In 1918 he returned to Vienna, where he began writing for left-wing papers, occasionally as “Red Roth,” “der rote Roth.” In 1920 he moved to Berlin, and in 1923 he began his distinguished association with the Frankfurter Zeitung. In the following years, he traveled throughout Europe, filing copy for the Frankfurter from the south of France, the USSR, Albania, Germany, Poland, and Italy. He was one of the most distinguished and best-paid journalists of the period — being paid at the dream rate of one Deutschmark per line. Some of his pieces were collected under the title of one of them, The Panopticum on Sunday (1928), while some of his reportage from the Soviet Union went into The Wandering Jews. His gifts of style and perception could, on occasion, overwhelm his subjects, but he was a journalist of singular compassion. He observed and warned of the rising Nazi scene in Germany (Hitler actually appears by name in Roth’s first novel, in 1923), and his 1926 visit to the USSR disabused him of most— but not quite all — of his sympathy for Communism.
When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, Roth immediately severed all his ties with the country. He lived in Paris — where he had been based for some years — but also in Amsterdam, Ostend, and the south of France, and wrote for émigré publications. His royalist politics were mainly a mask for his pessimism; his last article was called “Goethe’s Oak at Buchenwald.” His final years were difficult; he moved from hotel to hotel, drinking heavily, worried about money and the future. What precipitated his final collapse was hearing the news that the playwright Ernst Toller had hanged himself in New York. An invitation from the American PEN Club (the organization that had brought Thomas Mann and many others to the States) was found among Roth’s papers. It is tantalizing but ultimately impossible to imagine him taking ship to the New World, and continuing to live and to write: His world was the old one, and he’d used it all up.
Roth’s fiction came into being alongside his journalism, and in the same way: at café tables, at odd hours and all hours, peripatetically, chaotically, charmedly. His first novel, The Spider’s Web, was published in installments in 1923. There followed Hotel Savoy and Rebellion (both 1924), hard-hitting books about contemporary society and politics; then Flight Without End, Zipper and His Father, and Right and Left (all Heimkehrerromane—novels about soldiers returning home after the war). Job (1930) was his first book to draw considerably on his Jewish past in the East. The Radetzky March (1932) has the biggest scope of all his books and is commonly reckoned his masterpiece. There follow the books he wrote in exile, books with a stronger fabulist streak in them, full of melancholy beauty: Tarabas, The Hundred Days, Confession of a Murderer, Weights and Measures, The Emperor’s Tomb, and The Tale of the 1002nd Night.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Michael Hofmann, the son of the German novelist Gert Hofmann, was born in 1957 in Freiburg. At the age of four he moved to England, where he has lived, off and on, ever since. After studying English at Cambridge, and comparative literature by himself, he moved to London in 1983. He has published poems and reviews widely in England and the United States. In 1993 he was appointed Distinguished Lecturer at the English Department of the University of Florida in Gainesville.
To date he has published four books of poems and a collection of criticism, Farthingale to Astrakhon, all with Faber & Faber. He edited (with James Lasdun) a book of contemporary versions of the Metamorphoses, called After Ovid, and is now editing Rilke in English for Penguin. He has translated Kafka, Koeppen, Wenders, and Gert Hofmann, among others, and is the translator of the last four Joseph Roth titles to appear in English: Right and Left, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, The Tale of the 1002nd Night (for which he won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize), and Rebellion, and hopes to bring out collections of Roth’s journalism and shorter fiction.