Projects | Joseph Roth
Joseph Roth
05.02.2008
Joseph Roth was born Moses Joseph Roth to Jewish parents on September 2, 1894, in Brody in Galicia, in the extreme east of the then Habsburg Empire; he died on May 27, 1939, in Paris. He never saw his father - who disappeared before he was born and later died insane - but grew up with his mother and her relatives.
After completing school in Brody, he matriculated at the University of Lemberg (variously Lvov or Lviv), before transferring to the University of Vienna in 1914. He served for a year or two only as an army journalist or censor. Later he was to write: "My strongest experience was the War and the destruction of my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary." In 1918 he returned to Vienna, where he began writing for left-wing papers, occasionally as "Red Roth," "der...
Joseph Roth: To Gustav Kiepenheuer on his fiftieth birthday
14.02.2008
I have had to cover many miles. Between the place where I was born, and the towns and villages I have come to in the last ten years in order to dwell in them, and which I have dwelt in only, apparently, to leave them again, lies my life, amenable more readily to spatial than to chronological...
Joseph Roth: The White Cities
14.02.2008
I became a journalist one day out of despair over the complete inability of all other professions to satisfy me. I was not part of the generation that marked the beginning and end of its adolescence by scribbling poems. Nor did I belong to the very newest generation, which reaches sexual maturity...
Joseph Roth: Strawberries
14.02.2008
The town I was born in was situated in Eastern Europe, on a great and sparsely inhabited plain. To the east, it stretched on forever. To the west, it was bounded by a line of blue hills that were only visible on clear summer days.
Joseph Roth: Little Titch
14.02.2008
Little Titch was a tiny man with a huge head. His eyes were two dark blue marbles, his ears were as red as poppies, and a bloody rage flickered in them, the rage of the little man Little Titch. His face turned purple like a great beet. A whim of nature, the dwarf stood up on the stage. His stout,...
Joseph Roth: Goethe’s Oak in Buchenwald
14.02.2008
One should always tell the truth! Falsehoods are maliciously being put about concerning the concentration camp at Buchenwald: horror stories, one would like to say. It seems to me the time has come to correct these.
Joseph Roth: The Auto-da-Fé of the Mind
14.02.2008
Very few observers anywhere in the world seem to have understood what the Third Reich’s burning of books, the expulsion of Jewish writers, and all its other crazy assaults on the intellect actually mean. The technical apotheosis of the barbarians, the terrible march of the mechanized orangutans,...
Joseph Roth: Arrival in the Hotel
14.02.2008
The hotel I love like a fatherland is in a large European port city, and the heavy gold antiqua letters in which its banal name shines out over the roofs of the houses clustered beneath it, looks to my eye like a lot of little metal flags, flags that don’t flutter, but stand at attention and shine...
