors, the type envisaged in the concept of “Subordination” (V, 159).561 Carl
Joseph’s development as an autonomous individual is being stifled by
representatives of the two “pillars of Empire” which Roth portrays in this novel –
560
561
Derré, “Militärerziehung,” 54. Derré’s analysis refers to both Radetzkymarsch and Franz
Werfel’s Nicht der Mörder, der Ermordete ist schuldig.
The fact that Carl Joseph is unable to quote verbatim the definition of subordination is a
further early hint that he will not become “heimisch” in the army as his grandfather did before
him; more significantly, the exchange between father and son over the wording of the
definition reflects the Bezirkshauptmann’s emphasis on form over content, which corresponds
to his preference for appearances over reality and allows him to continue to believe in the
myth of Austria longer than Carl Joseph does.
149
the bureaucracy and the military. As his existential crisis intensifies, the Empire
marches inexorably towards its doom and it gradually becomes apparent that for
Roth there is an inextricable link between the intertwined fates of Carl Joseph and
the Empire and the structures of Habsburg society.
That his sexual awakening and relationship with Frau Slama cause Carl Joseph to
begin to question the tenets of his upbringing and faith in the monarchy is
indicated by its conjunction with his repeated attempts to learn something more
about his grandfather: “Immer, wenn Carl Joseph von Frau Slama heimkehrte,
ging er zu Jacques in den Hof und setzte sich auf die Kante. ‘Erzählen Sie vom
Großvater, Jacques!’” (V, 169) Carl Joseph seems to suspect that there is
something he does not know, some deeper truth perhaps concealed in – or by –
the portrait of the Hero of Solferino. Curious about “die erloschene Gestalt und
den verschollenen Ruhm des Großvaters”, he tries examining the portrait from
different angles and distances:
Carl Joseph [stieg] auf einen Stuhl und betrachtete das Bildnis des
Großvaters aus der Nähe. Es zerfiel in zahlreiche tiefe Schatten und helle
Lichtflecke, in Pinselstriche und Tupfen, in ein tausendfältiges Gewebe der
bemalten Leinwand, in ein hartes Farbenspiel getrockneten Öls. Carl Joseph
stieg vom Stuhl. Der grüne Schatten der Bäume spielte auf dem braunen
Rock des Großvaters, die Pinselstriche und Tupfen fügten sich wieder zu der
vertrauten, aber unergründlichen Physiognomie, und die Augen erhielten
ihren gewohnten, fernen, dem Dunkel der Decke entgegendämmernden
Blick. (V, 168)562
“[D]ie stummen Unterhaltungen des Enkels mit dem Großvater” which reveal
nothing to the grandson form a contrast with the earlier “stumme Zwiesprache”
which the grandfather held “mit seinem Angesicht”. (V, 153) The elder Trotta had
been sceptical about the ability of a one-dimensional picture to reflect the totality
of his being,563 but gradually “im Kommunikationsaustausch zwischen dem
Dargestellten und dem Lebendigen wird eine Wahrheit menschlicher Existenz
transparent mit der der alte Trotta sich im Einklang befindet”:564
[Das Porträt] weckte in ihm nie gekannte Gedanken, Erinnerungen,
562
563
564
Carl Joseph’s attempts to glean something hidden from the portrait recall to the reader his
grandfather’s first response to his likeness, which was to turn it over as if seeking further
details which had been left out on the front. (V, 153)
Cf. Reidel-Schrewe, “Im Niemandsland,” 68.
Reidel-Schrewe, “Im Niemandsland,” 68.
150
unfaßbare, rasch verschwimmende Schatten von Wehmut. Er hatte erst des
Bildes bedurft, um sein frühes Alter und seine große Einsamkeit zu erfahren,
aus der bemalten Leinwand strömten sie ihm entgegen, die Einsamkeit und
das Alter. War es immer so? fragte er sich. Immer war es so? (V, 153-54)
It was not always thus: his early old age and his Einsamkeit were a result of his
disillusionment, his discovery of the lies upon which his existence was founded.
The positive changes which occur in the grandfather’s life and manner after this
recognition reflect the importance of a true understanding of oneself and one’s
society. Carl Joseph’s attempts to discover a hidden truth in the portrait of his
grandfather, which represents his faith in and sense of obligation to the Emperor,
signals the beginning of his own search for such an understanding.565
Finding that his attempts to glean something from the portrait only leave him
feeling more disconnected from the truth of the past – so much so that he feels
there must come a time when only a blank canvas will stare down at him from the
black frame – Carl Joseph asks the one person he believes might have access to
the truth about his grandfather, the servant Jacques.566 Yet not even Jacques is
privy to the truth about the Hero of Solferino, because his master never spoke of
it:
Alle haben gewußt: Er hat dem Kaiser das Leben gerettet, in der Schlacht bei
Solferino, aber er hat nichts davon gesagt, keinen Mucks hat er gegeben.
Deshalb haben sie ihm auch ‘Der Held von Solferino’ auf den Grabstein
geschrieben. (V, 169)
Thus the Knight of Truth himself was in part responsible for the perpetuation of
the myth and the fact that his own grandson cannot know the truth. After Jacques
has told the same story for at least the twentieth time567 Carl Joseph’s
disappointment at the absence of new insight is evident in the narrator’s comment,
which appears to reflect Carl Joseph’s thoughts: “Das war alles.” (V, 169) The
paragraphs which immediately follow this expression of disappointment that the
truth remains concealed behind the legend of his grandfather suggest that Carl
565
566
567
His father, the Bezirkshauptmann, remains unquestioning of the truth concealed by the
portrait: cf. Reidel-Schrewe, “Im Niemandsland,” 68.
That Carl Joseph does not ask his father suggests that he is at least at some level aware that his
father accepts the portrait and all it represents at face value.
“Und wie immer und wie schon gute zwanzig Mal begann [Jacques]: ‘Ich bin immer mit ihm
ausgekommen!’” (V, 169)
151
Joseph is aware that any subsequent success is due to this myth rather than his
own abilities:
Einmal […] sagte der Bezirkshauptmann beim Abschied: ‘Ich hoffe, daß
alles glattgeht. Du bist der Enkel des Helden von Solferino. Denk daran, dann
kann dir nichts passieren!’
Auch der Oberst, alle Lehrer, alle Unteroffiziere dachten daran, und also
konnte Carl Joseph in der Tat nichts passieren. Obwohl er kein
ausgezeichneter Reiter war, in der Terrainlehre schwach, in der
Trigonometrie ganz versagt hatte, kam er ‘mit einer guten Nummer’ durch,
wurde als Leutnant ausgemustert und den X-ten Ulanen zugeteilt. (V, 169)
Through his affair with Frau Slama, then, Carl Joseph has begun to sense the
discrepancy between appearance and reality in other areas of his life as well. The
Bezirkshauptmann, having been made aware of the affair by Sergeant Slama and
determined to teach Carl Joseph the meaning of “Subordination”, exposes his son
(and Sergeant Slama) to a scene of the most excruciating humiliation. That he
then considers the matter closed is signalled by his placing his hand over his
son’s. The Bezirkshauptmann believes life has returned to normal and intends to
act as if the affair and its unfortunate end never happened:
Aus dem Tor der Bezirkshauptmannschaft tritt der Wachtmeister Slama im
Helm, mit Gewehr und aufgepflanztem Bajonett und Dienstbuch unter dem
Arm. ‘Grüß Gott, lieber Slama!’ sagt der alte Herr von Trotta. ‘Nichts Neues,
was?’
‘Nichts Neues!’ wiederholt der Wachtmeister. (V, 192)
However while the Bezirkshauptmann’s power over Slama remains unbroken, the
Sergeant colluding (and having little choice but to collude) in his superior’s denial
of what has happened, Carl Joseph has discovered that behind the surface reality
which his father believes has now been restored lies a deeper and more complex
truth:
[Der Wachtmeister] steht hinter der Lehne eines Sessels, umfaßt sie mit den
Händen, er hält sie vor sich wie einen Schild. Vor mehr als vier Jahren hat
ihn Carl Joseph zuletzt gesehn. Damals war er im Dienst. Er trug einen
schillernden Federbusch am schwarzen Hut, Riemen überkreuzten seine
Brust, das Gewehr hielt er bei Fuß, er wartete vor der Kanzlei des
Bezirkshauptmanns. Er war der Wachtmeister Slama, der Name war wie der
Rang, der Federbusch gehörte wie der blonde Schnurrbart zu seiner
Physiognomie. Jetzt steht der Wachtmeister barhäuptig da, ohne Säbel,
Riemen und Gurt, man sieht den fettigen Glanz des gerippten Uniformstoffs
auf der leichten Wölbung des Bauchs über der Lehne, und es ist nicht mehr
der Wachtmeister Slama von damals, sondern der Herr Slama, ein
Wachtmeister der Gendarmerie im Dienst, früher Mann der Frau Slama, jetzt
Witwer und Herr dieses Hauses. (V, 185-86)
152
Like the image of the dead Kathi Slama, this discovery that identity and life are
more complex than he had believed remains with Carl Joseph as he goes to his
first posting in Moravia. For the first time he is aware of the possibility of a
different sort of life from the one prescribed by the Bezirkshauptmann, but he is
too weak and passive to be capable of taking responsibility for himself and
indulges in a romantic fantasy of his ancestors’ peasant existence. In so doing he
not only fails to comprehend and thus possibly transcend the myth of the Hero of
Solferino, but adds a further layer to it:
Der Vater des Großvaters noch war ein Bauer gewesen. Sipolje war der
Name des Dorfes, aus dem sie stammten. Sipolje: Das Wort hatte eine alte
Bedeutung. Auch den heutigen Slowenen war es kaum mehr bekannt. Carl
Joseph aber glaubte, es zu kennen, das Dorf. Er sah es, wenn er an das Porträt
seines Großvaters dachte, das verdämmernd unter dem Suffit des
Herrenzimmers hing. Eingebettet lag es zwischen unbekannten Bergen, unter
dem goldenen Glanz einer unbekannten Sonne, mit armseligen Hütten aus
Lehm und Stroh. Ein schönes Dorf, ein gutes Dorf! Man hätte seine
Offizierskarriere darum gegeben!
Ach, man war kein Bauer, man war Baron und Leutnant bei den Ulanen! (V,
193)
While many critics assume that the narrator’s perspective coincides with Carl
Joseph’s and thus consider Roth to have romanticized the pre-modern past,568 the
sentence “Carl Joseph aber glaubte, es zu kennen, das Dorf” signals a switch to
erlebte Rede, meaning that the following description of the village, including the
exclamation “Ein schönes Dorf, ein gutes Dorf!”, is narrated not from the
narrator’s point of view but from the character’s. An ironic distance is thus
signalled which is underscored in the use three times in quick succession of the
impersonal pronoun man.569 The use of man instead of the expected er in this
passage of erlebte Rede signifies Carl Joseph’s reluctance to identify completely
with his own thoughts, thus relieving him of the responsibility of following
through with his fantasy.570 This interpretation is supported by the next image,
568
569
570
Marchand, for example, contends: “Der Radetzkymarsch ist ganz und gar ein sehnsüchtiges
Beschwören der verlorenen bäuerlichen Herkunft”: Marchand, Wertbegriffe 199.
On the various different functions of the pronoun man in Radetzkymarsch see Böning,
Radetzkymarsch 33-34; and Reidel-Schrewe, “Im Niemandsland,” 62-65. Scheible and
Trommler are more sceptical about Roth’s use of the pronoun: see Scheible, Joseph Roth 10508; and Frank Trommler, Roman und Wirklichkeit. Eine Ortsbestimung am Beispiel von
Musil, Broch, Roth, Doderer und Gütersloh (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966) 59.
Reidel-Schrewe comes to a similar conclusion about a different passage: Reidel-Schrewe, “Im
Niemandsland,” 63-64. The final line quoted above, “Ach, man war kein Bauer…”, which
begins a new paragraph, could also be understood as the narrator’s parody of the character.
153
which relates Carl Joseph’s feelings of being trapped in his life as Baron and
Lieutenant:
Immer, wenn er in die Kaserne am Nachmittag heimkehrte und das große,
doppelflügelige Tor hinter ihm schloß, hatte er die Empfindung, gefangen zu
sein; niemals mehr würde es sich vor ihm auftun. (V, 193)
Just as the gate opens each day to release him, Roth suggests Carl Joseph’s feeling
of being trapped, a victim of his fate, is an illusion or, at least in part, of his own
doing since he refuses to take responsibility for himself and his identity, taking
refuge instead in bucolic fantasy. As Reidel-Schrewe convincingly argues, the
frequent use of man in the narrating of Carl Joseph’s reflections signifies his
doubt about the “Autonomie seines Ichs […]. Nicht Identitätsverlust oder
Selbstentfremdung kennzeichnen diesen Charakter, vielmehr das Unvermögen,
eine Identität anzunehmen.”571
Carl Joseph and Max Demant: Ungleiche Brüder
The reasons for Carl Joseph’s inability to construct an identity for himself emerge
through his interactions with others who have a significant impact on his life. The
regimental doctor Max Demant seems also to suffer from the consciousness of
living “von den Toten” (V, 220), but there are important differences between him
and Carl Joseph.572 The fact that Demant remembers his grandfather clearly,573
whereas Carl Joseph never knew his, suggests that the doctor has a more realistic
view of the past and its relationship to the present than his younger friend. This
contrast is underscored by Demant’s mysterious insight into the complexity of the
man Carl Joseph knows only as the legendary Hero of Solferino:
‘Ihr Großvater’, sagte der Regimentsarzt, ‘war einer der merkwürdigsten
Menschen der Armee. Haben Sie ihn noch gekannt?’ ‘Ich habe ihn nicht
mehr gekannt’, antwortete Carl Joseph. ‘Sein Bild hängt bei uns zu Hause im
Herrenzimmer. Wie ich klein war, hab’ ich es oft betrachtet. Und sein
Diener, der Jacques, ist noch bei uns.’ (V, 206)
That Carl Joseph fails to remark upon Demant’s curious description of his
grandfather as “merkwürdig” underscores the one-dimensional view of his
571
572
573
The tendency in the secondary literature is to see only the similarities between the two
characters: see, for example, Herzog, “Der Segen,” 122.
“Er erinnerte sich noch deutlich seines Großvaters.” (V, 210)
154
grandfather represented in the portrait and his correspondingly naïve and skewed
vision of the past.
Carl Joseph believes that it is the weight of expectation represented by their
grandfathers that unites him in friendship with Demant, but the narrator distances
himself from the character’s perspective and casts doubt on the veracity of Carl
Joseph’s belief:
Auf einmal weiß er, daß der Regimentsarzt seit Wochen sein Freund ist; ein
Freund! Sie haben sich jeden Tag gesehn. Einmal ist er mit dem
Regimentsarzt auf dem Friedhof, zwischen den Gräbern, spazierengegangen.
‘Es gibt so viele Tote’, sagte der Regimentsarzt. ‘Fühlst du nicht auch, wie
man von den Toten lebt?’ ‘Ich lebe vom Großvater’, sagte Trotta. Er sah das
Bildnis des Helden von Solferino, verdämmernd unter dem Suffit des
väterlichen Hauses. Ja, etwas Brüderliches klang aus dem Regimentsarzt, aus
dem Herzen Doktor Demants schlug das Brüderliche wie ein Feuerchen.
‘Mein Großvater’, hat der Regimentsarzt gesagt, ‘war ein alter, großer Jude
mit silbernem Bart!’ Carl Joseph sah den alten, großen Juden mit dem
silbernen Bart. Sie waren Enkel, sie waren beide Enkel. (V, 220)
Here, as so often in the novel, the narrative perspective is elusive. The repetition
of the word “Freund” with the added exclamation mark and the variation of the
article from “sein” to “ein” indicates a shift in the narrative perspective to erlebte
Rede: we have entered the incredulous and child-like mind of Carl Joseph. If the
rest of the paragraph is read – as the shift to erlebte Rede suggests it should be –
as a continuation of Carl Joseph’s thoughts and his subjective memory of the
conversation in the cemetery, it is divested of any veneer of objectivity, and the
accuracy of Carl Joseph’s interpretation of his friend’s words as indicating a
shared burden and sense of commonality – “etwas Brüderliches” – becomes
doubtful.574 The evocation of the portrait which hangs “verdämmernd unter dem
Suffit des väterlichen Hauses” in this context underscores the likely inaccuracy of
Carl Joseph’s impression: his experience of the portrait as “verdämmernd” was
574
In fact, while their relationship is experienced by both as a rare friendship, Demant’s manner
towards Carl Joseph is less brotherly than fatherly. When they first meet he accompanies Carl
Joseph to the brothel as if wishing to protect him (“‘Müssen Sie mit?’ fragte er den Leutnant
Trotta leise. ‘Es wird wohl so sein!’ flüsterte Carl Joseph. Und der Regimentsarzt ging wortlos
mit.” – V, 207), and when Carl Joseph suddenly confesses his love for the dead Kathi Slama
(without knowing why he does so), Demant does not reciprocate with a story of his own, but
says as a voice of wisdom: “‘Sie werden noch andere Frauen lieben!’” (V, 207) During the
night before the duel they seem even further apart in age, Carl Joseph surrendering himself to
weeping like a child and saying over and again “‘Ich will nicht, daß du stirbst, ich will nicht,
daß du stirbst, ich will nicht! Ich will nicht!’” (V, 235), while Demant maintains a reasoned
tone, raising his voice only once (V, 237-38).
155
earlier evoked in conjunction with his imagining of the village of Sipolje, which
the narrator parodied (V, 193). Demant’s realistic view of his grandfather,
reflected in his matter-of-fact description of him as “ein alter, großer Jude mit
silbernem Bart”, forms a stark contrast to Carl Joseph’s metaphysical
understanding of the generational relationship: “Sie waren Enkel, sie waren beide
Enkel.”
Carl Joseph’s over-developed consciousness of being a grandson signifies the
inability to construct a viable identity in the present due to an overwhelming
orientation towards a mythologized past. His subsequent descent into a selfdestructive existence of drunken profligacy is a mark of this inability to deal with
present reality575 and is indicated to be a result of the overshadowing of his life by
the past, specifically the myth of his grandfather, when Carl Joseph declares to his
troubled and bewildered father in drunken anguish:
‘[A]n das Bild hab’ ich immer gedacht. Ich bin nicht stark genug für dieses
Bild. Die Toten! Ich kann die Toten nicht vergessen! Vater, ich kann gar
nichts vergessen! Vater!’ (V, 296-97)
Demant shares with Carl Joseph the awareness of living “ein Leben mit
Widerhaken” (V, 210), but in his case it does not result from a paralyzing feeling
that he is unable to fulfil expectations imposed by the past. While he knows that
his Orthodox Eastern Jewish grandfather576 would have been horrified to know
that his grandson had assimilated and joined the army,577 his sense of a mired life
575
576
577
Carl Joseph’s inability to confront and assess his present reality is given metaphoric
expression in his inability to calculate his financial debt and his childlike abandonment of any
attempt to do so: “Er konnte nicht rechnen. Seine kleinen Notizbücher hätten von seinen
trostlosen Bemühungen, Ordnung zu halten, zeugen können. Unendliche Zahlenkolonnen
standen auf jeder Seite. Sie verwirrten und vermischten sich aber, er verlor sie gleichsam aus
den Händen, sie addierten sich selbst und trogen ihn mit falschen Summen, sie galoppierten
vor seinen sehenden Augen davon, sie kehrten im nächsten Augenblick verwandelt zurück
und waren nicht mehr zu erkennen. […] Schließlich langweilte ihn jede Zahl. Und er gab ein
für allemal jeden Rechenversuch auf, mit dem Mut, den Ohnmacht und Verzweiflung
erzeugen.” (V, 373)
Demant’s grandfather’s long silver beard signifies that he is an Orthodox Jew: “Für streng
erzogene Juden, besonders für Anhänger des Chassidismus, geht das Tragen eines Vollbarts
[…] auf die Vorschriften des Gesetzes und der Bibel zurück. ‘Ihr sollt euer Haar am Haupt
nicht rund umher abschneiden, noch euren Bart gar abscheren’, heißt es ausdrücklich (3 Mose
19:27)”: Edward Timms, “Doppeladler und Backenbart. Zur Symbolik der österreichjüdischen Symbiose bei Joseph Roth,” Literatur und Kritik 247/248 (1990): 320.
“Wenn er gewußt hätte, daß sein Enkel einmal in der Uniform eines Offiziers und mörderisch
bewaffnet durch die Welt spazieren würde, hätte er sein Alter verflucht und die Frucht seiner
Lenden.” (V, 210-11)
156
has resulted from his failure to change its course, a failure he attributes to fate,578
but which in truth is the result of his incapacity to make decisions and act upon
them:
Man sank der Armee geradezu in die Arme. Sieben Jahre Essen, sieben Jahre
Trinken, sieben Jahre Kleidung, sieben Jahre Obdach, sieben, sieben lange
Jahre! Man wurde Militärarzt. Und man blieb es. […] Und ehe man einen
Entschluß gefaßt hatte, war man ein alter Mann. (V, 212)579
The use of the pronoun man instead of er distances the decision to join and remain
in the army from the person who made the decision, this signifying an
unwillingness, whether conscious or unconscious, to take responsibility for the
decision and passivity in the face of discontent. In addition, the use of the
imperfect (sank, wurde, blieb) after man gives the statements a ring of finality,
while at the same time implying the wish that it were otherwise, “der Wunsch,
daß man kein Militärarzt wäre”.580 As Reidel-Schrewe explains,
[i]n der Doppeldeutigkeit dieser Sprachform, die sowohl die Gebundenheit
an die Vergangenheit als auch den Wunsch, sich aus dieser Gebundenheit zu
lösen, zum Ausdruck bringt, manifestiert sich die Stagnation der
Gegenwartserfahrung im Bewußtsein des Reflektierenden.581
Demant’s inability to extricate himself from the past and the consequent
stagnation of his life sheds further light on Carl Joseph’s predicament. Demant
has continued to live the life of an army doctor despite recognizing it to be a
meaningless existence, as he expresses on the eve of the duel: “‘Dieser Tod ist
unsinnig! […] So unsinnig, wie mein Leben gewesen ist!’” (V, 233) This
recognition and the ability to articulate it distinguishes Demant from Carl Joseph,
but the reality of a meaningless existence applies to both of them. What renders
their lives so futile is revealed through Demant’s memory of his father, the postal
official and former military paymaster. The father’s tarot-playing, his drunken
command of the regimental crockery each year on the Emperor’s birthday, and
especially his regimental uniform, which hangs symbolically in the cupboard “wie
578
579
580
“Wenn mir das Schicksal günstig gewesen wäre, hätte ich Assistent des großen Wiener
Chirurgen und wahrscheinlich Professor werden können.” (V, 210)
This passage recalls Werfel’s description of the Habsburg world as permeated by a “grandiose
inertia which showed itself in its masterly ability to defer solutions”: cited in Manger, “Roth
and the Habsburg Myth,” 50. Thus Demant’s inability to make decisions represents a certain
mentality fostered by the Habsburg Empire.
157
eine in drei Teile zerlegte und immer noch lebendige Persönlichkeit” (V, 211)
evidence some sort of identity crisis, but the source of this crisis is not
immediately apparent. As with his son the regimental doctor, there is no evidence
that the father feels a loss of identity as a result of his assimilation, though such a
reading is not unthinkable. The posthumous transformation of the father in his
wife’s memory, however, suggests that an alternative interpretation is more likely:
Und im getreuen Gedächtnis der Witwe blieb der Tote haften, das Muster
eines Ehemannes, gestorben im Dienste des Kaisers und der kaiserköniglichen Post. Die Uniformen, die des Unteroffiziers, die des
Postoffizianten Demant, hingen noch nebeneinander im Schrank, von der
Witwe mittels Kampfer, Bürste und Sidol in stetem Glanz erhalten. Sie sahen
aus wie Mumien, und sooft der Schrank geöffnet wurde, glaubte der Sohn,
zwei Leichen seines seligen Vaters nebeneinander zu sehn. (V, 212)
The two corpses, together with the fiction of a death in the service of Emperor and
Empire – Demant’s father died of a stroke in bed – suggest symbolically that
these two pillars of the Empire, the army and the bureaucracy, are bereft of
content (sinnentleert).582 Father and son, both in the employ of the state, suffer a
crisis of identity not because of their assimilation but because of the moribund
state of the Empire they serve.
That the memory of seeing his father’s corpse-like uniforms is followed directly
by the statement “Man wollte um jeden Preis Arzt werden” (V, 212) implies that
Demant wanted to become a doctor at all costs because he recognized the lack of
meaning afforded by service to the Empire, whether in the military or in the
bureaucracy; his subsequent enlistment was not due to a change of heart but to
poverty (V, 212). Demant’s insight sheds light on Carl Joseph’s dilemma. Unlike
Demant’s “kluger Kopf” (V, 239), “der einfache Kopf” (V, 239) of Carl Joseph is
not capable of comprehending that “die Lebensform des Offiziers ist nicht mehr
von sich aus sinnerfüllt”;583 nevertheless, Carl Joseph too suffers “zunehmend
unter der Leere seines Dienstes, in dem sich, ohne daß er es zunächst ahnt, die
581
582
583
In connection with the military corpse, the father’s drunken commanding of the kitchen
regiment implies that in the absence of any higher meaning, military life has been reduced to
play-acting.
Müller, “Radetzkymarsch,” 306.
158
Agonie einer zum Untergang bestimmten Welt niederschlägt.”584 Without
understanding why or how, Carl Joseph, the quintessential representative of the
Habsburg Myth, has lost faith in the Empire in which he as a fifteen-year-old
cadet believed so utterly and which he was so eager to serve (V, 160).
Chojnicki’s Insight
The reason for the loss of meaning in serving Emperor and Empire, symbolized in
the military and bureaucratic corpses of Demant’s father, is articulated by Graf
Chojnicki, the eccentric Polish count who becomes a second father-figure to Carl
Joseph. Chojnicki asserts that if he were to become Minister for Culture and
Education or section head in the Ministry of the Interior that would be no less
peculiar than it is for him to continue to make his absurd and futile attempts to
produce gold: “‘[w]eil das Vaterland nicht mehr da ist.’” (V, 289). His
explanation to the bewildered and dismayed Bezirkshauptmann recalls and further
illuminates the earlier image of the military and bureaucratic corpses:
‘Natürlich! […] wörtlich genommen, besteht [die Monarchie] noch. Wir
haben noch eine Armee’ – der Graf wies auf den Leutnant – ‘und Beamte’ –
der Graf zeigte auf den Bezirkshauptmann. ‘Aber sie zerfällt bei lebendigem
Leibe. Sie zerfällt, sie ist schon verfallen! Ein Greis, dem Tode geweiht, von
jedem Schnupfen gefährdet, hält den alten Thron, einfach durch das Wunder,
daß er auf ihm noch sitzen kann. Wie lange noch, wie lange noch?’ (V, 290)
The monarchy itself is moribund. The institutions that support it – the army and
the bureaucracy – still exist in the literal sense of the word, but they cannot halt
the inevitable decline of the last Emperor and have become themselves the
“Spiegelbild der Hinfälligkeit des Reiches”.585 Furthermore, the third pillar of the
Empire, the Church, which is evoked here for the first time in the text, is not only
unable to arrest the process of decline and help rejuvenate the monarchy (the
“Greis”), but has itself been replaced by a modern form of religion:
‘Die Zeit will uns nicht mehr! Diese Zeit will sich erst selbständige
584
585
Müller, “Radetzkymarsch,” 306. Much later, after Carl Joseph has become aware of this fact,
his inability to do as Demant advises before his death and leave the army in order to have
some hope of a meaningful existence, is conveyed with the same image of the corpse: “Er
stand auf, um die offene Tür des Kleiderschranks zu schließen. Da hing, sauber und gerade,
eine gebügelte Leiche, der frei, dunkelgraue, zivilistische Trotta. Über ihm schloß sich der
Kasten. Ein Sarg: begraben! begraben!” (V, 377) Carl Joseph’s passivity is underscored by the
use of the passive voice in the second-last sentence.
159
Nationalstaaten schaffen! Man glaubt nicht mehr an Gott. Die neue Religion
ist der Nationalismus. […] Die Monarchie, unsere Monarchie, ist gegründet
auf der Frömmigkeit: auf dem Glauben, daß Gott die Habsburger erwählt hat,
über soundso viel christliche Völker zu regieren. Unser Kaiser ist ein
weltlicher Bruder des Papstes, es ist Seine K. u. K. Apostolische Majestät,
keine andere wie er apostolisch, keine andere Majestät in Europa so abhängig
von der Gnade Gottes und vom Glauben der Völker an die Gnade Gottes. Der
deutsche Kaiser regiert, wenn Gott ihn verläßt, immer noch; eventuell von
der Gnade der Nation. Der Kaiser von Österreich-Ungarn darf nicht von Gott
verlassen werden. Nun aber hat ihn Gott verlassen!’ (V, 290)
Some critics contend that Roth styled Chojnicki – the “hellsichtige[r] Analytiker
der Zeit” and “Sprachrohr des Erzählers”586 – on himself, thus implying that the
reader may take Chojnicki’s words as indicative of Roth’s own views.587
Conversely, these critics also tend to project the views Roth expressed in his
journalism of the 1930s onto the fictional character, reading more into the Count’s
words than can be justified by the text. Sidney Rosenfeld, for example, asserts
that for Roth Austrian universality was “an article of faith” and thus
the monarchy was fated to decline when its constituent peoples betrayed the
principle of supranationality for what Roth condemned quite literally as the
idolatory of nationalism. […] In The Radetzky March it is the Galician-Polish
landowner Count Chojnicki, portrayed as the embodiment of Austrianism,
who voices this conviction, clearly in Roth’s own name.588
Critics such as Rosenfeld who project Roth’s politics onto Chojnicki place too
much emphasis on the Count’s observation that the people have replaced faith in
God and the Emperor with faith in nationalism and neglect to ask why. Yet Roth’s
interest extends well beyond the diagnosis of a failure of belief; he wants to know
why people stopped believing in “Österreich” and turned to nationalism. His
conclusion is that “Österreich” was only a myth, a myth which was continually
reinforced and reproduced and which is symbolized in the novel by the March of
the title.
586
587
588
Müller, “Radetzkymarsch,” 310. Böning also interprets Chojnicki as voicing the views of the
narrator: Böning, Radetzkymarsch 86.
Landwehr explicitly states that Chojnicki voices Roth’s views: Margarete Johanna Landwehr,
“Modernist Aesthetics in Joseph Roth's Radetzkymarsch: The Crisis of Meaning and the Role
of the Reader,” The German Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2003): 404. See also Karlheinz F.
Auckenthaler, “Man hat den Doppeladler verjagt: und die Aasgeier sind gekommen. Joseph
Roth und Österreich,” in Lauter Einzelfälle. Bekanntes und Unbekanntes zur neueren
österreichischen Literatur, ed. Karlheinz F. Auckenthaler, New Yorker Beiträge zur
österreichischen Literaturgeschichte (Bern: Lang, 1996), 325.
Rosenfeld, Understanding 47. See also Bronsen, Biographie 397; Böning, Radetzkymarsch
86.
160
The March: “Einmal in der Woche, am Sonntag, war Österreich”589
Between the time of its preprint in the Frankfurter Zeitung in April 1932 and its
publication by Kiepenheuer later that same year, the title of Roth’s novel was
amended from Der Radetzkymarsch to simply Radetzkymarsch.590 Roth’s lastminute decision to omit the definite article is an indication that the March has
metaphorical significance in the novel. The complex subtext of the March is
threefold, but most critics limit their analysis to the first and most immediately
apparent of its connotations: Field Marshall Radetzky’s591 decisive victory at
Custozza in 1848, which more than any other event enabled the survival of the
Empire at that critical moment in history.592 In 1848 the collapse of the Habsburg
Monarchy seemed imminent: revolutionary violence forced Metternich to resign
and Emperor Ferdinand I to flee Vienna twice and eventually abdicate in favour
of his nephew Franz Joseph, and both the Italians and the Hungarians were
preparing to break free from Habsburg hegemony.593 Radetzky’s victories against
the Italians not only preserved the territorial integrity of the Empire, but also
contributed to the failure of the revolutions of 1848, enabling the Monarchy’s
power to be restored.594 Radetzky’s role in the Monarchy’s salvation inspired
Johann Strauß the elder to compose “Der Radetzky-Marsch” in the Field
Marshall’s honour, that famous composition of which it has been said: “Wenn es
eine völkerumspannende Seele Alt-Österreichs gab, im Radetzky-Marsch hatte sie
unsterblichen Ausdruck in Rhythmen gefunden.”595 By alluding to the celebration
of Radetzky’s victory and the triumphant reinstatement of Habsburg hegemony,
589
590
591
592
593
594
595
Joseph Wenzel Graf Radetzky von Radatz was Field Marshall from 1836 until 1857, and is
legendary for his virtually unbroken record of victory: Kessler, “Überdauern im ewigen
Untergang,” 636.
For a detailed account of Radetzky’s role in this survival see Alan Sked, The Survival of the
Habsburg Empire: Radetzky, the Imperial Army and the Class War, 1848 (London; New
York: Longman, 1979).
Sked, Survival ix.
Kurt Honolka, in K. Honolka, K. Reinhard and L. Richter, Knaurs Weltgeschichte der Musik
(München; Zürich, 1968) 409; quoted in Kessler, “Überdauern im ewigen Untergang,” 636.
Magris similarly claims that the March “[verkörpert] mit ihrem mitreißenden Rhythmus fast
die Seele der Monarchie”: Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos 117.
161
Roth’s title evokes, on one level, “die letzte Glanzzeit des Militärs”,596
encouraging nostalgia for an intact and powerful Habsburg Empire.
Most critics who discuss the implications of the novel’s title mention only this
most obvious association and take it as evidence of Roth’s nostalgic and escapist
intent.597 Yet the connotations are more complex and ambiguous than they first
appear. Radetzky’s Italian victories did reverse the embattled Monarchy’s
fortunes, but not for long: just eleven years later the Battle of Solferino saw the
Habsburg Army experience a decisive defeat against a Franco-Piedmontese
alliance598 – the first of a series of defeats which would stand like milestones
along the road to the Empire’s collapse.599 The juxtaposition of the novel’s title
with the Battle of Solferino depicted on the first page is deliberate,600 reminding
the reader that Radetzky’s triumph was in fact a “last hurrah” – it was the last time
military strength would save the doomed Monarchy and Empire:601
Von da an gab es nur noch Niederlagen. Und auch dort, wo Schlachten
gewonnen wurden, standen am Ende verlorene Kriege und verlorene
Provinzen. Am Ende die verlorene Monarchie.602
From the opening pages of the novel, then, the nostalgia evoked by the title
Radetzkymarsch is undercut, this adding a second layer of meaning to the use of
the March as a leitmotif.603
596
597
598
599
600
601
602
603
Albert Klein, “Joseph Roth: Radetzkymarsch,” in Deutsche Romane von Grimmelshausen bis
Walser. Interpretationen für den Literaturunterricht, ed. Jakob Lehmann (Königstein/Ts:
Scriptor, 1982), 272.
See, for example, Kessler, “Überdauern im ewigen Untergang”. Bronsen does not suggest any
other connotations of the title, but does recognize Roth’s ironic intention, insofar as the
“Österreich” evoked by the March – Österreich as idea – is shown to exist only as an ideal, not
as a reality: Bronsen, Biographie 398-400.
The Habsburg Army lost again to Prussia in 1866, this loss both determining their exclusion
from the German Reich in 1871 and forcing the Habsburgs into the Ausgleich with Hungary in
1867, after which it never recovered its former strength.
The first mention of the Battle of Solferino occurs in the second sentence of the novel.
As Branscombe notes, Roth would not have had to explain to his Austrian readers that the
Battle of Solferino was “eine entschiedene Niederlage”: Branscombe, “Symbolik in
Radetzkymarsch,” 96.
Hellmut Andics, Das österreichische Jahrhundert. Die Donaumonarchie 1804-1900 (Wien;
München: Molden, 1976) 114.
Cf. Heath, who notes that the title of the novel reflects the theme of Sein versus Schein: “the
Radetzky March was intended to reflect imperial glory, while Radetzky’s deeds in 1848
actually marked the beginning of the end”: Heath, “Legacy of the Baroque,” 334.
162
The immediate consequence of the loss at Solferino was the cession of Lombardy
to Sardinia-Piedmont. It was the first time a territory had been taken from the
Habsburgs in the nationalist cause, in this case the campaign for Italian
unification.604 The Italian movement represented “an idea totally subversive of the
Habsburg Monarchy”, threatening the very “Austrian idea”:
The Italian radicals did not seek concessions from the Habsburgs, did not
seek to ‘capture’ the dynasty, or to secure a special position within the
Empire; they did not even seek historic respectability by invoking ‘the iron
crown of Lombardy’.605
For Klaus-Detlef Müller, one of few critics to comment on the significance of the
starting point of the novel,606 Roth’s reason for choosing the 1859 battle to begin
his epic tale is clear: “Roth hat im Radetzkymarsch ganz ausdrücklich den
Nationalismus der Teilvölker als Ursache für die Zerstörung des habsburgischen
Reiches verstanden”.607 Yet although this conclusion is supported by Müller’s
arguments,608 Roth’s meaning is far more complex: the intricate interplay between
the Battle of Solferino as depicted first by the narrator and then in a very different
version in the school reader, its historical outcome from which both of these
narrations depart, and the nostalgia evoked by the novel’s title critically evokes
the Habsburg Myth and links the operations of this myth with the nationalism of
the Monarchy’s subject peoples. This is the third level of signification of the
novel’s title.
The Myth of the Hero, the Habsburg Myth and the Radetzky-Marsch
While the historical Battle of Solferino ended in inglorious defeat for the
Habsburg Empire, this fact is never acknowledged by the novel’s characters in
whose collective memory of the event only the glorious triumph of the Hero of
604
605
606
607
608
Müller, “Radetzkymarsch,” 301. Müller notes the role played also by Napoleon III’s power
politics: Müller, “Radetzkymarsch,” 300.
Müller himself comments on the surprising lack of commentary on this point: Müller,
“Radetzkymarsch,” 300.
Müller cites the narrator’s reference to Solferino in Chapter XVIII (“[…] und der Name
‘Solferino’ weckte in ihnen Schauder und Ehrfurcht, der Name der Schlacht, die zum
erstenmal den Untergang der kaiser- und königlichen Monarchie angekündigt hatte”: V, 402)
and Chojnicki’s declaration that nationalism is the new religion as evidence for his
conclusion: Müller, “Radetzkymarsch,” 301.
163
Solferino and the Emperor as related in the school reader are evoked.609 The
omission of any mention of the defeat leads Bronsen to conclude that the novel
begins “mit Siegeszuversicht und dem Gefühl der Sicherheit”.610 Yet Roth’s
intention in choosing the Battle of Solferino as the starting point for his novel is
not to create a false “heile Welt” in comparison with which the decline depicted in
the remainder of the novel will appear more stark, but to indicate that the
operation of the Habsburg Myth is already underway. The sense of security of
which Bronsen writes is ironically undercut when the myth created by the
bureaucrats around Lieutenant Trotta’s “Heldentat” is exposed, since the outcome
of the battle lost by the Habsburgs is also falsified in the school reader: “Damals
geriet die ganze feindliche Reiterei in Gefangenschaft.” (V, 145) The fact that
nobody from Trotta’s wife and his friend to the Emperor himself objects to the
falsification not only of Trotta’s part in the story, but also of the outcome of the
battle, suggests a widespread willingness to suppress uncomfortable facts which
do not accord with people’s idea of the world. The Radetzky March is implicated
in this conspiracy of silence, since from the second chapter through to the end of
the novel Carl Joseph connects the March’s victorious tones with the legend of his
grandfather.611 Thus the Radetzky March serves to symbolize the Habsburg Myth
critically evoked by Roth’s several re-writings of the Battle of Solferino.
The primary component of the Habsburg Myth, that collective “flight from
reality” which arose in the early nineteenth century, initially as a result of efforts
at the political level “für ein immer problematischer werdendes Staatsgefüge
Existenzgründe zu finden und auf solche Weise die Energien von der konkreten
Wahrnehmung der Wirklichkeit abzulenken,”612 was the idea of Austria as a
supranational Empire:
609
610
611
612
Only once, towards the end of the novel, is the true significance of Solferino acknowledged:
“[D]er Name ‘Solferino’ weckte in ihnen Schauder und Ehrfurcht, der Name der Schlacht, die
zum erstenmal den Untergang der kaiser- und königlichen Monarchie angekündigt hatte.” (V,
402) Yet significantly, the defeat is not spoken of; the characters are simply reported to
shudder and feel reverence at the mention of the word Solferino, so that it appears only the
narrator is consciously aware of the loss of the battle and its significance for the future of the
Empire.
Cf. Müller, “Radetzkymarsch,” 302.
164
Das übernationale Ideal, das noch in der väterlich-strengen Anfangswendung
der Proklamationen Franz Josephs ‘An meine Völker’ Ausdruck findet, war
das ideologische Fundament der Donaumonarchie, ihre geistige und
propagandistische Stütze im Kampfe gegen das moderne Erwachen der
nationalen Kräfte, kurz, eine Waffe des habsburgischen Kampfes gegen die
Geschichte.613
The link which Roth demonstrates between the myth of supranationalism and the
nationalism of the Monarchy’s subject peoples is the most obscure but also the
most important aspect of the title’s subtext.
Radetzky’s Italian victories are recognized to have contributed to the failure of the
1848 revolutions, not only in Vienna, but across Europe. In 1850 French Baroness
Blaze de Bury recalled:
The proof of the importance of Radetzky’s Italian Campaign lay in the
discouragement [with] which the revolutionists were seized, upon the news
of his successes. When the entrance into Milan of the Austrians was known
in Paris, you would have thought the republicans had heard their deathknell.614
The collapse of the revolution in Austria was naturally experienced by both the
nobility and the Monarchy as a victory; yet the survival of the Monarchy came at
a cost which is not often acknowledged but which plays a vital role in
Radetzkymarsch. Radetzky was celebrated in the Strauß March above all as “the
restorer of order in 1848”615 – because of his role in the defeat of the revolution.
The March is thus associated with the Habsburgs’ use of military force not only
against an external foe but also against its own citizens, whose revolutionary aims
blended democratic and national aspirations616 and thus conflicted with an
Imperial tradition built on loyalty to the dynasty and the supranationalism that
613
614
615
616
Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos 12. Le Rider gives a much more hardline reading: “[T]he
principle of supranationality can be reckoned as one of the finest deceptions of the official
ideology, a cloak for the hegemony of the German and Hungarian nations and the tendency for
nationalistic and racist feeling to intensify”: Jacques Le Rider, “Hugo von Hofmannsthal and
the Austrian Idea of Central Europe,” in The Habsburg Legacy: National Identity in Historical
Perspective, ed. Ritchie Robertson and Edward Timms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1994), 125.
The Baroness Blaze de Bury, Germania: Its Courts, Camps and Peoples, 2 vols. (London,
1850) Vol. II, 144-45, fn. 2; quoted in Sked, Survival ix-x.
The circumstances surrounding Strauß’s composition mirror this internal struggle: he
composed his celebratory march in part as a demonstration against his revolutionary sons, who
had gone to the barricades: Bronsen, Biographie 399. Strauß’s son Johann Strauß the younger
composed revolutionary marches: Kessler, “Überdauern im ewigen Untergang,” 636.
165
loyalty entailed.617 In this context, Demant’s quotation of the biblical aphorism
“Wer die Hand gegen seinesgleichen erhebt, ist ein Mörder” (V, 234) on the eve
of his duel with Tattenbach acquires a significance beyond the Jewish doctor’s
fear of betraying his people.
This last implication of the novel’s title and leitmotif is extended and given
concrete form in the present in the description of Carl Joseph’s first garrison in
Moravia:
Es schien, als wäre die Kaserne als ein Zeichen der habsburgischen Macht
von der kaiser- und königlichen Armee in die slawische Provinz
hineingestellt worden. […] Stand man am äußersten Nordrand der Stadt am
Ende der Straße […], so konnte man an klaren Tagen in der Ferne das breite,
gewölbte, schwarzgelbe Tor der Kaserne erblicken, das wie ein mächtiges
habsburgisches Schild der Stadt entgegengehalten wurde, eine Drohung, ein
Schutz, und beides zugleich. Das Regiment war in Mähren gelegen. Aber
seine Mannschaft bestand nicht aus Tschechen, wie man hätte glauben
mögen, sondern aus Ukrainern und Rumänen. (V, 192)
The paradox inherent in Habsburg hegemony is that it both protects its Slav
citizens from external enemies and threatens them as an internal enemy.618 The
unstated reason for the rank and file in this Moravian garrison consisting not of
Czechs but of Ukrainians and Rumanians is the climate of intensifying
nationalism: “Because the army might have to put down agitation by Bohemian
Sokols or Ruthenians in Bukovina, officials stationed Slav recruits far from their
homelands under German officers.”619
Carl Joseph’s first and only experience of active military duty before the outbreak
of war pits him against an internal enemy: the striking workers from the brush
factory. The suppression of “staatsgefährliche Umtriebe” (V, 331) by Carl
Joseph’s platoon echoes the crushing of the 1848 revolutionaries by an army then
under Radetzky’s command.620 The reference to Carl Joseph in this context as a
617
618
619
620
Not surprisingly, it became increasingly difficult to administer the state on these terms after
1848: Williams, The Broken Eagle 106.
Cf. Müller, “Radetzkymarsch,” 307; Adolf D. Klarman, “Das Österreichbild im
Radetzkymarsch,” in Joseph Roth und die Tradition, ed. David Bronsen (Darmstadt: Agora,
1975), 154.
This parallel is underscored when Carl Joseph thinks of Frau von Taußig “im ‘Süden’” with
Chojnicki and feels betrayed (“verraten”): “Da lag er nun in der Grenzgarnison am Wegrand
und wartete – nicht auf den Feind, sondern auf die Demonstranten.” (V, 336)
166
“Protektionskind”621 (V, 333) emphasizes his role as the representative of the
Emperor, so that when he faces the workers, it is as if Franz Joseph himself, who
began all his proclamations with the words “An meine Völker”, were
commanding the soldiers to shoot at these his people.
That the use of violence against its own people is an immediate cause of the fall of
the Monarchy is revealed by the narrator through the reporting of Carl Joseph’s
thoughts as he is faced by the workers singing the “Internationale” in three
languages (V, 336), representing a very different idea from the Radetzky
March:622
Den Leutnant ergriff eine dunkle Ahnung vom Untergang der Welt. Er
erinnerte sich an den bunten Glanz der Fronleichnamsprozession, und einen
kurzen Augenblick schien es ihm, als wallte die finstere Wolke der Rebellen
jenem kaiserlichen Zug entgegen. Für die Dauer eines einzigen hurtigen
Augenblicks kam über den Leutnant die erhabene Kraft, in Bildern zu
schauen; und er sah die Zeiten wie zwei Felsen gegeneinanderrollen, und er
selbst, der Leutnant, ward zwischen beiden zertrümmert. (V, 336)
Fronleichnam: Belief and Blindness
It is significant that Carl Joseph remembers the “bunte[…] Glanz der
Fronleichnamsprozession” at this point, a visual performance of the Habsburg
Myth which he ecstatically witnessed during a trip to Vienna in the previous
chapter. In the Habsburg Empire Fronleichnam, the Corpus Christi procession,
celebrated the interdependence of church and state each year on the Thursday
following Trinity Sunday.623 The ritual celebration of the transubstantiation of the
body and blood of Christ is a metaphor for the ostensible vitality of a moribund
Monarchy and hints at the role of the Church in maintaining the myth of the
Habsburgs and of an intact Empire. The juxtaposition of this parade with the grim
621
622
623
Johnston details the inequities of the institution of Protektion, by which the upper nobility
influenced most aspects of public life: Johnston, The Austrian Mind 43-44.
Cf. Klein, “Radetzkymarsch,” 275.
Johnston, The Austrian Mind 57. Since the Enlightenment and the influence of Joseph von
Sonnenfels, religion in Austria had been seen as an instrument for the support of state
authority: see Robert A. Kann, Kanzel und Katheder. Studien zur österreichischen
Geistesgeschichte vom Spätbarock zur Frühromantik (Wien, 1962): 174f.; cited in Wolfgang
Martens, “Die Habsburgische Monarchie als sakrale Instanz bei Joseph Roth,” Sprachkunst 22
(1991): 239. This is reflected in the Bezirkshauptmann’s attitude to religion: “[…] zeit seines
Lebens [hatte er] die Angelegenheiten des Himmels den Theologen überlassen und im übrigen
die Kirche, die Messe, die Zeremonie am Fronleichnamstag, den Klerus und den lieben Gott
für Einrichtungen der Monarchie gehalten”. (V, 290-91)
167
reality of the military’s role in the border areas of the Empire sheds further light
on the operations of the myth of supranationalism. Carl Joseph’s struggle to
identify with the ideal of Emperor and Empire with which he has been instilled
since childhood has intensified with his move to the Galician garrison on the
Empire’s far-eastern border, where the signs of decay and decline are more
obvious than at the Empire’s centre. The outward symptoms of his increasing
resignation – his falling prey to alcohol and gambling624 – prompt his fatherfigure friend Chojnicki to send him to Vienna with Frau von Taußig, a much older
woman who becomes his second mother-figure and lover after Frau Slama. Carl
Joseph’s affairs with maternal older women indicate that in adulthood he has
remained a child,625 incapable of taking responsibility for himself. His immaturity
is implicated in his eager, if ultimately transitory, embrace of the appearance of a
still intact world which is presented in the parade, his fervour reflecting his
desperate desire to identify with the Austrian ideal through his role in the military
and his idea of the example of his grandfather:
In Carl Joseph standen die alten kindischen und heldischen Träume auf, die
ihn zu Hause, in den Ferien auf dem väterlichen Balkon, bei den Klängen des
Radetzkymarsches erfüllt und beglückt hatten. Die ganze majestätische
Macht des alten Reiches zog vor seinen Augen dahin. Der Leutnant dachte an
seinen Großvater, den Helden von Solferino, und an den unerschütterlichen
Patriotismus seines Vaters, der einem kleinen, aber starken Fels vergleichbar
war, mitten unter den ragenden Bergen der habsburgischen Macht. Er dachte
an seine eigene heilige Aufgabe, für den Kaiser zu sterben, jeden Augenblick
zu Wasser und zu Lande und auch in der Luft, mit einem Worte, an jedem
Orte. (V, 320)
The narrator’s pointedly ironic description of Carl Joseph’s subjective experience
of his relationship with Frau von Taußig is placed just prior to the above passage
and indicates that the reader should approach Carl Joseph’s response to the parade
sceptically. The narrator not only distances himself from Carl Joseph’s
interpretation of the nature of his relationship with Frau von Taußig, but openly
contradicts it:626
624
625
626
That Carl Joseph’s struggle is not unique is reflected in the addictions of his fellow officers.
“[D]as Kindsein setzt sich bis in das Mannesalter fort”: Derré, “Militärerziehung,” 57. Carl
Joseph’s inability to take responsibility for himself is reflected also in his friendships with the
father-figures Demant and Chojnicki.
Cf. Derré, who notes the self-deception which this return to childhood beliefs entails: “Nach
jedem Schlag bedeutet die Rückkehr zum Vater, zum Väterlichen in der legendären
Kaisergestalt, Rettung aber gleichzeitig den feigen Wunsch, sich in einer Scheinwelt weiter
treiben zu lassen”: Derré, “Militärerziehung,” 58.
168
Dem Leutnant Trotta erschien die Welt verändert. Infolgedessen stellte er
fest, daß er soeben die Liebe kennengelernt habe, das heißt: die
Verwirklichung seiner Vorstellungen von der Liebe. In Wirklichkeit war er
nur dankbar, ein gesättigtes Kind. (V, 320)
Carl Joseph’s self-deception is mirrored in Frau von Taußig’s insatiable appetite
for young men in her attempts to ward off the aging process:
Frau von Taußig stellte dem nahenden Alter junge Männer entgegen wie
Dämme. Aus Angst vor ihrem erkennenden Blick ging sie mit geschlossenen
Augen in jedes ihrer sogenannten Abenteuer. Und sie verzauberte mit ihren
Wünschen die törichten Männer für den eigenen Gebrauch. (V, 317)
The wilful blindness seen earlier in the novel in Dr. Demant, who “liebte nicht,
um jeden Preis die Wahrheit zu hören” (V, 214), is comically heightened in the
descriptions of Frau von Taußig’s desire “ihr wirkliches Alter zu vernichten,
auszurotten, in dem Meer ihrer Leidenschaft zu versenken” (V, 330). The
determination of both Demant and Frau von Taußig not to see the truth reflects
the importance of appearance over reality which characterizes Roth’s depiction of
the Habsburg Empire.627 Just as Frau von Taußig’s wilful blindness is an
expression of her desire to appear young, the duel is fought for the sake of the
appearance of honour, and Taittinger declares to the assembled officers: “Also,
Hauptsache,
meine
Herren,
ist
strengste
Diskretion
gegenüber
der
Zivilbevölkerung!” (V, 222) The most extreme exponent of the importance of
appearances is the Bezirkshauptmann, who manifests a wilful blindness in the
face of nationalist movements:
In seinem Sprachschatz, auch im dienstlichen, kam [das Wort Revolution]
nicht vor; und wenn er in dem Bericht eines seiner Untergebenen etwa die
Bezeichnung ‘revolutionärer Agitator’ für einen der aktiven
Sozialdemokraten las, so strich er dieses Wort und verbesserte mit roter
Tinte: ‘verdächtiges Individuum’. Vielleicht gab es irgendwo in der
Monarchie Revolutionäre: Im Bezirk des Herrn von Trotta kamen sie nicht
vor. (V, 270)
The comic sub-plot of Frau von Taußig’s attempts to ward off age through
vampire-like liaisons with young men both indicates the prevalence of the desire
to deny reality and represents the futility of any attempt to do so. Just as Frau von
Taußig cannot become younger, denying the reality of the decline of the Empire
627
For Landwehr the leitmotif of blindness “suggests the subjective nature of meaning. The
pervasive references to and toying with notions of blindness and clarity suggest that meaning
is imposed upon reality by the viewer”: Landwehr, “Modernist Aesthetics,” 407.
169
and the emptiness of the Austrian myth – “Nein, die Welt ging nicht unter, wie
Chojnicki gesagt hatte, man sah mit eigenen Augen, wie sie lebte!” (V, 322)628 –
will not prevent the inevitable. The narrator’s irony could scarcely be more
palpable, since the impending collapse has been evoked in the potent image of the
previous paragraph:
Kein Leutnant der kaiser- und königlichen Armee hätte dieser Zeremonie
gleichgültig zusehen können. Und Carl Joseph war einer der
Empfindlichsten. Er sah den goldenen Glanz, den die Prozession verströmte,
und er hörte nicht den düstern Flügelschlag der Geier. Denn über dem
Doppeladler der Habsburger kreisten sie schon, die Geier, seine brüderlichen
Feinde. (V, 322)
The eyes deceive, and the mind eagerly believes.
Watching the parade evokes in Carl Joseph the happy memory of his childhood
visits to his father’s house and the Sunday concerts which always began with the
Radetzky March. Carl Joseph has encountered the March twice in quite different
contexts since becoming a lieutenant: first in the brothel, where its degradation
through the setting629 is matched by the shocked Carl Joseph’s discovery and
rescue of the portrait of the Emperor “[i]n einem bronzenen, von Fliegen
betupften Rahmen” (V, 209); then in the bar where he finds Demant just hours
before the duel where the March is corrupted even further:
In der Wirtsstube schmetterte der Musikapparat wieder, ein Potpourri aus
bekannten Märschen, zwischen denen die ersten Trommeltakte des
Radetzkymarsches, entstellt durch heisere Nebengeräusche, aber immer noch
kenntlich, in bestimmten Zeitabständen erklangen. (V, 233)
The progressive debasement of the Radetzky March in these episodes underscores
the decay of the military and the Empire, marching towards its collapse. Now, in
the context of memories evoked by the Fronleichnam parade, the March is
restored to its original military splendour as the inspiration for Carl Joseph’s
“alte[...] kindische[...] und heldische[...] Träume”. The reader recalls that it was
628
629
The childish conviction is attributable to Carl Joseph through its context – his perception of
the parade has just been described – but the pronoun man here also encompasses the entire
audience of the procession.
This degradation is also signalled in transformation of the sound: where once “[d]ie herben
Trommeln wirbelten, die süßen Flöten pfiffen, und die holden Tschinellen schmetterten” (V,
156) now a piano tinkles: “Drinnen begann das Klavier sofort zu klimpern: den
Radetzkymarsch.” (V, 207)
170
not only Carl Joseph who was affected by the Radetzky March at those Sunday
concerts:
Auf den Gesichtern aller Zuhörer ging ein gefälliges und versonnenes
Lächeln auf, und in ihren Beinen prickelte das Blut. Während sie noch
standen, glaubten sie schon zu marschieren. Die jüngeren Mädchen hielten
den Atem an und öffneten die Lippen. Die reiferen Männer ließen die Köpfe
hängen und gedachten ihrer Manöver. Die ältlichen Frauen saßen im
benachbarten Park, und ihre kleinen, grauen Köpfchen zitterten. Und es war
Sommer. (V, 156-57)
The highly evocative language and imagery in this passage is precisely the kind
that has led so many critics to read only nostalgia and transfiguration in
Radetzkymarsch. The narrator’s irony in this early passage is so understated as to
be easily overlooked: it is only the restrained ironic repetition of the final line of
this paragraph at the beginning of the next – “Und es war Sommer. / Ja, es war
Sommer.” (V, 157) – that undercuts the seemingly nostalgic evocation of an
idealized past. This ironic repetition of phrases with a slight variation or in a
changed context is characteristic of Roth’s literary texts and functions to expose
the reality hidden behind the words.630 The ironic note that accompanies the
Radetzky March in this second chapter is heightened by its reappearance in
conjunction with the Fronleichnam parade, the portrayal of which conveys the
appearance of an intact Empire and masks the reality of its inevitable decline.
While for Carl Joseph the Radetzky March is the “Nachklang einstiger
Vollkommenheit”,631 for the novel’s author it symbolizes the pervasive Habsburg
mentality which refuses to acknowledge present reality, preferring to live in and
off an imagined past.
Carl Joseph’s Recognition
Carl Joseph’s nostalgic reminiscence of a childhood full of heroic dreams as he
watches the Fronleichnam parade includes the pleasurable recollection of hearing
the Radetzky March. This concurrence of memory and music is repeated in the
next chapter with an ironic variation when Carl Joseph suddenly recollects the
Fronleichnam parade as he faces the workers singing the “Internationale” and has
a vision of himself crushed between the opposing forces of the Monarchy and the
630
631
171
new nationalism. The function of this ironic repetition is to remind the reader of
the superficial splendour of that parade which could only mask the inexorable
decline of the Empire. Watching the parade, Carl Joseph had been convinced that
the world was not going under (V, 322); just a few days later he sees that it is.
What has enabled him to see this – if only for a moment – is the opposition of the
Monarchy, which he represents, and the people, represented by the demonstrators.
Carl Joseph’s role in the deaths of these demonstrators marks a further stage in his
disillusionment. He is “entschlossen, endlich den Abschied zu nehmen” (V, 339),
and it is implied that this decision is due to a recognition: “Er hatte eine Art
Heimweh nach dem Vater, aber er wußte zugleich, daß sein Vater nicht mehr
seine Heimat war. Die Armee war nicht mehr sein Beruf.” (V, 339) The
Monarchy, represented by the two pillars of bureaucracy (the Bezirkshauptmann)
and military, cannot give Carl Joseph a sense of belonging. Presumably in an
attempt to recapture his youthful hope and faith, Carl Joseph re-reads some of the
books his father had assigned to him as holiday reading, “und jede Zeile erinnerte
ihn an den Vater und an die stillen, sommerlichen Sonntagvormittage und an
Jacques, an Kapellmeister Nechwal und an den Radetzkymarsch.” (V, 340) The
lack of any suggestion that these memories are comforting to Carl Joseph, or that
they rekindle his lost faith, implies that he has no reaction to the memories, an
implication subsequently confirmed when he sees the Emperor at manoeuvres
four weeks after leaving hospital:
[Trotta] stand vor seinem Zug, blaß, mager und gleichgültig. Als sich ihm
aber der Kaiser näherte, begann er, seine Gleichgültigkeit zu bemerken und
zu bedauern. Er hatte das Gefühl, eine Pflicht zu versäumen. Fremd
geworden war ihm die Armee. Fremd war ihm der Allerhöchste Kriegsherr.
Der Leutnant glich einem Manne, der nicht nur seine Heimat verloren hatte,
sondern auch das Heimweh nach dieser Heimat. […] Der Leutnant hätte sich
jenen Rausch wieder gewünscht, der ihn in allen festlichen Stunden seiner
militärischen Laufbahn erfüllt hatte, daheim, an den sommerlichen
Sonntagen, auf dem Balkon des väterlichen Hauses, und bei jeder Parade und
bei der Ausmusterung und noch vor wenigen Monaten beim
Fronleichnamszug in Wien. Nichts rührte sich im Leutnant Trotta, als er fünf
Schritte vor seinem Kaiser stand, nichts anderes regte sich in seiner
vorgestreckten Brust als Mitleid mit einem alten Mann. (V, 352-53)
Carl Joseph is not incapable of feeling, as his regret and sympathy reveal. But he
is incapable of believing any longer in what has been revealed as the myth of his
Emperor and the Empire, the myth of “Österreich”. The Empire is not intact, it is
172
in inexorable decline, and its depravity is reflected most potently in its willingness
to use its army against its own people. As the Emperor himself recognizes:
Ihm ging die große goldene Sonne der Habsburger unter, zerschmettert am
Urgrund der Welten, zerfiel in mehrere kleine Sonnenkügelchen, die wieder
als selbständige Gestirne selbständigen Nationen zu leuchten hatten. Es paßt
ihnen halt nimmer, von mir regiert zu werden! dachte der Alte. Da kann man
nix machen! fügte er im stillen hinzu. Denn er war ein Österreicher… (V,
352)
Nevertheless, at the end of the second part of the novel the narrator indicates that
most people loyal to the Monarchy do not want to acknowledge what the Emperor
has admitted to himself:
Dabei bemerkte [der Kaiser] nicht, daß an seiner Nase ein glasklarer Tropfen
erschien und daß alle Welt gebannt auf diesen Tropfen starrte, der endlich,
endlich in den dichten, silbernen Schnurrbart fiel und sich dort unsichtbar
einbettete.
Und allen ward es leicht ums Herz. Und die Defilierung konnte beginnen. (V,
354)
The significance of the drop on the end of the Emperor’s nose emerges only when
one of Chojnicki’s comments in an earlier chapter is recalled. Explaining his view
that the Monarchy was doomed, Chojnicki said to the Bezirkshauptmann: “‘Ein
Greis, dem Tode geweiht, von jedem Schnupfen gefährdet, hält den alten Thron,
einfach durch das Wunder, daß er auf ihm noch sitzen kann.’” (V, 290) The drop
on the end of the Emperor’s nose is a visible sign of his frailty and approaching
death which, as Chojnicki has predicted in no uncertain terms, will mean the end
of the Monarchy and the world as they know it: “‘Dieses Reich muß untergehn.
Sobald unser Kaiser die Augen schließt, zerfallen wir in hundert Stücke.’” (V,
265) The Fronleichnam celebration, which allowed Carl Joseph briefly to believe
again in the myth of the Habsburgs, commemorates the last meal of Christ before
the crucifixion and implies his eternal life. The Emperor’s body, however, is a
material reality and his death and the collapse of the Empire will be final. Yet the
self-deception of the Habsburg people continues: while Carl Joseph has lost not
only his faith in the Monarchy but also his ability to experience, at the sight of the
Emperor, the intoxication (“Rausch”) which has in the past enabled him to believe
in the myth (V, 353), others manage to believe, as long as the visible signs of the
approaching end remain hidden, like the drop on the Emperor’s nose which is a
reminder of his mortality.
173
Behind the Supranational Myth: What is “Österreich”?
Klaus-Detlef Müller contends that the exposure of the myths inherent in the
structures of the Empire is the narrative principle upon which Radetzkymarsch is
built.632 While this is an important recognition which differs from the more
common interpretation that both the novel and its writer have fallen prey to the
Habsburg Myth, Müller’s analysis does not go far enough. For Müller
Radetzkymarsch is a historical novel in Lukács’s sense because Roth portrays the
process of disintegration rather than the actual collapse.633 He argues that the story
of the Trottas symbolizes both the decline of the Habsburg Monarchy and its
historical “Überlebtheit”,634 a condition which has been acute since the Battle of
Solferino and of which Roth is fully aware:
[Roth] schildert den Untergang der Donau-Monarchie im Zeichen des von
der Forschung vielfach nachgewiesene (sic) ‘Habsburg-Mythos’ mit
Nostalgie und Trauer, jedoch durchaus kritisch und mit dem fortwährend
artikulierten Bewußtsein, daß die in ihm gestaltete Welt überlebt und nicht
mehr lebensfähig ist.635
Müller’s article makes an important contribution to the literature in demonstrating
that Radetzkymarsch fulfils some of Lukács’s criteria for the historical novel, but
in omitting any analysis of the relationship that emerges from the novel between
the world depicted in the novel and Roth’s contemporary context, he fails to take
the analysis to a deeper level. For what is even more important than Roth’s
revelation of the role of myth in keeping an Empire alive which was out of step
with the times is the truth that is concealed by the myth: the unacknowledged
reality of German cultural superiority which was at odds with the supranational
ideal, and which is directly linked to the nationalism of German Austrians in the
post-war present. It is in the exposure of this truth that Radetzkymarsch truly
becomes a historical novel in Lukács’s sense, revealing the past as the
“prehistory” of the present.
In the preface to the newspaper serialization of Radetzkymarsch in 1932, Roth
claimed that the Empire had allowed him to be “ein Österreicher und ein
632
633
634
635
Müller, “Radetzkymarsch,” 299-300.
174
Deutscher”.636 Taken at face value this statement feeds into the reception of the
novel as a nostalgic paean to a lost era of supranational harmony.637 It should be
remembered, however, that Roth had a propensity to play with his readers in the
prefaces to his novels, most transparently in the Vorwort to Die Flucht ohne Ende,
in which Roth satirizes the then popular literary movement Neue Sachlichkeit:
Im Folgenden erzähle ich die Geschichte meines Freundes, Kameraden und
Gesinungsgenossen Franz Tunda.
Ich folge zum Teil seinen Aufzeichnungen, zum Teil seinen Erzählungen.
Ich habe nichts erfunden, nichts komponiert. Es handelt sich nicht mehr
darum zu ‘dichten’. Das wichtigste ist das Beobachtete.
Paris, im März 1927
JOSEPH ROTH (IV, 391)
This preface, which has been understood by critics and readers as “ein Manifest
der Neuen Sachlichkeit”,638 conflicts with and is refuted by the poetic style of the
novel,639 Roth’s avowed distaste for the movement (detailed at the beginning of
this chapter), and finally his subsequent insistence that critics and readers had
misunderstood the preface: “bei dem Ruf nach dem Dokumentarischen [war]
durchaus nicht die berühmte ‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ gemeint […], die das
Dokumentarische mit dem Kunstlosen zu verwechseln möchte.”640 Similarly, the
claim in the preface to Radetzkymarsch that the defunct Empire had allowed Roth
to be both an Austrian and a German must be read for what it is: a statement
which appears to be a matter of simple fact but which belies a greater, and
contradictory, truth. For while it was possible for German-speakers to be both
Austrian and German, for the various other peoples in the Habsburg Empire, Roth
636
637
638
639
640
“Vorwort zu meinem Roman: Der Radetzkymarsch” (V, 874).
See, for example, Auckenthaler, “Man hat den Doppeladler verjagt,” 330.
Rainer Wild, “Beobachtet oder gedichtet? Joseph Roths Roman Die Flucht ohne Ende,” in
Neue Sachlichkeit im Roman. Neue Interpretationen zum Roman der Weimarer Republik, ed.
Sabina Becker and Christoph Weiß (Stuttgart; Weimar: Metzler, 1995), 27. See also
Trommler, “Neue Sachlichkeit,” 276; Pazi, “Exil-Bewußtsein,” 170-71; Cohen,
“Männerwelt,” 61; Rosenfeld, Understanding 29
An early critic noted that already on the second page of the novel the author uses highly poetic
language: “‘Der Pole zählte seine Worte wie Perlen, ein schwarzer Bart verpflichtete ihn zur
Schweigsamkeit’ […]. Das ist heftig gedichtet; es ist ein Stil von starrer, dem Erhabenen
zuneigender Art’”: W.E. Süskind, “Joseph Roth,” in Die Literatur 34, no.1 (1931) 17; quoted
in Trommler, “Neue Sachlichkeit,” 278.
Joseph Roth, “Es lebe der Dichter”, Frankfurter Zeitung 31.3.1929 (III, 45). Nevertheless,
critics persist in reading Die Flucht ohne Ende as an example of Neue Sachlichkeit. Wild
acknowledges and explores the discrepancies between Roth’s declaration in the preface and
the text of the novel but concludes that Roth was at the time unaware that his text was a
refutation of the tenets of Neue Sachlichkeit: Wild, “Beobachtet oder gedichtet?,” 44.
175
suggests, such a dual identity was unachievable, despite the supranational
rhetoric.
Slovene and Austrian: Mutually Exclusive Identities
For the Trotta family, becoming Austrian entails the relinquishing of their
Slovene identity, as the experience of Lieutenant Joseph Trotta in the opening
chapter of the novel demonstrates. When the narrator says of Joseph Trotta: “Er
wurde ein kleiner slowenischer Bauer” (V, 149), it is not, as Reidel-Schrewe has
argued, testimony to his “untrügliche[s] Bewußtsein von der Autonomie seines
Ichs, das sich eine seiner inneren Wahrheit gemäße Wirklichkeit schafft”;641
rather, this statement ironically reveals the limits of this autonomy: Joseph Trotta
in fact has been cut off “von dem langen Zug seiner bäuerlichen slawischen
Vorfahren” (V, 144), and while he may make the decision to leave the army and
work on the land, it is as heir to an estate in Bohemia, not as a landless peasant in
Sipolje. There is no indication that he actively wishes to return to Sipolje and
reconnect with the way of life of his Slovene forefathers, yet his alienation, his
“große Einsamkeit” (V, 154) revealed to him by the portrait, suggests that he has
been resigned to, rather than been in control of, his fate. Disabused of his faith in
the Monarchy, he resigns his commission in the army and ensures that his son will
never become an officer, but his grudging acceptance that there can be no escape
from the destiny of his family to serve the Empire is reflected in his refusal to
allow his son to quit his legal career and manage the family estate:
Der Major sagte: ‘Es ist zu spät! Du wirst in deinem Leben kein Bauer und
kein Wirt! Du wirst ein tüchtiger Beamter, nichts mehr!’ Es war eine
beschlossene Sache. War der Name Trotta auch aus den autorisierten
Schulbüchern verschwunden, so doch nicht aus den geheimen Akten der
hohen politischen Behörden, und die fünftausend Gulden, von der Huld des
Kaisers gespendet, sicherten dem Beamten Trotta eine ständige
wohlwollende Beobachtung und Förderung unbekannter höherer Stellen. (V,
154)
The description of the consequences of the Emperor’s favour for the Major’s son
reveals the meaning of the enigmatic words “Es ist zu spät!”: it is too late for a
641
“Die Flexibilität des alten Trotta, den Soldatenstand mit dem Bauernstand zu vertauschen,
beruht auf seinem untrüglichen Bewußtsein von der Autonomie seines Ichs, das sich eine
seiner inneren Wahrheit gemäße Wirklichkeit schafft”: Reidel-Schrewe, “Im Niemandsland,”
67.
176
Trotta to become a peasant or even a landlord because the family has been made
part of the Dienstadel642 by the Emperor and is thus destined to serve the Empire
for generations to come.643 Given their destiny, the Major expresses the hope in
his will “daß die Trottas, dem Kaiser dankbar für seine währende Huld, im
Staatsdienst zu Rang und Würden kommen und glücklicher als er, der Verfasser
des Testaments, im Leben werden könnten” (V, 154). That his unhappiness in life
stems from his estrangement from his heritage is indicated in his desire, also
expressed in the will, to be buried without pomp or ceremony near his father (V,
155).
The reader is reminded that the Emperor’s decree and the consequent
estrangement of the Trottas from their ethnic heritage are both final and eternal
when Carl Joseph wishes to be transferred from the cavalry in Moravia to an
infantry regiment near Sipolje, which he imagines will be almost as good as “eine
Heimkehr zu den bäuerlichen Vorfahren” (V, 246):
Die Dankbarkeit Franz Josephs hatte ein langes Gedächtnis, und seine Gnade
hatte einen langen Arm. Wenn eines seiner bevorzugten Kinder im Begriffe
war, eine Torheit zu begehn, griffen die Minister und Diener des Kaisers
rechtzeitig ein und zwangen den Törichten zu Vorsicht und Vernunft. Es
wäre kaum schicklich gewesen, den einzigen Nachkommen des neugeadelten
Geschlechts derer von Trotta und Sipolje in jener Provinz dienen zu lassen,
welcher der Held von Solferino entstammte, der Enkel analphabetischer
slowenischer Bauern, der Sohn eines Wachtmeisters der Gendarmerie. (V,
255)
The narrator’s ironic undertone lends a sinister note to what on the surface is
presented as the common sense approach of the Emperor and his ministers. Their
motives are soon revealed through the Bezirkshauptmann who, the reader is
informed, is of one mind with the authorities. The Bezirkshauptmann cannot
fathom the wish of his son to be transferred to the Slovene province from which
their family hails, for he has never felt the desire to visit his forefathers’ Heimat:
642
643
On the distinction between the upper nobility (Hochadel or Aristokratie) and the lesser
nobility (Briefadel or Dienstadel) see Johnston, The Austrian Mind 39. The Trotta family
belongs to the Dienstadel because the title was conferred on Joseph Trotta for service to the
crown.
This same acceptance of events as beyond his control is earlier reflected in Joseph Trotta’s
rather inadequate attempt to explain to his son that having a title makes them no better than
Joseph’s father, the Gendarmerie Sergeant, whom he admonishes his son to remember and
tells his wife was “ein guter Mann”: “‘Er war nur ein Gendarmeriewachtmeister’, sagte der
Vater, ‘ich habe dem Kaiser in der Schlacht von Solferino das Leben gerettet – und dann
haben wir die Baronie bekommen.’” (V, 151)
177
“Er war ein Österreicher, Diener und Beamter der Habsburger, und seine Heimat
war die Kaiserliche Burg zu Wien.” (V, 255) The Bezirkshauptmann’s thoughts
here betray that Austrian and Slovene identity are mutually exclusive, a fact
underlined in his letter to his son: “‘Das Schicksal hat aus unserm Geschlecht von
Grenzbauern Österreicher gemacht. Wir wollen es bleiben.’” (V, 256) In
expressing this sentiment the Bezirkshauptmann is typical of the Dienstadel,
which Magris describes as the
treue[...] und loyale[...] Kategorie par excellence […], die sich – sei es aus
dankbarem Stolz auf das jüngst erhaltene Adelsprädikat, sei es auf Grund des
Militär- oder Verwaltungsdienstes – mit dem kaiserstaatlichen System
identifizierte.644
This identification with the Imperial system entails a sacrifice of individual
identity, whether one serves in the role of Bezirkshauptmann or as a servant of the
Dienstadel, like Jacques. The story of Jacques’s name, given to him by his
original master, the Hero of Solferino, in an arbitrary act which mirrors the Hero’s
own unwanted change of name and rank at the hands of the Emperor, is a
metaphor for this sacrifice of identity (V, 277). Just as the Bezirkshauptmann has
come to identify completely with his bureaucratic role and feels no connection to
the land of his forebears, Jacques has become so used to the identity given to him
by his master that he rejects the suggestion he should revert to his old name, Franz
Xaver Joseph (V, 278) and declares that he would like “Jacques” on his
gravestone (V, 279). The sacrifice is given symbolic form in the pictures of St.
Antony and St. George which the dying Jacques gives to the Bezirkshauptmann:
St. George was an early Christian martyr who became an ideal of selflessness and
martial valour in the Middle Ages; St. Antony is considered the founder of
Christian monasticism and lived a life of extreme asceticism. These saints thus
symbolize the self-denial which has characterized both the Bezirkshauptmann’s
and Jacques’s life of service.
Both Jacques’s decisive “‘Ich bleib’ lieber beim Jacques!’” (V, 278) and the
Bezirkshauptmann’s “‘Wir wollen es [Österreicher] bleiben.’” (V, 256) suggest a
power of agency which is illusory: having become Austrians, the Trottas cannot
644
Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos 197. Magris uses the term Beamtenadel rather than
Dienstadel to refer to people like the Trottas.
178
ever become Slovenes again.645 The restriction of Carl Joseph’s choice to serving
in the interior of the Empire or on its eastern border symbolizes the restriction of
the free formation of identity which the Monarchy’s structures require. When he
finally leaves the army and briefly experiences a different kind of life, he becomes
contented (V, 434), but he does not become a Slovene peasant. Roth has been
taken to task by a number of critics for evoking a bucolic idyll in this chapter,646
yet a careful reading reveals that this is just another illusion. Carl Joseph
experiences leaving the army as a kind of death and rebirth:
Der Koffer stand noch offen, die militärische Persönlichkeit Trottas lag
drinnen, eine vorschriftsmäßig zusammengefaltete Leiche. Es war Zeit, den
Koffer zu schließen. Nun ergriff der Schmerz plötzlich den Leutnant, die
Tränen stiegen ihm in den Hals, er wandte sich Chojnicki zu und wollte
etwas sagen. Mit sieben Jahren war er Stift geworden, mit zehn
Kadettenschüler. Er war sein Leben lang Soldat gewesen. Man mußte den
Soldaten Trotta begraben und beweinen. Man senkte nicht eine Leiche ins
Grab, ohne zu weinen. (V, 432)
Living his new life in the little house on the edge of the woods Carl Joseph feels
“als hätte er niemals ein anderes Leben geführt” (V, 434). Yet throughout this
chapter Roth repeatedly negates statements made only paragraphs before, this
ironic negation undermining the impression given of Carl Joseph’s fulfilling new
life. Carl Joseph believes himself to have buried his military personality, yet he
continues to write the same letters to his father in the same way, “auf gelblichem,
fasrigem Kanzleipapier, die Anrede vier Finger Abstand vom oberen Rand, den
Text zwei Finger Abstand vom seitlichen” (V, 433). The narrator reports “Er
kannte nun die Sprache des Landes” (V, 433), but when Carl Joseph dies the
narrator notes that he wanted to say “In Ewigkeit. Amen! […] Es waren die
einzigen ruthenischen Worte, die er sprechen konnte” (V, 445). The action of
hiding his face from passing officers is described as “eine überflüssige Vorsicht”
because his physical appearance is so changed that “man konnte ihn kaum
erkennen” (V, 433), and yet Onufrij has no trouble at all recognizing him (V,
434). The cumulative effect of these negations and contradictions is to imply an
645
646
The fact that the power of choice is an illusion is underscored when the Bezirkshauptmann,
the Empire’s servant, has both Jacques’s real and his assumed names engraved on the
headstone, despite Jacques’s stated wish: “Er […] gab die Inschrift an: ‘Hier ruht in Gott
Franz Xaver Joseph Krimichl, genannt Jacques, ein alter Diener und ein treuer Freund.’” (V,
281)
Bance claims that “large parts” of Roth’s novels are “nostalgically bucolic”: Bance, “In My
End is My Beginning,” 34. See also Marchand, Wertbegriffe 205-06.
179
ironic distance to the passage of erlebte Rede which immediately precedes
Chojnicki’s announcement that war has arrived:
Ausgelöscht waren die Jahre beim Militär, als wäre man immer schon über
Felder und Landstraßen gegangen, den Stock in der Hand, niemals den Säbel
an der Hüfte. Man lebte wie der Großvater, der Held von Solferino, und wie
der Urgroßvater, der Invalide im Schloßpark von Laxenburg, und vielleicht
wie die namenlosen, unbekannten Ahnen, die Bauern von Sipolje. (V, 435)
Carl Joseph’s belief that his life has changed and that he has reconnected with his
Slovene roots is an illusion, and thus it comes as no surprise when he returns to
the garrison and the life he had left just weeks previously without a moment’s
hesitation when the war is announced: “Trotta kehrte in seine Montur zurück, in
seine Heimat.” (V, 440)647 The Habsburg army is the only identity he knows; he
has been unable to create any other. That this identity is hollow, as both Demant’s
father’s “corpses” and Carl Joseph’s own indicate, means that his return to the
Heimat of his Austrian identity must end in death.
First Among Equals: Germans and the Empire
In what, then, does this Austrian identity consist? Roth reveals that an
identification as “Österreicher” entails not only loyalty to the Habsburg dynasty
and the supranational ideal, but also, and paradoxically, a commitment to German
culture and Bildung. Thus, he implies, Austrian identity was open to the nonGerman nationalities, but only at the price of assimilation to a German-language
culture. Roth’s analysis in this respect mirrors the situation regarding the use of
the term “Österreich” after 1867:
Der Name ‘Österreich’ wurde zwar intern in den deutschen Teilen
Cisleithaniens verwendet, war aber nicht legal. Denn sowohl Tschechen wie
Polen, Italiener und die anderen Völker Cisleithaniens weigerten sich, den
Namen Österreich als den ihren zu akzeptieren, empfanden sie als
diskriminierend und als Ausdruck der Vorherrschaft der Deutschen.648
647
648
This return is foreshadowed at the beginning of Carl Joseph’s new life through Jan Stepaniuk,
the Unterförster with whom he will share a house, and who served in the military for 12 years:
“Er sagte ‘Herr Leutnant’ zu Trotta, heimgekehrt zur militärischen Muttersprache.” (V, 433)
180
The commitment to German culture and Bildung implied in the identification as
“Österreicher” is revealed through the highly ironic, if sympathetic,649
characterization of the Bezirkshauptmann. The Bezirkshauptmann’s identity is
based on an absolute identification with the Emperor and the Empire. His repeated
admonishment of Fräulein Hirschwitz for speaking Hochdeutsch reflects an
emphatic consciousness of difference and separateness from the Reichsdeutsche,
and his view of German students in Prague singing the “Wacht am Rhein”
seemingly confirms his commitment to a supranational Austrian Empire, not a
greater Germany:
Im ‘Fremdenblatt’ hatte man gestern noch lesen können, daß die deutschen
Studenten in Prag die ‘Wacht am Rhein’ gelegentlich singen, diese Hymne
der Preußen, der mit Österreich verbündeten Erbfeinde Österreichs. Auf wen
konnte man sich da noch verlassen? (V, 272)
However, in a number of episodes the Bezirkshauptmann’s words reveal an
unconscious prejudice about the superiority of the German culture and language, a
prejudice which Roth suggests is both a cause of the rise of nationalism in the
non-German peoples of the Empire from the middle of the nineteenth century and
linked to the chauvinist pan-German nationalism of post-Habsburg Central
Europe.
The first signs of the Bezirkshauptmann’s prejudice emerge in the portrayal of
fifteen-year-old Carl Joseph’s examination at the beginning of his summer
holiday, a three-hour ordeal to which the young cadet is evidently subjected each
year according to exactly the same schedule – the Bezirkshauptmann is an
extraordinarily rigid man. This time, the examination focuses on literature –
German literature of course, because German is the uncontested language of
culture at this time, and the class to which the Trottas now belong is Germanspeaking. The Bezirkshauptmann speaks at length on the importance of
Grillparzer and recommends to his son – “als ‘leichte Lektüre’ für Ferientage” (V,
159) – Adalbert Stifter and Ferdinand von Saar. All three of these writers were
Austrian, and all three contributed – albeit in very different ways – to the
649
As Hoffmeister has demonstrated, Roth retains “eine bestimmte Art von Sympathie” with all
of his characters, and his ironic critique, unlike Musil’s in Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften,
never amounts to antipathy: Hoffmeister, “Erzählhaltung,” 163.
181
development or maintenance of the Habsburg Myth;650 indeed Magris cites
Grillparzer’s work as “der erste, vollendete Ausdruck des habsburgischen
Mythos.”651 Having initially supported the revolutions of 1848, Stifter, Grillparzer
and many other writers soon began to fear anarchy and the disintegration of the
fatherland and to preach “Rückkehr zur Ordnung, zur alten Sicherheit und zur
Autorität des Staates.”652 In June 1848 Grillparzer wrote his famous poem
honouring “Feldmarschall Radetzky”;653 the verse “In deinem Lager ist
Österreich”, which expresses Grillparzer’s heartfelt loyalty to the unity of Austria
and gratitude to the man who seemed to have protected it, must surely be amongst
the most frequently quoted in Austrian literature. Readers familiar with this most
famous of Grillparzer’s poems will assume that its sentiment forms at least part of
the reason for the arch-conservative Bezirkshauptmann’s belief in the poet’s
importance, particularly given the title of Roth’s novel.
It is significant that the text the Bezirkshauptmann chooses to test his son’s
reading is not one by a Habsburg Austrian author but Zriny, a military saga by the
German nationalist writer Theodor Körner. For many of his contemporaries,
Körner was the “Inbegriff eines patriotischen Dichters”,654 both because of his
deeply patriotic poetry and plays,655 and also because he was killed in the war of
liberation in 1813. Zriny (1812/13) is based on the Croatian and Hungarian myth
of Nikolaus von Zriny, the heroic defender of the southern Hungarian fortress
Sigeth against the Turks in the sixteenth century. The myth of Zriny is mirrored
by the myth of the warrior and poet Theodor Körner, who was celebrated for
650
651
652
653
654
655
See Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos 91-134 (Grillparzer), 35-52 (Stifter), 91-202 (von
Saar).
Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos 98. Bartsch disputes Magris’s interpretation, arguing that
Grillparzer cannot be seen as a slave to or victim of the Habsburg Myth: Bartsch, “Literatur
aus Österreich,” 5.
Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos 95. Magris notes further: “Eine der bemerkenswertesten
Folgen des Wiener Revolutionsjahres ist die Aussöhnung der Schriftsteller und Dichter, der
einstigen Gegner, mit dem Regime und dem starren System. Treu scharen sie sich nun um die
grandiose Statik und die habsburgische Ordnung, die für sie Abwehr von Zusammenbruch und
Auflösung bedeutet”: Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos 96.
Marijan Bobinac, “Theodor Körner im Kroatischen Theater,” Kakanien Revisited (2003): 1.
The significance of Körner’s contribution to the development of German national patriotism
during the wars of liberation is reflected in Johnston’s study of the German national myth in
this period, which devotes a chapter to Körner and his influence: Otto W. Johnston, Der
182
having proved his German nationalist zeal on both the military and the literary
fields.656 Johnston reveals how Körner’s death itself became part of the German
national myth. At least seven witnesses were called to explain the circumstances
in which he was killed, but their accounts conflicted in significant ways, and only
the account which was the most flattering to Körner was recorded by Prussian
historians:
Körner erscheint als triumphierender Held, der noch im Sieg von einem
geschlagenen und hinterlistigen Feind ermordet wurde. Die Preferenz dieser
Darstellung in der patriotischen Geschichtsschreibung des wilhelminischen
Deutschlands bestätigt abermals die enge Beziehung zwischen dem historisch
Belegbaren und dem modernen Mythosaufbau, bei dem ideologisierende
Chronisten eine ihre Gesinnung unterstützende Zeugenaussage in die Mitte
der Diskussion rücken, damit ein ‘heroisches Beispiel’ im Leser eine
erwünschte sozialpolitische Haltung bewirkt. […] Das primäre Ziel einer
solchen Geschichtsschreibung ist die Einprägung einer bestimmten
Einstellung dem Heroisch-Patriotischen gegenüber, nicht die Verbreitung
oder Vertiefung historischer Kenntnisse.657
The parallel between the manipulation of historical fact in this instance and the
school reader account of the circumstances in which Lieutenant Trotta saves the
Emperor’s life in Solferino is unmistakable. While it is impossible to know
whether such a parallel was intended by Roth, it is certainly possible he knew of
the conflicting witness accounts, since they were published in 1898.658 Bobinac
notes that an essential feature of both the Zriny and the Körner myths is
der ‘freudige Opfertod’ ihrer Protagonisten, der dem Vaterland gilt. So wurde
durch den heroischen Widerstand und die bewusste Opferung Zrinys und
seiner Mitkämpfer das weitaus überlegene türkische Heer bei der Belagerung
von Sigeth 1566 so geschwächt, dass es auf den geplanten Zug nach Wien
schließlich verzichten musste. Einen ähnlichen Opfertod erblickten Körners
Zeitgenossen im Schicksal des jungen Dichters, der als Freiwilliger des
Lützow'schen Freikorps schon zum Beginn der Befreiungskriege 1813 ums
Leben kam.659
The first level of signification of the reference to Zriny in Radetzkymarsch, then,
is the mirroring of Zriny’s and Körner’s willingness to die for the fatherland in the
656
657
658
659
deutsche Nationalmythos: Ursprung eines politischen Programms (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990)
178-94.
Bobinac, “Theodor Körner,” 1.
Johnston, Der deutsche Nationalmythos 191.
Emil Peschel and Eugen Wildenow, Theodor Körner und die Seinen (Leipzig, 1898); cited in
Johnston, Der deutsche Nationalmythos 190.
Bobinac, “Theodor Körner,” 1-2.
183
young Carl Joseph’s dreams of a heroic death in the service of his Emperor.660
The reader has by this time gleaned enough of the authoritarian relationship
between the exacting father and his obedient son to infer that the
Bezirkshauptmann’s request that Carl Joseph recite the plot of Zriny for him will
reinforce the impressionable young cadet’s belief in the appropriateness of
Körner’s ideal of Opferbereitschaft for his own life, whether or not this is the
Bezirkshauptmann’s intention. That his retelling of the play act by act deeply
affects Carl Joseph is evident from the narrator’s concluding comment: “Dann
setzte er sich, müde, blaß, mit trockener Zunge.” (V, 159)
A further aspect of Zriny which is important in this context is Körner’s
unequivocal nationalism which had as its ultimate goal the political unification of
the German nation. In Zriny, Körner is not interested in the complexities of the
historical event, but in writing a political text which emphasizes the national
aspect of the conflict, the war being fought for “Freiheit, Ehre, Glauben,
Vaterland” – an anachronism, given the setting in the sixteenth century, and
clearly intended as a representation of the war of liberation against Napoleon.661
Körner combines a popular and accessible style with a “Freund-Feind-Schema”
formulated in unmistakably national terms:
Von daher ist im Gegenspieler Zrinys, dem greisen Sultan Soliman, eine
teuflische Napoleon-Figur leicht zu erkennen, während an der Autorität des
deutschen Kaisers, der die Besatzung von Sigeth schließlich im Stich lässt,
hingegen nicht gerüttelt wird.662
Although the historical Zriny was Croatian-Hungarian, Körner portrays him as
unambiguously Hungarian, intending him to represent the Germans and his
Turkish opponents to represent the French.663 The complexity of identity in
Central Europe – both in the actual sixteenth century setting and in the implied
nineteenth century setting – is thus smoothed over, multifaceted identities being
“ironed out” in favour of one-dimensional identities. The ideology upon which
Zriny is based, then, is very much at odds with the Bezirkshauptmann’s professed
660
661
662
663
Bobinac notes: “Überhaupt wird in Zriny ununterbrochen eine Todesbereitschaft zelebriert,
die ihresgleichen in der Weltliteratur suchen muss”: Bobinac, “Theodor Körner,” 4.
See Bobinac, “Theodor Körner,” 4; Johnston, Der deutsche Nationalmythos 179.
Bobinac, “Theodor Körner,” 3-4.
Bobinac, “Theodor Körner,” 5.
184
loyalty to the supranational idea of Austria. His apparent acceptance of the text as
appropriate reading for his son suggests a lack of understanding of the extent to
which this play promotes that pan-German nationalism which is anathema to him.
The Bezirkshauptmann is certainly not consciously German nationalist – indeed
he is consciously pro-Austrian and anti-German (Prussian) – but the attitudes and
prejudices which are revealed in this second chapter are demonstrated in the
course of the novel to be linked to the chauvinist German nationalism of the
1920s and 1930s.
The Bezirkshauptmann is less of an individual than a type: he represents the
German-speaking administrative caste which was unflinchingly loyal to the
Emperor, reflecting the values and ideals of the Habsburg dynasty. As such, the
pro-Austrian, anti-“Prussian” Bezirkshauptmann’s paradoxical de facto German
bias is indicative of a similar bias within the German-speaking ruling class as a
whole, including the House of Habsburg. This unconscious bias had a long
tradition: a prime example of its operation is the Sprachpatent issued by Emperor
Joseph II in 1784, which decreed that German was to replace Latin as the
language of governance in the Kingdom of Hungary.664 Joseph II’s motives for
standardizing German as the language of administration throughout the Empire
were pragmatic and instrumental – he wanted to rationalize the operations of the
bureaucracy.665 He had no intention of attempting a forced Germanization of
either the Hungarians or the other peoples under his rule,666 but the Sprachpatent
was perceived as a threat to Hungarian culture and it precipitated a backlash with
far-reaching ramifications.667 Joseph failed to predict the hostile reaction to his
reforms because, as heir to the Habsburg tradition, he did not think of himself as
664
665
666
667
For a detailed discussion of the Sprachpatent and its consequences see Leslie Bodi,
“Widersprüche der Aufklärung: das Sprachpatent von 1784 und die Folgen,” in Literatur,
Politik, Identität – Literature, Politics, Cultural Identity (St. Ingbert: Röhrig
Universitätsverlag, 2002).
The decree which made German instead of Latin the language of administration in Hungary
“betont, daß es sich hier um eine praktische, aufgeklärte Verordnung handle, die rein
pragmatisch der Vereinfachung und Rationalisierung des Amtsganges diene”: Bodi,
“Widersprüche der Aufklärung,” 332.
Bodi, “Widersprüche der Aufklärung,” 333.
Bodi writes that the potential to develop “eine[n] über ethnische Grenzen hinausgehenden
gesamtstaatlichen Patriotismus” within the cosmopolitan, universal ideology of enlightenment
was thrown into doubt by Joseph’s reforms, which precipitated a wave of xenophobia and
“Deutschenhaß”: Bodi, “Widersprüche der Aufklärung,” 331-34.
185
belonging to a German nation. Nevertheless, without perceiving any contradiction
or inconsistency, he regarded himself as the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire of
the German Nation and believed that German was “eine höher entwickelte
Sprache […] als Ungarisch oder die slawischen Sprachen der Erblande.”668 This
attitude was common to the ruling class:
The Imperial system created by Maria Theresa was strictly Imperial, or even
‘Austrian’; it had no defined national character. Still, the members of the
Imperial Chancellery in Vienna and most of the captains of circles
[Bezirkshauptmänner] were Germans: they received a German education and
used German as the language of official business among themselves. They
would have been surprised to learn that they were discharging a ‘German’
mission. All the same, once German national spirit stirred, the Germanized
bureaucracy gave German nationalism its claim to the inheritance of the
Habsburgs; and the Habsburgs themselves came to puzzle over the question
whether they were a German dynasty.669
After the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved in 1806, the Habsburgs continued to
lay claim to its heritage.670 In 1809 Friedrich Schlegel was commissioned to write
a historical account of the “Österreichischer Nationalcharakter”.671 Although the
connection to the Holy Roman Empire had officially been severed in 1806,
“Schlegel’s ‘Austrian idea’ appropriated the whole of the Christian Roman
universalist tradition” and was “designed to mask one of the most fundamental
changes in the structure and orientation of central Europe since the Thirty Years’
War.”672 Rosenfeld contends that Roth too “persisted in regarding Habsburg
Austria as a divinely ordained hierarchical entity, as the living heir to the Holy
668
669
670
671
672
Bodi, “Widersprüche der Aufklärung,” 333. See also Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 20.
In 1806 Emperor Franz II abdicated as Holy Roman Emperor, having declared himself
Emperor Franz I, Erbkaiser Österreichs (Hereditary Emperor of Austria) two years earlier:
Joachim Whaley, “Austria, ‘Germany’, and the Dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire,” in
The Habsburg Legacy: National Identity in Historical Perspective, ed. Ritchie Robertson and
Edward Timms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 3. See also Johnston, The
Austrian Mind 12.
On Schlegel’s role in promoting Austrian patriotism see Edward Timms, “National Memory
and the ‘Austrian Idea’ from Metternich to Waldheim,” Modern Language Review 86 (1991):
899-906, esp. 901f. See also Friedrich Heer, Der Kampf um die österreichische Identität
(Wien; Köln; Graz: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf., 1981) 170-83.
Whaley, “Austria, ‘Germany’,” 3. Whaley notes that despite the propagandistic aspect of his
work, Schlegel’s idealism was genuine: “He hoped [the ‘Austrian idea’] would provide the
foundation for a new era of Habsburg moral leadership. The religious and political values
embodied in the House of Habsburg would, he believed, bring peace and stability to the whole
of post-revolutionary Europe.” Timms contrasts Schlegel’s Austrian with Hegel’s Prussian
model of the state: Timms, “National Memory,” 900f.
186
Roman Empire of the German Nation, the center of which it had once formed.”673
Yet while this idea does find expression in Roth’s journalism, especially after
1933,674 in Radetzkymarsch he suggests that laying claim to this heritage was
inherently problematic for the Habsburg Monarchy, since it implied the
superiority of one nation over the others in the supposedly multi-national Empire.
This point is expressed most clearly in the Fronleichnam episode. In the colourful
pageantry of the parade the black and yellow Habsburg colours – “schwarzgelbe[...]
Töne[...]”,
“schwarz-goldene[...]
Helme”,
“goldbestickte[...],
schwarze[...] Röcke[...]”, “gelb-schwarze[...] Pantherfelle[...]” and so on (V, 321)
– harmonize with the colours of the various uniforms from all over the Empire,
like a common thread weaving the diverse parts of the parade together. Yet one
image stands out:
Die blutroten Feze auf den Köpfen der hellblauen Bosniaken brannten in der
Sonne wie kleine Freudenfeuerchen, angezündet vom Islam zu Ehren Seiner
Apostolischen Majestät. (V, 321)
Bosnia and Herzegovina had been under Habsburg administration since the end of
the Russo-Turkish war in 1878 but remained officially part of the Turkish Empire.
Between 1878 and 1908, when Austria-Hungary annexed the two provinces,
Bosnia and Herzegovina were “the only territorial expression of the ‘common
monarchy’ and thus the last relic of the great Habsburg Monarchy which had once
directed a united Empire.”675 The annexation of the territory in 1908 was thus yet
another symbol of the progressive disintegration of the Austrian idea; it also
precipitated the ‘Bosnian crisis’ which, although short-lived,676 inflamed the Serbled South Slav nationalist movement and contributed to the outbreak of World
War I five years later.677 The image of the Bosnians with their blood-red fezzes in
the midst of all the black and yellow harmony of the Fronleichnam-parade, then,
is not so much, as Riemen argues, a confirmation of the universalism of Habsburg
673
674
675
676
677
See, for example, “Dreimal Österreich: Bemerkungen zum Buch des Österreichischen
Bundeskanzlers von Schnuschnigg”, Das Neue Tage-Buch (Paris), 22.1.1938 (II, 774f.).
The crisis was resolved in March 1909 when Germany compelled Russia to abandon Serbia:
See Taylor, The Habsburg Monarchy 233f.
187
Catholicism,678 the inclusiveness and tolerance of an Empire which embraces
Catholics, Jews and Muslims, but a reminder of the national tensions simmering
beneath the surface of all this apparent harmony, underscoring the irony of Carl
Joseph’s briefly restored childlike faith in the durability of the Monarchy (V,
322). The depiction of the end of the parade again evokes the national aspirations
of the Teilvölker and the end of the Empire that this nationalism implies:
Blaue, braune, schwarze, gold- und silberverzierte Uniformen bewegten sich
wie seltsame Bäumchen und Gewächse, ausgebrochen aus einem südlichen
Garten und wieder nach der fernen Heimat strebend. […] [D]ie Fiaker und
selbst die Automobile hielten vor [den Leibgardisten] an wie vor
wohlvertrauten Gespenstern der Geschichte. […] Die goldenen Helme der
Feuerwehrmänner […] funkelten, heitere Mahner an Gefahr und Katastrophe.
(V, 322-23)
Carl Joseph is of course oblivious to these ominous signs, but the narrator
distances himself from Carl Joseph’s perception, thus underscoring the veracity of
the signs:
All das schüttete die Welt über den Leutnant Trotta aus. Er saß im Wagen
neben seiner Freundin, er liebte sie, und er fuhr, wie ihm schien, durch den
ersten guten Tag seines Lebens. (V, 323)
Roth links the nationalist discontent hinted at in the depiction of the
Fronleichnam parade with the contradiction between the supranational ideal
embodied by the Monarchy, symbolized in the profusion of black and yellow
finery, and its de facto German bias. This bias is signalled in the repeated
reference to the Habsburgs’ claim to the heritage of the Holy Roman Empire of
the German nation:
Vom Stephansdom dröhnten die Glocken, die Grüße der römischen Kirche,
entboten dem Römischen Kaiser Deutscher Nation. Der alte Kaiser stieg vom
Wagen mit jenem elastischen Schritt, den alle Zeitungen rühmten, und ging
in die Kirche wie ein einfacher Mann; zu Fuß ging er in die Kirche, der
Römische Kaiser Deutscher Nation, umdröhnt von den Glocken. (V, 322)679
The supranational ideal is exposed as a myth in the next paragraph, the
“goldene[r] Glanz” of the parade able briefly to obscure but not to negate the
existence of the “brüderliche Feinde”, the intensifying nationalism of the
678
679
Riemen, “Judentum – Kirche – Habsburg,” 387.
The reference to Franz Joseph as the Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation also
underscores the theme of the myths woven around and by the Monarchy, since the Habsburg
Emperors had not been able to use this title since 1806.
188
Monarchy’s diverse peoples which threatens the Habsburgs (V, 322). Thus the
image of the Emperor entering the church is ominous: the bells are tolling for him
and his Empire,680 and the repeated reference to the privileged position of the
Germans in this ostensibly supranational Empire evokes a clear connection
between this reality behind the propaganda and the Empire’s inexorable decline.
German Dominance as the Link between Past and Present
The unspoken, unconscious identification with German ethnicity that is implied in
Austrian identity is shown by Roth to have its counterpart in post-war German
nationalism in the German-speaking parts of the former Empire which found
expression in calls for the Anschluß of Austria to the German Reich. Roth implies
that the obsolete myth of the Habsburgs, cloaking as it did the cultural superiority
of the ethnic Germans, fed directly into the post-war revisiting of the großdeutsch
question. In a number of key events in the novel the attitudes of German-speakers
are linked to the racism of Germans and Austrians that characterized Roth’s postwar context. The duel between Rittmeister Tattenbach and the regimental doctor
Demant is one such event. The code of honour (Ehrenkodex), which requires the
settling of disputes by duelling, is both symptom and symbol of a system
hopelessly out of step with modern times681 and afflicted by an extreme form of
paralysis. But the chapter relating the duel has an additional function in the novel:
it suggests a link between the norms and structures of the late Habsburg Empire
and the German nationalism of the post-war era. The link is implied in Roth’s use
in this chapter of a particular combination of colours,682 which is taken up again in
680
681
682
This implication is underscored in the following paragraph by the reference to Carl Joseph’s
inability to hear “den düstern Flügelschlag der Geier” (V, 322).
The duel had died out in England by the middle of the nineteenth century but “in AustriaHungary until 1911 a challenge by one officer to another imposed a sacred obligation. An
officer who declined a challenge would lose his commission, besides being cut dead in good
society”: Johnston, The Austrian Mind 53-54. See also Norbert Elias, Studien über die
Deutschen. Machtkämpfe und Habitusentwicklung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/M.:
Suhrkamp, 1989) 66-71.
Kessler has pointed to Roth’s striking use of colour adjectives, suggesting that a thorough
study of the frequently unusual use of such adjectives in Roth’s work would be worthwhile:
Kessler, “Überdauern im ewigen Untergang,” 643, note 10. Kessler’s remarks in this article
are restricted to the use of the adjective gelb. Pauli writes of Roth’s striking use of colour
symbolism and analyzes the significance of the colour yellow and its combination with black
in Die Kapuzinergruft: Klaus Pauli, Joseph Roth “Die Kapuzinergruft” und “Der stumme
Prophet”. Untersuchung zu zwei zeitgeschichtlichen Porträtromanen (Frankfurt/M: Peter
Lang, 1985) 152-54.
189
subsequent chapters.683 When Taittinger begins to relate the circumstances of the
challenge, he induces a feeling of dread in the assembed officers:
Alle fühlten, daß [Taittinger] den Tod angerufen hatte. Der Tod schwebte
über ihnen, und er war ihnen keineswegs vertraut. Im Frieden waren sie
geboren und in friedlichen Manövern und Exerzierübungen Offiziere
geworden. Damals wußten sie noch nicht, daß jeder von ihnen, ohne
Ausnahme, ein paar Jahre später mit dem Tod zusammentreffen solle.
Damals war keiner unter ihnen scharfhörig genug, das große Räderwerk der
verborgenen, großen Mühlen zu vernehmen, die schon den großen Krieg zu
mahlen begannen. Winterlicher weißer Friede herrschte in der kleinen
Garnison. Und schwarz und rot flatterte über ihnen der Tod im Dämmer des
Hinterstübchens. (V, 223; emphasis added)
The passage ends with two sentences which evoke the colour combination black,
red and white – the colours of the flag of the Second German Reich,684 and in
Roth’s own time associated with anti-democratic and anti-republican forces,685 in
particular with Hitler’s National Socialists.686 The combination is evoked a second
time at the end of Taittinger’s recounting of the circumstances leading to the duel:
Mit schwarzen und roten Fittichen rauschte der Tod über ihren Köpfen.
‘Zahlen!’ rief Taittinger. Und sie verließen die Konditorei.
Es schneite neuerlich. (V, 226; emphasis added)
The reference to snow in this passage recalls the “[w]interlicher weißer Friede” of
the first. The repetition of the colours black, red and white at the beginning and
end of Taittinger’s story suggests symbolically that the Germans in the Habsburg
Empire are already thinking in ethnic national terms. In this context, the role that
anti-Semitism plays in the provocation of the duel acquires particular significance.
683
684
685
686
This same combination appears at least once in each of the chapters XI-XV.
Hattenhauer explains how this colour combination came to replace the black, red and gold of
the earlier nineteenth century as the national colours of the Germans during the reign of
Wilhelm II: Hans Hattenhauer, Geschichte der deutschen Nationalsymbole. Zeichen und
Bedeutung (München: Olzog, 1990) 23-27. It was not until 1892 that the black, white and red
flag of the military and merchant navy was adopted officially as the national flag:
Hattenhauer, Nationalsymbole 26.
Hattenhauer, Nationalsymbole 29. Roth had held grave fears for the future of the Weimar
Republic since at least 1925, when Paul von Hindenburg seemed likely to be elected president
after the death of Friedrich Ebert. Roth is reported by Max Krell from the Ullstein-Verlag to
have said: “Wenn es Hindenburg wird, reise ich ab, ich weiß, was dieser Zeit folgen wird.”
Krell goes on in his memoir to state: “Am anderen Morgen sah ich die schwarzweißroten
Fahnen und nicht die der Republik, Roth saß bereits im Zug nach Frankreich”; quoted by
Klaus Westermann in “Nachwort” (II, 1024).
Hitler designed the swastika flag in 1920 using the colours of the Kaisserreich: Hattenhauer,
Nationalsymbole 37-38.
190
It is not the insult to his honour as Eva Demant’s husband but Tattenbach’s antiSemitic taunt that finally provokes Demant to challenge him to a duel:
‘Also, “ich tät lieber zu Haus sitzen und aufpassen”, lallt der Tattenbach
weiter. “Unsereins läßt seine Frau nicht um Mitternacht mit Leutnants
spazieren!” –
“Sie sind besoffen und ein Schuft!” sagt der Demant. Und wie ich aufstehn
will und eh ich mich noch rühren kann, fängt der Tattenbach an, wie verrückt
zu rufen: “Jud, Jud, Jud!” Achtmal sagt er’s hintereinander, ich hab’ noch die
Geistesgegenwart gehabt, genau zu zählen.’ (V, 225-26)
Tattenbach insinuates twice that Demant’s wife is having an affair with Trotta but
each time Demant attempts to deflect attention from the accusations, telling
Tattenbach that he is drunk and a scoundrel. Furthermore, it is only after
Tattenbach begins yelling “Jud!” that Taittinger sends the orderlies away,
indicating that it is only the racist gibe that is considered by the onlookers to make
a challenge inevitable. Roth also hints that the anti-Semitism behind the drunken
Tattenbach’s reckless taunt is more widespread: neither Taittinger’s listeners nor
the onlookers at the club express any disapproval of Tattenbach’s behaviour.687
Anti-Semitic incidents are few in number in Radetzkymarsch, and their portrayal
is so muted that they could easily pass unnoticed. Indeed the characters
themselves seem not to notice, and this is Roth’s point: it is the failure of people
to remark upon and condemn non-violent, everyday anti-Semitism that allows it
to burgeon. A case in point is the incident which occurs when the
Bezirkshauptmann and Carl Joseph are joined by the Kapellmeister Nechwal for
coffee after lunch in Chapter II. The narrator describes the operetta-going
Nechwal with barely concealed irony as “ein Weltmann” before relating an aspect
of the customary conversation between the Nechwal and the Bezirkshauptmann:
Herr Nechwal erzählte von der letzten Lehár-Operette in Wien. Er war ein
Weltmann, der Kapellmeister. Er kam zweimal im Monat nach Wien, und
Carl Joseph ahnte, daß der Musiker auf dem Grunde seiner Seele viele
Geheimnisse aus der großen nächtlichen Halbwelt barg. Er hatte drei Kinder
und eine Frau ‘aus einfachen Verhältnissen’, aber er selbst stand im vollsten
Glanz der Welt, losgelöst von den Seinen. Er genoß und erzählte jüdische
Witze mit pfiffigem Behagen. Der Bezirkshauptmann verstand sie nicht,
lachte auch nicht, sagte aber: ‘Sehr gut, sehr gut!’ (V, 164)
687
Two of Taittinger’s listeners do express disapproval (“Schäbig!”) at Tattenbach’s opening
remark to Demant (“Servus, Doktorleben!”), but after Taittinger excuses Tattenbach with the
remark “Gewiß, schäbig, aber besoffen! Was soll man da?”, no further protests are heard. (V,
224-25)
191
Nechwal’s attendance of Lehár operettas, his three children and wife “aus
einfachen Verhältnissen” all mark him as a fairly typical member of the Germanspeaking middle class. A penchant for Jewish jokes is thus by implication also not
peculiar to him but standard, at least in the circles within which he moves. That
the Bezirkshauptmann neither understands nor laughs at the jokes could be
understood as a mark of better breeding and consistent with a belief in and
commitment to the ideal of supranationalism, were it not for his apparent
expression of approval (“Sehr gut, sehr gut!”), however insincere. It is not
enough, Roth suggests, simply not to be actively anti-Semitic; by not condemning
anti-Semitism, the Bezirkshauptmann and others like him implicitly condone it.688
The long-term consequences of such behaviour are symbolically suggested in the
concert which forms the backdrop to this episode. The concert which began with
the Radetzky March, the tribute to the man who for many was the saviour of the
multinational empire, ends with the overture from the anti-Semitic and German
nationalist Richard Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser.689 Unremarkable as they are,
then, the anti-Semitic incidents depicted in Radetzkymarsch are indicative of
further anti-Semitic and aggressive nationalist potential hidden beneath the
surface of the Empire of the King of Jerusalem.690
The False Opposition between “dazumal” and “heutzutage”
If there is a utopian moment in Radetzkymarsch, it exists in the form of an implied
question: Could the decline of the Empire have been halted if the Monarchy had
not failed to modernize, if it had adapted to the post-1848 socio-political
circumstances? Roth’s hostility towards manifestations of modernity from
688
689
690
Roth’s condemnation of such neutrality is expressed more explicitly in a 1939 polemic: “Ein
einziger Mensch, dem es egal ist, ob ein Jude geschlagen wird oder nicht, ist schädlicher als
die zehn, die den Juden – oder den Neger oder den Rothaarigen oder den Grünäugigen – mit
eigenen Händen schlagen. Verglichen mit der ‘Neutralität’ ist die Bestialität geradezu eine
human zu nennende Eigenschaft. Die Gleichgültigkeit ist der Feind aller Völker; nicht die
Juden; nicht einmal der Antisemit: nur der Gleichgültige”: Joseph Roth, “Das Feind aller
Völker”, Pariser Tageszeitung, 3.1.1939 (III, 861).
In typical fashion, Roth does not explicitly state that the overture is the last piece to be played,
but as Nechwal arrives the musicians are preparing to march off, and the Bezirkshauptmann
compliments Nechwal “heute wie jeden Sonntag” (V, 164), indicating that the same concert
takes place each week.
Like several of the Habsburg Emperor’s titles, which reflected “die jahrhundertelange
Geschichte und die Kompliziertheit dieses Vielvölkerreiches mit Eroberungen, Erbschaften
192
technology
to
cinema
to
fascism
has
been
well
documented.691
In
Radetzkymarsch, however, the representation of modernity is distinctly
ambivalent. In Chapter XII, it is negatively associated with the gambling hall that
has been eagerly anticipated in the border garrison (V, 300f.) and the colour
symbolism of the roulette table and the cards – the black, red and white which has
already been associated with anti-Semitism in Chapter VII – links the moral
corruption this brings with that most terrible expression of modernity, Nazism (V,
302, 306, 340). Yet the depiction of the gambling hall is juxtaposed with another
manifestation of the changed world: modern politics has brought awareness to the
workers that they have rights that are not being observed (V, 303-04).692 The
sympathetic portrayal of the workers in comparison with the exploitative factory
owners, who prefer not to adhere to the “unbequeme und kostspielige
Vorschriften” (V, 303) which would protect the workers’ health, implies that the
empowerment of the workers is a positive outcome of modernity. Furthermore,
the young officers who fall prey to the moral corruption represented by the
gambling hall are the same young officers who oppose the workers’ strike and
incur the narrator’s biting irony:
Die jüngeren Offiziere stellten sich vor, daß ‘das Volk’, das hieß die unterste
Schicht der Zivilisten, Gleichberechtigung mit den Beamten, Adligen und
Kommerzialräten verlangte. Sie war keinesfalls zu gewähren, wollte man
eine Revolution vermeiden. Und man wollte keine Revolution; und man
mußte schießen, ehe es zu spät wurde. Der Major Zoglauer hielt eine kurze
Rede, aus der all das klar hervorging. Viel angenehmer ist allerdings ein
Krieg. Man ist kein Gendarmerie- und Polizeioffizier. Aber es gibt vorläufig
keinen Krieg. […] Befehl ist Befehl. Er hindert vorläufig keinen Menschen,
in Brodnitzers Lokal zu gehen und viel Geld zu gewinnen. (V, 304)
691
692
und reichen Heiraten”, the title “König von Jerusalem” “hatte[...] nur noch historische
Bedeutung”: Hamann, Hitlers Wien 127.
Most often cited is the 1934 essay “Der Antichrist”, a lengthy diatribe against every
imaginable technological advance as well as the ideological manifestations of modernity
capitalism, communism and nationalism: Joseph Roth, “Der Antichrist” (III, 563-665).
Reifowitz argues that between 1927 and 1939 Roth “consistently opposed his Austria to
Modernity” and was “the enemy of Modernity”: Reifowitz, “Nationalism, Modernity,” 120.
See also Robertson, “1918,” 360f; Pizer, “‘Last Austrians’”; Wolfgang Müller-Funk, “Der
Antichrist. Joseph Roths Dämonologie der Moderne,” Literatur und Kritik 243/244 (1990);
Manger, “Roth and the Habsburg Myth,” 58f. Landwehr argues that Roth “felt ambivalent
towards technology”: Landwehr, “Modernist Aesthetics,” 404.
Roth draws attention to this juxtaposition by ending the description of the gambling with the
line “Die ganze Welt war verändert.–”, and beginning the next paragraph, which concerns the
workers’ protests, with the ironic repetition “Ja, die ganze Welt!” (V, 303)
193
Roth suggests that the failure to modernize in order to respond to changed
circumstances was the result not only of a desire on the part of the ruling classes
to maintain their dominance, but also of an excessive, almost pathological
orientation towards the past which prevented the Monarchy, the army and the
bureaucracy from even realizing that it needed to adapt. Carl Joseph’s desperate
attempts to identify with a mythical past represented by his grandfather – or rather
the legend of his grandfather – are symptomatic of an age which oriented itself
exclusively to the past,693 a past which was in any case so mythologized in the
service of propaganda aimed at maintaining the status quo that it had lost all
relationship to reality, and therefore by definition could not provide the necessary
conditions for the development of a viable identity.
Roth’s criticism of this excessive orientation to the past finds symbolic expression
in a passage from the novel which, ironically, is often quoted in support of the
argument that Radetzkymarsch is a backward-turned utopia:
Damals, vor dem großen Kriege, da sich die Begebenheiten zutrugen, von
denen auf diesen Blättern berichtet wird, war es noch nicht gleichgültig, ob
ein Mensch lebte oder starb. Wenn einer aus der Schar der Irdischen
ausgelöscht wurde, trat nicht sofort ein anderer an seine Stelle, um den Toten
vergessen zu machen, sondern eine Lücke blieb, wo er fehlte, und die nahen
wie die fernen Zeugen des Untergangs verstummten, sooft sie diese Lücke
sahen. […] So war es damals! Alles, was wuchs, brauchte viel Zeit zum
Wachsen; und alles, was unterging, brauchte lange Zeit, um vergessen zu
werden. Aber alles, was einmal vorhanden gewesen war, hatte seine Spuren
hinterlassen, und man lebte dazumal von den Erinnerungen, wie man
heutzutage lebt von der Fähigkeit, schnell und nachdrücklich zu vergessen.
(V, 242-43)
In this lengthy introduction to the eighth chapter, which portrays the aftermath of
the deaths of Demant and Tattenbach in the duel, the narrator compares the
attitude to the past in the Habsburg Empire with that in early 1930s Austria – and
finds both wanting. The sardonic interpolation “So war es damals!” undermines
the nostalgic tone of the first part of the passage which describes the seemingly
laudable values of pre-war citizens of the Empire compared with their post-war
counterparts. The corrective follows: the narrator’s summarizing comment “man
lebte dazumal von den Erinnerungen, wie man heutzutage lebt von der Fähigkeit,
693
Cf. Pazi, who writes of the generation of grandsons in Roth’s “k. und k. Romane”: “der
Lebensmut und -willen dieser Gestalten [werden] von der sie hemmenden Sehnsucht nach der
Welt ihrer Großväter gelähmt”: Pazi, “Exil-Bewußtsein,” 183.
194
schnell und nachdrücklich zu vergessen” suggests a parity, revealing that Roth is
as critical of the Habsburg tendency to live (or wallow) in the past as he is of the
post-war desire to forget or suppress the lines of continuity between then and
now. While his contemporaries are condemned for living solely in the present,
elements of Habsburg society are faulted for living so much in the past that they
failed to adapt to the challenges of changing times. The Bezirkshauptmann and
Carl Joseph, as representatives of the bureaucracy and the military respectively,
embody this fixation on the past which inhibits development in or even accurate
perception of the present.
Critics who read the passage as a straightforward condemnation of the present and
nostalgic glorification of the past, then, have failed to notice the nuances in the
text. But the real significance lies not in the condemnation of either the past or the
present but in the relationship between past and present expressed in the words:
“Aber alles, was einmal vorhanden gewesen war, hatte seine Spuren hinterlassen”.
The image recalls the allegory of the peasant from the opening chapter of the
novel with which Roth expressed the hidden relationship between the past and the
present: just as the magnificent billowing wheat which conceals the traces of the
peasant’s footsteps would not exist if those footsteps had not been taken, so Roth
implies in this passage a correspondence between past and present despite surface
dissimilarities. He views a proper examination of the relationship between past
and present as vital to the understanding of what ails his society and is deeply
concerned that historical continuities are being disregarded by his contemporaries.
This, rather than nostalgia for better times, is the implication of his criticism of
the modern “Fähigkeit, schnell und nachdrücklich zu vergessen”, and it is this that
makes Radetzkymarsch a historical novel rather than a backward-turned utopia.
195
Chapter 4
“Ein Mann sucht sein Vaterland”?694
Die Kapuzinergruft and the Confrontation with History
Ich ging an der Kapuzinergruft vorbei. Auch vor
ihr ging ein Wachtposten auf und ab. Was hatte
er noch zu bewachen? die Sarkophage? das
Andenken? die Geschichte?695
Not long after completing Radetzkymarsch Roth is reported to have declared:
“Der Leutnant Trotta, der bin ich”.696 This curious statement implies a congruence
between Carl Joseph’s fate and that of his creator which is perhaps not
immediately apparent. Although Carl Joseph is not Jewish, his family’s
progression from Slovene peasants to “Österreicher, Diener und Beamte[...] der
Habsburger”697 puts him in a comparable position to Roth, the assimilated
German-speaking Jew from the Empire’s periphery whose maternal grandfather
was an Orthodox Jew:698 each has an assimilated Habsburg identity which is three
generations old, and each is estranged from the traditions of his forebears.
German-speaking Austrian Jews such as Roth had identified in Habsburg times
simultaneously as subjects of the Austrian Emperor, as German by culture and as
Jewish in terms of ethnicity and culture, and in addition often had a regional or
provincial identity which implied a solidarity with the local Slavic population.699
After the collapse of the Empire, the unspoken German bias in the idea of Austria
which Roth exposed in Radetzkymarsch became explicit: “Austrian” implied
German ethnicity and the idea of a multiethnic Austria was increasingly
694
695
696
697
698
699
Working title for Die Kapuzinergruft: Joachim Reiber, “Ein Mann sucht sein Vaterland. Zur
Entwicklung des Österreichbildes bei Joseph Roth,” Literatur und Kritik 243/244 (1990): 113.
Roth, Die Kapuzinergruft (VI, 296).
Prof. Dr. med. Ernst Wollheim, quoted in Bronsen, Biographie 398.
This phrase is used to describe the Bezirkshauptmann in Radetzkymarsch (V, 255).
Bronsen, Biographie 40. Despite the Orthodoxy of the father, Roth’s mother’s family spoke
German at home. Roth’s father, Nachum Roth, was from Western Galicia and grew up in the
Eastern Jewish sect of Hassidim. His and his family’s influence on Roth’s path was negligible
because he disappeared before his son’s birth: see Bronsen, Biographie 40-42.
Roth’s Galician identity meant that he identified not as Polish but with Poles to a certain
extent, as his life-long friendship with the Polish-speaking Galician Jew Józef Wittlin attests.
Roth and Wittlin spoke Polish together and Wittlin stressed Roth’s great love for the Poles in
his memoir to his dead friend: Józef Wittlin, “Erinnerungen an Joseph Roth”, in Joseph Roth.
Leben und Werk, ein Gedächtnisbuch, edited by Hermann Linden (Köln, 1949) 56; cited in
Pazi, “Exil-Bewußtsein,” 161.
196
Chapter 4: Die Kapuzinergruft
unpopular. With political parties of all hues championing the Anschluß of Austria
to Germany,700 Austrian Jews, like their counterparts in the Weimar Republic,
found themselves excluded from claiming identification with the German nation,
since they were considered ethnically (and therefore nationally) non-German.
Thus, like Carl Joseph, assimilated Jews such as Roth were left with nothing but
history to identify with – the history of the supranational Monarchy which had
seemed to accommodate their multiple identifications as Jews, Austrians,
Germans and so on.
However, as Roth shows through Carl Joseph, this history was to a great extent
myth, and therefore the identification with history is intensely problematic. At the
same time, any attempt to revert to the identity of the forefathers – Carl Joseph’s
vain desire to reconnect with his ethnic heritage as a Slovene – is chimerical: the
process of assimilation to Austrian identity, once begun, cannot be reversed.701
With the outbreak of war rendering ongoing denial of the imminent collapse of
the Empire impossible, Carl Joseph’s death signifies that there will be no place for
those who have no ethno-national identity within the new socio-political
structures of Central Europe. Doktor Skowronnek’s assessment of the
Bezirkshauptmann and the Emperor thus applies equally to Carl Joseph:
‘Ich hätte noch gern erwähnt’, sagte der Bürgermeister, ‘daß Herr von Trotta
den Kaiser nicht überleben konnte. Glauben Sie nicht, Herr Doktor?’ ‘Ich
weiß nicht’, erwiderte der Doktor Skowronnek, ‘ich glaube, sie konnten
beide Österreich nicht überleben.’ (V, 455)
Radetzkymarsch, then, is a novel about Roth’s own predicament after the collapse
of the Empire, written in such a way as to allow the author both to identify with it
and to distance himself from it. Like Goethe before him, Roth writes his
protagonist to death in order to save himself. But it is a vain attempt: after the
collapse of the Habsburg Empire Roth has no place in Europe,702 and his
700
701
702
See Stanley Suval, The Anschluß Question in the Weimar Era: A Study of Nationalism in
Germany and Austria, 1918-1932 (Baltimore; London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974)
169f.
Here too Roth is expressing his own situation: although he tended to idealize the Orthodox
Eastern Jewry of his heritage, he recognized that a return was neither possible nor even
ultimately desirable. Cf. Ochse, Auseinandersetzung 215.
Cf. Reifowitz: “Roth was doubly alienated from his chosen homeland, first as a Galician-born
Jew in the Republic of Austria, and finally [in the 1930s] as a supranational Austrian in a land
of rampant German nationalism”: Reifowitz, “Nationalism, Modernity,” 130.
197
peripatetic existence after returning from the war, rather than reflecting a crisis of
belonging, is simply an appropriate response to this recognition.703 The rise of
National Socialism and the Anschluß of Austria to Germany in 1938 revealed just
how prescient Roth was; at the time of the Anschluß he underscored the parallels
between his fate and Carl Joseph’s with a paraphrase of the sagacious Doktor
Skowronnek: “Warum soll ich Österreich überleben?”704
Die Kapuzinergruft, begun in 1937 and completed in the immediate aftermath of
the Anschluß, represents a coda to Radetzkymarsch’s tale of homelessness, in
which the first person narrator Franz Ferdinand, unable to come to terms with the
1930s present, looks back to the Habsburg past in an attempt to both identify and
salvage it as his Heimat. Die Kapuzinergruft is often interpreted as an inferior
sequel to Radetzkymarsch,705 in which “[t]he hapless reactions of the narrator in
the face of history are […] a faithful reflection of the past-oriented nostalgic
conservatism of Roth himself.”706 Even critics who qualify the interpretation of
Radetzkymarsch as a backward-turned utopia, arguing that it portrays “both the
majesty and the folly of the Habsburg Monarchy under Franz Joseph”,707 read Die
Kapuzinergruft as “an idealized version of a multinational paradise that barely
resembled the reality of the past”.708 Yet although the author’s unremitting
pessimism about the contemporary political situation is evident on every page, he
703
704
705
706
707
708
Roth himself saw nothing strange in his itinerant existence, as he wrote to Stefan Zweig: “Seit
meinem achtzehnten Lebensjahr habe ich in keiner Privatwohnung gelebt, höchstens eine
Woche als Gast bei Freunden. Alles was ich besitze sind 3 Koffer. Und das erscheint mir gar
nicht merkwürdig”: Letter to Stefan Zweig, 27.2.1929, Briefe 145.
Roth is reported to have said this to Klaus Dohrn, quoted in Bronsen, Biographie 527. Klaus
Dohrn was a German member of the Austrian monarchist movement and introduced Roth to
Otto von Habsburg: Bronsen, Biographie 672-73.
See, for example, Koester, Joseph Roth 83; Andrew W. Barker, “Austrians in Paris: The Last
Novels of Joseph Roth and Ernst Weiß,” in Co-existent Contradictions: Joseph Roth in
Retrospect. Papers of the 1989 Joseph Roth Symposium at Leeds University to commemorate
the 50th anniversary of his death, ed. Helen Chambers (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1991),
208, 12-13; Magris, Der habsburgische Mythos 264; Zelewitz, “Zweimal politische Illusion,”
101; Rosenfeld, Understanding 4. For Reifowitz Die Kapuzinergruft is “of an inferior literary
quality to Radetzkymarsch” but “more compelling because it showed the depths of Roth’s
personal anguish”: Reifowitz, “Nationalism, Modernity,” 129. By contrast, Pauli argues the
aesthetic merits of the novel: Pauli, “Die Kapuzinergruft” 77 and passim.
Barker, “Austrians in Paris,” 214. See also Dollenmayer, “History as Fiction,” 309; Magris,
Der habsburgische Mythos 262; Williams, The Broken Eagle 108; Menhennet, “Flight of a
Broken Eagle,” 61.
Reifowitz, “Nationalism, Modernity,” 123.
Reifowitz, “Nationalism, Modernity,” 120. The quotation refers to all of Roth’s work after
1933.
198
does not idealize the past, instead using the form of the novel to critically examine
the flight from reality of which he himself is accused and to castigate present-day
Austrians for failing once again to break out of their political inertia. The futility
of Franz Ferdinand’s endeavour to identify with history is exposed in the
rhetorical question which ends the novel: standing outside the closed
Kapuzinergruft, Franz Ferdinand’s silent question is “Wohin soll ich, ich jetzt, ein
Trotta?…” (VI, 346) Franz Ferdinand’s flight to the Kapuzinergruft is not an
indication, as Reifowitz argues, that Roth has, with his narrator, “escaped into the
past”,709 but a recognition that such an escape is impossible. “The emperor [Franz
Joseph] is dead, unattainable, irrelevant”;710 his tomb is locked.711
“[Ich] sehe […] mich genötigt”:712 Monarchist out of Necessity
Just three months after Hitler came to power Roth penned a letter to his friend
Stefan Zweig from Parisian exile which is often quoted in support of the
contention that in the face of Hitler’s barbarism Roth’s earlier reservations about
the Monarchy dissolved:713
[E]s ist ganz finster – in der Welt und auch für uns, Individuen. […]
Was mich persönlich betrifft: sehe ich mich genötigt, zufolge meinen
Instinkten und meiner Überzeugung absoluter Monarchist zu werden.
Ich lasse in 6-8 Wochen eine Broschüre für die Habsburger erscheinen.
Ich bin ein alter österreichischer Offizier. Ich liebe Österreich. Ich halte es
für feige, jetzt nicht zu sagen, daß es Zeit ist, sich nach den Habsburgern zu
sehnen.
Ich will die Monarchie wieder haben und will es sagen.714
Bronsen reads this letter as an unambiguous declaration of faith in the Habsburgs:
Mit dem Aufkommen des Nationalsozialismus und der aufgezwungenen und
nicht mehr selbstgewählten Heimatlosigkeit des Exils wurde [Roth] im
Rückblick der Verlust des großen Österreich zu einem tiefen Einschnitt und
zur Zerstörung der Welt, in der er aufgewachsen war.715
709
710
711
712
713
714
715
Howes, “Kapuzinergruft,” 164.
Cf. Pauli, who notes that the locked tomb signifies that “die Zuflucht zur Geschichte [ist] als
realisierbare Möglichkeit ausgeschlossen”: Pauli, “Die Kapuzinergruft” 26.
199
Yet as Reiber explains, “[d]ie Formulierungen dieses Schreibens machen deutlich,
mit welcher Bewußtheit und welcher Willensanstrengung sich Roth für den
Monarchismus als seine einzig mögliche Reaktion auf den Nationalsozialismus
entscheidet.”716 Reiber’s argument that Roth’s monarchist conviction was less
than unequivocal and was contingent on his reaction to National Socialism717 is
compelling, and it is supported by the assessment of Martin Fuchs, editor of the
Österreichische Post and an authoritative voice in the monarchist movement. For
Fuchs the primary reason for Roth’s commitment to the monarchist cause was that
he believed (whether rightly or wrongly718) that a revived Monarchy would be a
bulwark against Nazism:
Als Journalist stand Roth dem Zeitgeschehen nahe, und er verkannte nicht
die propagandistischen und psychologischen Möglichkeiten, die Otto von
Habsburg als Träger des monarchistischen Gedankens und als Gegenfigur zu
Hitler darstellte.719
Similarly, Roth’s professed Catholicism, the extent of which has never been
verified, may have been “une position politique”.720 Joseph Gottfarstein, an
Eastern European Jewish journalist who knew Roth intimately from 1934 until
Roth’s death in 1939, reports that Roth professed to have converted to
Catholicism only because it was an indispensable element of his monarchist
716
717
718
719
720
Reiber, “Ein Mann sucht sein Vaterland,” 112.
“Daß Roth sich so verzweifelt an die Idee der Habsburger-Monarchie klammerte, hängt eng
mit seiner Einschätzung des Nationalsozialismus zusammen”: Reiber, “Ein Mann sucht sein
Vaterland,” 112. See also Pauli, “Die Kapuzinergruft” 176.
According to Carsten, the legitimist movement in Austria was small but active, and its goal of
preventing the Anschluß was not unrealistic: “eine Restauration würde dem Anschluß einen
Riegel vorgeschoben haben. Die Nationalsozialisten wußten das und sprengten daher häufig
monarchistische Versammlungen”: C.F. Carsten, Faschismus in Österreich. Von Schönerer zu
Hitler (München, 1977) 259; quoted in Pauli, “Die Kapuzinergruft” 348.
Martin Fuchs, quoted in Bronsen, Biographie 480. Fuchs cites “eine Art Heimweh nach dem
alten Österreich” as a second reason for Roth’s legitimism, saying that Roth knew the faults of
the Monarchy but as Jew and Galician believed that he had experienced a tolerance in the
multinational Empire which he did not find in the nation-states which replaced it: Bronsen,
Biographie 480-81.
Pierre Bertaux, quoted in Bronsen, Biographie 489. Professor Bertaux knew Roth from 1927
and met with him from time to time until 1939: Bronsen, Biographie 671. Other friends of
Roth to cast doubt on the truth of his conversion include René Schickele, Soma Morgenstern,
and Roth’s long-time companion Andrea Manga Bell: Bronsen, Biographie 489-90.
200
engagement, which in turn was necessary to prevent the catastrophe of the
Anschluß:721
Roth [sagte]: ‘Ich schwöre dir, es ist alles Lüge von A bis Z. Glaubst du, daß
ich wirklich ein Abtrünniger bin? Glaubst du, daß ich wirklich den Kopf
verloren habe? […] Verstehst du nicht, daß man die reine Wahrheit weder
sprechen noch spielen kann? Man kann sie nur schweigen.’ Und dann meinte
er, er müsse so weiter machen, weil er im Sinne der Monarchie handeln
müsse und weil es darum gehe, Europa vor der letzten Katastrophe zu
bewahren.’722
These personal testimonies from people close to Roth suggest that his
monarchism was pragmatic and instrumental rather than an article of faith. It is no
surprise that those journalistic writings which directly comment on contemporary
politics are unconditional in their support of the monarchist cause: their purpose is
propagandistic.723 Some of the less directly political pieces, however, are more
qualified in expression. “In der Kapuzinergruft”724 is a short reminiscence on the
funeral of Emperor Franz Joseph which is often cited as an example of Roth’s
thoroughgoing nostalgia for the Monarchy and his “liebevolle[...] Verherrlichung
des Kaisers Franz Joseph”.725 Reiber contrasts this piece with “Seine k. und k.
apostolische Majestät”,726 a feuilleton written five years before Hitler’s
assumption of power, and finds that where the earlier piece balances criticism
with nostalgia, seven years later Roth “verklärt, verwischt, beseitigt Konturen, die
721
722
723
724
725
726
Joseph Gottfarstein reports: “War er bei mir, führte er sich als Superjude auf; verkehrte er mit
anderen, trat sein anderes Ich [das Katholische] in Erscheinung”: Joseph Gottfarstein, quoted
in Bronsen, Biographie 548.
Joseph Gottfarstein, quoted in Bronsen, Biographie 549. Martens notes a discrepancy between
Roth’s letters, speeches and articles of the 1930s, in which the religious element is prominent,
and his novels, in which it is conspicuously absent: “[i]n allen die Vergangenheit der
habsburgischen Monarchie heraufbeschwörenden Dichtungen Roths, ist das religiöse Element,
wenn es überhaupt in den Blick kommt, eine Randerscheinung”: Martens, “Sakrale Instanz,”
238. This inconsistency lends weight to the theory that Roth’s professed Catholicism was
politically rather than religiously motivated.
Cf. Doppler: “Die Rücksicht auf den politischen Tageskampf veranlaßte Roth in den
journalistischen Arbeiten von 1938/39 zu Formulierungen, die so klingen, als gäbe es noch
praktische politische Möglichkeiten für eine Restauration des habsburgischen Österreich”:
Alfred Doppler, “Die Kapuzinergruft: Österreich im Bewußtsein von Franz Ferdinand Trotta,”
in Joseph Roth. Interpretation Rezeption Kritik, ed. Michael Kessler and Fritz Hackert
(Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 1990), 93.
Joseph Roth, “In der Kapuzinergruft”, Wiener Sonn- und Montags-Zeitung, 27.5.1935 (III,
671-73).
See, for example, Riemen, “Judentum – Kirche – Habsburg,” 391; Reiber, “Ein Mann sucht
sein Vaterland,” 104-05.
Joseph Roth, “Seine k. und k. apostolische Majestät”, Frankfurter Zeitung, 6.3.1928 (II, 91015).
201
er einst mit mühevoller Akribie aufgezeichnet hat”.727 This interpretation
underestimates the subtlety of Roth’s prose and ignores a crucial parallel between
the two feuilletons. In the first, Roth draws attention to the human tendency to
look back with fondness on whatever is associated with one’s childhood, recalling
die zwiespältige Trauer über den Untergang eines Vaterlandes, das selbst zur
Opposition seine Söhne erzogen hatte. Und während ich noch verurteilte,
begann ich schon, es zu beklagen. […] Die Sinnlosigkeit seiner letzten Jahre
erkannte ich klar, aber nicht zu leugnen war, daß eben diese Sinnlosigkeit ein
Stück meiner Kindheit bedeutete. Die kalte Sonne der Habsburger erlosch,
aber es war eine Sonne gewesen. (II, 910-11)
The faults of the Monarchy are expressly acknowledged, but they do not detract
from the writer’s sorrow at its passing, because for all its faults its passing marks
the passing of his own childhood: mourning and sober recognition coexist.
In the later feuilleton “In der Kapuzinergruft”, written in 1935, the association of
the Emperor and Monarchy with the author’s childhood recurs. In this case there
is no explicit acknowledgement of the “Sinnlosigkeit” of the Monarchy’s last
years, an omission which leads Reiber to conclude that the rain Roth conjures up
has washed away his “Zwiespalt”.728 However, the express, repeated connection
drawn between the author’s childhood and youth and his sense of bereavement
indicates Roth’s acute awareness of the operations of nostalgia:
Wem weinte ich damals nach? – Gewiß dem Kaiser Franz Joseph: aber auch
mir selbst, meiner eigenen Kindheit, meiner eigenen Jugend. Und obwohl ich
in jener Stunde wußte, daß ich bald, bald für den toten Kaiser und für seinen
Nachfolger zu sterben befohlen und bestimmt war, und obwohl ich damals
noch so jung war, schien es mir, daß es beinahe unschicklich sei, später zu
sterben als der Kaiser, dessen Glanz meine Jugend erleuchtet und dessen
Leid meine Jugend verdüstert hatten. Damals fühlte ich, daß ich ein
Österreicher bin; ein alter Österreicher. Alle Kaiser von Österreich waren
meine Kaiser gewesen. Alle Kaiser von Österreich, die noch kommen
könnten, werden meine Kaiser sein. […] Aber Kaiser Franz Joseph ist mein
besonderer Kaiser, der Kaiser meiner Kindheit und meiner Jugend … (III,
672; emphasis in original)
The criticism of the Monarchy may be more muted in this later text, but it is there
nonetheless in the reference to the battle that Roth was about to fight for a dead
727
728
202
Emperor, and the fact that he might die for that Emperor.729 The fact that the
writer is mourning the loss of childhood simultaneously with the death of the
Emperor suggests that he is grieving for what Franz Joseph represents on a
personal level: the innocence of Roth’s youth. The repetitive nature of the
depiction points to an expectation on the part of the writer that readers will be able
to identify with this nostalgia for youth and childhood but will also know it is
irrational and falsifies the past it remembers. The effect of the connection between
the end of childhood and grief over the death of Franz Joseph is heightened
through its repetition at the end of the passage as a mute address to the dead
Emperor, which the writer claims he delivers each time he visits the Emperor’s
tomb:
‘Lieber Kaiser! […] Alle österreichischen Kaiser liebe ich: jenen, der dir
gefolgt ist, und alle, die dir noch folgen werden. Aber dich, mein Kaiser
Franz Joseph, suche ich auf, weil du meine Kindheit und meine Jugend bist.
Ich grüße dich, Kaiser meiner Kinderzeit! Ich habe dich begraben: Für mich
bist du niemals gestorben!
Dein Joseph Roth’ (III, 672-73)
These excerpts articulate a wry recognition of the human tendency to look back
on the past through rose-coloured glasses. Roth’s nostalgia is certainly palpable,
finding particular expression in the lengthy description of the rain at the
Emperor’s funeral, which he calls “ein besonderer Regen […] – ein ganz
besonderer Regen”. (III, 671) Yet the poignancy of even this melancholy image is
undercut by the ironic repetition of the adjective in the phrase “mein besonderer
Kaiser, der Kaiser meiner Kindheit und meiner Jugend” on the next page.730 Just
as the association of the Emperor with the author’s childhood undercuts the
nostalgia expressed, the repetition of the adjective “besonderer” lends an ironic
undertone in retrospect to the melancholy atmosphere evoked by the rain. That the
years between 1928 and 1935 have seen the institution of a barbaric regime in
Germany and increasing ethnic German nationalism in Austria has undoubtedly
and understandably intensified Roth’s conviction that the Habsburg Monarchy,
for all its faults, was far better than what replaced it, but through his gentle
729
730
A further point of criticism occurs later in the article: “[…] und nicht einmal das k.u.k.
Dienstreglement, das damals meine Empfindungen regelte, dämpfte und unterdrückte, konnte
mich hindern zu weinen” (III, 672).
It is further undercut by Roth’s direct reference to the clichéd metaphor “Der Himmel weint”
(III, 672).
203
exposure of the processes by which nostalgia is created Roth demonstrates that he
is still capable of balancing criticism and nostalgia.
Even in some of Roth’s more overtly political pieces from the late 1930s, which
are provocative in their demonizing of Germany and eulogizing of the Habsburgs
and Old Austria, the careful reader can still detect signs of critical distance and
balance, if not towards Germany then at least towards Habsburg Austria. In his
essay on Grillparzer Roth contends that there are two types of Germans, “der
Typus des deutschen Weltbürgers”, which was produced by Habsburg Austria,
and his “Stiefbruder, [der] national gebundene[...] Deutsche[...]”.731 The former
was defeated and destroyed by the latter at Sadowa, Roth claims, and thus began
the progression foreseen by Grillparzer: “Von der Humanität durch Nationalität
zur Bestialität”.732 The Habsburgs are seemingly absolved of any responsibility
for the nationalism that has engulfed not only Germany but all of the Habsburgs’
former territories as well; it is Protestant Germany that must bear the
responsibility: “‘Von der Humanität durch Nationalität zur Bestialität’ heißt: von
Erasmus durch Luther, Friedrich, Napoleon, Bismarck zu den heutigen
europäischen Diktaturen.” (III, 745)
And yet, Roth does admit that the Habsburgs were partly to blame for the fate of
Austria: in a passage which echoes the charge made in Juden auf Wanderschaft
ten years earlier that the Monarchy “hätte den Beweis für das Gegenteil [der
Nationalitätentheorie] liefern können, wenn sie gut regiert worden wäre” (II, 834),
Roth accuses the Habsburgs of having misunderstood and abused their own motto
Divide et impera “für innerstaatliche Verhältnisse”:
In der sinngemäßen Übersetzung heißt es: Dezentralisiere und übe Einfluß
aus! Nicht Trenne und unterdrücke!
Aber: wie wenige konnten – damals schon! richtig Latein verstehen? Seit
Joseph II., der den preußischen Zentralismus, die Aufklärung nach
friderizianischem Muster nachzuahmen versuchte, der die Kirche
beschränkte und – sicherlich, ohne es zu wollen und zu wissen – die
moralische und geistige Basis für den späteren nationalistischen Hochmut der
deutschen Österreicher gegenüber den anderen Österreichern schuf (die
‘Diktatur’ könnte man sagen), war eine der letzten Zufluchtstätten des
731
732
Joseph Roth, “Grillparzer: Ein Portrait”, Das Neue Tage-Buch (Paris), 4.12.1937 (III, 745).
“‘Von der Humanität durch Nationalität zur Bestialität’: kein Aperçu, sondern ein Angstschrei
angesichts des nahenden Zerfalls der Monarchie, des Endsiegs der erwachenden nationalen
Barbarei” (III, 744).
204
universal Lateinischen von oben her zerstört […]. (III, 745)
Roth’s idealization of the universalism of the Habsburg Monarchy in comparison
with the nationalism of Germany is tempered by his acknowledgement that as far
back as Joseph II the Habsburgs misunderstood their own supranational
mission,733 and that through their mistakes they were responsible for the rise of a
supercilious nationalism among the ethnic Germans in the Empire. Here, as in
Radetzkymarsch, the universalism and supranationalism of the late Habsburg
Empire are exposed as more myth than reality.
This is not to deny that Roth argued passionately in many articles for the return of
the Habsburgs or that he truly believed that the only way to prevent the Anschluß
was to bring about a return of the Monarchy. As Pauli has remarked, even when
all of the tactical, political, socio-cultural and ideological reasons for Roth’s
legitimism are taken into account, it remains “noch merkwürdig genug”.734 It must
be acknowledged that some of Roth’s actions and attitudes in the 1930s smacked
of reaction – for instance his support for the authoritarian corporate state.735
However his conservatism “ist vor allem daran zu messen, wogegen er
Widerstand leistet, wenn ihm auch zuweilen das genaue Bewußtsein darüber
fehlte, was historisch noch möglich und sozialpolitisch erforderlich war.”736
Moreover, it is important to recognize that aspects of Roth’s post-1933 journalism
suggest that he was not completely convinced by his own rhetoric, instead
733
734
735
736
A similar acknowledgement of misgovernance can be found in the later essay “Dreimal
Österreich”: “[…] daß die alte österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie eine universale Aufgabe
zu erfüllen bestimmt war, unter deren Last sie zusammengebrochen ist, und nicht ohne eigene
Schuld”: Roth, “Dreimal Österreich” (III, 779).
Pauli, “Die Kapuzinergruft” 186.
This attitude was in fact typical of Austrian Jews, who viewed the Ständestaat “not only as the
lesser evil [compared with Hitler’s Germany] but also as a shelter necessary for survival”:
Bruce F. Pauley, From Prejudice to Persecution. A History of Austrian Anti-Semitism (Chapel
Hill, N.J., 1992) 260-74; cited in Anton Pelinka, “Austrian Identity and the ‘Ständestaat’,” in
The Habsburg Legacy: National Identity in Historical Perspective, ed. Ritchie Robertson and
Edward Timms (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1994), 171. Despite his public
support for the Ständestaat, however, in private Roth disparaged its leaders: Soma
Morgenstern, “Joseph Roth im Gespräch,” in Joseph Roth und die Tradition. Aufsatz und
Materialiensammlung, ed. David Bronsen (Darmstadt: Agora, 1975), 41, 56-57. See also
Morgenstern, Flucht und Ende. In a 1934 letter to Ernst Krenek Roth declared: “Offen gesagt:
ich mißtraue Schuschnigg”: 31.10.1934, Briefe 391. Pauli cites this statement as evidence that
Roth’s support for Schuschnigg and the corporate state was “eine künstlich forcierte
Sympathiebekundung”: Pauli, “Die Kapuzinergruft” 179.
205
viewing the Monarchy not as a perfect form of government, but as a better form
than the nationalistic dictatorship of Hitler. It should also be remembered that it
was in the context of the Weimar Republic that Hitler came to power, and so it is
not altogether surprising that Roth had little faith in democracy.737 The reader who
remembers these qualifications, together with the fundamental importance of
differentiating between narrator and writer, is more likely to be open to the critical
undertones of Roth’s final novel, Die Kapuzinergruft.
The Dialogue between Past and Present in Die Kapuzinergruft
In Die Kapuzinergruft, Roth extends the dialogue between past and present begun
in Radetzkymarsch. While in the historical novel Radetzkymarsch the post-war
present is evoked only intermittently and the novel ends before the fall of the
Habsburg Empire, in Die Kapuzinergruft Roth chooses a form midway between
the historical novel and the Zeitroman which was typical of his early work, the
novel spanning the period from late Habsburg times until the Anschluß of 1938,
Roth’s present. Even though the greater part of the text is set in the five years
prior to 1918,738 the present predominates through the first person retrospective
narrator, Franz Ferdinand. His post-war perspective is made abundantly clear in
the opening chapter through the references to “der Wille dieser Zeit”, “[das]
heutige[...] Österreich”, “[die] früheren Kronländer[...]”, “[die] verschollenen
Annalen der alten österreichisch-ungarischen Armee” (VI, 227) and Franz
Ferdinand’s father the rebel and patriot, “eine Spezies, die es nur im alten
Österreich-Ungarn gegeben hat” (VI, 228). The link between past and present is
thus made far more explicit in this novel than in Radetzkymarsch, although in a
way which at first glance seems to encourage the reader to accept at face value the
narrator’s idealization of the past due to his rejection of the present.
737
738
In an unpublished manuscript from 1937 Roth argued on the basis of the failed aspiring
dictators in Belgium and the Netherlands that “der Monarch allein verhütet den Usurpator”:
Joseph Roth, “Der Monarch verhindert den Diktator”, Manuscript from 1937, Leo Baeck
Institute (New York) (III, 765).
Howes calculates that 26 of the 34 chapters are set before 1920 but the only dates mentioned
in the text are 1913 (Ch. II) and 1918 (Ch. XXIII). The first 22 chapters, or 69 of 119 pages,
are thus set prior to the fall of the Empire. There are occasional historical references which
allow the dating of several chapters, for example the introduction of the new currency, the
Schilling, in 1922 (Ch. XXIX). Only the last 2 chapters are clearly set in the 1930s: 1934 and
1938 respectively – the civil war and the Anschluß are the historical markers.
206
Franz Ferdinand’s abhorrence of the present from which he is narrating is
declared on the first page:
Ich bin nicht ein Kind dieser Zeit, es fällt mir schwer, mich nicht geradezu
ihren Feind zu nennen. Nicht, daß ich sie nicht verstünde, wie ich es so oft
behaupte. Dies ist nur eine fromme Ausrede. Ich will einfach, aus
Bequemlichkeit, nicht ausfällig oder gehässig werden, und also sage ich, daß
ich das nicht verstehe, von dem ich sagen müßte, daß ich es hasse oder
verachte. (VI, 227)
This passage also establishes Franz Ferdinand as an unreliable narrator,739 a fact
underscored by Chojnicki towards the end of the novel: “Mir scheint, Sie sind ein
Schwindler.” (VI, 338) Franz Ferdinand’s unreliability makes it imperative that
the reader differentiate between the narrator and author,740 a distinction which
critics who view Die Kapuzinergruft as “historical escapism”,741 as “inspired
thematically by the retrogressive utopian vision of old Austria that Roth
cherished”,742 as opposing “to the new order a conservative Utopian vision of the
lost Empire”,743 or as describing “a world that had never really existed”744 fail to
make. As Howes has argued, although “the virtual contemporaneity of the
narration and the composition of the novel”745 mean that Roth and his fictional
narrator are “writing” in the same situation, it would be a mistake to attribute
Franz Ferdinand’s beliefs and attitudes to Roth: “Roth’s Austrianism is ironic and
Trotta’s is not. Roth is desperate but intelligent; Trotta is merely desperate.”746
The novel therefore must be read “nicht als Bekenntnis, sondern vor allem als
739
740
741
742
743
744
745
746
The fragmentary form of the text itself suggests the subjective nature of memory, this further
underscoring the unreliability of the narration. Cf. Pauli: “Die Aufteilung in meist sehr kurze
Kapitel kennzeichnet schon optisch die mosaikhafte Zersplitterung der Erinnerungen, die
Suggestivität der Stimmungen”: Pauli, “Die Kapuzinergruft” 78.
Pauli goes even further, distinguishing a “mehrfache Brechung der Darstellungsebene,
nämlich zwischen erzählendem und erinnertem Ich – und dem Autor Roth”: Pauli, “Die
Kapuzinergruft” 64.
Howes, “Kapuzinergruft,” 156. Howes does not subscribe to this interpretation himself but
cites Williams in particular as a proponent of this view: Williams, The Broken Eagle 108-09.
Howes, “Kapuzinergruft,” 161. Doppler is one critic who explicitly equates Franz Ferdinand
and Roth: Doppler, “Historische Ereignisse,” 75. Rosenfeld appears to make the distinction
between writer and narrator but then claims that “Roth also succumbed to the same
romanticizing tendencies as his central figure”: Rosenfeld, Understanding 84. Pauli has
demonstrated that Joseph Roth is politically much more perceptive than his narrator and that
Franz Ferdinand’s beliefs and attitudes can therefore not be assumed to be identical to Roth’s:
Pauli, “Die Kapuzinergruft” 23, 31-32, 114-27 and 164-90.
207
Darstellung eines Bekenntnisses”.747 Roth is critical both of his narrator’s
nostalgia for an imagined Heimat in the past and of his frivolous apathy both then
and in the present in the face of political realities which require urgent
engagement and positive action.
Heimat with Hindsight
The first sentence of Die Kapuzinergruft indicates that Franz Ferdinand’s identity
will be a primary concern of both his narration and the text. The fragmentation of
the narrator’s identity stands in stark contrast to the definitive tone of his initial
statement: “Wir heißen Trotta.” (VI, 227) While he may be certain of his name, he
is not certain of much else, and the narrative consists in the documentation of his
repeated failed attempts to construct a viable identity in the present through
recourse to memory. Much in the novel, from the initial declaration that he is
“nicht ein Kind dieser Zeit” (VI, 227) to the final plaintive but rhetorical question
“Wohin soll ich, ich jetzt, ein Trotta?…” (VI, 346), suggests that Franz
Ferdinand’s alienation is due to the radical changes in the political geography of
his once intact Heimat. Yet a very different picture emerges from between the
lines of the narration: it is in fact only with hindsight that Franz Ferdinand
identifies, or tries to identify, with the Habsburg Empire as his Heimat. His
disaffection with the 1930s present prompts him to seek refuge in a reconstructed
past, but his perception of the past is “filtered through twenty years of increasing
disillusionment and bitterness”,748 and therefore the novel is “a document of the
thirties”749 despite its narrator’s focus on the past.
As we learn in the opening paragraph, Sipolje, the Slovene village from which
Franz Ferdinand’s ancestors hail, no longer exists: “Sipolje besteht nicht mehr,
lange nicht mehr.” (VI, 227) Franz Ferdinand’s identity in the present is
predicated on a way of life and an Empire which no longer exist and perhaps
never existed in the form he imagines. His only connection to the former Empire
is through memory, just as he remembers the now vanished Sipolje from his
childhood:
747
748
208
Mein Vater hatte mich einmal dorthin mitgenommen, an einem siebzehnten
August, dem Vorabend jenes Tages, an dem in allen, auch in den kleinsten
Ortschaften der Monarchie der Geburtstag Kaiser Franz Josephs des Ersten
gefeiert wurde. (VI, 227)
Yet even Franz Ferdinand’s memories of a time when his identity seemed intact
are unreliable: they are “Erinnerungen an Erinnerungen, Idealisierungen von
Idealen”.750 Before the collapse of the Empire he was not so well disposed
towards it, helping to accelerate its fall through reckless derision and political
apathy, as he now admits. He is then, in a sense, “einigermaßen schwierig und
resonanzlos zwischen den Zeiten angesiedelt”.751 While Franz Ferdinand’s father,
who had dreamed of a “slawische[s] Königreich” and a “Monarchie der
Österreicher, Ungarn und Slawen” (VI, 228), named his son “Erbe[...] seiner
Ideen” (VI, 228) in his will, it is only after the collapse of the Habsburg Empire
that Franz Ferdinand sees fit to claim this legacy – when it is too late:
Es war das Ende. Ich dachte an den alten Traum meines Vaters, den von
einer dreifältigen Monarchie, und daß er mich dazu bestimmt hatte, einmal
seinen Traum wirklich zu machen. Mein Vater lag begraben auf dem
Hietzinger Friedhof, und der Kaiser Franz Joseph, dessen treuer Deserteur er
gewesen war, in der Kapuzinergruft. Ich war der Erbe, und der körnige
Regen fiel über mich, und ich wanderte dem Hause meines Vaters und
meiner Mutter zu. Ich machte einen Umweg. Ich ging an der Kapuzinergruft
vorbei. Auch vor ihr ging ein Wachtposten auf und ab. Was hatte er noch zu
bewachen? die Sarkophage? das Andenken? die Geschichte? (VI, 296)
Franz Ferdinand’s relationship to his father’s convictions has always been at one
remove, a fact signalled in his speaking Slovene not as his Muttersprache but only
because his father taught him. (VI, 229) Without a genuine relationship to his
father’s ideas Franz Ferdinand “cannot live them,”752 as Roth’s satire reveals.
Franz Ferdinand’s belief that his experience of Slovenia is authentic is reflected in
his enthusiastic declaration of affinity with his cousin Joseph Branco: “Ich fühlte:
dies ist ein Bruder, kein Vetter!” (VI, 229) However, his attempts to acquire from
his cousin “das Wichtigste, das zu einem echten Slowenen gehört: eine alte Kette,
eine bunte Weste, eine steinschwere, stehende Uhr mit Schlüsselchen” (VI, 232)
demonstrate the poverty of his understanding of what it is to be a Slovene peasant.
While for Franz Ferdinand “jede folkloristische Attrappe” is a symbol of his
749
750
751
209
father’s “Liebe zu den Slawen unseres Reiches” (VI, 231), a love with which he
has been instilled since childhood, Joseph Branco “gets what a real Slovene
peasant needs: money”.753 That Franz Ferdinand is incapable of any insight in this
regard is indicated in his surprised commentary on his cousin’s willingness to sell
him the items he so desires:
Und ich hatte doch im stillen gedacht, eingedenk der Lehren meines Vaters,
daß ein slowenischer Bauer viel zu edel sei, um sich überhaupt um Geld und
Geldeswert zu kümmern. (VI, 232)754
The very fact that Franz Ferdinand is motivated to acquire the trappings which
will signify to his frivolous friends his “nahe Beziehung zu der originellen Erde
des sagenhaften slowenischen Sipolje” (VI, 233) – a relationship these friends
covet755 but which is also even for Franz Ferdinand “in Wirklichkeit
unerreichbar”756 – suggests that his identity as a cosmopolitan assimilated
member of the Habsburg Viennese upper class is not meaningful. He has no
profession, and although he has enrolled to study law, it is only to please his
mother and he in fact does not study at all (VI, 233). Although he claims “[u]nser
Leben war vor dem großen Krieg idyllisch” (VI, 248-49), his description of the
life he shares with his friends reveals the triviality and emptiness of their
existence:
Ich lebte in der fröhlichen, ja ausgelassenen Gesellschaft junger Aristokraten,
[…]. Ich teilte mit ihnen den skeptischen Leichtsinn, den melancholischen
Fürwitz, die sündhafte Fahrlässigkeit, die hochmütige Verlorenheit, alle
Anzeichen des Untergangs, den wir damals noch nicht kommen sahen. (VI,
233)
It is because their lives are so meaningless that Franz Ferdinand and his friends
embrace every diversion that presents itself, from the folkloristic novelty of a
752
753
754
755
756
For Pauli, Franz Ferdinand’s father is revealed in these pages to have similarly subscribed to a
romantic “Austriazismus”: Pauli, “Die Kapuzinergruft” 54. However, since the only insight
readers have into the father is through his son’s unreliable narration it is impossible to say
whether this is the case or whether Franz Ferdinand was simply incapable of understanding
what his father tried to impress upon him.
“Denn alle beneideten mich um Weste, Kette, Uhr. Alle hätten sie mir am liebten den ganzen
Vetter abgekauft, meine Verwandtschaft und mein Sipolje.” (VI, 234)
210
genuine Slovene peasant to the advent of a war they know will spell the end of
this apparently carefree, but empty, existence:
Es schien mir damals, daß mir der Krieg durchaus gelegen käme. In dem
Augenblick, in dem er nun da war und unausbleiblich, erkannte ich sofort
und ich glaube, auch alle meine Freunde dürften es genauso schnell und so
plötzlich erkannt haben –, daß sogar noch ein sinnloser Tod besser sei als ein
sinnloses Leben. Ich hatte Angst vor dem Tod. Das ist gewiß. Ich wollte
nicht fallen. Ich wollte mir lediglich selbst die Sicherheit verschaffen, daß ich
sterben könne. (VI, 258)
This explicit recognition of the hollow life which he has led in Habsburg Austria
contradicts his earlier insistence that the war precipitated a loss of identity and
Heimat: it is called the world war, he explains, “nicht etwa, weil ihn die ganze
Welt geführt hatte, sondern weil wir alle infolge seiner eine Welt, unsere Welt,
verloren haben” (VI, 252). And yet what was this world? Franz Ferdinand tells of
the loss of not just one Heimat but several in succession, losses he claims are set
in train by the coming war. However, Roth casts a critical and often ironic eye on
each Heimat which Franz Ferdinand remembers losing, revealing each to have
been a figment of his imagination.
Visiting the Galician Jewish fiacre driver Manes Reisiger in Zlotogrod before the
outbreak of war, Franz Ferdinand is struck by the fact that most things about this
strange town and its “fremde[...], flache[...], wehmütige[...] Landschaft” (VI, 251)
seem “heimisch und vertraut” (VI, 252) to him. There follows a passage which
could have been taken from one of Roth’s eulogizing political pieces on the fallen
Habsburg Monarchy:
Ich spreche vom mißverstandenen und auch mißbrauchten Geist der alten
Monarchie, der da bewirkte, daß ich in Zlotogrod ebenso zu Hause war wie
in Sipolje, wie in Wien. Das einzige Kaffeehaus in Zlotogrod, das Café
Habsburg, gelegen im Parterre des Hotels ‘Zum goldenen Bären’, in dem ich
abgestiegen war, sah nicht anders aus als das Café Wimmerl in der
Josefstadt, wo ich gewohnt war, mich mit meinen Freunden am Nachmittag
zu treffen. Auch hier saß hinter der Theke die wohlvertraute Kassiererin, so
blond und so füllig, wie zu meiner Zeit nur die Kassiererinnen sein konnten
[…]. Die Schachbretter, die Dominosteine, die verrauchten Wände, die
Gaslampen, der Küchentisch in der Ecke, in der Nähe der Toiletten […]: all
dies war Heimat, stärker als nur ein Vaterland, weit und bunt, dennoch
vertraut und Heimat: die kaiser- und königliche Monarchie. […] Es dauerte
kaum eine Woche, und ich war in Zlotogrod ebenso heimisch, wie ich es in
Sipolje, in Müglitz, in Brünn und in unserem Café Wimmerl in der Josefstadt
gewesen war. (VI, 252-53)
211
Franz Ferdinand’s narration implies that not only he but all Habsburg subjects
would feel “heimisch” in any one of its towns: it was in the nature of the
Monarchy, “[das] durchaus natürliche[...] Gesetz eines starken Geistes” (VI, 252).
However, the paragraphs either side of this passage reveal that this experience is
restricted to those of Franz Ferdinand’s class. Franz Ferdinand has been invited to
Zlotogrod by Manes Reisiger, for whom he professes to feel a longing757 and to
whom he refers as his friend (VI, 253), and the invitation was expressly for Franz
Ferdinand to stay with Manes: “‘Ich habe mir vorgestellt,’” Manes writes, “‘daß
es auch Ihnen angenehm wäre, bei mir zu wohnen. Mein Häuschen ist arm, aber
geräumig.’” (VI, 248) However, Franz Ferdinand chooses to stay at the Hotel
“Zum goldenen Bären” because it is “[das] einzige[...] Hotel dieses Städtchens,
von dem man mir gesagt hatte, es sei einem Europäer angemessen.” (VI, 249) The
unstated implication is both that Manes Reisiger’s house would not be appropriate
or fitting for a European and that Manes himself is not a “European”.
The only “Europeans” in Zlotogrod appear to be the Bezirkshauptmann Baron
Grappik and the officers of the ninth dragoon regiment, who speak “das gleiche
näselnde, ärarische Deutsch der besseren Stände” (VI, 253) and with whom Franz
Ferdinand spends his evenings, having been driven around the district “im Fiaker
meines Freundes Manes Reisiger” (IV, 253) during the day.758 His description of
the countryside, which immediately follows his excursus on the virtues of the
former Monarchy and its ability to make every provincial town “vertraut und
Heimat”, betrays a further discrepancy between his experience of Heimat in
Zlotogrod and the reality of life in the town:
Das Land war in Wirklichkeit arm, aber es zeigte sich anmutig und sorglos.
Die weit gebreiteten, unfruchtbaren Sümpfe selbst erschienen mir saftig und
gütig und der freundliche Chor der Frösche, der aus ihnen emporstieg, als ein
Lobgesang von Lebewesen, die besser als ich wußten, zu welchem Zweck
Gott sie und ihre Heimat, die Sümpfe, geschaffen hatte. (IV, 253)
As one of the “Europeans” who is only visiting this harsh and barren landscape
and does not have to live here, Franz Ferdinand experiences its poverty – from the
757
758
“Plötzlich erfaßten mich die Ungeduld und sogar die Sehnsucht nach diesem Zlotogrod und
nach dem Fiaker namens Reisiger.” (VI, 249)
Cf. Pauli, who writes that the trip to Zlotogrod, which is conceived by the narrator as an
adventure and “als Suche in der Vergangenheit nach der eigenen Identität, endet doch wieder
nur im Casino”: Pauli, “Die Kapuzinergruft” 49.
212
comfort of the fiacre and the hotel – as romantic, and his determination not to
acknowledge its harsh reality is revealed to be symptomatic of his class when he
attempts to explain his habit of drinking all night and sleeping during the day:
[W]ir suchten die Erklärung in der Tatsache, daß wir zu jung waren, um die
Nächte zu vernachlässigen. Indessen war es, wie ich erst später sah, die
Angst vor den Tagen, genauer gesagt, vor den Vormittagen, den klarsten
Zeiten des Tages. Da sieht man deutlich, und man wird auch deutlich
gesehen. Und wir, wir wollten nicht deutlich sehen, und wir wollten auch
nicht deutlich gesehen werden. (VI, 254)759
This passage recalls the deliberate blindness of the characters in Radetzkymarsch,
which signified both the prevalence of the desire to deny reality, thereby avoiding
having to confront it, and the futility of any attempt to do so. Similarly here, the
motif of blindness functions to cast doubt on the narrator’s retrospective
perception of the Habsburg Empire as having been a vast Heimat for all its
peoples, “weit und bunt, dennoch vertraut und Heimat” (VI, 253).
Franz Ferdinand’s narration of Habsburg times moves “from one imagined
‘Heimat’ to the next, but none of these is convincing as a true home, not least
because of the ease with which Trotta is able to give them up.”760 Having
described the military as his Heimat,761 he then expresses a feeling of alienation
from his comrades, whose “Unbekümmertheit” (VI, 270) in the face of war
offends him, although he has just admitted that he is as “oberflächlich,
leichtsinnig, unkameradschaftlich, stupide” as they (VI, 268). Having decided that
he wants to die “mit Joseph Branco, meinem Vetter, dem Kastanienbrater, und mit
Manes Reisiger, dem Fiaker von Zlotogrod, und nicht mit Walzertänzern”, he
leaves his regiment: “So verlor ich zum erstenmal meine erste Heimat, nämlich
die Einundzwanziger, mitsamt unserer geliebten Wasserwiese im Prater.” (VI,
271) Drawn to his romanticized idea of Joseph Branco and Manes Reisiger and
believing they represent a more authentic experience of Austria than “die
759
760
761
The unreliability of Franz Ferdinand’s perceptions of Zlotogrod as a new or extended Heimat
is further exposed in his reaction to the breakfast habitually eaten by Manes: “Ich trank [den
Tee] in der blau getünchten Küche, vor dem großen, weißblechernen Samowar, während
Manes geschabten Rettich, Zwiebelbrot und Gurken aß. Es roch stark, aber heimlich, heimisch
fast, obwohl ich niemals diese Art Frühstück gegessen hatte; ich liebte damals eben alles, ich
war jung, einfach jung.” (VI, 255)
“Die Wasserwiese der Einundzwanziger war meine Heimat.” (VI, 269)
213
verwöhnten Kinder unserer frohlebigen Wiener Gesellschaft” (VI, 272), Franz
Ferdinand does not so much lose his “erste Heimat” as he abandons it. Before this
point, he has not once referred to his Heimat in the military: “He brings it up only
to mention that he loses it, but this loss is in fact a free choice; he casually leaves
one home to pursue another mirage of a ‘Heimat’.”762 The very fact that he can
leave it with such ease reveals that it was not a real Heimat, affording him no firm
sense of identity or purpose, much like his cousin Carl Joseph in Radetzkymarsch.
Franz Ferdinand, Joseph Branco and Manes Reisiger are taken prisoner during
their first and only battle at Krasne-Busk, sent to Siberia and eventually given
brief sanctuary by the Siberian Pole Jan Baranovitsch. Witnessing the fight
between Branco and Reisiger that precipitates their expulsion from this sanctuary,
Franz Ferdinand claims to have been struck by the insight “daß ich nicht mehr zu
ihnen gehörte.” (VI, 293) However, this is another delusion: as the reader knows,
Franz Ferdinand has never belonged with the Slovene peasant and the Jewish
fiacre driver,763 and his promotion to Lieutenant at the point of his transfer to the
Thirty-Fifth Landwehr (VI, 274) is the visible sign of his difference and distance
from them. The knowledge that he is to leave Baranovitsch triggers a sensation of
loss in the narrator:
Das Wasser siedete, ich schüttete Tee in den Tschajnik, goß Wasser drauf
und stellte den Tschajnik auf die Samowarröhre. – Zum letztenmal! dachte
ich. Ich hatte keine Angst vor dem Lager. Es war Krieg, alle Gefangenen
mußten ins Lager. Aber ich wußte nun, daß Baranovitsch ein Vater war, sein
Haus meine Heimat war, sein Brot das Brot meiner Heimat. Gestern waren
mir meine besten Freunde verlorengegangen. Heute verlor ich eine Heimat.
Zum zweitenmal verlor ich eine Heimat. Damals wußte ich noch nicht, daß
ich die Heimat nicht zum letztenmal verloren hatte. Unsereins ist gezeichnet.
(VI, 294)
The melodramatic and sentimental exclamation “‘Zum letztenmal!’” in response
to the simple act of making tea suggests that Franz Ferdinand’s belief that he is
losing “[z]um zweitenmal […] eine Heimat” is exaggerated. Furthermore, the
762
763
Howes, “Kapuzinergruft,” 162. Howes argues that Franz Ferdinand then “sets up another
insubstantial home in his hasty marriage to Elisabeth”, but in fact the narrator never refers to
his marriage as a Heimat. Instead, he calls it “ein ‘häusliches Leben’” (VI, 268), which he
fears more than death and which appears to make the danger they face in war appear
welcoming: “Und also waren wir gewappnet, [der Gefahr] entgegenzugehen, wie einer noch
unbekannten, aber bereits freundlich winkenden Heimat …” (VI, 268)
Cf. Howes, “Kapuzinergruft,” 162.
214
incongruous claim that a hut he briefly inhabited in Siberia has been his Heimat
casts doubt on his capacity to understand what Heimat is and suggests he is
desperately trying to identify it anywhere he can.
“Der Tod kreuzte seine knochigen Hände…”:764 Fatalism and Apathy
The fight between the Slovene peasant Branco and Galician Jew Reisiger has the
further function of symbolizing the growing discord between the Habsburg
Empire’s ethnic groups. The Viennese aristocrat Franz Ferdinand’s failure to
intervene in this unnecessary and trivial argument is indicative of the failure of the
ruling classes to mediate and be a vehicle of reconciliation between the
Monarchy’s peoples before it was too late.765 Hearing Branco and Reisiger fight,
Franz Ferdinand leaves the kitchen where he is washing dishes – keeping things in
order – but when he sees them he says nothing, feeling that he himself is immune
to the “Wahn der Wüste” with which his friends have been seized:
Eine gehässige Gleichgültigkeit erfüllte mich. Ich ging zurück in die Küche,
die Teller waschen. […] Nachdem ich mit meiner Arbeit fertig geworden
war, setzte ich mich auf den Küchenschemel und wartete ruhig.
Eine geraume Weile später kamen sie auch heraus, kamen sie gleichsam zum
Vorschein, einer hinter dem anderen. Sie beachteten mich auch jetzt nicht. Es
schien, als wollte mir jeder von den beiden, und jeder für sich, da sie doch
Feinde untereinander waren, seine Geringschätzung dafür bezeugen, daß ich
mich in ihren Kampf nicht eingemischt hatte. (VI, 292-93)
Franz Ferdinand’s apathy in the face of an argument so trivial it would have been
easy for him to put an end to it is characteristic of his attitude to the troubled
Monarchy before the war. While he does not explictly acknowledge a sense of
guilt over his role in his friends’ argument, preferring to focus on the
inconvenience it occasions him, his sense of remorse over the fall of the Habsburg
Empire is palpable from the opening pages of the novel, and must therefore be
seen as a key element of his motivation in writing. In the first chapter, regret is
implicit in his imagining that his rebel father “hätte vielleicht den Gang der
Geschichte verändern können, wenn er länger gelebt hätte” (VI, 228), and he
chastizes himself for not having carried on his father’s struggle for a reform of the
Monarchy before it was too late:
764
765
Cf. Pauli, “Die Kapuzinergruft” 39, 136.
215
Nicht umsonst hatte er mich auf den Namen Franz Ferdinand taufen lassen.
Aber ich war damals jung und töricht, um nicht zu sagen: leichtsinnig.
Leichtfertig war ich auf jeden Fall. Ich lebte damals, wie man so sagt: in den
Tag hinein. Nein! Dies ist falsch: Ich lebte in die Nacht hinein; ich schlief in
den Tag hinein. (VI, 228)
Franz Ferdinand’s very name – after the assassinated archduke who had wanted to
reform the Austro-Hungarian dualism into a triangular monarchy of Austrians,
Hungarians and Slavs – stands “für eine enttäuschte Hoffnung, für eine versäumte
Gelegenheit, menschenfreundliche Lebensbedingungen zu schaffen”.766 He
regrets his frivolous, unthinking existence before the war, repeatedly using
adjectives such as “leichtsinnig” and “leichtfertig” to refer to his and his friends’
past behaviour in the course of his narration. After the war, his friend Chojnicki
declares that Franz Ferdinand and his circle must bear responsibility for the
destruction of the state due to their reckless indifference to political
developments:
‘An allem seid ihr schuld, ihr, ihr’, er suchte nach einem Ausdruck, ‘ihr
Gelichter’, fiel ihm endlich ein, ‘ihr habt mit euren leichtfertigen
Kaffeehauswitzen den Staat zerstört. […] Ihr habt nicht sehen wollen, daß
diese Alpentrottel und die Sudetenböhmen, diese kretinischen Nibelungen,
unserer Nationalitäten so lange beleidigt und geschändet haben, bis sie
anfingen, die Monarchie zu hassen und zu verraten. Nicht unsere Tschechen,
nicht unsere Serben, nicht unsere Polen, nicht unsere Ruthenen haben
verraten, sondern nur unsere Deutschen, das Staatsvolk.’ (VI, 315)
Franz Ferdinand’s response to Chojnicki’s outburst is revealing: “‘Aber meine
Familie ist slowenisch’”. (VI, 315) This denial of his share of responsibility
characterizes Franz Ferdinand’s narration from the outset, despite his apparent
willingness to castigate himself and his friends for being “töricht”, “leichtfertig”
and ‘leichtsinnig” (VI, 228).767 From the opening pages he implicitly justifies his
behaviour and that of his aristocratic friends with his fatalistic view of history:
766
767
Doppler, “Kapuzinergruft,” 91-92. That his father’s dream, shared with the archduke, was
perhaps unrealistic is reflected in Franz Ferdinand’s unconscious repetitive use of the word
“träumen” in his description of his father’s desired reform of the Monarchy (VI, 228). Cf.
Chojnicki is also guilty of blaming others rather than facing up to his own role. It is one thing
to have recognized before the war that “Österreich wird an dieser Nibelungentreue zugrunde
gehn, meine Herren!” (VI, 235); it is quite another to act to counter this nationalism. Roth
satirizes Chojnicki’s pompous self-righteousness in the brawl with the Sudeten German Papa
Kunz that follows his exchange with Franz Ferdinand: “‘Gott strafe die Sudeten!’ schrie
Chojnicki, der eben eine Partie verloren hatte. Er sprang auf und lief mit erhobenen und
geballten Fäusten auf den alten Papa Kunz los. Wir hielten ihn zurück. Schaum stand vor
seinem Munde, Blut rötete seine Augen. ‘Markomannische Quadratschädel! rief er endlich. Es
216
Über den Gläsern, aus denen wir übermütig tranken, kreuzte der unsichtbare
Tod schon seine knochigen Hände. Wir schimpften fröhlich, wir lästerten
sogar bedenkenlos. Einsam und alt, fern und gleichsam erstarrt, dennoch uns
allen nahe und allgegenwärtig im großen, bunten Reich lebte und regierte der
alte Kaiser Franz Joseph. Vielleicht schliefen in den verborgenen Tiefen
unserer Seelen jene Gewißheiten, die man Ahnungen nennt, die Gewißheit
vor allem, daß der alte Kaiser starb, mit jedem Tage, den er länger lebte, und
mit ihm die Monarchie, nicht so sehr unser Vaterland wie unser Reich, etwas
Größeres, Weiteres, Erhabeneres als nur ein Vaterland. Aus unsern schweren
Herzen kamen die leichten Witze, aus unserem Gefühl, daß wir Todgeweihte
seien, eine törichte Lust an jeder Bestätigung des Lebens: an Bällen, am
Heurigen, an Mädchen, am Essen, an Spazierfahrten, Tollheiten aller Art,
sinnlosen Eskapaden, an selbstmörderischer Ironie […]. (VI, 233)
Franz Ferdinand’s sense of being “todgeweiht” and his foreboding that the
Monarchy will die with the Emperor echoes the fatalism of characters in
Radetzkymarsch and Roth’s early novels. In relation to Radetzkymarsch,
Margarete Landwehr has argued persuasively that
Roth both focuses upon and undermines the concept of fate as a cosmic or
historical force by depicting apparently inevitable, tragic events as caused by
fortuitous, alterable circumstances: that which the characters view as
causality, the readers and the omniscient narrator perceive as chance.768
Although the characters in Radetzkymarsch perceive the demise of both the
Trottas and the Habsburg Monarchy as inevitable, the narrator consistently
undermines this fatalistic view from the very first paragraph in which we are told
on the one hand that fate had chosen the first Lieutenant Trotta for a special
deed,769 but on the other that he ensured that later times forgot him,770 implying
that the individual has a power of agency denied by the concept of fate.771 The
narrator constantly distances himself from the fatalism of his characters by
revealing the disparity between their interpretation of events and reality. Thus,
while Carl Joseph and Demant’s father-in-law Knopfmacher claim that nothing
could have been done to save Demant’s life,772 the reader knows that his death is a
768
769
770
771
772
war der Gipfel seiner Rage. Jetzt wurde er zusehends sanfter.” (VI, 315-16) Chojnicki is
typical of the intellectuals of pre-war Vienna described by Johnston who “would converse for
hours without seeking to alter reality”: Johnston, The Austrian Mind 119.
Landwehr, “Modernist Aesthetics,” 401.
“Zu einer besonderen Tat hatte ihn das Schicksal ausersehn.” (V, 139)
“Er aber sorgte dafür, daß ihn die späteren Zeiten aus dem Gedächtnis verloren.” (V, 139)
The effect is heightened by another sentence towards the end of the same paragraph, which
subverts the impression of Trotta as a hero guided by fate: “Niemals schoß er, ohne zu zielen,
und jeder seiner Schüsse traf.” (V, 139) Cf. Landwehr, “Modernist Aesthetics,” 402.
The following is part of the exchange between Knopfmacher and Carl Joseph: “‘Er hat Eva
gebeten, nach Wien zu fahren, ohne etwas anzudeuten. Und sie ist ahnungslos abgefahren.
217
result of human action and inaction, from Demant’s denial of his wife’s infidelity
to Knopfmacher’s refusal – despite knowing of his daughter’s affairs with officers
– to faciliate his son-in-law’s desire to leave the army,773 not to mention Demant’s
failure to defy an archaic code of honour he knows is senseless.774
Similarly, the ironic portrayal of Carl Joseph’s refusal to see that his deepening
financial crisis is the result of his own injudiciousness subverts his fatalistic
interpretation of his altercation with Kapturak:
Er glaubte, die tückischen Schliche einer finsteren Macht zu erkennen,
unheimlich erschien ihm der Zufall, daß Frau von Taußig gerade heute zu
ihrem Mann hatte reisen müssen, und allmählich sah er auch alle düsteren
Ereignisse seines Lebens in einen düsteren Zusammenhang gefügt und
abhängig von irgendeinem gewaltigen, gehässigen, unsichtbaren Drahtzieher,
dessen Ziel es war, den Leutnant zu vernichten. Es war deutlich, […] daß
Leutnant Trotta, […] zu jenen unseligen Wesen gehörte, auf die eine böse
Macht ein böses Auge geworfen hatte. […] Das Schicksal, sein Schicksal!
(V, 383-84)
There can be no doubt that Carl Joseph’s financial debt to Kapturak is the result
not of “the insidious machinations of fate”775 but of imprudence and a fatalistic
approach to life. The ironic distance created by the use of erlebte Rede (signalled
in the last line of the quotation) serves to underscore the discrepancy between
reality and Carl Joseph’s despondent and self-justifying interpretation of it.
The cumulative effect of Roth’s exposure in Radetzkymarsch of the gulf between
the characters’ belief in an ineluctable fate and the reality of their own choices is
to “challenge[...] the view of the Danube monarchy’s demise as a collective
historical destiny.”776 The sense of inevitable doom which pervades the novel as a
result of the recurring motifs of death and rain is subverted when the two motifs
coalesce in the scene in which Franz Ferdinand’s assassination is announced:
773
774
775
776
Und dann ist sein Abschiedsbrief gekommen. Und da hab’ ich gleich gewußt, daß nix mehr zu
machen ist.’ ‘Nein, es war nichts zu machen!’” (V, 252) Later in the conversation
Knopfmacher repeats his judgement: “‘Es war nix mehr zu machen!’ wiederholte
Knopfmacher.” (V, 253)
Cf. Landwehr, “Modernist Aesthetics,” 402-03.
“Ein stupides, eisernes Gesetz ließ keinen Ausweg frei. ‘Ich bin ein Dummkopf, mein lieber
Freund!’ sagte der Doktor. ‘Ich hätte mich von Eva längst trennen müssen. Ich habe keine
Kraft, diesem blöden Duell zu entrinnen. Ich werde aus Blödheit ein Held sein, nach
Ehrenkodex und Dienstreglement.’” (V, 239)
218
Der Diener brachte den Zufall des Gewitters mit der schrecklichen Kunde
[der Ermordung] in einen übernatürlichen Zusammenhang. Er bedachte, daß
die Stunde endlich gekommen sei, in der sich übernatürliche Gewalten der
Welt deutlich und grausam kundgeben wollen. (V, 418)
The servant’s superstitious interpretation of a natural event, the storm, as a
supernatural omen “exposes the concept of fate as a human construct and an
absurd one at that.”777 The assassination of the Archduke was, as readers know,
the catalyst for the outbreak of the First World War. By ironically undermining
the servant’s fatalistic interpretation of Franz Ferdinand’s death, Roth implies that
the collapse of the Habsburg Empire which the war precipitated was also not
inevitable or fated but the result of a confluence of factors, including the reality of
German dominance behind the Habsburg Myth of supranationalism which Roth
exposes in this novel.
In Die Kapuzinergruft, Franz Ferdinand’s fatalistic view of the fall of the
Habsburg Monarchy finds expression in the leitmotif of death crossing his bony
hands over the chalices from which Franz Ferdinand and his friends obliviously
drink (VI, 233, 247, 249, 253, 268). Heath identifies this recurring image as the
archetypal Baroque memento mori funeral motif and understands it to be a key
element of Roth’s portayal of “the end of the Habsburg monarchy as the end of
the world”, the two being “as intrinsically linked for Roth as they were for many
intellectuals of the Baroque period.”778 Yet this interpretation fails to take into
account the way in which Franz Ferdinand’s fatalism is consistently undermined
in the novel. Candles burning towards their end – another Baroque motif779 –
represent for Franz Ferdinand the approaching end of the world:
Es waren beinahe nur noch Stümpfe von Kerzen, und sie schienen mir das
Ende der Welt, von dem ich wußte, daß es sich jetzt zu vollziehen begann, zu
symbolisieren. (VI, 259; emphasis added)
For Heath, the fact that these candles are described as burning towards their end
“gefaßt und sicher” (VI, 259) denotes that “in the world of confusion presented,
only death is certain”.780 Yet Franz Ferdinand’s subjective certainty that the world
777
778
779
780
Heath, “Legacy of the Baroque,” 330.
219
is about to end is ironic, just as his repeated pronouncements that he and his
friends are doomed to die in the war are clearly false, since he has survived to tell
his tale. The satire intended in the image of the candles and the meaning the
narrator melodramatically ascribes to them is underscored at the end of the novel
when the Jewish Cafetier Adolf Feldmann gives Franz Ferdinand two candles
before leaving the café after the announcement of the Anschluß:
‘Dann leben Sie wohl, Herr Baron! Ich lösche die Lampen aus! Hier sind
zwei Kerzen!’
Und damit zündete er zwei bleiche Kerzen an, und ehe ich mir noch von
meinem Eindruck, er hätte mir Totenkerzen angezündet, eine Rechenschaft
geben konnte, waren alle Lichter im Café erloschen, und blaß, mit einem
schwarzen, steifen Hut auf dem Kopf, ein Totengräber eher als der joviale,
silberbärtige Jude Adolf Feldmann, übergab er mir ein wuchtiges
Hakenkreuz aus Blei und sagte:
‘Für alle Fälle, Herr Baron! Bleiben Sie ruhig bei Ihrem Schnaps! Ich lasse
den Rollbalken zu. Und wenn Sie gehen wollen, können Sie ihn von innen
aufmachen. Die Stange steht rechts neben der Tür.’ (VI, 344-45)
The composed and practical response of the Jew to the crisis – which poses far
greater danger to himself than to Franz Ferdinand – heightens the absurdity of
Franz Ferdinand’s irrational and self-centred histrionics. The candles have a
practical purpose and it is only in Franz Ferdinand’s subjective imagining that
they become “Totenkerzen, meine Totenkerzen!” (VI, 345)781 Thus the Baroque
motifs identified by Heath reflect not the author’s but the narrator’s equation of
the end of the Monarchy with the end of the world, a view from which Roth
distances himself by repeatedly undermining or satirizing Franz Ferdinand’s
fatalism.
“Was gingen mich noch die Dinge dieser Welt an?”782 Apathy and its
Consequences
A fatalistic view of life relieves the individual of responsibility for action. Franz
Ferdinand’s fascination with death is typical of the upper and middle bourgeoisie
during the period Hermann Broch dubbed “die fröhliche Apokalypse” (18481918):783 “To them death promised release from ennui; in a world gone stale it
781
782
783
Further underlining the satire, the candles absurdly remind Franz Ferdinand of “eine Art
weißer, aufrechter, angezündeter Würmer. Ich erwartete jeden Augenblick, daß sie sich bögen,
wie es Würmern eigentlich geziemt.” (VI, 354)
Hermann Broch, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit (München: R. Piper, 1964) 75f.
220
alone remained a mighty unknown.”784 In this class, financial security “prompted
pursuit of pleasure for its own sake. Among people loath to make decisions
spectacle and amusement gladdened daily life.”785 Indifference to political and
social reform, or what Johnston calls “therapeutic nihilism”, went hand in hand
with this decadent pleasure-seeking and living for and in the moment.786 Williams
accuses Roth of never having overcome a propensity to fatalism,787 a charge
which accords with the more typical pronouncement that Roth’s late work was
characterized by historical escapism. Yet whether Roth’s engagement for the
monarchist cause was realistic or not,788 he was at least taking action rather than
waiting for the inevitable to happen and therefore cannot be accused of fatalism.
Roth makes Franz Ferdinand’s fatalism and political apathy the centre of his
concern in Die Kapuzinergruft because it is an attitude which he sees as both
endemic and dangerous, in the sense that it can have horrendous political
consequences.789 Through the exposure of parallels between Franz Ferdinand’s
behaviour in the past and his conduct in the present Roth demonstrates that the
failure to engage with politics not only characterized Habsburg times but was also
typical of post-war Austrian society,790 and was in part responsible for the
catastrophe of the Anschluß.791
784
785
786
787
788
789
790
Johnston contrasts what he calls the Austrian national attitude to death with the Hungarian
dream of political action, arguing that Austrians “cultivated a Baroque vision of death as the
fulfilment of life”: Johnston, The Austrian Mind 165. Williams writes that the upper middle
class in fin de siècle Vienna was politically quiescent: “In alliance with the aristocracy and the
civil service it was pledged to maintain the status quo upon which its prosperity and influence
depended. In an Austria threatened with disruption and haunted by an ever-increasing loss of
power and prestige, the upper middle class was loyal to the Crown but displayed at the same
time a notable apathy towards politics in general”: Williams, The Broken Eagle xviii-xix.
Critics typically dismiss Roth’s Habsburg legitimism on the grounds that it was unrealistic –
the least realistic of the anti-fascist choices available: see, for example, Williams, The Broken
Eagle 102.
Cf. Pauli, “Die Kapuzinergruft” 31. For Pauli this makes Die Kapuzinergruft a political novel,
because “auch die konsequente Darstellung eines unpolitischen Verhaltens – wie es am
Beispiel Trottas ja mit all den Auswirkungen auf sein Leben vorgenommen wird – kann eine
politisch aufklärende Absicht widerspiegeln”: Pauli, “Die Kapuzinergruft” 97-98. By
contrast, for Scheible, who equates the narrator with the author, the novel “muß […], so sehr
das dem Eindruck einer ersten Lektüre widersprechen mag, als nicht politischer Roman
gekennzeichnet werden”: Scheible, Joseph Roth 164-65.
This in part explains his support for the regime of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg: in Dreimal
Österreich, which Roth reviewed favourably, Schuschnigg promoted a specific interpretation
of Austrian identity which was intended to “strengthen the government’s legitimacy in the
221
Franz Ferdinand is himself unaware of the parallels between his past and present
conduct. He is critical of his history of living “in die Nacht hinein” (VI, 228)
before the war, thereby avoiding having to see and be seen clearly (VI, 254). The
advent of war seems to precipitate a change in him and upon marrying Elisabeth
he reflects:
Es war mir, als hätte ich jetzt die dreiundzwanzig leichtfertig und lieblos
verbrachten Jahre meines Lebens wettzumachen, innerhalb einer Stunde, und
statt wie sonst ein Jungvermählter die sogenannte neue Existenz anzufangen,
bestrebte ich mich, vielmehr die verflossene zu korrigieren. Am liebsten hätte
ich wieder bei der Geburt angefangen. Es war mir klar, daß ich das
Wichtigste versäumt hatte. Zu spät. Ich stand vor dem Tod und vor der Liebe.
(VI, 281)
The irony is that his desire to correct the past is just a way of once again avoiding
present reality. By focussing on his past mistakes, Franz Ferdinand paradoxically
fails to learn from them and is bound to repeat them.
The repetition of his pattern of inaction from pre-war times is demonstrated
through the sub-plot of his relationship with Elisabeth after his return from the
war. Perturbed by developments in Elisabeth’s life during his absence,792 by his
“altes, wohlvertrautes [Gasthaus]” (VI, 303) which has become “fremd” and his
father-in-law’s Stammlokal, and by conversation he does not understand (VI,
303), Franz Ferdinand seeks to regain control through the imposition of order:
Von Geburt und Erziehung dazu geneigt, Verantwortung zu tragen, und auch
aus einem starken Widerstand gegen die Ordnung, die rings um mich
herrschte und in der ich mich nicht auskannte, fühlte ich mich gezwungen,
vor allem Ordnung in meinen eigenen Angelegenheiten zu schaffen. (VI,
306)793
791
792
793
eyes of Nazi Germany and also of the Western democracies”: Pelinka, “Austrian Identity,”
169. For Roth, any action taken to shore up support for an independent Austria was laudable.
Roth was consistently critical of such apathy in his journalism, from the 1923 polemic
“Schweigen im Dichterwald” (I, 1068-69) through to the post-Anschluß piece “Der Feind aller
Völker” (III, 859-61).
“An der Tür verkündete eine kleine Tafel: Atelier Elisabeth Trotta. Ich schreckte vor meinem
Namen zurück. […] Ich wollte ihr die Hand küssen, aber sie drückte meinen Arm herunter
und brachte mich dadurch allein schon aus der Fassung. Es war die erste Frau, die meinen
Arm hinunterdrückte, und es war meine Frau! Ich verspürte etwas von jenem Unbehagen, das
mich immer bei dem Anblick von Anomalien und von menschliche Bewegungen
vollführenden Mechanismen befallen hatte: zum Beispiel von irren Kranken oder von Frauen
ohne Unterleib.” (VI, 301)
Heath notes that following his return from war Franz Ferdinand uses the words “ordnen” and
“Ordnung” nine times. This attempt to impose order and find consistency in life is for Heath
222
To this end he speaks with his father-in-law:
Ich sagte ihm, daß ich nunmehr mein Leben regeln müsse, unser Leben
vielmehr. Ich sei, so sagte ich, keineswegs gesonnen, das Entscheidende
hinauszuschieben. Ich müßte alles sofort wissen. Ich sei ein systematischer
Mensch. (VI, 305)
The use of the subjunctive form is telling: Franz Ferdinand is unconsciously
distancing himself from his stated resolve. The reason for this distancing soon
emerges when his dynamic but opportunistic father-in-law informs him that
Elisabeth might not want to live with him and virtually commands him to speak
with his wife before making any decisions (VI, 305): thus Franz Ferdinand’s first
attempt to impose his own order on his new post-war life fails.
Embarking on a second attempt, he arranges a meeting with Elisabeth, but she
arrives with Jolanth and, once again, Franz Ferdinand resigns himself to the state
of affairs with which he is faced:
Ich hatte natürlich erwartet, daß sie allein kommen würde. Als aber auch
Jolanth Szatmary erschien, wunderte ich mich gar nicht darüber. Es war mir
klar, daß Elisabeth ohne diese Frau nicht gekommen wäre, nicht hätte
kommen können. Und ich verstand. (VI, 306-07)
A pattern of discrepancy between Franz Ferdinand’s emphatically stated desire to
order his affairs and the reality of his resignation and indecision is thus
established. Even when, faced with Stettenheim’s deception of his mother, Franz
Ferdinand appears to take control of his affairs, forbidding his mother from
signing any cheques without his approval and telling Elisabeth “‘Um alles zu
ordnen, Elisabeth! Du ziehst hierher, mit mir!’” (VI, 326), his decisiveness is once
again illusory. Elisabeth does not immediately come to live with her husband and
when she does, “eines Tages”, it is on her own initiative, apparently because she
has decided that she wants a child (VI, 328).794
794
reminiscent of “the Barqoue striving for ordo” in response to the experience of a fragmented
world: Heath, “Legacy of the Baroque,” 334-35.
The fact that Franz Ferdinand’s failure to impose his chauvinist attitudes on Elisabeth is
implicitly criticized by Roth could be read as evidence of Roth’s own chauvinism. However,
Roth’s intention here is not to make a judgement about Franz Ferdinand’s values but to show
that he consistently fails either to impose his ideas and values or to come to terms with the
reality of the situation with which he is faced. Pauli argues that both Franz Ferdinand’s and
Roth’s attitude to Elisabeth is ambivalent: Pauli, “Die Kapuzinergruft” 136.
223
While the pattern of Franz Ferdinand’s irresolution and resignation continues, he
claims that he is gradually becoming used to the new situation. Yet, importantly,
this does not imply a newfound capacity to confront the present. Rather, it is a
wallowing in misery which allows him and his friends to continue the pattern of
avoiding dealing with the present:
Wir gewöhnten uns alle an das Ungewöhnliche. Es war ein hastiges SichGewöhnen. Gleichsam ohne es zu wissen, beeilten wir uns mit unserer
Anpassung, wir liefen geradezu Erscheinungen nach, die wir haßten und
verabscheuten. Wir begannen, unsern Jammer sogar zu lieben, wie man treue
Freunde liebt. Wir vergruben uns geradezu in ihn. Wir waren ihm dankbar,
weil er unsere kleinen, besonderen, persönlichen Kümmernisse verschlang,
er, ihr großer Bruder, der große Jammer, dem gegenüber zwar kein Trost
standhalten konnte, aber auch keine unserer täglichen Sorgen. (VI, 316)
In fact, Franz Ferdinand and his friends manage as best they can to continue the
existence they led before the war:
Oh, nicht, daß wir nicht imstande gewesen wären, noch ein paar kleine
Freuden vor [dem ungeheueren Jammer] zu retten, sie ihm abzukaufen,
abzuschmeicheln, abzuringen. Wir scherzten oft und lachten oft. Wir gaben
Geld aus, das uns zwar kaum noch gehörte, das aber auch kaum noch einen
Wert hatte. Wir borgten und verborgten, ließen uns schenken und
verschenkten, blieben schuldig und bezahlten anderer Schulden. (VI, 316-17)
Characteristic of Franz Ferdinand’s failure to come to terms with and make the
best of the present situation is his attitude to the pension he and his mother are
obliged to open. When the Trottas’ lawyer Doktor Kiniower, who handles their
financial affairs, advises Franz Ferdinand to convert their house into a pension in
order to stave off financial ruin, there is initially no indication of Franz
Ferdinand’s response. More than two pages later he reveals that he “suchte
krampfhaft, den Gedanken an die Pension zu verdrängen” (VI, 324), although he
knows that Kiniower is right and his wife’s craft business will ruin them (VI,
325). Contradicting his earlier insistence that he was raised to bear responsibility
(VI, 306), Franz Ferdinand expresses horror at the thought of running a pension:
Ich – und eine Verantwortung! Nicht, daß ich feige gewesen wäre! Nein, ich
war einfach unfähig. Ich hatte keine Angst vor dem Tod, aber Angst vor
einem Büro, einem Notar, einem Posthalter. Ich konnte nicht rechnen, zur
Not noch addieren. Meine Multiplikation schon schaffte mir Pein. Ja! Ich und
eine Verantwortung! (VI, 325)
Here, as with Carl Joseph in Radetzkymarsch (V, 373), the inability to do simple
calculations is a metaphor for the inability – or refusal – to confront present
224
reality. Just as Carl Joseph “gab ein für allemal jeden Rechenversuch auf, mit dem
Mut, den Ohnmacht und Verzweiflung erzeugen” (V, 373), Franz Ferdinand
continues to avoid the reality of his financial difficulties and the necessity to open
the pension until the “Jolan-Werkstätte” is bankrupt and they are left with only
one third of their house and a few thousand Schillings (VI, 327). Even then it is
only due to the stubborn insistence of Doktor Kiniower, who “gehörte zu jenen
sogenannten praktischen Menschen, die außerstande sind, eine sogenannte
produktive Idee aufzugeben, auch wenn die Menschen unfähig sind, sie
auszuführen” (VI, 329), that Franz Ferdinand finally accedes. It is, however,
Doktor Kiniower who organizes the conversion of the house into the pension,
arranging not only the licence but also the staff, telephone connections, beds and
bells (VI, 329). Through his declaration that he is incapable, and impractical (VI,
329), Franz Ferdinand has already relieved himself of the responsibility of
concerning himself either with the renovations or with the ongoing business of
running the pension. There is no suggestion that Franz Ferdinand ever takes an
active part in the running of the pension: he leaves the accounts to Elisabeth,
declaring “[i]ch verstand nichts von den Rechnungen” (VI, 337).
While Franz Ferdinand’s mother, to his surprise, is “entzückt” with the pension
and her “neues Leben” (VI, 330), her son sits passively by and watches it go to
ruin, a metaphor for the lost opportunity of the First Republic. Roth suggests here
that while post-war Austria was chaotic and difficult it also presented new
opportunities. Rather than wallowing in the past and waiting fatalistically for the
seemingly inevitable Anschluß, people should have made the most of these
opportunities. Franz Ferdinand comments of his mother’s reaction to the pension:
“Ich hatte sie noch niemals so gesehen.” (VI, 330) In this sentence is contained all
the disappointed hope for a new beginning, since, although his mother adjusts to
the changed circumstances and even embraces them, Franz Ferdinand refuses to
involve himself in the running of the pension with the result that it fails. His folly
is highlighted in the juxtaposition with his cousin, Joseph Branco, in the following
chapter. Branco, who is much worse off than Franz Ferdinand and his mother and
is not even allowed any longer to sell his chestnuts in the former crownlands of
the Monarchy (VI, 333), makes the best of a bad situation, selling roasted apples
instead when the chestnuts are full of worms. (VI, 332) Unlike Franz Ferdinand,
225
he has not been used to a life of indulgence and simply adapts to whatever
challenges life brings, no matter how senseless they might appear to him: his new
passport (VI, 333) is the visible symbol of his practical outlook.
After his mother’s death Franz Ferdinand withdraws completely from life, selling
the house and, rather inexplicably, sending his son away to Paris:
Ich kümmerte mich nicht mehr um die Welt. Meinen Sohn schickte ich zu
meinem Freund Laveraville nach Paris.
Allein blieb ich, allein, allein, allein.
Ich ging in die Kapuzinergruft. (VI, 341)
His visit to the Kapuzinergruft, mentioned here at the end of the penultimate
chapter but not described in detail, signifies the flight from reality into history that
many critics accuse Roth of having taken, but it is a journey of which Roth is
critical, as the final chapter reveals. This chapter reports the Anschluß as seen
through Franz Ferdinand’s apolitical eyes. Completely resigned and withdrawn
from life, Franz Ferdinand lives only for the evenings (VI, 341), this mirroring his
admission in the first chapter that before the war he “lebte in die Nacht hinein”
(VI, 228): he has come full circle, without progressing.795 The totality of his
resignation is signalled in the fact that he has stopped reading newspapers (VI,
342), and his own narration reveals the extent to which he continues to subscribe
to a fatalistic worldview, just as he did before the war:
Ich setzte mich also ins Café, und während meine Freunde an meinem Tisch
immer noch von ihren privaten Angelegenheiten sprachen, empfand ich, der
ich durch ein ebenso unerbittliches wie gnädiges Schicksal jede Möglichkeit
eines privaten Interesses ausgeschaltet sah, nur noch das allgemeine, das
mich zeit meines Lebens so wenig anging und dem ich zeit meines Lebens
auszuweichen pflegte… (VI, 342)
He sees himself as “ein vom Tode auf unbeschränkte Zeit Beurlaubter”, “[ein]
nicht mehr zu dieser Welt Gehörende[r]” and asks rhetorically: “Was gingen mich
noch die Dinge dieser Welt an?” (VI, 342) His words signify total withdrawal
from life, yet, paradoxically, the failure of Franz Ferdinand and people of his ilk
795
This fact is reiterated at the conclusion of the novel, which ends with the word “Trotta” (VI,
346), mirroring the first sentence: “Wir heißen Trotta.” (VI, 227)
226
to be politically vigilant and engaged is implicated in the dramatic political event
of the Anschluß:796
Dennoch bekümmerten sie mich, und besonders an jenem Freitag. Es war, als
ginge es darum, ob ich, ein vom Leben Pensionierter, meine Pension in Ruhe
weiterverzehren sollte, wie bis jetzt, in einer verbitterten Ruhe; oder ob mir
auch noch die genommen würde, diese arme, verbitterte Ruhe, man könnte
sagen: den Verzicht, den ich mir angewöhnt hatte, eine Ruhe zu nennen.
Dermaßen, daß oft in den letzten Jahren, wenn dieser oder jener meiner
Freunde zu mir kam, um mir zu sagen, jetzt sei endlich die Stunde da, in der
ich mich um die Geschichte des Landes zu kümmern hätte, ich zwar den
üblichen Satz sagte: ‘Ich will meine Ruh’ haben!’ – aber genau wußte, daß
ich eigentlich hätte sagen sollen: ‘Ich will meinen Verzicht haben!’ Meinen
lieben Verzicht! Auch der ist nun dahin! (VI, 342)
Howes argues that in this final chapter Franz Ferdinand is forced to “recognize
that political concerns are not superfluous”.797 He cites three phrases used by the
narrator as indicating the change in him, phrases in which he seemingly retracts
his declared resignation:798 “The change is slight, barely perceptible, but it is
significant because it is the bitter end of [Franz Ferdinand’s] refusal to pay
attention to reality.”799 However, although Howes’s argument is compelling, the
change he identifies in Franz Ferdinand is very short-lived. The third passage
which Howes cites as signalling the change describes Franz Ferdinand’s reaction
at the moment a strangely dressed young man enters the café to announce the
Anschluß:
Und auch die Aufregung meiner Freunde, selbst an diesem Freitagabend,
schien mir überflüssig; bis zu jener Sekunde, da die Tür des Cafés
aufgerissen wurde und ein seltsam bekleideter junger Mann an der Schwelle
erschien. (VI, 343)
For Howard, the words “bis zu jener Sekunde” suggest that Franz Ferdinand is
“forced by the extremity of events to worry about the world, to resign, so to
speak, his resignation”.800 However, Franz Ferdinand becomes fixated on the
796
797
798
799
800
Cf. Pauli: “Der Anschluß”, d.h.: der nicht verhinderte “Anschluß”, dokumentiert die Folgen
eines solchen Mangels an politischer Wachheit”: Pauli, “Die Kapuzinergruft” 195.
The relevant passages are: “Was gingen mich noch die Dinge dieser Welt an? Dennoch
bekümmerten sie mich, und besonders an jenem Freitag” (VI, 342); “Ich […] hätte eigentlich
sagen sollen: ‘Ich will meinen Verzicht haben!’ Meinen lieben Verzicht! Auch der ist nun
dahin! (VI, 342); and “Und auch die Aufregung meiner Freunde, selbst an diesem
Freitagabend, schien mir überflüssig; bis zu jener Sekunde, da die Tür des Cafés aufgerissen
wurde” (VI, 343); Howes’s emphasis.
227
man’s clothing, and his musings on the significance of the clothes’ colours
indicate that his resignation and refusal to engage with present reality is
ongoing:801
Ich war, ferne der Welt und der Hölle, die sie für mich darstellte, keineswegs
geeignet, die neuen Mützen und Uniformen zu unterscheiden, geschweige
denn, sie zu erkennen. Es mochte weiße, blaue, grüne und rote Hemden
geben; Hosen, schwarz, braun, grün, blau lackiert; Stiefel und Sporen, Leder
und Riemen und Gürtel und Dolche in Scheiden jeder Art: Ich jedenfalls, ich
hatte für mich beschlossen, seit langem schon, seit der Heimkehr aus dem
Kriege schon, sie nicht zu unterscheiden und sie nicht zu erkennen. (VI, 343)
He does take notice when the “neue deutsche Volksregierung” (VI, 343) is
announced, and he engages with this fact long enough to reject it because the
concept of a “Volksregierung” is as absurd for him as the idea of a woman
sleeping with herself in order to create a baby (VI, 343-44), but the fact that he
has failed to register the political reality is revealed in his response to his friends’
reaction: “Insbesondere deshalb überraschte mich der Schrecken, der bei der
Ankunft des seltsam gestiefelten Mannes und seiner seltsamen Verkündung alle
meine Freunde ergriff.” (VI, 344) He dismisses both the man and his
announcement as “seltsam”, thus obviating the need for a reaction, as his
continuing to sit alone in the café while everyone else hurriedly leaves reflects.
His refusal to acknowledge the new reality is indicated in his insistence on the
maintenance of routine, even when the silence, the darkness and the candles
which appear to him to be “Totenkerzen” make him feel uneasy: “Da es mir
unheimlich zu werden begann, rief ich: ‘Franz, zahlen!’ – wie sonst an jedem
Abend.” (VI, 345)
“Ein Mann sucht sein Vaterland”: Whose Search?
Roth’s final comment on Franz Ferdinand’s apolitical fatalism comes at the
entrance to the Kapuzinergruft, to which Franz Ferdinand has wandered with the
purpose of visiting “den Sarg meines Kaisers Franz Joseph” (VI, 346). Franz
801
Cf. Pauli: “Das permanente Desinteresse an allem Politischen führte auch zur Unterschätzung
des über Jahre hinweg sich immer geschlossener formierenden – und uniformierenden, also
eigentlich unübersehbar gewordenen Rechtsextremismus, seiner Parolen und paramilitärischen
Aufmachung. Nicht von ungefähr wird gerade darauf aufmerksam gemacht, daß Trotta die
neuen Uniformen – als äußere Zeichen ideologischer Zugehörigkeit und Hörigkeit – nicht
wahrnimmt, nicht wahrnehmen will, bzw. sie nur in ihrer Wirkung als lächerliche Draperie
beiläufig registriert”: Pauli, “Die Kapuzinergruft” 194.
228
Ferdinand’s desire to see the dead Emperor signifies an identification with history
which Roth indicates is no solution to the political catastrophe of the Anschluß. It
is both illusory (signified by the locked tomb) and cannot halt the march of
history. Roth understands the impulse of his character to identify with the past, as
his own declared affinity with Carl Joseph just after writing Radetzkymarsch
reflects, but unlike his fictional character Franz Ferdinand, Roth recognizes that it
is a chimera. Herein lies the significance of the final line of the novel, the
rhetorical question: “Wohin soll ich, ich jetzt, ein Trotta?…” (VI, 346)
In writing his own story Franz Ferdinand has ostensibly been searching for his
fatherland in the lost world of the past, as the novel’s working title “Ein Mann
sucht sein Vaterland” suggests. Reiber argues that this phrase could be considered
the motto of Roth’s own life:
Auch Roth erlebt ‘Heimat’ nicht real, nicht gegenwärtig, sondern nur in der
dichterischen Projektion. Seine Zugehörigkeit zur Habsburger-Monarchie ist
das späte Produkt einer ungestillten Sehnsucht. In Wahrheit blieb Roth
immer ein Suchender.802
In reaching this conclusion Reiber fails, like many Roth scholars, to differentiate
between the narrator Franz Ferdinand and author Roth. While Franz Ferdinand
appears to experience, as Reiber maintains, a sense of Heimat and belonging not
in the present but projected retrospectively, Roth exposes the unreality of this
experience in the serial loss of Heimat Franz Ferdinand narrates. The reproduction
of his life story has become a substitute for life, but it can only be temporary:
[A]m Ende dieses – wiederholbaren – Erinnerungsprozesses wird ihn immer
wieder die Gegenwart einholen, und er wird sich stets die gleiche,
verzweifelte Frage stellen müssen, in die der Roman so konsequent
mündet.803
It is not Roth who has been searching vainly for his fatherland in the lost world of
the Habsburg Monarchy but his narrator.
802
803
Reiber, “Ein Mann sucht sein Vaterland,” 113. Rosenfeld similarly argues that this image
“aptly characterized the greater part of [Roth’s] fictional work and the entirety of his personal
life: Rosenfeld, Understanding 81. This interpretation may also be attributed to David
Bronsen, who adapted the working title of Die Kapuzinergruft for the title of one of his
articles: Bronsen, “The Jew”.
229
Conclusion
In 1935 Roth published Die Büste des Kaisers, a short novella which has been
cited as evidence of the writer’s increasingly desperate “Wirklichkeitsleugnung”804 in the wake of Hitler’s ascent to power in Germany. It has been
described as painting “ein von Trauer überschattetes Bild einer goldenen
Vergangenheit”805 and as “a tale of unconditional praise for the Habsburg
Monarchy”.806 The oft-quoted description of the protagonist Count Morstin on the
opening page of the novella as “einer der edelsten und reinsten Typen des
Österreichers schlechthin, das heißt also: ein übernationaler Mensch und also ein
Adeliger echter Art” (V, 655) certainly lends itself to this sort of interpretation.
However, the subtext is a recognition of the historical fact of the Monarchy’s
passing and an acceptance that there can be no return to the past. For although the
Count attempts to reconstruct his life from the “Trümmer [s]einer alten Heimat”
(V, 668), symbolically reinstating the Emperor “als hätte es keinen Krieg gegeben
– als gäbe es keine neue polnische Republik – als ruhte der alte Kaiser nicht längst
schon in der Kapuzinergruft – als gehörte dieses Dorf Lopatyny noch zu dem
Gebiet der alten Monarchie” (V, 670), the illusion is short-lived, and he is forced
to concede historical reality:
Ach! Es hatte keinen Sinn mehr, die Augen vor der neuen Welt der neuen
Republiken, der neuen Bankiers und Kronenträger, der neuen Damen und
Herren, der neuen Herrscher der Welt zu schließen. Man mußte die alte Welt
begraben. Aber man mußte sie würdig begraben. (V, 673)
Through the Count’s ceremonious burial of the bust of the Emperor Roth
acknowledges the past as past, thus precluding the escapist nostalgia of which he
is accused, both in this text and generally in his 1930s fiction.807
804
805
806
807
Marchand, Wertbegriffe 186. See also Bronsen, “The Jew,” 54.
Riemen, “Judentum – Kirche – Habsburg,” 391.
Reifowitz, “Nationalism, Modernity,” 126. Both Reifowitz and Pazi equate Roth with his
protagonist: “The Count’s comments reflect[...] the author’s complete and utter alienation
from the world in which he lived”: Reifowitz, “Nationalism, Modernity,” 128; Pazi, “ExilBewußtsein,” 187.
Cf. Menhennet, who describes the burial as a practical act which “serves as a bulwark against
mere escapist nostalgia by registering the ‘death’ of the old world in a concrete form”:
230
Conclusion
Roth affirms in this novella the relative humanity of the old Empire, but at the
same time he implicitly questions the narrator’s808 and the Count’s memory of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire as “[e]in kleines Abbild der bunten Welt” (V, 656), as
a place of supranational harmony. Reiber contrasts the image of the fallen Empire
presented in Die Büste des Kaisers with that expressed by the elderly Herr von
Maerker in Der stumme Prophet, a novel fragment from 1929:
Und doch war zu meinen Zeiten, als noch der Mensch wichtiger war als seine
Nationalität, die Möglichkeit vorhanden, aus der alten Monarchie eine
Heimat aller zu machen. Sie hätte das kleinere Vorbild einer großen
zukünftigen Welt sein können und zugleich die letzte Erinnerung an eine
große Epoche Europas, in der Norden und Süden verbunden gewesen wären.
Es ist vorbei.809
The use of the subjunctive in this passage from the earlier novel acknowledges
that the Monarchy never realized its potential to become “eine Heimat aller”.
Reiber argues that what Roth recognized as a “nicht verwirklichte[...]
Möglichkeit” in 1929 he falsely presents as having been a historical reality in
1935.810 However, Count Morstin’s belief that the Monarchy was “ein großes
Haus mit vielen Türen und vielen Zimmern, für viele Arten von Menschen” (V,
675) does not mean that Roth himself now believes that the projected ideal was a
reality. That the Count is regarded as an eccentric (V, 668, 671) suggests that his
views are not representative. The discrepancy between his beliefs and reality is
reflected in the fact that what is buried is not the Emperor himself but an artistic
representation – and an incomplete, “unscheinbare” and “unbeholfene[...]” (V,
670) one at that. The mysterious transformation of the crude bust into a work of
artistic perfection is a metaphor for the mechanisms of memory and nostalgia that
distort reality:
Und die unscheinbare Büste, hergestellt in billigem Sandstein, […] gewann
mit der Zeit auch einen besonderen, einen ganz eigenen künstlerischen Wert
– selbst in den Augen des Grafen Morstin. Es war, als wollte der erhabene
808
809
810
As if to forestall the equation of narrator and author Roth uses the word “Erzähler” rather than
“Autor” on the first page: “Mögen die Leser freundlicherweise dem Erzähler nachsehen, daß
er den Tatsachen, die er mitzuteilen hat, eine historisch-politische Erläuterung vorausschickt.”
(V, 655; emphasis added)
Roth, Der stumme Prophet (V, 922).
Reiber, “Ein Mann sucht sein Vaterland,” 110. Reifowitz similarly argues that while in Der
Stumme Prophet (1928) Roth used the conditional tense to talk of the possibility of what
Austria could have been, “[i]n later works he discussed the Monarchy as if it had actually
become a true homeland for all its nations, destroyed only by the blind forces of modernity”:
231
Conclusion
Gegenstand, je mehr Zeit verging, das Werk, das ihn darstellte, verbessern
und veredeln. Wind und Wetter arbeiteten, wie mit künstlerischem
Bewußtsein, an dem naiven Stein. Es war, als arbeiteten auch Verehrung und
Erinnerung an diesem Standbild und als veredelte jeder Gruß der Bauern,
jedes Gebet eines gläubigen Juden bis zu künstlerischer Vollkommenheit das
hilflose Werk der jungen Bauernhand. (V, 670-71)
This passage reveals a gulf between the reality of the Emperor and his Empire in
the past and its transfiguration in post-Habsburg nostalgic remembrance. Thus,
although Die Büste des Kaisers may be seen as evidence of Roth’s preference for
the Habsburg Monarchy over Hitler’s Germany and an increasingly völkisch
Austria, the picture he paints is more differentiated than most critics acknowledge.
Their one-sided readings are symptomatic of the reductionism which characterizes
much of Roth scholarship, dividing it into a “socialist” early and “monarchist”
late period.
The early novels are best understood as stages in Roth’s journey towards the
historical form he finds with Radetzkymarsch. In all three novels Roth draws
attention to the continuities between past and present: in Das Spinnennetz he
demonstrates that the roots of reactionary violence in the Weimar Republic lie in
the socialization of a particular personality type in Wilhelmine Germany; in Hotel
Savoy he exposes the belief that the war has changed everything as an illusion
which masks a continuity in social and economic inequality from pre-war times;
and in Die Rebellion history is presented not as progress but as repetition. In these
novels Roth engages with the search for solutions which was a common literary
response to the chaos of the 1920s, but he is too sceptical, as he himself stated in
1926,811 to commit to any of them. As a Jew he naturally rejects Theodor Lohse’s
ethnic German nationalism, but he also distances himself from Benjamin Lenz’s
anarchic apocalypticism, exposing its destructive potential. In Hotel Savoy he is
critical of the apolitical apathy of his narrator Gabriel Dan, but likewise condemns
the revolutionary violence of Zwonimir Pansin, showing himself to be
unconvinced by the possibility of a socialist post-apocalyptic redemption. And in
Die Rebellion Andreas Pum, an incarnation of the authoritarian personality type
which appears in so many of Roth’s novels from Theodor Lohse in Das
Spinnennetz to Carl Joseph in Radetzkymarsch, surrenders to an impotent
811
Letter to Bernard von Brentano, 11.2.1926, Briefe 79.
232
Conclusion
apocalyptic impulse rather than taking active steps to change his situation in life.
Contrary to the reductive interpretations which suggest that a form of socialism,
whether ideological or merely emotional, underlies these novels, they are in fact
linked by Roth’s resistance to the appeal of simplistic solutions.
David Roberts has used the term “apocalyptic interregnum”812 to refer to the
situation of writers between 1914 and 1945. These writers – people such as
Thomas and Heinrich Mann, Hermann Broch and Elias Canetti – were all acutely
aware that they were “living through a turning point of truly cataclysmic
dimensions”.813 The result of their efforts “to make sense of their time” were
novels which “unfold an historical perspective, [placing] contemporary events in a
larger historical pattern.”814 Despite Roth’s rejection of the apocalyptic paradigm,
his novels of the 1920s and the 1930s are also products of this historical
experience. It is the desire to “make sense of his time”, not the escapist urge to
take flight from an increasingly unbearable present, that compelled Roth to look
to the Habsburg past in Radetzkymarsch. In this novel Roth does not portray the
ideal of a multi-ethnic supranational Empire; on the contrary, he exposes this ideal
as myth. The Habsburg Myth of a supranational Empire conceals the reality of
German cultural and linguistic dominance in the structures of state, from the
bureaucracy to the military, and is even associated with the third pillar of
Habsburg power, the Catholic Church, through the celebration of the Emperor at
Fronleichnam as “der Römische Kaiser Deutscher Nation” (V, 322). Two months
before his death in 1939 Roth expressed this same idea more explicitly in an
article entitled “Die Hinrichtung Österreichs”,815 in which he condemned what he
called “die konstitutionell bedingt gewesene Bereitschaft aller Regierungen zu
einem offenen oder verhüllten ‘Anschluß’” (III, 922) from the first day of the
Republic to the last of the corporate state:
Eine konstitutionelle Bedingtheit übrigens, die sich aus den Irrtümern der
alten Monarchie noch herleitet und die in der Hauptsache darin bestanden
hat, innerhalb eines großen Reiches von sechzehn Nationen die deutschsprachigen Österreicher als eine Art von dominierendem ‘Staatsvolk’ gelten
zu lassen. (III, 922-23)
812
813
814
815
Joseph Roth, “Die Hinrichtung Österreichs”, Pariser Tageszeitung, 11.3.1939 (III, 922-25).
233
Conclusion
It is this German bias in Habsburg ideology against which the other peoples of the
Monarchy rebel. In Radetzkymarsch it is thus not simply, as Müller contends,
“de[r] Nationalismus der Teilvölker”816 which is reponsible for the failure of the
Habsburg solution in Central Europe. Roth reiterates the relationship between
German nationalism and the nationalism of the other Habsburg peoples in 1939:
“Tatsache ist, daß, je mehr die deutschen Österreicher zu Wilhelm II. tendierten,
sich die anderen Völker der Monarchie zu einer staatlichen Selbständigkeit
drängten.” (III, 924) Roth’s tone after the Anschluß is far more bitter than in
Radetzkymarsch but the sentiment is the same: it is only through understanding
the past that we can hope to understand the present:
Von Berchtesgaden führt eine einzige Blutspur nach Österreich.
Die historische Schuld daran ist alt. Die moralische ist jünger. Man darf nicht
jene über dieser übersehen, wenn man die Vergewaltigung Österreichs
verstehen will. Alle Schuld ist tiefer und früher gelegen, als es der
‘Aktualitätssinn’ ahnt. (III, 925)
Radetzkymarsch is thus a historical novel in Lukács’s sense: a novel which makes
possible an understanding of the present through the portrayal of the past, of the
“different and specific”817 forms that contemporary problems took in earlier times.
The historical factors in the collapse of the Empire are reflected into the small
world of the mediocre hero Carl Joseph, last representative of the von Trotta
family, as the factors which make his life impossible. Carl Joseph is a tragedy of
the Habsburg Myth: incapable of integrating past and present, self and world,
individual perception and external ideology, he carries out an act of suicidal,
unheroic folly. His attempt to fetch water for his troops in the midst of enemy fire
is, on one level, the very opposite of the heroic act of his grandfather which lies at
the beginning of and determines his existence. It represents the undoing of the
Habsburg Myth, the falsity of which had already led to the disillusionment of his
celebrated grandfather. On another level, however, the Hero of Solferino’s act of
saving the Emperor’s life was itself senselessly heroic, since it was able only to
postpone, but not to prevent, the dissolution of an Empire past its time. This is the
sense of the Emperor’s declaration in the final chapter of the novel “‘Wär ich nur
816
817
234
Conclusion
bei Solferino gefallen!’” (V, 453), a declaration which, significantly, falls on deaf
ears.
Roth sympathizes with Carl Joseph’s desire to identify with history but, through
the unravelling of his protagonist’s life and the circumstances of his death, shows
this identification to be futile. It is an insight which also informs Die
Kapuzinergruft, a novel which is perhaps a lesser artistic achievement than
Radetzkymarsch, but which nonetheless gives expression to Roth’s sense of the
complex reality of the present and its relationship to the past. Through the critical
portrait of Franz Ferdinand Roth reveals parallels between the failure of Austrians
to prevent the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy in the past and their failure to
avert the Anschluß in the present. Roth’s condemnation of his apathetic narrator is
indicative of his continuing belief in the critical importance of political
engagement, and thus the charge that he was indulging in a nostalgic flight from
reality in this novel must be refuted.
Roth was well aware that history marches onward and there can be no return to a
past which is subjectively remembered not as perfect but as preferable. In
Radetzkymarsch he gently satirizes the desire for a different outcome to history in
the chapter which depicts the duel between Demant and Tattenbach. The officers
in Carl Joseph’s Moravian garrison gather to hear Rittmeister Taittinger relate the
circumstances which have led to the duel, and although they have heard the tale
many times already, they beg Taittinger to tell them again and again, “denn sie
hofften im törichtesten und geheimsten Abteil ihrer Herzen, daß die Erzählung
des Rittmeisters sich einmal verändern und eine spärliche Aussicht auf einen
günstigeren Ausgang offenlassen könnte.” (V, 224) Taittinger’s tale is the same
each time, but suddenly he remembers a trivial detail, which for a moment seems
to his listeners to open the possibility of a different outcome:
Es war, als könnte sich aus der Tatsache, daß Tattenbach Namenstag hatte,
eine ganz neue, günstige Lösung der traurigen Affäre ergeben. Jeder
überlegte für sich, welcher Nutzen aus dem Namenstag Tattenbachs zu
ziehen wäre. Und der kleine Sternberg, durch dessen Gehirn die Gedanken
einzeln dahinzuschießen pflegten wie einsame Vögel durch leere Wolken,
ohne Geschwister und ohne Spur, äußerte sofort, vorzeitigen Jubel in der
Stimme: ‘Aber, dann ist ja alles gut! Situation total verändert! Namenstag hat
er halt gehabt!’ (V, 225)
235
Conclusion
In contrast to his characters, Roth does not fall prey to the desire to rewrite
history, but instead recognizes its inexorable forward movement. Even the title of
this novel, Radetzkymarsch, signals this recognition: one does not march
backwards. Roth recognizes and accepts the historical fact of the collapse of the
Habsburg Empire as reality, and does not in retrospect attempt to idealize it but to
understand the reasons for its failure and the connections between the nationalism
of post-war Central Europe and the structures of the Monarchy. Marching into
history is about the search for truth through fiction.
236
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