Roth, Joseph

Joseph Roth was born in Brody in Galicia, then part of the Habsburg Monarchy, now Ukraine, on September 26, 1894 in the family of Maria (Miriam) Roth née Grübel and Nahum Roth. He attended Baron-Hirsch Jewish public school and the German grammar school ( Kronprinz-Rudolf-Gymnasium ) in Brody from 1905 to 1913. After graduation, he started German studies and philosophy at the University of Lemberg (Lwów, now L'viv, Ukraine), but after one semester he transferred to the University of Vienna. Joseph Roth did not finish his studies, for he together with his friend Józef Wittlin volunteered in the Army in 1916. He was sent as a one-year volunteer ( Einjährig-Freiwilliger ) to the Eastern front. Joseph Roth was always proud of his military service.

In 1918 Joseph Roth returned to Vienna, where he started his journalistic career. He began writing for the left-leaning Der neue Tag and Arbeiter-Zeitung, but soon moved to Berlin where he worked for several newspapers, such as the Neue Berliner Zeitung, Berliner Börsen-Courier, and Vorwärts . In 1922 he married Friederike Reichler. He gradually became one of the best-paid German journalists. In 1923 he started working as a Berlin correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung . Joseph Roth wrote in all kinds of journalistic genres - reports, essays, opinions, book and theatre reviews, and serialized travelogues - from his trips to Germany, the Soviet Union, France, Italy and the Balkans. Besides the Frankfurter Zeitung, Joseph Roth contributed to many more newspapers, among them the Prager Tagblatt that published one of his earliest literary attempts during the First World War.

At the end of the 1920s he tried to free himself from his journalistic obligations to focus on his writing. At this time he also wrote his most successful books. However, soon after Joseph Roth left Germany and settled in Paris in 1933, he started again contributing to German exile publications, such as Das neue Tage-Buch, Die Österreichische Post, Pariser Tageblatt, and Pariser Tageszeitung . Joseph Roth wrote over thirteen hundred newspaper articles in the inter-war period. The ideological bias of his writing gradually shifted from the socially-tilted critical articles that were often radical and close to the political conviction of his left-leaning friends to more conservative and monarchistic positions where Joseph Roth gradually appeared in isolation.

However, it was not for his journalistic work Joseph Roth gained most of his acclaim, but for his novels and short stories. Joseph Roth wrote thirteen novels, eight short stories, volumes of essays and numerous articles. His first novel Das Spinnennetz (The Spider's Web) was published in newspapers in 1923. Hotel Savoy and Rebellion were published in 1924. His greatest successes were the later novels Hiob (Job) and Radetzkymarsch (The Radetzky March) published in 1928 and 1930 respectively. Joseph Roth did not have a chance to capitalize on his literary breakthrough. When the NSDAP took power he left for France and lived the life of an political émigré.

Joseph Roth did not stop working on his novels and further contributed both to French and exile newspapers. Joseph Roth published every year at least one new novel, among them Antichrist (Antichrist), Tarabas (Tarabas), Stationschef Fallmerayer (Fallmerayer the Stationmaster), Die Hundert Tage (Ballad of the Hundred Days), and the sequel of the Radetzky Marsch, Die Kapuzinergruft (The Emperor's Tomb).

Joseph Roth died in the Necker hospital in Paris on May 27, 1939. His wife, Friederike (Friedl), who was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1928, lived in an Austrian mental sanatorium, where she was killed in the Nazi euthanasia program in 1940.

From the guide to the Joseph Roth Collection, 1897-1995, (Leo Baeck Institute)