“Where can I go now, I, a Trotta?”

When I return to Vienna in March I’ll likely spend an hour or two at the Kaisergruft, the Capuchin Crypt wherein lie the remains of “150 Habsburg personalities,” as the web site has it. It will be my third visit over the years, and wandering the crypt, chilly and low-lit, encourages a certain amount of historical contemplation. Some of this contemplation leads to a comparison of the old Empire with our own world.

It certainly did for Joseph Roth, whose 1938 novella The Emperor’s Tomb (translated by Michael Hofmann and published by New Directions) has just found its way out of my hands and onto my bookshelf. Die Kapuzinergruft, to give the book its original German title, is often characterized as a sequel to Roth’s epic 1932 The Radetzky March — I briefly wrote about that novel here — but is actually more of an epilogue, a completion of the Trotta family chronicle that began with the earlier book. That novel’s timespan reached from the 1859 Battle of Solferino, in which the young Lieutenant Trotta saves the life of the blundering emperor Franz Joseph, to the 1914 Battle of Krasne-Busk, at which Trotta’s grandson is killed.

The Radetzky March poetically and majestically explores the slow descent and dissipation of the Empire through three generations. There’s another Trotta at the Battle of Krasne-Busk, though — a cousin, Franz Ferdinand Trotta, who enlists in the Austro-Hungarian Army after a rather misspent and dissolute youth. His story — fragmented and told, unlike The Radetzky March, in the first person — reaches from 1913 through the 1938 Anschluss, a story of rapid personal, cultural, and political decline. Like the first novel, the second also reaches from Vienna to Galicia and back again, from the skeptical and mildly corrupt but mannered and polite 19th-century Empire through the seemingly progressive and modern but vulgar and cynical 20th-century Europe, from the polyglot multicultural Empire to the nationalistic, ethnocentric, and brazenly antisemitic [Sounds familiar. -Ed.] Central and Eastern Europe of the long war between 1914 and 1945. The same theme informed another film of the period, Jean Renoir’s 1937 Grand Illusion, also set in the First World War and a melancholic elegy for a lost world.

I expect to meet the Trottas’ ghosts during my next visit to the Kaisergruft, as well as other ghosts of that long-defunct Empire, perhaps even a few of my own family’s. In the meantime, I highly recommend The Emperor’s Tomb as well as The Radetzky March, which remain timely reminders of a lost and perhaps more civilized world.

One character who appears in both novels is Count Chojnicki, a minor Galician noble skeptical of European progress. In his brief appearances, he, perhaps speaking for Roth himself, delivers monologues that emphasize the virtues of a world which is rapidly being lost. In The Radetzky March, Chojnicki wittily condemns the nationalism which is leading to the First World War (“Here’s to my countrymen, wherever they happen to hail from!” is his generous and all-embracing toast); in The Emperor’s Tomb he argues with Trotta and his friends the benefits of the Church, which in Vienna means the Catholic Church. (Roth, a Galician Jew, flirted with Catholicism through his life.) He says:

The Church of Rome … is the only brace in this rotten world. The only giver and maintainer of form. By enshrining the traditional element “handed down” in its dogmas, as in an icy palace, it obtains and bestows upon its children the licence to play round about this icy palace, which has spacious grounds, to indulge irresponsibility, even to pardon the forbidden, or to enact it. By instituting sin, it forgives sins. It sees that there is no man without flaw: that is the wonderfully humane thing about it. Its flawless children become saints. By that alone, it concedes the flawed nature of mankind. It concedes sinfulness to such a degree even that it refuses to see beings as human if they are not sinful: they will be sainted or holy. In so doing the Church of Rome shows its most exalted tendency, namely to forgive. There is no nobler tendency than forgiveness. And by the same token, there is none more vulgar than to seek revenge. There is no nobility without generosity, just as there is no vengefulness without vulgarity.