Joseph Roth

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Joseph Roth 1926
Joseph Roth Signature.jpg

Moses Joseph Roth (born September 2, 1894 in Brody , Eastern Galicia , Austria-Hungary , † May 27, 1939 in Paris ) was an Austrian writer and journalist .

Life

origin

Roth was born in the Galician shtetl Brody , which at the time belonged to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy . Brody was a border town to the Russian Volhynia . His mother Maria Grübel came from a Jewish merchant family based in Brody, his grandfather traded in cloth and his five uncles in hops. Roth's father Nachum Roth came from an Orthodox Hasidic background. When he married in 1892 he was a grain dealer on behalf of a Hamburg company. When goods stored by him in Katowice were embezzled, he had to travel to Hamburg to settle the matter. On the return trip, he was noticed by his behavior on the train. For this reason he was first sent to an institution for the mentally ill, then handed over to his West Galician relatives, who left him in the care of a Russian-Polish miracle rabbi , at whose court one of Joseph Roth's uncles found him years later. He described the father as very beautiful, laughing incessantly and completely insane.

Joseph Roth made his origins the object of veiling and mystification. Above all, the person of his father appeared in several dazzling changes: he was the illegitimate son of an Austrian officer, a Polish count, a Viennese ammunition manufacturer. Roth also claimed to have been born in Szwaby (Schwaby), a small village near Brody, the majority of the population of which were of German descent, in contrast to the Jewish majority in Brody. In fact, Roth's birthplace was in a quarter around the train station in Brody, which at that time was nicknamed “Schwabendorf” or “Szwaby” because the families of former German immigrants lived here. Roth's birthplace was destroyed in the Soviet-Ukrainian war of 1919/1920. The early loss of a father and, in a figurative form, the loss of the fatherland, namely the Austrian monarchy, runs like a red thread through Roth's work.

Childhood and youth in Brody

Roth reported a childhood and adolescence marked by poverty and poverty. On the other hand, photographs from the period and the reports of his relatives do not indicate wealth, but do indicate bourgeois living conditions: his mother had a maid, Joseph received violin lessons and attended high school.

In other than material respects, however, his mother's situation was actually precarious: she was not a widow, as her husband was still alive or was considered missing. She could not get a divorce , as this would have required a divorce letter ( get ) from her husband, but for this he would have had to be sensible. In addition, in Orthodox Judaism, Galicia’s madness was a curse of God that lay on the whole family and significantly worsened the children's prospects of marriage. That is why the family kept silent about the father's fate, and they preferred to accept the rumor that Nachum Roth had hanged himself.

The mother lived withdrawn and looked after the grandfather's household until his death in 1907. She concentrated on bringing up the son, who grew up secluded and sheltered.

Kk Kronprinz-Rudolf-Gymnasium Brody

From 1901, Joseph Roth attended the Baron Hirsch School in Brody, a business school founded by the Jewish railroad magnate and philanthropist Maurice de Hirsch , which, unlike the traditional orthodox schools known as Cheder , was not limited to religious instruction, but instead focused on Hebrew and Torah studies German, Polish and practical subjects were also taught. The language of instruction was German.

From 1905 to 1913 Roth attended the Kronprinz-Rudolf-Gymnasium in Brody. It is not entirely clear whether the school fee of 15 guilders per semester (a considerable sum; however, the kroon currency was already introduced at this time ) was paid by his guardian and uncle Siegmund Grübel, whether he had a scholarship or whether his school fees were waived . He was a good student. The grammar school held on to German as the language of instruction for existing classes until 1914. As the only Jew of his year, he passed the Matura sub auspiciis Imperatoris in 1913 . He appeared partly reserved, partly arrogant on his classmates, an impression that he later made on his fellow students at the University of Vienna. His first literary works (poems) fall during this time. Together with other well-known former students, Roth is honored in a school's own museum room.

Studied in Lviv and Vienna

Memorial plaque for Joseph Roth in Vienna

After graduating from high school in May 1913, Roth moved to Lemberg , the capital of Galicia, where he enrolled at the University of Lemberg . He found accommodation with his uncle Siegmund Grübel, but tensions soon appeared between the sober businessman and the budding poet. He found a maternal friend for many years in Helene von Szajnoda-Schenk, then 59, a frail, but mentally very lively and highly educated lady who had rented an apartment in his uncle's house. He soon became friends with his cousins ​​Resia and Paula.

At that time, the atmosphere in Lviv was marked by increasing tensions, not only between nationalities (there were fights between Polish and Ruthenian students at the university ), but also within Judaism the conflict between Hasidism, Haskala (Enlightenment) and the ever-growing force was fermenting zionist movement. It is not clear to what extent Roth actually studied in Lviv. He was already temporarily in Vienna in autumn 1913, where he worked from September 2 to 9, 1913 on the 11th. Zionist Congress attended.

In Brody, Roth's class was the last to have German as the language of instruction; at the University of Lemberg, Polish had been the language of instruction since 1871. The fact that Roth saw his literary home in German literature was possibly one of the reasons for leaving Lemberg and enrolling at the University of Vienna for the summer semester of 1914 .

In Vienna, Roth first took a small room in the 2nd district, Leopoldstadt , where many Jews lived. In the following semester, he and his mother, who had fled to Vienna before the turmoil of the outbreak of World War I, moved into a small apartment in the neighboring 20th district , Brigittenau ( Wallensteinstrasse 14/16). Roth and his mother, and later also Aunt Rebekka (Riebke), lived in very poor circumstances during this early period. Roth was without income, his mother received a small amount of refugee aid. After the beginning of the First World War , Uncle Siegmund's donations were made only sporadically because of the Russian occupation .

Roth began studying German . It was important to him to do successfully in the exams and to be acknowledged by the professors. In retrospect, he judged students and teachers negatively. Walther Brecht, the professor for modern German literature, was an exception. Heinz Kindermann , Brecht's assistant, became something of a rival. In Roth's first story, Der Vorzugschüler , published in 1916, Kindermann was the model for the main character Anton Wanzl , a character portrayed with some hatred and some knowledge.

The material situation soon improved. Scholarships and private tutor positions (among others with Countess Trautmannsdorff ) allowed Roth to purchase good suits. With crease, stick and monocle, witnesses of the time described him as an image of the Viennese "Gigerl" ( dandies ).

First World War

The First World War and the subsequent collapse of Austria-Hungary became a pioneering experience for Roth . In contrast to many others who were seized by national enthusiasm when the war broke out, he initially took a pacifist position and reacted with a kind of terrified regret. But in the course of time he, who had been classified as unfit for war, found his own attitude shameful and embarrassing: “When the war broke out, I gradually lost my lessons, one after the other. The lawyers moved in, the women became bad-tempered, patriotic, and showed a clear preference for the wounded. I finally volunteered for the 21st Jäger Battalion. "

On May 31, 1916, Roth signed up for military service and began his training as a one-year volunteer on August 28, 1916 . He and his friend Józef Wittlin opted for the 21st Feldjäger Battalion, whose one-year school was located in the 3rd district of Vienna . The original plan was to continue studying in your free time.

During the training period, the death of Emperor Franz Joseph I fell on November 21, 1916. Roth stood in the line of soldiers along the funeral procession: “The shock that came from the realization that a historic day had just passed met the conflicting one Mourning for the downfall of a fatherland that had raised its sons to be opposition. ”The death of the 86-year-old emperor becomes a central symbol for the downfall of the Habsburg Empire and the loss of homeland and fatherland several times in Roth's works, including in the Novels Radetzky March and The Capuchin Crypt .

Roth was transferred to Galicia to the 32nd Infantry Troop Division. From 1917 until the end of the war, he was assigned to the military press service in the Lemberg area. Roth's alleged Russian prisoner-of-war captivity is undetectable, and no files or personal letters have survived.

After the end of the war, Joseph Roth had to break off his studies and concentrate on earning a living. When he returned to Vienna, he initially found accommodation with Leopold Weiss , the brother-in-law of his uncle Norbert Grübel. After a stay in Brody, on the way back, he got caught up in clashes between Polish, Czechoslovak and Ukrainian units, from which he escaped back to Vienna with difficulty.

While still in the military, Roth began to write reports and feature articles for the magazines Der Abend and Der Friede . Poems and prose appeared in Austria's illustrated newspaper . In April 1919 he became editor of the Viennese daily newspaper Der Neue Tag , which also included Alfred Polgar , Anton Kuh and Egon Erwin Kisch among its employees. In this newspaper he published his articles under the heading "Viennese Symptoms" under the name "Josephus". In this professional environment it was part of being a regular at Café Herrenhof , where Roth met his future wife Friederike (Friedl) Reichler in autumn 1919.

Journalist in Vienna and Berlin

Memorial plaque in Berlin-Charlottenburg , Kurfürstendamm 15

At the end of April 1920, the New Day ceased to appear. Roth moved to Berlin. There he initially had difficulties with his residence permit because of the ambiguities and fictions in his documents. For example, a pastor friend of mine had issued him with a baptismal certificate in which the place of birth was Swabia in Hungary. He soon appeared in various newspapers, including the Neue Berliner Zeitung . From January 1921 he worked mainly for the Berlin stock exchange courier .

In the fall of 1922, he resigned from working for the Börsen-Courier . He wrote: “I can truly no longer share the considerations of a bourgeois audience and remain their Sunday chatterbox if I don't want to deny my socialism every day. Perhaps I would still have been weak enough to suppress my convictions for a richer salary or for more frequent recognition of my work. ”In the same year Roth's mother fell ill with cervical cancer and was operated on in Lemberg, where she the son for the last time shortly before her death saw.

From January 1923 he worked as a feature section correspondent for the renowned Frankfurter Zeitung , in which a large part of his journalistic work appeared in the following years. Due to the inflation in Germany and Austria and the alternating relatively poorer economic situation, Roth commuted several times between Vienna and Berlin and wrote articles for the Wiener Sonn- und Mondags-Zeitung , the Neue 8-Uhr-Blatt , in addition to the FC (Vienna), Der Tag (Vienna) and the Prager Tagblatt as well as for the German-speaking Pester Lloyd in Budapest. During this time he also worked on his first novel, Das Spinnennetz , which was published as a serial in the Wiener Arbeiter-Zeitung in the autumn of 1923 , but remained unfinished.

His relationship with the Frankfurter Zeitung and Benno Reifenberg , who was then responsible for the features editorial team, was not free from friction. Roth did not feel sufficiently valued and tried to compensate for this by demanding fees. When he wanted to part with the newspaper, he was offered to continue working as a correspondent in Paris. Roth accepted, moved to Paris in May 1925, and expressed himself enthusiastically about the city in his first letters. When he was replaced as a correspondent by Friedrich Sieburg a year later , he was deeply disappointed. You have no idea how much my private life and the literary carrier will be destroyed when I leave Paris, he wrote to Reifenberg on April 9, 1926.

To compensate for this, he demanded that FC be commissioned with large travel report series. From August to December 1926 he therefore toured the Soviet Union , from May to June 1927 Albania and Yugoslavia , in autumn 1927 the Saar region , from May to July 1928 Poland and in October / November 1928 Italy. In June 1929 he resigned from the FC . Nevertheless, Roth continued to write for the FC on a free basis , including extensive court reports on the Caro-Petschek trial , one of the most complex criminal trials in the final phase of the Weimar Republic .

Parallel to his FC work, Roth drew articles for the socialist newspaper Vorwärts as “Der Rote Joseph” . He used an observational style in his reports and feature pages and drew conclusions regarding social grievances and political conditions from the perceived fragments of life and direct expressions of human misfortune. Friends and colleagues criticized him violently when he wrote in 1929 for good pay for the nationalist Münchner Neue Nachrichten . In the period from August 18, 1929 to May 1, 1930, he wrote about 30 articles for the Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten. His contract there provided for 2000 marks per month for at least two contributions to be delivered.

marriage

Joseph (right) and Friedrike Roth (center) on a ride (1925)

On March 5, 1922, Roth married Friederike (Friedl) Reichler, born on May 12, 1900, in Vienna, whom he had met in the autumn of 1919 in the “Herrenhof” literary café. The young woman was employed in a vegetable and fruit trading center and, like him, was of Jewish Galician origin. The attractive and intelligent woman did not correspond to the restless life at the side of a traveling star journalist. Roth, on the other hand, showed symptoms of an almost pathological jealousy . In 1926 the first symptoms of Friedl's mental illness appeared, and in 1928 her illness became manifest. She was first treated in the Westend mental hospital in Berlin , then she lived with a friend of her husband's for a while, being looked after by a nurse.

His wife's illness plunged Roth into a deep crisis. He was not ready to accept the incurability of the disease, hoped for a miracle, blamed himself for the disease: madness was and is among pious Jews as a punishment from God. A possible possession by a dibbuk led him to the (unsuccessful) consultation of a Hasidic miracle rabbi. During this time he began to drink heavily. His financial situation also deteriorated.

When the accommodation with Friedl's parents did not bring any improvement and the patient increasingly fell into apathy and refused to eat, she was taken to the private sanatorium in Rekawinkel near Vienna on September 23, 1930 . She had a body weight of only 32 kilograms. In December 1933 she was transferred to the state sanatorium “Am Steinhof” on the outskirts of Vienna, and finally in June 1935 to the Mauer-Öhling sanatorium in Lower Austria . Friedl's parents emigrated to Palestine in 1935 . Roth filed for divorce from his incapacitated wife. On July 3, 1940, Friedl Roth was transferred to the Niedernhart Tarnanstalt (now the State Psychiatric Clinic Wagner-Jauregg ) near Linz, a so-called intermediate institution as part of the T4 campaign , from where it was taken to the Hartheim Nazi killing center . Friederike Reichler was killed there in the gas chamber . The date of her death is July 15, 1940.

Relationships

His wife's illness remained a source of self-reproach and oppression for Roth - even during the following relationships. In 1929 he met Sybil Rares, a Jewish actress from Bukowina who was engaged at the Frankfurt Schauspielhaus , and entered into a brief relationship with her.

Andrea Manga Bell

In August 1929 he met Andrea Manga Bell (1902–1985), daughter of the Hamburg Huguenot Emma Mina Filter and the Cuban pianist Jose Manuel Jimenez Berroa. She was married to Alexandre Manga Bell , Prince de Douala et Bonanyo from the former German colony of Cameroon , son of the Douala King Rudolf Manga Bell , who was executed by the Germans in 1914 , but who had left her and returned to Cameroon. When Roth first met her, she was an editor at the Ullstein -Magazine commercial art and so malnourished their two children. Roth was immediately fascinated by the self-confident and independent woman. Soon they moved into a shared apartment with the children. Andrea Manga Bell may have been the model for the character of Juliette Martens in Klaus Mann's key novel Mephisto .

When Roth had to emigrate, Andrea Manga Bell followed him with her children. In the course of time, tensions developed between the two, for which Roth blamed the financial problems caused by caring for the Manga Bells family ("I have to feed a Negro tribe of nine people!"). Andrea Manga Bell, however, later wrote about this time in a letter to Karl Retzlaw that she had received money from her brother in Hamburg from her inheritance. "Roth drunk completely the money that he sent me via Holland with mortal danger. Therefore, I disinherited it. I worked for Roth from early in the morning, cooked on alcohol, also typed all correspondence and manuscripts for his friends until late at night 2 O 'clock." The more likely cause of the quarrels and the final falling out in late 1938 was Roth's extreme jealousy.

Irmgard Keun

At the beginning of July 1936 Roth traveled to Ostend at the invitation of Stefan Zweig , where he met the writer Irmgard Keun, who had recently emigrated there . Both immediately became interested in each other. Irmgard Keun:

“I had the feeling that I was seeing a person who simply died of sadness in the next few hours. His round blue eyes stared almost blank with despair, and his voice sounded as if buried under a load of grief. The impression was later blurred because Roth was not only sad at the time, but also the best and most lively hater. "

The two lived together in Paris from 1936 to 1938. Egon Erwin Kisch confirmed that the couple had a tendency towards excessive alcohol: "They both drink like crazy". Keun accompanied Roth on his travels, including when he visited Lemberg at Christmas 1936, where he introduced her to his old friend Helene von Szajnoda-Schenk. This relationship also eventually broke up. According to Irmgard Keun, Roth's jealousy was again the cause:

“I couldn't even get out without making him restless. If I fell asleep, he'd buried his fingers in my hair, even when I woke up. [...] His insane jealousy made me feel more and more cornered, until I couldn't take it anymore, until I absolutely had to break out. In Paris I left him with a deep sigh of relief and went to Nice with a French naval officer. "

emigration

Memorial plaque for the German and Austrian refugees in Sanary-sur-Mer , among them Joseph Roth

On January 30, 1933 , the day Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor, Roth left Germany. In a letter to Stefan Zweig he judged:

“By now it will be clear to you that we are driving great disasters. Apart from the private ones - our literary and material existence has been destroyed - the whole thing leads to a new war. I don't give a penny more for our life. It has been possible to let barbarism rule. Do not be under any illusions. Hell rules. "

Roth's books fell victim to the book burnings by the National Socialists. Roth initially chose Paris as the place of his exile , but undertook various trips, some of which lasted several months, including to the Netherlands, Austria and Poland. Like many other emigrants, Roth stayed on the French Riviera from June 1934 to June 1935 . Together with Hermann Kesten and Heinrich Mann , Roth and Manga Bell rented a house in Nice .

The trip to Poland took place in February / March 1937; he gave a number of lectures at the invitation of the Polish PEN Club. On this occasion he made a detour to Lemberg, Poland, to visit his relatives, all of whom were victims of the Shoah .

Unlike many emigrated writers, Roth not only succeeded in remaining productive, but also found opportunities for publication. His works appeared in the Dutch exile publishers Querido and de Lange and in the Christian publisher De Gemeenschap . For this reason, among other things, he stayed several times during his exile in the Netherlands and Belgium (May 1935 in Amsterdam and in 1936 longer stays in Amsterdam and Ostend ). He also wrote articles for the exile magazine Das neue Tage-Buch, published by Leopold Schwarzschild .

Last years of life

Joseph Roth's grave in the Thiais cemetery near Paris (2008). In the meantime, the thuja planted by an unknown person has blown up the front grave border.

Roth's financial and health situation has deteriorated rapidly in recent years. In November 1937, his place of residence for ten years, the Hotel Foyot in Paris' Rue de Tournon , was demolished due to its disrepair. He moved across the street into a small room above his regular café, Café Tournon . On May 23, 1939, Roth was admitted to the Hôpital Necker hospital for the poor after he collapsed in Café Tournon (allegedly after receiving news of Ernst Toller's suicide ). On May 27, he died of bilateral pneumonia . The lethal course of the disease was favored by the abrupt withdrawal from alcohol ( alcohol delirium ).

On May 30, 1939, Roth was buried on the Cimetière parisien de Thiais in Thiais , south of the capital, which belongs to Paris . The burial took place according to the "muted Catholic" rite, as no evidence of Roth's baptism could be provided. At the funeral there was almost a clash between the very heterogeneous participants in the mourning society: Austrian legitimists , communists and Jews each claimed the deceased to be one of their own. The grave is in the Catholic section of the cemetery ("Division 7"). The inscription on the tombstone reads: écrivain autrichien - mort à Paris en exil ("Austrian writer - died in Paris in exile").

Writing and biographical references

classification

Roth's literary work cannot simply be assigned to a certain direction or grouping of contemporary literature, most likely to New Objectivity , especially with regard to his early novels. Thus contributing Flight Without End subtitled A report , and in the preface, the author assures, "I have invented nothing, composed nothing. It is no longer a question of 'composing'. The most important thing is what is observed. "

Roth was primarily known to his contemporaries as a journalist and journalistic work accounts for a good half of his work. Roth did not take part in the language experiment of Expressionism , which shaped the literature of the Weimar period and whose counter-movement was the New Objectivity. He represented the position of the journalistic "craftsman" and remained conservative in his linguistic means.

However, Roth rejected this trend in 1930 in his paper, “ End with the New Objectivity” . From a journalistic point of view, he criticized the unformed nature of literature that seeks to limit itself to “bare facts” by contrasting the testimony with the (formed) report : “The fact and the detail are the content of the testimony. They are the raw material of the report. The event can only 'reproduce' the shaped, i.e. artistic expression in which the raw material is contained like ore in steel, like mercury in a mirror. ”In this text he accuses the New Objectivity of adopting the attitude of the naive reader to make: “The primitive reader either wants to stay in reality or to flee from it completely.” Roth, on the other hand, prefers the supposedly authentic of the unformed eyewitness report. As a journalist, he was familiar with the work that forms a report from individual statements - and as a poet states: “... only the 'work of art' is 'real like life'.” The following sentence is programmatic for his work: “The narrator is an observer and an expert. His work is never detached from reality, but reality transformed into truth (through the medium of language). "

Truth and mystification

Truth and justice are - as divine attributes - central concepts of Jewish culture. Roth felt connected to these values. However, Roth also worked as a “ mythomaniac ” and “ mystifier ”. For example, he talked about the hardships he suffered in captivity - until Egon Erwin Kisch researched him and proved that Roth was never a prisoner of war. But Franz Tunda in Escape without End was a prisoner of war and Roth merged with his fictional character. Roth stated: "It does not depend on reality, but on inner truth."

Other altered narratives:

  • He was not born in Swabia, Hungary, but in Brody, Galicia.
  • various legends told by him about his father
  • He was not an Austrian officer, but a one-year volunteer. After the end of the war, he turned himself first into an ensign, then into a lieutenant. In the course of time he adapted his language and clothing perfectly to the image of the Austro-Hungarian officer. His demeanor seemed absolutely convincing to those around him (including former Austrian officers).
  • He wasn't a Catholic. In fact, no proof of conversion could be produced at his funeral . Roth recognized himself alternately as a Jew and now as a Catholic.

Roth's poetic remodeling of his biography caused irritation among his friends and acquaintances at the time, as well as among his biographers. There is no evidence, however, in which Roth took personal advantage of his mystifications. Rather, he was known as a generous and selfless helper of those in need beyond his own means.

"Red Joseph" and Austrian legitimist

In general, Roth sees a change from earlier socialist positions to monarchist ones around 1925/26 . Some of his articles from earlier years are socially critical. Roth described the specifics and tried to observe very closely. He did not go into the field of political theories. Some of Roth's articles in the social democratic forward appeared under the pseudonym "Der Rote Joseph". Uwe Schweikert (1982) retrospectively classifies Roth as a social romantic and described his later turn away from the leftist position as typical of a bourgeois intellectual who was not sufficiently solidified by socialist theory. Roth belonged to the 1925 group , an association of left-wing writers. He signed their resolutions and followed their activities, but did not attend the meetings.

While Roth was very critical of the monarchy in early journalistic work, this position later turned into an idealization of the Habsburg monarchy. Although he saw the mistakes and omissions of the no longer existing Austrian empire, at the same time, in romantic transfiguration, he painted the utopia of an Austria as it could or should have been. He attempted to transfer Austria into the mythical-utopian like other representatives of this specific Austro-Hungarian nostalgia, such as Fritz von Herzmanovsky-Orlando (Tarockanien) and Robert Musil (" Kakanien "). With his positive assessment of the Habsburg monarchy, Roth was in line with many writers and artists of his time such as Stefan Zweig , Hugo von Hofmannsthal but also James Joyce , who came into contact with the multi-ethnic state Austria-Hungary in the cosmopolitan port city of Trieste and that retrospectively classified perished states with “They called the Austrian Empire a ramshackle empire, I wish to God there were more such empires”.

When the dictatorship of National Socialism emerged and became a reality, Roth saw the monarchy and the Catholic Church as the only forces that he trusted to be able to offer adequate resistance to the "brown plague" - if they could decide to do so. It was particularly about the preservation of the Habsburg principle "Live and let live!" In contrast to the strictness of Prussia. He strengthened his self-styling as a Catholic Austrian officer and supported the cause of the monarchists through articles and political work. In his last years he sought contact with legitimist circles around the pretender to the throne Otto von Habsburg and on his behalf traveled to Vienna on February 24, 1938 (a few days before the annexation of Austria ) with the aim of abdicating the Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg To persuade Otto von Habsburgs. Roth was unable to speak to Schuschnigg, and the Vienna police chief Michael Skubl advised him to return to Paris immediately.

Home, loss of home and Judaism

First edition Radetzkymarsch

At the center of important works by Roth in the 1930s is the downfall of Austria as a metaphor for the loss of homeland par excellence, for example in Radetzkymarsch (1932) and (narrative connected to this) The Capuchin Crypt (1938), as well as in the story The Bust of the Emperor (1934 ). In his foreword to the Radetzkymarsch preprint in the Frankfurter Zeitung , he writes:

“A cruel will of history has shattered my old fatherland, the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. I loved this fatherland that allowed me to be a patriot and a citizen of the world at the same time, an Austrian and a German among all Austrian peoples. I loved the virtues and virtues of this country, and now that it is dead and lost, I love its flaws and weaknesses too. There were many of them. She atoned for it in his death. It went almost immediately from the operetta performance to the gruesome theater of the World War. "

This feeling of being lost and uprooted repeats the experience of the early loss of the father. Roth also shapes it as the attitude towards life of the Galician Jews and the Jews in general, for example in the essay Jews on the move . The story The Leviathan and the novel Job are considered to be explicitly Jewish or primarily dealing with Jewish topics .

In the last years of his life, Roth transformed the longing for a return home into the (also religious) security of the Jewish culture of the “ shtetl ” into the Catholic, for example in the legend of the holy drinker , where the homeless drinker Andreas Kartak, who was almost persecuted by miracles and God's grace, died Finds redemption and homecoming.

Appreciation

In his lecture at an international symposium in Stuttgart in 1989 , Marcel Reich-Ranicki paid tribute to Joseph Roth's novels. In particular, the speaker emphasized Roth's aversion to the monumental and the childlike, naive style of the calm, serene, perfectly formed language of the novelist.

In his hometown of Brody , a small plaque inscribed in Ukrainian and German commemorates the town's son. In 2001, Joseph-Roth-Gasse in Vienna- Leopoldstadt (2nd district) was named after him.

Not far from Joseph Roth's former places of work in Berlin is the Joseph-Roth-Diele , a restaurant decorated with letters, pictures and books by the writer on Potsdamer Straße .

Works

First editions (chronological)

  • The preferred student . narrative
    • Abridged version in: Österreichs Illustrierte Zeitung September 10, 1916, Vienna
    • First edition in: Joseph Roth. The stories. With an afterword by Hermann Kesten. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1973.
    • Undated manuscript in the Leo Baeck Institute, New York
  • Barbara . Narrative. In: Österreichs Illustrierte Zeitung April 14, 1918, Vienna
  • The spider web . novel
    • First printing in: Arbeiterzeitung. Vienna October 7th - November 6th 1923.
    • First edition posthumously with an afterword by PW Jansen. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1967
  • Hotel Savoy . A novel. The forge, Berlin 1924
  • The rebellion . Novel. The forge, Berlin 1924
  • April , the story of a love. JHW Dietz Nachf., Berlin 1925
  • The blind mirror , a little novel. JHW Dietz Nachf., Berlin 1925
  • Jews on the move. Essay, Die Schmiede, Berlin 1927: New edition: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1976, ISBN 3-462-01699-7 .
  • The Endless Escape - A Report. Novel. Kurt Wolff, Munich 1927
  • Zipper and his father . Novel. Kurt Wolff, Munich 1928
  • Right and left . Novel. Gustav Kiepenheuer, Berlin 1929
  • The mute prophet
    • Fragment: A Chapter Revolution. In: 24 new German storytellers. Edited by Hermann Kesten. Gustav Kiepenheuer, Berlin 1929
    • Fragment: The Mute Prophet. In: Die neue Rundschau , Berlin 1929
    • First edition posthumously with an afterword by Walter Lenning. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1966
  • Letters from Germany. In: Conclusion. A cross-section through German journalism. Edited by Ernst Glaeser. Brothers Enoch, Hamburg 1929
  • Job. Novel of a Simple Man , Gustav Kiepenheuer, Berlin 1930
  • Panopticon. Figures and backdrops. Knorr & Hirth, Munich 1930
  • Radetzkymarsch , Gustav Kiepenheuer, Berlin 1932
  • Station chief Fallmerayer . In: Novellas of German contemporary poets. Edited by Hermann Kesten . Allert de Lange, Amsterdam 1933
  • Tarabas , a guest on this earth. Querido, Amsterdam 1934
  • Triumph of beauty . Novella. Published in French translation by Blanche Gidon ( Le triomphe de la beauté ) in: Nouvelles littéraires , September 1934, Paris
  • The bust of the emperor . Novella. Published in French translation by Blanche Gidon ( Le buste de l'empereur ) in: Nouvelles littéraires , December 1934, Paris
  • The antichrist. Essay, Allert de Lange, Amsterdam 1934
  • The leviathan . Novella. Querido, Amsterdam 1940
    • Partial print: The coral dealer. In: Das neue Tage-Buch , December 22, 1934, Paris
  • The hundred days . Novel. Allert de Lange, Amsterdam 1935
  • Confession of a murderer, told in one night . Novel. Allert de Lange, Amsterdam 1936
  • The wrong weight. The story of a verification master . Querido, Amsterdam 1937
  • The Capuchin Crypt . Novel. De Gemeenschap, Bilthoven 1938
  • The story of the 1002nd nights . Novel. De Gemeenschap, Bilthoven 1939
  • The legend of the holy drinker . Novella. Allert de Lange, Amsterdam 1939
    • Partial print: The end of the legend of the holy drinker. In: The New Day Book June 10, 1939, Paris

expenditure

Works
  • Works in three volumes. Edited by Hermann Kesten , Cologne 1956
  • Werke , edited and introduced by Hermann Kesten, 4 vols. Cologne 1975–1976
  • Works , 6 vols. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1989–91 ( table of contents on Wikisource )
    • Volume 1–3: The journalistic work . Ed .: Klaus Westermann
    • Volumes 4–6: Novels and Stories . Ed .: Fritz Hackert
Letters
  • Letters 1911–1939 , edited by Hermann Kesten. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1970
  • But life marches on and takes us with it. The correspondence between Joseph Roth and the De Gemeenschap publishing house 1936–1939 . Edited and introduced by Theo Bijvoet and Madeleine Rietra. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 1991 ISBN 3-462-02101-X
  • Madeleine Rietra: “Do you always have to send money by return mail in order to be able to deal with you at all?” Joseph Roth and Barthold Fles in letters . In: Interbellum and Exile. Ed .: Sjaak Onderdelinden. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991. (Amsterdam Publications on Language and Literature. Vol. 90.) pp. 199–224
  • "Any friendship with me is pernicious". Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig. Correspondence 1927–1938 . Edited by Madeleine Rietra and Rainer-Joachim Siegel. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2011 ISBN 978-3-8353-0842-8
Partial editions

estate

Part of Roth's estate is in the German Literature Archive in Marbach . Individual pieces of it can be seen in the permanent exhibition in the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, in particular the manuscript on Job and his Radetzky March in the 70 episode preprint from the Frankfurter Zeitung .

Adaptations

Film adaptations

Audio books

alphabetically by title

Radio plays

literature

in chronological order in descending order

Web links

Wikisource: Joseph Roth  - Sources and full texts
Wikiquote: Joseph Roth  - Quotes
Commons : Joseph Roth  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files
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Portals
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Film adaptations

Sources and Notes

  1. ↑ S. Niels Bokhove: Nieuwe glimp van Nachum Roth. An ooggetuige remembers zich de vader van Joseph Roth . In: De Parelduiker 14 (2009), No. 4, pp. 37-44
  2. ^ F. Hackert: Joseph Roth. In: H. Steinecke (ed.): German poets of the 20th century. Berlin 1994, p. 363
  3. ↑ Hartmut Steinecke: German poets of the 20th century . Erich Schmidt Verlag GmbH & Co KG, January 1, 1994, ISBN 978-3-503-03073-6 , p. 363.
  4. ↑ Thomas Gerlach, Gert Schmidt: Ukraine: Between the Carpathians and the Black Sea . Trescher Verlag, 2011, ISBN 978-3-89794-192-2 , p. 199.
  5. ↑ See Steffen Höhne, Justus H. Ulbricht (Ed.): Where is the Ukraine? Determining the position of a European culture. Böhlau, Cologne 2009, p. 33, books.google.com
  6. ↑ Municipality of Vienna, Remembrance Path ( Memento of the original from October 22, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.wien.gv.at
  7. ↑ Józef Wittlin reports that Kindermann was a role model for Anton Wanzl in his memoirs of Joseph Roth ( memory book , p. 52).
  8. ^ To Gustav Kiepenheuer on his 50th birthday. Works in three volumes (1956) Vol. III, p. 835.
  9. ↑ His k. and k. apostolic majesty. Works in three volumes (1956), Vol. III, pp. 328–329
  10. ^ Heinz Lunzer, Victoria Lunzer-Talos: Joseph Roth. Life and work in pictures. Cologne 2009, ISBN 978-3-462-04102-6 , p. 62
  11. ↑ The new day
  12. ^ Wilhelm von Sternburg: Joseph Roth. A biography. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2009, ISBN 978-3-462-05555-9 , pp. 198 .
  13. ^ Letter to Herbert Ihering dated September 17, 1922
  14. ↑ cit. According to Joachim Kersten : Nobody is lucky with Germany. (via Sieburg), in border crossings. zu Klampen, Lüneburg 1999, ISBN 3-924245-77-0 , p. 61.
  15. ↑ On this Alexander Löwen: Socialism with a petty-bourgeois countenance. Joseph Roth's reports from the Soviet Union . In: Eastern Europe , Volume 62, Issue 4, April 2012, pp. 9–19.
  16. ^ Klaus Westermann (Ed.): Joseph Roth. The journalistic work 1929–1939. Third volume. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989, pp. 432 f, 710 f.
  17. ↑ See Bronsen (1974), p. 376 ff.
  18. ↑ No gentle death for a shy one. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . March 7, 2011.
  19. ↑ Andreas Hutter: No gentle death for a shy woman - Frieda Roth, the wife of the Austrian poet Joseph Roth, died in the Nazi gas chamber at Hartheim Castle . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . Zurich March 7, 2011, p. 37 .
  20. ^ Forbidden Land, A black German novel by John Eichler
  21. ↑ Andrea Rebuffé, cited in Bronsen (1974), p. 466.
  22. ↑ Alexandra Lübcke, Stefanie Michels: Theoretical considerations on memory concepts. In: Elisabeth Boesen, Fabienne Lentz (ed.): Migration and memory. Concepts and methods of research. Berlin 2010, p. 201, ISBN 978-3-643-10341-3
  23. ↑ Irmgard Keun: If we were all good. Memories and stories. Progress Verlag, Düsseldorf 1954, p. 146 f.
  24. ↑ Egon Erwin Kisch: Letters to Brother Paul and to Mother. Berlin 1987, p. 297
  25. ↑ The illustration by Volker Weidermann in: Ostend 1936 - Summer of Friendship, btb, Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2015 is also illuminating
  26. ↑ Bronsen (1974), p. 502.
  27. ↑ Letters 1911–1939. Cologne 1970, p. 249.
  28. ↑ knerger.de: The grave of Joseph Roth
  29. ^ Cimetière parisien de Thiais - Plan des concessions et des sépultures les plus demandées
  30. ↑ No more "New Objectivity". In: Die literäre Welt , January 17 and 24, 1930. Edition in: Roth, Werke Vol. 4, Cologne 1976, pp. 246-258.
  31. ↑ Conclusion ... 1976, p. 248.
  32. ↑ Conclusion ... 1976, p. 249.
  33. ↑ Conclusion ... 1976, p. 250.
  34. ↑ Conclusion ... 1976, p. 250 f.
  35. ↑ Quoted in: Geza von Cziffra: The holy drinker. Berlin 2006, p. 53.
  36. ↑ See Bronsen (1974), p. 175 ff.
  37. ↑ Roth had a solid reputation as a scrounger. There are, however, a few stories that have come down to us in which he passed the scumbled money directly on to an almost stranger in need.
  38. ↑ A simple change of his name: "Joseph Roth" becomes the "red Joseph". Elsewhere he signed “Josephus”.
  39. ↑ About Uwe Schweikert: The red Joseph. In: Heinz Ludwig Arnold (Ed.): Joseph Roth , text + criticism Sonderband, München 1982, pp. 40–55.
  40. ^ Franz Karl Stanzel: James Joyce in Kakanien (1904-1915). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-8260-6615-3 , p. 29.
  41. ↑ cf. in detail: William M. Johnston: Zur Kulturgeschichte Österreichs und Ungarns 1890–1938 (2015), p. 46 ff.
  42. ↑ Frankfurter Zeitung of April 17, 1932. Printed in Bronsen (1974), p. 400.
  43. ↑ Almuth Hammer: Remember the election. Literature as a medium of Jewish self-understanding. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004, p. 103.
  44. ^ Reich-Ranicki, Stauffenburg Verlag 1990/1994
  45. ↑ Volker Weidermann writes about this edition of the correspondence between Roth and Zweig: "The correspondence between these two friends is the most impressive book about the time of exile that I know.", In: Im free fall , Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung September 25, 2011, P. 27 (full-page review)
  46. ^ Badische-zeitung.de , literature & lectures , February 20, 2015, Katharina Brenner: Another world
  47. ↑ Information about the holdings of the DLA about Joseph Roth.
  48. ^ BR radio play Pool - Roth, Das Spinnennetz
personal data
SURNAME Roth, Joseph
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Roth, Moses Joseph (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH September 2, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Brody , East Galicia , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH May 27, 1939
Place of death Paris