Regular readers expecting frequent reports of my profound insights have I’m afraid been disappointed over the past month; life does get away from one, doesn’t it? I still plan to write more about my very meaningful journey to Vienna in March, but I am also still thinking about it and trying to find a good structure for the writing. I think I’ve found it and I hope to get to it soon. At any rate, apologies to all, and I still think fondly of my new friends in Austria.
In the meantime I can recommend The Director, the new novel by Daniel Kehlmann and shortlisted for this year’s International Booker Prize. Lichtspiel, to give it its original German, Paul Celanian title, follows the great Austrian film director G.W. Pabst (1885-1967) from a brief exile in Hollywood in the 1930s through his return to Central Europe in 1939 with his wife and son (a fictional invention) to visit his ailing mother. He finds himself trapped through the war years and decides to work for the Third Reich, on films which he insists do not contribute to Nazi propaganda. The novel is a keen and often funny — not to mention timely — exploration of compromise and the artistic spirit (in one episode, Pabst acts as a co-director of a film by the spiky Leni Riefenstahl — yes, this film; in another, we’re treated to P.G. Wodehouse’s attendance at the Berlin premiere of Pabst’s Paracelsus in 1943), and I highly recommend it.
The latest issue — #47 — of what Drew Friedman calls “by far the best magazine being published on planet Earth” is arriving in mailboxes now. Mineshaft 47 is as always chock-full of visual and literary work that would be cutting-edge if you could locate the edge; as it is, the Mineshaft world is a world in itself. This issue features R. Crumb’s debate with Chat GPT about vaccines, great new comics from the fine Simone Baumann and Christoph Mueller (who also designed the striking cover image), two new portraits by Mr. Friedman, photography by John Haynes, and contributions from the likes of Bill Griffith, Robert Armstrong, and Sophie Crumb. “It’s such a gift to see new work by the giants of my generation (Fleener, Collier, Head, Friedman, etc.) alongside our heroic forebears (Crumb, Aline, Armstrong, Griffy, Deitch) and heirs (Harkham, Van Sciver, etc.) alike,” Daniel Clowes says. “I don’t take it for granted — one of a dwindling number of good things in this world.”
A quick glance over the philosophy section of the local bookstore will reveal the prominence of books about stoicism. This is, I think, a sign of the times; volumes like The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living and Lessons in Stoicism: What Ancient Philosophers Teach Us about How to Live cherrypick Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Epictetus for nuggets of wisdom that will somehow make us all more “resilient,” that awful word that’s become a 2026 catchphrase, like “boots on the ground.” On the flip side of all the positive qualities associated with the word is a certain emotional coldness to the slings and arrows of the world that dissuades us from acting on the desire to change it. “Life sucks, get a helmet,” stoicism distilled into a nutshell, is one of the more cynical approaches to experience, whether it’s from the stoics or anyone else.
“There is a popular style of philosophical biography that presents the philosopher’s life as a model for how to live well,” writes David Bather Woods on the first page of his biography Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist, out just a few months ago from the University of Chicago Press, citing Sarah Bakewell’s 2011 life of Montaigne. “Introducing Schopenhauer to this genre faces a major obstacle, and not just because of his many personal flaws.” What Bather Woods does not mention here, in the first chapter of his very fine biography of the Sage of Frankfurt-am-Main, is that Schopenhauer’s already written his own self-help book, Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life, which appears in the first volume of Parerga and Paralipomena.
This is not that. It’s fair to be leery of the biographical approach to any writer, and kudos to Bather Woods for admitting it. He has produced a swiftly and gracefully readable book about Schopenhauer which doesn’t stint on explication (though because Schopenhauer wrote for a general public rather than an academic audience there are fewer knotty interpretive problems than you might expect). Divided into ten chapters, the book focuses on the philosopher’s life, then the issues that arise from it: his father’s early death introduces a discussion of Schopenhauer’s attitudes towards suicide; his early travels in Europe provide a ground for explicating Schopenhauer’s approach to madness and punishment; his often misogynistic conception of women is clarified through a survey of Schopenhauer’s relationship with his sister and mother; and the last chapter, of course, focuses on death, from both the biographical and metaphysical stances. I should note here that Bather Woods is especially good on Fichte’s influence on Schopenhauer, and that a chapter on Schopenhauer and photographic portraiture is a new contribution to a consideration of Schopenhauer’s thinking on aesthetics. (I admit I was a little disappointed that Bather Woods gives Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory short shrift, but this is a quibble; certainly that ground has been covered quite comprehensively in the past; aesthetic experience, and especially music, is where the Veil of Maya may be at its thinnest, though, and I would have liked to see Bather Woods’s two cents on this issue.)
Schopenhauer rarely wrote about his personal life, leaving any biographer somewhat at a loss. Also new in this book, though, is Bather Woods’s adept and insightful use of a trove of letters written by the philosopher’s sister Adele. Here we have a few tantalizing hints, too, of Schopenhauer as lover and as father (he sired two daughters who died in infancy).
What differentiates Schopenhauer from the Stoics is that the Stoics counselled an active participation in political and social activities of the day, anathema to a man like Schopenhauer who believed the solution of the world’s most important problems did not inhere in political or cultural action. Schopenhauer instead counselled, ideally, ascetic resignation, but he knew it was impossible for most men and women to achieve that resignation; next best, as Bather Woods concludes, was compassion for the suffering of one’s fellow men and women and the alleviation of their pain. I doubt that Schopenhauer would have considered this a definition of hope, since the conflict of will and world is violent, dark, and eternal. The highest form of self-help is helping others: this doesn’t call for resilience, which is aimed inward. It is a sort of love, Bather Woods muses. He’ll get no argument from me. I’ll raise a glass to him and the Sage of Frankfurt-am-Main at the Cafe Schopenhauer in March.
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.
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.
