Geoffrey C. Howes, Bowling Green State University

The Madness of Count Chojnicki: Habsburg Cultural Pessimism in Joseph Roth's Radetzkymarsch

This paper will examine the rambling conservative opinions of the Polish Count Chojnicki, whose extreme pro-Habsburg beliefs cause him to disdain every aspect of the monarchy on the eve of World War I as decadent, weak, and moribund. His attitudes will be looked at in terms of the political and cultural realities they reflect, but also in terms of their irrational, even superstitious basis. Chojnicki is taken from the battlefield to Steinhof, where Herr von Trotta visits him to receive his prophecy of the Emperor's impending death. Chojnicki's madness will be seen as a negative Utopia, a vision of the world so far from reality as to be mad, yet which lays bare the "madness of normality" (Arno Gruen) that prevails before the war: the refusal to believe that the structure of the monarchy, which seems to supply all political and cultural meaning, bears the origins of its own destruction. In Die Kapuzinergruft, a reprise of Chojnicki's character-this time through the eyes of his brother-implies that any lessons that the conflagration of war might have taught have been ignored.