The Emperor's Tomb (Works of Joseph Roth)

"... for we loved nostalgia just as unthinkingly as we loved pleasure." Thus Franz Ferdinand Trotta, the narrator of The Emperor's Tomb, launches his confession of futility, irrelevance, and humiliation. He's mocking his own folly, one hopes the reader recognizes. That's the whole point of Trotta's `autobiography' -- his profound embarrassment at his life and with the frivolity of his generation, "that arrogant decadence whose doomed but proud sons we all were." Trotta's one other constant emotion is anger, rage at the stupidity of demolishing the old order - the multi-ethnic Hapsburgia - but replacing it with something vastly less worthy, the rising `National Socialism' of the `20s and `30s, where "... they all sing `Die Wach am Rhein'. Austria will perish at the hands of the Nibelungen fantasy, gentlemen!" Trotta's `narrative voice' is so convincingly personal that many readers have fallen into the error of assuming that he `speaks' for the author. It's not so. Joseph Roth was not a "Trotta", not an aristocrat, not even a recently coined one. He was certainly not an idle dilettante, and not a gentile. Roth was a Jew from a stetl on the outer edge of Galicia, and a busy leftist journalist throughout the `20s, the period when his character Trotta purports to be unburdening himself of his dislillusionment. If there's a prototype of Roth himself in "The Emperor's Tomb", it's the `gifted' son of Trotta's Jewish companion-in-arms, the young radical who is killed in an aborted revolution. Trotta does not speak for Roth except in his realization that his privileged circle of Viennese intellectuals were in fact no better than smug drones. Trotta is above all an object of satire, and Roth toys with him sardonically by letting him satirize himself most cruelly. The Emperor's Tomb is usually taken to be a sequel to Roth's novel "The Radetsky March". That's a misperception. The two works are of different genres. The Radetsky March is what German critics call a "Roman" -- a work of large scale, with many themes, a `novel of generations' narrated from the dispassionate distance of third-person. The Emperor's Tomb is a `novella', just 150 pages, and fiercely concentrated on its single theme of folly. Yes, the narrator is a Trotta, as he announce is the first sentence -- "Our name is Trotta" -- and reasserts in his last phrase -- "So where could I go now, a Trotta?" His fictional grandfather's brother was the Slovenian peasant soldier who saved the Emperor's life at the Battle of Solferino, for which the family was ennobled. That's the starting-point of The Radetsky March, a grand depiction of the inherent weaknesses of the great Austro-Hungarian Empire, which inevitably led to its collapse. This sly novella, The Emperor's Tomb, is more a comic monologue, an `aside' rather than a sequel. I didn't use the word "comic" casually. The Emperor's Tomb is a very comic book, though the humor is of the caustic sort that curls your lips in a sneer rather than a smil

Although this novel is not a real sequel to The Radetzky March, it takes place within the confines of the same period, the wasteful and waning days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. But it goes a step further and brings us to the sad, purposeless, lost days following the end of the empire, where all that remains as a symbol of past glory is Franz Joseph's tomb, outside of which stands a lackluster guard who, in effect, is guarding a memory that is fading away. And from these vacant days emerges an evil, the Third Reich, almost as a consequence of the indifference that the narrator, Trotta, exhibits. Trotta, like the empire, loses everything in the end: his friends, his mother, his wife, his son, and his country. He is the ultimate alienated modern man in search of meaning. He longs for the certainty of the past and cannot change or adapt to the present. And he is utterly lost in the face of overwhelming evil.All of this is presented in exquisite prose and imagery that captures delicate emotional nuances and historical events. Joseph Roth accomplishes more in just a few pages than most writers do in a hundred. He was a great artist, a literary giant, whose genius I hope will be fully recognized in the coming years.

Roth's novel of Austria-Hungary in the years before the first world war, The Radetzsky March, is one of the best novels I've read recently. Though billed as a sequel to The Radetzky March, this novel is considerably different with only a handful of minor characters that overlap the two stories. It has its pleasures but they are of a different nature.Certain differences leap out right away. First, this "novel" is considerably shorter than The Radetzky March. Second, this novel is written in the first person, from the point of view of Franz Ferdinand von Trotta. Third, the language is considerably more colloquial than the more formal structure Roth used in the previous novel. Everything contributes to what feels like a more casual experience than The Radetzky March.Still, Roth has a lot to say about the experience of pre- and post-Great War Austrians. Von Trotta, the narrator of the story, is a pretentious young man hanging out in the coffee shops of Vienna completely unprepared for the experience of war he will soon face. He sees little fighting, however, as he is captured early and spends the bulk of the war as a prisoner in Russia. Returning to his wife (with whom he never consummated his marriage) and mother, he finds a world he no longer understands through which he must find his way.I am always fascinated how so many things we only consider "modern" problems crop up in these old stories. The intriguing lesbianism Trotta's wife engages in during his absence is one example. The vanity and conning of Trotta's elderly mother is another. It amazes me how we can read a novel like this and see how little human nature changes over the decades.Though my personal taste leans more towards the formalism of The Radetzky March and its deep examination of the relationships between fathers and sons, there is much to enjoy here. It certainly has a more modern flavor that will appeal to many readers as some of Roth's other novels may not. Roth's ability to find truth in character is also on good show here. I would recommend it highly.

Spanning the First World War, this short novel outlines the fall from grace of a minor Austro-Hungarian Noble, a scion of a once proud and heroic family.It is quite a bleak book in many ways - and reminds me of the world Beckett creates in Waiting for Godot. There is an inevitability in the fall and no action could have prevented it.The language used (at least in this translation) is minimal and strips to the bone images - making those that remain quite haunting. One which has remained with me for several days is the image of violets blooming from the bones of dead men.Certainly a great, if troubling, book.

"the emperor's tomp" continues where "radezky march" left off. Unfortunately it is not one of joseph roth's best books, despite some very touching scenes, when he writes up to his usual standards. roth aimed to write a story of the austria before hitler, but it seems he lost it somewhere in the middle, and couldn't remember what he was doing. at the time he was writing this book roth was already a lost-to-the-world alcoholic, which shows. Still, the heart-wrenching sadness of some passages make it an interesting read. I wouldn't recomend it as a first introduction to roth's work though (better start with radezky march).