A newcomer to Austrian literature, but shaped (as we all are) by the immense legacy of the country’s music, design and visual art, I was excited to explore the ACF’s library and learn more about Austrian literature. My choice of Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March (in Michael Hoffman’s 2003 translation) was backed by many strong recommendations. In the 1990s, Jeremy Paxmann and Nobel Prize-winner Nadine Gordimer both named it as an all-time favourite, probably for different reasons than Hoffman found in the 2000s and we find reading it today, in the 2020s. It is a book about the end of something – here, the immense Austro-Hungarian empire between 1859 and 1916. The period Roth describes is too immense to describe in 300 pages. He invokes the scope and complexity of the Empire’s control (and dissolution) by invoking perspectives and scenes that, without affording knowledge, offer understanding; like music does. He seems to know too well the limitations of trying to inform, but Roth uses the techniques of music – impressions, episodes, motives and movements – to write a book that readers have found as affecting as they have difficult to explain.
What surprised me about a novel with such a wide ambitus is that it began, and then continued, at a calm, observant pace; but then when something very big collapses, it can seem to do so in slow motion. And in the six decades The Radetzky March spans, Roth describes quiet episodes in the lives of men in the Von Trotta family, who are maintained in a comfortable but precipitous existence in regions disconnected from the Imperial centre of Vienna. The eldest earned the status of military hero after saving the Emperor’s life in a fluke act of bravery, and subsequent generations have been kept with a stipend, a small estate, and access to high-ranking (but ineffectual) military positions. They are subjects in an Imperial propaganda meant to keep alive a myth of heroism, but without real agency or power to control their destinies. They are pushed through the arteries of the Empire, not knowing or caring to know how the fantastic organism works.
But suspecting the immanence of the Empire’s decline, the Von Trottas meditate on images that reinforce their belief: a painting of the grandfather which hangs on the wall like an icon, swords inherited from friends who died in action, and Strauss’s Radetzky March, played every Sunday in the park.
“That was how things were back then. Anything that grew took its time growing, and anything that perished took a long time to be forgotten. But everything that had once existed left its traces, and people lived on memories just as they now live on the ability to forget quickly and emphatically.”
Swords, however, became useless for fighting by the time the Archduke Ferdinand is shot. And the portrait was made by a student, painting from memory after observing the grandfather over breakfast; it is an exercise and a trick, rather than a professional commission meant to conserve the hero’s image. “Don’t fool yourself,” Roth wrote to his friend, Stefan Zweig, cognisant of how such objects of faith had lost their substance, “Hell reigns.”
Roth’s own circumstances in 1932 made the fallibility of rule impossible to ignore. He wrote The Radetzky March in a devastated economy, watching the rise of fascism. Meanwhile his wife, who suffered long-term ill health, became impossible to care for and was moved into an asylum.
Around him, art reflected the changes and crises of the time. Literature, music and painting were drastic and deformative, and artists’ voices were urgently personal. The publication of The Radetzky March coincided with Billie Holiday’s career breakthrough in Harlem. The same year, Edgar Varèse’s Ionisation for 13 percussion instruments premiered at Carnegie Hall.
In literature, Hungarian writer and Imperial citizen Ödön von Horváth wrote about a death of values in Youth without God (1937) while living in Trieste. But Youth without God is written in the first person, and describes in flashing, diary-like chapters how schoolboys collude to have a teacher sacked; the story spirals in a frenzy, and the teacher is left with no way forward except to capitulate to forces of fascism.
In this context, The Radetzky March feels untimely. It is told in the third person, slowly, using the kind of imagery deployed by Turgenev in his sentimental novellas of the 1860s, and the morality of Tolstoy. Roth therefore uses plot to expose the Empire’s flimsiness, but he shows that the power of its language and imagery endured, drawing on the consolatory power of description and Romanticism. He observes the effects of weather, the cut of soldiers’ uniforms, and the fidgeting disquietude of social interaction. It expresses itself unironically using the narrative techniques of an earlier age. Scene moves to scene with the calm of a gramophone record spinning out, and silently being replaced with another.
So The Radetzky March does not show the old Empire being bulldozed by WWI and modernisation; it proposes that however the machinery of society transforms, people remain hopeful for their own freedom, and unable to ignore the mix of anxiety and nostalgia that accompanies something ending. A similar narrative is unwound in Roth’s story Fallmerayer the Stationmaster (1933). This could be slipped into The Radetzky March without deforming the novel – it is a love story about a regional administrator and a Baroness who believes her husband has died at war. Dependent on politics they cannot control, they will be pulled apart if ever the husband returns.
Fallmerayer and Radetzky both deal with the effects of powerlessness and the emotive effects of inevitability, without revealing their causes. The Emperor’s life draws out like the slow bars of Brahms’s Op 119 No 1 intermezzo, from his final set of piano pieces written in 1893. Soon after composing them, the styles and techniques Brahms spent his life studying would be exploded in the music of Mahler, Stravinsky and Schönberg; although these pieces represent Brahms’s most advanced and individualistic work, Brahms seems to concede his own artistry. He composes stillness, untimeliness and nostalgia into the pieces, without suggesting what was happening outside to have this effect. And by the time Emperor Franz Josef dies in 1916, the war is well under way. The society in his purview is all Roth shows in The Radetzky March, but we know the world has already stopped paying attention.
“That is how a farmer walks across the soil in spring--and later, in summer, the traces of his steps are obscured by the billowing richness of the wheat he once sowed.”
Review by Steven Doran
This review was written for the ACF London's EXPLORE OUR LIBRARY initiative.
