"Es ist eine Lüge!" Habsburg Potemkin Villages in Joseph Roth's Radetzkymarsch

In the foreword to its 1932 serialization in the Frankfurter Zeitung, Joseph Roth presents Radetzkymarsch as a correction to the derogatory image of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in films and operettas and thus as a contribution to an understanding of history. By recording "das Menschlich-Bezeichnende" in the lives of three generations of Trottas from 1859–1916, Roth reflects nineteenth-century realism's view of the writer as a social historian who links private lives to the broader sweep of history (Romane und Erzählungen 874–75). He counted Flaubert and Balzac among his favourite authors, and his insistence on authenticity – "Ich habe die merkwürdige Familie der Trottas [...] gekannt und geliebt" (875) – recalls Balzac's insertion of the English "All is true" in the opening pages of Père Goriot to impress on readers the verisimilitude of characters and situations. Yet, paradoxically, the foreword's first sentence undermines Roth's authority to improve on others' versions of collective history: "Ein grausamer Wille der Geschichte hat mein altes Vaterland, die österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie, zertrümmert" (874). This invocation of an irrational historical force weakens, too, the credibility of the representative role of the Trottas: "An ihrem Aufstieg, an ihrem Untergang glaube ich den Willen jener unheimlichen Macht erkennen zu dürfen, die am Schicksal eines Geschlechts das einer historischen Gewalt deutet" (875).

Previous commentaries on Radetzkymarsch have ignored this contradiction between pedagogical purpose and mystifying language and thus have not analyzed the narrative to ascertain whether it makes a compelling case for fate as the prime mover in history. Since the novel portrays the aging of the Emperor Franz Joseph, the waning in grandsons of the inner strength of their grandfathers, and an empire's collapse, readers are inclined to accept the "unheimliche Macht" as a metaphor for determinism, which absolves Roth's characters of any personal responsibility for the downfall of their society by rendering them as helpless as the victims of Galician swamps: "Keiner war so kräftig wie der Sumpf" (258). Yet an account of inevitable and irresistible decline patently represents no improvement on the presentation of history in films and operettas that Roth rejected. While the foreword's historical obfuscation is consistent with Roth's often arbitrary approach to reality, he could record it more scrupulously, as his journalism attests. The foreword's brief admission – that the empire was not without "Fehler und Schwächen. Deren hatte es viele" (874) – indicates that his growing emotional attachment to the Habsburg past had not yet totally displaced an earlier and more balanced assessment. In 1923 he distanced himself from the monarchy's policies, while admiring its human qualities (Bronsen, "Joseph Roth und sein Lebenskampf" 12), unspecified, but presumably part of "das Menschlich-Bezeichnende" whose memory he wanted to preserve. This ambivalence has encouraged critics to see both sympathy and criticism in Radetzkymarsch; thus, recently, Jan T. Schlosser: "Im Radetzkymarsch werden unvereinbare ideologische Positionsbestimmungen im Spannungsfeld zwischen Gesellschaftskritik und Apologetik erkennbar" (197). However, such references to ambivalence fail both to address the incompatibility of the foreword's irrational language with its claim to greater truth, and to ask whether the novel persuades the reader to accept the fate proposition or whether it offers a cogent refutation.

Significantly, Roth's narrative style calls into question the foreword's emphasis on anonymous, incomprehensible historical forces by drawing attention to the discrepancy between the public image of individuals and the reality of their attitudes and actions. Thus he reflects the tradition of other Austrians who had unmasked what they saw as a false image of reality in their respective fields, such as Freud, Kokoschka, and Wittgenstein. Roth's exposure of the falseness of imperial splendour in a world whose centre was Ringstraße Vienna recalls particularly the architectural criticism of Adolf Loos. His 1898 essay "Die Potemkin'sche Stadt" drew a parallel between the imposture of the imposing buildings along the Ringstraße and Prince Potemkin's alleged deception of Catherine the Great by hiding peasants' hovels behind facades of prosperity. The fraudulence of Ringstraße buildings lay architecturally in their historical styles...