The Emperor's Tomb

Translator’s Introduction

The Emperor’s Tomb — in German Die Kapuzinergruft, “The Crypt of the Capuchins” (the eerie underground burial place of the Habsburgs on the Neuer Markt in the middle of Vienna), and before that variously “The Cup of Life” and “A Man Seeks His Fatherland” — was the last novel Joseph Roth wrote, and the last he actually saw in print, in December 1938 or January 1939. The String of Pearls was published after his death in May 1939, but was written rather earlier, in 1935 and 1936, only to be overtaken in Roth’s gruelling and chaotic final years by this more political and more commercially promising and up-to-the-minute “sequel” to Roth’s most successful novel, The Radetzky March of 1932. Both were published (in German) by the tiny Dutch Catholic press, de Gemeenschap, of Bilthoven, Roth having exhausted the few other, more conventional émigré possibilities through a combination of need, under-payment, market-saturation and all-round prickliness.

As a sequel, it is a study in complementarity, but also in contrasts. It is a novel of mothers and marriages where The Radetzky March is strictly patrilineal. The Radetzky March begins and ends with scenes of battle (Solferino and Krasne-Busk), The Emperor’s Tomb runs from the eve of one war to the eve of the next, from 1913 to 1938. Where The Radetzky March — uniquely in Roth’s fiction — impresses with its orchestration, its stateliness, its pageantry, the glorious Tolstoyan fullness of its realization (“done in oils,” is how I described it), The Emperor’s Tomb — the cartoon after the finished painting — seems to revert to Roth’s “Zeitungsroman” mode of the twenties, scribbled, spur of the moment, skittish, distrait: the numerous short chapters, the insistent tugging at the narrative (“So, in the middle of the summer of 1914, I went to Zlotogrod”), the continual introduction of new characters and locations and abrupt twists and jags in the plot. While the composition of The Radetzky March recalls “broad discs overhanging one another, like the records cued on an old-fashioned gramophone,” The Emperor’s Tomb — colourful, bitty and intense — is more like a shaken kaleidoscope of tumbled glass shards. The Radetzky March is wine, The Emperor’s Tomb — in Yeats’s word — “wine-breath.”

The Radetzky March conveys a whole gone world; The Emperor’s Tomb is more a canny valedictory repertoire of Rothian tropes and characters, done fast, glancingly and sometimes approximately: the spoiled, rather foolish youth; the return to the army; falling in and out of love; male friendships often across gulfs of class, geography and language; the frontier bar; being taken prisoner in the East; the Heimkehrer of 1918, who becomes a “superfluous man” unable to settle into the altered postwar world; a jaundiced view of contemporary design and morals; the centre and the fringes of empire; the operation of treachery and infidelity and economic ruin; the hero’s final isolation in space, time and feeling. While The Radetzky March can seem like a fabulous concatenation of anthology-ripe scenes never bettered anywhere — seduction, death, duel, feast, drinking, roulette, manoeuvres, battle, you name it — everything in The Emperor’s Tomb seems to have come from somewhere else in Roth, where it was usually handled with greater expansiveness and willingness. There is something astringent and shorthand and weathered about it. It is a “slight return,” like the “wheel” of a sestina, or the satyr play concluding a Classical trilogy. It is like one of Elisabeth’s blueprints for an unrealized design; a teasing combination of menu and confit (in contrast to the opulent multi-course meal that is Radetzky). It is laconic and mannerly; spare and drenched in a desperate intensity of feeling; detailed when it wants to be, rapid and fast-forward when it doesn’t. (As a measure of this, Roth promised his publishers — with him one almost always wants to say, his poor publishers — a manuscript of 350 pages, but actually delivered just 173.) Where The Radetzky March is third person and epic, The Emperor’s Tomb (though it began in third person) is in a slightly problematical first person. It is not so much a direct sequel, as a sort of round-the-corner continuation, with its three separate moorings: its Trotta is the second cousin of the hero of The Radetzky March; its Chojnicki a brother of the wise and far-seeing alchemist count who ends up in the asylum at Steinhof; Onufri and Kapturak are wheeled on again, and its Jacques is a mystical double or perhaps reprise of the original servant character.

Where Austria in The Radetzky March is to some extent accidental — it is a great novel about anywhere — The Emperor’s Tomb is deliberately and unmistakably a book about the Austria of those years, couched between symbol and allegory (what price the lesbian relationship between Elisabeth and Jolanth as a scurrilous reflection of the Dual Monarchy of Austria and Hungary?). It is indeed, as Paul Keegan once put it to me, a “non-fiction novel,” whose characters and action are shaped, if not supplied, by the bigger action of history in those years: sleepwalking into war, defeat, revolution, inflation, confusion of classes (old and new money), Depression, reaction. Most of the characters are weak, but in any case, character is no refuge against such history, any more than a piece of seaweed is against a tide. No one can oppose these developments, no one: not the brilliant violinist Ephraim who gives up his violin for Communist politics and a police bullet; not Elisabeth who goes to Hollywood, nor her father whose brilliant time as a war-profiteer is followed by years of failed and instinctless speculations; not the army bureaucrat Stellmacher, who winds up as an information office on the whereabouts of mostly dead officers; not Joseph Branco whose chestnut-selling tours of the Dual Monarchy are abruptly curtailed by new frontiers; not Frau Trotta who takes refuge in deafness and infirmity, so as not to feel her personal Anschluss by the appalling Prussian vulgarian von Stettenheim; and least of all Franz Ferdinand Trotta, awed by his mother but shaped by his father, who does everything that is asked of him, and still winds up alone and in despair. It is no accident that the hero climbs down into the tomb of the Habsburgs, because, in truth, where else is there for him — for Roth — to go in 1938, after the annexation and incorporation of Austria into Hitler’s German Reich of March of that year? When the Brownshirt walks into the café at the end to make his pompous announcement, Trotta in his lordly confusion thinks he must have come up out of the toilets, even though part of him knows the toilets are actually elsewhere. Then he thinks the whole world must have been turned upside down, which makes the final descent into the tomb an act of self-preservation as much as one of self-sepulture.

The Emperor’s Tomb is a strange, wonderful, drastic and unconsoling book. Like Flight Without End of 1927, the novel of Roth’s it most resembles, it plunges through a world and a lifetime as through a vacuum. The finishing line comes up way before we were ready for it — and we’ve lost. Was that everything, hero and reader think, in both cases, looking up in startled unison. Well, yes. The haunting final scene of Roth’s earlier Flight Without End goes — in David Le Vay’s translation:

It was at this hour that my friend Tunda, thirty-two years of age, healthy and vigorous, a strong young man of diverse talents, stood on the Place de la Madeleine, in the centre of the capital of the world, without any idea what to do. He had no occupation, no desire, no hope, no ambition, and not even any self-love. No one in the whole world was as superfluous as he.

It could almost double as a beginning (indeed, doesn’t Musil’s Man Without Qualities begin similarly, with a city and a gifted man in some perplexity?), only the world is used up and the hero has nothing to offer it. They recoil from each other in mutual disappointment. “Where can I go now, I, a Trotta?” is a little lower, and a little less clamorous — there is no brass about it, no thèse, no O Welt outcry — but it’s basically the same ending: Tunda the tragedy of potential, Trotta the tragedy of none; Tunda in the capital of the world, Trotta in Germany’s newest fiefdom; Tunda on the threshold of a life, Trotta in the house of death. Still, no one who knows both books could fail to be reminded of the other. Indeed, it seems Roth himself was, because at one stage he mailed his publishers the ending for the earlier book. With adorable innocence, they wrote back (September 16, 1938):

It has come to our attention that the last chapter of The Emperor’s Tomb which you sent us is almost word for word the same as the last chapter of your Flight Without End. Is that an error? Surely one can’t use exactly the same chapter in two different books.

It’s hard to know if Roth purposed anything by it, whether it was a clerical error or an early instance of recycling, or a cynical try-on (all seem possible). There followed some of the usual Hickhack — Roth about money, the publishers about the manuscript; then Roth about the manuscript, and the publishers about money — the pages by now had been set! — before, fully two months later, Roth explained that there had indeed been a misunderstanding, and at the eleventh hour the ending of Flight Without End was successfully kept out of The Emperor’s Tomb.

All his life, Roth had an ambivalent attitude to psychology. He was happy to adopt the Freudian picture of the house, with its basement, ground floor, upstairs and attic, but he had no use for Freud’s theories or practice. When Stefan Zweig (who wrote a monograph on Freud, spoke at his funeral and counted himself one of his most loyal friends) suggested to Roth that he might be “subconsciously angry” with him, Roth exploded back (April 2, 1936): “What’s that supposed to mean, ‘subconscious? It’s pure Antichrist!” In Right and Left (1929), sounding unusually pompous, Roth proclaims: “Passions and beliefs are tangled in the minds and hearts of men, and there is no such thing as psychological consistency.” The plurality, the mutability, the essential unknowability of people is one of his great themes. In The Radetzky March a woman in the space of a single hour is “capable of piling the characteristics of all four seasons on a single shoulder.” In The Leviathan, Nissen Piczenik has a sudden idea: “A notion like that arrives suddenly, lightning is slow by comparison, and it hits the very place from where it sprang, which is to say the human heart.” In Right and Left again (but of a different character), Roth writes: “He remembered the lunatic in his village at home, who never tired of asking everyone he met: ‘How many are you? Are you one?’ No, one wasn’t just one. One was ten people, twenty, a hundred. The more opportunities life gave us, the more beings it revealed in us. A man might die because he hadn’t experienced anything, and had been just one person all his life.” At the same time, it is obvious that Roth is a wonderful observer, an intricate understander and a droll relater of human behaviour. Take, in the present novel, the series of interactions in the third chapter where Trotta acquires his cousin’s waistcoat, watch and chain; or, near the end of the book when he realizes how long his mother has been struggling with her deafness; or the time when Jolanth and Elisabeth go to the ladies’ loo together, taking care on their way back, to see that they, in their female supremacism, are presented with the bill, and not Trotta. All this is nothing if not psychology, but psychology of an unusual sort, namely something momentary and dramatic, on occasion even catastrophic. It is a thunderbolt or lightning-flash, not a climate to be measured, calculated and predicted — something you might take an umbrella for, or a sweater-vest. Consistency doesn’t interest Roth, perhaps even at a certain level, plausibility; and if plausibility, then as a servant not as a master.* What interests him is change.

In an odd way, The Emperor’s Tomb is a sort of Bildungsroman, beginning with a privileged, rather shallow character (technically an adult though he continues to see himself primarily as a child), and ending with a Lear-like figure, with nothing but the first stirrings of wisdom and dignity. To do this, Roth has had to deepen the character as he went along: begin with one of his trustful blockheads (I don’t think I’m exaggerating), and end not just with experience and pain, but grafting on a nervous system and an intelligence with which to absorb them. Austria, the culture of Sachertorten and Sacher-Masoch and whipped cream and Klimt and Strauss and braided uniforms and archaic usages and Schnitzler and sweet little girls in the sticks (of the name of a girl in a Trafik scrawled on a box of cigarettes — a name, incidentally, almost identical to that of Roth’s poor schizophrenic wife, Friedl Reichler) needed to be made into a subject for tragedy, because that was how Roth understood what had happened to it, and he was no longer interested in writing anything else. Hence — I imagine — the switch during the writing of the novel from third person to first. Roth wanted access to his own intelligence and anguish and dignity. He therefore had to merge or morph his hero with himself, and he could only do it with the discretion afforded by the first person. (The book moves, you might say, from Trotta in the morning to Roth at night. The one who is woken up in the morning is not the same as the other who can’t go to bed at night. It’s only when you put it down at the end that you realize that something has happened to our hero or anti-hero.) Trotta has gone along rather purposelessly, except for, in his rather baffled and passive way, accruing losses — except for (as we say) de-accessioning. In the space of not many pages, he has lost basically everything: his mother, their servant, his wife, his child, his house, his cousin and his Jewish friend, his noble friends and his Polish Siberian friend, the remains of his fortune, even the quality of the night in Vienna at the turn of the century. The ending is naked self-portraiture. It is not the property of a character in a fictional situation, but the feeling Roth gives voice to in propria persona in his non-fiction of the time, the atmosphere of terminal dereliction and hopelessness experienced and expressed in pieces like “In the Bistro After Midnight”(November 1938) or “Rest While Watching the Demolition” (June 1938):

When the first silvery streetlights glimmer on, a refugee, an exile, sometimes comes along, without a wanderer’s staff, quite as if he were at home here, and — as if he wanted to prove to me in one breath that he felt at home, that he knew his way around, but also that where he felt at home wasn’t home — he says: “I know somewhere you can get a good, cheap meal here.” And I’m glad for him that he does. I’m glad that he walks off under the trail of silvery streetlights, and doesn’t stop, now that night is falling, to take in the ever-ghostlier-looking dust on the empty lot opposite. Not everyone has to get used to rubble and to shattered walls.

The exile, the displaced person, has taken the newspapers away with him. He wants to read them in his good, cheap restaurant. In front of me the table is empty.

“Where can I go now, I, a Trotta?” is absolutely of a piece with that terminal desolation — not least as “Trotta” chimes with the German “Toter,” a dead man.

In Roth, the practical and the quixotic are usually inextricable and inseparable. In February 1938, he visited Vienna for the last time, mirabile dictu, on a diplomatic mission for the Habsburg Legitimists; he spoke on behalf of the young Otto von Habsburg (grandson of Franz Joseph, and Pretendant to the throne that had been abolished at Versailles in 1918) to members of the Austrian government. He got a dusty answer and will have sensed the atmosphere himself (like Trotta’s friends suddenly melting away from the café table where they had all been sitting a moment before). A month later, huge crowds turned out to greet Hitler and the Wehrmacht. After a life spent for the most part in exile, and in the service of European unity, Otto von Habsburg died on July 4, 2011 at the age of ninety-eight, and was buried in the Kapuzinergruft, where Joseph Roth, one of his last and least and unlikeliest and so to speak ferventest subjects ended his last novel seventy years — ein Menschenalter, a biblical lifetime — before. The one word on his tomb (I seem to remember hearing late one night on the BBC World Service) is Frieden — Peace.

MICHAEL HOFMANN

AUGUST 2012

* Perhaps this is the place to draw the reader’s attention to a handful of minor inconsistencies in the text, which I have of course let stand: a little toing and froing in the months around the beginning of World War One; a little wavering in the names of the cafés; and the fact that the doors to Jadlowker’s border tavern are “grass-green” in one place and later “brown,” and that Jacques is described now as having hair, now as bald. Honi soit.