Joseph Roth (Austrian journalist and novelist.) Add a review

Moses Joseph Roth (Austrian German: [roːt]; 2 September 1894 – 27 May 1939) was an Austrian novelist, journalist and essayist, born into a Jewish family in Galicia in Austria-Hungary. He is widely regarded as one of the major German-language writers of the interwar period. His best-known fiction includes Job (1930), Radetzky March (1932), The Emperor's Tomb (1938) and the posthumously published novella The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939). His nonfiction includes The Wandering Jews (1927), an extended work of reportage on eastern European Jewish migration.

Roth was also one of the outstanding European journalists of the 1920s and early 1930s. A master of the feuilleton, he wrote for newspapers including the Frankfurter Zeitung, travelling as a correspondent through Germany, France, the Soviet Union, Poland, Albania and Italy. In his journalism as in his fiction he observed the upheavals of post-World War I Europe, the displacement of populations, the growth of nationalism and authoritarian politics, and the lives of people on the social and geographical margins.

The destruction of Austria-Hungary in 1918 became one of the defining experiences of Roth's life and work. His later fiction repeatedly returned to the vanished multinational empire, most famously in Radetzky March, which follows three generations of the Trotta family during the final decades of the Habsburg monarchy. Although Roth came increasingly to idealise the monarchy as a supranational alternative to ethnic nationalism, scholarship has challenged the traditional view that his career can be divided neatly between an early socialist period and a later, merely nostalgic monarchist one.

On 30 January 1933, the day Adolf Hitler became German chancellor, Roth left Germany for Paris; he never returned. His entire body of work appeared on an early Nazi blacklist and was affected by the Nazi book burnings. Roth became an outspoken opponent of National Socialism and spent the remainder of his life largely in exile in France. In February 1933 he warned his friend Stefan Zweig that Germany was moving towards another war, concluding: "Hell reigns."

Roth died in Paris in May 1939 at the age of 44 after years of severe alcoholism and declining health. His reputation grew substantially after the Second World War, and particularly in the English-speaking world from the late twentieth century onwards, aided by new translations by Michael Hofmann. The publication in 2022 of Keiron Pim's Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth, the first full-length biography of Roth in English, formed part of a renewed international interest in his life and work.