Marching Into History

Marching into History: From the Early Novels of Joseph Roth to Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft Kati Tonkin B.A. (Hons), M.A. (Dist.) This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The University of Western Australia School of Humanities German and European Studies February 2005 Acknowledgements I wish to express my gratitude to the Österreichischer Austauschdienst for an Österreich-Stipendium and to the University of Western Australia for a Fay Gale Fellowship. These two awards enabled me to spend the period September 2001 to February 2002 in Vienna conducting the initial research for this thesis. Emeritus Professor Leslie Bodi gave me the benefit of his expertise in Austrian literature and culture in stimulating conversations over a period of several years. I am indebted to him also for providing me with many contacts in Vienna whose assistance in the early stages of my research was invaluable. In Vienna I was fortunate to meet with a number of scholars who have written on the work of Joseph Roth. I would like to thank Professor Moritz Csáky of the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften; Professor Wendelin Schmidt- Dengler from the Universität Wien; and Dr. Heinz Lunzer, director of the Literaturhaus Wien for their interest in my project and their academic advice. Dr. Lutz Musner kindly enabled me to attend lectures at the Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften of which he is the director. My supervisor, colleague and friend Associate Professor Peter Morgan has been a wonderful mentor and an inspiration since I first attended his classes as an undergraduate. I have greatly appreciated, enjoyed and benefited from our supervision meetings over the years, and I cannot thank him enough for his unfailing support and encouragement while I have been combining work and study. My family and friends have supported and encouraged me throughout and I am thankful for their confidence, their understanding and their patience. In particular, I would like to thank Barbara Tonkin for helpful comments on drafts and for her constant support, Annette Harres for proof reading the final draft, and Ian Gollagher, for everything. Abstract This thesis takes as its starting point the consensus among scholars and interpreters of Joseph Roth’s work that his writing can be divided into two periods: an early “socialist” phase and a later “monarchist” phase. In opposition to this view, a reading of Roth’s novels is put forward in which his desire to make sense of post-Habsburg Central Europe provides the underlying logic, thus reconciling his early novels with Radetzkymarsch and Die Kapuzinergruft. The first chapter addresses the common contention that the transformation in Roth’s work is the result of a deep identity crisis. An alternative reading of the relevance of Roth’s identity to his work is offered: namely, that Roth’s conviction that identity is multivalent explains his rejection of both nationalism and other “solutions” to the problems of post-war Europe, a sentiment that finds expression in his early novels. The interpretation of these novels, which represent Roth’s early attempts to give literary form to contemporary reality, is the focus of the second chapter of the thesis. In the third chapter Radetzkymarsch is analyzed as a historical novel in the terms first proposed by Georg Lukács, as a novel which facilitates the understanding of the present through the portrayal of the past. Paradoxically, it is the historical form that most effectively captures and illuminates the complex reality of Roth’s contemporary times. The fourth and final chapter demonstrates that Die Kapuzinergruft is not simply an inferior sequel to Radetzkymarsch, a nostalgic evocation of an idealized lost Habsburg world and condemnation of the 1930s present, but rather continues the dialogue between past and present begun in Radetzkymarsch. In this novel, written before and in the immediate aftermath of the Anschluß of Austria to Nazi Germany, it is not Roth but his narrator who takes flight from reality, behaviour that Roth condemns as leading to the repetition of mistakes from the past and the failure to prevent the ultimate political catastrophe. Contents Introduction........................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Identity and Ideology ...................................................................... 19 A Central European Experience ..................................................................... 19 Post-War Alienation ....................................................................................... 24 Identity and the Nation ................................................................................... 32 Identity and Nationalism in Juden auf Wanderschaft .................................... 34 “Die süße Freiheit, nichts mehr darzustellen als mich selbst” ....................... 53 Chapter 2: The Early Novels.............................................................................. 55 “Der rote Joseph”?.......................................................................................... 55 Socialism and the Early Novels...................................................................... 58 The Reactionary Mentality and its Origins: Das Spinnennetz........................ 61 Inequality and the Socialist Revolution: Hotel Savoy .................................... 93 History as Repetition: Die Rebellion............................................................ 108 Coda: From the Early Novels to Radetzkymarsch........................................ 121 Chapter 3: Radetzkymarsch as Historical Novel............................................. 124 Form and Truth............................................................................................. 126 Truth and Fiction in the Historical Novel..................................................... 130 “Er war Slowene”: Identity – Myth – Generational Patterns ....................... 136 “Man lebte im Schatten des Großvaters!”: The Crisis of Carl Joseph ......... 145 The March: “Einmal in der Woche, am Sonntag, war Österreich” .............. 161 Behind the Supranational Myth: What is “Österreich”? .............................. 174 The False Opposition between “dazumal” and “heutzutage”....................... 192 Chapter 4: Die Kapuzinergruft and the Confrontation with History ........... 196 “[Ich] sehe […] mich genötigt”: Monarchist out of Necessity..................... 199 The Dialogue between Past and Present in Die Kapuzinergruft .................. 206 Conclusion.......................................................................................................... 230 Bibliography ...................................................................................................... 237 Introduction Critics have never been able to reconcile Roth's early writing with his most famous novel, Radetzkymarsch, and its sequel Die Kapuzinergruft.1 According to the widely accepted periodic-thematic divisions of Roth’s work, the early fiction is grouped under the rubric “socialist” and the later works are interpreted as manifestations of the idealizing nostalgia of an alcoholic monarchist with a decreasing grip on reality.2 This categorization can be traced back to Roth’s friend Hermann Kesten, who published the first collection of Roth’s works in 1956: In den fünfzehn Jahren, da er Bücher veröffentlichte, ward Roth aus einem skeptischen, zuweilen pessimistischen Moralisten ein legitimistischer Katholik, aus einem Linksradikalen ein Rechtskonservativer, aus einem Mitarbeiter sozialdemokratischer Blätter ein Inspirator sozialdoktrinärer Zeitschriften, aus einem ‘Frontsoldaten’ ein ‘österreichischer Leutnant’, aus einem Neuerer ein Erbe, aus einem witzigen Spötter ein frommer Prediger.3 Kesten’s dualistic assessment of Roth’s writing was adopted and developed by Ingeborg Sültemeyer in the late 1960s in the first major study of Roth’s early work,4 before which very little critical attention was paid to the early novels.5 As a result Roth was viewed as a conservative writer.6 Since Sültemeyer’s ground- 1 All references to Roth’s fiction and journalism are to Joseph Roth, Werke, 6 vols, vols. 1-3, Das journalistische Werk, ed. Klaus Westermann; vols 4-6, Romane und Erzählungen, ed. Fritz Hackert (Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1989-91). Roman numerals indicate the volume and Arabic numerals indicate the page number. 2 The terms “socialist” and “monarchist” are used in this study to refer to the conventional reading of Roth’s work as consisting of two antithetical phases. 3 Hermann Kesten, “Joseph Roth,” Wort in der Zeit 9 (1959): 6. 4 Ingeborg Sültemeyer, Das Frühwerk Joseph Roths 1915-1926. Studien und Texte (Wien; Freiburg; Basel: Herder, 1976). This monograph is the book-version of Sültemeyer’s dissertation of 1969. 5 Sültemeyer outlines the few studies in which the early work had been discussed before the completion of her dissertation in 1969: Sültemeyer, Das Frühwerk 16-17. 6 Wolf R. Marchand, Joseph Roth und völkisch-nationalistische Wertbegriffe. Untersuchungen zur politisch-weltanschaulichen Entwicklung Roths und ihrer Auswirkung auf sein Werk (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974) 1; Klaus Zelewitz, “Joseph Roth: Zweimal politische Illusion,” in Joseph Roth: Werk und Wirkung, ed. Bernd M. Kraske (Bonn: Bouvier, 1988), 101. Schmidt- Dengler notes that in the 1950s and 1960s Roth appears in literary histories largely as the author of one novel, Radetzkymarsch: Wendelin Schmidt-Dengler,

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