Joseph Roth

Summary

In Our Time: Joseph Roth

BBC Radio 4 – June 4, 2026
Host: Melvyn Bragg
Guests: Helen Chambers (University of St Andrews), Deborah Holmes (University of Salzburg), John Hughes (Royal Holloway University of London)

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Episode Overview

This episode delves deep into the life and work of Joseph Roth (1894–1939), a master chronicler of Central Europe's twilight in the aftermath of the First World War. Roth, an Austrian-Jewish writer and journalist whose books were later banned and burned by the Nazis, created iconic literary works such as Radetzky March, Job, Rebellion, and Flight Without End. The discussion covers Roth's origins in Galicia, his rise as a feuilletonist in Vienna and Berlin, his poignant exploration of loss and exile, and his artistic grappling with themes of empire, identity, and displacement.

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Roth’s Childhood and Origins

(Starts @ 03:13)

• Borderland Beginnings: Joseph Roth was born in Brody (then Galicia, Austria-Hungary; now western Ukraine), a multiethnic, multilingual border town (John Hughes, 03:13).
• Brody was “quite a mixed community, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural… Roth himself was born to a German-speaking Jewish family… but he would have been very familiar with the sound of Polish, Yiddish, Ukrainian, [and] Russian” (John Hughes, 03:39).
• Family Background: Largely raised by his protective mother; his father, a failed businessman, abandoned the family and was later institutionalized, a loss Roth mythologized in adulthood (John Hughes, 04:37).
• Education: Attended the local gymnasium, excelling academically but socially a loner; his schooling occurred as teaching languages shifted from German to Polish (John Hughes, 05:50).
• Move to Vienna: “He moved to Vienna, the imperial capital, on the very eve of the First World War,” just as the old world was dissolving (Melvyn Bragg, 06:18).

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War, Upheaval, and Journalism

(06:18–12:03)

• Post-War Displacement: After WWI, Roth returned to a “not really recognizable” hometown, now under Polish rule; he initially embraced the postwar world but grew disillusioned (John Hughes, 06:38).
• Vienna’s Literary Scene: Entered journalism in 1919 with “a remarkable output and success”—178 articles in his first year (Helen Chambers, 07:47).
  • “This young man appeared very skinny in a ragged military shirt, very proud and handed over his short texts which were then received and indeed published.” (Helen Chambers, 07:51)
• Focus on the Underdog: Roth’s journalism honed in on injustice—wounded veterans, poverty, and “details that at first glance appear insignificant, but actually… really matters” (Helen Chambers, 09:05).
  • “He wrote a really hard-hitting piece: they should show these photographs [of war-wounded] before the newsreels, put them on the advertising pillars and people wouldn’t fight wars again.” (Helen Chambers, 09:29)
• The Feuilleton: Roth as a “photonist”—short, subjective pieces that captured fleeting moments intended to outlast the daily news cycle (Deborah Holmes, 10:12):
  • “The original feuilleton was published under a thick black line on the bottom third of the page… you [could] cut off that bit of the page and keep it, because although this writing was subjective and personal, it was going to be what outlived the daily news.” (Deborah Holmes, 11:25)

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Early Novels and Thematic Outlook

(12:03–15:38)

• First Novels (“Rebellion”): Written and published three novels in 1923–24, including Rebellion, which was “about a veteran who returns from the front… and he feels totally content… the government must know what it’s doing… [but] one disaster after another happens to this poor man.” (Deborah Holmes, 12:03)
  • “From the beginning… he’s quite happy to fit in with the existing order, to the end… saying, ‘I want to go to hell.’” (Deborah Holmes, 13:35)
• Central theme: Disillusionment with authority, loss of faith in government and order, wrestling with senselessness of war.

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Berlin: Cultural Magnet and New Directions

(15:38–18:08)

• Move to Berlin (1920): Seeking greater opportunity, “Berlin… was becoming something of a mecca or a cultural magnet” (John Hughes, 14:26).
• Prominence at the Frankfurter Zeitung, one of the Weimar Republic’s prestigious publications.
  • “He was at one time the best-paid journalist on the Frankfurter Zeitung… Berlin was like [a] waiting room in a big station… I’m trading in books and newspapers to get the money to get my ticket out of here.” (Helen Chambers, 16:37)
• Ambitions to be Paris correspondent were thwarted; reporting trips included a major assignment in Soviet Russia.

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Roth’s Literary Style and “Radetzky March”

(20:41–27:56)

• Master of the Poignant: “It’s been said that he writes very simply, but that’s deceptively simple… He’s very good at children and childlike figures… but they’re not made into heroes… they remain ordinary people.” (Deborah Holmes, 20:48)
• Absence of Heroes: “There’s an absence of clear heroes in Roth’s work.” (Melvyn Bragg, 22:08)
• Radetzky March (1932): Roth’s magnum opus, chronicling the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire through three generations of the von Trotta family.
  • “It’s a generational novel in which the story of a single family somehow stands as a metaphor for the decline of the Empire as a whole.” (John Hughes, 22:27)
  • “Has a real sense of finality in its conclusion… it’s those incredibly detailed descriptions of formal occasions, of the sorts of rituals of empire and the military… Vienna in its imperial pomp.” (John Hughes, 27:56)
  • “I think it’s got great humanity. It’s also very funny despite… being morbid… Roth shows you human beings… great concrete precision about these things.” (Helen Chambers, 25:33)
  • On nostalgia: “I’m looking back, but not uncritically… he knew it was thus,” showing both the decadence and lost humanity of the empire (Helen Chambers, 27:14).
• Notable Moment: Funny, ironically tender scenes—“The Emperor draws them all up… everybody’s gaping because there’s a drip on the end of his nose. Roth’s showing you the frailty of this old man.” (Helen Chambers, 25:33)

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Writing, Women, and Personal Life

(28:40–33:36)

• Writing Habits: Roth wrote clean copy quickly—“He’d be writing the rest of the same time” he was hosting others around a café table (Helen Chambers, 29:39).
• Women in Life and Literature: “There are no main female characters in Roth, but [women] quite often play a decisive role… The power dynamics are always uneven.” (Deborah Holmes, 29:59)
• Roth’s marriage to Friedl Reichler; nomadic, unsettled domestic life, brief attempts at stability.
• Tragedy of Friedl: Roth’s wife’s mental illness escalated in the late 1920s, institutionalized and later murdered as part of the Nazi euthanasia program (T4) (Deborah Holmes, 31:56).

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Later Works: “Job” and Exile

(33:36–39:38)

• Job (1930): Widely read, seen as a spiritual turning point; “It reprises some of the things that made Rebellion a great novel… has a sort of simplicity about it, a sort of fable-like structure. It plays loosely with the story of the Book of Job…” (John Hughes, 33:36)
  • The main character suffers repeated losses (alienated children, wife’s death, daughter’s mental illness). The tragic personal undertones reflect Roth’s own life.
  • “Unlike Rebellion, he gives us a twist, a happy ending… Roth, I think, had some doubts about that sentiment.” (John Hughes, 36:37)
  • Marlene Dietrich named Job her favorite novel; Roth “so delighted, he wrote to her to thank her.” (John Hughes, 36:56)
• Life in Exile: “He left Germany in 1933 and went into exile… his books were being burnt.” (Helen Chambers, 37:32)
  • Dependent on advances and loans, especially from Stefan Zweig; gave money away to others worse off.
  • “He drank all day and he needed to drink in order to work… he needed people around him to work.” (Helen Chambers, 39:38)

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Decline, Despair, and Final Works

(39:38–45:18)

• Alcohol and Isolation: Heavy drinking, partly rooted in war trauma, unstable lifestyle, and guilt over Friedl’s illness (Deborah Holmes, 40:04).
• Themes of Abandonment: “In the later years he starts to think of the old empire in near-utopian terms at times… a way of compensating for the world that was collapsing around him.” (John Hughes, 41:36)
• Nationalism: Roth rejected all forms of nationalism, including Zionism, “and sees it as pernicious” (John Hughes, 42:10).
• The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939): “He did say as much [that it was about himself]… The man finds grace, the drinker… Joseph Roth, in his own life, had a terrible death, did not have what he wished for himself.” (Helen Chambers, 42:44)
  • The novella tells of a Parisian vagrant’s miraculous encounters with grace; Roth died from the effects of alcoholism shortly after completing this work.
  • “God, give all of us drinkers such a good and easy death.” (Roth, via Helen Chambers, 44:52)

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Roth’s Legacy: Relevance and Endurance

(45:18–46:05)

• Does he stand the test of time?
  • “Surprisingly well. It’s about the human cost of war and… individual dignity.” (Deborah Holmes, 45:32)
  • “It’s the little details that he’s captured and made permanent in his work that makes it still sort of sing today.” (John Hughes, 45:38)
  • “It’s the human condition in bright, beautiful colours in quite short works, and I think they’re wonderful.” (Helen Chambers, 45:57)

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Bonus Section: Jewishness, Legacy, and Literary Parallels

(46:19–53:54)

• Roth’s Jewish Identity: Contradictory, observed Eastern Jews with both empathy and detachment; rejected Zionism, yet critical of assimilated Jews while himself highly assimilated (John Hughes, 46:37).
• Funeral Symbolism: Catholic priest, Jewish friends, communists, and Habsburg monarchists all present—reflecting his eclectic affiliations (Helen Chambers, 47:52).
• Dedication to the Habsburg Cause: At one point plotted (improbably) to smuggle Otto von Habsburg, exiled heir, back into Austria, seeing a monarchy restoration as the only way to resist Nazism (Helen Chambers, 49:25).
• Stefan Zweig vs. Joseph Roth: “Joseph Roth is definitely the better writer… Roth is much, much more… ironic in a way that Stefan Zweig seemingly can’t or doesn’t want to achieve.” (Helen Chambers, 51:36)
• Prescience about Hitler: The Spider's Web (1923) referenced Hitler directly—“the first explicit reference to Hitler in a literary work” (John Hughes, 53:43).

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Coffee House Culture & Final Years

(54:02–56:48)

• Coffee houses in Vienna and Berlin were essential as workplaces, meeting points, and refuges for writers like Roth.
• Vienna post-WWI: a city in deep crisis, starvation, and poverty (Deborah Holmes, 54:54).
• Roth’s habits were typical—he needed the vibrancy of café life and the company of others for both work and sustenance.

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Recommendations for Further Reading

• Radetzky March (1932)
• Job (1930)
• Rebellion (1924)
• Weights and Measures (1937; praised as a “better composed novel than The Emperor’s Tomb”) (Helen Chambers, 58:01)
• The Spider’s Web (1923)
• The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939)
• The Wandering Jews (1927, essays)

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Memorable Quotes

“He writes very simply, but that’s deceptively simple… he combines small details with very big ideas.”
— Deborah Holmes (20:48)

“It’s the little details that he’s captured and made permanent in his work that makes it still sort of sing today.”
— John Hughes (45:38)

“I’m looking back, but not uncritically.”
— Helen Chambers on Roth’s self-assessment of nostalgia (27:14)

“God, give all of us drinkers such a good and easy death.”
— Joseph Roth, as cited by Helen Chambers (44:52)

“Joseph Roth is definitely the better writer. I think there’s no dispute.”
— Helen Chambers on comparison to Stefan Zweig (51:36)

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Suggested Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:13 – Roth’s childhood in Galicia
• 07:47 – Early journalism in Vienna
• 10:12 – Feuilleton culture and Roth’s journalism style
• 12:03 – Rebellion and early novels
• 14:26 – Move to Berlin
• 22:27 – Radetzky March analysis
• 29:59 – Women and marriage in Roth’s life and fiction
• 33:36 – Job and its biographical context
• 37:32 – Exile and economic hardship
• 42:44 – The Legend of the Holy Drinker and Roth’s death
• 45:32 – Roth’s lasting relevance
• 46:37 – Jewish identity and funeral
• 51:36 – Roth vs. Zweig

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Overall, this episode offers a nuanced, compassionate portrait of Joseph Roth—his art, his struggles, and his enduring assessment of a vanished world that continues to resonate today.

Transcript

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[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

this is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time Archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description of the Wherever you're listening, I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. Joseph Roth, 1894-1939 was one of the great writers on the dying of the old order in Central Europe after the First World War, the loss of homeland, and the horror of what was to come. Most English speakers, incidentally, refer to him as Joseph Roth. In his journalism and in works such as Radetzky, March, Job Rebellion and Flight without End, Roth explored the impact of the Austro Hungarian Empire's collapse on the world around him. And as a German speaking Jew from the northeastern edge of that empire whose books the Nazis burned, Roth was to spend his life drifting westwards without ever finding a settled home. With me to discuss Joseph Roth or Roth are Helen Chambers, Emeritus professor of German at the University of St. Andrews, Deborah Holmes, Associate professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Salzburg, and John Hughes, Reader in German and Cultural Studies at Royal Holloway University of London and John it's to You, I want to come first. Can you tell us a bit about Roth's childhood in Brody, then in the Austro Hungarian empire? Of course, but it's now on the very edge of Ukraine.

[John Hughes]

Yes, indeed, yeah. So, I mean, many listeners, if they know Roth at all, they will probably think of him as an Austrian author, but his origins were far from Austria as we know it today. As you said, born in Brody, which at the time of his birth was in Galicia, which was the largest, the northernmost province in Austria, Hungary, the Habsburg Empire. Galicia, as you mentioned, occupies a fairly large area which falls now within southeast Poland and the west of Ukraine. And if you look up Brody on the map today, you'll see it's there in the west of Ukraine, maybe 100 km or so east of Lviv or Lemberg as it was known in Roth's time in German. But in the year of Roth's birth, 1894, Brody was very much a border town. It was right on the edge of the Austro Hungarian empire, close to the border with Russia. And because of that it had flourished as a sort of trading center for the previous century or so. And you know, perhaps as a consequence of that, it was quite a mixed community, multi ethnic, multilingual, multicultural. Roth himself was born to a German speaking Jewish family and so grew up speaking one of the languages of empire, High High German. But he would have been very familiar with the sound of Polish, Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian also during his childhood. And I think he also had a working knowledge of all of those languages. Despite that, I think Horth felt Brodie was quite a provincial place. He spent his childhood often wishing he could get away, even though later in life it became so important to him. And in his work he was brought up by a single mother who by all accounts was quite protective, overprotective even. He never knew his father, who had abandoned the family when Roth was quite young. In later life, Roth tended to fabricate fantastical stories about this absent father. He often sort of claimed, for example, that the father had been some sort of high ranking military officer. But in truth he was a Jewish businessman, a failed businessman really, who later became mentally ill and was institutionalized and, you know, never really came to terms with that. It was not a detail which he confided really to anyone in his lifetime. At any rate, he did get away from Brodie eventually. He studied first in Lviv and then transferred to Vienna before his studies were interrupted by the First World War, the outbreak of war.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

And he was a very intelligent young boy. He did well at school.

[John Hughes]

Yes, he attended the gymnasium. So the Sort of grammar school in Brodie excelled really academically, although by all accounts was something of a loner from an early age. Enjoyed literature, German literature in particular. This was at the tail end of when German was one of the teaching languages actually in Brodie. And shortly after he completed his secondary education, I think the language of instruction switched almost entirely to Polish. So it was changing really during his lifetime.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

So he moves to Vienna, the imperial capital capital on the very eve of the, of the First World War. With the defeat of the Central powers in, in 1918, the empire collapses too. How abrupt were the changes which he experienced after 1918?

[John Hughes]

He'd served in the war, although not, not in. On the front line. We don't think he served in frontline combat, although he again, it's something he claimed various things to the contrary later in life. So he finished the war de mobbed really from, from the army, returning to Vienna. Brodie, his hometown from 1919 became part of the new Polish Republic and so really was not really recognisable as the place in which she'd grown up and with which she had identified. German was no longer one of the languages spoken there, not a recognized one for a time. I think then he was ready to embrace the post war world. He was quite open to the opportunities that might be offered by the new democracies that were emerging, but that gradually started to during the course of the next decade or so.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Well, let me follow on with Helen Chambers. Helen, he stays in Vienna and starts work as a journalist. What were the opportunities there like? Because there must have been some stiff competition. I mean the Austrian capital boasted a rich array of novelists and commentators at the time.

[Helen Chambers]

Yes, it's quite hard to know how he got into it, except that there are reports from editors in the offices that he turned up at and the reports that this young man appeared very skinny in a ragged military shirt, very proud and handed over his short texts which were then received and indeed published. And he had a quite remarkable output and success. And in that first year, 1919, when he'd filled in his registration card with occupation journalist, which he wasn't really, he then published 178 articles in 1919 as a 24 year old and already in these articles, and you asked me why and how he succeeded, perhaps sheer bloody mindedness. But also the quality of his work is absolutely clear from the outset. I mean not every article is a gem, but very many of them do all the things that he was later to do in his novels.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

And one of the things that characterize journalism is he has an eye for the, for the underdog. Details that at first glance appear insignificant, but actually perhaps something that really matters.

[Helen Chambers]

Yes, I mean, he was very concerned with injustice, with the underdog, with the veterans coming back with nowhere to go, unemployed, no income. And he watched them and he saw them and he went to military hospital and he saw people whose faces had been shot away, jaws shot away, and they weren't allowed to look in the mirror and they weren't allowed to see plaster casts of themselves, although these existed. And Rote wrote a really hard hitting piece saying they should show these photographs before the newsreels, they should put them on the advertising pillars and people wouldn't fight wars again. Was, I mean, he didn't say explicitly people wouldn't fight wars again, but that was very much what he, you know, he could see that these people were suffering dreadful injustice.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Deborah Holmes, let me ask you about Roth as a feuilleton writer. So can you explain what a feuilleton is very important in Austrian and German culture and why they were so important?

[Deborah Holmes]

Certainly, yes. I mean, I think one of the reasons why Joseph are ot, even at this very, very dynam period in cultural history was able to be such an immediate success, I think it's fair to say is that we're in. Despite the end of the war and shortage of paper and a shortage of healthy manpower, we're still in a period that's a golden age of print media and the daily papers. There were, you know, schools of daily papers in each big city, each big German speaking city, and they had two and three editions a day. I mean that's, that's a lot of newspaper to fill. And the feuilleton was both a part of the newspaper, it was the cultural and arts section of the newspaper. But the word photon was also used to describe short texts that could be subjective, descriptive, narrative, question mark. They could be purely descriptive, but that photonists. So Roth thought of himself as a journalist, but as a photonist. They would churn them out day on day about anything and everything that they saw walking around the city. And the idea was, or the tradition was, is that the style could or should be subjective. And it was in the newspaper partly as a commentary on current affairs and on politics and business and other daily news, but also as a part of the newspaper that would outlive current affairs. So the original feuilleton was published under a thick black line on the bottom third of the page. And the idea was that you cut off that bit of the page and kept it, because although this Writing was subjective and personal. It was going to be what outlived the daily news, these little perceptions and descriptions of daily life.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Sounds a bit like in our time. He, before long started experimenting with novels as well. And one of the early ones is called Rebellion, and it encapsulates quite a lot of Roth's outlook on life. Can you tell us about that?

[Deborah Holmes]

Certainly, yeah. It's a fabulous novel. It's of his earlier novels, so we're talking 1924. In 1923, 24, he actually wrote and published three novels, which is also quite a considerable feat when you consider that he's, as we've said, is churning out journalism the whole time as well. So Rebellion, Rebellion is actually based on a true story. It was based on a court case from 1923 that Kyle Kraus, a famous Viennese satirist and commentator, talks about in his one man periodical, Die Faco. So the Torch, which saw itself as a sort of antidote to the daily press. And Roth takes up this story. It's about a veteran who returns from the front and he's lost a leg, but he feels totally content. He feels that the government must know what it's doing, he's going to get a prosthetic leg, he's going to get some way of supporting himself, it's all fine. And he did his duty. And the story basically takes that mindset apart and there's one disaster after another that happens to this poor man. So the story from the. The actual sort of true story that it's based on was of an invalid who gets back from the war and is given a license to play a barrel organ on the street to earn money. And that's what happens in the novel as well. But the barrel organ owner is confronted with someone who thinks that they are just pretending to be an invalid, that they are playing the system. And an argument ensues and the police are involved and the barrel organ license gets taken away from the invalid. And that happens in the novel as well. And then he loses his wife, loses his family, loses his source of income, and by the end of the novel is left railing at God and at Providence. And from the beginning of the novel, where he's quite happy to fit in with the existing order, to the end of the novel where he's saying, I want to go to hell. But a typical rot, we have this sort of scene that seems to be taking place in the afterlife. But the last that we hear about the war invalid is he wasn't sure whether he was in heaven or Hell, but the rebellion itself is the point of the novel. This realization that actually maybe it wasn't enough to do your duty, or it wasn't. The government doesn't actually know what it's doing. Maybe the war was senseless.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

So John, he has this experience of Vienna, of decline, disappointment, decides fairly quickly to move to Berlin. What is it about Berlin that attracts him?

[John Hughes]

Well, I think he moves to Berlin in 1920, so as you say, fairly quickly. He's hugely productive in Vienna, but he moves to Berlin, I think primarily as an economic migrant. He goes there because he thinks there'll be better opportunities for him and a better chance that he will establish himself as a writer there. Berlin in this period is becoming something of a mecca or a cultural magnet, I think for people from all around, German speaking Europe and beyond. It's growing very quickly. I think by the end of the 20s, there's more than 4 million people living in Berlin, which means it was bigger then than it is today. It has an incredibly productive and thriving newspaper and publishing industry, even more so than was the case in Vienna. Dozens of daily newspapers in multiple editions, as Deborah said, as well as weekly magazines. So there are plenty opportunities for God in a place like Berlin. Of course, there's also the art scene there, theater, music, cabaret, the emerging film industry in Weimar Germany as well. So there's a lot happening in Berlin, but it's also a place of extremes as well, political, cultural, social. And he's very sensitive to those extremes as well.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

And he gets good work. He starts working for the Frankfurter Zeitung, the forerunner of the Frankfurter Allgemener Zeitung, which is as good as it gets at that time.

[John Hughes]

Yeah, I mean, it was the Frankfurter Zeitung, where he eventually becomes one of their key names, publishing regularly in the Feuilleton section. It was one of the prestige titles in the Weimar Republic, headquartered in Frankfurt am Main. But he was the sort of Berlin cultural correspondent for a time and he was correspondingly well paid. He was a prominent figure by the middle of the 1920s. So Berlin gives him the chance to establish himself first as a journalist and then building on that as a. As an author of fiction from 1923.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Thank you, John. So Helen Chambers. He's doing rather well in Berlin, but he's moving around a lot. Seems to be a bit of a restless soul. His writing is also quite unpredictable. It goes off in different directions. Is that right?

[Helen Chambers]

Up to a point. I mean, he was just to perhaps go on from what John was saying, he was at one time the best Paid journalist on the Frankfurter Zeitung. And he wrote his articles exactly the same size as the column inches in the paper. And he earned a mark, a line. So he was earning a lot of money. But he said that Berlin was like waiting room in a big station. And he was.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

What did he mean by that?

[Helen Chambers]

Well, he meant he was waiting. He didn't like Berlin very much. Well, I mean it got worse and worse of course with the Nazi violence and with what was going on in the court, which he saw very early on. But he said it was like this waiting room, it was a kind of no man's land. And I think he said I'm trading in books and newspapers to get the money to get my ticket out of here. And you're quite right. I mean he traveled a lot. He wanted to be the Paris correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung, but they gave it to another guy for reasons that we won't go into. And Rote had a thing or two to say about that. But to kind of compensate for that, they sent him to Russia to report on Soviet Russia, on the new Russia for four months in 1926. So he did travel a lot, but he also did other trips for the Frankfurtered Zeitung and that was the kind of thing they published in the press. You know, I traveled to Galicia or to the Rorgabeat or wherever it happened to be.

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[Deborah Holmes]

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[John Hughes]

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[Helen Chambers]

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[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Deborah he is, in literary terms, a master of the poignant, would you agree?

[Deborah Holmes]

Yes. Although it's very difficult to pin down how he does it. It's quite often been said that he writes for simply. But that's deceptively simple somehow. I mean, we've said that he, you know, he champions the underdog. He looks at the small details everyday life. So it's partly that, but he's not afraid to combine small details with very big ideas. So he's looking for the universal. He's looking for. He can be quite, not exactly kitschy, but he can be quite sentimental. I'm thinking of a passage in Rebellion, in Rebellion that we've just been talking about where character Andreas Pum has to sell his donkey and it's a very, very sad scene and the donkey is described as having grey fur and a human soul and that, you know, poignant, sentimental bit of both. But in the context of the novel as a whole, it really works, or it works for me anyway. So it is, it's often he's very good at children and childlike figures and he's also, I think what makes it poignant to me is that he manages to make these figures convincing. You're invested in them, but they're not made into heroes in any way, and they don't become sort of unrealistically perceptive or they remain ordinary people.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

No, I would say there's an absence of clear heroes in Roth's work. Which brings us on, John, to his major work, the one that he's best known for. Radezky March, a fun farewell to life in the Empire. What's he up to here?

[John Hughes]

Yeah, well, Radezky March, or the Radezky March, as I think it's been translated into English. It's certainly his longest novel. It's the one which is most acclaimed and for which he's probably best remembered. It's the one which established him as the great chronicler of the end of Empire. It's actually quite different to many of his previous novels, certainly the ones he published in the 1920s, many of which, with the partial exception of Rebellion, actually have quite fragmentary, quite open endings. A good example would be Flight without end, from 1927, which concludes with the protagonist feeling completely lost, alive, but not knowing what to do with his life. And we don't know what happens next. The Radezky Marsh, by contrast, has a real sense of finality in its conclusion. It concludes with the deaths of its main characters, but also with the end of the empire that has shaped them. And the two are sort of intertwined in the novel. So, as you say, it's the moments in his career that he really firmly looks back and tries to take stock of what happened at the end of Empire and why it mattered to him. So it's a generational novel in which the story of a single family somehow stands as a metaphor for the decline of the Empire as a whole. Under the leadership of the aging Kaiser Franz Josef, who actually appears several times as a character in the novel. The story is focused on three male members of the von Trotter family. It begins with a grandfather figure who, as a young man, saves the life of the Emperor at the Battle of Solferino, which took place in 1859, which makes him a sort of hero of the Empire, but also elevates the family into the aristocracy. We meet his son, who is a sort of patrician bureaucrat, very, very conservative and controlling. And finally, his son, Karl Joseph, who is the last in the line, if you like. And Karl Joseph is characterized as somehow sort of paralyzed by life, doesn't really know what to do with himself, or seems incapable often, of making decisions for himself. He, in particular, he's intimidated by the idea of living up to the memory of that heroic grandfather. He grows up looking at the portrait of this grandfather. So literally having to try and live up to the image of the grandfather. And failing to do that, mainly he becomes a career soldier, but seems wholly unsuitable for that role, unsuited for that role. And he seems also incapable of making any lasting relationships in his life. So there are some quite negative or almost morbid themes that run through the novel which. And it also plays with the musical motif of the title, which is of course a reference to Johann Strauss Sr's famous victory march. But in the novel it functions almost an ironic accompaniment to the terminal decline of the empire.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

So, Helen Chambers, what do you ascribe the success of the novel? And, and do you see in it the work of a genius?

[Helen Chambers]

Yes, I do. And I mean, I think it's got great humanity. It's also very funny, despite what John has said. I mean, it's morbid, but there is this conflict between officialdom and the army which trains people to obey. And then these characters. And you usually. And this is part of Roachmagic, really, you usually see the characters from their own perspective, so you know what they're thinking. And young Carl Joseph, the third one along, he's a 16 year old who's seduced by the local sergeant's wife, the beautiful Frau Salma, and she unbuttons his uniform and he's sitting there thinking, don't think there's anything at the cadet school that told me what to do in this situation. So there are things like that happen and the Emperor is indeed in it and he kind of misses the battles in a way because he's an old soldier, so he thinks, I'll have some maneuvers out in the eastern borderlands. And he draws them all up and he's sitting there on his horse and everybody's gaping because there's a drip on the end of his nose. So Roth's showing you the frailty of this old man and that he doesn't know what's going on and he's a human being. And that's part of, I think, Roth's great art that he shows you human beings. He takes you close to their nose, noses, their nostrils, their ears, their eyes, the back of their mouth. I mean, there's a great concrete precision about these things.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

And would you say that it's a nostalgic novel?

[Helen Chambers]

Well, I mean, Roche himself said, I'm looking back, but not uncritically. So it's kind of nostalgic because he misses this multinational land.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Yes, you do get a sense. I Mean, Austria Hungary towards its end was often described as the prison of nations. And you get a sense that he's trying to modify that view of the Austro Hungarian Empire.

[Helen Chambers]

Well, he would like it not to have been thus, but he knew it was thus. And he does show the decadence of the frivolity and what the terrible officers get up to. I mean, fiddling with as Rome Burns has got nothing on Joseph Roman. So.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Yeah, John, you wanted to come in?

[John Hughes]

Yeah, just. Just briefly, I mean, on what, you know, what makes the novel great, the what I enjoy really about it, despite those negative themes. It's the evocation of a lost world, really. It's those incredibly detailed descriptions of formal occasions, of the sort of rituals of empire and the military. We get descriptions of uniforms, parades, duels, formal dinners, drunken parties, but also a sense of place as well. So Vienna in its sort of imperial pomp. And also Brodie as well. I mean, the second half of the novel is essentially set in a Galician border town that draws on all of those memories of Roth's childhood.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Helen, what's extraordinary is his ability to write clear, clean copy, and I mean for his novels as well. He's not a writer who is endlessly, endlessly revising his work.

[Helen Chambers]

No, that's fairly remarkable. Although there may be things that were lost, I should perhaps say, about his writing practices, that when he was writing Radetzky Martian, he drinking quite a lot, he left chapter four in a taxi and he never got it back, so he had to write it again. And it's an extremely good chapter. I mean, all of the chapters are good. But that is also remarkable in its way, in terms of his working practice. But he kind of held court, you know, people gathered round him and they would not want to interrupt him and he would say, no, on you go, on you go. And then sometimes he would just join the conversation, but he'd be writing the

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

rest of the same time.

[Helen Chambers]

Yeah, yeah.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Deborah, I'm going to move us on from Radezky March onto a very important subject. What about women in Roth's novels and also in his life, because we haven't mentioned it, but fairly early on he married in Vienna and that was a very, very important part of his narrative.

[Deborah Holmes]

Yes, although it's surprisingly often not commented on or commented on far too much in the wrong way. I mean, it's a difficult topic. Helen has already referred to Frau Salame in the novels, women are never major characters. There are no main female characters in Roth, but they quite often play quite a decisive role. The power Dynamics are always uneven. There are no balanced gender relations. There are no colleagues or comrades of different sexes. Either the women are much more powerful than the men somehow, or they are a long way below them and they're either protecting the men or they need protecting. There's nothing. There's no balance in between. And it's an obvious temptation to equate these literary figures with the women in Roth's life. If I can lump them together like that. So his wife Friedel, whom he married in 1922, was an acquaintance from. From a. From a coffee house in Vienna, very typically Ferraud. We haven't talked about bars or coffee or coffee houses yet, but that's where

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

he seemed to spent most of his life.

[Deborah Holmes]

Spent most of his life and where he did a lot of his writing as well, of course. And he learned Friedel from one cafe table to the. To the next. She was the. The daughter of a shopkeeper in Vienna's Jewish district, very pretty, as we can see from the photos. And they married when they were both still very young. She was six years younger than him, him. And he does not prevent the marriage, doesn't let the marriage prevent him from living the life that he wishes to lead as a traveling journalist.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

The two of them basically live out of a suitcase, as far as I know.

[Deborah Holmes]

Yes and no. It quite often is said of Roth that he never had a flat, that he never had a home, that he never settled. I think that he twice shared a flat, once with Friedel and once with a later partner, Andrea Mange Bell in Berlin. So he did. There were attempts at domesticity, but they never lasted for long and they were always very strained.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

And what happens to Friedel in the end? Because I think this is quite important.

[Deborah Holmes]

It's an extremely sad story and it must have been very, very, very stressful and tragic for Roth himself. Friedl becomes increasingly, at first, he thinks, increasingly unable to cope with the life. Traveling around with moving so often, with living out of a suitcase. And then it becomes clear that she is mentally unstable and she is taken into psychiatric. Psychiatric care, I think already from 1925, 26 onwards.

[John Hughes]

I think she's not in care at that point, but at the end of the 20s, yes.

[Deborah Holmes]

And repeatedly ill. And then is taken into full time psychiatric care or is living at home, but with a full time nurse, is not really verbalizing anymore, is not really eating. And she then remains in care until the end of her life, although care becomes a misnomer, as under the Nazis in 1940, she is then murdered as A long term psychiatric patient at one of the. In Hartheim in Upper Austria, in one of the parts of the Nazis so called T4 program to kill psychiatric patients and the mentally unfit.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

And Groutes refers to Friedel and her illness in some of his work, in some of his.

[Deborah Holmes]

I'm not sure that's a good. I'm not sure about the work, certainly repeatedly in the letters. I'm not sure to extent.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Let me take it on to John Hughes in that case and talk about Job, the story of a simple man, which is what I think where he maybe does reference Friedel. Can you tell us about this novel? Because as I understand it, Marlene Dietrich thought it was fabulous.

[John Hughes]

She did. I mean it was actually the novel that preceded Radezky, much as it happens, and could be said to have been this artistic turning point for him, the one that allowed him to. Gave him the confidence, I think, to write the Radetzky. So it was published in 1930, before came before Radezky much. Although we've already discussed perhaps the most famous novel. But Job is perhaps a close second, certainly looking at his reputation around the world. It's a very widely read, translated, much loved novel. Give it its full title. It's Job the Story or the Novel of a Simple Man. And in a way it reprises some. Some of the things that made Rebellion a great novel. It has a sort of simplicity about it, a sort of fable like str. It plays loosely with the story of the Book of Job. But unlike Rebellion, it's firmly set in the past. It's the first novel in which he sets the story firmly in the pre war world, in central. The central Europe in which he'd grown up. And it's also unusually amongst Roth's works, it's firmly set in a Jewish milieu, which is not something he did that often. So the main character, Mendel Heidel Singer, the simple man of the title, is an embodiment of the Hasidic Eastern Jews, the Ostjuden. And he's presented as a pious man, as a village teacher who lives just on the other side of the border with the Russian Empire, so just outside of the geographical limits of Galicia. And in the course of the story he suffers misfortune after misfortune, both him personally and his family, starting with the birth of. Of a son with disabilities, Menuchim. He then becomes alienated from his older sons and then loses them during the war. His wife Deborah dies and his oldest daughter Miriam becomes mentally ill. And the description of Miriam's sort of mental collapse and institutionalization. Writing in 1930, shortly after the same thing had happened to Friedl, is indeed, you know, very tough read. It's based on personal experience in the novel. So the novel ends with the other. I should say that the other thing that haunts the character is the fact that he's abandoned the disabled son when they family move to America. All of which results in him essentially turning his back on his Jewish identity, his faith. He rages at the God in whom he's always believed at the end of the novel. But unusually for Roth, and different to rebellion, he gives us a twist, a happy ending, a rather sentimental turn of events at the end. So the abandoned son Menouhim, turns out has miraculously recovered from his disabilities, has grown up to become a successful composer and musician, and he's on tour in America. And so the novel ends up with the two men being reunited and gives us this happy ending. Roth, I think, had some doubts about that sentiment.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

I was going to say it's so unworthy.

[John Hughes]

It is very, very. And he didn't quite disown the novel, but he was a bit reluctant to sort of praise. But he was happy that it was a success because the ending was a winner for readers. And as you mentioned, Marlene Dietrich in an interview in 1931, I think, with an American film magazine, she was asked for her favorite novel and she named Job, which had just appeared in English translation. And Roth was so delighted, he wrote to her to thank her. And so that's a nice little story.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Helen Chambers. We've heard how he had a rather stellar career in the 1920s, certainly in the first half, but with the 1930s onwards, after the illness of his wife, his health starts to decline. He has an unreliable stream of income, no fixed abode really, yet he remains very prolific. How does he sustain all this?

[Helen Chambers]

Well, should we say that he left Germany in 1933 and went into exile

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

for obvious reasons, his books were being burnt.

[Helen Chambers]

But I mean, he. How did he live? Well, he borrowed money. He bought in 1927, Stefan Zweig, who was a great bestseller, major literary figure, pots of money, wrote to Joseph Roth and said, I've just read your Wandering Jews. It's wonderful.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Those are his essays about the Eastern Jews, the Ostjoden, and Roth got back

[Helen Chambers]

to him and sort of sponged off. And for the rest of his life, although Zweig didn't manage to pay for all that Roth needed, although he did put him up quite often in south of France, or sometimes they were in Austria, I think sometimes they were in Ostend. But Roth, he needed the money. He got big advances, but he often didn't deliver in time. He commanded a lot of money, but he spent a lot of money. And he didn't just spend it on himself. He was. Was always giving money away, giving it away to people who were worse off than him. Exiles, emigres, refugees. And he also, when he had money, he would live in smart hotels. He liked the smart hotels. He liked the Hotel Bristol in Vienna. He liked the Hotel Fouilllot, where he ended up. Well, didn't end up in Paris because. And this is part of Roth's fate, that his worlds were destroyed one after the other. And this included the Hotel Fouillot, where he had a room which is just opposite Le Jardin de Luxembourg. A fine hotel. Anyway, it turned out that it was not fit for purpose and it was demolished. So where he'd been living for years was demolished before his very eyes. He sat in the cafe across the road, but he worked. I don't know if I've answered. I mean, he drank all day and he needed to drink in order to work, and he did work at cafe tables and he needed people around him to work. He couldn't work without the people around him.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Yes. So, I mean, he was drinking very heavily, Very heavily, nonetheless, writing at the. At the same time, I don't know about all of you, but the experience of trying to write when you've had a drink is really. I mean, for me, it just doesn't work. But he appeared to be inspired by it, Deborah. By the late 30s, he was drinking himself to death. What was. What were the ghosts he was struggling with or the.

[Deborah Holmes]

Well, I mean, he was, as we said, a highly functional alcoholic, but very definitely, you know, so terminal alcoholic. And that had been clear for a long time. I mean, it's. I sometimes wonder whether it stemmed from the war years, from the First World War, because, I mean, as we know, on both sides of the front, you know, soldiers were being plied with alcohol to make the war possible at all. I mean, that might well be part of the. The roots of his heavy drinking. Then later on. I think it's partly because of the lifestyle he's having to keep deadlines. He's up late at night, he's living in hotels and bars, drink is readily available. It's also part of the sort of journalistic camaraderie, inviting people for drinks. And then comes Friedel and the marriage and the problems and the feelings of guilt and having to earn also to support Friedel and her care. And, and I think that sort of underlines or cements this sort of turning to alcohol to find relief for that. And then comes National Socialism, which Roth had very early on seen coming with a clear sightedness that's very interesting. Compared to others of his generation who were hoping that it wouldn't be as bad as all that. You know, it's kind of altogether, it's enough to make anyone turn to drink perhaps.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

And towards the end, of course, the Nazis invaded, invade Austria, so he loses Austria. Is there a sense of abandonment running through his work? I mean, perhaps starting with his father. I don't want to over as a

[John Hughes]

theme in the work, I think probably, yes. And there certainly as a per. In terms of his personal life and his view of the world. Yes. I mean he, I think in the later years he, he starts to think of the old empire in near utopian terms at times. And it's a way, I think of compensating for the world that was collapsing around him the idea that there may once have been a place, a supranational place where national identities were somehow less important than some sort of collective identity.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Because he does see nationalism as a

[John Hughes]

fundamentalism, fundamental reject in all its forms. He, he rejected Zionism as well, incidentally. He saw it as a form of nationalism. So no matter the motive, no matter what the motivation was, he would reject nationalism and sees it as pernicious.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

So two final questions for you all. But Helen, let me start with you. How appropriate is it that his final work was the Legend of the Holy Drinker. And what was that about? Was that basically him saying, saying this is me?

[Helen Chambers]

Yes, and he did say as much. I mean, one's reluctant to look at biographical sort of reasons for text, but he said this and I mean it's the story of a tramp in Paris who was originally a coal miner in Silesia and came to Paris for work. And that's quite typical. An economic traveler, migrant if you like, and the tramp ends up sleeping under the bridges in Paris. But one day a well dressed gentleman, and some people say that might have been modeled on Stefan Zweig, arrives and gives him 200 francs and says it's in gratitude at his finding conversion to the church. And the tramps takes it and says, thank you very much, I'll pay it back to you. And there are several attempts in the course of this short narrative. Well, he drinks the money, he loses the money, people make him part with the money and he always gets it back again. And he's always saying, I'm going to. And how he's going to pay it back is to give it to the church in Batignolle, where Sainte Therese is there. And she was a very modest saint with a humble life, an unshowy sort of person, but in a Catholic church. And at the very end, oh, I don't know that I was. Want to spill spoil the end. But at the very end, spoiler alert. The drunkard, who again, well, he's in a very bad state physically, but he dies. And he thinks that the little saint has taken the money and he's paid it back and it's all grace has descended upon him. And he says, God, give all of us drinkers such a good and easy death. And so in the story, the man finds grace, the drinker. But of course, Joseph Frode, in his own life, had a terrible death, did not have what he wished for himself, but he collapsed face down on the table in the cafe. He had lots of friends who didn't have money but looked after him, took him to hospital. They didn't diagnose it properly. He got. They withdrew alcohol completely and he had terrible delirium. He had to be strapped to the bed and indeed died the very opposite kind of death from his own literary creation.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Well, on that sad note, a quick fire, last round, literally in half a sentence even. How well do Roth's works stand the test of time? Deborah?

[Deborah Holmes]

Surprisingly well. It's about the human cost of war and it's about individual dignity.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

John?

[John Hughes]

Yeah, I would agree. There's something he says in one of his early Feuilleton articles, Going For a Walk, where he says it's only the minutiae in life that count, and it's the little details that he's captured and made permanent in his work that makes it still sort of sing today, I would say.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Helen?

[Helen Chambers]

Well, it's the human condition in bright, beautiful colours in quite short works, and I think they're wonderful.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

My thanks to Deborah Holmes, Helen Chambers and John Hughes. Next week, the African civilization on the edge of the Roman Empire. That's the Garamantes. Thank you for listening.

[Deborah Holmes]

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

And now the podcast bit where we can relax slightly. So let me. The first thing I ask is, what did we miss out?

[John Hughes]

Well, perhaps we could say a little bit more about Roth's own Jewishness. I mean, he had a somewhat, perhaps it's no surprise, but. But he had slightly sort of Contradictory sense of himself as a Jew. As Helen mentioned, he did write quite extensively about the Jewish community and the lives of the Eastern Jews in the 1920s. And the collection of essays the Wandering Jews was published in 1927. But what's interesting about it, or one of the things that's interesting about it, is that he never identifies himself as a Jew. He observes the community almost as an anthropologist might, without. Without actually mentioning that he'd grown up pretty much within that community in Galicia. As I mentioned in our main discussion. He rejected Zionism, for example. He was also quite critical of Jews who had assimilated and Westernized themselves, even though he himself was very much a Westernized assimilated Jew. So it was quite contradictory. What did he say? He said he was a sort of an Eastern Jew with a Catholic brain, and there were two sides to his personality.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

And he did. Did he not, actually, at one point, if not join the Catholic Church, then

[Deborah Holmes]

he also said he was a Frenchman from the East?

[John Hughes]

Yes, he had various. Various ways of characterizing himself.

[Helen Chambers]

I mean, I might say something about his funeral. Can I say something about that story? So he was buried in the cemetery, which is in the south of Paris, because nobody had enough money to put him in Pere Lachaise where Heine was. And he really should have belonged. But at the grave site he was never baptized, but he went to the Catholic Church in Paris, the Austrian Catholic Church. So there was a Catholic priest officiating. And there were a lot of Eastern Jewish friends there at the grave site. And then there was Egon Ervin Kish, the great communist, who turned up with his red communist banner and his red carnations. And then there was also a Tumblr magic scholar Gottfar Stein, whom wrote. Spent a lot of time with in Paris, and he was prepared to pronounce the Kaddish. And some people wanted the Kaddish. Oh, and I've missed out the Austrian legitimist monarchist because Otto von Habsburg had sent a wreath which would have had the yellow and black ribbons on it because Roth wanted to restore the monarchy. And he actually had fairly concrete plans to do that before things got really bad. So there were monarchs, anarchists, Communists, Eastern Jews and Catholics at the graveside. And they were kind of. I mean, it nearly came to ugly scenes. And then the chap that was going to say Kaddish was with his friend Soma Morgenstern, also an Eastern Jew. And they said, no, we won't do this here now. We'll just let it be.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

How dedicated was he to the Habsburg cause.

[Helen Chambers]

He was very dedicated to the Habsburg cause. And he met Otto Faulkner Habsburg, who was the heir to the throne that had kind of gone. He met him in his court in exile in Belgium. And he got together with these Austrian legitimists and they had a plan to smuggle Otto von Habsburg back into Vienna in a coffin. And they had to find a dead Austrian in order to do that. And Roths thought, well, in any case, I'm going to Vienna to talk to. Well, he wanted to talk to Schuschnik, who was head of the government at

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

the time and the Austrian fascist dictator of. The dictator of Austro fascism.

[Helen Chambers]

So this was.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

It was after. It was after the death of Schuschnik was in chance.

[Helen Chambers]

It was just before the Anschluss.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Yeah, Shushnik is in charge.

[Helen Chambers]

He's certainly Shushnik's in charge. But was there already a Gauleiter there?

[Deborah Holmes]

Because.

[Helen Chambers]

No, no, but that was just after.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

That comes after.

[Helen Chambers]

So he went in just before the. And wanted to talk to Schuschnik and say, we'll get Otto von Habsburg back and this is how we're going to do it. And he had the blessing of the Habsburg monarchists and he went to Vienna, which was very dangerous thing for him to do. And he never got to see the highest instance. He did get to see a chief of police, I think, and the chief of police said, you better get out of here fast. And he did get out of here fast. But he, he was very hands on. I mean he wanted. And he thought the reason he wanted to do this was he could see this as the only solution to getting rid of the Nazis.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Sounds like a pretty hare brained scheme,

[Helen Chambers]

though harebrained is indeed the word for it.

[John Hughes]

Not entirely realistic.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

One of the things that really interests me is the parallels between Stefan Zweig and Josef Roth. So, so they sort of run alongside each other. They're very aware of each other. As you said, Zweig gave Roth quite a lot of money. But who is the better writer?

[Helen Chambers]

Well, Joseph Roth is definitely the better writer. I think there's no dis. Well, I don't know. You might want to dispute with me.

[John Hughes]

Stefan Zweig also agreed that Georau was the better writer.

[Deborah Holmes]

He was.

[John Hughes]

Oh, he, he always was quite willing

[Helen Chambers]

to admit he was.

[Deborah Holmes]

I think the differences are very interesting. I think it's a very fruitful comparison for the literature of the time. One of the things that Zweig does that Hoult doesn't, as we said, is that Zweig has heroes. Zweig has Goodies and baddies and Zweig has heroes and he hero worships. And that's not something that Roth does at all. Roth is much, much more. He's ironic in a way that Stefan Zweig seemingly can't or doesn't want to achieve.

[John Hughes]

And that of course made Fyke a best selling author in a way which. Well, Roth did sell books, but he never, he never owned the big books.

[Deborah Holmes]

Timing was unfortunate, wasn't it? I mean in a typically kind of Rothian fashion. It's to do with, with chance and contingency and Radetsky Marsch could have been an immense success. But it came out just before, just before the National Socialists took over.

[John Hughes]

Was it in fact. It was, it was published in 32. So when just at the point the royalties were coming in early 19, Hitler's already taken over roots in Paris in exile. He never really seized the, the money that he was due.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

And he was one of the, one of those few people I think his, his first novel, Spin and Netz either the spider's web actually engages with Hitler, him, himself, even though this is in 1923. 1920. 24.

[Deborah Holmes]

2323.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Extraordinary prescience.

[John Hughes]

Yes.

[Helen Chambers]

It came out just before the Hitler Putsch and it's a novel about the Beer Hall Putsch.

[John Hughes]

The Beer hall.

[Helen Chambers]

The Beer Hall Puts. That's right. When Hitler was put in, in prison. And they actually finished publishing the last part of it in the newspaper days before that happened. And in Rot's novel there's a terrorist attempt planned so that he, he saw very clearly what was going on from a very early time. Time.

[John Hughes]

I think it's the, the novel with the first explicit reference to Hitler. There, there isn't another work of literary fiction that an earlier work of literary fiction that names Hitler.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Deborah, tell us a bit about the coffee house culture that we, we, we skipped over because he did spend a

[Helen Chambers]

lot of time in which to be fair.

[Deborah Holmes]

I mean it's. He, he did. But many, many other newspaper men and women of the time did you know, it was a lot.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

They still do in my experience.

[Deborah Holmes]

Yes, yes, yes, let's put that in a different tense. Yeah, but it was very much, it's partly to do with the problems of the time. It was difficult to heat your house at home, you know, in the immediate post war period. It was a place to go where you could be sure of being warm enough to, you know, to sort of move a pen on paper. And it was also where you could meet and mix and keep up to date and have all of the daily newspapers at your disposal. Because. Because, you know, a Viennese coffee house also today typically has, you know, a fine array of newspapers, international national newspapers.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

And I think it's worth pointing out that in 1918, 1919, Vienna was in a terrible state.

[Deborah Holmes]

Vienna was literally starving. There was a survey done by a children's doctor at the time that over 90% of Viennese children were suffering malnutrition after World War I. Yeah, yeah.

[John Hughes]

I mean, a lot of the same applies to Berlin, of course, where he continues the same habits. The coffee houses and the bars were also places to network. So there were good career reasons for spending time. You know, a place like the Romanisches Cafe in Berlin, where he was an habitual customer, it was the place to be seen. It was well known that the prominent people there. Prominent people would be there. And so it wasn't just a place to work, it was a place to see and be seen. And yeah, Kish was often there.

[Deborah Holmes]

And a place where someone was going to pick you up off the floor if you felt like you're stooling stupid.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

And you mentioned that Radetzky March was unique, but he did then write a sequel, the Emperor's Tomb. Why did he do that?

[John Hughes]

Well, I think he did it, you know, for commercial reasons. He wanted to build on the success of Radetzky March. But after 1933, he writes quite a lot of novels and novellas, but in difficult circumstances. Not only is his lifestyle working against him, but he's working to tight deadlines. He's never quite sure where. He's working with different publishing houses, all based in exile now, many of them in the Netherlands. And he's desperate really to just make ends meet. So the sequel, the Emperor's Tomb di Cappuccino, it follows a sort of a separate branch of the von Trotto family and tries to bring the story up to the point of the Anschluss of Austria to Nazi Germany in 1938. And it's an interesting read and anyone that's enjoy, enjoyed Radezky Marshall should probably read it, but it isn't the same. It is not. It isn't of the same quality. It's not.

[Deborah Holmes]

It's written in the first person as well, isn't it? Which is not. Not so common amongst his novels.

[John Hughes]

It was. He sort of rushed it as well. In 1938, as events were happening in Austria, he thought, I'd better get this out quickly as well.

[Helen Chambers]

And I think it's looked too, by students of German as A kind of set text because it's got all this history in. But actually wrote a far better novel in 1937 called Weights and Measures in English, which picks up a lot of the characters from Radetzky Marsh and indeed Mendel Singer from Heob pops up in it as well, at least the name does. And it's. It's a story about a move from west to east and an inspector of weights and measures, an honest man who's been forced to leave the army and get out of his uniform by his wife and he's lost when he gets out of his uniform and he has a kind of slide into. Well, maybe it's sin and maybe it's grace. It's a bit hard to tell, but it's a beautiful novel that picks up a lot of his other themes and evokes the landscape back in the east again. And we haven't mentioned the larks in the sky and the frogs in the swamps and the crickets chirping, but he opens up this huge space that's full of life and full of animals and human beings responding to them. But I would recommend Weights and Measures as a better composed novel than the Emperor's Tomb, which is historically perhaps more interesting.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

So. Well, thank you very much. I think not only are we going to be offered tea, but Martha baked me a lemon drizzle cake for my birthday and so we also have exceptionally lemon drizzle cake. Simon, to go with tea or coffee?

[John Hughes]

I'll have a coffee, please.

[Helen Chambers]

Coffee, please.

[Host (Melvyn Bragg)]

Tea, please.

[Helen Chambers]

In Our Time with Misha Glennie is

[Deborah Holmes]

produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production.

[Helen Chambers]

If you've got a scrolling problem, then this is the podcast for you.

[John Hughes]

It's called Top Comment.

[Deborah Holmes]

With me, Matt Shea and me, Mariana Spring, we both investigate social media for a living.

[John Hughes]

Whether it's disinformation, conspiracy theories, Internet culture, media memes.

[Deborah Holmes]

We're going to be getting behind the stuff that is popping up on your

[John Hughes]

feed on this podcast that's Top Comment on BBC Sounds.

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