1 - Identity and Ideology

Summary

Ich bin ein Franzose aus dem Osten, ein Humanist, ein Rationalist mit Religion, ein Katholik mit jüdischem Gehirn, ein wirklicher Revolutionär.

— Joseph Roth

A Central European Experience

SINCE THE REDISCOVERY of Roth's early work, critics have identified two seemingly antithetical points of view in his novels and hence have had to grapple with the problem of how to explain the differences. The most common response has been to point to a deep sense of personal crisis due to which Roth took flight from an increasingly unbearable reality from the late 1920s. Most recently, John Heath has drawn a parallel between Radetzkymarsch, which he reads as “symptomatic of its author's lamenting the loss of order in postwar confusion” and Roth's life, which he calls “episodic, a nomadic journey from hotel to hotel across Europe.” Moritz Csáky supports the thesis of a radical change in Roth's outlook triggered by an identity crisis, but where other critics simply locate the origins of this crisis in the historical events of the collapse of the Habsburg Empire and the rise of National Socialism, Csáky presents a more differentiated analysis, arguing that Roth's response to these events was determined by a specifically Central European historical consciousness (ZÖ, 9–14). The particular character of Central Europe, with its dense patchwork of peoples, languages, and cultures, had developed over centuries of cross-cultural contact and acculturation (ZÖ, 9).