The pleasure provided by the sight of good food is an odd contrast to the haste and voracity with which the protagonist of the novel then gulps it down. For Trotta, tafelspitz is a symbol of a strict, chaste lifestyle based on respectability. The grey officer “was a Spartan. But he was an Austrian,” is how he is described in Roth’s “Radetzky March”.

In doing so, Trotta appraises the meal not only for aesthetic reasons, but also for analytical ones: Just as expertly as he cuts the meat, he comments on the quality: “You see, madam, it is not enough to ask for a tender cut of meat from the butcher. You also have to pay attention to the way it is cut. What I mean is a crosswise or longitudinal cut. Butchers don’t understand their trade any more today. The finest meat is spoilt, just from the wrong cut ...”

Accordingly, except for an exquisite, but incidental schnitzel, solid food is never put on the table again. The poet serves hard drinks – slivovitz, cognac, “ninety percent” – to the games of chance, affairs and duels of the officers in the remote-lying provinces of the Danube monarchy.

Joseph Roth also came from the periphery of “Franz Joseph Land”. Born in Galician Brody in 1894, he studied in Lemberg and Vienna. After World War I he worked for a liberal newspaper in Berlin and published his first novels. A journey through the early Stalinist Soviet Union destroyed his socialist dreams.

This resignation opened Roth’s eyes to the loss of old Austria-Hungary – and to the coming catastrophes of National Socialism. In 1933 the author fled from the Nazis to Paris, where despite his deepening despair he was able to complete his six later major novels in addition to his journalistic duties before he died in 1939.



Text: Thomas Held