Tunes of vanishing glory

Just as Gustav Mahler wove a bugle fanfare into his symphonies, so Joseph Roth wove martial music into his novels. In Roth’s case, it was invariably Johann Strauss’s ‘Radetzky March’, a signature tune which tum-te-tums through his earlier fiction and then becomes the title of this, his 1932 masterpiece.

For Roth, like Mahler, military tunes were the very symbol of Austria-Hungary. They underpinned a whole way of life, uniting that multi-ethnic empire that stretched precariously across central Europe. Born in 1894, Roth arrived too late to be a part of the astonishing creativity of Vienna in the dying days of Habsburg power. Most of his output focused on the sense of fracture and alienation after its collapse – but The Radetzky March examines instead its protracted death, and reveals Roth’s ambivalent attitude to the ancien rZgime.

A saga depicting three generations of the Trotta family, it opens at the battle of Solferino in 1859, where the first Trotta of the story saves the young Emperor Franz-Josef’s life. From that point on, the fate of the obsessively loyal Trottas is linked to the vast Empire itself.

Most of the story focuses on the grandson of the ‘Hero of Solferino’, Carl Joseph, who is haunted by the example of service shown by his grandfather and his father, both fanatical imperial servants. A decent, mediocre, patriotic lieutenant, he nevertheless feels overwhelmed by the permeation of the empire into every part of his experience. He is fated to die in the mud of 1914, ‘not with sword in hand, but with a couple of buckets of water’. Such irony and compassion underpin the whole work.

The novel is a remarkable piece of compression. Although relatively slim in size, it stands with Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities as a classic analysis of Austria-Hungary in all its vast scope.