The Radetzky March is listed in 1001 Books so I pounced when I saw it at the library!
This is why the editors included it:
The Radetzky March ranks as one of the finest European historical novels of the twentieth century and is the outstanding literary work produced by the prolific journalist and novelist Joseph Roth.
Through three generations of the Trotta family, the story traces the decline of the Hapsburg Empire in its dying days, but this is not a family saga. From the hero of the battle of Solferino who saves the Emperor Franz Joseph’s life and is subsequently ennobled from plain Lieutenant Trotta to Baron von Trotta and Sipolje; to his son Herr Van Trotta who becomes the District Commissioner; to his grandson Carl-Joseph who has an indifferent peacetime career in the army, the book focusses just on these three men who are all, effectively, bachelors, and how they represent the fracturing of the old certainties of empire.
Strauss’ Radetzsky March is a motif throughout the book. Throughout his rigid loveless childhood when he is steam-rollered into the military career denied to his father, Carl-Joseph hears the local bandmaster play this march and he associates it with tradition, order, duty and belonging.
But as the first Baron rightly surmised, these values are under stress. As Emma from Book Around the Corner explains in her review the Baron steered his only son into the bureaucracy because he was livid about the misrepresentation of history in the legend that proliferated about the way he saved the Emperor. Truth takes second place, because a mere infantryman from a peasant background could not be seen to have saved an emperor. (Or even to have touched him). So the story in the schoolbooks transforms Trotta into a cavalry officer, and when the newly ennobled Van Trotta appeals to the Emperor, he is told that the legend is meant to inspire Austro-Hungarian patriotism. But the story is removed from the textbooks anyway, thus ensuring that Van Trotta’s son and grandson wrongly think that they are of aristocratic lineage.
This unusual level of access to the Emperor is a motif in the book as well. Carl-Joseph is a poor soldier, his lofty ideals having no outlet since the country is at peace. The only time he sees any action is when his unit is required to put down industrial action in the region bordering Russia, and so he drifts into a dissipated life of drinking 90% proof, amassing a colossal debt due to gambling, and dereliction of duty due to womanising. When his folly causes a fatal duel and he is in serious trouble, his dutiful letters to his father begin at last to confront reality and the family’s special connection to the Emperor rescues him, not for the first time.
Too late, father and son begin to forge a relationship as disillusionment with empire sets in for both of them. Carl-Joseph had never enjoyed family life. As a small boy he was sent away to school so that he could realise his widowed father’s ambitions that he would become a cavalry officer. (A career destined to become irrelevant in the mechanised warfare of WW1). They communicated in a routine of diffident letters which made it impossible for either one to know the other. In a parody of the relationship that the Emperor has with his subjects, the District Commissioner has exactly the same conversations each time with his underlings because he has no idea who they are or even if their children are boys or girls.
The strict regimes of Carl-Joseph’s father’s and his routine pretensions to nobility sabotage all his relationships, and late in life he realises that he has had no friends. The death of the old family retainer Joseph provokes a crisis because he is irreplaceable and the District Commissioner has no one to talk to or help him with advice about his son’s catastrophes. While Roth’s portrait of Carl-Joseph is not unsympathetic, his character’s eventual rescue by the Empire is symptomatic of a regime that looked back to protecting an entirely useless, accident-prone young man at the expense of better people who had something worthwhile to offer.
The novel is superbly written, evoking a bygone age with finesse and the translation is perfect. (Hofman is a poet, and he also translated Hans Fallada’s Alone in Berlin). It is a tragedy that Roth (1894-1939) was forced to flee Germany under the Nazis and died in poverty in Paris aged just 44.
Apart from the fact that this is a thoroughly engaging novel, why should readers find a story tracing the decline of an empire relevant now? Well, we are living through the decline of the American empire and the same lessons apply. Poor leadership in political life; flawed education systems more focussed on test results than on preparation for the future; dysfunctional family life; mythmaking history through mass media; a failure to teach ethical standards of behaviour in the military; inequitable economic policies and an intolerance of diversity. We in Australia might not have an empire, but we might do well to interrogate how many of these lessons apply to us too…
Author: Joseph Roth
Title: The Radetsky March
Translated from the German by Michael Hofman
Publisher: Granta Books, 2003 (first published in 1932, first English translation 1933)
ISBN: 9781862076051
Source: Dandenong Library
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog 
Reblogged this on The Logical Place.
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By: Tim Harding on July 4, 2018
at 11:36 am
Now I KNOW you are stalking my library, Lisa! It’s uncanny how similar our book responses are.
This is one of the great books, for me. Part of a whole, not genre, but group of books chronicling the end of a way of life, of an era dying, of the old passing into the modern. And the incomprehension of those it left behind. Brideshead Revisited, The Leopard, Isabel Colgate’s The Shooting Party, and many others. It’s the end of ‘The Long 19th Century’. Everything changed. Half the western world was dead or about to die: of wars and Influenza and revolution. Nothing could ever be the same again. Roth’s characters did not know all of this but felt it – the air was full of foreboding and presages and omens. The two old men, the doctor and the lawyer, had both lost their sons and their certainties. And yet, in a beautiful passage, they glance at each other in the bar and realise they are reading the same thing in the same newspaper. They have things in common. And when they begin to play Chess together, their fingers touch as they move the pieces and a spark of the simple human condition is lit, and they have each other, in the face of the world lost, they are not alone. I bought an old painting because it depicts that very scene. Do you remember the Trevelyan quote in my own book: ‘One generation vanishing into another/gone as utterly as we ourselves shall shortly be gone.’ The Radetzky March was strongly in my mind when I quoted that. I am so glad you reminded me of this book and what it means.
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By: Jan Wallace Dickinson on July 4, 2018
at 1:29 pm
*giggle* One of many libraries I’m stalking, I must confess:)
This novel is a perfect model of an historical novel, because it’s written from the heart. Roth witnessed the breakup of the Austria he had grown up in and loved, and I feel sure that he heard people saying some of the things that he uses in dialogue. And even though all the characters are flawed, I couldn’t help feeling compassion for them.
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By: Lisa Hill on July 4, 2018
at 5:41 pm
You are right on all of your assessments on the present state of this country. Some days I verge on despair but then the books give me succour as always. I must read this one as have never explored this great writer but have read The Leopard a few times.
Big thanks as always for your insightful reviews.
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By: Fay Kennedy on July 4, 2018
at 1:47 pm
Thank you, Fay. I like to think that America will be great again, but not in the way That Man is barking about! We in Australia have more values in common with the US than we do with China, and I think that good people in both countries will rise above the current debacle and put things right again.
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By: Lisa Hill on July 4, 2018
at 5:43 pm
Thanks Lisa for your thoughtful and illuminating review of a book I found unusually challenging, possibly because the unpleasantness of the second and third von Trotta men drove me away from it several times and I had to read my way back in.
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By: Lyn Leader-Elliott on July 4, 2018
at 6:13 pm
Hello Lyn, thanks for your comment:)
I think I might have had more patience with Carl-Joseph than I otherwise might because I’d read in Tolstoy how the military life was so harmful to young men of the nobility. With nothing much to do, and often garrisoned in out of the way places, it was too easy to drift into drinking and gambling and because of their privileged positions, they were able to get away with bad behaviour (much like our sports stars of today).
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By: Lisa Hill on July 4, 2018
at 6:37 pm
I respected the book, but did not like it much at the time, repelled by the life of the mostly-useless young man. He was destroyed by the life he was bred up to lead, but did not do anything to correct his situation. My (deceased) husband was born in Hungary. All members of his family always spoke well for Franz Joseph. It was not so much that they admired him personally but they were nostalgic for a time of certainty and security.
You touched me with the parallels you cite to the death of empire. I am living through it here, and it is very painful. The pain is not for the loss. I never wanted empire much in the first place — at least I think I didn’t — but for the mean reactions to it.
Someone reminded us of The Leopard. The first time I read it, I could not see what all the fuss was about. Some years later I reread it on the advice of a friend and I was smitten with its insights, perfectly embodied in the story. We live and learn.
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By: SilverSeason on July 4, 2018
at 10:11 pm
Hi Nancy, thanks for dropping by:)
I think the nostalgia comes through in the book, and I think many of us too young to have lived through even its dying days still regret the loss of certainty and the entire debacle of the 20th century…
I was using the word empire loosely of course: the American empire has been an empire of ideas and ideals, and the values of honorable leaders like Rooseveldt and Obama were values worth exporting to the world.
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By: Lisa Hill on July 4, 2018
at 10:42 pm
Roosevelt and Obama were not the problem. There is another empire, often described as “the military industrial complex,” which seeks dominance and control through military presence and capitalistic manipulations. Our current would-be Caesar finds any failure to completely submit to be a defiance and a potential loss of power. It seems to be a insecure male thing. Anything less than total control threatens masculinity.
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By: SilverSeason on July 4, 2018
at 11:13 pm
Well, yes, I did think about military adventures… I forget which president (Bush?) was reported here as invoking the intervention in Iraq as a way of exporting democracy into the Middle East with the hope that a democracy there would pressure the other Arab states into political change. I assumed at the time that he also meant economic change that would suit US purposes, and this was often glibly interpreted as an intervention to secure oil supplies. But I really don’t know enough about it or US NATO activities to have an opinion about that aspect of US dominance in world affairs.
So I was primarily thinking of what some people call cultural imperialism: swamping local cultural industries and products with US film, literature and also news. Our film & TV is dominated by US products, and so are our bestseller lists. It would probably astonish you to see how much of our daily news is about stuff that’s happened in the US, compared to stuff that happens in our Asian neighbourhood. We hear about a US bus crash killing 10 people in great detail and a monsoon that kills thousands in Asia gets a paragraph. And the values that underlie that cultural dominance are not as closely aligned to ours as they used to be. The gun issue is a good example: Australians have comprehensively rejected the idea of gun ownership as a right so the films where the gun is an everyday accessory to solving problems seems remote and unrealistic to us.
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By: Lisa Hill on July 5, 2018
at 9:27 am
Great review Lisa. This is one that’s been lurking on my shelves for ages, and I have read some Roth which I have enjoyed. Sounds like this one is still very relevant…
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By: kaggsysbookishramblings on July 5, 2018
at 12:04 am
I think I’m going to hunt out some more of his books:)
(LOL when I have time and some space on my shelves….)
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By: Lisa Hill on July 5, 2018
at 9:28 am
Reblogged this on penwithlit and commented:
Roth is a great writer and strongly recommend -Summer Before the Dark: Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth, Ostend 1936 by Volker Weidermann too!
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By: penwithlit on July 5, 2018
at 4:17 am
Yes, Stefan Zweig is very important. Beware of Pity was the first book of his, I read.
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By: Jan Wallace Dickinson on July 5, 2018
at 9:42 am
Thanks for that, I’ll keep an eye out for that one:)
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By: Lisa Hill on July 5, 2018
at 9:42 am
It’s strange butcwhenever I consider reading a book by Roth I rarely think of this one and yet it’s generally considered to be his best book – it’s the only one of his on the 1001 list. I must read it soon.
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By: Jonathan on July 5, 2018
at 9:21 am
I think you’d like it. (I love it when 1001 Books works like this, actually introducing me to a new author who turns out to be terrific).
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By: Lisa Hill on July 5, 2018
at 9:43 am
There are quite a few books on the list that I’d never heard of. I finally added a ‘1001 Books’ page to my blog a fw months ago. I’m not necessarily concentrating on them specifically but I’m keeping note.
Haven’t you read any other Joseph Roth? I really love ‘The Legend of the Holy Drinker’ which was his last book.
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By: Jonathan on July 5, 2018
at 3:59 pm
Me too. I don’t set out to read them as you would if you were doing a challenge, but I tend to recognise titles on my 1001-to-read list if I see them at the library and so I do get through a few of them every year. (Though I suspect that old age will get to me before I get anywhere near completing it!)
I haven’t read that one. I’ve read Fallada’s The Drinker, but I have to say that I don’t have much interest in reading books by/about people with addiction problems.
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By: Lisa Hill on July 5, 2018
at 4:44 pm
I may try to read some of the 17thC & 18thC ones from the list that I still haven’t read, e.g. Fielding, Diderot, Richardson, Defoe etc.
TLOTHD isn’t about addiction as such; the main character is homeless and a drunk but it concerns his attempts to pay back some money that was lent to him. It’s really just a short story.
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By: Jonathan on July 5, 2018
at 10:54 pm
Well, maybe… but the current preoccupation with drink and drug addiction in Australian publishing doesn’t interest me at all.
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By: Lisa Hill on July 5, 2018
at 10:59 pm
Great review, Lisa.
Thanks for mentioning my billet.
I like your conclusion.
I have a feeling of dread each time I read a book from the 1930s. What they describe feels too close to home. And when you know what happened then…
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By: Emma on July 21, 2018
at 4:33 pm
It does seem eerily familiar… I have trouble believing what I read in the news sometimes, it seems so stupid.
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By: Lisa Hill on July 21, 2018
at 6:25 pm
I’ve ordered this new edition from my local bookseller, Clifford Posner at the Grumpy Swimmer in Elwood. In the meantime, I’m reading the Penguin edition translated by Joachim Neugroschel, with an Introduction by Nadine Gordimer and a wonderful cover shot of an abandoned red drum that it’s easy to imagine has been dropped in the woodland by a fallen soldier.
I’m nuts about the Strauss music of the same name and always wait with great anticipation for the finale of the NYE concert from Vienna where the conductor invites the audience to clap along in time.
In The Radetzky March Joseph Roth is writing about the world of my grandfathers, the world they were prescient enough to see held no place for Jewish families. Both emigrated to London in the 1890s.
One grandfather was in the army of Tsar Alexander II and it seems likely he was conscripted as a young boy, maybe twelve years old. He told stories of eating worm-infested ‘sandviches’ during a campaign against the Turks so I imagine this must have been the 1877 Ottoman war when he was about fifteen. It was common practice for the military authorities to take children from poor Jewish families and they were bound to serve for twenty-five years. When Roth refers to the ‘border countries’ I imagine my grandfather bravely setting off through the Pale of Settlement into the unknown with his belongings in a sack on his back, a bit like Dick Whittington.
My other grandfather was in the army of Emperor Franz Joseph. Although he was born in Lemberg (now Lviv) in the east, he was stationed in the western part of the Hapsburg Empire. He was a master tailor and made those ‘chocolate box’ uniforms all gold braid and epaulettes – think ‘The Merry Widow’ operetta – for the Emperor’s cavalry. Vienna was the epicentre of this world and news from the outside filtered through Austrian newspapers; about pogroms in the east and the Dreyfus case in Paris. My grandfather dithered a bit. He and my grandmother went to London, where several children, including my father, were born and then, because the Emperor, celebrating his jubilee, declared an amnesty to soldiers who had failed to complete their military service, he went back to Europe. It soon became apparent that this was a mistake and the family returned to London for good.
As the Empire collapsed and Europe fragmented, the families that my grandparents left behind gradually disappeared. The Holocaust accounted for all but one branch who escaped from Vienna just after the Anschluss. I believe some of my Russian ancestors died in the massacre at the ravine at Babi Yar, near Kiev. I know that four great-uncles from Austria died in Auschwitz.
Although my new book ‘Rosa: memories with licence’ (to be published by Hybrid Publishers in 2019) is primarily set in London and Melbourne, I have devoted two chapters to these distant European ancestors, and as I read Roth I realise that, like so many other migrants, I have debts.
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By: roscollins on August 11, 2018
at 4:21 pm
Ros, your personal connection with events in this book makes an amazing story – I thank you for sharing it here.
That business of conscripting children is bizarre: we tend to think of child conscription as something only Hitler did, or those Lord’s Army conscripts in Africa today. And 25 years! That’s a lifetime, ruining young adolescence, young adulthood and the time when a man would have been establishing a family and career.
I can’t wait till Rosa comes out. Do you have a likely publication date? I don’t to miss the launch this time!
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By: Lisa Hill on August 11, 2018
at 5:46 pm