by Joseph Roth
2
Fate had elected him for a special deed. But he then made sure that later times lost all memory of him.
How unfailingly Roth knew how to begin! That is the fourth sentence in The Radetzky March. His sense of the ridiculous lies always in the dark mesh of serious matters. Puny opposition (alone person) to the grandiose (an empire): What could have led to the perversity of the statement? And while following the novel the reader will unravel from this thread not simply how this memory was obscured, but how it yet grew through successive generations and was transformed into a myth within the mythical powers of empire.
The outstanding deed is not recounted in retrospect. We are in the battle of Solferino and with Trotta, a Slovenian infantry lieutenant, when he steps out of his lowly rank to lay hands upon the Emperor Franz Joseph and push him to the ground, taking in his own body the bullet that would have struck the Emperor. Trotta is promoted and honored. A conventional story of heroism, suitable for an uplifting chapter in a schoolbook, which it becomes. But Captain Joseph Trotta, ennobled by the appended “von Sipolje,” the name of his native village, has some unwavering needle of truth pointing from within him. And it agitates wildly when in his son’s first reader he comes upon a grossly exaggerated account of his deed as the Hero of Solferino. In an action that prefigures what will be fully realized by another Trotta, in time to come, he takes his outrage to the Emperor himself, the one who surely must share with him the validity of the truth.
“Listen, my dear Trotta!” said the Kaiser. “… But neither of us comes off all that badly. Let it be!”
“Your Majesty,” replied the captain, “it’s a lie!”
These are some of the most brilliant passages in the novel. Is honesty reduced to the ridiculous where “the stability of the world, the power of laws, and the glory of majesties were all based on deviousness”? Trotta turns his back on his beloved army, and estranged by rank and tide from his peasant father, vegetates and sourly makes of his son Franz a district commissioner instead of allowing him a military career.
The fourth generation of Trottas is the District Commissioner’s son, Carl Joseph, who, with Roth’s faultless instinct for timing, enters the narrative aged fifteen to the sound of the Radetzky March being played by the local military band under his father’s balcony. The DC has suffered a father withdrawn by disillusion: he himself knows only to treat his own son, in turn, in the same formula of stunted exchanges, but for the reader, though not the boy. Roth conveys the sense of something withheld, longing for release within the DC.
Brooded over by the portrait of his grandfather, the Hero of Solferino, lonely Carl Joseph is home from the cadet cavalry school where he has been sent to compensate the DC for his own deprivation of military prestige. The boy is seduced by the voluptuous wife of the sergeant-major at the DC’s gendarmerie post. When she dies in childbirth, Carl Joseph, concealing his immense distress from his father, has to pay a visit of condolence to the sergeant-major, and is given by him the packet of love letters he wrote to the man’s wife. “This is for you Herr Baron,… Please excuse me. I have orders from the district captain. I took it to him right away.” There follows a wonderful scene written with the dramatic narrative restraint that Roth mastered for these later books. Devastated, Carl Joseph goes into the village café for a brandy: his father is there and looks up from a newspaper. “‘She’s given you a cheap brandy… Tell the girl’ he remarks to the waiter, ‘that we only drink Hennessy.’”
One has hardly breathed again after this scene when there is another tightening of poignantly ironic resolution. Father and son walk home together.
From the entrance to the district headquarters, Sergeant Slama emerges in a helmet, with a rifle and a fixed bayonet plus a rule book under his arm.
“Good day, my dear Slama!” says old Herr von Trotta. “No news, eh?”
“No news,” the sergeant echoes.
Carl Joseph is haunted by the portrait of the Hero of Solferino, and though inept and undistinguished in his military career, dreams of saving the Emperor’s life as his grandfather did. A failure, haunted as well by the death of Slama’s wife (Roth leaves us to draw our own conclusion that the child she died giving birth to may have been Carl Joseph’s) and his inadvertent responsibility for the death of his only friend in a duel. Carl Joseph fulfills this dream only when, incensed by the desecration, he tears from a brothel wall a cheap reproduction of the official portrait of the Emperor—that other image which haunts his life.
Roth reconceives this small scene at full scale when, at a bacchanalian ball that might have been staged by Fellini on a plan by Musil’s Diotima for her “Collateral Campaign” to celebrate Emperor Franz Joseph’s seventy-year reign, the news comes of the assassination of the Emperor’s heir at Sarajevo. Some Hungarians raucously celebrate: “We are in agreement, my countrymen and I: we can be glad the bastard is gone!” Trotta, drunk, takes “heroic” exception—
“… my grandfather saved the Kaiser’s life. And I, his grandson, will not allow anyone to insult the House of our Supreme Commander in Chief.”
He is forced to leave ignominiously.
As the District Commissioner’s son deteriorates through gambling and drink, Roth unfolds with marvelous subtlety what was withheld, and longing for release, in the father. The old District Commissioner’s unrealized bond with his old valet, Jacques, is perfectly conveyed in one of the two superlative set pieces of the novel, when Jacques’s dying is, first, merely a class annoyance because the servant fails to deliver the mail to the breakfast table, and then becomes a dissolution of class differences in the humanity of two old men who are all that is left, to one another, of a vanished social order: their life.
The second set piece both echoes this one and brings back a scene that has been present always, beneath the consequences that have richly overlaid it. The leveling of age and social dissolution respects no rank. The DC not only now is at one with his former servant; he also, at the other end of the ancient order, has come to have the same bond with his exalted Emperor. In an audience recalling that of the Hero of Solferino, he too has gone to ask for the Emperor’s intercession. This time it is to ask that Carl Joseph not be discharged in disgrace from the army. The doddering Emperor says of Carl Joseph, “ ‘That’s the young man I saw at the most recent maneuvers.’… And because his thoughts were slightly scrambled, he added, ‘He nearly saved my life. Or was that you?’ ”
A stranger seeing them at this moment could have easily mistaken them for two brothers’… And one thought he had changed into a district captain. And the other thought he had changed into the Kaiser.
The unity of Roth’s masterwork is achieved in that highest faculty of the imagination Walter Benjamin6 speaks of as “an extensiveness… of the folded fan, which only in spreading draws breath and flourishes.”
Carl Joseph, firing on striking workers, hears them sing a song he has never heard before, the “Internationale.” At the same time, he has a yearning to escape to the peasant origins of the Trotta family. Unable to retreat to the “innocent” past, superfluous between the power of the doomed empire and the power of the revolution to come, he is given by Roth a solution that is both intensely ironic and at the same time a strangely moving assertion of the persistence of a kind of naked humanity, flagellated by all sides. Leading his men in 1914, he walks into enemy fire to find something for them to drink. “Lieutenant Trotta died holding not a weapon but two pails.”
Carl Joseph’s cousin, of The Emperor’s Tomb, has never met him although Roth knows how to give the reader a frisson by casually dropping the fact that they were both in the battle at which Carl Joseph was killed. But this Trotta links with the peasant branch of the family, through his taking up, first as a form of radical chic, another cousin, Joseph Branco, an itinerant chestnut roaster from Roth’s familiar frontier town. Emotionally frozen between a mother who, like the DC, cannot express her love, and a young wife who turns lesbian after he leaves her alone on
their wedding night while he sits with a dying servant (the vigil of the DC with Jacques composed in a new key), Trotta forms his warmest relationship with Branco and Branco’s friend, the Jewish cab driver. They go to war together, live together as escaped prisoners of war in Siberia, and in this phase of Roth’s deepest reflection on the elements of his meganovel, exemplify brilliantly his perception that consistency in human relations is not a virtue but an invention of lesser novelists. The ideal camaraderie of the three men cracks along unpredictable lines, just as the complexity of Trotta’s love for and indifference to his wife, and her constant breaking out of what has seemed to be emotional resolutions to their life, are consonant with the jarring shifts of war and postwar that contain them.
As with all Roth’s work, this phase is as wonderfully populous as any nineteenth-century novel, psychologically masterly, particularly in the person of Trotta’s mother and the tangents of distress and illogical fulfillment in the relationship between him and her. But The Emperor’s Tomb was one of Roth’s last works, published only the year before he died, the year of the next war for which all that was unresolved in the previous one was preparing in his world, his time. Although he wrote at least two more novels after this one, he concludes this phase, and—for me—the summation of his work, with a scene in which Trotta is in a café. On that night “my friends’ excitement… seemed to me superfluous”—as it does to the reader, since it is not explained until, with Roth’s power to shatter a scene with a blow of history:
the moment when the door of the café flew open and an oddly dressed young man appeared on the threshold. He was in fact wearing black leather gaiters… and a kind of military cap which reminded me at one and the same time of a bedpan and a caricature of our old Austrian caps.
The Anschluss has arrived. The café empties of everyone, including the Jewish proprietor. In an inspired fusion of form with content, there follows a dazedly disoriented piece of writing that expresses the splintering of all values, including emotional values, so that the trivial and accidental, the twitching involuntary, takes over. Trotta sits on in the deserted café, approached only by the watchdog. “Franz, the bill!” he calls to the vanished waiter. “Franz, the bill!” he says to the dog. The dog follows him in the dawn breaking over “uncanny crosses” that have been scrawled on walls. He finds himself at the Kapuzinergruft, the Emperor’s tomb, “where my emperors lay buried in iron sarcophagi.”
“I want to visit the sarcophagus of my Emperor, Franz Joseph… Long live the Emperor!” The Capuchin brother in charge hushes him and turns him away. “So where could I go now, I, a Trotta?”
I know enough of the facts of Joseph Roth’s life to be aware that, for his own death, he collapsed in a café, a station of exile’s calvary.
1. In a letter to his translator, Blanche Gidon, quoted by Beatrice Musgrave in her introduction to Weights And Measures (Everyman’s Library, 1983), p. 9. Roth lived in Paris for some years and two of his novels, Le Triomphe de la beauté and Le Buste de L’Empereur, were published first in French. Le Triomphe de la beauté probably was written in French; it appears not to have been published in German.
2. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, Vol. I (Seeker and Warburg, 1961), p. 64, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. Musil was born in 1880, and though long neglected as a writer outside German-speaking culture, was not forgotten as long as Roth. Musil became a figure in world literature in the Fifties; Roth’s work had to wait another twenty years before it was reissued in Germany, let alone in translation.
3. The Silent Prophet was edited from unpublished work, with the exception of fragments published in 24 Neue Deutsche Erzähler and Die Neue Rundschau in 1929, and published after Roth’s death, in 1966. The English translation by David Le Vay was published in the United States by The Overlook Press in 1980. The work appears to have been written, with interruptions, over several years. The central character, Kargan, is supposedly, modeled on Trotsky.
4. Czeslaw Milosz, “To Raja Rao,” Selected Poems (Ecco Press, 1980), p. 29.
5. The dates I give are generally the dates of first publication, in the original German.
6. Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, edited and with an introduction by Peter Demetz, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Schocken, 1986), p. 83.
PART ONE
Chapter 1
THE TROTTAS WERE a young dynasty. Their progenitor had been knighted after the Battle of Solferino. He was a Slovene. Sipolje—the German name for his native village—became his title of nobility. Fate had elected him for a special deed. But he then made sure that later times lost all memory of him.
At the Battle of Solferino, he, as an infantry lieutenant, commanded a platoon. The fighting had been raging for half an hour. Three paces ahead of him, he could see the white backs of his soldiers. The front line of his platoon was kneeling, the second line standing. All the men were cheery and confident of victory. They had lavishly devoured food and liquor at the expense of and in honor of the Kaiser, who had been in the field since yesterday. Here and there, a soldier fell from the line. Trotta swiftly leaped into every gap, shooting from the orphaned rifles of the dead or wounded. By turns he serried the thinned rank or widened it, his eyes sharpened a hundredfold, peering in many directions, his ears straining in many directions. Right through the rattling of guns, his quick ears caught his captain’s few, loud orders. His sharp eyes broke through the blue-gray fog curtaining the enemy’s lines. He never shot without aiming, and his every last bullet struck home. The men sensed his hand and his gaze, heard his shouts, and felt confident.
The enemy paused. The command scurried along the interminable front rank: “Stop shooting!” Here and there a ramrod still clattered, here and there a shot rang out, belated and lonesome. The blue-gray fog between the fronts lifted slightly. All at once, they were in the noonday warmth of the cloudy, silvery, thundery sun. Now, between the lieutenant and the backs of the soldiers, the Kaiser appeared with two staff officers. He held a field glass supplied by one of his escorts and was about to place it on his eyes. Trotta knew what that meant: even assuming that the enemy was retreating, the rear guard must still be facing the Austrians, and anyone raising binoculars was marking himself as a worthy target. And this was the young Kaiser! Trotta’s heart was in his throat. Terror at the inconceivable, immeasurable catastrophe that would destroy Trotta, the regiment, the army, the state, the entire world drove burning chills through his body. His knees quaked. And the eternal grudge of the subaltern frontline officer against the high-ranking staff officers, who haven’t the foggiest sense of bitter reality, dictated the action that indelibly stamped the lieutenant’s name on the history of his regiment. Both his hands reached toward the monarch’s shoulders in order to push him down. The lieutenant probably grabbed too hard; the Kaiser promptly fell. His escorts hurled themselves upon the falling man. That same instant, a shot bored through the lieutenant’s left shoulder, the very shot meant for the Kaiser’s heart. As the emperor rose, the lieutenant sank. Along the entire front, a tangled and irregular rattling awoke from the terrified guns, which had been startled from their slumber. The Kaiser, impatiently urged by his escorts to leave this perilous zone, nevertheless leaned over the prostrate lieutenant and, mindful of his imperial duty, asked the unconscious man, who could hear nothing, what his name was. A regimental surgeon, an ambulance orderly, and two stretcher bearers came galloping over, backs bent, heads stooped. The staff officers first yanked the Kaiser down and then threw themselves on the ground. “Here—the lieutenant!” the Kaiser shouted up at the breathless medic.
Meanwhile the firing had petered out. And while the acting cadet officer stepped in front of the platoon and announced in a clear voice, “I am taking command,” Franz Joseph and his escorts stood up, the orderlies gingerly strapped the lieutenant to the stretcher, and they all withdrew toward the regimental command post, where a snow-white tent spread over the nearest cle
aring station.
Trotta’s left clavicle was shattered. The bullet, lodged right under the left shoulder blade, was removed in the presence of the Supreme Commander in Chief, amid the inhuman bellowing of the wounded man, who was revived by his pain.
Trotta recovered within four weeks. By the time he returned to his south Hungarian garrison, he possessed the rank of captain, the highest of all decorations—the Order of Maria Theresa—and a knighthood. Now he was called Captain Joseph Trotta von Sipolje.
Every night before retiring and every morning upon awakening, as if his own life had been traded for a new and alien life manufactured in a workshop, he would repeat his new rank and his new status to himself and walk up to the mirror to confirm that his face was the same. Despite the awkward heartiness of army brethren trying to bridge the gulf left by a sudden and incomprehensible destiny, and in spite of his own vain efforts to encounter everyone as unabashedly as ever, the ennobled Captain Trotta seemed to be losing his equilibrium; he felt he had been sentenced to wear another man’s boots for life and walk across a slippery ground, pursued by secret talking and awaited by shy glances. His grandfather had been a little peasant, his father an assistant paymaster, later a constable sergeant on the monarchy’s southern border. After losing an eye in a fight with Bosnian smugglers, he had been living as a war invalid and groundskeeper at the Castle of Laxenburg, feeding the swans, trimming the hedges, guarding the springtime forsythias and then the elderberry bushes against unauthorized, thievish hands, and, in the mild nights, shooing homeless lovers from the benevolent darkness of benches.
