Joseph Roth

Moses Joseph Roth (; 2 September 1894 – 27 May 1939) was an Austrian novelist, journalist and essayist. Born into a Jewish family in Brody, eastern Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary, he became one of the leading German-language journalists and novelists of the interwar period. His best-known fiction includes Job, Radetzky March (1932), The Emperor's Tomb (1938) and the posthumously published The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939). His nonfiction includes The Wandering Jews (1927), an extended essay on eastern European Jewish migration.

Roth was also a prominent journalist and a master of the feuilleton. From 1923 he wrote for the Frankfurter Zeitung, which became his principal journalistic outlet, and travelled as a correspondent through Germany, France, the Soviet Union, Poland, Albania and Italy. His journalism and fiction repeatedly addressed the consequences of the First World War, political radicalisation, migration, exile and the lives of people displaced by changing borders and regimes.

The dissolution of Austria-Hungary in 1918 became one of the defining experiences of Roth's life and writing. His mature fiction repeatedly returned to the vanished multinational empire, most famously in Radetzky March, which follows three generations of the Trotta family in the final decades of the Habsburg monarchy. Although Roth became increasingly committed to Habsburg legitimism during the 1930s, scholarship has challenged the older tendency to divide his career neatly into an early socialist phase and a later, merely nostalgic monarchist one.

On 30 January 1933, the day Adolf Hitler became German chancellor, Roth travelled from Germany to Paris on a journey that had already been planned. He never lived or worked in Germany again. His entire published work appeared on the first Nazi prohibition list, and he lost much of the German-language market on which his livelihood had depended.

Roth died in Paris in May 1939, aged 44, after years of alcoholism and declining health. His reputation grew substantially after the Second World War. In the English-speaking world, new translations by Michael Hofmann contributed to a major revival of interest from the late twentieth century onwards. Keiron Pim's Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth (2022) was the first full-length biography of Roth written in English.

Life

Childhood and education

Roth was born on 2 September 1894 in Brody, close to the Russian frontier in eastern Galicia. His mother was Maria Roth, née Grübel. His father, Nachum or Wilhelm Roth, worked in international commerce but disappeared before Joseph's birth following a business journey and did not return to the family. Roth never knew him; the circumstances of his father's disappearance and later mental illness became surrounded both by family stories and by versions Roth himself invented.

Roth later gave contradictory and embellished accounts of his military career, sometimes presenting himself as an officer, prisoner of war or front-line soldier. Modern research considers it unlikely that he experienced front-line combat.

Paris, travel and literary success

Roth arrived in Paris on 16 May 1925 as a special correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung. From this period he and Friedl increasingly lived in hotels, a form of existence that became both a subject of his journalism and a recurring setting in his fiction.

Monarchism, Catholicism and the Austrian crisis

Roth's political development resists simple classification. In the early post-war years he wrote for socialist and social-democratic publications and attacked militarism, nationalism and social inequality. Kati Tonkin has argued against a rigid division between an early "socialist" Roth and a later monarchist writer, stressing continuities in his criticism of nationalism and in his concern with the political legacy of Austria-Hungary.

His religious position was similarly complex. Roth remained deeply engaged with Jewish history and culture, but in exile increasingly associated himself with Catholic and legitimist circles. From October 1935 he contributed to the Austrian Catholic-conservative journal Der Christliche Ständestaat.

Journalism

Although Roth later became internationally best known as a novelist, journalism occupied a central place in his professional life. By 1931 he was among the best-paid journalists working in Germany, even though his travelling, debts and family responsibilities repeatedly left him short of money.

In March 2026 Wallstein Verlag published a four-volume, 2,496-page edition presenting major novels and stories together with a selection of essays and feuilletons, with the literary texts generally based on their first printed versions. It is a selected edition rather than a complete collected works.

Works

The following dates follow the bibliography of the International Joseph Roth Society and normally refer to first publication in book form unless otherwise noted.

Olmi's The Legend of the Holy Drinker, starring Rutger Hauer, won the Golden Lion at the 45th Venice International Film Festival.