The border is also the place from which the signs of imminent upheaval are most visible. In The Radetzky March dwellers in the Austrian border regions perceive the approaching war long before those in Vienna, “not only because they were accustomed to sensing coming things, but also because they could see the portents of collapse every day with their own eyes.” Having grown up in a climate of disquiet and ferment that presaged the monarchy’s downfall, Roth was keenly aware of the augmented vision of things from the periphery, “where the demise of the world could already clearly be seen, as one sees a storm at the edge of a city, while its streets still lie unsuspectingly and blissfully under a blue sky.” This border-perspective is crucial to Roth’s world-view as a quintessential outsider, from his beginnings as a fatherless and poetically inclined Jew from Europe’s eastern frontier to his last years as an exile in Paris. The acuity of Roth’s discernment from the margins is evident in the incisive nature of his journalism, the political foresight of his early fiction, and the emotional profundity of his late work.
The elegiac turn in Roth’s writing that begins with Job is traceable to the author’s afflictions at the time. In 1929 his wife was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Like Deborah Singer in the novel, who is desperate to find a cure for her disabled son, Roth sought the help of a Hassidic rabbi for his stricken wife. The crisis with Friederike must have reawakened the painful memory of his father’s madness: Nachum Roth had been entrusted to the custody of a wonder rabbi. The scenes in Job in which the Singers’ daughter, Miriam, succumbs to insanity and ends up in an asylum reflect the trauma of Friederike’s eventual institutionalization. In letters from this period, Roth explained his woes in terms akin to those he uses in Job: “It is a curse that has struck me,” he wrote, “God alone can help.” The novel’s fairy-tale ending, in which the rabbi’s prophecy comes to pass and father and son are miraculously reunited (and which Roth once confessed he could not have written had he not been drunk), may well have served as a catharsis for the author in more ways than one. The scene in Job, in which it is not the father but the son who is healed, is the mirror image of the longed-for reunion that remained an unfulfilled wish outside the realm of fiction. Friederike’s psychosis no doubt compounded this grief.
After Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Roth refashioned himself as a Catholic conservative and monarchist. Having fled Berlin for Paris, the writer – who had once signed his articles for socialist-leaning newspapers “Der rote Joseph” (Red Joseph) – espoused the conviction that only the Catholic Church and a resuscitation of Habsburg rule could save Austria and Europe from the Nazi menace. Numerous contemporaries noted Roth’s mythomania and his tendency to adopt diverse masks and roles, but this was certainly the most bewildering of his transformations. Still, it seemed to emanate in some way from his elemental yearning for the vanished past, which intensified in those years. At the same time, tormented by guilt over his wife’s suffering and burdened by ever-worsening financial strains, Roth – who had always been a heavy drinker – descended ever deeper into the alcoholism that would take his life in 1939. A year later, Friederike would fall victim to the Nazis’ so-called “euthanasia” program in an Austrian sanatorium. Roth’s art had reached its pinnacle at the point when his life and his world began their tragic collapse.
Ross Benjamin
Joseph Roth, Job
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