The writer and journalist Joseph Roth was born in 1894 in the Habsburg crown territory of Galicia, in what is now western Ukraine. An eastern European of impoverished Jewish origins, he craved literary recognition and won it, deservedly, for his 1932 novel, The Radetzky March. In prose of dark foreboding, it articulates the lost political tolerance and cosmopolitanism of the long-vanished Austro-Hungarian empire. With the rise of nationalist demagogueries in interwar Europe and antisemitism in Hitler’s Germany, the book was fed to the flames in the Nazi book-burnings of 1933 and afterwards banned. Roth began to detest Germany and, as the Nazis brutishly consolidated power, the German people collectively. The bonfires were still raging when he wrote to his wealthy Viennese Jewish writer friend and patron Stefan Zweig: “The Prussians are representatives of the chemical inferno, of the industrialised inferno” – a remark that seems to foreshadow the assembly line gassings and burnings at the Nazi death camps. Haunted by the “impossibility” of being a Jew in a post-Habsburg world, Roth took to the bottle and, in 1939, died in Paris, destitute. He was 44.
Keiron Pim’s is the first English-language biography of Roth, and what a superb book it is – impeccably researched, extremely readable and, it must be said, grimly relevant in the wake of Putin’s assault on Ukraine. With rare verve, Pim exalts Roth as a novelist of tragic pan-European yearning. The Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy had, in Roth’s view, united Turkish Tatars, Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs, Bulgarian Muslims, Jews, Roma and Russian “old believers” in a great east-to-west, Muslim-to-Christian supranational community of peoples. But Hitler and Stalin had unleashed a “viciousness” far greater than anything the German-Hungarian rulers could have dreamed of. Jewish communities would disappear overnight in Roth’s ancestral Ukraine as totalitarian intolerance took hold. Fascism was Europe’s new “hell on earth”, he warned his readers.
Pim portrays Roth as a romantic pessimist beset by calamity. As a philosophy and literature student in 20s Vienna, he affected the air of a dandified metropolitan. But Roth began to drink heavily and soon alcohol was the curse of his life. It provoked bouts of lachrymose self-pity (his many letters to Zweig are awash with references to calvados) and interfered with his marriage to Louise Brooks lookalike Friedl Reichler. (Later diagnosed with schizophrenia, Reichler was consigned to an asylum outside Vienna, where the Nazis murdered her in the interests of eugenics.) While working as a journalist, Roth lived with her in a rented apartment in Berlin for 10 years until 1933. He was, says his English language translator Michael Hofmann, a “newspaperman all his life”; as well as 17 novels and novellas (Job, The Legend of the Holy Drinker, Zipper and his Father), Roth wrote countless articles on subjects ranging from Parisian hotels to Balkan tinpot dictators to Prussian duelling scars.
Like his contemporary Thomas Mann, Roth fled Germany the moment Hitler came to power – and never returned. Beneath Berlin’s decadent jazz dives and cabaret clubs, he detected only a proliferating darkness. In his newspaper broadsides from Paris he contemplated the “furor teutonicus” that had set German-Jewish civilisation symbolically ablaze in the Hitlerite pyres of books. Political extremism of any kind – whether Nazi German or Soviet communist – had become hateful to him. “It’s late, it’s all so late,” he wrote to Zweig in 1935. Roth’s tormented relationship with his Judaism (at times he disdained eastern Jews as “backward”) was not shared by the comfortably assimilated Zweig. But much else about the writers’ mutual admiration and occasional ill-concealed rancour (“I hope you’ve calmed down,” Zweig typically upbraided the frequently rude and excoriating Roth) stemmed from their shared distaste for political dictatorship and the necessity to survive Hitler’s war against European Jewry. Roth was never under any illusions. “The barbarians have taken over. Do not deceive yourself,” he informed Zweig (who, dreadfully, killed himself with his wife, Lotte, in Brazil in 1942).
A ferocious malcontent for much of his brief life, Roth freewheeled to self-destruction with the aid of brandy and Pernod. He was a liability to anyone who cared about him; his writing was all he cared about. Alcohol was conceivably a balm for the hurt he had suffered as a teenager in Ukraine when his father, Nachum, died before his time, apparently “insane”. Yet for all his Faustian dissipation, Roth managed to write an extraordinary amount, and today he is recognised as a “canonical” German-language author whose reputation rests on a handful of novels and essay collections that, for their exploration of exile and rootlessness, continue to enthral. Unfailingly well-written and informative, Endless Flight is a grand tribute to one of the most discomfiting literary geniuses of the 20th century.
• Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth by Keiron Pim is published by Granta (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
