I am a conservative and a Catholic, consider Austria my fatherland, and desire the return of the
    Empire.
           -Joseph Roth

It has aptly been noted that the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth was a man at war with his times.  Many of the Post World War I generation convinced themselves that the ancient regimes and institutions had lead Europe, particularly the naive youth of Europe, into a self-destructive war which no one really wanted and, as a result of this determination, declared themselves unalterably opposed to the antediluvian system.  Roth, in his multivolume, multigenerational saga of the extended von Trotta family, more accurately diagnosed the rot in his own generation, the lack of beliefs and values that had contributed to the unthinking descent into war:

    I lived in the cheerful, carefree company of young aristocrats whose company, second only to that
    of artists, I loved best under the old Empire.  With them I shared a skeptical frivolity, a
    melancholy curiosity, a wicked insouciance, and the pride of the doomed, all signs of the
    disintegration which at that time we still did not see coming.  Above the ebullient glasses from
    which we drank, invisible Death was already crossing his bony hands.  We swore without malice
    and blasphemed without thought.  Alone and old, distant and omnipresent in the great and
    brilliant pattern of the Empire, lived and ruled the old Emperor, Franz Joseph.  Perhaps in the
    hidden depths of our souls there slumbered that awareness which is called foreboding, the
    awareness above all that the old Emperor was dying, day by day with every day that he lived, and
    with him the Monarchy--not so much our Fatherland as our Empire; something greater, broader,
    more all-embracing than a Fatherland.  Our wit and our frivolity came from hearts that were
    heavy with the feeling that we were dedicated to death, from a foolish pleasure in everything
    which asserted life: from pleasure in balls, new wine, girls food, long walks, eccentricities of
    every sort, senseless escapades, self-destructive irony, unfettered criticism: pleasure in the Prater,
    in the giant Ferris wheel, in Punch and Judy shows, masquerades, ballets, light-hearted
    lovemaking in quiet boxes at the Court Opera, in manoeuvres, which we mostly missed, and
    pleasure even in those illnesses which love more than once bestowed upon us.

And so, the specter of Death haunts these melancholy, elegiac novels, as the Trotta family rises to the respectable lower levels of the aristocracy after Lieutenant Joseph Trotta fortuitously intervenes at the Battle of Solferino to save the Emperor's life.  But by the time of The Emperor's Tomb, Franz Ferdinand Trotta seeks companionship among the peasantry, with his cousin Joseph who sells chestnuts from a cart and his friend Manes Reisiger, a Jewish wagon driver; they seem more authentic to him than his urban aristo circle of friends.  Meanwhile, the nation careens into the Great War, which will see Franz, Joseph and Manes defeated in battle and shipped to a Siberian prison camp.

Upon returning home after the War, Franz says:

    I felt happy.  I was home again.  We had all lost position, rank and name, home and money and
    esteem, past, present and future.  Every morning as we woke up, every night as we lay down to
    sleep, we cursed Death who had vainly beckoned us to his mighty banquet.  And each of us envied
    the dead.  They were at rest beneath the soil, and next spring violets would grow from their
    bones. But we had returned home, fruitless and inconsolable, crippled, a generation dedicated to
    death, by death disdained.  The verdict of the Commission of Enquiry was without appeal.  It
    read: 'Found unfit for death.'

There are not a whole lot of great explicitly conservative novelists, and it's no wonder with passages like that.  What could be more harsh than to judge a generation that sought dissipation and death as ultimately unworthy for that death?  The truth that Roth intuited--that the old Empires, as archaic and repellent as our modern liberal sensibilities may find them, offered a unique means for unifying diverse peoples and giving them a common sense of purpose and destiny--is not one that folks then or now were willing to hear.  This is not to say, as Roth surely would have, that monarchy is a desirable form of government, nor is it comparable to democracy.  However, it is hard to see any benefit that accrued to the people of particularly Central and Eastern Europe when they simply disposed of their monarchies after, or during, World War I.

The story of the Trottas ends, as did Roth's own life, at the dawn of the Nazi era in Austria.  Here writ large were the trends that Roth opposed.  Gone was the idea that many peoples could be ruled by a central authority; replaced by the idea that blood and race should determine political representation.  Roth drank himself to death rather than see this culmination of all that he feared. But not even in his worst nightmares could he have imagined how many would be found fit for death in the coming years.

(Reviewed:02-Mar-00)

Grade: (A+) Orrin C. Judd

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