Radetzkymarsch

"The fatherland no longer existed. It was crumbling, it was breaking apart."By sally tarbox on 2 August 2018Format: Kindle EditionI know we're only halfway through the year, but I'm going to say this will be the best book I read in 2018; it's absolutely exquisite writing, up there with Tolstoy.Set in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian empire (it closes with the outbreak of WW1), this is the story of three generations of the Trotta family, who rise to prominence in the first few pages when one Joseph Trotta has the presence of mind to shield the Emperor from a bullet while in battle. We follow the ennobled Trotta, a stiff, formal military man, unswervingly loyal to the ruler. We have hopes that his softer-hearted son will break the mould...but he takes on the same characteristics, running an inflexible household and putting the fear of God into his own son, who is early on entered into the military.The novel primarily follows the youngest scion as he experiences various traumas in his life, and seems to be becoming a (relatively) independent-thinking character; and through contact with his world, his father too starts to realise the impending fate of the Empire he has always revered .And behind it all is the long-lived Emperor Franz Josef, a fixture in the lives of all three Trottas, but who now is a very old man...Every time I put this down, I was just struck with the ability of the author to so bring to life a world and his characters. Utterly wonderful writing

The story of three generations of men in the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Joseph Roth's novel takes its name from a march by Johann Strauss Senior who composed the rollicking tune, and a hundred years ago you could hear it in market towns the length and breadth of the Empire. The story follows the destiny of a family of humble Slovenian origins who rise to prominence through valor on the battlefield. Ennobled by the Emperor, the Trottas become part of the establishment, but by this stage, the cosmopolitan empire is beginning to come apart at the seams. The author's ability to evoke a sense of place, and Michael Hofmann's translation present the novel to wonderfully lyrical effect. The whole work has a dream-like quality, but there is a brooding sense of foreboding. Much of the The Radetzky March is focused on Carl von Trotta, who on joining the army, struggles to live up to the legend of his grandfather. The novel is peopled with memorable characters, such as the nonchalant Polish Count Chojnacki and the troubled Doctor Demant. Even some of the peripheral figures are beautifully sketched, such as Lieutenant Taittinger, 'whose single passion in life was the consumption of pastries.' The decline in the Trotta family that is so exquisitely presented mirrors a similar decline in the fortunes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. By the time of Carl the empire had frayed at its edges and was a mess after the First World War. The Radetzky March is far more than an exercise in mawkish sentimentality, and the Habsburg regime is not given a white-washing. Roth was largely a forgotten figure for several decades, and this, his most acclaimed novel, was rarely cited by Western academics. However, when Michael Hofmann published the current translation, writers queued up to hail The Radetzky March as one of the great European novels of the twentieth century - some consolation for the embattled author, who died tragically at the advent of war in 1939. But much consolation for readers like myself who were able to discover this author and include him in our personal pantheon of great twentieth century authors.

Slow paced but full of memorable scenes. Roth is a master in composing scenes in which every detail expresses the mood and meaning of that scene, like Flaubert although Roth is less compact in his writing. Definitely a masterpiece worth rereading for its language and those scenes.

Mooie evocatie van de ondergang van het rijk, gepersonaliseerd door de Trotta’s en de keizer. Enkele prachtige passages, maar ook zwakke momenten

I began to read Joseph Roth's "Radetzkymarsch" from a sense of obligation: it's considered one of the ten best German-language novels of the 20th century, up there with Thomas Mann. I had avoided it for decades thinking it was one of those Strauss waltz and Kaffee mit Schlag sentimental Viennese confections. Not at all. In fact, I fell in love with it immediately, was moved to tears more than once, and I'm still not quite sure what happened exactly in the plot line. The book follows three generations of Slovenian-Austrian men, the von Trottas, who participate in the slow decline and final brutal collapse of the Habsburg empire in World War I. Joseph Roth tells the story in loving detail, nostalgic for the certainties and the quality of life of the empire, but telling it as an outsider, a Jewish observer who could never be quite accepted and who could never understand the mute "trust and obey" ethic of the military and bureaucracy that let the whole ship of state run aground. One recurring leitmotiv is a series of touching moments when the characters are brought together and try to express love and caring but simply do not have words for such things. Instead of saying "I will always remember this moment",they mumble something banal like "don't catch cold" or "nothing to report." For someone as articulate and verbal as Roth, that kind of mindless and wordless obedience must have be excruciating.If you want to avoid spoilers, just stop reading here.The narrator plays lots of tricks on the reader. He dips into the perspective of one character, even the Kaiser Franz Josef himself a couple times, and lets you guess what's going on with the others. Then he assumes an omniscient ability to describe a scene in lengthy and ornate detail, while something dramatic is happening offstage. The fate of the three women in Carl Joseph von Trotta's life is oddly opaque, real Habsburg men don't talk about such things. I got the odd feeling the the first one, a married woman named Frau Slama, died of a botched abortion. Carl Joseph is merely told she died "an einer Geburt," without a doctor in attendance. Nothing about any child. We readers don't find out that both Carl Joseph's father and the husband know all about their affair until CJ finds out from them himself when they return his love letters to him. The only love in his life is gone. There are different mysteries regarding his involvement with the doctor's wife and with the elusive Frau von Traussig. Hauptmann Jedlicek seems to be engaging in espionage in the borderlands while CJ is called away without leave to dally with Frau von Traussig in Vienna, but it's never quite clear what that all means.Roth is at his best describing the Slavic characters that inhabit the Eastern fringes of the empire, the area that Roth came from. They indulge in nationalistic agitation, lots of gambling and slivovitz, trick horse riding, folksongs, espionage and odd moments of heartwarming generosity. Graf Chojnicki is rich, powerful, well connected, a generous host, given his experiments with alchemy--clearly crazy, often absent for extended periods, and manipulates all around him. At a well-oiled dinner, he announces that the end of the Habsburg empire is at hand, and proves it by turning on the newfangled electric light. The empire could never survive such a thing. After all, the Kaiser reads by candlelight. Chojnicki's crazy but he turns out to be right. He also seems to be involved with national separatists, but the narrator never quite reveals how or why. In a final scene from 1916, after Carl Joseph is killed in World War I, the Kaiser is known to be dying, and the father is called by Frau von Traussig to visit Chojnicki in an insane asylum...where secrets will be revealed and the whole "Zusammenhang" will become clear. But Chojnicki's mind is not clear, and he summons the father with great ceremony to announce that the Kaiser is dying. That's it. Just what's going on with Traussing and Chojnicki and Carl Joseph? Like real life, we can only speculate.One endearing character in the novel is the father's friend from his youth, the painter Moser. Moser paints a portrait of the grandfather, the one who accidently gets the family en-nobled through an inadvertent act of heroism that saves the life of the young Kaiser at the battle of Solferino (a bloody defeat June 24, 1859). Moser paints a regal portrait of grandfather von Trotta, that presides over the entire novel. Roth never mentions that Solferino was the first battle lost by the Habsburg army against the Italians who wanted to be free of the Austrian yoke. The first domino to fall in the long decline of empire. The painting of the hero of Solferino is mentioned at regular intervals as though it were a great triumph. The military bands keep playing the triumphant, victorious "Radetzky March" as reality descends into defeat. Self-delusion may well be the novel's main theme. The artist Moser appears regularly to beg money from the father and then the grandson, as Moser becomes an incurable alcoholic. Moser's drunkeness, well drunkeness in general, is described with great accuracy, apparently from Roth's own personal experience. Roth would beg for money from his more successful writer friend Stefan Zweig. (Zweig, while wildly popular and financially successful, never wrote anything of the same quality as Roth's Radetzkymarsch.)The von Trotta family does not survive the empire and it seems best that way. All that is left is the portrait of the hero of Solferino.

Book Description The Radetzky March , Joseph Roth's classic saga of the privileged von Trotta family, encompasses the entire social fabric of the Austro-Hungarian Empire just before World War I. The author's greatest achievement, The Radetzky March is an unparalleled portrait of a civilization in decline, and as such, a universal story for our times.

My Review I was very interested to read this book as my Croatian grandfather left to come to America in 1914 in order to escape the pending war. The book gave me a good perspective as to what was happening in the area at that time. Joseph Roth's writing is easy to read and very interesting and somewhat poetic. I look forward to reading more by Joseph Roth and I recommend this book to those who are interested in conditions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire prior to WWI.

"A word, a word so easily spoken; it is not spoken."

I am developing a minor obsession with the literature of the 19th and early 20th century Hapsburg Empire, and I can't quite put my finger on why, or how it started, unless it was when I read about Robert Musil in Philip Ball's amazing Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another. Ball's interest was in Musil's unfinished two-volume novel, The Man Without Qualities, and its depiction of a mathematician's dispassion for the world, which doesn't sound terribly promising on the face of it, does it? But it's quite an engaging read nonetheless, and one that I look forward to re-reading again soon; I'm a Robert Musil fan (see also my look last year at Musil's first novel, The Confusions of Young Torless, from last year), loving his way of examining moral and social paralysis and its consequences, as well as how his German prose becomes English.

The (delightfully!) occasionally ornithological Radetzky March* both does and not partake these qualities (or, I guess, lack of qualities) as it details the misadventures of three generations of the Trotta family: a grandfather ennobled as a reward for sort of blunderingly saving Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph's life in battle, a son whom the new Baron forces into a civil service instead of a military career**, and a grandson who takes up the family's military mantle again, only to very nearly disgrace it.

But this makes it sound like The Radetzky March is a book in which things happen, and really, it's not. It's more a book in which things are felt and perceived, and what is perceived is mostly that the Empire is in a period of stasis and stagnation, a period in which the gloss of civilization is polished to a blinding brightness, the better to conceal the turmoil it hides, the turmoil of an empire that purports to bind a staggering variety of cultures, religions and ethnicities into one people*** but really hasn't, except in that all those different peoples are temporarily too busy buffing and polishing (under some duress) to get on with the business of being themselves and hating each other. But don't worry, they'll get around to it. Boy, will they get around to it.

But even that makes it sound like stuff is happening. Which is erroneous. I mean, these people don't even eat:
"The baron had a bizarre relationship with food. He ate the most important morsels with his eyes, so to speak; his sense of beauty consumed above all the essence of the food -- its soul, as it were; the vapid remainders that then reached mouth and palate were boring and had to be wolfed down without delay."
And:
"He was sorry that Trotta had missed the schnitzel. He would have gladly chewed a second one for the lieutenant -- or at least watched it being eaten with gusto."
Nor do they ever really seem to talk to each other, especially not the Trottas. Especially not the youngest Trotta, who is constantly struggling over whether or not to utter even the most banal pleasantry: "Carl Joseph almost replied reverently 'Good evening, Herr Doctor!' But all he said was 'May I?' and sat down."

And things get worse when young Lieutenant Carl Joseph Trotta (the grandson), posted to a border village whose chief employer is a bristle factory, suddenly faces his duty as a soldier to put down an insurrection at said factory. He insists to a colleague that he "simply won't order the men to shoot!" because he now realizes that the factory workers are "poor devils" but another tells him "You'll do what you have to, you know you will." And what he has to do right away is get drunk... And do things improve from there?
"Immense files swelled around the Trotta case, and the files grew, and every department in every agency splattered a little more ink on them, the way one waters flowers, to make them grow."
So, uh, not so much, then.

And then there's the dreary love affair and whatnot (in general, women are not well-regarded in Radetzky March, but what are you gonna do? This is a story about a young man raised motherless by, apparently, a motherless son of a military hero, said son spending most of the novel either in military school or in the military. Sausage fests everywhere). Sigh.

But so then why bother to read this stuff at all, you might ask? Because it's good. As a masterful evocation of the spiritual paralysis of an entire society, as a look at the consequences of too much civilization as something that does not require robot butlers and flying cars to happen, as a vivid portrait of the twilight years of Emperor Franz Joseph (who had "lived long enough to know that it is foolish to tell the truth.") and the Hapsburg Empire just before the outbreak of World War I****, and, yes, as an exquisite piece of writing for its own sake -- as all of these things, The Radetzky March is a very, very good book.

*The book's title comes from a piece of music by Johann Strauss, Sr., which a military band plays outside of the grandfather's house every Sunday to salute their local hero.

As for my characterization of Radetzky March as occasionally ornithological, dude, it is loaded with references to birds, from a servant's caged canary to the different birds singing outdoors in every season in Austria and the empire -- a very charming touch. Seriously. More birds than anything I've read this year that wasn't by Michael Chabon. Birds signal changes in scene and setting and sometimes provide the strongest of dramatic counterpoints (hello, wild geese and Russian ravens!). This is wonderful!

**The grandfather's insistence that the son have any career but military stems from a misunderstanding regarding a children's history book that presents a tarted up version of how the grandfather saved the Emperor's life, to which the grandfather takes great but ultimately ineffectual umbrage in one of the more bitterly humorous sections of the novel.

***All in the service of allowing the Hapsburgs, once Holy Roman Emperors and lords over most of Europe in one form or another, to feel like they still had an Empire and were still a relevant power in world affairs, big terrifying inbred jaws and all (though yes, I'll admit to having been a little sad when they finally had to cut down the Sisipalm in 2008).

Oh, and check out the people, as seen through the eyes of a somewhat minor character, Count Chojnicki:
"The German Austrians were waltzers and boozy crooners, the Hungarians stank, the Czechs were born bootlickers, the Ruthenians were treacherous Russians in disguise, the Croats and Slovenes, whom he called Cravats and Slobbers, were brushmakers and chestnut roasters, and the Poles, of whom he himself was one after all, were skirt chasers, hairdressers and fashion photographers."
So, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was basically the Golgafrincham B Ark, then?

****Weirdly, it was only when the assassination of Franz Ferdinand was communicated (very dramatically) that it hit home for me that the events of this novel were taking place in the 20th century. The book otherwise feels so timeless, so universal, that a particular historical event's depiction, even second-hand as happens here, is really jarring, but not in a bad way. Just a wow way.

I had no great expectations of this novel, and yet it sucked me in and I read it as if in a fever. Three generations of soldiers in a dissolving empire - fantastic.

I picked up this book by pure chance in a bookstore in London. I was interested in the period portrayed in the book (late 19th and early 20th centuries), and the Austro-Hungarian angle piqued my curiosity. I wasn't disappointed -- this saga of three generations of the Trotta family held my interest throughout, though I found the story terribly sad. This novel is definitely worth a read.

This is a brilliant look at empire in decline. It deserves to be more widely read, especially by Americans, whose futures look pretty dismal.

An austrian/german novel and a solid classic in european literature. A family saga of three generations in the Trotta family during the last years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.It all starts with the grandfather, who save the life of Emperor Franz Josef on the battlefield - and he is rewarded and suddenly lifted from mere soldier into the aristocracy with all its pomp and riches. But he and his son and grandson are struggling to come to terms with their new station in life. The hero - or should we say anti-hero is third generation Carl Joseph without the principles and backbone of his grandfather and father - a weak man who is struggling to find his way forward - and also echoes in some way the decline of the empire itself. Roth is a good writer, no doubt - but the story itself wasn't that interesting.

Written in 1932 by German author Joseph Roth, the book tells the story of the decline and fall of the Hapsburg Republic through the Trotta family. It is a part of 1001 Books you must read and is an early example of a story that has a recurring historical figure. Emperor Franz Joseph I of Austria who ruled from 1830 to 1916. I read the newer translation of 1995 by Joachim Neugroschel. During the battle of Solferino (1859, Italy) Franz Joseph I is almost killed. Infantry Lieutenant Trotta causes the Emperor to fall from his horse and prevents his being killed. Trotta is awarded honors and ennobles him. The Trotta family origins in Slovenian peasant. The award while appearing to be a good thing leads to the ruin of the Trotta family which parallels the ruin of the Austrian Hungarian dynasty and eventual collapse. The story follows the The grandfather, his son who becomes a civil servant and the grandson who joins the cavalry as an officer. The grandson is mediocre. He never rides well, he can't make decisions, he only desires to be heroic like his grandfather but instead, people around him die because of his actions. The title is from the Radetzky March, by Johann Strauss. This is a political novel and tells the story of not only the Trotta family but of the Ethnic groups within the Hapsburg Republic; Moravia, Serbia, Ukrainia, Romania, Poland, Hungary, Bosnia Herzegovina and the Jewish people. It heralds the changes from the 1800's to the 1900's and takes the reader to the start of the WWI. While the book was all of this, it should have been good and it was good but it was not engaging. I could sit and read once I started but it was not a book that drew me back once I set it down. I am glad I read it. I appreciate it and will give it 3 1/2 stars because it is an important novel but it loses a 1/2 star because it work to read.

This book swept me up unexpectedly for many different reasons. So much so I was able to ignore the horrid pink marker which the books previous owner had used to underline 50% of most pages and the 99% of the book which they had dog eared (Not to mention the incredibly misinformed margin notes... "Beginning of WW2" being one! The book was written in '32! Ugh...) The horrible state of the previous owners education aside, this book brought me into a world that my meager Ameri-centric historical education has never been able to take me. The world reaches only as far as the borders of the Austro-Hungarian empire and within this world unfolds strained father-son relationships, battles with alcoholism, gambling and a constant obsession with upholding ones honor against all things no matter how absurd they may seem in a modern context. The story is steeped in history and customs of the Austro-Hungarian empire yet the themes are universal. Roth captured a snapshot that will forever allow us to see the world before everything changed in ways more drastic than we can even fathom still.Simply and beautifully written.A

Pretty good, but I'm surprised by the universal praise that gets lavished on it. H. Bloom says it "stands with the best of Thomas Mann." Um.... no, it doesn't come anywhere near that. Maybe I just came in with the wrong expectations. For some reason I was expecting some high modernism; what I got was some pretty solid realism with occasionally beautiful images and analogies, the odd philosophical aside and some use of the present tense. Thomas Mann? Er, no.

I'm also willing to believe that I should have read a different translation. The edition I read was via Joachim Neugroschel. Roth is meant to be a great stylist, but for most of the book (the high emotional points aside, which are very well done) this isn't much more than slightly-better-than-average translanglish. Was Carl Joseph's first lover really wearing 'blue panties'? I find it hard to believe. I also find it hard to believe that the German has the same color palate as this translation suggests: white, grey, yellow, blue, red, green, black, silver, gold. That's it. No shades in between, and everything is one of these colors rather than, say, two of them.

So my three stars could easily have been four stars. Had I come in expecting less Dr Faustus and more The Leopard, I would've gotten what I was expecting and more. Great characters, pretty well done ties between the personal and the historical, and the occasional perfect paragraph.

A chronicle of the erosion and eventual disappearance of the Austro-Hungary Empire through the Trotta family. How it was able to sustain itself through unbelievably inept bureaucracy is amazing. The frustration, complexity and decay of a once proud empire is mirrored in a family trying to hold on to an honorable heritage that is doomed and, in retrospect, not so honorable after all.

I enjoyed Joseph Roth's "The Radetzky March" less than I thought I would. The novel is beautifully written but the story itself is paced so slowly that I had a hard time keeping interested in the book.The story follows three generations of the Trotta family in the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The later generations have great difficulty living up to the standard set by the first, when a man wins national recognition by saving the emperor.The narration feels really detached, unfortunately, so even when the characters are wrestling with something it was hard to care very much. This is definitely a book I appreciated for the writing itself far more than the actual plot.

Although the writing is beautiful throughout, I did not enjoy this book- I found it quite a shlog. Nadine Gordimer's preface to my Overlook Press edition was far more compelling. She was right that the book tells reams about the writer's depressive personality and complete lack of interest in, or understanding of, women. He draws some very interesting character sketches, but he hates every one of them and never grants any of them a moment of joy. The few female characters are flimsy cardboard cut-outs compared to the men, which I find more boring than offensive. Okay, so I got some very good insights into the atmosphere in the Hapsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire in the years before the First World War broke out- an aging, obsolete behemoth on the verge of inevitable collapse with pressures from socialists and nationalists- that was informative. And as I said, the prose is beautiful through and through, but I could barely get myself through to the end (and I just knew everyone would experience the most ignominious death possible). Not particularly recommended, unless it's on a list of of "books you must read before you die," although you are a trooper if you manage to finish it.

This is about the fall of the Habsburg empire. There are some really good scenes as well as depictions of Franz Joseph, the emporor himself. The book is also a saga, following four generations of the von Trotta family. Beautiful, clear, easy-to-read prose, but would have liked to see better and more dialogue.

This book was an odd surprise for me. I picked it up in a used book shop having vaguely remembered reading a positive review of it once in the NYT. The subject matter - Pre-WWI Austria - makes it feel like you're reading an old classic, but the outlook is decidedly modern. This is hymn and farewell to the old Europe that died in the First World War. Moving, well conceived, slow but thoroughly engaging, it was was, for me at least, well worth the effor

The Radetzky March is Joseph Roth's brilliant tale of the declining years of the Austro-Hungarian or more accurately the Hapsburg Empire as told through the fortunes and misfortunes of three generations of the Von Trotta family. The book opens in 1859 with young Lt. Joseph Trotta saving the life of the also young emperor Franz Joseph at the Battle of Solferino. That deed earned the `von' for Baron and began a connection between the Von Trotta's and the emperor that was intermittently called upon when the family's fortunes suffered. The book ends with the outbreak of World War I. In addition to the slow motion disintegration of the Empire, the book focuses on the relations between successive generations of father and son. Strict notions of honor and duty figure in their thinking above all other considerations. The third generation Von Trotta, Carl Joseph leads a foolish and dissolute life, but still clings to honor and duty above all else. The decline in the family's fortunes traces the decline in the Empire. A New York Review of Books piece by J.M. Coetzee called Roth the `emperor of nostalgia', a phrase which summarizes my own sentiments (the article is freely available on the Internet). While the writing is excellent, at the end of the day the book is simply an examination of a mostly forgotten time and place. An enjoyable read, yes, but do not look for lasting or universal insights. (The Radetzky March was recommended by fellow Amazonians and I enjoyed the book and appreciate the recommendation.) If an extraordinarily well-written period piece on the decline of Hapsburg Empire meets your fancy, then you must not miss The Radetzky March.

Written in 1932 by Joseph Roth, the under-appreciated Austrian-Jewish writer who died young of alcoholism in Paris a few years later, The Radetzky March depicts the waning of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the years before World War I. It begins in 1859, at the Battle of Solferino, when a peasant-born lieutenant saves the life of the young Kaiser, Franz Joseph I, and is rewarded with elevation to the nobility. The novel follows successive generations of the now-aristocratic von Trotta family into the bureaucracy and the military and into eventual disillusionment that parallels the collapse of the Empire. Roth's prose evokes a lost world on every page, not as nostalgic reverie but with a portrayal of the deadly effects of the monarchy on its subjects of all classes and with vivid, detailed descriptions of everything from the landscape to village life to an old man's cuffs. Brilliant.

While this book was very good I had trouble staying focused on it. I found it to be quite interesting in the European social mores of the time, which was just prior to WWI, but the main characters did not seem fully developed to me.The book is about 3 generations of of the men in the Trotter family who all lived and served under the Kaiser. The character I found to be the most complete was that of the 2nd Trotter's manservant. He was a wonderful character and I thought we actually got to know him. But the others I didn't think I actually got to know so it was difficult for me to remain emotionally involved in the story.I would recommend this book to those of you who have a real interest in the historical background of pre WWI Austria, Hungary & Poland. I wasn't disappointed in it as I didn't go into the book with pre-conceived notions of what to expect.

Fabulous. The story of the Trotta family in Hapsburg empire as it disintegrates leading up to world war I.

F*cking awesome .... if you want to learn more about the end of the K&K monarchy based on the story of a family at this time read this book. I am in love with Joseph Roth

There's a moment in The Radetzky March when a soirée at a country estate is being broken up in the early hours of the morning. Word has just arrived of the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and the host tells his staff to silence the band and usher his guests off the property. But the musicians are so drunk that they won't stop playing even when their instruments are plucked from their hands by footmen: violinists keep drawing their bows ‘over the unresponsive material of their sleeves’, and a drummer continues ‘to beat and swish his various sticks about in the empty air’.It's an exquisite little metaphor of life during the late Austro-Hungarian empire, where armies of civil servants, aristocrats and, indeed, soldiers continued to go through the motions, not realising that their world was already functionally dead, and they had long stopped making any ‘music’ at all. Not the least striking example of this is Joseph Roth himself, who simply could not come to terms with what had happened. Year after year, from exile in Berlin and then in Paris, he went back over the same ground in his fiction and journalism. And, for that matter, in his non-writing life, too: as late as March 1938, he was heading to Vienna on some insane scheme to convince the Chancellor to cede power back to a coterie of Habsburg ‘Legitimists’. He was turned away at the border – and three days later came the Anschluss.The fact that what followed was so much worse has, perhaps, made it difficult for us to feel how baffling Roth's love of the empire was. At least, I find it rather baffling. This novel's primary mode is one of ironic but heartfelt nostalgia; it's presented as an elegy to a lost mitteleuropäisch paradise; and yet, reading between the lines, it's clear that Roth's Austria-Hungary was a dreary, hidebound, odorously masculine place, hamstrung by outdated codes of behaviour, paralysed by bureaucracy, and riven by inter-ethnic hatreds. It would be easy enough to claim that he understood all this and that he is simply ‘problematising’ it, but I don't know – it really feels like he wants to view the empire with undiluted approbation and simply can't make it work. As a consequence, the politics of the book are all over the place: he has liberal instincts, but he is forced into a position of essential conservatism (Roth referred to Strauss's ‘Radetzky March’ as ‘the “Marseilleise” of conservatism’).Perhaps what mattered was that in the end, the Empire was his home – and after its dissolution his home just didn't exist any more, however much the towns themselves still showed up on maps. Reading Roth talking about Austria-Hungary reminds me of reading certain Pakistani writers talking about the Delhi of their childhood, pre-Partition, which cannot be returned to because it's a civilisation that no longer exists. The point was its multiculturalism, and Roth deliberately ranges around the full extent of imperial geography and linguistics in The Radetzky March. The central family, the Trottas, are from the south of the empire: the original patriarch spoke Slovenian, but his grandson, a district commissioner, speaks only ‘the nasal Austrian of upper officialdom’; his housekeeper speaks High German, and his son is stationed off in the boondocks surrounded by peasants speaking ‘Ruthenian’ (i.e. Ukrainian) and overseen by a Polish-speaking landowner.All this is offered up as a kind of flawed Eden, with nationalism as the lurking serpent. Roth seems to sympathise with the feelings of District Commissioner von Trotta, who opines that, in imperial terms, there are ‘plenty of peoples, but no nations’. This may indeed be a utopian outlook, but it's striking that the novel makes it only too clear why the various constituent peoples wanted some autonomy. The dissolute Count Chojnicki, who is presented sympathetically and who pops up now and then to make gloomy, accurate predictions about the future, talks at some length about how abhorrent Czechs, Hungarians and Slavs are, how the state should take an iron grip over their lives, and how local peasants ought regularly to be shot. Nationalism might well seem promising in that context, which Roth nevertheless seems determined to extol.Of course Roth was Jewish, and when nationalism finally blew the empire into a constellation of nation-states, the Slovenians, Hungarians, Slovaks et al. at least had patches of Europe to which they could stake their Tolkienesque claims of historical ownership. The Jews did not. In that sense they gained more from Austria-Hungary's existence, and suffered proportionately from its break-up. Maybe that is why he writes in such rosy tones about the otherwise soulless Silesian border towns that loom so large in his work.The unnamed burg in which Carl Joseph, the youngest von Trotta, is stationed in The Radetzky March is a perfect example, but variants on the theme recur in many of his books (at least according to summaries and synopses – I haven't actually read any others). A tiny town near the Russian border; a Polish count in his castle; a bored military garrison whose officers are drunk on the local schnapps; a large Jewish population; and all of it surrounded by swamps full of croaking frogs. It's a perfect description of – surprise, surprise – Roth's home town of Brody. After the war and the break-up of the empire, Brody became part of interwar Poland (it's now in Ukraine), and Roth, engaged in a slow suicide-by-alcoholism in Paris, applied himself to recreating it over and over again in fictional form.I find that riveting – more riveting, frankly, than the novel itself, which is shot through with extraordinary moments but which I can't help feeling could have benefited from a smidgen more in the way of actual plot or incident. Perhaps its main flaw though seems to me to be a slight heavy-handedness when it comes to dramatic irony. At the end of something like – oh, I don't know – Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, when the heroes head off cheerfully to the war, that feels properly ironic because we know so much better than they do what they have in store for them. Roth, by contrast, rather overdoes it by having characters simply come right out and explain what's going to happen: ‘The age doesn't want us any more! This age wants to establish autonomous nation states!’ as the Count says in one of his many infeasible outbursts. The pinnacle of this comes when a man looks at his sleeping children and somehow predicts the terrors of the 1930s:‘They're still so young, my children! One of them is eight, the other ten, and when they're asleep, they have round rosy faces. And yet there's cruelty in those sleeping faces. Sometimes I think it's the cruelty of their time, the future, that comes over them. I don't want to live to see that time!’Dun-dun-dunnnn! Now come on, that is cheating. But again, it comes back to Roth's conflicted feelings about how shitty the world around him was, and how all of it could (he felt) be traced back to the end of this multiethnic superstate, which even he can't portray as anything but fucked-up in the first place. From this point of view, The Radetzky March takes the form of a bleak joke: ‘It was awful, and then it was replaced by something worse.’ Roth was astute enough to see that disaster was inevitable one way or another – the only choice, as one character here puts it, ‘was between a sudden catastrophe and a more gradual one’. The catastrophe had already overtaken Roth, but he kept playing all the same.

Mooie evocatie van de ondergang van het rijk, gepersonaliseerd door de Trotta’s en de keizer. Enkele prachtige passages, maar ook zwakke momenten

The story follows three generations of the Trottas, a family of Slovenian peasants living on the periphery of the empire, who find themselves instantly elevated to the rank of aristocracy, when the grandfather, a young lieutenant at the time, saves the life of the emperor, Franz Joseph I, at the Battle of Solferino.The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth’s most famous and acclaimed novel, is in essence a meditation on the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Roth expertly captures the pomp, pageantry and formality of the dwindling years of the Habsburg dynasty at this time of change, as the old order gives way to the new. Discontent is simmering in the multi-ethnic empire, discontent that culminates towards the end of the book with the onset of The Great War.The youngest Trotta, Carl Joseph, though known wherever he goes as the grandson of the hero of Solferino, is in reality something of a reluctant soldier. A romantic, pensive character, who eventually resigns from his military outpost, only to belatedly take up this mantle when war breaks out, meeting his demise in a heroic, yet pitiful manner; an early casualty of the fighting.Nostalgia and melancholy, prevalent themes throughout The Radetzky March, are illustrated both by the passage of time as well as through Carl Joseph’s romantic and platonic relationships, and his later memory of them. Roth, often considered to be something of a prophet of doom, predicts through the voices of his various characters the forthcoming war and the resulting demise of the empire.Wistful and enchanting, the style is very much of the classical genre, in keeping with the fact that it marks the end of the old era. The Radetzky March is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth-century and there is no doubt that many further readers will add credence to this, now that the book is becoming more widely read in the English speaking world.

Roth's epic is a kind of Brideshead revisited for Hapsburg Austria, an unlikely mix of satire and sentiment that comes together to create a glorious epic in which the rise and fall of the Trotta family - raised from insignificance to the nobility by the chance of one military defeat and extinguished by another - is set against the decline and fall of the improbable and heterogeneous empire ruled over by Franz Joseph. Roth has a penetrating eye for the absurdities of official and military life and the peculiar deformation of language that goes with them. When District-governor Trotta is explaining his worries about his son to a friend, Roth notes how he presents them like an official report: "Er teilte gewissermaßen seine Sorgen in Haupt- und Untersorgen." (He essentially divided his troubles into main and sub-troubles). And the scene where Captain Trotta goes to the Emperor to complain about a distorted patriotic pastiche of his little act of heroism that has found its way into the official schoolbooks is as brilliant and memorable as the descriptions of the appalling Sunday lunches at the District-governor's house. But Roth clearly has a very deep affection for the stubborn older generations of the Trotta family and for the old Emperor whose life theirs seem to parallel in so many ways, and uses the background of stultifying formality to make their little moments of humanity stand out more. The youngest Trotta, the cynical army lieutenant Carl Joseph, isn't quite as engaging a character as his father and grandfather, only coming to vivid life in the moments when Roth projects his own alcoholism onto him. He's there mostly to give us a sceptical point of view on the other characters, and to illustrate the paradox that the Austrian army, which is still one of the most important elements uniting the country, exists only to fight the war which everyone knows will destroy the country and the imperial family. A wonderful, beautifully written, absorbing book, that almost makes you want to be able to believe in Roth's quixotic Habsburgophilia...

In the first pages of this book, Captain Joseph Trotta takes the bullet meant for Emperor Franz Joseph at the Battle of Solferino, throwing the reader into the turmoil of the historic years between 1859 and the beginning of WWI in 1914 when the heir to the throne is assassinated in Sarajevo. A family?s sudden promotion from peasant origins to becoming an Austrian dynasty is juxtaposed with the agonizing collapse of the powerful Austro-Hungarian Empire in this book published in 1932. Joseph Roth captures the whims of fate that propel the unrest of a nation in decline and the struggles of the Trotta family to maintain their status in troubled times.History comes alive through the eyes of people, even if they are characters in a novel. Roth makes the rise of the Trotta family a believable vehicle to usher in the demise of an empire. He utilizes military themes of allegiance, honor, and hierarchy of rank to show both the political and familial aspects of the book. This is as much a book about family stature and ties between fathers and sons as it is the historic account of the fading glory of a world power. It is ironic that such beautiful language can represent the harbingers of doom for both man and country: ?In those days there were a lot of men like Kapturak (the money lender) on the borders of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. They began to circle around the old empire like those black cowardly birds that ogle a dying man from infinitely far away. Dark and impatient, beating their wings, they wait for his end.? Or, how about this mystical passage? "The sky was very close; a good familiar shell made of a familiar blue glass, it lay within reach, over the earth. Earthly hands had pinned the stars into the nearby sky like tiny flags into a map. At times the entire blue night whirled around the captain, rocking softly and then standing still...the horses were ghostly white in front of the black carriage, and over them loomed the coachman in a black overcoat. The horses whinnied, and as soft as cat paws their hoofs scratched the damp, sandy ground...The district captain was sobered by the night wind, but a vague fear nestled in his heart. He saw the world going under, and it was his world." This is not a happy book, but it tells a memorable story in a haunting way. It is an excellent depiction of a slice of history, and is highly recommended to lovers of compelling historical fiction.