What young Ukrainians will learn from reading Joseph Roth

As Russia’s assault on Ukraine continues, Volodymyr Zelensky’s ministry of education has just announced changes to the national curriculum that include removing almost all the Russian authors on the foreign literature syllabus. In last week’s Spectator, Svitlana Morenets revealed the new names: we see Robert Burns, whose inclusion may be a nod to Britain’s support during the conflict. Then there is Joseph Roth, a master of German prose, whose writing about interwar Europe speaks to Ukraine’s modern upheavals.

Roth was born in 1894 in Brody, a town that now stands in western Ukraine but then lay in what was known as Galicia, the eastern Austro–Hungarian crownland. He left as soon as he could and rarely returned, but wrote about it from afar with increasing nostalgia until he drank himself to death on the eve of the second world war.

Equally brilliant as a journalist and writer of fiction, Roth’s short and frantic career produced countless newspaper articles alongside 17 novels and novellas. Some of them are classics of Mitteleuropean literature, but too many were hastily knocked-out when a publisher threatened to reclaim the advance Roth had already spent on drink and the expensive hotels he preferred to live in. His fiction switched from a series of brisk, contemporary 1920s stories to a post-1930 collection of near-historical novels that chronicle a crumbling empire. As he wrote in his late novel The Emperor’s Tomb: ‘People call [it] the “World War”, and in my view rightly, and not for the usual reason, that the whole world was involved in it, but rather because as a result of it we lost a whole world, our world…’

In reading his greatest work, The Radetzky March, tenth-grade students in Ukraine’s schools will learn about a long-gone world whose decline is described over three generations of the Trotta family.