Inspiring Older Readers
The Radetzky March by Joseph Roth
Joseph Roth is virtually the stereotype of the impoverished, wandering mittel-European writer. As well as a wealth of first-hand eyewitness journalism and vast numbers of that curiously European form, satirical feuilletons, he also wrote fourteen novels, the most famous of which is his masterpiece, The Radetzky March, written in 1932. And yet he died in poverty in Paris aged just forty-four, a matter of months before the outbreak of the second world war. Constantly dogged by debt, deadlines and ill-health, Roth was also an alcoholic and looked after his desperately ill wife who suffered from schizophrenia. She was murdered shortly after Roth’s death during the Nazis’ Aktion T4 euthanasia killings.
Churned out against impossible deadlines in order to scratch a precarious living, one might imagine that Roth’s work would be scamped and hurried. While it is true that it often was produced in almost impossible circumstances, he is nonetheless one of the finest novelists and prose stylists of the first half of the twentieth century, developing a light, impressionistic style that enabled him to convey a lot with great economy. And for over thirty years he has been fortunate in having his work translated and championed by the German-born poet, Michael Hofmann, who has made Roth’s oeuvre – and reputation – his personal mission. So far he has translated around a dozen of Roth’s books; The Radetzky March is his and Roth’s crowning achievement.
Roth was born in Eastern Galicia in the furthest eastern reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was living in Germany when Hitler came to power in 1933. He wrote to his patron and friend Stefan Zweig: ‘You will have realised by now that we are drifting towards great catastrophes. Apart from the private – our literary and financial existence is destroyed – it all leads to a new war. I won’t bet a penny on our lives. They have succeeded in establishing a reign of barbarity. Do not fool yourself. Hell reigns.’
Of all Roth’s novels – which are typically short, often fable-like, nimbly written, the kind of fiction one might imagine a man on the run writing during snatched periods of peace and quiet – The Radetzky March is distinguished by being the longest and the most detailed. It tells the story of three generations of the Trotta family, ennobled by the Emperor Franz Josef in 1859 following the Battle of Solferino when grandfather Trotta, then a young infantryman, intervened (clumsily and perhaps not even quite intentionally) and prevented the Emperor being shot on the battlefield.
Elevated to the aristocracy, every subsequent Trotta generation lives in the shadow of the man known as ‘the hero of Solferino’, the family’s fortunes inextricably linked with those of the Emperor and in some respects mirroring the decline and decay of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its catastrophic implosion following the assassination of the Emperor’s heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, by a Bosnian Serb nationalist in Sarajevo on the 28th June 1914. The outbreak of the Great War would sweep aside not just the old Austro-Hungarian Empire but every vestige of what Michael Hofmann has called its tolerant, cosmopolitan, doomed Central European culture.
The Austro-Hungarian Empire was a profoundly conservative society, rigidly stratified and ossified, in which elite membership of either the military, the aristocracy or the state bureaucracy – or indeed all three – meant everything. And yet Roth, despite his early left-wing views, regarded the Imperial and Royal empire – often referred to as K-und-K: kaiserlich and königlich – with the exasperated affection of hindsight, treasuring it on the one hand for its cosmopolitanism and tolerance, on the other lashing its imperial absurdities. For all its profound faults it was better than the hatred and slaughter ushered in by its collapse.
If this makes The Radetzky March sound a Tolstoyan novel, then there is some truth in this. It does seem crammed with the raw stuff of history. But Roth’s methods are not Tolstoy’s. For despite the scale of its historical canvas, Roth’s prose is closer to Chekhov’s – a wealth of lightly sketched impressionistic detail and subtle allusion in prose of luminous sensuality. A great amount is conveyed with the utmost economy of means and it is a prose that requires careful attention, because what seems a slight, glancing reference easily missed often turns out to be crucial in informing character or attitude or actions.
It is a bleak but beautiful book whose real subjects, I think, are dissolution and mortality – not just personal, individual mortality, but the mortality of social systems, cultures and traditions.
At one point, Roth paints a marvellous picture of Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian officers, resplendent in their imperial uniforms as they toast each other in a muddy backwater garrison town on the very border with Russia:
‘And none of the Tsar’s officers, and none of the officers of his Apostolic Majesty knew then that over the glass bumpers from which they drank Death had already crossed his bony, invisible hands.’ Elsewhere he says: ‘white wintry peace reigned in the little garrison town… At the time none of them was able to hear the machinery of the great hidden mills that were already beginning to grind out the Great War’.
And yet, even in its bleakest moments, The Radetzky March is also a gentle book. As rumours are received of the Archduke’s murder, the present son of the Trotta dynasty, Carl Joseph, is helping celebrate the centenary of the infantry regiment he has transferred to. This is beautifully done, capturing not just the joyousness and beauty of the occasion, but also its complacent regimental ignorance, the impending tragedy and the emerging nationalist divisions which will fuel slaughter on an unprecedented scale. It is one of the book’s great set pieces, but throughout there are a succession of equally fine miniatures, each having the clarity and intensity – as the translator notes – of oil paintings.
A book to be read slowly and savoured: it repays the effort generously.
Alun Severn
June 2020