I took far too long to finish this book. Which is a reflection on me, rather than the book. It's not that the German is difficult (rather, it's flowing, highly readable, and very powerful); it's not that it's uninteresting (rather, it's exquisitely atmospheric and tragi-comic, and its set-pieces are monumental). It's just that I started it while we were travelling, and it is dense, rich in description, and full of ideas and irony, so it's the sort of thing that needs a solid chunk of time to enjoy and think about. It's not the kind of book you can pick up for five minutes, and then put down again.

It's by Joseph Roth (1894-1939); it was published in 1932; and it has been recommended in no fewer than five widely disparate categories on the Five Books website (European Classics, Jewish Vienna, Veterans, The Death of Empires, and Love, War, and Longing).

The story follows three generations of the Trotta family (well, four, if you count the Slovenian peasant great-grandfather, from Sipolje -- which, it turns out, is not at all far from Trieste -- but he takes up just a few pages).

They're all subjects of the Austro-Hungarian empire, ruled by Franz Joseph I from 1848 (he came to the throne at the age of 18) until his death in 1916.

It was Franz Joseph's wife, Elisabeth, who was assassinated in Geneva in 1898; his brother, Maximilian, who was executed in Mexico in 1867; and his nephew and heir, Franz Ferdinand, who was assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914.


Elisabeth's statue in Trieste


Maximilian's statue in Trieste

The Trotta family has been connected with the emperor since Grandfather Trotta saved the imperial life at the Battle of Solferino in 1859 (and was promoted, ennobled, and decorated for his pains, emerging as Captain Joseph Trotta von Sipolje, with the name of his village of origin now transformed into his title of nobility).

Emperor Franz Joseph makes regular appearances, mostly in the shape of his ubiquitous portrait (sometimes inappropriately positioned, or badly cared for), but sometimes as an object of veneration and/or petition for the various generations of Trottas.

Also appearing recurrently, thereby explaining the title, is Johann Strauss Sr's Radetzky March (you know the one: Diddle-om, diddle-om, diddle-om-pom-pom; diddle-om, diddle-om, diddle-OM-pom-pom...), which was dedicated to Field Marshal Joseph Radetzky von Radetz.

The book progresses relentlessly from Joseph Trotta's accidental triumph, through unstoppable decline, to the final, inevitable crash; the empire and the Trotta family march along in parallel towards a tragic shared denouement.

Captain Joseph is the one we hear least about. Never entirely comfortable with his enhanced position, he now feels distanced from his father, and "detached from the long procession of his peasant Slavic ancestors". But he marries rank-appropriately, and has a son.


Ljubljana, 2023

As noted, the book is punctuated by encounters between the Trottas and the emperor. Grandfather Captain Joseph Trotta, for example, personally requests the removal of the exaggerated version of his royal rescue mission that he was shocked to find in his child's history book. "It's a lie," he protests. "There are lots of lies," replies the emperor laconically. Our hero decides he'll leave the army if this is the way things stand. He moves to his father-in-law's estate in Bohemia, and directs his son toward the civil service, explicitly stopping him from pursuing an army career. But -- lo and behold -- the story disappears from the history book. Captain Joseph is now "the unknown bearer of a transient fame".

We don't initially feel much warmth for Franz, Captain Joseph's son, who duly becomes a district commissioner in the civil service. He's a cold fish, and he rules Carl Joseph, his son, by polite but unnegotiable decree. But as the story progresses, and the certainties of his world loosen and fall away, we see him soften. He is devastated by the death of Jacques, the man who had loyally served both him and his father before him. He loyally helps a friend of his youth, the painter Moser, who has gone to seed (it is Moser who painted the portrait of Captain Joseph that so haunts his grandson). He forges a friendship with a doctor, and even -- for the first time in his life, perhaps -- brings himself to confide in him. And he finally starts to understand his son, at least to some degree, and comes through for him at the end when he's in a deep scrape.

Carl Joseph, the representative of the third generation since ennoblement, is the one who fills most of the pages. He is one of those ill-starred people who are dogged by tragedy, compound it with their own poor judgement, and eventually spiral down into a sump of incapacity. Frau von Taussig, his much older lover, says to him at one point: "Please don't ever gamble. You don't look like someone who is lucky at gambling."

He has been directed by his father towards a career in the army, but he never seems comfortable in this role. He's an insecure sort of man, lacking in confidence (and over-awed, we suspect, by his illustrious grandfather and his cold, distant father).

After the death of the first woman he loved (the wife of one of his father's underlings, unfortunately), and the calamity of a friend's duel, which he feels himself partly responsible for, he requests a transfer, and is sent to a regiment stationed just a few miles from the Russian border: "This country was the kindred homeland of the Ukrainian peasants, their wistful accordions, and their unforgettable songs; it was Slovenia's northern sister."



Roth was born in Brody in Galicia (not that far from Krakovets, the scene of the Wasserstein family tragedies that I read about recently). I'm not quite sure of the location of Burdlaki (the nearest village to Carl Joseph's new base), but he travels more than 17 hours by rail to get there, and alights at the monarchy's easternmost railway station. It's a markedly marshy area, and the hub of all sorts of "commerce", licit and otherwise: "Any strangers who came to this area were bound bit by bit to be lost. None was as strong as the swamp. None could withstand the border. At that time, the high-ranking gentlemen in Vienna and St Petersburg were already beginning to prepare for the Great War. The people at the border felt it coming earlier than others, not only because they were used to predicting things, but also because they could see every day with their own eyes the portents of doom. And they turned these preparations to profit."

Death stalks Carl Joseph even here. He is caught up in the violent suppression of an unprecented protest at the bristle factory (he gave the order to fire, people were killed, and even though he is himself knocked unconscious by a projectile, the case becomes the subject of an inquiry). But the magic name of Trotta gets him off the hook. When the emperor becomes aware of the Trotta file, he instructs that the matter be "settled favourably". (He later meets Carl Joseph face to face when he inspects the troops out on the eastern frontier.)

But the youngest Trotta is never in the clear. Army life on the border is fairly dissolute, and we've been watching him for a while increasingly succumbing to alcohol (a path Roth was very familiar with). He becomes entangled with a comrade, Captain Wagner (who is a reckless gambler, gets hopelessly into debt, and eventually commits suicide, leaving Carl Joseph to drum up the money for which he has stood guarantor). The young man is appalled that here is yet another corpse on his path: "He thought he recognized the insidious tricks of a dark power... and he gradually saw all the dark events of his life joined in a dark connection, dependent on some huge, hateful, invisible puller of strings, whose goal was to destroy the lieutenant. It was clear, it was plain as a pikestaff, as they say, that Lieutenant Trotta, the grandson of the hero of Solferino, was partly the cause of the downfall of others, was partly dragged along by those who were perishing, and overall belonged to that group of unfortunate beings on whom an evil power had cast an evil eye."

But again, there's an imperial intervention, after District Commissioner Franz bends heaven and earth to get himself an off-the-record audience with the aging emperor.

Carl Joseph finally leaves the army (with his father's blessing). But then war breaks out, and he immediately has to re-enlist... We're not surprised when, just a short time into the conflict, he is shot dead while trying to fetch water for his men. He dies not with a weapon in his hand, but with two buckets of water.

His father outlives him, but he's a shadow of his former self: "What did old Mr von Trotta care about the hundred thousand new dead who had since followed his son? What did he care about the hasty and confused orders issued week after week by his superiors? And what did the end of the world matter to him, which he now saw coming even more clearly that the prophetic [Polish Count Wojciech] Chojnicki once did? His son was dead. His job was over. His world had ended."

He dies in 1916, on the day the emperor is buried...


Sarajevo, 2023

*_*_*

Woven into this family saga is the story of the disintegration of the Habsburg empire. The drumbeat of decay starts quite early, and intensifies as the book closes in on the cataclysm of World War I.

The character who most clearly expresses his misgivings about the rising tide of nationalism and socialism is the multi-faceted Chojnicki, who owns an estate near to the barracks by the frontier: "On each return from Vienna and the other parts of the great world in which he made himself at home, he used to deliver a gloomy lecture, which ran something like this: 'This empire must perish. As soon as our emperor closes his eyes, we will fall into a hundred pieces. The Balkans will be more powerful than we are. All the nations will establish their dirty little states, and even the Jews will proclaim a king in Palestine. The democrats' sweat stinks in Vienna... The workers have red flags, and don't want to work any more... I tell you, gentlemen, if there's not any shooting soon, it will be over. And we will live to see it."

Later he complains: "This age doesn't want us any more! This age wants to create independent nation states. People no longer believe in God. Their new religion is nationalism." This rhetoric makes complete sense to the district commissioner, who is visiting his son in his remote encampment. He feels that Chojnicki's doom-laden words have pierced "the confusion that had been oppressing him for the last few weeks, especially since the death of old Jacques". He looks around him with a vague sense of fear: "He was seeing the end of the world, and it was his world... There were no bears or wolves at the frontier. There was only the end of the world."

The army is not united (the news of the Archduke's death in Sarajevo is greeted very differently by the ethnically diverse officers); and it is demoralized (Nechwal, the bandmaster's son, who visits District Commissioner Franz, expresses his dual conviction that his army would lose a war, and that the different constituent nations of the empire won't stay together for much longer: "Everyone knows it," he says. And everyone says it openly...). NOT saying it openly but definitely feeling it is the emperor himself, when he goes east to watch the manoeuvres: "For a few minutes he felt proud of his army, and for a few minutes he felt regret at its loss. For he saw it already smashed and scattered, divided among the many nations of his monarchy."





When war arrives, it is initially characterized in that region by brutality and kangaroo courts (it's the kind of mayhem that Wasserstein describes).

Aside from the acknowledged difficulties of holding together a disparate empire, there is also a more general sense that decadence has befallen the youth of the age. Demant, the doctor killed in the duel, says to Carl Joseph: "Our grandfathers did not bequeath us great strength -- little strength for life, just barely enough to die senselessly." Franz also regrets that his son's generation of officers is hewn from a softer wood than its forebears.

Standing out from the steadily building melancholia are some brilliant set-pieces. Worthy of mention are:

-- The duel
-- The death of old Jacques
-- Franz's visit to his son's frontier garrison, and the sumptuous "light meal" Chojnicki has prepared
-- The Corpus Christi procession in Vienna, which Carl Joseph watches: "All the majestic power of the old empire passed before his eyes... The emperor smiled in all directions. The smile sat on his old face like a little sun that he himself had manufactured"
-- The stand-off with the strikers from the bristle factory

But the piece de resistance, the absolute triumph, is the description of the regimental party towards the end, into which bursts not only a gargantuan thunderstorm but also a messenger bearing news of the shooting of the Archduke in Sarajevo. This commentator calls it "the greatest scene in this great novel", and continues: "Half of the guests dance in drunken, ignorant abandon; the other half work themselves into nationalistic frenzies. You can see the Empire splintering; you can admire/pity/condemn the ignorance of those who waltz along the abyss. It's all so obvious; it shouldn't work at all. But it does."

The party scene is also a good example of the flashes of humour that testify to Roth's ever-alert sense of the ridiculous, and periodically leaven what is at heart an elegy. The soldiers of the regiment, for example, are pressed into service as waiters and kitchen help; those likely to encounter the guests have to exhibit to their commander their white-gloved hands. Lanterns and garlands have been strung up in the trees, but because there are storms in the offing, a permanent guard is stationed in the wood to take the decorations down at the first whiff of a storm. It's a brilliant example of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic... When the terrible news of the assassination arrives, it seems inappopriate to the organizers that everyone is dancing to jolly music. So the bands are ordered to play the funeral march, but they're all pretty drunk by now, and the scene becomes filmically grotesque: "Gradually, the bands quickened their pace, and the legs of the sleepwalkers began to march... Faster and faster the bands belted out the funeral march. In between, the triangle tinkled, silvery, bright, and tipsy." The staff eventually start to clear away the instruments. But the players go through the motions of playing on: "When his percussion instruments were dragged away from the drummer, he was still waving his various sticks in the empty air."

A disconcerting flaw in an otherwise hugely impressive book is Roth's depiction of women. Which is weird, given his palpable talent for digging down into the minds of his characters, and expressing their deeply buried angst. But his women characters are two-dimensional, and horribly similar. Frau Slama, Frau Demant, Frau von Taussig: They're all seductresses, their power to entrap Carl Joseph all the more inappropriate because they should by rights be ineligible (being too old and/or too married). According to David Mikics, Roth was congenitally jealous, and wary of women. His treatment of his wife, Friedl, became increasingly oppressive, to the extent that she ended up having a mental breakdown, for which he (with some justification, it would seem) blamed himself.



*_*_*

A Jewish thread runs quietly under the bolder colours of the pattern. There's a distinctly racist edge to the insult that prompted Demant's duel, and many of the different kinds of traders near the Russian border where CJ is stationed are Jews. There are good ones and bad ones, but Kapturak, Carl Joseph's creditor, is one of the latter: "On the frontiers of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy there were at that time many men like Kapturak. They began to circle around the old empire like those black and cowardly birds that spot a dying man from an infinite distance." The emperor, however, has a low-key but rather moving encounter with the Jewish community when he's visiting the manoeuvres out east.

Roth was Jewish, in a complicated sort of way. And although he doesn't idealize the Habsburg era, he definitely regrets its passing. Nationalist forces effectively destroyed the land he called home. Once WWI was over, his birthplace was ceded to Poland, and his "country" -- the sprawling empire made up of 17 nationalities -- was defunct. J.M. Coetzee quotes him as writing: "My most unforgettable experience was the war and the end of my fatherland, the only one that I have ever had: the Austro-Hungarian monarchy." Elsewhere, he wrote: "I loved this fatherland... It permitted me to be a patriot and a citizen of the world at the same time, among all the Austrian peoples also a German. I loved the virtues and merits of this fatherland, and today, when it is dead and gone, I even love its flaws and weaknesses." According to Gerry Cordon, "Roth's politics are hard to pin down. But what is clear is that by the time he came to write The Radetzky March, with the Nazis knocking at his door, he had come to see the Austro-Hungarian monarchy as having maintained peace and stability in central Europe, the supranational authority of the Emperor a first and last line of defence for the Ostjude on the Empire’s eastern margins."

Roth moved to Paris in 1933 -- the same year The Radetzky March became one of the books to be designated un-German and burned by the Nazis.

Roth wrote to Stefan Zweig:

"'Very few observers anywhere in the world seem to have understood what the Third Reich’s burning of books, the expulsion of Jewish writers, and all its other crazy assaults on the intellect actually mean... You will have realized 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.'"

He died in Paris in 1939, of pneumonia exacerbated by his extreme alcoholism. (Ernest Hemingway, incidentally, in A Moveable Feast, which is also set in Paris, informs us: "Most drunkards in those days died of pneumonia.")

*_*_*

As a German graduate, I am mystified that I don't know Roth better... I read Hiob a few years ago (brief thoughts here), but The Radetzky March is only my second experience. I have, then, a lot to catch up on...