Joseph Roth

born Sept. 2, 1894, Brody, Galicia,
Austria-Hungary [now in Ukraine]
died May 27, 1939, Paris, France
journalist and regional novelist who,
particularly in his later novels,
mourned the passing of an age of
stability he saw represented by the last
pre-World War I years of the Habsburg
empire of Austria-Hungary.
Details about Roth’s early years,
religious beliefs, and personal life are
little known; Roth himself made a
practice of concealing or transforming
such biographical information. It is
known that he studied at Lemberg (now
Lviv, Ukraine) and Vienna and then
served in the Austrian army from 1916 to
1918. After the war he worked as a
journalist in Vienna and Berlin and was
a regular contributor to the Frankfurter
Zeitung (1923–32). During this period he
wrote several novels, including
Radetzkymarsch (1932; Radetzky March),
considered his best novel, an excellent
portrait of the latter days of the
monarchy. Roth was concerned with the
dilemma of individual moral heroes in a
time of decadence and moribund
traditions. A number of his plots treat
the difficulties of the father-son
relationship; the aged emperor Francis
Joseph appears repeatedly as a paternal
figure. In 1933 Roth immigrated to
Paris, where he spent the remainder of
his life. In his final years he viewed
the past with increasing nostalgia, a
sentiment evident in the six novels that
were written during this exile period.
Die Kapuzinergruft (1938; “The Capuchin
Tomb”) is an example. Der stumme Prophet
(1966; The Silent Prophet), the story of
a failed revolutionary, was written in
1929.