This is another novel by Joseph Roth (1894-1939). It was published in 1938. That's five years after he had fled to Paris, six years after the success of The Radetzky March, and just a year before he died (this is one of Roth's final works, and the last to be published -- in the Netherlands -- in his lifetime).


Belgium, 1936. Stefan Zweig (left) and Joseph Roth

The English translation is known as The Emperor's Tomb. I read the German version, and I've stuck to the literal translation of the title. But I can see why that wouldn't be a good commercial choice, as few in the English-speaking world know that the Capuchin Crypt in Vienna is where the mortal remains of the House of Habsburg are interred. Along with archdukes and emperors from down the ages, we have Emperor Franz Joseph (beloved of the family in The Radetzky March), Sissi (his assassinated wife), and Rudolf (their tragedy-stricken son).

It's the same Trotta family that we knew from The Radetzky March, but a different branch. The Trotta who was known as the "hero of Solferino" (because he saved the emperor's life) is the great-uncle of our narrator, Franz Ferdinand. And, whereas the Trottas who were ennobled on account of this act of courage were devoted servants of the Emperor, the narrator's father starts out as a bit of a rebel. A rebel and a patriot, though... What he aspired to do was reform the empire, and save the Habsburgs, which might not -- in retrospect -- have been a bad thing. But, back then, he was seen as suspect, and had to flee to America. By the time he came back he was rich, and -- as we're told -- the Austrian police love people who are rich. He still dreamed of a Slav monarchy under Habsburg rule, but he died about 18 months before the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and so didn't live to see the very different way history unfolded.


The pre-WWI Austro-Hungarian patchwork

His son, Franz Ferdinand, is looking back on his life from the vantage-point of 1938, the year Nazi Germany annexed Austria. We don't know that until we reach the end, but right from the beginning, he is signalling decay and disappointment. Sipolje, the Slovenian home of the other Trottas, doesn't exist any more, he tells us. And he's clearly a man at odds with his era: "I am not a child of this time. It is difficult for me not to call myself its enemy."

This is not as fine a book as its predecessor. It's much shorter, and it apparently wasn't what the publishers were expecting: "[They] had been promised 350 pages, and received 173. Moreover the last chapter was 'almost word for word the same as the last chapter of your Flight Without End. Is that an error?'"

Nevertheless, it's a powerful narrative.

We start with youth, frivolity, and indolence: "I lived in the cheerful, even exuberant, company of young aristocrats, the class that -- next to the artists -- was my favourite in the old empire." It's 1913, and downfall is looming on the horizon, but this band of oblivous friends doesn't see it coming: "Over the glasses from which we drank so boisterously, invisible death was already folding its bony hands." This motif -- the bony hands of invisible death -- is repeated numerous times.


Vienna, 1910, three years before the novel opens

Early in the story, Franz Ferdinand gets to know another Trotta, a cousin. He is Joseph Branco; he's from Siploje; and he's a farmer from spring to autumn, and an itinerant chestnut roaster during the winter. Our narrator, clearly yearning for some kind of rootedness, admires his folkloric clothing. Through Branco, he meets Manes Reisiger, a Jew from Zlotogrod in Galicia (and Zlotogrod no longer exists either, he tells us). Franz Ferdinand is not anti-Semitic -- because anti-Semitism is now a lower-class thing, and therefore unseemly for the moneyed echelons...

In the midsummer of 1914, he visits Zlotogrod, and notes how the provincial railway stations look alike all across the old Austro-Hungarian empire. The "strange, flat, melancholy landscape", with its geese, its frogs, and its mud, is reminiscent of what was described in The Radetzky March. But much feels familiar to our traveller, the institutions of the old monarchy ensuring that people could feel at home right across the empire. Branco also joins Franz Ferdinand and Reisiger, so all three are in Zlogogrod when World War I breaks out.

This is a psychologically interesting section, as our leisured young man contemplates the prospect of service and death. He is afraid of dying. And yet he feels that a pointless death is better than a pointless life...

He also feels it's time to do something about Elisabeth. This is the young woman he had grown fond of in Vienna, but love was looked down on by his cynical and superficial companions, so he'd kept quiet. But now: "I thought of Elisabeth. Since reading the Emperor's proclamation I had had only two thoughts: Death and Elisabeth. Even today I do not know which of the two was the stronger."

It's a confused time, a bit like a fever dream: "We didn't know any more whether we longed for death or hoped for life." Soon a rash of engagements and marriages is under way. In normal times these men would have resisted commitment. But things are different now: "Marriage made us seem even more noble than our willingness to shed our blood had done. It made death, which we feared, but at any rate preferred to a lifelong commitment, less dangerous and ugly for us. We cut off our chance to retreat, as it were. And the first unforgettable and stormy enthusiasm with which we went off into our first unlucky battles was certainly fed by the fear of a return to 'domestic life'... Danger was inevitable anyway. But to sweeten it, we let ourselves be married. That way we were prepared to face danger, like a still unknown but already friendly and beckoning homeland."

Curious...

Even though all his would-be comrades-in-arms are doing the same thing, Franz Ferdinand feels they all look superficial and frivolous in comparison with Joseph Branco and Manes Reisiger. He elects to serve with these two, and is granted a transfer, but learns that the forces they're serving with are already in retreat...


Reflecting Franz Ferdinand's interest in his Slovenian roots, the rest of the pictures are from the National Museum of Contemporary History, Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2023

Meanwhile, he needs to get himself married... The newly-weds go off to Baden. But from the get-go, things don't prosper. (Why he's irritated because she reads an amusing book during the train journey I can't imagine, but it's certainly a bad sign...) Waiting for them in Baden is Jacques, the old family servant. Franz Ferdinand seems strangely reluctant to spend time with Elisabeth, and takes the 78-year-old Jacques to a coffee house. It's a supremely inappropriate time for him to feel he has to somehow make up for all the time he has taken Jacques for granted... He even thinks of sending Elisabeth a message, saying he has had to go immediately to the front. He doesn't. But then Jacques falls ill. He abandons Elisabeth to see to the old man, and when he returns, she has locked the door. He wonders whether to force it open. "But at that same moment I also knew that we didn't love each other. I had two deaths to deal with. The first was my love. I buried it on the threshold of the connecting door between our rooms."

Elisabeth heads home, without seeing him again. And he goes off to find his regiment, which is in constant retreat. He travels through chaotic scenes, meeting crowds of wounded.

But he eventually finds Branco and Reisiger and their platoon. They experience no battles. Only retreats. Then the three are taken prisoner, and sent to Siberia; it takes six months to get there. The lieutenant in charge of them is a strange, unpredictable person, but he lets them escape, and tells them who they can take refuge with. This works for a while, but Branco and Reisiger go slightly stir-crazy, and their host throws them out. So they report to a POW camp. Branco and Reisiger again manage to escape, and head for Vienna. Our narrator doesn't see them for another four years, when he returns to the capital after the hostilities are over.

That's all we hear of the war. Some find that a little bizarre. But the war, per se, is not what Roth is interested in. What he wants to portray is the result of the war, which was the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Everything is different now. Back in Vienna, Franz Ferdinand tells us: "I went past the Capuchin Crypt. A sentinel was walking up and down in front of it. What did he still have to guard? The sarcophagi? Memories? History?"

Economically, times are tough. Franz Ferdinand's father-in-law did well from the war, but loses money hand over fist in the post-war environment, as he speculates on all the wrong things.

The narrator's family has lost its wealth. His mother put her money into war bonds: "Lost, therefore, like the war." What's left is the house, which they can mortgage. Eventually they turn it into a boarding-house, and Franz Ferdinand finally has to shoulder responsibilities. His mother, far from resenting the commercialization of her home, enjoys the vigour that has returned to it.



Elisabeth, meanwhile, has become a craftswoman, and makes "modern things". She has also formed a relationship with a woman called Jolanth Szatmary (described with horror by Franz Ferdinand's mother as "a creature with short hair"). Elisabeth brings her to a meeting with the narrator, who says: "I had no prejudices whatsoever, oh no! In the world in which I had grown up, prejudice was almost considered a sign of vulgarity. But to publicly demonstrate what was considered forbidden seemed cheap to me. Elisabeth would probably not have allowed a woman with whom she was not in love to come to our meeting. Here she had to obey."

It's hard to know how reliable the narrator is here. On the one hand, he feels as though Elisabeth and Jolanth are in alliance against him. On the other hand, Elisabeth seems confused. She says Jolanth has trapped her, and although she eventually sleeps with her husband, the next morning she seems resentful.

It's a strange, topsy-turvy world. The communists are on the rise. There are quarrels at the cafes. But Franz Ferdinand feels a kind of doleful happiness at being at home again: "We had all lost position and rank and name, home and money and value, past and present and future. Every morning when we woke up, every night when we went to bed, we cursed death, which had lured us in vain to its mighty banquet. And each of us envied the fallen. They rested under the ground, and the following spring violets would grow from their bones. But we had returned home incurably unfruitful, with lame loins, a generation dedicated to death, but spurned by death. The verdict of the Commission of Enquiry was irrevocable. It read: 'Found unfit for death.'"

Elisabeth is still torn (at least that's how she's presented to us). She continues to see Jolanth, but wants a child from Franz Ferdinand. She has her child, and Franz Ferdinand thinks he will erase Jolanth in this way, but he is semi-erased himself: "I was no longer Trotta, but the father of my son." Shortly afterwards, his mother has a stroke. So the man who never desired any occupation now has two: He's a son, and he's a father. Elisabeth is often away. Jolanth and another dodgy character have reappeared. And one day Elisabeth disappears. She has gone off to try her hand in the film industry.



Franz Ferdinand's mother dies. He sells the house, but keeps on the boarding-house business. The friends who have lived there (largely without paying) move out. He sends his son to Paris. Meanwhile: "I stayed on alone. Alone, alone, alone. I used to go to the Capuchin Crypt." As this commentator notes, "Everything that made up the old monarchy is now concentrated, so to speak, in the Capuchin Crypt, where the symbols of the old order and, alongside them, the old way of life lie buried for ever..."

Time cannot be stopped, however, and eventually we hit the evening of the Anschluss. Franz Ferdinand has cut himself off from the newspapers and his friends' talk: "I was disconnected; that's it, disconnected. To be disconnected among the living means something akin to being extraterritorial. I was an extraterritorial among the living. And the excitement of my friends, even on this Friday evening, seemed superfluous to me -- until that second when the door of the cafe was flung open, and a strangely dressed young man appeared on the threshold." Black leather gaiters, a military cap. The narrator thinks at first he's a toilet attendant. But the man announces: "Fellow-countrymen! The government has fallen. A new German people's government exists!"

Alarm grips the customers. They disappear. The proprietor formally takes leave of Franz Ferdinand, but because his guest wants to stay on, he lights two candles for him -- they feel like funerary candles -- and gives him a heavy swastika made of lead. Eventually, Franz Ferdinand leaves the cafe, accompanied by a stray dog...

And the final sentences go like this: "The Capuchin Crypt, where my emperors lie buried in stone coffins, was closed. The Capuchin friar came towards me, and asked, 'What do you want?' 'I want to visit the coffin of my Emperor Franz Joseph,' I replied. 'God bless you!' said the brother, making the sign of the cross over me. 'God save...!' I cried. 'Hush,' said the brother. Where should I go? Where should I go now, I, a Trotta?"



*_*_*

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is the description of the unravelling of the empire. It's clear from numerous conversations what has gone wrong: The periphery has been neglected.

-- Joseph Branco talks of the celebrations for the Emperor's birthday in Sipolje, and one of the narrator's friends comments on the "strangeness" of the Slovenes: "The Hungarians take away their most elementary national rights, they defend themselves, they even rebel occasionally, or at least give the appearance of rebelling, and yet they celebrate the king's birthday."

-- Count Chojnicki, the oldest of the companions, replies: "It is only in this crazy Europe of nation-states and nationalisms that the self-evident seems strange." It's the minorities who sing the national anthem, he complains, while the Germans sing Die Wacht am Rhein: "Austria will perish because of this loyalty to the Nibelungen, gentlemen! The essence of Austria is not the centre but the periphery. Austria is not to be found in the Alps. There are chamois there, and gentian and edelweiss, but hardly a clue about the double-headed eagle. The substance of Austria is nourished and replenished, time and again, by the Crown Lands." He enumerates how many peoples are oppressed by the Hungarians...

-- In opting to serve with Branco and Reisiger, the narrator looks down on his aristocratic companions. They are products of Vienna, he thinks, which is like a spider at the heart of a web, constantly drawing in the power, energy, and brilliance of the surrounding Crown Lands.

-- The result of the war is fragmentation. Joseph Branco complains: "You need a visa for each country now... I have never seen anything like it in all my life. Every year I was able to sell my wares everywhere: In Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Galicia... And now everything is forbidden. And I have a passport. With a photograph." As Chojnicki says, "Now there are no more chestnuts without a visa..." And, of course, it only got worse...

*_*_*

The Capuchin Crypt is less sweeping, then, than The Radetzky March. The feeling of inexorability is much heavier, which gives us less texture; the confusion is much thicker (what IS going on with Elisabeth?); and there's a choppiness that is sometimes unhelpful. But all those features are signs of the times. Alexander Peer describes the import of those times very aptly: "In the last moving scene, Franz Ferdinand Trotta visits the Capuchin Crypt... This place is symbolic as a farewell to the monarchy, the end of which Roth always viewed as a great European disaster. With the 'annexation' of Austria to the German Reich in March 1938, the hope of a resurrection of the multi-ethnic state along the Danube finally died. This was a hope that the legitimists had harbored. A year later, Joseph Roth dies as an impoverished exile in Paris; a few months later, the Second World War begins."