KING OR COUNTRY: THE NOSTALGIC LEFTISM OF JOSEPH ROTH

JACOB GRECH / HERTFORD, HISTORY AND POLITICS

Joseph Roth is, comparatively speaking, a forgotten writer. Only in the last decade or so have several of his works found a translator from their original German. From the barest biography, some of the principal themes of his novels - disillusion, dislocation, war, loss - might reasonably be guessed at. Born in the multicultural eastern territory of Galicia (now mainly in Ukraine) in 1894 in the final decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Roth made his name as a well-paid and celebrated journalist for a plethora of left-leaning newspapers in the inter-war decades, criss-crossing Europe and residing exclusively in hotels. could be termed historical fiction. A common thread to most of his writings is the Great War and its shattering effect on the world he was born and grew up in. Chronicling the interwar years, the notion of the ‘old world’ that had been lost is a constant, however implicit, in the many brief feuilletons he submitted to the likes of the Bohemian-German Prager-Tagblatt, the German Social Democrats’ paper, Vorwärts, and - above all - the hallowed liberal publication Frankfurter Zeitung.

Add to this his early death as an émigré in Paris just before the outbreak of the Second World War and it’s easy to picture him as a shadowy yet endearing kind of bohemian of bygone days. A writer you read to soak up the spirit of an age, he and his world are arguably impossible to convincingly compare with our own. This is not a wholly unwarranted leap to make, but to sum up Roth in this way is to overlook both the full force of his work and the distinctive and prescient questions posed by his politics. There is a convincing case to be made for a distinction between Roth the journalist and Roth the novelist, although the boundary between the two is often blurred and virtually all of his oeuvre

could be termed historical fiction. A common thread to most of his writings is the Great War and its shattering effect on the world he was born and grew up in. Chronicling the interwar years, the notion of the ‘old world’ that had been lost is a constant, however implicit, in the many brief feuilletons he submitted to the likes of the Bohemian-German Prager-Tagblatt, the German Social Democrats’ paper, Vorwärts, and - above all - the hallowed liberal publication Frankfurter Zeitung.

“I paint the portrait of the age,” he confidently wrote to his editor in 1926. “I’m not a reporter, I’m a journalist. I’m not an editorial writer, I’m a poet”. Surely more a precursor to Hunter S. Thompson’s ‘Gonzo Journalism’ than Walter Cronkite’s “that’s just the way it is”, Roth applied a lens of social criticism and personal experience to his articles. Adopting the moniker ‘Der Rote Joseph’ - literally, ‘Red Joseph’ - he engaged in the 1920s with themes of inequality and injustice as they played out on the streets of Berlin or Vienna. Like the New Objectivity artists of the time, he catalogued the homeless, frequently maimed war veterans who lined city streets, abandoned by a society unwilling to honestly grapple with the defeat they represented. Intimations of the tragic events to come appear in his account of the casual antisemitism of swastika-donning university students.

But Roth was never comfortable with the grand narratives and heroic struggles to build new worlds that were part of the currency of interwar years, as much on the left as the right. This was the era of the Austro-Marxists who attempted to chart a path between reform and revolution, constructing ‘Red Vienna’ through large-scale investment in public housing and services and building mass-membership paramilitaries and workers’ committees. Despite his pen name, Roth kept a critical distance from the Social Democrats, let alone the Communists, whether of his native Austria or the Weimar Republic he frequented. So where to place him politically? indulging Roth and pursuing his vision further.

His journalistic writings are interspersed with reflections on the arrival of ‘the modern’ - whether understood philosophically, politically or even artistically. Writing in 1926 of the German city of Magdeburg, he lamented the “new zealotry” of featureless “metropolitan” design, which he considers the outcome of pure arrogance. He worried that the beaux-arts cafés and even the cathedral might be sacrificed at the behest of some progressive-minded municipal official, concerned with practicality and efficiency. These are not necessarily the themes of a traditionalist - conservation has a long history on the left. Indeed, in the same breath as he disparages Social Democrats, Roth’s protagonist in his 1938 novel The Emperor’s Tomb (perhaps the most strikingly autobiographical of them all) expresses disdain for attempts to build a new Austrian national identity on the basis of what he deems retrograde, exclusionary clericalism.

The elusive nature of Roth’s political identity seems to emerge most convincingly in the novels he wrote in the 1930s - in particular, his opus The Radetzky March (1932) and The Emperor’s Tomb. There is an increasing focus on the loss of the ‘old world’ of the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg Empire as defined by a sense of tolerance, even tentative fellowship, amidst its famous religious, linguistic and ethnic diversity. This may seem an unconvincing ideal, the product of a nostalgic writer who had lost, in his words, “my fatherland, the only one I have ever had: the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary”. It is, however, worthwhile indulging Roth and pursuing his vision further.

His picture of the Empire is sentimental, but not rose-tinted. After all, in its own inherently unstable, conflictual underbelly lay the roots of the present condition that he loathed. Antisemitism and deep ethnic resentments are prominent themes in his novels on the era. A distinctly unheroic - though his novels do have heroes - sense of fatalism permeates his writings. The Radetzky March charts the growing disillusion and alienation of a family of loyal servants of the Emperor over three generations. Roth writes of shattered hopes due to the undermining of the foundations that upheld them. At the end of the novel, when the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo is announced, most of the military dignitaries gathered for an elaborate dinner party crack jokes and gabble away in their native tongues. The writing was on the wall. It was all inevitable.

And yet, both in his writing and in his public life in the 1930s, Roth increasingly looked back to the Empire - and in particular the figure of the Emperor himself - as something worthy of celebration. We surely would recognise, as he did, that the tolerance that did exist was more substantive than what would THE KARL-MARX-HOF, ICON OF INTERWAR follow the attempts to raise

VIENNESE SOCIALIST ARCHITECTURE borders between new nation-states after 1918. Knowing what unfolded after his death in 1939, this seems even more understandable. However, Roth also saw in the very governing narrative of the empire reigned over by the ageing, conservative but devoted and dutiful Franz Joseph I, a conduit for a unique, ephemeral culture of apolitical tolerance. As Michael Hofmann puts it, he appreciated the “graceful and accommodating nature of the Empire… the love of the frontier for the centre”. The Empire was no egalitarian space. There is, arguably, a reactionary sensibility as manifested in the recurring figure of the Emperor as an object of sincere respect on the part of Roth’s protagonists. But to simply label Roth as a nostalgic monarchist in an age of godless and communitarian ideologies would be to miss the subtlety of his argument. The figure of the Emperor is ultimately the centrepiece of a mythology. Roth knew this, as do his protagonists. He poked

fun at it gently, recognising that, at its core, it was a fabrication, and often a crude one. But, unlike the other mythologies of his age, he found it a unifying project worth admiring, manifested in a collection of signs - the anthem (if not the words, then the tune), military processions, a common currency, a shared architectural vocabulary - and most of all, the monarch as an overarching father figure and object of devotion for each of ‘his peoples’. ism. This is Roth the self-described “Hotelpatriot” - a writer who identified the guesthouses he frequented, multicultural places defined by a playful exchange of ideas, as “freed from the constriction of patriotism, from the blinkers of national feeling, slightly on holiday from the rigidity of love of land”. Here, at least, people seemed to him “what they should always be: children of the world”.

The protagonists in Roth’s books engage with this symbolism in a very particular way. Without illusions, they are able to pierce the veil of myth that surrounds the Emperor. And yet, deep down, they both value it practically as a tool to promote unity and stability and possess a sentimental attachment to it. Slovenian chestnut-vendor, Jewish cab driver, Viennese lieutenant: each of these ‘common men’ is, even if they’ve lost faith in almost anything else, prepared to go to war and lay down their life for the Emperor. Is Roth’s world our world? In many obvious ways, it is not, and he merits reading today primarily on his own terms, rather than as offering prescriptions for contemporary politics. However, in studying, both through his novels and his journalism, the undulating path of his intellectual journey, there is much food for thought. Do we need myths to survive? Is nostalgia a retrograde, even dangerous, tendency? How do we navigate competing narratives of loss and gain? On these questions and more, Joseph Roth is a provocative, but also sensitive and humane, voice from another era.

Here we find the frequently alluring idea, common to both our own times and Roth’s, of a unifying personality as capable of engineering an escape for individuals from politics - in order to achieve certainty and security - at the cost of genuine participation. It might easily be termed paternalistic; certainly not progressive. Indeed, most of Roth’s characters have a distant relationship with “the collective” and display a reluctance to engage with political projects that call for popular agency of a concerted, heroic character. In The Emperor’s Tomb, the protagonist locates himself in history: “I belong to an evidently lost world, in which it was only expected that a people would be ruled in some form, and that, unless it were to cease being a people, it would not rule itself”.

REFERENCES

• Joseph Roth, Radetzky March (1932) • Joseph Roth, The Emperor’s Tomb (1938) • Michael Hofmann (ed.), Joseph Roth, The Hotel Years: Wanderings in Europe between the Wars (2015) • James Wood, Empire of Signs (1999) London Review of Books 21:5 [link] EMPEROR FRANZ JOSEPH I • Michael Hofmann, Conspiratorial (RULED 1848-1916), A Hapsburger (1987) London Review of

RECURRING FIGURE IN ROTH’S NOVELS Books 9:5 [link] • Paul Scraton, How Joseph Roth saw Europe’s future (2019) New Statesman [link] • Michael Hofmann, I learned to see Joseph Roth as his own solar system (2012) The Guardian [link]

So was Roth a kind of conservative? It is true that his sentimentality, and arguably his increasing desperation, drove him in improbable directions. In February 1938, just a month before the Anschluss annexed Austria to Nazi Germany, he led a representation of monarchists to meet the Austrian government, pleading the case for the restoration of the throne to Franz Joseph’s grandson, Otto von Habsburg. And yet, a more consistent ideal is that of cosmopolitan-