Joseph Roth

The Radetzky March follows three generations of the Trotta family down the long decline of Austria-Hungary, and it is the book that made Roth the great elegist of a state he had watched collapse. He was a Galician Jew from what is now Ukraine, a journalist of enormous output in Berlin and Vienna, and he left Germany on the day the new regime took power in 1933. After that he wrote in Paris hotel rooms and drank steadily, and he died there in 1939 at forty-four, a few weeks before the war he had been predicting in print for years. His wife Friederike had schizophrenia and was killed under the regime's euthanasia programme. The title on this page is the Dutch spelling rather than the German.