The Radetzky March

"Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March. It’s a novel covering three generations of an Austrian family, beginning in the mid 19th century and ending in 1916. But it concentrates on the last generation. Yes. It’s a fascinating story and, of course, one that’s less well-known to us than the British story. One of the things that interests me about the Austro-Hungarian Empire is that it’s an early reflection of the European Union. It had the same problem with language. I remember reading in a book by Norman Stone about this thing called the Kommandosprache , which they used to have in the Austro-Hungarian army. All these different regiments were made up of different nationalities, and most of the men spoke different languages. The Kommandosprache was the dozen words they needed to know: shoot, don’t shoot, present arms, that sort of thing. For everything more subtle there was the regiment’s own native language. There was even one regiment that spoke English. The EU doesn’t have an army, but it has related problems, and no Kommandosprache . When I wrote The People’s Act of Love I had a Jewish character who emerges from the First World War as an officer in a regiment of free Czech and Slovak soldiers, but nevertheless, unlike his Czechoslovakian comrades, mourns the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to which they all once belonged. I hadn’t read The Radetzky March then, but when I did, I was relieved to find out that I had been right. The novel was written by a Jew, and it’s suffused with this elegiac spirit. It’s certainly not a criticism of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is, as all great novels are, an elegy for the folly of humanity, but it’s no kind of indictment. It’s a lyrical summoning of a remarkable world, a balance between so many ethnoses, and the thing that brought them together more than anything else, as is usually the case with empires, was the military. The generations in this book are military men. You understand through them that the centre of the empire is not Vienna but the provinces, and that at the eastern edge of the empire, the supposed line dividing us, the Austro-Hungarians, from them, the Russians, is not so much a border as a shading, a merging, a swampy world of doubt, distrust and lassitude. There’s just a crowd of wild Jews straddling the border who have powerfully ambivalent feelings about both the Austrians and the Slavs."

"This is a book about the end of the Habsburg Empire and about a father and a son, and it was the favourite book of most journalists who worked in the Balkans. It has these themes of melancholy and the Balkans is a very melancholy place, especially in autumn. This book is very evocative of that. Roth came of age at the end of the Habsburg Empire and he killed himself on the Rue des Tournelles, just two streets away from where I live. He was an alcoholic. He was one of the great European novelists of the time but is very cultish – not as widely known as he should be. He writes very evocatively and hauntingly of a vanished world, about losing your youth, your friends, your family. It’s not cheerful, but the Balkans is not a cheerful place. “He writes very evocatively and hauntingly of a vanished world, about losing your youth, your friends, your family.” The father and son relationship in the book is a very damaged one. The son is a failed soldier who lets his father down in every imaginable way. There is a scene where he’s talking to his father, a typically strong figure, and he can’t shake thoughts of death. He’s haunted by death and keeps saying something like; ‘The dead, the dead.’ So, it’s also about him longing for the love of his father. It’s about longing."

"I know The Radetzky March has already been chosen by other people on Five Books. I’ve done so anyway because Joseph Roth is a totally lovable man and it’s a beautifully written novel. It’s twice been translated into English and both versions are wonderful, though I personally prefer the first one. It’s the story of three generations of one family who are ennobled after an act of heroism by the oldest member. Some scenes take place in Vienna, but about a third of the novel is set on the edge of empire in Galicia on the Russian frontier. Many of the characters have Hungarian and Slovenian names, and you feel the mix of ethnicities and nationalities. The emperor himself appears only twice in the novel, but he’s a red thread throughout, pictures with his China blue eyes and side whiskers hanging from walls and Radetkzy March played regularly. You hear a few strains in a brothel, or in the street on a barrel organ. The novel, though quite short, features deeply moving set pieces with great subtlety of feeling. Ones that stick in my mind are between an old man and his dying servant or a Jewish doctor who fights a duel and is going to die from his injuries. It was published in 1932 and you see the decline of empire through three generations of the same family. To a certain extent in this novel, but more in his other writings, Roth wrote about what the decline of the empire meant to the Jews. The double assassination at Sarajevo was a terrible moment, in Roth’s view, because it heralded the end of his homeland. With competing ethnicities and the rise of nationalism and so many wanting their own country, the Jews no longer had a homeland. So he lost his country. Roth was born in 1894 in Slovenia. His father left when he was a baby and later went insane. Roth was himself a heavy, heavy drinker. After 1919, he worked for a while for an Austrian newspaper, writing typically Viennese feuilleton s , the colour piece on the front page. He was a master at this and said it was all about saying true things in half a page. He became very well known and highly paid. Then he left for the Frankfurter Zeitung , which sent him as correspondent to Paris and Berlin. There he drank himself to death; he said the only way he could live was by drinking to excess, even if that was shortening his life. Much of his writing has been published in English, including his journalism when in Germany. He was a monarchist to the end because he felt that under Emperor Franz Josef ethnic groups managed to cohabit. Roth had a deep nostalgia for that period, even if also very critical of it. The emperor was not an anti-Semite. He was good for the Jews, and they liked him. In my book I write about how, when his son Rudolf committed suicide at Mayerling, my great-grandmother was so upset she gave premature birth to her first son. They identified with him and his family woes. Franz Josef was very firm in a number of situations, including when he refused to confirm Karl Lueger as mayor of Vienna because of his anti-Semitic statements. It’s said Hitler was very influenced by Karl Lueger and that he even studied his way of speaking. So yes, maybe he did pick up some of it in Vienna. He went back to a very medieval kind of anti-Semitism in Mein Kampf , of the Jewish man waiting behind street corners to leap on gentile woman, of blood rites and the like. I suppose he may have formed some of these ideas in his native Austria. But some of my family—and some authors, like George Clare who we’ll get to in a minute—thought that, in the long term, Karl Lueger had not been such an enemy of the Jews. They thought the same would happen with Hitler in 1933, that when he was elected he’d tone down his anti-Semitism. Another book I’d like to mention is Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities , an unfinished three-volume novel. Musil was an engineer by training and he too wrote about the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but in such a different way from Roth that it’s almost the opposite. Musil centres his story in Vienna and writes much like a scientist, going into an almost clinical analysis of the interactions between people. Roth’s focus is at the border of the empire, and his approach is much more emotional and poetic. They make an interesting contrast in the study of the same period. Yes. He wasn’t a Jew, though. And then you have Stefan Zweig and The World of Yesterday ."

"It’s an extraordinary account of a world collapsing. It conveys the lost world of Mitteleuropa and the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire. And he does it brilliantly. The Trotta family are quite mediocre, only relatively interesting minor officials—and in the case of the son, a very minor soldier—that is, intrinsically not particularly exciting characters, who nevertheless convey a very interesting world. It’s an extraordinarily powerful book. Roth is a very interesting writer, a brilliant writer, who lived a very tragic life. We shall publish another Roth novel, Rebellion, next year. Not so much that, as civil war and invasion. Certainly that, yes. One of the things that struck me as a Scot living in Paris in my twenties was how lucky we have been in Britain, being so insular. We haven’t really had an invasion since 1066, or a civil war since the 1640s, whereas every other European country has had regular invasions and wars marked by extraordinary violence. All the books I’ve chosen do rather reflect that; even Cellini’s Italy is invaded by Charles V and Francois Ier."

"The Radetzky March is about three generations of a family set during the twilight of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The first soldier in the Trotta family saves the Emperor Franz Joseph during battle and is elevated to nobility, but by the time we get to his grandson and the brink of World War I , the family is much diminished. It’s not so much about war as it is about the ways in which the family has been shaped by its relationship with the military and its relationship with a fading empire. It’s so brilliantly written. I’m not from a military family. My maternal grandfather was a diplomat, my dad was in the Peace Corps and my mother worked in international medical aid in various capacities. One of my brothers joined the Marines and one joined the Army. The military is increasingly a family business, which is something that worries me. You don’t want to have a warrior caste separate from the rest of American society. Perhaps because so few people have a direct connection to military service, we tend to put veterans on a pedestal, to consider them personifications of patriotism. Or, on the other hand, to assume that they’re damaged. These contrasting but prevailing views of veterans are corrosive. Take the Navy Seal who claimed to have shot Osama Bin Laden. He tweeted, in the wake of President Trump’s defeat at the polls, “I cannot believe we invaded Iraq for these…people,” projecting the idea that citizens should follow veterans’ political lead. “Veterans don’t deploy themselves. Veterans are sent to war by governments that answer, to varying degrees, to their citizenry” In his Farewell Orders, George Washington told the Continental Army “it is earnestly recommended to all the troops that … they should carry with them into civil society the most conciliating dispositions, and that they should prove themselves not less virtuous and useful as citizens, than they have been persevering and victorious as soldiers.” That sense that we are all citizens and that we all must take part in the work of citizenship becomes attenuated when there is a warrior caste that is set apart and fetishized."