The Radetzky March, first published in Berlin in 1932, is regarded as the most significant novel by Joseph Roth (1894–1939) and the work that clearly defines the author’s public image as a Hapsburg nostalgist. Joseph Roth was born in Brody, Galicia, a town of about 20,000 with an ethnically diverse population of German, Slavic, and Jewish citizens in what is now Ukraine, with its background of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The title refers to the traditional last item in the concert music of Viennese Johann Strauss Sr. and Jr.: the Radetzky March (op. 228, composed by Strauss Sr. in 1848), composed to commemorate Field Marshal Johann Josef Wenzel Graf Radetzky von Radetz, who in his 70s saved Italy for the Hapsburgs, albeit temporarily, through his military victories of 1848–49.
The novel follows the Trotta family from its founder (a Slovenian farmer who appears in cameo) over three generations, as it emerges onto the stage of the AustroHungarian Empire, ascends to a minor title, and then falls into insignificance as the empire declines (the head of the family dies in 1916, the same year as the Emperor Franz Joseph). This trope of generations (familiar in Thomas Mann‘s Buddenbrooks), 1901) allows three different views of the empire to emerge, as the family becomes Hapsburg rather than remaining Slovene or becoming German-Austrian, but ultimately loses its international reference point as the empire ceases to exist.
The army transforms farmers into Hapsburg civil servants. By accident and instinct of training, the first Hapsburg Trotta saves the young Emperor Franz Joseph from a sniper’s bullet at the battle of Solferino (1859). His son benefits from the emperor’s subsequent patronage of the family that now has a title (Trotta von Sipolje, after the family’s home village); this second Hapsburg generation has an exemplary civil service job as district commissioner. The family has moved from speaking only Slovenian and the harsh German of the army to speaking “the nasal German of higher civil servants and the Austrian upper middle class.”
The final member of this family, Lieutenant Carl Joseph von Trotta, loses his faith in the system and in himself. Despite his military education and imperial protection, he does not feel he can live up to his ancestors and tries to leave the army and live among the peasants along the empire’s eastern border. Yet then he attends his ex-regiment’s centenary celebration, which is interrupted by news of the 1914 Sarajevo assassination. He returns to the army and is killed in the Ukraine trying to fetch water for his wounded men.
Joseph Roth in the Place de l’Odéon, Paris, c.1925. [Bridgeman Images]
What decisively removes this story from the realm of nostalgia is a subplot: The Trotta who had saved the emperor one day finds “his” story in a school reader, described in an exaggerated, heroic revision. He writes a protest letter to the ministry of education, which responds that such pieces help to build the “patriotic sentiments of each new generation.” Finally, he demands an audience with the emperor, who commiserates but notes that he must accede to his ministers. Despite the emperor’s sense of his own powerlessness, education bureaucrats quietly remove the story from the reader’s next edition. This parable reveals how the empire was both less and more than it was presumed to be: It brought families like the Trottas onto the world stage, albeit at the cost of their traditional identities, and it did so without necessarily making a clear assessment of the price they paid for their essential decency and work, and for their essential thoughtlessness and lack of self-awareness.
Significantly, the Trotta family as a whole does not die out, only the baronial line. A nontitled branch of the family appears in Roth’s 1938 sequel, Emperor’s Tomb (Kapuzinergruft, 1938; translated 1984). There, Franz Ferdinand Trotta survives the war and returns to a Vienna that offers him no guidance. He wants to return to Sipolje, the family village in Slovenia, but that search for roots is revealed as a sentimental, romantic urge for the exotic. He eventually marries and fathers a child, without necessarily finding himself. In the Emperor’s Tomb, an illegitimate Trotta cousin, Joseph Branco, a peddler and country bumpkin, is the only one who could express, at least on a practical level, what had happened to the Dual Monarchy: “ ‘Every year I could do business everywhere in Bohemia, Moravia, Silesia, Galicia’—and he counted up all the old Crown Lands. ‘And now everything is forbidden. And with it all I have is a passport.’ ”
Taken together, these two novels mark the Dual Monarchy of Austro-Hungary as the continuing fate of a region and its people because of the way monarchies colonized the imaginations of the people. While it created new classes and an image of imperial greatness around its aging emperor and his capital, its human cost was great, as its Trottas became homeless, rootless, and exhausted, even as they helped to propagate some modicum of civility and a perhaps false vision of humanity in a region continually destabilized by the centrifugal forces of ethnicity, religion, and nationalism. Like the Field Marshall Radetzky who fought for the Hapsburgs in 1859, such families won incidental battles only to lose wars and disappear into history, victims of delusions with great political consequences.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bronsen, David. Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie. Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1974.
Hughes, Jon. Facing Modernity: Fragmentation, Culture and Identity in Joseph Roth’s Writings in the 1920’s. London: Maney, 2006.
Koester, Rudolf. Joseph Roth. Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1982.
Rosenfeld, Sidney. Understanding Joseph Roth. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001.
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