From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TASTE COMMENTARY
What He Saw, and What He Wrote
Americans will soon be able to read more of Joseph Roth.
For American readers, Joseph Roth has long been an island on the map of 20th-century literature, known, if at all, for a single novel, "The Radetzky March." But recent translations and editions of Roth's work have revealed him to be, in fact, a continent. His genius for metaphor, his compassionate irony, and his historical and psychological insight are evident in nearly all his books; now English-speakers can appreciate the breadth of his interests and range of his observation--and see him for the major writer he is.
Roth's life made him uniquely suited to portray the whole of modern Europe. Born in 1894 to a Jewish family in Austrian Poland, Joseph Roth (pronounced "Rote") served in World War I and began writing for Vienna newspapers after the war. He quickly became one of the most esteemed journalists of his time, with datelines from nearly every major European city. When Hitler came to power in 1933, he cut whatever ties he had to Germany and remained in Paris, continuing to write for émigré newspapers. But he suffered increasingly from alcoholism and despair, and died in 1939 at the age of 44. Given what might have befallen Roth had he lived a year longer, when Hitler's army marched into France, it's hard to feel that he died too soon.
"The Radetzky March," published in 1932, is rightfully considered Roth's masterpiece. By telling the story of three generations of the Trotta family--a story of generational decline, like a tragicomic echo of Thomas Mann's "Buddenbrooks"--Roth lovingly evokes the vanished world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which dissolved into a host of nation-states after 1918. Indeed, the last Trotta (and the novel's main character) is claimed by the early fighting of World War I. But long before we hear any rumor of war--in a brilliant scene toward the end of the novel, news of the archduke's assassination disrupts an elegant dinner party--we have seen the morale of the polyglot empire crumble: "People no longer believe in God," an aristocratic character laments. "The new religion is nationalism."
As this passage suggests, it would be a mistake to see the novel simply as an exercise in nostalgia. Writing about the tolerant if often hidebound empire, Roth always has in mind the nightmare that succeeded it, the 20th-century Europe of world war, ethnic hatred and barbaric mass culture. He is like a storyteller aboard Noah's Ark, reminiscing about a drowned world even as the floods are rising.
The four Roth books just published--one for the first time in English--give us a much clearer sense of the chaos and dread that fueled his writing. "Flight Without End" (1927) tells the story of Franz Tunda, a sort of nihilistic Candide whose adventures take him from a POW camp in Siberia to a Red Army brigade, a post in the Bolshevik government, the complacent cities of postwar Germany and finally to decadent Paris. The book ends in a nightmare vision at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, under the Arc de Triomphe: "Tunda sometimes felt as if he himself lay there in the ground, as if we all lay there, all those of us who set out from home and were killed and buried, or who came back but never again came home--for it is a matter of indifference whether we are buried or alive and well. We are strangers in this world, we come from the realm of the dead."
As this passage suggests, "Flight Without End" is the rare work in which Roth's black view of history outstrips his usual, compensating black humor. "Job: The Story of a Simple Man" (1930) takes a very different approach, turning misery into fable. As the title suggests, Mendel Singer, a teacher in a Jewish shtetl, is a good man doomed to suffer. The first part of the short novel lovingly re-creates the world of pre-World War I Eastern European Jewry, the world of Roth's childhood. Poverty, piety and fear govern Singer's life; but with typical Rothian irony, things don't fall apart until Singer goes to America, where the streets are supposed to be paved with gold. Singer quickly loses his children, his wife and his faith in an inversion of the American Dream. After so much suffering, Singer's final, Job-like redemption seems defiantly artificial, as though Roth were daring us to believe that good can exist in a world of evil.
"Confession of a Murderer," published in 1936, masters still another genre. Its mad hero, Golubchik, deserves to stand alongside the brilliantly unreliable narrators of Gogol, Dostoevsky and Nabokov. The illegitimate son of a wealthy prince--or so he believes--Golubchik becomes obsessed with the idea that the prince's adopted heir is trying to cheat him out of his rightful identity. Through a series of bizarre events--orchestrated, he strongly suggests, by the Devil himself, in the guise of a Hungarian businessman--Golubchik becomes a spy for the czarist secret police and uses his position to take revenge on his hated rival. In the end, nothing about Golubchik's story is clear, not even whether he really is the "murderer" of the title. But this paranoid uncertainty is the perfect fictional expression of the real-life nightmare then unfolding in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany.
A homeless soldier, a ruined emigrant, a deranged spy--these are the dramatis personae of Roth's fiction. They are also exactly the kind of subject that attracted Roth the journalist. "What I Saw: Reports From Berlin 1920-1933"--translated by Michael Hofmann, who is largely responsible for the recent Roth revival--is the first English collection of his newspaper writing. Here we see Roth seeking out the darkest corners of a troubled city: homeless shelters, dive bars, police stations. Even his trip to a new movie palace fills him with dread.
Roth's gift as a journalist, which makes these pieces worth reading now, is his ability to make local details capture the spirit of the age, with all its nervous foreboding. Any number of reporters could have filed reports on election campaigns and parliamentary debates, as Roth did. But it took a novelist's eye to see the whole fate of the Weimar Republic in a city bus: "I will be so bold as to offer this theory: that a bus full of rancorous, quarrelsome, and aggressive passengers is bound sooner or later to have a collision."
Germany's collision was not long in coming. "What I Saw" concludes with "The Auto-da-Fe of the Mind," Roth's despairing response to the Nazis' burning of books by Jewish writers. He demands that the world recognize what is happening in the Germany he knew and wrote about so well: "The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination." All through his brief life, Roth used the humane qualities of his writing--insight, compassion and humor--to hold back that flood. At last it broke, and took Joseph Roth with it. But it could not destroy his books, which resurface in our own time as powerful and moving as ever.
Mr. Kirsch is the author of a book of poems, "The Thousand Wells."
