Alexis Pong, Berkeley

The Imagined Legacy of the Austrian Empire in Joseph Roth’s Radetzkymarsch: The Literary Construction of a Habsburg Myth

This paper argues that Joseph Roth’s novel Radetzkymarsch constructs an Austrian cultural identity that continues to influence perceptions about former regions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His narrative presents a nostalgic portrait of the governing Austrian state apparatus, which Roth describes as sustaining and upholding all of Europe. This apparatus, represented by the Emperor Franz Joseph, maintained throughout Austria and its provinces stability, purpose, prosperity, confidence, optimism, faith in progress, secular humanism, social equality, and cultural superiority over other European nations because only the Austrian Habsburgs could balance the precarious situation of multiple ethnicities within one united, cosmopolitan empire.

Although he sometimes critiques this political apparatus, Roth upholds the idea of a patriarchal natural order: the world of the novel is structured around Franz Joseph, the father figure. Opposing this patriarchal system sows discord, rather than promoting harmony; it perverts meaning and purpose on a personal and historical level, so that the only outcome is eventual destruction. Roth depicts each province as a mirror of Habsburg rule; District Captain Trotta, for example, is a miniature Franz Joseph. When ethnic groups in the provinces demand independence, when nationalist sentiments arise, they disturb not only the harmony the Austrian state apparatus has carefully constructed but also any future harmony or meaning in the personal, social, and political spheres. This discord reverberates throughout the entire empire.

This paper examines the strategies Roth employs to construct a Habsburg myth. It analyzes how Roth’s conception of the operating political apparatus and its influence on the neighboring provinces was specifically Austrian. Yet Roth also recognizes how this political apparatus itself was vulnerable to provincial pressure. The paper then contrasts Roth’s narrative with the historical and social realities of a much diminished Austrian power at the time of the novel’s composition and eventual publication in 1932. Finally, this paper discusses the implications of this literary construction for subsequent interpretations of cultural, political, and social phenomena in Austria and in parts of Eastern Europe that once belonged to Austria.