The Modern Novel

Biography

Joseph Roth is an author who had considerable fame, died in obscurity at the beginning of World War II and then regained some of his lost fame posthumously. He was born in 1894 in Brody (now in the Ukraine), a primarily Jewish city in Galicia. He never knew his father, who went insane before Roth’s birth and died in Poland in 1910. In 1914 he entered the University of Vienna to study literature, where he published poems and short stories, before enlisting in the army in 1916. In the army he served in the press corps. At the end of the war, he returned to Vienna. He claimed that he had been a Russian prisoner of war but this is probably untrue. He worked as a journalist, primarily for socialist newspapers.

In 1923 he joined the Frankfurter Zeitung. His first novels were published in serial form in newspapers. In 1925 he moved to Paris as a correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung and then, in 1926, he was sent to the Soviet Union. His first successful novel was Die Flucht ohne Ende (Flight without End), published in 1927. He came to be known as one of the leaders of the Neue Sachlichkeit school, a form of documentary-social writing. However, it is the two novels he published in the early thirties that really made his reputation – Hiob (Job, the Story of a Simple Man), a tribute to his Jewish heritage, and Radetzkymarsch (The Radetzky March), a tribute to his Austrian heritage, are both major works.

At this time, he started becoming far more sympathetic to the monarchy. However, when Hitler came to power in 1933, he left Austria for Paris. Despite coming back three times, he had lost both his publishers and his readers. He continued to write and publish in exile but was permanently in debt as his income was substantially reduced. Separated from his wife, whom he continued to support, he also had charge of his mistress and her children. He travelled all over Europe but his health, made worse by his drinking, rapidly deteriorated. He returned to Austria to plead the Hapsburg case for the last time in 1938. He was urged to leave. Three days later Austria became part of the Third Reich. His health worsened even more. He turned down an offer to go the United States and collapsed and died in May 1939 after hearing that his friend Ernst Toller had killed himself in New York.

Books about Joseph Roth

Michael Bienert: Joseph Roth in Berlin : ein Lesebuch für Spaziergänger
David Bronsen,: Joseph Roth : eine Biographie (Life of Joseph Roth)
Michael Hoffman: Joseph Roth : A Life in Letters
Ilse Josepha Lazaroms: The Grace of Misery: Joseph Roth and The Politics of Exile, 1919–1939
Hermann Linden: Joseph Roth, Leben und Werk; ein Gedächtnisbuch
Keiron Pim: Endless Flight. The Life of Jospeh Roth
Heinz Lunzer: Joseph Roth : Leben und Werk in Bildern
Dennis Marks: Wandering Jew: The Search for Joseph Roth
Helmuth Nürnberger,: Joseph Roth : in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten
Rainer-Joachim Siegel: Joseph Roth, Bibliographie
James Bradford Street: The Habsburg Monarchy in the Writings of Joseph Roth
Wilhelm von Sternburg : Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie

Other links

Joseph Roth
Joseph Roth
My life with Roth
How Joseph Roth saw Europe’s future
Playing Depart The restless fiction of Joseph Roth
The Curse of Joseph Roth
A March to the Grave (review of the Hoffman biography)
Joseph Roth (in German)
Joseph Roth (in German)
Joseph Roth (in German)