Just as Gustav Mahler wove a bugle fanfare into his symphonies, so Joseph Roth wove martial music into his novels. In Roth’s case, it was invariably Johann Strauss’s ‘Radetzky March’, a signature tune which tum-te-tums through his earlier fiction and then becomes the title of this, his 1932 masterpiece.
For Roth, like Mahler, military tunes were the very symbol of Austria-Hungary. They underpinned a whole way of life, uniting that multi-ethnic empire that stretched precariously across central Europe. Born in 1894, Roth arrived too late to be a part of the astonishing creativity of Vienna in the dying days of Habsburg power. Most of his output focused on the sense of fracture and alienation after its collapse – but The Radetzky March examines instead its protracted death, and reveals Roth’s ambivalent attitude to the ancien rZgime.
A saga depicting three generations of the Trotta family, it opens at the battle of Solferino in 1859, where the first Trotta of the story saves the young Emperor Franz-Josef’s life. From that point on, the fate of the obsessively loyal Trottas is linked to the vast Empire itself.
Most of the story focuses on the grandson of the ‘Hero of Solferino’, Carl Joseph, who is haunted by the example of service shown by his grandfather and his father, both fanatical imperial servants. A decent, mediocre, patriotic lieutenant, he nevertheless feels overwhelmed by the permeation of the empire into every part of his experience. He is fated to die in the mud of 1914, ‘not with sword in hand, but with a couple of buckets of water’. Such irony and compassion underpin the whole work.
The novel is a remarkable piece of compression. Although relatively slim in size, it stands with Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities as a classic analysis of Austria-Hungary in all its vast scope. It ranges from the barrack towns of the eastern border to Vienna; from vivid and exact landscape descriptions to the staterooms of the aging Emperor himself.
English translations have been available before, but this one, by a seriously committed Rothian, Michael Hofmann, is a big event. Thanks to Granta, a recent string of Hofmann’s translations has given English-speakers the best chance ever to get a handle on Roth’s wider work. In his excellent introduction, Hofmann rightly emphasises the extent to which The Radetzky March is a maturing of Roth’s style. The earlier novels, such as Right and Left and Flight Without End, often bewilder readers with their formal restlessness; the sense, at times, that they have been roughly sketched out.
By contrast, The Radetzky March is, in Hofmann’s words, ‘done in oils’. The episodes unfold with unerring dramatic judgment, and the descriptive passages are both rich and exact. Roth is particularly good on faces, as in this episode on a train from Vienna, when the young Carl Joseph watches his sleeping father:
The myriad wrinkled bluish membranes of the closed eyelids trembled continually and faintly
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