Joseph Roth—Zur Modernität des Melancholischen Blicks ed. by Wiebke Amthor and Hans Richard Brittnacher (review)

As I read the 2012 essay collection, Joseph Roth—Zur Modernität des Melancholischen Blicks, I realized that it has been thirty years since I authored a dissertation on family relationships in Joseph Roth’s fiction. During that study, I found that my seemingly straightforward subject could be addressed only in light of Roth’s tumultuous life and times, his changing beliefs and ideals, his incorporation of Jewish and Catholic, European, Slavic and American cultures, and his turns from grim or prosaic realism to myth and miracle. Several hundred Roth studies in the intervening years have provided numerous insights into such topics and have explored subjects, as seen in this volume, involving autobiographical influences, general and theoretical questions, detailed analysis of individual works, comparisons to other authors (here including Kafka, Musil, Broch, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Heinrich Mann, and Andrzej Stasiuk), and literary/narratological techniques. Examples of the latter here are Markus May’s semiotic study of Roth’s meaningful use of signs and Thomas Koebner’s explication of filmic techniques in his prose.

Much fruitful research in recent years has been undertaken on Roth’s letters and journalistic essays, both for their own sake and as they relate to his literary works. This trend is seen here in Janus Golec’s study of Roth’s feuilletons on Berlin in the 1920s, Gesa Dane’s study of Roth’s essay on changing fashions and gender roles, and Jewgenija Woloschtschuk’s “Die ukrainische Welt in Essayistik und Prosa Joseph Roths.” Woloschtschuk examines Roth’s gallery of fictional Ukrainian characters in light of his ambivalent essays on the Ukraine. In a similar vein, Marek Jakubów’s article on Galician characters in Roth uses Roth’s essays on his Galician homeland to interpret its significance in his novels.

The book’s title points to enduring questions about Roth’s unique combination of conservatism and modernism, highlighting the first group of essays, “Ordnungen der Moderne.” Included here is “Zur Anthropologie der Kälte,” in which Irmela von der Lühe identifies several of Roth’s protagonists as an indifferent modern type, Helmuth Lethen’s “cold personality.” Likewise, in “Das Verschwinden vertrauter Welten,” Phuong Duong uses anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s concepts of “warm” and “cold” cultures to explicate the tension in Roth’s fiction between societies that are “coldly” rigid, conservative, and militaristic and “warm” realms that are more flexible, dynamic, and productive. Contrasting patterns of time (identified as “Ereignis” and “Dauer”) in Roth’s novels are traced by Bastian Schlüter. Schlüter acknowledges Roth’s antimodern attitudes reflected in his well-known nostalgia for the lost Habsburg Empire and his sharp critique of contemporary society in the essay “Der Antichrist.” However, he finds Roth’s awareness of time modern, his “ausgeprägtes Bewusstsein für die Zeitlichkeit der Geschichte, für ihre temporale Struktur. Diese Bewusstsein lässt sich in Roths Werk herausarbeiten als ein reflexives Moment in Bezug auf das moderne Geschichtsdenken als solches” (42–43). Modernity in one particular novel is analyzed in Alexander Chertenko’s “Zufall und Ordnung: Zwei Pole der Moderne in Joseph Roth’s Das falsche Gewicht.”

Essays collected under the title “Figuration des Dritten” focus on marginal or “third sector” individuals, notably in editor Brittnacher’s study “Von Heimkehrern, Vagabunden und Hochstaplern: Glück und Fluch des improvisierten Lebens bei Joseph Roth.” In the introduction, Brittnacher and Amthor explain that this group of essays discusses not only “outsider” characters but also border places that do not fit into neatly defined orders. They write, “Im zweiten Teil des Bandes geht es um das Paradigma des Dritten, greifbar in Räumen, die sich der dichotomischen Struktur des Hüben und Drüben widersetzen, […] Landschaften, deren mythische Konturen resistent bleiben gegen den Eingriff der Geschichte” (10–11). Such physical places include not only Galicia and the Ukraine but also various border regions, as discussed by...