Joseph Roth's Habsburg Novels Reading Order

Joseph Roth's The Radetzky March (Radetzkymarsch, 1932) is the great novel of Habsburg decline — three generations of the Trotta family from Solferino to the First World War, each generation diminishing from the hero of the Battle of Solferino to his grandson the District Captain, a portrait of an empire losing faith in itself. Roth, born in Brody on the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in what is now Ukraine, wrote with the nostalgia of someone who had grown up in the empire and seen it collapse; The Radetzky March is his masterwork, the most fully achieved of his approximately fifteen novels. The novel follows the three Trottas chronologically but meditatively, organized around the famous Radetzky March by Johann Strauss Sr. and the portrait of the Solferino hero that hangs in the District Captain's study. The Emperor Franz Joseph appears throughout as a weary, ancient figure embodying the empire's self-exhaustion. The Capuchin Crypt (1938), Roth's direct sequel following a minor character from the earlier novel, continues the story into the Austrian Republic after the empire's fall.