Joseph Roth's Habsburg Novels

About Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth (1894–1939) was the great elegist of the Habsburg Empire — an Austrian-Jewish journalist and novelist born in Brody on the eastern edge of the empire whose fiction mourns the world that disappeared with the First World War. The Radetzky March (1932) is his masterwork: three generations of the Trotta family from the hero of Solferino to the District Captain, the Emperor Franz Joseph a weary presence throughout, the whole edifice of the empire declining. The Capuchin Crypt (1938), the sequel, follows a minor character through the empire's fall and into the bleak Austrian Republic. Roth fled Hitler's Germany in 1933, lived in exile in Paris, drank himself to death, and died in 1939, two months before the Second World War began.