Joseph Roth. Europäisch-jüdischer Schriftsteller und österreichischer Universalist ed. by Johann Georg Lughofer and Mira Miladinović Zalaznik (review)

Perhaps more than most other authors, Joseph Roth has traditionally been viewed as a product of a specific time and place. Although his career stretched from the last years of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire through the First World War and to the first years of the Third Reich, Roth has consistently been viewed both popularly and by scholars as eternally fixed in the final years of the Habsburg Empire, a lost world from which he never escaped. How can an author who, even in his own lifetime, was seen as a throwback to a bygone era be considered relevant today? In 2009, the year that marked the seventieth anniversary of Roth’s death, a group of scholars gathered for an international conference in Ljubljana to consider this question. The participants found that the cosmopolitan author, whose life took him from Eastern to Western Europe, is, in fact, highly relevant in an age of European integration. It is not Roth the nostalgic witness to a former time, but Roth the transnational and intercultural writer who comes to the fore in the pages of this volume.

Johann Georg Lughofer and Mira Miladinović Zalaznik’s co-edited volume comprises twenty-nine articles written by an international group of scholars who approach Roth’s career from a number of different angles. Individually and as a whole, they provide stimulating new perspectives on Roth. The individual chapters range widely in subject and methodology, but together they explore Roth’s work in the political, social, and cultural contexts of his times and our times and place a particular emphasis on the interplay between Western and Eastern European themes and elements. The collection constitutes a major contribution to Roth scholarship.

Drago Jančar offers a poignant tribute in the book’s preface to Roth as an artist, an intellectual, and a person, emphasizing his emotional engagements and frequent struggles with people, places, and events and considering the ways in which these interactions served as the motivations for his writings. The chapters that follow address Roth as both identifiable by specific identities and subject positions (as an Eastern European, a Jew, a male, an Austrian, an exile, etc.) and as a universal figure. The book is divided into five major sections, each of which examines Roth from a different angle. The first group of articles—“Zum Judentum”—addresses Roth’s associations with Judaism, a prominent theme that runs through his journalistic writings and his reception to this day. The following sections—“Zwischen Kulturen und Orten,” “Zwischen den Geschlechtern,” and “Soziales und Geschichtliches”—place Roth in various “in-between” positions: between cultures and places, between genders, and between social and historical contexts. The final section is devoted to the history of Roth’s reception and scholarship on Roth following his death. The argument of the volume as a whole—that Roth was a man of many complex, changing, and intersecting identities—is clear and persuasive. Equally convincing is the argument that Roth cannot and should not be tied to one historical time and place, but rather is of interest not only in the context of the rapidly-changing Central Europe of his time, but also in the context of the rapidly-changing Central Europe of our own time.

It is outside the scope of this review to address all of these varied entries. Instead, I would like to point to some of the common themes that emerge throughout the volume. Several of the chapters, for example, examine Roth’s travel literature, considering his frequent perspectives on and from hotels, cafés, train stations, and cities throughout Europe. In these studies, Roth’s journalistic and fictional texts intermingle, just as they did in Roth’s career. Throughout his life, Roth was a traveler—by choice, by profession, and by necessity. The temporary and transitional spaces that he depicts so memorably in his texts (the...