In Our Time - Joseph Roth

Episode Date: June 4, 2026

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the great writers on Central Europe after the first world war and on the dying of the old orders with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. As a German speaking Jew from Brody in the north-eastern edge of that Empire, which was then in Galicia, next in Poland and is now in Ukraine, Roth (1894 - 1939) was to spend his short life moving first to Lviv then to Vienna and finally to Paris via Berlin without ever finding a settled home. Roth explored the loss of homeland and anticipated the dangers of the new nationalism through his journalism and in his novels including Radetzky March, Job, Rebellion and Flight Without End, and his books were among the first the Nazis burned.With Helen Chambers Emeritus Professor of German at the University of St AndrewsDeborah Holmes Associate Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of SalzburgAnd Jon Hughes Reader in German and Cultural Studies at Royal Holloway, University of LondonProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list:Jon Hughes, Facing Modernity: Fragmentation, Culture and Identity in Joseph Roth's Writing in the 1920s (MHRA, 2006) Heinz Lunzer and Victoria Lunzer-Talos, Joseph Roth: Leben und Werk in Bildern (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994)Keiron Pim, Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth (Granta, 2022)Joseph Roth (trans. Deborah Holmes, ed. Helen Constantine), Vienna Tales (Oxford University Press, 2014)Joseph Roth (trans. and ed. Michael Hofmann), A Life in Letters (Granta, 2012)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), Collected Shorter Fiction (Granta, 2001)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), Rebellion (Granta, 2000)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Radetzky March (Granta, 2022)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Legend of the Holy Drinker (Granta, 2022)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Wandering Jews (Granta, 2001)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933 (Granta, 2022)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Hotel Years: Wanderings in Europe Between the Wars (Granta, 2015)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), Reports from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France 1925-1939 (Granta, 2004)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Emperor’s Tomb (Granta, 2013)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The String of Pearls (Granta, 1999)Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The White Cities: Reports From France 1925-1939 (Granta, 2013)Joseph Roth (trans. David Le Vay), Weights and Measures (Pushkin Press, 2024)Joseph Roth (trans. Daved Le Vay and Beatrice Musgrave), Flight Without End (Pushkin Press, 2024)Joseph Roth (trans. Ruth Martin), The Coral Merchant: Essential Stories (Pushkin Press, 2020)Joseph Roth (trans Will Stone), On the End of the World (Pushkin Press, 2019)Joseph Roth (trans. Dorothy Thompson), Job: The Story of a Simple Man (Granta, 2022)Wilhelm Von Sternburg, Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009)In Our Time is a BBC Studios ProductionSpanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Josef Roth, 1894 to 1939, was one of the great writers on the dying of the old order

in Central Europe after. the First World War, the loss of homeland and the horror of what was to come. Most English speakers, incidentally, refer to him as Joseph Roth. In his journalism and in works such as Redetsky March, Job, Rebellion, and Flight Without End, Root explored the impact of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's collapse on the world around him. And as a German-speaking Jew from the northeastern edge of that empire, whose books the Nazis burned, Roth was to spend his life drifting westwards without ever finding a settled home.

With me to discuss Joseph Roth or Roth are Helen Chambers, Emeritus Professor of German at the University of St Andrews, Deborah Holmes, Associate Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Salzburg, and John Hughes, reader in German and cultural studies

at Royal Holloway University of London. And John, it's to you, I want to come first. Can you tell us a bit about Roth's childhood in Brodie, then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of course, but it's now on the very edge of Ukraine? Yes, indeed, yeah. So, I mean, many listeners, if they know Root at all, they'll probably think of him as an Austrian author, but his origins were far from Austria, as we know it today, as you said, born in Brodie, which at the time of his birth was in Galicia, which was the largest, the northernmost province in Austria-Hung, Hungary, the Habsburg Empire. Galicia, as you mentioned, occupies a fairly large area which falls now within Southeast Poland and the west of Ukraine. And if you look up Brodie on the map today, you'll see it's there in the west of Ukraine, maybe 100 kilometres or so east of Leviv or Lemberg, as it was known in Roth's time in German. But in the year of Roth's birth,

1894, Brodie was very much a border town. It was right on the edge. of the Austro-Hungarian Empire close to the border with Russia and because of that it had flourished as a sort of trading centre for the previous century or so and perhaps as a consequence of that it was quite a mixed community

multi-ethnic, multilingual, multicultural. Root himself was born to a German-speaking Jewish family and so grew up speaking one of the languages of empire, high German, but he would have been very,

very familiar with the sound of Polish, Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian also during his childhood. And I think he also had a working knowledge of all of those languages. Despite that, I think Hort had felt that Brodie was quite a provincial place. He spent his childhood often wishing he could get away, even though later in life it became so important to him and in his work. He was brought up by a single mother, who by all accounts was quite protective, overprotective, even. He never knew his father, who had abandoned the family when Root was quite young. In later life, Root tended to fabricate fantastical stories about this absent father. He often sort of claimed,

for example, that the father had been some sort of high-ranking military officer. But in truth, he was a Jewish businessman, a failed businessman, really, who later became mentally ill and was institutionalized. And, you know, never really came to terms with that. It was not a detail which he confided really to anyone in his lifetime. At any rate, he did get away from Brody eventually. He studied first in Leviv and then transferred to Vienna before his studies were interrupted by the First World War, the outbreak of war. And he was a very intelligent young boy. He did well at school, right? Yes, he attended the gymnasium, so the sort of grammar school in Brodie excelled really academically, although by all accounts was something of a loner. From an early age,

enjoyed literature, German literature in particular. This was at the tail end of when German was one of the teaching languages actually in Brody. And shortly after he completed his secondary education, I think the language of instruction switched almost entirely to Polish. So it was changing, really, during his lifetime. So he moves to Vienna, the imperial capital, on the very eve of the First World War, with the defeat of the central powers in 1918, the empire collapses too.

How abrupt were the changes which he experienced after 1918? He'd served in the war, although not on the front line. We don't think he served in frontline combat, although he again, it's something he claimed various things to the contrary later in life. So he finished the war, demobbed really from the army, returning to Vienna. Brodie, his hometown from 1919, became part of the new Polish Republic. and so really was not really recognisable as the place in which she'd grown up and with which he had identified.

German was no longer one of the languages spoken there, not a recognised one. For a time, I think then he was ready to embrace the post-war world. He was quite open to the opportunities that might be offered by the new democracies that were emerging. But that gradually started to change during the course of the next decade or so. Well, let me follow on with Helen. members. Helen, he stays in Vienna and starts work as a journalist. What were the opportunities there like? Because there must have been some stiff competition. I mean, the Austrian capital boasted a rich array of novelists and commentators at the time. Yes, it's quite hard to know how

he got into it, except that there are reports from editors in the offices that he turned up at. and the report that this young man appeared very skinny in a ragged military shirt, very proud and handed over his short texts, which were then received and indeed published. And he had a quite remarkable output and success. And in that first year 1919, when he'd filled in his registration card with occupation journalist, which he wasn't really, he then published. 178 articles in 19

as a 24-year-old and already in these articles and you ask me why and how he succeeded perhaps sheer bloody mindness but also the quality of his work is absolutely clear from the outset. I mean not every article is a gem but very many of them

do all the things that he was later to do in his novels. And one of the things that characterises that journalism is he has a, an eye for the underdog. Details that at first glance appear insignificant, but actually perhaps something that really matters. Yes, I mean, he was very concerned with injustice, with the underdog, with the veterans coming back

with nowhere to go, unemployed, no income. And he watched them and he saw them, and he went to military hospital, and he saw people whose faces had been sure, shot away, jaws shot away, and they weren't allowed to look in the mirror, and they weren't allowed to see plaster casts of themselves, although these existed, and wrote a really hard-hitting piece saying they should show these photographs before the newsreels, they should put them on the advertising pillars, and people wouldn't fight wars again.

I mean, he didn't say explicitly people wouldn't fight wars again, but that was very much what he, you know, he could see that these people were suffering dreadful injustice. Deborah Holmes, let me ask you about Rot as a foetton writer. So can you explain what a foetton is, very important in Austrian and German culture, and why they were so important? Certainly, yes. I mean, I think one of the reasons why Yorosuf Roth, even at this very dynamic period in cultural history, was able to be such an immediate success, I think it's fair to say,

is that we're in, despite the end of the war and shortage of paper and a shortage of healthy manpower, we're still in a period that's a golden age of print media. And the daily papers, there were, you know, scores of daily papers in each big city, each big German-speaking city. And they had two and three editions a day. I mean, that's a lot of newspaper to fill. And the Féthont was both a part of the newspaper. It was the cultural and arts section of the newspaper. But the word Féthon was also used to describe short-telling.

that could be subjective, descriptive, narrative, question mark. They could be purely descriptive. But that photonists, so Errol thought of himself as a journalist, but as a photonist, they would churn them out day on day about anything and everything that they saw walking around the city. And the idea was, or the tradition was, is that the style could or should be subjective. And it was in the newspaper partly as a commentary on current affairs and on politics and business and other daily news. but also as a part of the newspaper that would outlive current affairs. So the original phaeton was published under a thick black line on the bottom third of the page.

And the idea was that you cut off that bit of the page and kept it. Because although this writing was subjective and personal, it was going to be what outlived the daily news, these little perceptions and descriptions of daily life. Sounds a bit like in our time. He before long started experimenting with novels, as well. And one of the early ones is called Rebellion, and it encapsulates quite a lot of Roads' outlook on life. Can you tell us about that?

Certainly, yeah. It's a fabulous novel. It's of his earlier novels. So we're talking 1924. In 1923, 24, he actually wrote and published three novels, which is also quite a considerable feat when you consider that he's, you know, as we've said, he's churning out journalism the whole time as well. So rebellion, rebellion, is actually based on a true story. It was based on a court case from 1923 that Kyle Krauss, a famous Viennese satirist and commentator, talks about in his one-man, periodical di Facque, so the torch, which saw itself as a sort of antidote to the daily press.

And Rot takes up this story. It's about a veteran who returns from the front, and he's lost a leg. But he feels totally content. He feels that the government must know, what it's doing. He's going to get a prosthetic leg. He's going to get some way of supporting himself. It's all fine and he did his duty. And the story basically takes that mindset apart. And there's one disaster after another that happens to this poor man. So the story from the actual sort of true

story that it's based on was of an invalid who gets back from the war and is given a license to play a barrel organ on the street to earn money. And that's what happens in the novel as well. But then the barrel organ owner is confronted with someone who, thinks that they are just pretending to be an invalid, that they are playing the system and an argument ensues, and the police are involved, and the barrel organ licence gets taken away from the invalid, and that happens in the novel as well. And then he loses his wife, loses his family, loses his source of income, and by the end of the novel, is left railing at God and at Providence. And from the beginning of the novel where he's quite happy to fit him with the

with the existing order to the end of the novel where he's saying, I want to go to hell. But a typical road, we have this sort of scene that seems to be taking place in the afterlife, but the last that we hear about, the war invalid, is he wasn't sure whether he was in heaven or hell. But the rebellion itself is the point of the novel, this realization that actually maybe it wasn't enough to do your duty

or it wasn't, the government doesn't actually know what it's doing. You know, maybe the war was senseless. So, John, he has this experience. experience of Vienna of declined disappointment, decides fairly quickly to move to Berlin. What is it about Berlin that attracts him? Well, I think he moves to Berlin in 1920. So, as you say, fairly quickly. He's hugely productive in Vienna. But he moves to Berlin, I think primarily as a sort of economic migrant. He goes there because he thinks there'll be better opportunities for him and a better chance that he will establish himself as a writer there.

And Berlin in this period is becoming something of a mecca or a cultural magnet, I think, for people from all around German-speaking Europe and beyond. It's growing very quickly. I think by the end of the 20s, there's more than 4 million people living in Berlin, which means it was bigger then that it is today. It has an incredibly productive and thriving newspaper and publishing industry, even more so than was the case in Vienna. dozens of daily newspapers in multiple editions, as Deborah said, as well as weekly magazines.

So there are plenty of opportunities for Ford in a place like Berlin. Of course, there's also the arts scene there, theatre, music, cabaret, the emerging film industry in Weimar, Germany as well. So there's a lot happening in Berlin. But it's also a place of extremes as well, political, cultural, social, and he's very sensitive to those extremes as well. And he gets good work. He starts working for the fact. Frankfurter Zeitung, the forerunner of the Frankfurter-Algemanner Zeitung, which is as good as it gets at that time.

Yeah, I mean, it was the Frankfurtter Zeitung, where he eventually becomes one of their key names, publishing regularly in the Foytons section. It was one of the prestige titles in the Weimar Republic, headquartered in Frankfurt and mine, but he was the sort of Berlin cultural correspondent for a time, and he was correspondingly well paid. He was a prominent figure by the middle of the 1920.

So Berlin gives him the chance to establish himself first as a journalist and then building on that as an author of fiction from 1923. Thank you, John. So Helen Chambers, he's doing rather well in Berlin, but he's moving around a lot. Seems to be a bit of a restless soul. His writing is also quite unpredictable. It goes off in different directions.

Is that right? Up to a point, I mean, he was just to perhaps go on from what John was saying, he was at one time the best paid journalist on the Frankfurter Tsaitung and he wrote his articles exactly the same size as the column inches on the paper and he earned a mark a line. So he was earning a lot of money but he said that Berlin was like waiting room in a big station and he was... What did he mean by that?

Well, he meant he was waiting. He didn't like Berlin very much and thought, well, I mean it got worse and worse of course with the Nazi violence and with what was going on in the courts, which he saw very early on. But he said it was like this waiting room. It was a kind of no man's land.

And I think he said, I'm trading in books and newspapers to get the money to get my ticket out of here. And you're quite right. I mean, he travelled a lot. He wanted to be the Paris correspondent for the Frankfurters Saitung, but they gave it to another guy

for reasons that we won't go into and wrote it a thing or two to say about that, but to kind of compensate say it for that. They sent him to Russia to report on Soviet Russia, on the new Russia for four months in 1926.

So he did travel a lot, but he also did other trips for the Frankfurt's sighting, and that was the kind of thing they published in the press. You know, I've travelled to Galicia or to the Roegoviet or wherever it happened to be. Step inside

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by the Signal Awards Judging Academy, an invitation-only body of podcast professionals from acclaimed organizations which include the BBC. Grow your audience, celebrate your team, and stand out. The final entry deadline to submit is the 26th of June. Enter your podcast at signalaward.com for consideration. Deborah, he is in literary terms a master of the poignant. Would you agree? Yes, although it's very difficult to pin down how he does it. It's quite often been said that he writes simply, but that's deceptively simple somehow. I mean, we've said that he, you know, he champions the underdog. He looks at the small details everyday life. So it's partly that, but he's not afraid to combine small details with very big ideas. So he's looking for the universal.

looking for, he can be quite not exactly kitschy, but he can be quite sentimental. I'm thinking of a passage in rebellion that we've just been talking about where the main character, Andreas Pum, has to sell his donkey. And it's a very, very sad scene. And the donkey is described as having

grey fur and a human soul. And that, you know, poignant, sentimental, a bit of both. But in the context of the novel as a whole, it really works. It works for me anyway. So it's a, it's often he's very good at children on childlike figures. And he's also, I think, what makes it pointing to me is that he manages to make these figures convincing you're invested in them.

But they're not made into heroes in any way. And they don't become sort of unrealistically perceptive or they remain ordinary people. No, I would say there's an absence of clear heroes in Roth's work, which brings us on John to his major work, the one that he's best known for, Radetsky March, a fun farewell to life in the empire. What's he up to here? Yeah, well, Radetsky March, or the Redetsky March, as I think it's been translated into English, it's certainly his longest novel. It's the one which is most acclaimed and for which he's probably best remembered. It's the one which established him as the great chronicler of the end of empire. It's actually quite different to many of his

previous novels, certainly the ones he published in the 1920s, many of which, with a partial exception of rebellion, actually, have quite fragmentary, quite open endings. A good example would be Flight Without End from 1927, which includes with the protagonist feeling completely lost alive, but not knowing what to do with his life, and we don't know what happens next. The Redetsky Marsh, by contrast, has a real sense of finality in its conclusion. It concludes with the deaths of its main characters, but also with the end of the empire that has shaped them. And the two are sort of intertwined in the novel.

So as you say, it's the moments in his career that he really firmly looks back and tries to take stock of what happened at the end of empire and why it mattered to him. So it's a generational novel in which the story of a single family somehow stands as a metaphor for the decline of the empire

as a whole under the leadership of the 80s, King Kaiser Franz Josef, who actually appears several times as a character in the novel. The story is focused on three male members of the Fontrotter family. It begins with a grandfather figure who, as a young man, saves the life of the emperor at the Battle of Solferino, which took place in 1859, which makes him a sort of hero of the empire, but also elevates the family into the aristocracy. we meet his son, who is a sort of patrician, bureaucrat, very, very conservative and controlling. And finally, his son, Carl Jorzef, who is the last in the line, if you like.

And Carl Jouzzef is characterized as somehow sort of paralyzed by life. It doesn't really know what to do with himself or it seems incapable often of making decisions for himself. He, in particular, he's intimidated by the idea of living up to the memory of that heroic grandfather. He grows up looking at the portrait of this grandfather, so literally having to try and live up to the image of the grandfather and failing to do that mainly. He becomes a career soldier but seems wholly unsuitable for that role, unsuited for that role.

And he seems also incapable of making any lasting relationships in his life. So there was some quite negative or almost morbid themes that run through the novel, and it also plays with the musical motif of the title, which is, of course, a reference to, Johann Strauss Sr's famous victory march. But in the novel, it functions almost an ironic accompaniment to the terminal decline of the empire. So Helen Chambers,

what do you ascribe the success of the novel? And do you see in it the work of a genius? Yes, I do. And I mean, I think it's got great humanity. It's also very funny, despite what John has said. I mean, it's morbid, but there is this conflict between officialdom and the army which trains people to obey and then these characters. And you usually, and this is part of Roots Magic really,

you usually see the characters from their own perspective. So you know what they're thinking. And young Carol Joseph, the third one along, he's a 16-year-old who's seduced by the local sergeant's wife, the beautiful Frous Lama and Cheyenne buttons his uniform and he's sitting there thinking don't think there's anything at the cadet school

that told me what to do in this situation so there are things like that happen and the emperor is indeed in it and he's well he kind of misses the battles in a way because he's an old soldier so he thinks I'll have some manoeuvres out in the eastern borderlands

and he draws them all up when he's sitting there in his horse and everybody's gaping because there's a drip on the end of his nose. So Roots showing you the frailty of this old man and that he doesn't know what's going on and he's a human being. And that's part of, I think, Roots' great art

that he shows you human beings, he takes you close to their noses, their nostrils, their ears, their eyes, the back of their mouth. I mean, there's a great concrete precision about these things. And would you say that it's a nostalgic novel? Well, I mean, wrote himself said I'm looking back, but not uncritically. So it's kind of nostalgic because he misses this multi-national land. Yes, you do get a sense.

I mean, Austria-Hungary towards its end was often described as the prison of nations. And you get a sense that he's trying to modify that view of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Well, he would like it not to have been thus, but he knew it was thus. And he does show the decadence of the frivolity and what the terrible officers get up to. I mean, fiddling with as Rome Burns has got nothing on Yosef Road. So, yeah. John, you wanted to come in. Yeah, just briefly, I mean, on what makes the novel great,

what I enjoy really about it, despite those negative themes, It's the evocation of a lost world, really. It's those incredibly detailed descriptions of formal occasions, of the sort of rituals of empire and the military. We get descriptions of uniforms, parades, duels, formal dinners, drunken parties, but also a sense of place as well. So Vienna, in its sort of imperial pomp. And also Brody as well, I mean, the second half of the novel

is essentially set in a Galician. border town that draws on all of those memories of Hote's childhood. Helen, what's extraordinary is his ability to write clear, clean copy. And I mean, for his novels as well, he's not a writer who is endlessly revising his work. No, that's fairly remarkable, although there may be things that were lost. I should perhaps say about his writing practices that when he was writing Redetsky Marsh and he was drinking quite a lot. He left chapter 4 in a taxi

and he never got it back. So he had to write it again and it's an extremely good chapter. I mean, all of the chapters are good but that is also remarkable in its way in terms of his working practice. But he kind of held court, you know, people gathered round him

and they would not want to interrupt him and he was saying, on you go, on you go. And then sometimes he would, we'd just join the conversation, but he'd be writing the rest of the time. Yeah, yeah. Deborah, I'm going to move us on from Rudetsky March onto a very important subject. What about women in Roth's novels and also in his life?

Because we haven't mentioned it, but fairly early on he married in Vienna. And that was a very, very important part of his narrative. Yes, although it's surprisingly often not commented on, or commented on far too much in the wrong way. I mean, it's a difficult topic. I mean, Helen has already referred to Frau Slamer. In the novels, women are never major characters. There are no main female characters in Roald.

But they quite often play quite a decisive role. The power dynamics are always uneven. There are no balanced gender relations in Roch. There are no colleagues or comrades of different sexes. Either the women are much more powerful than the men somehow, or they are a long way below them. And they're either protecting the men or they need protecting. There's nothing, there's no balance in between.

And it's an obvious temptation to equate these literary figures with the women in Roth's life, if I can lump them together like that. So his wife, Friedel, whom he married in 1922, was an acquaintance from a coffee house in Vienna, very typically for Roort. We haven't talked about bars or coffee houses yet. But that's where he seemed to spend most of his life. of his life and where he did a lot of his writing as well, of course,

and he learnt Friegel from one cafe table to the next. She was the daughter of a shopkeeper in Vienna's Jewish district, very pretty, as we can see from the photos. And they married, when they were both still very young, she was six years younger than him. And he does not prevent the marriage, doesn't let the marriage prevent him from living the life that he wishes to lead as a travelling journalist.

The two of them basically live out of a suitcase. as far as it. Yes and no. It quite often is said of Roort that he never had a flat, that he never had a home, that he never settled. I think that he twice shared a flat with, once with Friedel and once with a later partner, Andrea Mangabelle in Berlin. So he did, there were attempts at domesticity, but they never lasted for long and they were always very strained. And what happens to Friedel in the end? Because I think this is quite important. It's an extremely sad story and it must have been very, very stressful and tragic for Roel

himself, Friedel becomes increasingly, at first he thinks, increasingly unable to cope with the life travelling around, with moving so often with living out of a suitcase. And then it becomes clear that she is mentally unstable and she is taking into psychiatric care, I think already from 1925, 26 onwards. I think she's not in care at that point, but at the end of the 20s, yes. And repeatedly ill and then is taken into full-time psychiatric care or is living at home but with a full-time nurse is not really verbalising anymore, is not really eating. And she then remains in care until the end of her life, although care becomes a misnomer as under the Nazis in 1940, she is then murdered as a long-term

psychiatric patient at one of the, in Hartheim in Upper Austria and one of the parts of the Nazi's so-called T-4 program to kill psychiatry. psychiatric patients and the mentally unfit. And Rortes refers to Friedel and her illness in some of his work. In some of his, I'm not sure about the work certainly repeatedly in the letters. I'm not sure to what extent she... Well, let me take it on to John Hughes in that case and talk about Job, the story of a simple man, which is what I think where he maybe does reference Friedel.

Can you tell us about this novel? Because, as I understand it, Marlina Dietrich, thought it was fabulous. She did. I mean, it was actually the novel that preceded Redetsky March as it happens and could be said to have been this artistic turning point for him, the one that allowed him to, getting the confidence, I think, to write the Radetsky March. So it was published in 1930. Before Redetsky March.

Although we've already discussed perhaps the most famous novel. But Job is perhaps a close second. looking at his reputation around the world. It's a very widely read, translated, much-loved novel. It gives it its full title. It's Job, the story or the novel of a simple man. And in a way, it reprises some of the things that made Rebellion a great novel. It has a sort of simplicity about it, a sort of fable-like structure. It plays loosely with the story of the book of Job. But unlike Rebellion, it's firmly set in the past. It's all, it's a sort of, it's a It's the first novel in which he sets the story firmly in the pre-war world in the central Europe in which he'd grown up.

And it's also unusually amongst Roth's works. It's firmly set in a Jewish milieu, which is not something he did that often. So the main character, Mendel Singer, the simple man of the title, is an embodiment of the Hasidic Eastern Jews, the Ostyuddin. and he's presented as a pious man, as a village teacher who lives just on the other side of the border with the Russian Empire, so just outside of the geographical limit of Galicia. And in the course of the story, he suffers misfortune after misfortune, both him personally and his family, starting with the birth of a son with disabilities.

Menlohim, he then becomes alienated from his older sons, and then loses them during the war. his wife, Deborah, dies and his oldest daughter, Miriam, becomes mentally ill. And the description of Miriam's sort of mental collapse and institutionalisation, writing in 1930, shortly after the same thing had happened to Friedel, is indeed, you know, very, it's a tough read. It's based on personal experience in the novel. So the novel ends with, I should say,

that the other thing that haunts the character is the fact that he's abandoned the disabled son, the family moved to America, all of which results in him, essentially turning his back on his Jewish identity, his faith. He rages at the God in whom he's always believed at the end of the novel. But unusually, for Root, and different to rebellion, he gives us a twist, a happy ending, a rather sentimental turn of events at the end. So the abandoned son, Menuchim, turns out, has miraculously recovered from his disabilities, has grown up to become a successful composer and musician and he's on tour in America.

And so the novel ends up with the two men being reunited and gives us this happy ending. Rort, I think had some doubts about that sentiment. I was going to say, it's so unwroteing of that. It is very, very. And he didn't quite disown the novel, but he was a bit reluctant to sort of praise it. But he was happy that it was a success because the ending was a winner for readers. And as you mentioned, Marlene Dietrich in an interview in 1931, I think, with an American film magazine.

was asked for her favourite novel and she named Job, which had just appeared in English translation. And Roet was so delighted he wrote to her to thank her. And so that's a nice little story. Helen Chambers, we've heard how he had a rather stellar career in the 1920s, certainly in the first half. But with the 1930s onwards after the illness of his wife, his health starts to decline. He has an unreliable stream of income. no fixed abode really, yet he remains very prolific. How does he sustain all this? Well, should we say that he left Germany in 1933 and went into exile? For obvious reasons.

Because his books were being burnt. But, I mean, how did he live? Well, he borrowed money. He bought, in 1927, Stefan Zweig, who was a great bestseller, made her literary figure, pots of money, wrote to Joseph wrote and said, I've just read, You're wandering Jews, it's wonderful.

Those are his essays about the Eastern Jews, the Austerodian. And Root got back to him and sort of sponged off him for the rest of his life, although Sveig didn't manage to pay for all that Roat needed, although he did put him up quite often in south of France, or sometimes they were in Austria, I think, sometimes they were in Ostend. But Roet, he needed the money,

He got big advances, but he often didn't deliver in time. He commanded a lot of money, but he spent a lot of money, and he didn't just spend it on himself. He was always giving money away, giving it away to people who were worse off than him, exiles, emigraise refugees. And he also, when he had money, he would live in smart hotels. He liked the smart hotels. He liked the Hotel Bristol in Vienna. He liked the Hotel Foyot where he ended up. I didn't end up in Paris because, and this is part of Roet's fate,

that his whirls were destroyed one after the other. And this included the Hotel Foyot, where he had a room, which is just opposite the Jardin de Luxembourg, a fine hotel. Anyway, it turned out that it was not fit for purpose, and it was demolished. So where he'd been living for years was demolished. Before his very eyes, he sat in the cafe across the road. but he worked

I don't know if I've answered I mean he drank all day and he needed to drink in order to work and he did work at cafe tables and he needed people around him to work he couldn't work without the people around him

yes so I mean he was drinking very heavily and nonetheless writing at the same time I don't know about all of you but the experience of trying to write when you've had a drink is really I mean for me it just doesn't and work, but he appeared to be inspired by it. Deborah, by the late 30s, he was drinking

himself to death. What were the ghosts he was struggling with? Well, I mean, he was, as we said, a highly functional alcoholic, but very definitely, you know, so terminal alcoholic. And that had been clear for a long time. I mean, it's, I sometimes wonder whether it stemmed from the war years, from the First World War because, I mean, as we know, on both sides of the front, you know, soldiers were being plied with alcohol to make the war possible at all. I mean, that might well be part of the roots of his heavy drinking. Then later on, I think it's partly because of the lifestyle. He's having to keep deadlines. He's up late at night. He's living in hotels and bars. Drink is readily available. It's also part of the sort of journalistic camaraderie, inviting people for drinks. And then comes Friedel and the marriage. and the problems and the feelings of guilt and having to earn also to support Friedel and her care. And I think that, you know, sort of underlines or cements this sort of turning to alcohol to find relief for that.

And then comes National Socialism, which Roort had very early on seen coming with a clear-sightedness that's very interesting compared to others of his generation who were hoping that it wouldn't be as bad as all that. You know, it's kind of altogether, it's enough to make anyone turn to drink, perhaps. And towards the end, of course, the Nazis invade Austria.

So he loses Austria. Is there a sense of abandonment running through his work? I mean, perhaps starting with his father. I don't want to over. As a theme in the work, I think probably, yes. And certainly as a part in terms of his personal life and his view of the world. Yes. I mean, I think in the later years, he starts to think of the old empire in near utopian terms at times.

And it's a way, I think, of compensating for the world that was collapsing around him. The idea that there may once have been a place, a supranational place where national identities were somehow less important than some sort of collective identity. Because he does see nationalism as a fundamental evil. Nationalism is something he totally rejected, in all its forms. He rejected Zionism. as well, incidentally, he saw it as a form of nationalism. So no matter what the motivation was, he would rejects nationalism and sees it as pernicious.

So two final questions for you all. But Helen, let me start with you. How appropriate is it that his final work was the legend of the holy drinker? And what was that about? Was that basically him saying, this is me? Yes. And he did say,

as much. I mean, one's reluctant to look at biographical sort of reasons for text, but he said this. And I mean, it's the story of a tramp in Paris who was originally a coal miner in Silesian came to Paris for work, and that's quite typical in economic traveller, migrant, if you like. And the tramp ends up sleeping under the bridges in Paris. But one day, a well-dressed

gentleman, and some people say that might, have been modelled on Stefan Sveig, arrives and gives him 200 francs and says it's ingratitude at his finding conversion to the church. And the tramps takes it and says, thank you very much, I'll pay it back to you. And there are several attempts in the course of this short narrative. Well, he drinks the money, he loses the money,

people make him part with the money, and he always gets it back again. and he's always saying and how he's going to pay it back is to give it to the church in Batignoll where Saint-Terez is there and she was a very modest saint with a humble life, an unshoey sort of person

but in a Catholic church and at the very end oh I don't know that I want to spoil the end but at the very end Spoiler alone The drunkard who again well he's in a very bad

state physically. But he dies and he thinks that the little saint has taken the money and he's paid it back and it's all grace has descended upon him and he says, God give all of us

drinkers such a good and easy death and so in the story the man finds grace the drinker but of course Joseph wrote in his own life had a terrible death, did not have

what he wished for himself, but he collapsed face down on the table in the cafe. He had lots of friends who didn't have money but looked after him, took him to hospital. They didn't diagnose it properly. They withdrew alcohol completely, and he had terrible delirium. He had to be strapped to the bed

and indeed died the very opposite kind of death. from his own literary creation. Well, on that sad note, a quick-fire last round, literally in half a sentence each, how well do Roth's works stand the test of time? Deborah. Surprisingly well, it's about the human cost of war

and it's about individual dignity. John? Yeah, I would agree. There's something he says in one of his early foetton articles, going for a walk where he says it's only the minutiae in life that count. And it's the little details that he's captured and made permanent in his work that makes it still sort of sing today, I would say. Helen.

Well, it's the human condition in bright, beautiful colours in quite short works. And I think they're wonderful. My thanks to Deborah Holmes, Helen Chambers and John Hughes. Next week, the African Civilisation on the... edge of the Roman Empire. That's the Garamantes. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests. And now the podcast bit where we can relax slightly. So let me, the first thing I ask is, what did we miss out? Well, perhaps we could say a little bit more

about Roth's own Jewishness. I mean, he had a someone. what, perhaps it's no surprise, but he had slightly sort of contradictory sense of himself as a Jew. As Helen mentioned, he did write quite extensively about the Jewish community and the lives of the Eastern Jews in the 1920s, and the collection of essays, the Wandering Jews was published in 1927. But what's interesting about it, or one of the things that's interesting about it is that he never identifies himself as a Jew. He observes the community almost as an anthropologist might, without actually mentioning that he'd grown up

pretty much within that community in Galicia. As I mentioned in our main discussion, he rejected Zionism, for example. He was also quite critical of Jews who had assimilated and westernized themselves, even though he himself was very much a westernized, assimilated Jew. So it was quite contradictory.

What did he say? He said he was a sort of an Eastern Jew with a Catholic break. and there were two sides to his personality. And he did, did he not actually at one point, if not join the Catholic Church? He also said he was a Frenchman from the East. Yes, he had various ways of characterising himself. I mean, I might say something about his funeral.

Can I say something about that? So he was buried in the cemetery, Thier, which is in the south of Paris, because nobody had enough money to put him in Perlachés, where Heine was and he really should have belonged. But at the grave site, he was never baptized, but he went to the Catholic Church in Paris, the Austrian Catholic Church. So there was a Catholic priest officiating, and there were a lot of Eastern Jewish friends there at the graveside. And then there was Egon Ervin Kish, the great communist, who turned up with his red communist banner and his red carnations. And then there was also a Talmudic scholar Gottfartstein

who wrote spent a lot of time with in Paris and he was prepared to pronounce the caddish and some people wanted the caddish. Oh and I've missed out the Austrian legitimate monarchist because Otto von Habsberg had sent a wreath which would have had the yellow and black ribbons on it because Roet wanted to restore the monarchy and he actually had fairly concrete plans to do that

before things got really bad. So there were monarchist, communist, Eastern Jews and Catholics at the graveside and they were kind of, I mean, it nearly came to ugly scenes. And then the chap that was going to say, Kanish, was with his friend Soma Morganstern, also on Eastern Jew. And they said, no, we won't do this here now.

We'll just let it be. How dedicated was he to the Habsburg calls? He was very dedicated to the Habsburg cause, and he met Otto von Habsburg, who was the heir to the throne that had kind of gone. He met him in his court in exile in Belgium and he got together with these Austrian legitimists and they had a plan to smuggle Otto von Habsburg

back into Vienna in a coffin and they had to find a dead Austrian in order to do that. And Roetz thought, well, in any case, I'm going to Vienna to talk to, well, he wanted to talk to Shushnik, who was head of the government at the time, and explain... The Austrian fascist dictator of Austro-Fascism.

So this was... It was after the death of... Shushnik was the chance before 30. It was just before the Anshluz. Yeah, Shushnik is in charge. Shushnick's in charge. But was there already a gal lighter there? No, no.

But that was just after. That comes after. So he went in just before the Anshluss and wanted to talk to Shus. to Shushnik and say, we'll get Otto von Hapsburg back and this is how we're going to do it and he had the blessing of the Habsburg monarchists and he went to Vienna which was very dangerous thing

for him to do and he never got to see the highest instance. He did get to see a chief of police I think and the chief of police said you better get out of fear fast and he did get out of fear fast but he was very hands on I mean, he wanted to, and he thought the reason he wanted to do this was he could see this as the only solution to getting rid of the Nazis. Sounds like a pretty hairbrained scheme, though.

Hairbrained is indeed the word for it. Not entirely realistic. One of the things that really interests me is the parallels between Stefan Zweig and Josef Roth. So they sort of run alongside each other. They're very aware of each other. You said Swaig gave Rod quite a lot of money. But who is the better writer? Well, Joseph Roet is definitely the better writer.

I think there's no – well, I don't know you might want to dispute with me. Stefan Sveik also agreed that Roed was the better writer. He always was quite willing to admit. I think the differences are very interesting. I think it's a very fruitful comparison for the literature of the time. All of the things that Svig does, that Hort doesn't, as we said, is that Svig, Zweig has heroes. Zweig has goodies and baddies and Zweig has heroes and he hero worships. And that's not something that Hort does at all.

Rort is much, much more. He's ironic in a way that Stefan Zweig seemingly he can't or doesn't want to achieve. And that, of course, made Svich a best-selling author in a way which, well, Rort did sell books, but he never earned the big books. Elrude's timing was unfortunate, though, wasn't it? I mean, in a typically kind of Rorty. fashion. It's to do with chance and contingency and Radetsky Marsh could have been

an immense success but it came out just before the National Socialists took over. In fact, it was published in 32 so just at the point the royalties were coming in in early 1933 Hitler's already taken over Rothen, Paris in exile

and he never really seized the money that he was due. And he was one of the one of those few people. I think his his first novel, Spinnanets. The Spiders Webb. The Spiders Webb actually engages with Hitler himself,

even though this is in 1923, 1924. 23. Extraordinary prescience. Yes, it came out just before the Hitler pooch and it's a novel about... The Beer Hall Pooch. The Beer Hall Pooch, that's right,

when Hitler was put in prison and it actually finished publishing the last part of it in the newspaper days before that happened and in Roots novel there's a terrorist attempt planned so that he saw very clearly what was going on from a very early time. I think it's the novel with the first explicit reference to Hitler.

There isn't another work of literary fiction from that, an earlier work of literary fiction that names Hitler. Deborah, tell us a bit about the coffee house culture that we skipped over because he did spend a lot of time. Which, to be fair, I mean, he did but many, many other newspaper men and women of the time did. You know, it was a lot. They still do in my. Yes, yes, let's put that in a different tense.

Yeah, but it was very much, it's partly to do with the problems of the time. It was difficult to heat your house at home, you know, in the immediate post-war period. It was a place to go where you could be sure of being warm enough to, you know, to sort of move a pen on paper. And it was also where you could meet and mix and keep up to date and have all of the daily newspapers at your disposal. Because, you know, a Viennese coffee house also today typically has a, you know, a fine array of newspapers, international, national newspapers. And I think it's worth pointing out that in 1918, Vienna was in a terrible state. Yeah. Vienna was literally starving.

There was a survey done by a children's doctor at the time that over 90% of Viennese children were suffering malnutrition after World War I. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the same applies to Berlin, of course, where he continues the same habits. The coffee houses and the bars were also places to network.

So there were good career reasons for spending time, you know, a place like the Romanishes Café in Berlin where he was a habitual customer. It was the place to be seen. It was well known. that the prominent people there would be there. And so it wasn't just a place to work. It was a place to see and be seen.

And, yeah, Kish was often there. And a place where someone was going to pick you up off the floor if you fell like your stool in. Drunken, stupid. And you mentioned that Redetsky March was unique, but he did then write a sequel. He did. The Emperor's Tomb.

Yeah. Why did he do that? Well, I think he did it, you know, for commercial reasons. He wanted to build on the success of Redetsky March. But after 1933, he writes quite a lot of novels and novellas, but in difficult circumstances, not only is his lifestyle, you know, working against him, but he's working to tight deadlines. He's never quite sure, you know, where, you know, he's working with different publishing houses

all based in exile now, many of them in the Netherlands. And he's desperate, really, to just make ends meet. So the sequel, the Emperor's Tomb di Caputzenegroft, it follows a sort of a separate branch of the Fontata family and tries to bring the story up to the point of the Anschluss of Austria to Nazi Germany in 1938. And it's an interesting read, and anyone that's enjoyed Redetsky Marshall should probably read it.

But it isn't the same. It isn't of the same quality. It's not accomplished. It's written in the first person as well, isn't it? Which is not so common amongst his novels. He sort of rushed it as well in 1938. As events were happening in Austria, he thought, I'd better get this out quickly as well.

And I think it's looked too by students of German as a kind of set text because it's got all this history in. But actually he wrote a far better novel in 1937 called Wights and Measures in English, which picks up a lot of the characters from Radetski Marsh and indeed Mendel's singer from Heob pops up in it as well. Unless the name does. And it's a story about a move from west to east. And an inspector of weights and measures,

an honest man who's been forced to leave the army and get out of his uniform by his wife and he's lost when he gets out of his uniform. And he has a kind of slide into, well, maybe it's sin and maybe it's grace. It's a bit hard to tell. but it's a beautiful novel that picks up a lot of his other themes and evokes the landscape back in the east again

and we haven't mentioned the larks in the sky and the frogs in the swamps and the crickets chirping but he opens up this huge space that's full of life and full of animals and human beings responding to them but I would recommend weights and measures as a better composed novel than the emperor's tomb, which is historically perhaps more interesting. So, well, thank you very much.

I think not only are we going to be offered tea, but Martha baked me a lemon drizzle cake for my birthday. And so we also have exceptionally lemon drizzle cake. Simon, to go with... Tea coffee. I'll have a coffee, please. In our time with Misha Glennie is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production. If you've got a scrolling problem, then this is the podcast for you.

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