No theme in Roth, however strong, runs as a single current. There are always others, running counter, washing over, swelling its power and their own. The father/son, mother/son relationship combines with the relationship of the collection of peoples to a political determination laid as a grid across their lives. And this itself is a combination with the phenomenon by which the need for worship (an external, divine order of things) makes an old man with a perpetual drip at the end of his nose, Franz Josef, the Emperor-god; and, again, combines with an analysis — shown through the life of capital city and village — of an era carrying the reasons for its own end, and taking half the world down with it.
‘Though fate elected him [Trotta] to perform an outstanding deed, he himself saw to it that his memory became obscured to posterity.’
How unfailingly Roth knew how to begin! That is the fourth sentence in The Radetzky March. His sense of the ridiculous lies always in the dark mesh of serious matters. Puny opposition (an individual) to the grandiose (an empire); what could have led to the perversity of the statement? And while following the novel the reader will unravel from this thread not simply how this memory was obscured, but how it yet grew through successive generations and was transformed into a myth within the mythical powers of empire.
The outstanding deed is not recounted in retrospect. We are in the battle of Solferino and with Trotta, a Slovenian infantry lieutenant, when he steps out of his lowly rank to lay hands upon the Emperor Franz Josef and push him to the ground, taking in his own body the bullet that would have struck the Emperor. Trotta is promoted and honoured. A conventional story of heroism, suitable for an uplifting chapter in a schoolbook; which it becomes. But Captain Joseph Trotta, ennobled by the appended ‘Von Sipolje’, name of his native village, has some unwavering needle of truth pointing from within him. And it agitates wildly when in his son’s first reader he comes upon a grossly exaggerated account of his deed as the Hero of Solferino. In an action that prefigures what will be fully realized by another Trotta, in time to come, in some of the most brilliant passages of the novel, he takes his outrage to the Emperor himself, the one who surely must share with him the validity of the truth. ‘Look here, my dear Trotta,’ said the Emperor, . you know, neither of us shows up too badly in the story. Forget it.’ ‘Your Majesty,’ replied the Captain, ‘it’s a lie.’
Is honesty reduced to the ridiculous where ‘the stability of the world, the power of the law, and the splendour of royalty are maintained by guile? Trotta turns his back on his beloved army, and estranged by rank and title from his peasant father, vegetates and sourly makes of his son Franz a District Commissioner instead of allowing him a military career.
The third generation of Trottas is the District Commissioner’s son, Carl Joseph, who, with Roth’s faultless instinct for timing, enters the narrative aged fifteen to the sound of the Radetzky March being played by the local military band under his father’s balcony. The D.C. has suffered a father withdrawn by disillusion; he himself knows only to treat his own son, in turn, in the same formula of stunted exchanges, but for the reader though not the boy, Roth conveys the sense of something withheld, longing for release within the D.C. Brooded over by the portrait of his grandfather, the Hero of Solferino, lonely Carl Joseph is home from the cadet cavalry school where he has been sent to compensate the D.C. for his own deprivation of military prestige. The boy is seduced by the voluptuous wife of the sergeant-major at the D.C.’s gendarmerie post. When she dies in childbirth, Carl Joseph, concealing his immense distress from his father, has to pay a visit of condolence to the sergeant-major, Slama, and is given by him the packet of love letters he wrote to the man’s wife. ‘This is for you, Herr Baron. . I hope you’ll forgive me, it’s the District Commissioner’s orders. I took it to him at once after she died.’ There follows a wonderful scene in the dramatic narrative restraint Roth mastered for these later books. Devastated Carl Joseph goes into the village café for a brandy; his father is there and looks up from a newspaper. ‘That brandy she gave you is poor stuff. . Tell that waitress we always drink Hennessy.’
One has hardly breathed again after this scene when there is another tightening of poignantly ironic resolution. Father and son walk home together. Outside the door of the D.C.’s office is Sergeant Slama, helmeted, with rifle and fixed bayonet, his ledger under his arm. ‘Good day, my dear Slama,’ says Herr von Trotta. ‘Nothing to report, I suppose.’ ‘No, sir,’ Slama repeats, ‘nothing to report.’
Carl Joseph is haunted by the portrait of the Hero of Solferino, and though himself inept and undistinguished in his military career, dreams of saving the Emperor’s life as his grandfather did. A failure, haunted as well by the death of Slama’s wife (Roth leaves us to draw our own conclusion that the child she died giving birth to may have been Carl Joseph’s) and his inadvertent responsibility for the death of his only friend in a duel, Carl Joseph’s only fulfilment of this dream is when, incensed by the desecration, he tears from the wall in a brothel a cheap reproduction of the official portrait of the Emperor — that other image which haunts his life. Roth reconceives this small scene in full scale when, at a bacchanalian ball that might have been staged by Fellini on a plan by Musil’s Diotima for her ‘Collateral Campaign’ to celebrate Emperor Franz Josef’s seventy-year reign, the news comes of the assassination of the Emperor’s son at Sarajevo. Some Hungarians raucously celebrate: ‘We all agree we ought to be glad the swine’s done for.’ Trotta, drunk, takes ‘heroic’ exception—’My grandfather saved the Emperor’s life. . I will not stand by and allow the dynasty to be insulted!’ He is forced to leave ignominiously.
As the District Commissioner’s son deteriorates through gambling and drink, Roth unfolds with marvellous subtlety what was withheld, longing for release in the father. The aged District Commissioner’s unrealized bond with his old valet, Jacques, is perfectly conveyed in one of the two superlative set-pieces of the novel, when Jacques’s dying is first merely a class annoyance because the servant fails to deliver the mail to the breakfast table, and then becomes a dissolution of class differences in the humanity of two old men who are all that is left, to one another, of a vanished social order: their life.
The second set-piece both echoes this one and brings back a scene that has been present always, beneath the consequences that have richly overlaid it. The levelling of age and social dissolution respects no rank. The D.C. not only now is at one with his former servant; he also, at the other end of the ancient order, has come to have the same bond with his exalted Emperor. In an audience recalling that of the Hero of Solferino, he too has gone to ask for the Emperor’s intercession. This time it is against Carl Joseph’s demission in disgrace from the army. The doddering Emperor says of Carl Joseph, ‘ “That’s the young fellow I saw at the last manoeuvres.” Since this confused him a little, he added, “You know, he saved my life. Or was that you?” A stranger catching sight of them at this moment might have taken them for brothers. . the one felt he had changed into a District Commissioner, the other, that he had changed into the Emperor.’ The unity of Roth’s masterwork is achieved in that highest faculty of the imagination Walter Benjamin speaks of as ‘an extensiveness of the folded fan, which only in spreading draws breath and flourishes.’