the radetsky march (joseph roth, tr michael hofmann)

We go searching for clues in life. Perhaps the fact that I finished Roth’s classic text on the day that the British queen was buried is one of them. The potential parallels are striking. Roth’s novel depicts the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which had been held together for so long by the figure of its ruler, the Emperor Franz Joseph. The novel opens with Lieutenant Trotta saving the emperor’s life at that battle of Solferino, which occurs in 1859. For this act he is rewarded by being made Baron Trotta von Sipolje. His son becomes the District Administrator of a small town in the Empire and his grandson, forever in awe of his grandfather’s heroic reputation,  joins the cavalry. The novel follows the family over the course of 55 years, reigned over by an increasingly doddery monarch, as the internal tensions within the Austro Hungarian empire begin to fray, tensions which will lead to the assassination of Franz Joseph’s heir, Franz Ferdinand and the onset of the First World War.

The Radetsky March is about fathers and sons and grandfathers, but it is also about the way that historical certainties are constructed on myths and destined to become uncertain, sooner or later. After the initial meeting of Emperor and the first of the Trottas, there will be subsequent future meetings between Emperor and family, all of which hark back to the original incident, which becomes more and more obscure in the mists of time. The Emperor will come to physically resemble almost exactly the District Administrator, whose peaceful life will be overtaken by tragedy as his son’s fate becomes more and more conjoined to the eventual fate of the Empire, which will be extirpated by the Great War. Periods of peace contain entropy which will provoke the onset of tragedy and destruction. The more something appears to be set in stone, the more this is true.

Roth expresses a marvellous humanism in his portrayal of this family and its empire. The characters are beautifully flawed and their flaws are shown to be related to the nature of the society they have been born into. A society whose apparent inertia, taken up by small scandals and plaintive festivities, is invisibly disintegrating. This is the world of Freud and Schiele, as well as the world Hitler was born into. Not to mention my grandfather, whose parents might have had similar expectations to the District Administrator’s, before the twentieth century burst onto the scene and interrupted the peace with all its sound and fury.