Books - George Hunka

The Hero of Solferino

Stefan Zweig (left) and Joseph Roth in Ostend, 1936.

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.

The idea of community

From Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (1942), translated by Anthea Bell:

In fact, it must be said in all honesty that a good part, if not the greater part, of all that is admired today in Europe and America as the expression of a newly revived Austrian culture in music, literature, the theatre, the art trade, was the work of the Jews of Vienna, whose intellectual drive, dating back for thousands of years, brought them to a peak of achievement. Here intellectual energy that had lost its sense of direction through the centuries found a tradition that was already a little weary, nurtured it, revived and refined it, and with tireless activity injected new strength into it. Only the following decades would show what a crime it was when an attempt was made to force Vienna — a place combing the most heterogeneous elements in its atmosphere and culture, reaching out intellectually beyond national borders — into the new mould of a nationalist and thus a provincial city. For the genius of Vienna, a specifically musical genius, had always been that it harmonised all national and linguistic opposites in itself, its culture was a synthesis of all Western cultures. Anyone who lived and worked there felt free of narrow-minded prejudice. Nowhere was it easier to be a European, and I know that in part I have to thank Vienna, a city that was already defending universal and Roman values in the days of Marcus Aurelius, for the fact that I learnt early to love the idea of community as the highest ideal of my heart. (44-45)

The world of yesterday

From Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday (1942), translated by Anthea Bell:

I myself have lived at the time of the two greatest wars known to mankind, even experiencing each on a different side — the first on the German side and the second among Germany’s enemies. Before those wars I saw individual freedom at its zenith, after them I saw liberty at its lowest point in hundreds of years; I have been acclaimed and despised, free and not free, rich and poor. All the pale horses of the apocalypse have stormed through my life: revolution and famine, currency depreciation and terror, epidemics and emigration; I have seen great mass ideologies grow before my eyes and spread, Fascism in Italy, National Socialism in Germany, Bolshevism in Russia, and above all the ultimate pestilence that has poisoned the flower of our European culture, nationalism in general. I have been a defenceless, helpless witness of the unimaginable relapse of mankind into what was believed to be long-forgotten barbarism, with its deliberate programme of inhuman dogma. It was for our generation, after hundreds of years, to see again wars without actual declarations of war, concentration camps, torture, mass theft and the bombing of defenceless cities, bestiality unknown for the last fifty generations, and it is to be hoped that future generations will not see them again. Yet paradoxically, at the same time as our world was turning the moral clock back a thousand years, I have also seen mankind achieve unheard-of feats in the spheres of technology and the intellect, instantly outdoing everything previously achieved in millions of years: the conquest of the air with the aeroplane, words travelling all over the world at the moment when they are spoken, the conquest of space, the splitting of the atom, the defeat of even the most insidious diseases. Almost daily, things still impossible yesterday have become possible. Never until our time has mankind as a whole acted so diabolically, or made such almost divine progress. (xiv; emphasis mine — GH)

Solitary tourism, in Vienna and elsewhere

From Simon Winder’s delightful 2010 book Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History:

Quite possibly the pleasure of this way of life would be much reduced in some other countries, particularly more insistently gregarious places such as Italy. German culture puts a high value on temporary solitude of a stagey kind. Perhaps this is its great gift. In some moods I think there is no need to do anything other than read German writers from the first half of the nineteenth century — a sort of inexhaustible storehouse of attitudes flattering to those who just like sometimes to be left alone. …

The poetry on this subject stretches out to the most hazy, distant horizon and fed a century of German songs, culminating perhaps in the greatest of them all: Mahler’s setting of a Rückert poem, “I have lost track of the world with which I used to waste much time,” a work of such richness that it can only be listened to under highly controlled circumstances. The idea, whether in Goethe, Mörike, Rückert or Heine, is to be alone, in a wood, on a mountain, in some overpoweringly verdant garden, or just inside one’s head, almost always as a moment’s pause before plunging back into a world of love and normal human decisions. This tic is of course a bit unpolitical and some writers have seen it as passive in a way that implies a German malleability and failure to engage with disastrous implications for the future. But equally it is an anti-political, fiercely private stance, with a built-in resistance to fanaticism or mass manipulation. It seems hard on Schubert’s songs for them to be viewed as early danger signs of a failure to stand up to Nazism.

Marjorie Perloff (1931-2024)

Marjorie Perloff. Photo by Alan Thomas (2016).

Marilyn and I will be raising our glasses tonight to the memory of critic, translator, and memoirist Marjorie Perloff, who cast off this mortal coil last Sunday at the age of 92.

Professor Perloff was a staunch champion of the American avant-garde, especially its poets (Frank O’Hara and Charles Bernstein) and its musicians and choreographers (John Cage and Merce Cunningham). But more recently she had turned her attention to the Vienna of her youth; her 2004 memoir The Vienna Paradox is a moving, beautifully written but typically intellectually uncompromising examination of her youth and early career as an emigre from Austria, and I’ve written about her 2016 Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire — a book that deeply affected me when I read it — here. In 2022 she published a fine translation of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks: 1914-1916 (noted here), and her introduction graces a new translation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published just last month and on my next-to-read list.

Clay Risen wrote the obituary for the New York Times, and an “In memoriam” written by Alan Thomas with the collaboration of Perloff’s family, the poet Charles Bernstein, and the University of Chicago Press appears here.