Category: German Literature ~ 1900 – 1945

A Human Adultery Tale: Waves / Wellen by Eduard von Keyserling

Eduard von Keyserling is the latest German writer who publishers seem to have decided needs a revival. This is explained partly by his dates – he was born in 1855, and died in 1919 – which means there has been a flurry of attention upon him anyway thanks to the centenary of his death. My own edition of his late novels, which Waves / Wellen is included among, is a lovingly crafted hardback, filled with notes and the impressions of his contemporaries. The only problem is that it’s written in German. There are also new English translations of his works coming out all the time, Wikipedia suggests, including one of Waves itself which was released in 2019 and translated by Gary Miller.

Keyserling is interesting not only because he happened to die a hundred-ish years ago, though. He’s also the most well-known Baltic German writer. The Baltic Germans were the ethnically German ruling class who once inhabited Latvia and Estonia, a people who have now vanished for a variety of reasons. Keyserling is therefore interesting for representing a now vanished people, a now vanished way of life. But since every writer does that in some sense, we should perhaps look for reasons to read him elsewhere.

Waves, the short novel I finished yesterday, is a tender exploration of the life of a woman who has left her husband. It’s interesting to compare the life of Doralice, the heroine, with the heroines of the 19th century “adultery classics” – Anna Karenina, Emma Bovary, and Effi Briest. While those novels showed adultery ending in unpleasant deaths, here Keyserling tries to ask what life is like instead.

A Woman’s Story

Theodor Fontane, my favourite German novelist of the 19th century, once remarked that women were far more interesting to write about than men. At least at that time, he was on to something. The realist tradition often takes as its spiritual core the battle between the individual and his or her society, and since women in that period saw their lives and freedoms more constrained by society than men did, their lives generally provided a more interesting canvas for writing on than did those of men. It’s just a shame that our occasionally well-intentioned 19th century male authors did not realise that the “interesting lives” of women did not necessarily have to be about adultery or marriage. I forgive them, sometimes, this.

Waves, or Wellen in the original, was published in 1911. Taking place on the Baltic coastline, it centres around two groups of people. The first is Doralice and her partner, Hans Grill. Doralice, who only a year before the story begins had been living as the Countess of Köhne-Jasky in a big castle, abandoned her much older husband to be with Hans, who she met while he was painting her portrait. The second group centres around the aristocratic and respectable Buttlär family – father, mother, the mother’s mother, and various children – most importantly, Lolo, whose fiancé Hilmar joins them a little into the story. These two groups, forced together by the small size of the beach setting, are what leads to the novel’s central conflict.

Eduard von Keyserling is often called an Expressionist. So is Edvard Munch, whose paintings match the slightly expressive mood of Waves.

Doralice, or Countess of Köhne-Jasky?

Doralice, or the Countess of Köhne-Jasky, is our main character. By the time the story begins she has already left her husband for Hans Grill, who is a humble painter. Together they are relaxing in on the coast, making use of her money. But Waves begins not with Doralice, but with Mrs General von Palikow and her daughter, Baroness Buttlär. We are introduced to Doralice through the rumours about her and the fear that she inspires in other characters. Baroness Buttlär is so terrified of the influence this free woman could have upon her children that she forces them to go to bed early so that they might not hear about her past. The adults of the family are “like two fortresses, keeping out all those who do not belong to their kind”. (all translations are mine)

Of course such attempts do not work, and the children are fascinated by the beautiful countess. Waves is a novel about misperceptions, as much as anything else, and for the children their misperception is that this woman is a Romantic heroine. Doralice is far less passionate and far more human than they make her out to be. Even her love for Hans is startlingly normal, which is the problem. At times we are left asking whether she left her husband because of how awful he was, or because of how nice Hans was. Doralice herself sits and dreams of her old life, with its luxury and respectability. In meeting the Buttlärs she is confronted with what she has lost forever.

A Woman’s Identity

What is sad is that all around Doralice are people who, if not bad, are still unwilling to let her develop in her own way. From the words she remembers from her parents – “”when you will be married”” – to her old husband’s habit of saying “we” when he really means “you”, and even to Hans Grill himself (though in a less oppressive form), Doralice’s identity is always being determined by those around her. When she finally has her “freedom”, it is unpleasant. Locked out of society, but still by birth an aristocrat, her days at the beach are marked by idleness and English novels.

This is in stark contrast to the fishermen of the village, who are always hard at work, and to Hans himself. Although it seems unfair, Hans is right when he says: “Work and action – this is what we need in our lives”. For idleness is fallow ground for the imagination, and imagination (especially when English novels are involved) can lead to tragedy.

An Adulteress

When Hilmar, the dashing Lieutenant who is Lola’s husband-to-be, turns up, things take a turn for the dangerous. Where the aristocrats think Doralice is someone to be feared, and the children admire her, Hilmar sees her as someone to seduce. And within the world he lives in, his view is logical. Here, an adulteress is a woman who has shown herself to be a loose woman with loose morals. Within German society at the time there was very little opportunity to say that actually, one can make a mistake in marriage, and that the second love may be more successful than the first. And so, even though he breaks his fiancée’s heart, Hilmar sets about seducing Doralice. He takes her out sailing, he finds her alone while she’s reading… you know, the usual.  

Their meeting while she is reading in the forest is one of the saddest moments in the story. For Doralice is lonely, desperately lonely in her new life. And yet Hilmar, a new face, can only see her as an object.

““I was once told by a young Attaché that he thought it was impolite for him to spend more than a moment alone with a young lady without declaring his love for her””.

Doralice’s words made me laugh, but they also contain a deep sense of the emptiness of even what first appears to be passionate feeling. She inhabits a world – all of the characters inhabit a world – where behaviour is almost completely conditioned by society, and true feelings are repressed so deeply that they may never come out again. Hilmar of course denies that he is here to declare his love. But Doralice knows better – she doesn’t want to play his game. “”All of my ties with the world have been cut. You can either talk about the weather with me, or you can declare your love for me instead.”” Everything is socially determined, and Doralice’s deep loneliness is the result.

More Munch. Both artists, Keyserling and Munch, have an excellent sense for the intensity of loneliness.

Conclusion: Waves, Loves, and Other Things

One of the aspects of Waves that I haven’t been able to talk about yet is the style. Although much of it is written in the same realist style of Fontane or Turgenev, when dealing with passionate emotions Keyserling is not afraid to go into long, intense and very expressive paragraphs. Waves as a title calls to mind Woolf’s The Waves, and the beach setting and style occasionally reminded me of To the Lighthouse. Like Woolf, Keyserling can write a beautiful, thoughtful description when he wants to. In this he is a transitional figure between the realisms of his youth and the modernisms that took over in his late middle age.

And I think that this is an important part of why this story is interesting in the first place, and why it’s worth reading if you can find a translation (or read German). Keyserling really gives Doralice a soul – he lets her feel. She is not as cunning as Emma Bovary, or as passionate as Anna Karenina. Instead, she is a human being who was forced into a marriage and life that were wrong, and who made the brave decision to walk away from it. Her story is the working out of a difficult relationship with the man she left her husband for, rather than one of passion and punishment. And after so many adultery tales, it’s nice to read one that sees the adulteress for what she really is – a human like the rest of us, instead of a lamb to be sacrificed to make a point about society.

That’s why Waves is worth your time. And did I mention it’s under two hundred pages?

Thomas Mann: Mario and the Magician, Disorder and Early Sorrow

The dislike I have for Thomas Mann’s writing can be summarised as the sneaking suspicion that he does not have a soul. I do not doubt Mann’s intelligence, for how else could anyone write such long sentences on such fascinating topics, ranging from fascism to the conflicted identities of so many bourgeois artists, running around them so that they are illuminated from every possible angle? Yet every time Mann just leaves me cold. I have a certain dislike for the way that his stories always seem to be about educated rich German men, usually on holiday, musing about the same things over and over again. Only exams, and the sheer richness of his writing, makes me get anything out of him. He is the last writer who I would ever read for pleasure. In short: “how clever he is”, says the head; “how cold he is”, says the heart.

Disorder and Early Sorrow (Unordnung and frühes Leid) and Mario and the Magician (Mario und der Zauberer), as the first paragraph perhaps indicates, have not changed my opinion of Mann much. The first story is the description of a party held during the dark days of the Weimar Republic, while the second describes a middle-class holiday gone badly wrong. Both works, published in 1926 and 1930 respectively, are linked, I think, by a certain trepidation about the future. Mann was in his fifties and he had seen his country destroyed in a World War, and in the peace that followed for Europe he saw only its fragility and the growing resentment of individuals, the sort that led eventually to the rise of Hitler and the Second World War.

Disorder and Early Sorrow

“Disorder and Early Sorrow” takes us into the home of a family of what in German are called Bildungsbürger, or the educated middle class. As opposed to the standard bourgeois these people were well educated, but they were economically weak. The family here consists of a mother, a father – Professor Cornelius, two older children – Ingrid and Bert, and two younger children – Lorchen and Beißer (Ellie and Snapper in one English translation). In addition to these are various servants, of whom Xaver is the most important.

The story is about a party that the two older children are throwing. Over and above the difficult financial situation the family finds itself in, unable to repair their nice house or feed themselves properly – at one point they decide they need “a cake, or something cakish” – the problem facing Cornelius, who is the central figure here, is that of dealing with a changing world. Traditional barriers are falling all around him. Not only is language collapsing – as in the cake anecdote – so too are class barriers. Xaver and Bert look so much the same that Cornelius can’t tell them apart when he looks out of the window. For Cornelius, who is a history professor, it is difficult to keep track, so he retreats into his studies – of the beginnings of national debt in Spain and England. 

For the young ones, this breakdown of barriers is only a good thing. They are politically engaged, and make use of all the newest technology, such as telephones. At one point one of their hobbies is described – they go onto a tram and pretend to be other people, speaking in funny accents as if they have only just arrived in Berlin. Cornelius also acts, once the party gets underway, saying hello to his children’s guests, but his acting is far more awkward and nervous. He belongs to a generation where “good breeding” and “gallantry” are the key virtues. When the guests speak to him, they are terribly polite, but as soon as he turns away they speak naturally again.

Cornelius is gripped with a “Father’s pessimism”. His eldest children have already broken free, but the younger two may yet have their innocence saved. There are a number of touching moments in “Disorder and Early Sorrow”, and all of them are between Cornelius and his two youngest children. They play a game with a pillow, and it is Cornelius’s fatherly love for them that most successfully humanises him: “Tenderness floods Dr Cornelius’ heart as if it were wine”.

But even in this love there is something fragile. Lorchen, the girl and his favourite, suffers the “sorrow” of the title when she is rejected by one of the boys at the party who decides he wants to dance with someone his own age, instead of a toddler. She ends up crying tremendously, so that the boy in question eventually comes to wish her a good night. When she falls asleep afterwards, Cornelius reckons that she will forget everything by the next day. But one day Lorchen – whose name recalls the Lorelei myth that inspired so many German Romantic ballads – will grow up, and Cornelius will have to let her go just as he has his other children.

The story is filled with little details but one thing that stood out was the use of space in it. It’s quite a claustrophobic tale, with almost all the action taking place on one floor of Cornelius’s house. In this it reflects the cramping of his own power in the world as the Weimar economy falls apart and the politics of consensus that educated men such as himself had dominated falls apart with it. I almost enjoyed reading it. Perhaps if I had read it in English I would have. As it stands, it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. 

Mario and the Magician

“Mario and the Magician” is another one of those fun little beach-tales that Mann was so fond of – think “Death in Venice”. An unnamed family goes on holiday to Mussolini’s Italy only to find to their horror that the country is filled with fascists! This “tragic travel experience” is written like a chapter in a travel book, which is an interesting approach for Mann to take. The style tries to contain excessive outbursts of emotion, but the topic is inherently emotional, because the family had a dreadful time. In some way, this tension reflects the tension in European life at the time between resentment and apparent peace.

Anyway, the story is rather unsubtle. Mann really didn’t like fascism, which we can certainly forgive him for. The story was written before Hitler was a major force in Germany, and so we can call Mann prescient enough for noticing that fascism is bad. Considering he is an artist, it’s something of an achievement for him not to be drawn into it as so many were at the time, including Rilke, Wyndham Lewis, Yeats. But then again, I’ll just put that down to Mann not having a soul. Fascism manages to find so many supporters because it appears to offer salvation for the soul, and only the intellect can stand against that.

Before we meet the magician of the title, the main event is a trip to the beach. The beach is a rather unnatural place – we are supposed to relax here. Yet the beach instead is “lacking in innocence and aimlessness”. The children aren’t just children, but “patriotic children”, waving flags and being used by their parents as a pretext for nationalist fights with foreign tourists. At one point the narrator lets one of his children run around naked, only to be punished with a fine for it for offending public decency and “national dignity”.

The main event of this story, though, is the trip they take to watch a magician, Cipolla. Cipolla is a fascist demagogue. There is nothing more to it. He stands on stage and manipulates people, and the crowd cheers him for it. His volunteers are made to do embarrassing things, surrendering their will to him in the process. The narrator cannot make sense of it, calling him “the most effective hypnotist I have ever seen”. There is no rational explanation for why people seem to lose their self-control, but it happens anyway. Cipolla, this angry, ugly, monster of a man who is filled with resentment (vaguely related to women) is able to control everyone through the force of his voice and personality. However strange it seems to Mann, the approach worked in much of Europe then, and still works in parts of the world now.

As for Mario, I can’t tell you about his role in the story without spoiling its ending. He is a waiter who serves the children in one of the cafes they visit. But he also takes part in Cipolla’s performance.

“Mario and the Magician” appealed to me less than “Disorder and Early Sorrow”. Its lack of subtlety is not the main problem – after all, the fact that fascism is awful is something that needs to be made clear. I disliked the language of it – I read as much in English as I did in German – but most of all I disliked its message. Not the one that says fascism is bad, but the one that seems to propose a solution. I do not know what the answer is to fascism or radicalization, and perhaps there is nobody who truly does, but the one that Mann seems to put forward here is not one I can support at all. It is, to be frank, politically naïve. But then, perhaps, in 1930 we still had a right to be politically naïve. In a few more years we would lose that right forever.

Conclusion

Mann oh man, I wish I could like Thomas Mann. But I just find him too intellectual. It’s not that intellectuality is a problem per se, but rather that when intellectuality is there without a corresponding warmth of feeling it’s really hard to be excited while you are reading. Dostoevsky’s characters may be in some sense representatives of certain views or systems of thought, but they always feel like passionate people, motivated by ideas, rather than ideas who have been poured into people. Mann liked Dostoevsky – I haven’t read his thoughts on the Russian, but I’d be interested to know what they were.

I am going to read more Mann one day. Like Robert Musil, whose “Three Women” I enjoyed intellectually, there’s definitely something to enjoy in these two stories. But at the end of each you are – or at least I was – always left feeling that there is something missing, and that’s a great shame. Because Mann definitely knew how to write.

Honour in Decline: Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March

Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March is a story of decline. On one level, it describes the rotting of an Empire, Austria-Hungary; on another, it is a much more personal story, telling the tale of three generations of the Trotta family, a family whose own rise and decline are both the result of their country’s decay, and in a way partly responsible for it. In dealing with the fortunes of a family, it is in some way comparable to Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, but The Radetzky March is a much tighter book, thanks to its focus on only three characters – grandfather Joseph Trotta, father Franz Trotta, and son Carl Joseph Trotta. As men, they are the administrators and soldiers of the great empire. As a result, their fates are inevitably bound with its own.

Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria-Hungary, is the one constant of The Radetzky March. He lived to be 86 and ruled for almost 68 years.

There is a lot to like about the novel. For me, above and beyond Roth’s talent for description and portraiture, what I loved most about The Radetzky March was its description of family and the shifting of the generations. My great grandfather became the world leader in his field and a household name; my grandfather became a famous and influential politician. But my father and his brother, the heirs, both found it difficult to live up to the expectations of the past and in some sense their lives can be read as an attempt to cope. It is now my turn, like Carl Joseph under the gaze of his grandfather’s painted eyes, to face the pressure to be someone I may not be.

The Radetzky March is not a source of guidance on this topic, but it is a picture of a world that is now lost, and we would do well to sift through the ashes in search of what might be worth holding on to.

The Birth of a Dynasty – The Opening of The Radetzky March

The first chapter of The Radetzky March is enough to decide whether the novel is for you. Detailing the life of grandfather Trotta, it works perfectly as a short story. We meet him in the army at the Battle of Solferino of 1859, where he saves the life of the young Austrian Kaiser, Franz Joseph. Joseph Trotta, who is the son of simple Slovene peasants, is ennobled for his deed. No longer is he a Slovene, now he is an Austrian – “a new dynasty began with him”. He receives a promotion, becoming a captain, and now is not merely Trotta, but “Trotta von Sipolje”. We might expect him to be happy, but instead the honour is more of a curse than a blessing. We feel his pain as his identity becomes uncertain, fragmented. “He felt he had been sentenced to wear another man’s boots for life”.

But he cannot return to the past either. When he meets his father again the conversation is stilted, awkward. The only thing for him is to try to become the aristocrat he supposedly is. Grandfather Trotta marries “his colonel’s not-quite-young well-off niece” – a lovely description conveying all the delicacy of aristocratic reasoning – and raises his only son with military constriction. “Never was the son given a toy, never an allowance, never a book, aside from the required schoolbooks. He did not seem deprived. His mind was neat, sober, and honest.” The son is not damaged by the life of discipline. These were different times, when individuality was less important than service. But things will change.

In the end, the father dies soon after the son comes of age. “Now little was left of the dead man but this stone, a faded glory, and the portrait. That is how a farmer walks across the soil in spring – and later, in summer, the traces of his steps are obscured by the billowing richness of the wheat he once sowed.” The rest of The Radetzky March concerns the wheat – his son and grandson, and their fates.

Fathers and Sons

Time changes. The father Franz Trotta grows up and now raises his own only son, Carl Joseph. He raises him in just the same way as his own father did. In these early chapters the only thing Carl Joseph seems to say to Franz (who is almost always referred to by his role, district captain) is “Yessir, Papa”, which indicates the degree of independence of thought the young lad has. There is no intimacy between them. They write each other letters, just as the grandfather wrote his own father letters, out of a kind of obligation and without any heart in them. When, later in the book, there are moments that put father and son together, they are unable to speak to each other.

Always he wanted to say, Don’t cause me any grief, I love you, my son! All he said was, “Stay well!”

Honour, of a sort

It is honour, that mysterious network of social rules and regulations, that binds both mouths shut. Honour is not all bad – it was, after all, a great source of dignity, and it bound together members of the upper classes with its common behavioural language. Nevertheless, honour places all of the characters of The Radetzky March in chains, whether they notice them or not. We see this most tragically with a young man, Max Demant, who Carl Joseph befriends early in his military career. He is in many ways a double of Carl Joseph – he, too, finds himself in a social position unthinkable to his ancestors. Demant is a Jew – his grandfather was a tavern keeper, his father a postal official. He is no soldier, no cavalryman, and his wife doesn’t love him. As he puts it, his is “a life with snags”.

One evening Demant departs a theatre performance early, leaving his wife alone. Trotta offers to escort her back, but they are seen by the other officers. The next time they are all together, the other officers drink heavily, leading one of them ultimately to start yelling “Yid, Yid, Yid!” Demant has no choice but to challenge the speaker to a duel. No choice? Demant knows that he has a choice – he knows there are ways to disappear, for example to flee to America. But he is unable to make that decision. “A contemptible, shameful, stupid, powerful iron-clad law was fettering him, sending him fettered to a stupid death.” In spite of honour’s stupidity, if he wants to remain a part of the community, he has no choice but to submit to it.

The ordinary citizens, who live outside the officers’ world, see things as perhaps they really are. “The officers went about like incomprehensible worshippers of some remote and pitiless deity, but also like its gaudily clad and splendidly adorned sacrificial animals.” We do not even see the duel, we only hear its result as Trotta does – second hand. Just as did Effi Briest, The Radetzky March makes duelling into something pointless, depriving it of its romance. Roth skilfully weaves both hope and despair into the final hours before the fight, and even with that the final result still surprised and shocked me. Honour, Roth shows, is something insidious as well as something obvious. It can lead to duels and avoidable deaths, but it can also be responsible for a coldness between family, where really there should be warmth.

Decay

Is honour the source of the decline of the Hapsburg monarchy? I don’t think that Roth suggests that here. Things are more complicated than that. After the duel, Carl Joseph is forced from his prestigious cavalry regiment into the infantry and posted to the Austro-Hungarian border with Russia. I loved the description of the nature there, of how the Austro-Hungarians “sacrificed” gravel year by year in trying to force the swampland into roads and solid ground. Here Carl Joseph meets a Polish Count, Chojnicki, whose pessimism about the Empire’s prospects is unconcealed. Chojnicki, however, sees a solution to the decline, and that solution is violence. He is a dark prophet of reaction. In killing its rebellious elements, there’s a chance the Empire may yet survive.

Back in Moravia, the district captain also witnesses changes as The Radetzky March progresses:

“At first he had merely belittled the nations that demanded autonomy and the “working people” who demanded “more rights.” But gradually he was getting to hate them – the carpenters, the arsonists, the electioneers.”

He does not think that the Empire is ending, but he knows that it has enemies. His transition, as the novel goes on, from benign governance to hatred, is perhaps a better starting point for thinking about the Empire’s decline. Like many others, he is unable to understand why Hapsburg subjects would have any loyalty to anyone other than the Empire and Emperor. His closemindedness, which has made him an excellent bureaucrat, leaves him unable to read his times.

Chojnicki is the borderland society’s leader, and Carl Joseph visits him regularly. With nothing else to do, and grieving for his friend, Carl Joseph takes up drinking. And now the Empire’s decay is coupled with his physical decay.

Demonstrations for universal suffrage in Prague, 1905. Of course, one could just shoot the lot of them. But that tends to have unforeseen consequences.

Blood

We have a chance to see Chojnicki’s theories in action. Carl Joseph is tasked with putting down some striking workers, with violence if necessary. He does not question his orders. “It had not yet occurred to the lieutenant that the workers were poor wretches who could be right.” Carl Joseph’s mind, like his father’s, has been conditioned to serve without questioning. But shooting civilians, even unruly ones, is far less noble than the fate he had once believed would be his. As he prepares to give the order to fire, he tries to imagine what his grandfather would have done. But he cannot. He is living in an unheroic age, and he no help comes to him. Instead,

he saw the times rolling toward one another like two rocks, and he himself, the lieutenant, was smashed between them.

The incident needs to be hushed up. People have died. But for Trotta the memory of that day remains with him as a time when he was powerful. It is a dangerous memory. As Carl Joseph’s decline continues, he gets drawn into gambling debts as a co-signatory to friends, and when the original debtors are unable to pay for various reasons, the creditor, Kaputrak, comes to Carl Joseph instead. Carl Joseph feels powerless before the man, even though he is an officer and the other a mere civilian. Unable to control himself, he grabs his sabre and forces the other out of the room with it, nearly stabbing him in the process. But there is a witness, and all Carl Joseph achieves is a little more time before he has to pay. Without war to give an outlet to his trained violence, Carl Joseph ultimately turns it against others.

The Little Things

What makes The Radetzky March so good is its subtlety. Little things, little ironies, pile up throughout the novel. Towards the end, there are more and more images of clocks and watches, pointing to the limited time left for Austria-Hungary. Then there is the use of music. The “Radetzky March” was a kind of unofficial anthem for the Empire, a tune the boy Carl Joseph used to hear each Sunday, is replaced by the “Internationale” as the workers begin fighting for their own corner, instead of blindly submitting. And then we have the use of portraits. Carl Joseph is haunted by the image of his grandfather, hanging in his father’s house. It represents his obligations to live up to the family name, and he comes back to it again and again.

But there are also portraits of the Emperor too. Early in The Radetzky March Carl Joseph removes one such portrait from a brothel, ashamed to see it there. By the end of the novel, however, the portraits, which once hung all over the Empire, have disappeared, stowed away now that other causes have grown in popularity. The situation with the portraits, as with the Trottas themselves, represents the state of the Empire. When they are taken down, the end is not far off.

Conclusion

I really enjoyed The Radetzky March. It is an extremely rich book, filled with irony and thoughtfulness. Roth treats Austria-Hungary neither as an ideal world, nor as a complete disaster. Within the all-encompassing idea of honour, he finds both good and bad. When he writes that, “all in all, Lieutenant Trotta’s experiences amounted to very little”, there is more than a hint of sympathy in the condemnation. Carl Joseph has been brought up rigidly, in a rigid world, and when he is forced to face things he hasn’t been prepared for he (understandably) falls apart into drinking and violence. If the Empire had not been heading for collapse, perhaps all would have been alright. He would have found a place in the world for himself. But history did not give him that choice.

Joseph Roth, author of The Radetzky March.

In some way The Radetzky March contains a lot of what makes Tolstoy so good. Roth describes a wide range of characters from various social strata, giving the impression that he understands the entire world. In The Radetzky March even the Emperor himself is a character, which was pretty cool (Tolstoy does the same in Hadji Murat). But Roth is not quite as good as Tolstoy at making characters, and this is especially obvious with the female characters. For the most part they were boring seductresses, serving to demonstrate the Empire’s moral decline. Of course, given the story is mostly about officers, there’s little space for women to have a big role. All the same, I’d have liked to see a bit more variety. Tolstoy, for all his views on women, was definitely a lot better at writing them.

The Radetzky March is a great book in spite of both the women and Roth’s occasionally confusing chronological signposting of events (Roth doesn’t always link the chapters very clearly). It is an insider’s account of the decline of an empire, and a timeless story of the way the generations can fail to connect with one another.

For more about the tension between honour and practice, Effi Briest is worth reading. To look at another world that has faded away, read my review of Salvatore Satta’s novel, The Day of Judgement. For more Roth, I’ve written about Job: The Story of a Simple Man, here.