George Hunka

Joseph Roth’s 1932 novel The Radetzky March chronicles three generations in the life of a family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1859 through 1916, and like many Austrian novels and memoirs of the period, it’s also a chronicle of dissipation and collapse. Joseph Trotta, an infantry lieutenant and the son of a Slovenian peasant, manages somehow to save the life of a befuddled Emperor Franz Joseph I on the battlefield, taking a bullet himself in the process; hailed as a hero, he reads about his exploit ridiculously exaggerated in a children’s history book and insists to the Emperor during a private audience that the record be corrected:

“Listen, my dear Trotta!” said the Kaiser. “The whole business is rather awkward. But neither of us comes off all that badly. Let it be!”

“Your Majesty,” replied the captain, “it’s a lie!”

“People tell a lot of lies,” the Kaiser confirmed.

“I can’t, Your Majesty,” the captain choked forth. …

“My ministers,” Franz Joseph began, “must know what they’re doing. I have to rely on them. Do you catch my drift, my dear Trotta?” And after a while. “We’ll do something. You’ll see!”

And Franz Joseph does something; the story is indeed expunged from the children’s book, though not until the story has become legendary among Austrian schoolchildren. It’s all downhill from there.

Over the years, The Radetzky March has become a kind of companion novel to Stefan Zweig’s memoir of the same period, The World of Yesterday, published posthumously in 1942, with some interesting and important differences. Zweig’s memoir looks westward from Vienna and is peopled by intellectuals, artists, and writers; Roth’s novel instead looks eastward, especially to the Moravian and Galician frontiers, and is peopled by unimaginative civil servants, soldiers, and the middle-class bourgeoisie and the peasantry. Zweig himself is a pacifist and a political progressive, admiring Erasmus as the standard-bearer of humanism; Roth once characterized the Strauss march as “the Marseillaise of reaction,” Marjorie Perloff reported in her chapter about the book in her fine Edge of Irony. And of course, as Jewish writers, both Zweig and Roth offer portraits of Jews in both regions: the assimilated Jews of Vienna for Zweig, and the unassimilated Jews of Galicia for Roth.

Though superficially a realistic novel traditional in style, The Radetzky March is also a fabric woven of metaphors and symbols. Roth painstakingly describes the manners and morals of the period in a language both poetic and musical, especially as both begin to disintegrate as nationalism — Roth’s bete noire as well as Zweig’s (read Zweig’s condemnation of nationalism here) — threatens the uneasy stability of the empire on the eve of the First World War (indeed, the narrator is fond of describing the disintegration of dead bodies); painted portraits of both the elder Trotta, the Hero of Solferino, and Franz Joseph occur and recur through the narrative; and of course the march itself, heard in a variety of situations, both exterior and in the minds of the characters.

Like other great Modernist novels such as Ulysses and Remembrance of Things Past, The Radetzky March transcends its time and setting. The decay of private and public behavior and conceptions of honor is, I would hope, a continuing tragedy for all of us (though Roth at the end of the book provides hope for honor and redemption, in an ironic echo of the Hero of Solferino’s own unsuspected courage); in an episode when the civil authorities call out the military to suppress a public demonstration late in the book, there are disastrous consequences. And Roth is no mere nostalgist. He sees bluntly and clearly, as his experience as a journalist must have taught him. His reportage rings true as an eyewitness to this decay.

The Radetzky March covers three generations of a family; I am only three generations on myself from my own Galician peasant forebears who themselves were Austrian citizens at the time, which may be why I’ve reacted to the novel as deeply as I have. Affinity, you know; I wrote more about it here. And some other things never change, either. In 2005, translator Michael Hofmann wrote an appreciation of Roth for the Guardian. “I don’t have a favourite chapter in The Radetzky March … , or even a favourite sentence,” he says. “However, I have always been moved by the majestic paragraph of (frankly) authorial commentary at the beginning of chapter eight.” Perhaps it’ll move you too; here’s Hofmann’s translation:

In the years before the Great War, at the time the events chronicled in these pages took place, it was not yet a matter of indifference whether a man lived or died. When someone was expunged from the lists of the living, someone else did not immediately step up to take his place, but a gap was left to show where he had been, and those who knew the man who had died or disappeared, well or even less well, fell silent whenever they saw the gap. When a fire happened to consume a particular dwelling in a row of dwellings, the site of the conflagration remained for a long time afterwards. For masons and bricklayers worked slowly and thoughtfully, and when they walked past the ruins, neighbours and passers-by alike recalled the form and the walls of the house that had once stood there. That’s how it was then! Everything that grew took long to grow; and everything that ended took a long time to be forgotten. Everything that existed left behind traces of itself, and people then lived by their memories, just as we nowadays live by our capacity to forget, quickly and comprehensively.