Freely adapted from "Job," the novel by Joseph Roth, "Sins of Man" is a thoroughly sentimental, painstakingly somber and devastatingly complete portrait of a man in sorrow. While it is uncompromisingly tearful, it happens also to have been splendidly performed, honestly directed and handsomely produced. In sum, a well-planned conspiracy against the lachrymal duct which has been so perfectly organized that it is impervious to any resentful cry of "You harrow me!"
Our preference, frankly, is for a more "contrasty" negative. "Sins of Man" has blocked in its tragic shadows solidly, courageously ignoring any romantic sub-plot and only in a few penultimate episodes seeking to bring its heavy theme into clearer relief through recourse to a "funny man." Although this is a more mature approach to tragedy than the screen generally employs, and must be encouraged in principle if not in this specific instance, still there is danger in overdoing it.
- From The New York Times movie review of Sins of Man, by Frank S. Nugent, published June 19, 1936
Your Hollywood-style Job is said to be, well, exquisite. They’ve turned Mendel Singer into a Tyrolean peasant. Menuchim yodels. I simply have to see it. I will roll in the aisles on your behalf.
- From Stefan Zweig’s letter to Joseph Roth, April/May 1934
Sins of Man, "freely adapted" from Joseph Roth's book Job, wasn't the easiest movie for me to get a copy to watch. I lean (strongly) toward Zweig's response. The best thing I can say about it is the movie demonstrates how horribly wrong Roth’s Job could have gone and makes me appreciate the book more than my initial lukewarm liking of it.
Albert Einstein to B. W. Huebsch
(24 February 1935)
Esteemed Mr. Hübsch,
I am truly grateful to you for sending me this consoling book [Job] by a real mensch and great writer. As I read it, I was able to share the pain of a clear and kindly human soul, inflicted upon it by the callousness and spiritual blindness of the present age, and felt myself strangely shriven by the sort of objective invention of which only an artistic genius is capable.
Friendly greetings from you [A. Eisntein]
P.S. Please forward this note to the respected author. You have my permission to use it to publicize the book in any way you see fit.
(Letter 328)
What emerges from these letters is a man constantly on the edge during troubled times. In many ways Roth reflects the turbulence of civilization coming apart at the seams. I’ve included a lot of excerpts from the Roth’s letters (and some to him) in the links below, trying to provide a flavor of his life as he described it. As I’ve mentioned in earlier posts, Roth was a very complex, flawed, gifted, and troubled man. Even if he exaggerated some of his troubles in these letters, it’s a wonder that his novels were written under such circumstances. The troubles he foretold for Europe, though, were often accurate. Roth’s life, reflected in these letters, shows the price of being an émigré, not just from a country but from the world at large.
Posts on Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters:
Some links to excerpts from the book
1911 – 1924
1925 – 1927
1927 – 1932
1933
1934 – 1935
1935 - 1939
Books mentioned by Roth and Hofmann that I have queued up to read:
George Letham: Physician and Murdered by Ernst Weiss
The Thibaults by Roger Martin du Gard
Updates:
Review by Tess Lewis in The Wall Street Journal
Review by Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set
Ian Thomson's review in The Telegraph
Michael Hofmann looks at the circumstances surrounding the writing of The Radetzky March as mentioned in these letters
Review in The Guardian
Amelia Atlas' review in The New York Times
Simon Schama's review in the Financial Times. Also mentioned is Wandering Jew: The Search for Joseph Roth by Dennis Marks
Literalab's interview with Dennis Marks regarding his book.
Review by Mark Falcoff in The Weekly Standard
Review by Roger Boylan in Boston Review
My Jewishness never appeared as anything else to me but an accidental quality, like, say, my blond mustache (which could equally well have been brown). I never suffered from it, I was never proud of it. Nor is it the fact that I think and write in German that bothers me now—but the fact that 40 million people in the middle of Europe are barbarians. I share this sorrow with quite a lot of other people, including most of the remaining 20 million Germans, inasmuch as these things can be quantified. I believe in a Catholic empire, German and Roman, and I am near to becoming an orthodox, even a militant Catholic. I don’t believe in “humankind”—I never did—but in God, and in the fact that mankind, to whom He shows no mercy, is a piece of shit. … I will do all in my feeble power to bring about a Habsburg return. … Mine is not hatred, but righteous fury. And I will be proved right, because Hitler won’t last more than another year and a half, and then, slowly but surely, we shall have a new German Empire. … The Habsburgs will return. Please don’t deny what’s all too evident! You see I’ve been right thus far. Austria will be a monarchy. I’m right. I foresaw the madness and excess of Prussia. Because I believe in God. And you, you didn’t see it, because you believe in “humankind,” a concept so unclear that by contrast with it, you could think to meet God on the nearest street corner.
Roth upbraids Zweig in Letter 350 (19 August 1935) for his tardiness in understanding what was happening in Germany and his feeble proposals:
We’ll protest: fine! Another protest. A good protest! And people will sit up and take note. And then what? What is it we want to achieve? You underestimate or ignore a couple of major things:
1. the urge to humiliate Jews didn’t begin yesterday or today; it’s been part of the platform of the Third Reich from the very start. Everyone knows that. Streicher is no different from Hitler, and you didn’t need to wait for Streicher to make his way from Nuremberg to Berlin! The founding principle, so to speak, of National Socialism, is none other than contempt for the Jewish race! Why did it take you this long to grasp that? How come you didn’t get it 2 years ago? 2 ¾ years ago? That bestiality [a word Roth used almost from the beginning when describing the Nazis and their actions] was there from the start. It didn’t suddenly set in a couple of months ago, the vilification of Jews. We were insulted and humiliated from Hitler’s very first day! Why is this protest so tardy?
2. … But do you really think a manifesto can do something so late in the day?
Letter 352 to Stefan Zweig (27 August 1935) encapsulates Roth’s outlook very well:
I am not in a tizzy about the letter from […]. In view of the approaching end of the world, it’s no big deal. But even then, in the trenches, staring death in the face 10 minutes before going over the top, I was capable of beating up a son of a bitch for claiming he was out of cigarettes when he wasn’t. The end of the world is one thing, the son of a bitch is another. You can’t put the son of a bitch down to the general condition of things. He’s separate.
Letter 360 to Stefan Zweig (17 November 1935):
The way in which you seek to connect God to my writing is inadmissible. Writing is a terrestrial thing, and, from a “metaphysical” vantage point, is in no way different from shoemaking. Say. … You may say to me that it’s my duty to serve literature. I don’t serve literature. Literature is a terrestrial matter; it’s my job.
Stefan Zweig to Joseph Roth in Letter 366 –I’m sure this went over well with Roth:
My dear good fellow, don’t forever by arraigning the times and the wickedness of other people, admit that you bear some responsibility for your state, and help us to help you.
Roth, in Letter 371 to Stefan Zweig (17 February 1936) sounds the theme mentioned above that writing was an escape from his unordered and pressure-filled life, although the deadlines and the need to receive advances provide their own tensions:
I think I can only understand the world when I’m writing, and the moment I put down my pen, I’m lost.
Roth, again to Stefan Zweig, Letter 390 (11 May 1936):
Landauer wants to publish the new novel in summer, he claims it’s a good time, and then I could hope to get another contract in the autumn. There are supposed to be German Jews abroad then buying books they won’t find at home.
(Hofmann’s note: I don’t know what’s more striking here—to be so reduced, or still to be calculating.)
Letter 393 to Stefan Zweig (29 May 1936) gives details on Roth’s physical condition. While he always grumbled about his health in general, he begins to include more specifics on his ailments. While complaining about his poverty, he makes clear his priorities:
I am very feeble, and barely able to walk. There’s no particular illness. Every day brings with it different symptoms. If I don’t vomit spleen and blood, then my eyes are inflamed, or my feet are swollen. Palpitations, heart pain, shocking migraines, teeth falling out. It sometimes seems to me that nature is kindly afterall, because it makes life so rotten that you positively long for death. [Roth would live for another three years] … I managed to get the price for the room down to 1 gulden today, but there’s nothing more I can do. I have to drink wine now, no more schnapps for weeks now.—My room looks like a coffin; but a bottle of wine costs a gulden. I own 2 suits and 6 shirts. I wash my own handkerchiefs. I’ve never learned to iron shirts. I look completely dreadful.
Letter 417 to Stefan Zweig (10 July 1937):
You already have a clear notion … of the inadequacy of all human idealisms that you bathed in from the time of your youth, and in which you have steeped yourself. You’re bound to be disappointed. The nonviolence of Mahatma Gandhi is just as unhelpful to me, as Hitler’s violence is detestable.
[B]ut for me and many others, standing outside, there is a straightforward equation between [Ernst] Jünger and Goebbels. If out of woolly-mindedness or boneheadedness or stupidity he [Jünger] has supported or prepared the ground for the bestial ideology of National Socialism—and apart from that remained a decent human being—it’s completely ridiculous, in an émigré journal, a journal of his direct or indirect victims, to give him six pages of space, even if it finally comes down against him.
From letter 270 to Stefan Zweig (14 June 1934)—I wonder how much he’s influenced by the American cinema treatment of his book Job (released as Sins of Man, which I’ll review soon):
Film is not just a contemporary phenomenon. It may make people happy, but the devil sometimes does that. I am unalterably persuaded that the devil shows himself, so to speak, in living shadow play. The shoadow that speaks and acts is what Satan is. The cinema marks the beginning of the twentieth century. It ushers in the end of the world. Please don’t underestimate that. Telephone, radio, aeroplane, are nothing in comparison to it: the separation of the shadow from the man. It’s a turning point in human history, more significant that the Russian Revolution with its so-called liberation of the “proletariat.” (If only it had freed people instead! But of course it couldn’t do that.)
Letter 271 to Stefan Zweig (22 June 1934)—a sample of the self-effacement and debasement he often presented in his letters:
It might not be easy for you—or pleasant—to hear all the acts of folly I perpetrated since you left Paris—all under the pressure of repulsive experiences. I know how difficult it is even for a great understanding to cope with a small derangement. But I still beg you to continue to think of me as a sensible person subject to occasional fits of madness but broadly in control, and as a conscientious friend who only writes like this in hours of clarity. I have debased and humiliated myself. I have borrowed money from the most impossible places, despising and cursing myself as I did so. And it was all because never in my life have I had anything like a secure financial base, never a bank account or savings. Nothing, nothing, just advances—expenditures, expenditure, advances, and until the Third Reich, I had publishers. … I feel obliged to come before you quite naked, my dear friend. Whatever you do, you cannot judge me more harshly than I do myself. I abuse you too, with the desperate selfishness of someone putting the life of his friend in danger by clinging to him like a drowning man clinging to his rescuer. … I have drunk nothing while writing this to you. I am stone-cold sober.Letter 280 to Stefan Zweig (13 July 1934) puts Roth’s sometime petulant temperment on full display. After whining about how he has been wronged by others (and begging for money), we see the “I’ll hold my breath until I turn blue” Roth:
And you have no right to distrust my insight as if it were with some grocer’s. Oh, what do I care! Just tell me you don’t like getting letters from me. I know the process. Gooancz doesn’t want to antagonize Heinemann [both publishers]. The Anarchist could be a success! They don’t want to step on each other’s toes. Solidarity! You withdraw your offer and call a man of honor a cheat. Not with me you don’t!
I DON’T WANT YOU going through my affairs with a publisher. Believe me or don’t believe me. See for yourself! And while you’re going through my affairs, just set aside for a while your preconceptions regarding my character [if anyone knew Roth’s character without preconceptions it waw Zweig]. Don’t you worry, I’m as clever as your Huebsches, your Gollanczes, your Henemanns and your Landauers!
I was just lazy, and easily decived. I’ve had it anyway. In my will I will write down the names of all those I mistrust. (I’ll send you a copy) None of my tormentors will take any pleasure in my end. … It won’t be any good for anyone if I die. … Write to me straightaway, and tell me you wash your hands of me. Go with God. I am very fond of you. I embrace you.
Stefan Zweig, in Letter 284 (later in July 1934) offers advice he knows will be ignored. After scolding Roth for mucking up negotiations, he tries to reason with him and asks him (yet again) to sober up, not just physically but also in his outlook:
I’ve been imploring you for years, adjust to the reality that as a German Jewish author nowadays you’ll only be lucky enough in certain exceptional circumstances to earn money, and that the writer’s life is historically a pretty unprofitable one. Don’t try to force an income for yourself that’s impossible, that’ll only get you into warped contracts, tangles, and these unceasing difficulties!Michael Hofmann’s note to Letter 290, to Stefan Zweig (20 July 1934):
Roth tends to have it in for Czechs and Hungarians most of all—see his later outburst against Budapest… because he blames them for the breakup of the Dual Monarchy. Villains in his books are very often Hungarians.
Letter 309 to Klaus Mann (6 October 1934):
Fifth, you make comparisons [of Russia] with Germany. Don’t make comparisons with Germany. Only hell is comparable. Everything, everything evil in the world, becomes noble by comparison with Germany. Germany is accursed, you have to learn to get out of the habit of comparing anything at all to this German shit.
(For Amateur Reader) From Letter 315 to Carl Seelig (11 November 1934), about writing The Hundred Days, which Roth tended to call “a historical novel”:
I’ve found in the material a way of expressing myself directly. And I’m in the worst pickle: I despise the low modes of the historical novelist, and become lyrical, in the way of the novelist. It’s difficult, but it tempts me, perhaps in the same way it seemed tempting once to write a Salammbô.
Letter 319 to Blanche Gidon (27 December 1934), presaging The Legend of the Holy Drinker again:
There are miracles in my life, poor little miracles, but miracles just the same—only fair for a poor little believer like myself.
Letter 326 to Stefan Zweig (15 February 1935) on his living situation and his state of mind:
I’ve moved, after various complications, without Huebsch’s money it would have been impossible. You were quite right, I’m not cut out for apartment life. It’s the last time I’m going to let myself be drawn into foolish experiments lite that. … I’ll start the second part [of his novel] over again. I have the courage of desperation. (I have only the courage of desperation.) … I need to know that I will certainly be able to stay alive for another 3-4 weeks, to be able to write. This horrible book—I wish I’d never embarked on that wretched story—must be brought to an end quickly. And I’m so slow! And on top of my slowness, there’s my crippling fear, slowing me down.
Letter 329 to Blanche Gidon (27 February 1935) encapsulates where he lays political blame:
I have the right to speak frankly about the Jews—who have introduced Socialism and catastrophe into European culture, “novarum rerum cupidissimi”[Roth uses the same expression in his essay The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind]: that’s the Jews for you. They are the real cradle of Hitler and the reign of the janitors.
Letter 333 from Stefan Zweig (March 1935) tries once again to accept the reality of the market, this time in Austria, for writers in a world burdened by the constant tension of war and fiscal depression:
One thing, Roth, don’t name figures to anyone but me. You have no idea on what tiny amounts people get by here, and how much resentment it causes when (to them) fantastic amounts are referred to deprecatingly. The newspapers pay 20 schillings for a feuilleton, and people come to blows over royalties.
Roth expresses his frustration on finishing The Hundred Days in Letter 338 to René Schickele:
I am horribly busy and even weighed down with my stupid book. This is the first and last time I’ll ever tackle anything “historical.” Devil take it—in fact, I think it was the Antichrist in person who got me into it. It’s improper to want to form existing, historical events all over again—and it’s disrespectful too. There is something godless about it—only I can’t quite say what.
Letter 342 to Blanche Gidon (17 June 1935) highlights the turmoil in his personal life, a concise comment on the situation for émigré writers. He ends reaffirming his stance of no compromises in outlook to Germany:
I have a ghastly thing going on in Vienna, over my wife. I have taken steps to start to divorce her, which is horribly difficult, like everything in that area. … It’s like a hornet’s nest, this agitation among the “émigrés,” these letters, this noise, this tittle-tattle. … And I mean to do all I can to remain just as unyielding as hitherto, and to fight those others who want to “understand everything,” basically because they’re cowards, JUST COWARDS, with their “profound humanity.” In fact, it’s profound cowardice.
“On the morning of 30 January 1933, the day Hitler was appointed chancellor, Joseph Roth boarded the Berlin-Paris train, and never set foot in Germany again.” (page 229)
“Eventually there is nothing that Roth will not write; a letter, in his hands, is an instrument of necessary terror. The extremity of his situation justifies it. Anything less is the waste of a stamp.” (page 230)
“Soma Morgenstern describes his friend in these terms:As he took a sip of cognac to recover from his coughing laugh, I studied him closely. The changes to face and form staggered me. He was not quite forty-three years old, and—my heart won’t forgive me for saying so: he looked like a sixty-year-old alcoholic. His face, once so animated and alert, with its prominent cheekbones, and short jutting chin, was now puffy and slack, the nose purple, the corners of his blue eyes rheumy and bloody, his head looking as if someone has started plucking it and given up part way, the mouth completely covered covered by heavy, dark red, Slovak-style drooping mustaches. But when summoned to the telephone, he slowly hobbled away with the aid of a stick, his thin legs in narrow old-fashioned pants, his sagging little paunch at odds with his birdlike bones, the east Galician Jew made the impression of a distinguished, if somewhat decayed, Austrian aristocrat—in other words, exactly the impression he had striven all his lfe to give, with every fiber ofhis body and soul, by means both legitimate and illegitimate.This understands—as it is important to understand—the balance between tragedy and dignity in Roth, sadness and success. (pages 232-233)
Letter excerpts:
Letter 176 to Stefan Zweig (18 January 1933):
Be on your guard. You may be smart, but your humanity blinds you to others’ wickedness. You live on goodness and faith. Whereas I have been known to make sometimes startlingly accurate observations about evil.
Letter 178 to Félix Bertaux (9 February 1933):
I’m tired of all these things, because of the goings-on in Germany I’m incapable of settling the least personal matter, and I feel completely downtrodden.
Letter 182 to Stefan Zweig (February 1933):
It will have become clear to you now that we are heading for a great catastrophe. Quite apart from our personal situations—out literary and material existence has been wrecked—we are headed for a new war. I wouldn’t give a heller for our prospects. The barbarians have taken over. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns.
Letter 193 to Stefan Zweig (26 March 1933):
You understand, the difference between 1933 and 1914 is roughly that between a sick animal like Goering, and Wilhelm II, who at least kept vestiges of humanity. Obviously, fools perpetrate folly, and beasts commit bestiality, and madmen commit mad acts: all of them suicidal. But it is not all obvious that our equally sick and confused surroundings discern stupidity, bestiality, and madness. That’s the difference.
Letter 206 to Stefan Zweig (20 July 1933), indicative of Roth’s style of living (out of a suitcase):
Dear esteemed friend, would you happen to have a copy of my novel Zipper and His Father? Or can you manage to get hold of one? If so, then please send it to A. Corticelli… . He wants to publish it, and will pay me for it. It’s shocking, I have no copies of any of my books.
Letter 218 to Stefan Zweig (9 October 1933):
In this world it’s a matter of absolute indifference—unfortunately—what is written about us or by us. There’s a handful who know, and they know everything. All the others are blind or dear. Haven’t you go that yet? The word has died, men bark like dogs. The word has no importance any more, none in the current state of things.
The November 7, 1933 letter to Stefan Zweig (#223) shows a judgmental Roth trying to help his friend Zweig understand the new dynamics in German political life:
It used to be that you were happy to deny that you were Arnold Zweig. What you’re doing today, with the least association with Germany, is denying that you’re Stefan Zweig. (A reader of yours came up with that.) You have so much to lose: not just your personal dignity, but your literary—and world-renowned—bearing. To thousands who think of Germany the way I do, not you, you were a prop, a pillar of faith. In the war you stood at the side of Roman Rolland. And now, now that things are at a worse pass than they ever were then, you’re writing anxious little letters to the Insel [Zweig’s publisher]. … Everything is the fault of your shilly-shallying. All the badness. All the ambiguity. All the stupid newpaper comments on you. You are in danger of losing your moral credit vis-à-vis the world, and not winning anything in the Third Reich either. Put practically. And in moral terms: you’re repudiating your personal principles of 30 years. And why? For whom? For a business partner. … It’s the hour of decision, not just in the sense that it’s time to take the side of mankind against Germany, but also in that it’s time to tell every friend the truth.
[From the postscript, written the next day] I’ve just read over the letter I wrote you yesterday. Lest you be in any doubt: I did not write it while intoxicated. .. I am, further, quite clear about the fact that it constitutes an act of crass presumption to approach you with rules for conduct. I apologize. I have probably made a mess of my own life. But I still think I can see the life of one dear to me perfectly.
Part of Stefan Zweig’s response, from Letter 224 (November 1933):
[W]hat I am concerned about is getting control of my own work again and not (my nerves wouldn’t be up to it) having to go to court over it. But it couldn’t be done violently, the way you imagine it. Why won’t you give someone you’ve known for many years a few weeks’ grace, and not shout “Treason!” right away where you don’t understand something (as with Thomas Mann too, a highly principled man, who as an Aryan has no need to share the fate of Jews). You can’t rub out the seventy million Germans with your outcry, and I’m afraid the Jews abroad are in for more disappointment, it’s quite possible that a pact may be concluded over their heads, diplomacy is capable of any sort of datardliness, and politics of the wildest leaps, we will have to bear a lot of disappointment in the time to come: how crazy to rage against each other now!
When someone says they are just kidding, you know they aren’t. And when Roth says it isn’t personal in Letter 230 (30 November 1933), you know it is. But he’s only getting warmed up at that point:
He’s a plebian (just like his wife, whom I met once. She looks huge, but only sitting down. A stumpy-legged plebian.) (You know my intentions with all this stuff are not personal.) …
Wherever they oppress us, in Russia, Italy, Germany, is a TOILET. It stinks there. It’s not true to say that Communism has “transformed an entire continent.” Like fuck it has. It spawned Fascism and Nazism and hatred for intellectual freedom. Whoever endorses Russia has eo ipso endorsed the Thrid Reich.
Letter 232 to Stefan Zweig (22 December 1933)—Roth never lacked in self-awareness, just restraint:
I got to Amsterdam by borrowing 100 francs. I sat in the American Hotel for 3 days, without eating anything. My. Querido [his new publisher] was, for the first time in his life, confined to bed.—Little tricks of the devil, things I’m pretty much used to by now. In the end I was able to secure 1,000 fancs from Mr. Landshoff. Then I began to drink. I had a supper invitation from Mr. de Lange, for which I turned up completely drunk. Now, Mr. de Lange is a mighty drinker, and he wasn’t sober either. But something happened that I thought would never happen to me. For the first time in my life I experienced a complete blackout. My recollection of the evening is absolutely nonexistent. It’s possible I’ve wrecked my chances with de Lange. You know, he’s a sort of Junker type really. He knows from somewhere that writers drink, but in his imagination or experience it doesn’t stretch to their actually being drunk. He can only have had a very approximate sense of me [before the meeting]. I was a “literary name” to him, little more. He was very nice, but I’m afraid I’ve messed up my chances. For the first time I felt a real sense of weakness. My dear friend, it’s possible that my “self-destructive instinct” put in a major appearance; even though, in physiological terms it’s easy enough to explain how a man can get very drunk if he hasn’t had anything to eat. I’m still rather shocked at myself. For the first time. … Maybe it’s a sign for me to stop. But believe me: however much I believe that my muse is the muse of separation, I know perfectly clearly that she is driving me to suicide. … I can’t historicize myself. But nor can I continue to convert this intrusion of private grief into my “true,” unliterary life into literature. It’s killing me. And believe me, never did an alcoholic “enjoy” his alcohol less than I did. Does an epileptic enjoy his fits? Does a madman enjoy his episodes?
From Letter 235 to René Schickele (end of 1933 or early 1934), a comment that reflects part of The Radetzky March, and more. Hofmann notes this letter includes Roth’s “tremendous tirade against all ethical relativism.” A taste:
”Mess spirit” I took to be the splendid training of young officers (at least in Austria) to respond to an insult with an insult back, and to prefer death to disgrace. That is a clear human quality. … You may forgive and you may love. You are even instructed to do so. But you may not move the absolute line between good and evil because it suits you. A vile act is a vile act—there’s no more to be said about it.
[David] Bronson [biographer of Roth] tells the lovely story of how they met: Marcuse was upset after being dumped by some other flame, Roth reminded him that the world was full of attractive women, and pointed to the waitress in the bar in Berlin where they were sitting. This was Erna, who, a little later, became Sasha when Marcuse told Roth that he loved her dearly, but found her Berlin speech full of embarrassing solecisms. Roth’s solution was to dub her Sasha and claim she was a Russian princess; his policy with Friedl, his own wife, was not dissimilar, but much less successful.
From letter 52 to Benno Reifenberg (1927):
I’m finished with the Saarland. … I have visited factories and a mine. For half a day I worked as a salesman, got drunk at night, and slept with an ugly hotel chambermaid from sheer wretchedness.
From letter 61 (17 January 1928):
I finally got to be introduced to [André] Gide. He Olympian. I merely snotty.
From letter 79 (27 February 1929) to Stefan Zweig:
The only reason I work though is material. I must succeed in producing the minimum from my existence, without regularly writing articles that undermine my health. So that my life isn’t too grotesquely abbreviated, I should like to find myself a free man in a year’s time. And for that to happen, I have to write every day. But that’s a change. It’s impossible to fix myself. I have no such thing as a stable literary “character.” I am not stable in other respects either. I haven’t lived in a house since my eighteenth year, aside from the odd week staying with friends. Everything I own fits into three suitcases. It doesn’t strike me as odd at all, either. What is odd, though, to me, and even romantic, is a house, with pictures on the walls, and so on and so forth. In a fit of mindlessness, I took on the responsibility for a young woman. I need to keep her somewhere, she is frail, and physically not up to a life at my side.
From letter 89 (20 January 1930) to Rene Schickele:
Being an author is actually no help at all. That may be my official designation, but privately I’m just a poor wretch who’s worse off than a tram conductor. Only time and not talent can provide us with distance, and I don’t have much time left. A ten-year marriage ending like this has the effect of forty, and my natural tendency to e an old man is horribly supported by external misfortunes. Eight books to date, over 1,000 articles, ten hours’ work a day, every day for ten years, and today, losing my hair, my teeth, my potency, my most basic capacity for joy, not even the chance of spending a month without financial worries. And that wretch literature!Letter 98 is to publisher Gustav Kiepenheuer on his fiftieth birthday (10 June 1930). The famous “Kiepenheur letter” ends with this section:
There must be some secret connection between us somewhere. Because sometimes we do agree. It’s a though we each made concessions to the other, but we don’t. Because he doesn’t understand money. That’s a quality we share. He is the most courtly man I know. So am I. He got it from me. He loses money on my books. So do I. He believes in me. So do I. He waits for my success. So do I. He is certain of posterity. So am I.
Letter 113, emphasizing the mounting toll (in addition to the monetary cost) of taking care of his wife—to Jenny Reichler (his mother-in-law):
I don’t think there’s anything to be done about my sadness. I’m through with life, for good. I can’t wait around any more for miracles. I have become an old man, and have gotten used to the absence of joy. In my own life, that is. If Friedl pulls through, I will be far older than she is.
Letter 114, to Stefan Zweig (23 October 1930), highlighting his sensitivity to politics. Also interesting because it is a month before his first mention of The Radetzky March:
Europe is killing itself, and in a peculiarly slow and horrible way, because it is a corpse already. This ending is devilishly like a psychosis. It’s a psychotic’s suicide. The devil really is in the saddle. But it’s the two extremes I don’t understand, for that I’m too much the contemporary of Franz Joseph, I hate extremism; it’s the most fiery and disgusting tongue of the flame.
From Letter 118 to Stefan Zweig (31 January 1931):
There is nothing more important than being a private person, than loving your wife, taking your children on your lap as you did when we came for you. Public affairs are only and ever shit, whether it’s the nation, politics, the newspaper, the swastika, or the future of democracy.From Letter 128 to Stefan Zweig (13 May 1931), after his affair with the 20-year old has ended:
Life is so much finer than literature! I feel sorry for literature! It is a SWINDLE!Letter 143 to Freidrich Traugott Gubler (8 October 1931):
[S]ometimes I’m egocentric enough to suppose that it’s me and my success that have sparked off the world financial crisis. Certainly, every one of the laws of this horrible world had to be overturned for me to have a success.
Letter 150 to Freidrich Traugott Gubler (Spring 1932):
I am unhappy, confused, wholly unable to leave the four walls I’ve thrown up around me and the book [The Radetzky March], though it feels more like a mountain range in which I wander about in terror. One day, everything comes off, the next day it’s all shit.
From Letter 154 to Stefan Zweig (7 August 1932):
National Socialism will strike at the core of my existence—apart from the fact that the booksellers are terrorized, inasmuch as they’re not Nationalists themselves, and want nothing to do with writing that strikes them as “cosmopolitan” or western European, and so on and so forth. I’m convinced nothing will befall the cheeky chutzpah-Jews, but the conservatives will suffer—never has it been as true as now: dog will not eat dog. … It’s meaningless, everything’s become meaningless! I have the strong sense that for me personally there is no future.
Michael Hofmann’s note to Letter 156 to Ernst Křenek (10 September 1932), the composer:
Professor Brecht, with whom Roth studied in Vienna before World War I, believed in and advanced an idea of Austria not as a corrupt and negligible appendage ripe for a tacit or explicit Anschluss, … but as an older, better form of Germany, “the land of the older form of German culture, a culture that has preserved many ancient German traits…a land of the soul and the spirit, full of tolerance, protean, rich and colorful, eluding definition, yes, opposed to definition, like the Middle Ages, like the life of the Catholic Church.” … Without this Austrocentric, in excelsis Austria creed in mind, it is difficult to make sense not just of JR’s tone to Křenek here, but of his overall faith in Austria, his opposition to Germany, perhaps even his late upsurge of Royalism.Letter 157 to Stefan Zweig (18 September 1932), just after The Radetzky March was released in book form. In the next letter, dated the same day, Roth credits Zweig with shaping or providing scenes in the novel:
Any friendship with me is ruinous. I myself am a wailing wall, if not a heap of rubble. You have no idea how dark it is inside me.
Letter 164 to Blanche Gidon, French translator (11 October 1932):
Where the Radetzky March is concerned, I’ve never doubted that publishers of all nationalities are businessmen. What annoys me is that they’re bad businessmen, and that, particularly in France, foreign books are badly paid for, badly translated, and badly sold. I care too much about words for me to be able to look on while my words are twisted and mutilated—merely because a publisher won’t give up the false vanity of continuing to bring out foreign books, nor admit that he doesn’t have deep enough pockets to do it with dignity. When I look at the revolting literary “scene”: … these snobberies and cliques, prepared to genuflect before each “novelty”, the incomprehensible Joyce, the latest postwar epsilon out of Germany, well” it makes me shudder!
From Letter 165 to Hans Natonek, journalist and novelist (14 October 1932):
And a few personal eizes [Yiddish for tips]:
a. Read more of the greats and the immortals: Shakespeare, Balzac, Flaubert!
b. No Gide! No Proust! Nor anything of the sort!
c. The Bible. Homer
d. Don’t distrust the “reader” too much!
e. Try to keep yourself clear of journalism.
f. Try to keep yourself clear of journalism at heart.
g. No interest in day-to-day politics. They distort. They distort the human.
h. You have sufficient means—thank God—that there’s really no need for you to write para-feuilletons! Fuck them. All they’re good for is a hat for the wife and a dress for the girlfriend.
Letter 168 to Otto Forst-Battaglia (28 October 1932):
The most powerful experience of my life was the war and the end of my fatherland, the only one I have every had: the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. To this date I am a patriotic Austrian and love what is left of my homeland as a sort of relic.
I have seen a bullfight for the first time in my life. If you’ve never seen anything like that, then you can have no conception of the gruesomeness of it. I know of no French writer who has written about—much less against—these Provençal bullfights. Not Daudet, not Mistral either, to the best of my knowledge. I think they’d be ashamed, and they’re scared. They’re happy to write about the wind, the sky, the people, the riders, the women. Tell me why a great writer isn’t duty bound to accuse his country instead of praising it. They all write as though they wanted their personal monument.
…
[Writing from Marseille]There are 700 vessels in the port. I’ve half a mind to suddenly take one of them. My wife cries every day, if it weren’t for her, I’d be long gone. It’s the first time I’ve had a feeling for the presence of my wife. It’s only in a port that you know you’re married.
…
Inevitably, the Germans and the French are going to intermarry. They are both desperately short of what the other have.
From letter 22, to Benno Reifenberg (August 1925):
Fast is the only way I can write well. The Germans write even literary books scientifically. Their feeling is scientific. That’s why the write slowly. The slow working of someone like Flaubert is based on completely different grounds: laziness, namely. You must remember from your schooldays that it’s possible to slog away all day with the greatest laziness inside you.
From letter 23, again to Benno Reifenberg (September 1925):
At the time Emperor Franz Joseph died, I was already a “revolutionary,” but I shed tears for him. I was a one-year volunteer in a Vienna regiment, a so-called elite unit, that stood by the Kapuzinergruft as a guard of honor, and I tell you, I was crying. An epoch was buried.
From letter 25, to Bernard von Brentano (friend and protégé—December 1925):
You say something about some woman or other you claim to be in love with. This condition is known to be delusory, and ends in bed, just as pink elephants go away when you have a drink. Just call a spade a spade and I’ll understand you better. If you want to sleep with her, don’t come telling me you’re in love with her. I might have believed it from Clemens Bentano [Romantic poet that was Bernard’s ancestor], but not from Bernard. That’s “literature”—i.e., unworthy of a writer. You must never take a woman as seriously as, say, mounting debts. Only the latter can make us lose a night’s sleep. I am sufficiently old-fashioned as to hold marriage—not that I overestimate that either—in higher regard than “love.” In marriage, coition isn’t the be-all and end-all, rather it’s a whole string of intercourse, which may as much take the form of looks and conversations, as that of so-called physical union. I appreciate thatit’s upsetting not to have one’s way with a woman. But a fat man put on a diet by his doctore is much more upset, and with far more substantial reason.
From letter 27, to Bernard von Brentano:
I am becoming dangerous to ordinary decent people because of my knowledge of them. It makes for an atrocious life. It precludes all of love and most of friendship. My mistrust kills all warmth, as bleach kills most germs. I no longer understand the forms of human intercourse. A harmless conversation chokes me. I am incapable of speaking an innocent word.
From letter 34, to Benno Reifenberg (April 1926), where he spells out his professional situation while providing his political outlook:
You can’t write feuilletons with half a mind or one hand tied behind your back. And it’s wrong to write feuilletons on the side. It’s a bad underestimation of the whole profession. The feuilleton is just as important to the paper as its politics—and to the reader it’s even more important. The modern newspaper is made of everything else in it before it’s made of politics. The modern newspaper needs a reporter more than it needs a leader writer. I am not an encore, not a pudding, I am the main dish. Why won’t people stop kidding themselves that a fancy-pants article on the situation in Locarno will grip readers and win subscribers. If Mr. Sieburg is to write mainly feuilletons, then I don’t see why I shouldn’t equally well have remained your Paris correspondent. … But the firm persists in thinking of Roth as a sort of trivial chatterbox that a great newspaper can just about run to. Wrong. I don’t write “witty glosses.” I paint the portrait of the age. That ought to be the job of the great newspaper. I’m a journalist, not a reporter; I’m an author, not a leader writer. …
Spain is journalistically uninteresting. Italy is interesting, Fascism less so. I take a different position on Fascism than the newspaper. I don’t like it, but I know that one Hindenburg is worse than ten Mussolinis. We in Germany should watch our Reichswehr, our Mr. Gessler, our generals, our famous compensation program to landowners. We don’t have the right to attack a Fascist dictatorship while we ourselves are living in a far worse, secret dictatorship, complete with Fememorde[“an antrhopoligical label from the Dark ages for these political killings that appear in a list of shameful manifestation in the Weimar Republic”], paramilitary marches, murderous judges, and hangmen attorneys. My conscience would never allow me, as an oppressed German, to tell the world about oppression in Italy. It would be a rather facile bravery to report behind Mussolini’s back, and keep my head down in my homeland, and go on subsidizing the thugs of the Black Reichswehr with my taxes. …
There is so much going on in Russia, one doesn’t have to write about the Communist terror. The presence of so much new life springing up from the ruins will give me a lot of unpolitical material.
From letter 36 (June 1926):
I am carrying none of the ideological baggage of the sort that most literary visitors to Russia have carried with them in the last few years. Unlike them, as a consequence of my birth and my knowledge of the country, I am immunized to what goes by “Russian mysticism” or “the great Russian soul,” and the like. I am too well aware—as western Europeans are apt to forget—that the Russians were not invented by Dostoyevsky. I am quite unsentimental about the country, and about the Soviet project.
From letter 37 (August 1926)—sadly Roth is right, there is a new world about to be born although it’s clear he doesn’t know how terrifying it will be:
There’s no doubt that a new world is being born in Russia. For all my skepticism, I am happy to be able to witness it. It’s not possible to live without having been here, it’s as if you had stayed at home during the war.
From letter 38 (September 1926), funny to read after his complaint and claim in letter 36:
I feel as though I’ve been gone from Europe for six months. I’ve experienced so much here, and all of it strange to me. … It’s a boon I’ve come to Russia. I should never have gotten to know myself otherwise. … The issue here is not politics, the issue is culture, religion, metaphysics, spirituality.
From letter 39, to Benno Reifenberg (October 1926), working on a self-description :
Everything we say about it [Russia] is mistaken. I read Lenin and Victor Hugo alternately, political authors both, chance purchases, cheap, secondhand editions. … Lenin is a great dialectical brain, Victor Hugo a great dialectical heart, and he writes a better style.
From letter 42, to Benno Reifenberg (April 1927):
I am slow, thorough, full of fear that I might see something wrong, my so-called style is based on nothing but an exact understanding of the facts—I write badly without that—like Sieburg in the Easter issue. I don’t have “ideas,” only understanding. I am incapable of vacuous writing.
There is something of Venice in the air today, as there sometimes is on summer days, and I am in a mood as if after lunch I were going by gondola to some wharf. … I am going to have my lunch soon, and am looking forward to it. Today we are having something cheesy and prosy, but the Venetian element in the air today will ennoble and Italianize it, and I will eat nothing cheesy or prosy, but macaroni. And then I really will go out on a gondola, past the Ring and the Volkgarten, and I will encounter a pretty Venetian girl, and will accost her thus: May I bore you, Signorina? And the pretty Venetian girl will reply in purest Viennese: See if I care. And for all that, I am in Venice today. Today, today only, I am the doge of Venice and an Italian tramp rolled in one, but tomorrow, tomorrow I will go back to being the dreamy German poet, art enthusiast, and 3rd year German student studying under Professor Brecht. …
Lunch wasn’t good, because firstly, my neighbor beat his wife with a broomstick. Secondly, the macaroni weren’t proper macaroni at all. And thirdly, Auntie Rieke ate cheese off the point of her knife. Just as well Aunt Mina confiscated my revolver in Lemberg, otherwise I might have committed tanticide.
What do you think about money? I don’t think it’s worth bothering about. If I had it, I would chuck it out the window. Money’s the opposite of women. You think highly of a woman until you’ve got her, then when you get her, you feel like chucking her out (or at least you ought). Whereas money you despise as long as you don’t have it, and then you think very highly of it.
Also from letter no. 6:
The fair-haired boy, the dog, and I—we are the only decent people in the whole building.
From letter no. 7, again to his cousin Paula, this time from his field post during World War I (24 August 1917). Again, ideas from The Radetzky March appear as well as some beautiful lines:
I am currently in some Augean shtetl in East Galicia. Gray filth, harboring one or two Jewish businesses. Everything’s awash when it rains, and when the sun comes out it starts to stink. But the location has one great advantage: it’s about 6 miles behind the lines. Reserve encampment.
Materially, I’m not so well off as I used to be. Our newspaper is failing, and once the aura of reporter has faded away, there’ll be nothing left of me but a one-year volunteer. And I’ll be treated accordingly.
But for the likes of me that doesn’t really matter. The main thing is experience, intensity of feeling, tunneling into events. I have experienced frightful moments of grim beauty. Little opportunity for active creation, aside from a couple of lyric poems, which were more out of passive sensation anyway.
I know what I'll be leafing through at work today. I'm sure I'll be posting some excerpts over the next week.
If you're interested in Roth, be sure to check out the book excerpt at The New Yorker, which includes ten letters from the book.
Paul Raymont at Philosophy, lit, etc. has more links at the end of this post, as well as several more posts on Roth over the years.
There is really nothing that people get used to so readily as miracles, once they have experienced them two or three times. Yes! In fact, such is human nature that people begin to feel betrayed when they don’t keep getting all those things that a chance and fleeting circumstance once bestowed on them. People are like that—so why should Andreas be any different? He spent the rest of the day in various other establishments, and was soon quite reconciled to the fact that the age of miracles he had lately experienced was now, finally, at an end, and that the preceding age had resumed. And so, with his heart set on that slow decline for which a drunkard is always available—and which no sober person can possibly understand!—Andreas took himself back to the banks and bridges of the Seine.
The Legend of the Holy Drinker by Joseph Roth is a sparkling novella about Andreas, a drunkard (translator Michael Hofmann uses the wonderful term 'clochard') living under the bridges of Paris. Andreas experiences a host of minor miracles, starting with a generous gift from a devotee of St Thérèse de Lisieux. Andreas promises to repay this gift to the chapel of the devotee’s choosing. The only things as consistent as Andreas’ lucky breaks are the obstructions, usually self-induced, that prevents Andreas from successfully repaying the gift. As Andreas demonstrates through his actions, though, he has a good soul despite his reduced state. While some of the obstructions come from his generosity, many of the obstacles come from his carnal desire or less than generous behavior by others.
The novella taps into themes such as generosity of spirit, possibility of redemption, and nobility in the downtrodden, any of which have the possibility to turn ponderous or preachy but never reach that point in Roth’s skillful hands. Andreas’ constant memory lapses, caused by alcohol, reinforce his live-for-the-moment philosophy. His drinking becomes a self-induced remedy to lose his sense of self. A theme in The Radetzky March I didn't develop as much as I should have was a sense of estrangement, which Andreas exhibits physically and spiritually. It turns out Andreas is really a Pole staying in Paris despite his work papers long expired. In addition, it seems there is little use for a flawed saint, who will not be prayed to but exists to be preyed upon by others. Highly recommended.
Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March traces the history of the Trotta family across three generations. The grandfather, Joseph, saved Emperor Franz Joseph’s life at the Battle of Solferino, an act that helps and haunts the family across the years. The novel parallels and intertwines the connection between sons and fathers in the Trotta family with the relationship between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its subjects. In both cases, the head of the family/empire becomes a symbol that proves to be wildly overblown, causing members on both sides of the relationship to struggle with unrealistic expectations.
Roth proves to be a little heavy-handed at times but usually he displays a deft and humorous touch. Roth takes a complex look at causes leading to the disintegration of the empire—while he finds fault with the codes of honor of the older generations, Roth highlights the greater danger from the lack of values in his own generation. Roth’s view of the empire adds to the ambiguity in the novel. Roth recognizes that the empire requires a monarchy with a strong personality in order to unite its disparate nationalities, but that is not the same as endorsing such an arrangement. Such a recognition points to reasons for the dissolution—weakness from above combined with increasing disunity and rot from below. Pressure from outside the empire is certain to destroy it since the empire has been hollowed out, the weakening of a common vision or purpose the catalyst to its collapse.
My ratings are loose at best, but I give this novel my highest recommendation (which doesn’t explain why it took me eight years to get beyond the first ten pages of it—I bought it in the San Francisco airport in August 2003).
I’ll have to apologize for the slow, scattershot writing about this book (well, worse than usual) but other events have been demanding my energy and focus.
A look at some quotes from two translations are here, The Overlook Press edition with translation by Joachim Neugroschel and Granta Publication’s edition with translation by Michael Hofmann.
Posts about and excerpts from The Radetzky March:
Part One
Each died a soldier’s death for the honor of the regiment
Part Two
A feeble attempt to click his heels under the blanket
A lovely secret in a ruinous castle
His own holy mission to die for the Kaiser at any moment
Part Three
Between lightning and thunder, eternity itself was crammed in
Tears wept by his brain
Twenty or rather fifteen years ago
For an alternate take, or rather supplemental data, on the popularity of Joseph Radetzky and the march named after him, see Vienna-Life.com. Contrary to the article's claim that the anecdote might explode "the solemnity of the novel's theme", the story and alternate lyrics support Roth's point about the divisiveness within the empire.
Update (10 Feb 2012): Michael Hofmann's article on the circumstances surrounding writing the book as reflected in Roth's letters.
Most of these orders pertained to the evacuation of villages and town and the treatment of pro-Russian Ukrainians, clerics, and spies. Hasty court-martials in villages passed hasty sentences. Secret informers delivered unverifiable reports on peasants, Orthodox priests, teachers, photographers, officials. There was no time. The army had to retreat swiftly but also punish the traitors swiftly. And while ambulances, baggage columns, field artillery, dragoons, riflemen, and infantrists formed abrupt and helpless clusters on the sodden roads, while couriers galloped to and fro, while inhabitants of small towns fled westward in endless throngs, surrounded by white terror, loaded down with red-and-white featherbeds, gray sacks, brown furniture, and blue kerosene lamps, the shots of hasty executioners carrying out hasty sentences rang from the church squares of hamlets and villages, and the somber rolls of drums accompanied the monotonous decisions of judges, and the wives of victims lay shrieking for mercy before the mud-caked boots of officers, and red and silver flames burst from huts and barns, stables and haystacks. The Austrian army’s war had begun with court-martials. For days on end genuine and supposed traitors hung from the trees on church squares to terrify the living. (317)
(All quotes and page numbers are from the translation by Joachim Neugroschel.)
Roth intensifies the theme of deterioration, whether of individuals, families or empire, in Part Three. When looking at families and individuals there is an incapacitating weakness in each, often causing people to abandon their future to fate (the exceptions stand out even more because of this malaise). Weakness shows itself in many ways: increase in drunkeness, overindulgence in gambling, or shirking all responsibilities, personal or professional. Some characters, such as Lieutenant Carl Joseph von Trotta and his inheritance as the grandson of “the Hero of Solferino”, come to the realization that they have failed, not just to live up to an ideal held before them but even with more modest goals. “Not only did he have a thoroughly wicked character, but his mind was tired and foolish. In short: he was an utter failure.” (251) Carl Joseph’s father, Baron Fritz, while not sinking to the same depths as his son, realizes “how hard it is to be helpless yet maintain one’s dignity.” (267) The father and his generation usually receive the most sympathy from Roth. Their world was supposed to apply a rigid code inherited from their parents, yet such absolutes don’t seem to apply anymore. Roth provides ambiguous support for these codes of behavior, though. These codes can lead to honorable action but they also insist on mindless violence or taint future generations as well as the empire:
That lost era, which was virtually buried under the fresh grave mounds of the fallen, was ruled by very different notions. If someone offended the honor of an officer of the Imperial and Royal Army, and that officer failed to kill the man apparently because he owed him money, then that officer was a misfortune and worse than a misfortune: he was a disgrace to his progenitor, to the army, and to the monarchy. (266)
While the Trotta family realizes the benefits from their grandfather’s heroic action in saving the emperor, the legacy carries disadvantages, too, as I hope I’ve pointed out in previous posts. Roth hammers home the difficulty in choosing such a code to live by when Carl Joseph carries out selfless acts, only to find his actions lead to his financial ruin and ultimately to death. The imagery of worms feasting on the dead, appearing throughout the novel, highlights the fate of all of us. But was a similar fate unavoidable for the Austro-Hungarian Empire?
Roth conveys a sense of inevitable doom for the empire throughout the novel. At a discernable point, Baron Fritz von Trotta loses faith in the empire and simply goes through the motions when doing his duties, although it could be argued he went through the motions prior to that point since he was unable to understand the danger posed by “revolutionary” individuals or groups. The distance and friction between ethnic groups within the empire mirror the distance and friction between generations. This lack of cohesion is called out directly, in particular by the younger Nechwal (231), as well as by Roth during the summer festival held at Chojnicki’s house (296), where a laundry-list of ethnic groups argue after Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination. Parts of Roth’s novel read like a sober Hašek (irony intended) or, even more perversely, a combination of Hašek and Barbara Tuchman (I’m thinking of The Guns of August here). The shadow cast by history is felt by the empire and the emperor to the same extent it helps/burdens the Trotta family.
A few sidenotes before I finish posting on The Radetzky March:
- Roth’s use of nature can be heavy-handed at times, such as the looming storm before the summer festival. The agitation of the pending storm mirrors the conflict about to spread across Europe, where “between lightning and thunder, eternity itself was crammed in.” (294) At other times, though, he shows a humorous touch that conveys several points in a deft manner. “He [Baron Fritz von Trotta] looked gaunter than usual, reminding his friend Hasselbrunner of the exotic birds at the Schönbrunn Zoo—creatures that constitute Nature’s attempt to replicate the Hapsburg physiognomy within the animal kingdom. Indeed, the district captain reminded anyone who had seen the Kaiser of Franz Joseph himself.” (275) Everything in nature, not just the emperor’s subjects, exists to serve or mimic the Hapsburgs.
- One motif within the novel focuses on the ability to see things clearly before death. At the summer festival Carl Joseph begins to pierce the fog of alcohol, history, expectations, and delusion. In Part One Dr. Demant has a miraculous improvement in his vision immediately before his duel. Carrying this motif a step further, Chojnicki accurately predicted what was going to happen. Actually seeing it unfold, however, drives him mad.
- As I mentioned in this post, music plays a role in the novel, which is fitting given the title. Part Three adds another example of this role during the summer festival. After Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination, the crowd calls for Chopin’s Funeral March. The earlier summer performances outside the Trotta home, with the elder Nechwal directing “The Radetzky March” and insisting musicians precisely follow the score, stands in marked contrast to this performance, highlighting how much has changed:
Men in uniform or in mufti escorted ladies. Their feet unsteadily obeyed the macabre and stumbling rhythm. For the bands were playing without scores, not conducted but accompanied by the slow loops that the black batons traced in the air. Sometimes one band lagged behind the other and then tried to catch up with the hastier one by skipping a few measures.
The guests walked in a circle around the empty, mirrorlike parquet floor. They circled round and round, each person a mourner behind the corpse of the one in front of him, and, at the center of the room, the invisible corpses of the heir apparent and the monarchy. (299-300)
And Beniover [a local “banker”] opened a huge book. This book indicated that Onufrij owned four and a half acres of land. Beniover was prepared to lend him three hundred crowns on that.
“Let’s go to the mayor,” said Beniover. He called his wife, told her to mind the store, and he and Onurfrij Kolohin went to the mayor.
Here he gave Onufrij three hundred crowns. Onufrij sat down at a brown worm-eaten table and began writing his name at the bottom of the document. He removed his hat. The sun was already high up in the sky. It managed to send its burning rays through the tiny windows of the peasant hut where the mayor of Burdlaki officiated. Onufrij was perspiring. The beads of sweat grew on his low brow like transparent crystal boils. Every letter that Onufrij wrote produced a crystal boil on his forehead. These boils ran, ran down like tears wept by Onufrij’s brain. At last his name was at the bottom of the document.
Frau von Taussig stood on the platform in North Station. Twenty years ago—she imagined it was fifteen, for she had been denying her age for so long that she herself was convinced her years had ground to a halt and would not go till the end—twenty years ago she had likewise stood in North Station, waiting for another lieutenant, albeit a cavalry lieutenant. She climbed up to the platform as if it were a fountain of youth. She submerged in the caustic haze of coal dust, in the hissing and streaming of shunting locomotives, in the dense ringing of signal bells. She wore a short travel veil. She imagined it had been fashionable fifteen years ago. But it had been twenty-five years ago, not even twenty! She loved waiting on the platform. She loved the moment when the train rolled in, and she spotted Trotta’s ridiculous little dark-green hat at the compartment window and his beloved, perplexed young face. For she made Carl Joseph younger, as she did herself, made him more naïve and perplexed, as she did herself. The instant the lieutenant left the lower footboard, her arms opened as they had opened twenty or rather fifteen years ago. And from the face she wore today, that earlier one emerged, the rosy, uncreased face she had worn twenty or rather fifteen years ago, a girls’ face, sweet and slightly flushed. Around her throat, where two parallel rills were already digging in, she had hung the thin childish gold necklace that had been her sole ornament twenty or rather fifteen years ago. And, as she had done twenty or rather fifteen years ago, she rode with the lieutenant to one of those small hotels, where concealed love blossomed in squalid, squeaking, and delicious bed paradises that were rented by the hour.
As I mentioned in this post, disjointment or uncertainty about time is a common theme in the book. This quote provides one of the more humorous examples since it goes beyond uncertainty about time. One area going beyond the 15/20 year gag lies with the theme of alleged higher standards in previous times versus the dissolute standards of the current (pre-World War I) Austro-Hungarian empire. Such a comparison runs into a brick wall with Valerie. She highlights the deceptiveness in such comparisons since she operates at the same level she always has, which happens to be at a level slightly less than the nostalgic ideal.
The humor in this passage doesn’t stop there. By only mentioning Valerie’s current behavior and that of 15/20 years ago, Roth conveniently omits the intervening years with many similar trysts. Or the quip aimed at Carl Joseph’s current status in the infantry—he had been a lieutenant in the cavalry until his dishonor in provoking a duel “required” his reassignment. There’s an implied pun in the comparison between Carl Joseph’s and Valerie’s mounting and disembarking with the spring in the step of the Emperor Franz Joseph alighting from a carriage and the youthfulness his subjects seek to mimic. And, to randomly choose a stopping point before the subject is exhausted, Roth highlights the reliance on tokens of the past and their irrelevance, made even more ridiculous by describing the “two parallel riffs” where Valerie’s necklace dug in—the necklace may be the same but there’s no doubt she has changed. Everything has changed, despite outward appearances, and usually not in the manner the characters perceive...
When evening set in, the kegs, kicked along by the Cossack boots, trundled and rumbled over the bumpy streets toward the Russian officer’s club, and a soft splashing and gurgling revealed the contents of the kegs to the populace. The czar’s officers showed His Apostolic Majesty’s [Emperor Franz Joseph’s] officers the meaning of Russian hospitality. And not one of the czar’s officers and not one of His Apostolic Majesty’s officers knew that Death was already crossing his haggard, invisible hands over the glass beakers from which the men drank.
I won’t go into detail about the opening of a casino house where the troops on the border are stationed other than to say gambling becomes a substitute for battlefield heroics. The soldier’s code leads Carl Joseph to assume an IOU in order to support his fellow officer: “Because he was drunk, his heart was bursting with the commiseration for the captain. The poor comrade had to be rescued. He was in great danger.” Roth’s gambling scenes have the feel of Dostoevsky’s The Gambler. Even when someone wins at the roulette table they aren’t happy. The winnings are never enough to satisfy the winner and there is a lingering feeling that fate is still somehow cheating them.
Carl Joseph descends into alcoholism, a state that gives him a sense of belonging as well as numbness. He becomes good friends with those around him during his inebriation, highlighting an underlying theme in the novel of belonging. Unfortunately for someone trying to live up to the standard of his grandfather’s heroics, Carl Joseph recognizes his shortcomings and his unpayable debt to everyone, dead or alive: “The dead! I can’t forget the dead! Father, I can’t forget anything! Father!” The appeal across the generations cannot be heard by a father overwhelmed because of his own powerlessness and the changes going on around him. The father feels alone and helpless, too. Yet despite his feelings of ineffectualness, the father carries on while the son succumbs to his weaknesses. The feeling of powerlessness and weakness adds another tie between fathers/sons and emperor/subjects (see quotes on Franz Joseph in the previous post). Carl Joseph keenly feels his detachment from everything around him:
The army had become alien to him. The Supreme Commander in Chief was alien to him. Lieutenant Trotta resembled a man who had lost not only his homeland but also his homesickness for his homeland. He pitied the white-bearded oldster who drew nearer and nearer, curiously fingering kit bags, bread pouches, tin cans.
So why the title The Radetzky March? Music plays an important role in the book, none more important than the title march by Johann Strauss, dedicated to the Austrian Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky von Radet in 1848. The piece invokes pride for the empire (or at least what it used to be), which Roth describes in Carl Joseph’s response during the Corpus Christi parade:
Inside Carl Joseph the old childish and heroic dreams surfaced, the ones that had filled him and made him happy during vacations at home, on his father’s balcony, when he had heard the strains of “The Radetzky March.” The full majestic might of the old empire passed before his eyes. The lieutenant thought about his grandfather, the Hero of Solferino, and the unshakable patriotism of a father who was like a small but strong rock amid the towering mountains of Hapsburg power. He thought about his own holy mission to die for the Kaiser at any moment, on water or on land, or also in the air—in short, any place. The oath he had perfunctorily sworn a few times came alive. It rose up, word for word, each word a banner. The porcelain-blue eyes of the Supreme Commander in Chief—eyes grown cold in so many portraits on so many walls in the empire and now filled with a new fatherly solicitude and benevolence—gazed like a whole blue sky at the grandson of the Hero of Solferino.
Roth also uses music to highlight irony or deterioration, such as the whorehouse piano player breaking into The Radetzky March as soldiers arrive at the establishment, or when the hotel casino adds a band with “renowned chanteuses” singing songs like “Underneath my frock I wear pink and pleated undies.” Also heard during Part Two is a new piece of music, sung at the workers’ strike, which will have implications for the future—“The Internationale.”
On to Part Three.
