Joseph Roth always knew when to get out. As a young man, he ran like hell from his birthplace of Brody, a small, struggling town in Galicia, on the northern fringe of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He arrived in Vienna in 1913, when it was the most intellectually thrilling city in Europe, and left when it shrivelled after the first world war. Having become a successful journalist, he fled Germany for the first time in 1925, on the morning after Paul von Hindenburg was elected president, and again, permanently, when Hitler became chancellor. And he left the world, his mind and body brutalised by alcoholism, in May 1939, between the annexation of Austria and the invasion of Poland, as if constitutionally incapable of witnessing the culmination of everything he had been warning about. He died in a Parisian pauper’s hospital at the age of 44, delirious, strapped to his bed to prevent him from running away. His last utterance, it seems, was a scream: “I have to get out of here!”
Flight, as the title of the first ever English-language biography of Roth indicates, is one way of making sense of his chaotic life. Another, Keiron Pim suggests, is paradox: “If you think you’ve placed him, he’ll prove you wrong.” He was a victim and critic of antisemitism yet sometimes a self-hating practitioner who called his editors “scheming Jews” and may have converted to Catholicism in 1936. Once a socialist, he adopted the bearing of an aristocrat and became an arch-nostalgist for empire in novels such as his 1932 masterpiece The Radetzky March. He thought and wrote in German but came to despise it as “a dead language”. At his best, claims the critic James Wood, “there is no greater modern writer than Joseph Roth”, yet several of his novels feel slapdash and incomplete.
