The writer and journalist Joseph Roth was born in 1894 in the Habsburg crown territory of Galicia, in what is now western Ukraine. An eastern European of impoverished Jewish origins, he craved literary recognition and won it, deservedly, for his 1932 novel, The Radetzky March. In prose of dark foreboding, it articulates the lost political tolerance and cosmopolitanism of the long-vanished Austro-Hungarian empire. With the rise of nationalist demagogueries in interwar Europe and antisemitism in Hitler’s Germany, the book was fed to the flames in the Nazi book-burnings of 1933 and afterwards banned. Roth began to detest Germany and, as the Nazis brutishly consolidated power, the German people collectively. The bonfires were still raging when he wrote to his wealthy Viennese Jewish writer friend and patron Stefan Zweig: “The Prussians are representatives of the chemical inferno, of the industrialised inferno” – a remark that seems to foreshadow the assembly line gassings and burnings at the Nazi death camps. Haunted by the “impossibility” of being a Jew in a post-Habsburg world, Roth took to the bottle and, in 1939, died in Paris, destitute. He was 44.
Keiron Pim’s is the first English-language biography of Roth, and what a superb book it is – impeccably researched, extremely readable and, it must be said, grimly relevant in the wake of Putin’s assault on Ukraine. With rare verve, Pim exalts Roth as a novelist of tragic pan-European yearning. The Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy had, in Roth’s view, united Turkish Tatars, Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs, Bulgarian Muslims, Jews, Roma and Russian “old believers” in a great east-to-west, Muslim-to-Christian supranational community of peoples. But Hitler and Stalin had unleashed a “viciousness” far greater than anything the German-Hungarian rulers could have dreamed of. Jewish communities would disappear overnight in Roth’s ancestral Ukraine as totalitarian intolerance took hold. Fascism was Europe’s new “hell on earth”, he warned his readers.
