Joseph Roth - Fiction Career

Fiction Career

In 1923 Roth's first (unfinished) novel, The Spider's Web, was serialized in an Austrian newspaper. He achieved moderate success as a writer throughout the 1920s with a series of novels exploring life in post-war Europe. Only upon publication of Job and Radetzky March did he achieve real acclaim as a novelist.

From 1930, Roth's fiction became less concerned with contemporary society, with which he had become increasingly disillusioned; during this period, his work frequently evoked a melancholic nostalgia for life in imperial Central Europe prior to 1914. He often portrayed the fate of homeless wanderers looking for a place to live, in particular Jews and former citizens of the old Austria-Hungary, who, with the downfall of the monarchy, had lost their only possible Heimat ("true home"). In his later works in particular, Roth appeared to wish that the monarchy could be restored in all its old glamour, although at the start of his career he had written under the codename Red Joseph. His longing for a more tolerant past may be partly explained as a reaction against the nationalism of the time, which finally culminated in National Socialism.

The novel Radetzky March (1932) and the story "Die Büste des Kaisers" ("The Bust of the Emperor") (1935) are typical of this late phase. In the novel The Emperor's Tomb, Roth describes the fate of a cousin of the hero of Radetzky March, until Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938.

Of his works which deal with Judaism, the novel Job is the best known.