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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In "The Radetzky March," Joseph Roth's 1932 novel about the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, there is an Army surgeon, Max Demant, whose wife loathes him. She is very beautiful. We first encounter her as Demant walks into their bedroom. She is wearing only a pair of blue panties, and is brandishing a large pink powder puff. "Why didn't you knock?" she asks poisonously. He adores her, and that isn't his only problem. He never wanted to be in the Army, but he didn't have the money to set up a private practice. He is dumpy and clumsy and nearsighted. He can't ride; he can't fence; he can't shoot. He is intelligent and melancholic. He is a Jew. The other officers despise him, the more so since his wife deceives him at every opportunity. One night, a young lieutenant--Baron Carl Joseph von Trotta, the hero of the novel and Demant's only friend--innocently walks Frau Demant home after the opera. The next day, in the officers' club, a swinish captain, Tattenbach, taunts Demant about his wife's adventure. When Demant insults him back, Tattenbach screams, "Yid, yid, yid!," and challenges him to a duel at dawn. According to the Army's code of honor, Demant must go to the duel, in which he knows he will die, and for nothing. Later, in the night, he reconciles himself to this. His life has offered him little but insults. Why regret leaving it? He takes a drink. Soon he feels calm, lighthearted--already dead, almost. Then Trotta comes rushing in, weeping, begging him to escape, and at the sight of someone shedding tears for him Demant loses hold of his hard-won stoicism: "All at once he again longed for the dreariness of his life, the disgusting garrison, the hated uniform, the dullness of routine examinations, the stench of a throng of undressed troops, the drab vaccinations, the carbolic smell of the hospital, his wife's ugly moods. . . . Through the lieutenant's sobbing and moaning, the shattering call of this living earth broke violently."
It goes on breaking. The sleigh arrives to take Demant to the duel: "The bells jingled bravely, the brown horses raised their cropped tails and dropped big, round, yellow steaming turds on the snow." The sun rises; roosters crow; birds chirp. The world is beautiful. Indeed, Demant's luck changes. At the duelling ground, he discovers that his myopia has vanished. He can see again! He is thrilled, and forgets that he is in the middle of a duel: "A voice counted 'One!' . . . Why, I'm not nearsighted, he thought, I'll never need glasses again. From a medical standpoint, it was inexplicable. [He] decided to check with ophthalmologists. At the very instant that the name of a certain specialist flashed through his mind, the voice counted, 'Two!' " He raises his pistol and, on the count of three, accurately shoots Tattenbach, who also shoots him, and they both die on the spot.
Thus, a third of the way through his novel, Roth kills off its most admirable character, in a scene of comedy as well as tears. The crime, supposedly, is the Army's, but behind the Army stands a larger principle. You marry a beautiful woman, and she hates you; you kill a scoundrel, and he kills you back; life is sweet, and you can't have it. For this tragic evenhandedness, Roth has been compared to Tolstoy. For his dark comedy, he might also be compared to his contemporary Franz Kafka. In Kafka's words, "There is infinite hope--but not for us."
With the writings of Kafka and Robert Musil, Roth's novels constitute Austria-Hungary's finest contribution to early-twentieth-century fiction, yet his career was such as to make you wonder that he managed to produce novels at all, let alone sixteen of them in sixteen years. For most of his adult life, Roth was a hardworking journalist, travelling back and forth between Berlin and Paris, his two home bases, but also reporting from Russia, Poland, Albania, Italy, and southern France. He didn't have a home; he lived in hotels. His novel-writing was done at cafe tables, between newspaper deadlines, amid the bloody events--strikes, riots, assassinations--that marked Europe's passage from the First World War to the Second, and which seemed more remarkable than anything a novelist could imagine. His early books bespeak their comfortless birth, but his middle ones don't. They are solid structures, full of psychological penetration and tragic force. "The Radetzky March," his masterpiece, was the culmination of this middle phase. Shortly after it came out, he was forced into exile by the Third Reich. In the years that followed, he lived mainly in Paris, where, while he went on writing, he also swiftly drank himself to death. He died in 1939 and was soon forgotten.
Roth was a man of many friends, mostly writers--the celebrated biographer and memoirist Stefan Zweig, the playwright Ernst Toller, the novelist Ernst Weiss--and his work was rescued by a friend. After the war, the journalist Hermann Kesten, a longtime colleague of his, gathered together what he could find of Roth's writings and, in 1956, brought them out in three volumes. With this publication, the Roth revival began, but slowly. For one thing, much of his work was missing from Kesten's collection. Because Roth was always on the move, he had no files, no boxes of books in the attic. Meanwhile, the Third Reich had done its best to wipe out any trace of his career. (In 1940, when the Germans invaded the Netherlands, they destroyed the entire stock of his...
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