About this title: Strauss's "Radetzky March," signature tune of one of Europe's most powerful regimes, presides over Joseph Roth's account of three generations of the von Trotta family in the years preceding the 1918 collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Grandfather, son, and grandson are equally dependent on the empire: the first for his ennoblement after heroic action on the battlefield; the second for the tradition of selfless devotion to civic duty that makes him a meticulous servant of an administration whose failure he can neither comprehend nor survive; the third for the family standards of conduct ...
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Description: Good. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Description: Good. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Shipped to over one million happy customers. Your purchase benefits world literacy! read more
Edition: First Edition, First Printing.
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Overlook Pr, Bergenfield, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Date Published: 1995
ISBN-13:9780879515584ISBN:0879515589
Description: Very Good. 8vo-over 7¾"-9¾" tall. A very good paperback copy, lightly used. The spine is solid and square. The cover shows almost no wear. just some very light rubbing of the edges. The text is clean and unmarked. 331 pages. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Overlook TP
Date Published: 1995-08-01
ISBN-13:9780879515584ISBN:0879515589
Description: Good. Mild shelf wear; Corners minorly bumped; Faint spine crease; Minor tanning\soiling to page edges; Clean Copy; ** Free USPS tracking and confirm on US orders ** read more
Binding: Hardcover
Publisher: Everyman's Library
Date Published: 1996
ISBN-13:9780679451006ISBN:0679451005
Description: Very good in good dust jacket. Sewn binding. Cloth over boards. 384 p. Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics, 197. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Date Published: 1984
ISBN-13:9780140064636ISBN:014006463X
Description: Good. * BOOKS DISPATCHED WITHIN 24 HOURS * SATISFACTION GUARANTEED * ALL QUESTIONS ANSWERED PROMPTLY * SHIPPED FROM UK * USA DELIVERY IN 3-5 DAYS * SHIPPED FROM UK: USA & EUROPE SPECIALISTS DELIVERY IN 3-5 DAYS. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Date Published: 1984
ISBN-13:9780140064636ISBN:014006463X
Description: Good. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! read more
Description: Very good. 1984 Unread Paperback edition in excellent condition. All items guaranteed. Immediate worldwide dispatch. PLEASE NOTE IF PURCHASING A VIDEO: Unless otherwise specified, all our videos are VHS PAL-UK & Europe Format. read more
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Classics
Date Published: 2000
ISBN-13:9780141185279ISBN:0141185279
Description: Good. **SHIPPED FROM UK** We believe you will be completely satisfied with our quick and reliable service. All orders are dispatched as swiftly as possible! Buy with confidence! read more
Description: Good. Ships from the UK. Former Library book. Shows some signs of wear, and may have some markings on the inside. Your purchase also supports literacy charities. read more
Binding: Softcover
Publisher: Overlook Pr
Date Published: 2002-09-01
ISBN-13:9781585673261ISBN:1585673269
Description: NEW. Softcover. From an inventory that is 100% brand-new, 100% direct from the publishers' distribution channel. We carry NO pre-owned, NO remaindered. We pack in CARDBOARD to ensure the pristine quality is maintained. (Bubble-wrap alone is NOT sufficient to protect from USPS equipment. ) Guaranteed brand-NEW, protected with CARDBOARD, your satisfaction is guaranteed. BKLUVID: 9781585673261. read more
"Joseph Roth was an Austrian novelist who was born in 1894 and died of chronic alcoholism in Paris in 1939.
This novel begins on a decidedly ironic note when the Kaiser knights a young Austro-Hungarian soldier, Trotta, for allegedly saving the Kaiser's life, thereby creating a vast gulf between the soldier and his family and friends by lifting him into an aristocracy for which he is not prepared. Moving rather quickly through two more generations, the story begins to linger on the figure of Carl Joseph, the grandson of the "hero." Roth presents a picture of the Hapsburg Empire through the eyes and experiences of such particular figures, Carl being a young military officer who feels out of place with the culture and society around him. Everything in the novel is initially very emotionally restrained, regimented, traditional, very oriented to class and position. And the society is almost entirely male, the rare women who make an appearance being minor and peripheral. The ambiance conjured suggests a kind of Prussian militarism, although the story is occurring south of Prussia, and Prussia is the archenemy of Austria. The mood is heavy and somber. Indeed, as the narrative proceeds, there is an air of fatalism, of events being outside of anyone's control, of missed opportunities and inevitable tragedies. None of the highlighted characters seems to "fit" into their assigned societal roles, each being and feeling different from those around them. Was this dis-ease the result of individual temperamental characteristics, or was it the result of a society and culture in decline, nearing its dissolution? How does this reflect upon our own times, our own culture and society? Is this sense of dislocation endemic, the result of a loss of faith in verities that used to hold society together? How does this novel speak to us today? Above all, I think, the reader is left with the senselessness and hopelessness of events that seem inexorable and inevitable.
In a parenthetical aside, Roth asserts that before the First World War, people somehow mattered; if someone died, there was a gap, and people mourned and new there had been a loss. With the World War I, everything changed, and such deaths became meaningless data, empty places quickly filled and forgotten. Is this part of the picture the author is trying to paint?
At the fringes of the Empire some prescient people were feeling that something was amiss, that the Empire was ripe for dissolution. More people closed their eyes and ears and chose to deny it. A rottenness existed in society, a softening, and old forms became increasingly ossified and invariable. Dissident groups began to flourish.
In the very middle of the book, there is a long and unexpectedly touching chapter about the death of Carl Joseph's father's servant, Jacques; the mood is tender and caring, a marked contrast to all that has gone before.
Feeling his world shifting beneath his feet, Carl Joseph's father, the district captain, then sets out to visit Carl Joseph at the eastern edges of the Empire, finding that while there he cannot express his love to Carl Joseph or do anything to save the boy from his alcoholism. Even at this remote site, officials are sensing the end of the Empire, that nationalism and sectarianism of every stripe will rip the Empire apart when the Kaiser dies, which cannot be long in the future. Roth is masterful in creating the ambiance of a society, Empire, and culture in decline, a situation that people perceive but can do nothing to prevent. As if holding back the dark, as if there was nothing else for the people of the Empire to hold onto, ritual and ceremony reigns, empty pageantry, the illusion of stability and pomp masking the deterioration everywhere underneath. The "glue" holding the Empire together was the old Kaiser Franz Joseph; Roth vividly conveys his importance to the populace, showing what a paternal figure he had become. His death, coinciding with the last of the Trotta family, was widely perceived as the sign that the Empire had come to an end. Indeed, the picture conveyed was less of an Empire conquered than of an Empire already dying and aware of it. Yet Roth is able to communicate the poignancy of it all, the yearning and dismay, the deep sense of unease and fear pervading all classes of society, those people aware of what is occurring and also those desperately choosing to deny or ignore it. Not only does nationalism tear at the fabric of the empire, but class unrest does so as well as workers begin to assert their rights and the army is called upon to fight them. How much of this picture can be applied to our own times? How much can we perceive about the internal dissolution of our own society, the tensions and strains that are beginning to tear it apart, the weakness and softness at its core that will lead it to implode eventually?
Carl Joseph's personal world seems to begin crumbling when he is involved in leading a slaughter of rebellious workers and when he thoughtlessly assumes responsibility for the gambling debts of a colleague who then kills himself. One central issue to which Roth draws attention is the concept of honor before and after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, its formerly having been central to the lives and values especially of the military and civil service. This issue governs many of the actions of each character, generation after generation, and is both their glory and their undoing. Above all, it raises important considerations about the differences between the cultures of the late 18th century and our own.
Across this vast canvas, Roth traced the declining fortunes of a doomed family, poignantly delineating the primary figure in each generation with tenderness, sympathy, and grace. He wrote beautifully and well deserves to be more widely read today.
The Radtzky March, by the way, appears again and again throughout the novel as background music in different contexts, always representing the traditional way of doing things.; composed by Strauss, it had become a sort of official song of the Austrian military."
"This seems to be as much an essay on time and decay as it is on the specific relationship of a father and son negotiating the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in which they serve. Franz von Trotta is a District Commissioner, and his son Carl Joseph a lieutenant in the Kaiserlich und Königlich (Imperial and Royal, or 'K-and-K') Army. Franz's father was a captain who once saved the Emperor's life at the Battle of Solferino and who was subsequently ennobled. Both Franz and Carl Joseph live their entire lives in the shadow of the 'Hero of Solferino' and his one great deed. The demise of the Empire (which seems to track exactly the diminishing personal health of the Emperor) is watched first with disbelief, then with despair and finally with tired resignation by obedient, upright Franz and his hapless, luckless son. Finally, the war arrives - but this is not the war that Carl Joseph had once wished for, the ennobling war that would alleviate the boredom of his military life and give some meaning to his years of training. This is, of course, the war that will sweep their whole society away for ever.
The gaiety of Strauss's 'Radetzky March' is evoked many times throughout the novel, as Carl Joseph remembers the band in his home town playing it outside his father's house every Sunday. The sheer certainty of the march's cheerful optimism is exactly what Carl Joseph sees dissolving around him in his dreary garrison life. Once he leaves his cavalry regiment and transfers to an infantry posting on the eastern border of the Empire, this dissolution becomes mirrored in his very surroundings - swamps, marshlands, cloaked in fog, an uncertain and treacherous topography that, on most days, offers no landmarks, and in which every day seems destined to be identical to the last, and the next.
Roth blends a strange, brusque detachment with moments of devastating interiority, moments when the characters experience some quite incontrovertible epiphany that will once again change the course of their lives (and never for the better). The characters are sketches, guided by simple motivations, but they are thoroughly credible and believable: their devotion to duty, to the fatherland, or their turning away from duty, their competing needs to satisfy their basic desires, are all that needs to be revealed of them, for in reality the 'inner world' of the novel is the formal, mannered, fraught world of relationships, expectations and duties within the institutions of the Empire. The skein of these relationships and dependencies is what starts to fray as the novel progresses, both in the Trotta family and in the extended 'family' of the many peoples of the Empire. Ultimately, the fragile web is torn apart, and Roth does not need to tell us that nothing will emerge to replace it."
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