Tag: Austrian Literature

Peter Handke – The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick, which I read in the original German, is not a book that brought me much pleasure. It is probably the best-known work by the Austrian author Peter Handke, who won the Nobel Prize a few years ago. Thankfully, it is quite short. I covered my copy with annotations, but with me, that is not always the sign of a good book. In fact, I was quite convinced the novel was a complete waste of time and energy until somewhere around the halfway mark when I began to perceive some actual sense in it and dutifully upgraded it to merely a book I will be glad both to have read and never to have to read again.

The Goalie’s Anxiety… is a novel about Bloch, a former goalkeeper who loses his job, murders a random woman, and then loses his mind, though possibly not in that order. The murder happens early on and after it, Bloch leaves town and spends time loafing about near the Austrian border. He gets into fights and flirts with various women, and he goes on walks and goes mad while looking at things. This is all that happens. From such nothingness, it is for us as readers to work out why the book has gathered the reputation of a literary masterwork. As much as I want to complain, I will try to turn my complaints into strengths for the book.

The way I found to appreciate this book was to consider it as part of the rather rich tradition of German literary works dealing with madness, such as Büchner’s “Lenz”, Hoffmann’s “Sandman”, and Heym’s “The Madman”. As a theme, madness is a rich one because it naturally turns itself around to raise questions about who is actually mad – Bloch, us, or society. At the same time, the particular form of Bloch’s madness, which so often seems to relate to perception and speech, connects The Goalie’s Anxiety… to the language crisis affecting German letters at the beginning of the 20th century, where Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler were only some of the big names that tried to consider our ability to represent anything at all with words.

Translations are my own.

Language of Experience

In a way, reading in another language gives you a sort of madness akin to the one afflicting Bloch. Much more so even than when we closely read on our own, we notice thingswhen we have to trudge through a foreign tongue. Words and phrases that repeat strike us, and odd formulations strike us too. From the beginning, The Goalie’s Anxiety… strikes us with its numbness. The very first word in German is “dem” – the dative, telling us that something is happening to Bloch, rather than the other way around. That something is his firing.

The passive voice we tend to associate with passivity and numbness, and that is the dominant note of the book. The language is simple, and the sentences are short. Handke’s narrator typically refers to characters with their roles, not their names. Even Bloch’s ex-wife and child are deprived of the emotional significance that a name would give them. Most of the dialogue is reported, rather than given directly so that it too is numb. When Bloch calls a woman, he has to talk for some time “until she knew who he was.”

This numbness is Bloch’s world. Sometimes he stretches out to play an active role, as when he commits murder, but mostly things happen to him, like random fights and his anxiety in the city. He reads a lot of newspapers but there’s no real sense that he takes anything in. It seems compulsive more than anything. But newspapers themselves, like the cinema that plays an important role, are sites where we are passive receivers rather than active agents. A newspaper tells you, in essence, that something was happening in the world, but you weren’t involved. Just as a film shows action you also can only see as a spectator.

This general numbness is what makes the book hard to read. There are paragraphs, but nothing like white space for pauses or chapters. This has, again, a levelling effect. Everything that happens, from murder to looking at a field, is equally important – or, we might better conclude, equally unimportant. It also leads to a certain perception of determinism because there are no breaks to the logic. One thing just follows on from the other, except for the “plötzlich” (“suddenly”) that begins the paragraph with the murder. In other words, the way the story comes to us makes us numb and feel our own powerlessness.

Bloch’s Madness

We never really see into Bloch’s mind, only as far as his perceptions of things. Unlike Arthur Schnitzler’s “Fräulein Else”, where mental collapse is seen from within, here madness is seen almost from without – “Everything he saw disturbed him”. We learn, at other times, how things disturbed him. But the language is thoroughly unemotive. “Bloch was” either “excited”, or “not at peace”, or “disturbed” – this is a typical and repeated sentence. He does not have an inner world, at least not one that is revealed. Neither firing nor murder actually results in any feeling that we can see.

Instead, our understanding of Bloch comes from the surface, both from his actions and perceptions. The least interesting thing is that he struggles with any kind of commitment or acknowledgement of others’ existence – he is numb to the idea of it. He has no real friends; his marriage has collapsed; he organises meetings with women and then leaves the bar with another person before the original person arrives; he casually murders another woman after a night together.

More interesting, though is his perception of things. Martin Swales’ comment on Büchner’s “Lenz”, that it is the tale of “a mind already unhinged, in the sense that there is no coherent and sustaining relationship to the world”, is perfectly apt here. In that novella, there is no violence, but there is the same problem – a man walking about trying to make sense of things and failing utterly. (“Lenz”, about a poet who went mad, is more enjoyable to read for Büchner’s beautiful language, which shows that poetic mind at work.)

Bloch’s problems circle around sensory problems and odd fixations, but these specific problems change. At one point, he notices persistence – of urine on a market wall, of shells he was chewing the day before. At another, he becomes obsessed with asking the price of objects. At still another, he wants to find something that has been lost and refuses to believe that someone else has found it when he is told, as if he wants to be some kind of hero.

What links these oddities and all the others? Perhaps the key one to me is the idea of control. In the numbness of Bloch’s world, fixations – like murder – are a way of trying to impart a framework and meaning and personal presence onto things. They are a reaction to individual powerlessness. We read the word “wehr” (“defence”) more than a few times here in the context of Bloch’s attempts to survive life. He is actually trying to find some way of holding on to his grip on things, even if that way looks even more mad than what came before it to us.

Words, words, words.

Which brings us to the language problem. Ultimately, stories like The Goalie’s Anxiety… are made of words. So, madness must come to us in words. Bloch’s final collapse comes to us as a “Wortspielkrankeit”, a “problem of language games” or “punning”. He stops finding any meaning in language. He hears a woman scream and thinks it has no meaning, so he ignores it. He tries to tell a story but finds he needs to explain the meaning of every single word before he can use it, so he is unable to tell the story at all. Things swerve rapidly into an overabundance of meaning, however, when Bloch becomes paranoid and convinced that everything is a code only he can read if only he can see behind the language. Still, words are failing him – giving him too much, or altogether too little.

In Austria, at the beginning of the 20th century, something similar was happening. Language had been exhausted by realism, and poets like Rilke, Trakl, and Hugo von Hofmannsthal sought to recover the meaning of words like “spirit” from simple definitions that killed their significance. There was both a huge sense of hidden meaning, with Freud gaining popularity and showing hidden mental worlds even we could not access, and a striving to find meaning in the desperately desolate world left by god-killing thinkers like Max Weber and Nietzsche. Sometimes the struggle was too much. Hofmannsthal gave up on poetry with the fictional “Letter of Lord Chandos”, which shares much with Bloch’s own problem.

In that work, the fictional Lord struggles with the fact that he has “totally lost the ability to put anything coherent together in word or thought.” He has only a personal language, uncommunicable. “Words… break apart in my mouth like rotting mushrooms”. This is what Bloch has too. He stops being able to communicate, so he just becomes more and more isolated from others while his internal language grows stranger and stranger. He is left adrift in a world he cannot find words for, but nobody cares.  

Whose madness? Film and Society

The “Letter of Lord Chandos” is a letter, written by one man. The Goalie’s Anxiety… puts the same kind of madness into a social setting. How does that change our understanding of that madness? For one, we see that it goes beyond just Bloch. Near the end of the book he talks to a village schoolmaster who reveals that nearly all the children there are unable to create full sentences. If that is the case, then the problem is not just Bloch’s. We know this already, though. Bloch is subject to random violence himself, and on the streets, he greets people who don’t return that greeting. The world itself is numb and cruel. If it is so, then the same solutions – conspiracist thinking, odd fixations, and finally murder – may appear to others too. It’s not just noblemen who get word-sick.

Then there is the cinema, a modern intrusion Hofmannsthal did not have to worry about. Like the newspapers that Bloch is constantly reading, cinema runs through the book – the woman he kills works at one, and Bloch regularly compares things in real life with things he has seen in films. The significance of cinema, it seems to me, is twofold. I have already mentioned how it numbs the world by making it seem like life is elsewhere. For example, Bloch reads about the police hunting him in the paper, but he does not react to it – because it does not feel real, it feels like it is happening somewhere else. But then, films also represent reality without being a reality. They create a space for us to lose our sense that the world we see is the real world, and in that space Bloch wanders, unable to see sense.

Conclusion

The Goalie’s Anxiety… is thus a novel of madness and the breakdown of language, rather than just a boring story about a man who commits a murder and then mooches around. It sits in a tradition of such works in German literature and contributes to it by having a perspective – external and sensory rather than stream-of-consciousness as in Schnitzler’s “Fräulein Else” – and a focus – language collapse as social rather than purely individual, as in Büchner’s “Lenz” – which sets it apart from other works. It is a strange little novel.

But reading it brought me no joy, and analysing it, now that I don’t pay professors to read that analysis and say nice things about it, was not very joyous either. If our world is as numb and miserable as Bloch’s, why read about it? As for Bloch himself, the perspective choice means that even if he were charming (Humbert Humbert was dead wrong when he said “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style”), we would hardly know it. Else is likeable – I feel sad when she goes nuts. Bloch was an empty, violent man from the beginning. His only character development consists of actually losing his mind.

So, interesting, but a tale that’s hard to recommend. “Lenz” is much shorter and more beautiful, “Else” much more emotionally impactful, and “Lord Chandos” more likely to come to mind when you try to live and say things in this world of ours. Handke kicks the ball, but it hits the post.

Chopping Down the Bourgeoisie – Thomas Bernhard’s Woodcutters

I am not, on the whole, a fan of what I would call “closed-box novels”. Those torturous first-person narratives which Beckett and Murnane and so many others like to write, where our main character is generally floating in space, very rarely lucky enough to be trapped in a small box. From within this cramped environment they ramble, complain, whatever. But given how far detached from our own world theirs is, I get very little from them. Such narratives neither bring us closer to our fellows, nor do they ever appear to have any positive message to impart at all. Just pessimism and cynicism. If I wanted that, I’d go outside.

Thomas Bernhard’s novel Woodcutters is in some sense one of these closed-box mysteries. The main character spends most of the narrative sitting in a chair at a party, reminiscing or else thinking ill of those around him. A little later he has a bite to eat, sits and listens to an actor discourse, and finally goes home. What action there is lies within his mind until very late in the story. Though it is unparagraphed, and though it has a certain peculiar disconnection from human life that reminds me of Beckett, I ended up enjoying the novel. There was some light within its caverns, and the writing is also (trans. David McLintock) far funnier than I had expected.

I suppose I would like to open the box, and explain briefly what value to us in the real world this novel might have.

Plot Introduction

Woodcutters is set in Bernhard’s native Austria, in the Vienna of the 1980s. Our narrator is a writer, temporarily back in his homeland from England, where he appears to be in self-imposed exile. While in Vienna he accidentally encounters the Auersbergers – a married couple and old friends from the 50s, whom our narrator now despises, and they give him an invitation to “an artistic dinner” that he somehow fails to decline. He also hears of the suicide, by hanging, of their mutual friend, a woman called Joana. The action of Woodcutters takes place during this dinner, the same day as Joana’s funeral – first as our narrator sits alone on his chair, then during the dinner itself. The guest of honour is an actor from the Burgtheater, the most important Viennese theatre, but he is running late. Among the various guests is also Jeannie Billroth, another writer who the narrator despises.

Joana

The narrator’s treatment of his old friend’s suicide is rather ambiguous. As with most of the people in Woodcutters, Joana had once had a great impact on the narrator’s life, but since been abandoned by him. She had had a hard life, coming from the countryside to Vienna to be an artist but then ending up simply doing movement classes with actors. She married, but then Fritz, her famous fabric-making husband, ran off to Mexico without her. And so she drank, and drank, and the narrator is more surprised to hear that she had recently still been alive than that she had died. Why exactly she ended her life is unclear – what final thing brought her to go to the countryside and hang herself. But the narrator says he had always known she would hang herself, because she had dreams and dreams are not fit for this world.

Joana had been the narrator’s friend, and he had taken no interest in her these past ten or twenty years. Whether or not there is any guilt there is hard to say, but the cynicism of the narrator shouldn’t be confused with authority. At the funeral, which takes place in the village where Joana grew up and died, the narrator encounters John, Joana’s companion. At first he hates him, considering him an ill-educated peasant, but as he recollects the funeral his opinion changes, and he realises that in comparison with the bourgeois trash that were also there, John was actually a good man. He had organised the funeral, he had done his duty and looked death in the face in the way that the endlessly posing Viennese never had. And that, of course, is better than nothing.

Auersberger

Just now looking through the German Wikipedia page for Woodcutters I discovered to my surprise and, I think, horror, that these characters all have quite clear analogues in the real world. In many cases Bernhard did not even bother changing first names. That is a surprise because Woodcutters is full of characters with changed names. Joana was originally Elfriede, for example, and Auersberger’s name has also been pruned by him to make it sound more aristocratic. Everyone here is trying to be someone other than themselves.

The Auersbergers, “Auersberger” and “his wife”, are the hosts of the party. They have not changed in the thirty or so years that the narrator has had the misfortune of knowing them. The man is a composer, from the school of Anton Webern; his wife is a singer. Auersberger had promise, had genius perhaps, but now he is simply considered one of Webern’s many successors. He has a drinking problem, and occasionally goes for drying-out cures.

Their marriage is not happy – none in the book is. They are sustained by her money and these social events. They are, to quote our narrator, “perfidious society masturbators”. They have destroyed an entire village – the source of her wealth – by their indolence. As they do no work, they are forced to gradually sell parcels of land from her inheritance, which leads to land development. And no doubt by not working they are also doing a lot of damage to their souls. Everything about the Auersbergers is fake, dishonest. I particularly enjoyed the several pages where the actor talks about The Wild Duck, the play by Ibsen that he had been in, and not one person save Jeannie and the narrator has actually seen it. But in addition to the fake names there are fake books, fake libraries, fake relationships. Their whole world is false.

Auersberger, though, is terribly funny. He has drunk far more than he should and his wife keeps trying to force him to go to bed, whereupon he kicks her. But the best line in the book, I thought, comes when the discussion turns to suicide’s prevalence among the Austrians at that time.

“The Styrians are rather prone to suicide, said Auersberger, who by this stage was just about totally drunk and had become highly agitated. He told the actor that he was surprised that so few Burgtheater actors killed themselves, since they had such good reason to do so. Saying this he burst out laughing at his own remark, though the others merely found it embarrassing and glared at him.”

This gives a good idea of the humour in Woodcutters. It is cruel, but it is also shockingly funny. Yet I cannot leave Auersberger like this, because his particular character goes too far. The narrator is cynical, is brutal. But Auersberger – at least to me, reads as someone far more sinister, considering the context of politically unrepentant Austria in postwar period. When he starts talking about how “the human race ought to be abolished”, or “we should all kill one another”, it suggests a kind of unreformed Nazi nihilism, at least to me. So too does his destruction of chairs and wineglasses. He is good for a laugh, but not when you start thinking about him.

Jeannie and the Actor

Considering it is a broadside against Viennese bourgeois society, art naturally enough sits at centre of Woodcutters. Our narrator time and again refers to the way that Vienna consumes talented artists and turns them into mediocrities – Joana and Auersberger are but examples of this. Only Fritz and – we presume – the narrator, were able to escape the Austrian capital’s pernicious influence, and then only by fleeing abroad. Jeannie Billroth, who the narrator once served as lover, is one who has not escaped Vienna’s clutches. Styling herself as the Viennese Virginia Woolf, she is in the narrator’s eye a phenomenal mediocrity. Her days, he suggests, are spent pandering to politicians to secure pensions and prizes. After all,

“Artistic life in Austria is a road built by state opportunism out of people’s baseness and mendacity, paved with scholarships and prizes, lined with decorations and distinctions, and leading to an honoured grave in the Central Cemetery”.

If Jeannie is as untalented and inauthentic as everyone else at the party, the actor is almost the opposite. He arrives incredibly late, pays decorum no heed, but though he is for the most part boring, he is nonetheless himself. When Jeannie asks him, not once, not twice, not even three times but repeatedly until he cannot ignore her any longer, whether he could say, “at the end of his life, that his art had brought him fulfilment”, he at last snaps. He hates the party, hates the people there, and hates Jeannie above all. What he wants, what he truly wants, is “to go into the forest, deep into the forest… to yield oneself up to the forest” and be a woodcutter.

The actor, who had described to the uninterested listeners how he had holed himself up in a mountain shack in order to learn his lines and truly feel his role, is the real artist. Of course, he is as petty as the rest of them in many ways, and he does appear slightly ridiculous. Here is the wonderful description of him eating. It is truly amazing how Bernhard manages to convey the rush of the artist’s spooning in his language:

“Ekdal, he said, spooning up his soup, has been my dream role for decades. And then he went on, interrupting himself after every other word to spoon up more soup, Ekdal—pause for a spoonful—has always—another spoonful—been my—another spoonful—favourite part, adding, after two more spoonfuls, for decades.”

Truth-telling and Cynicism

Why mention the spooning? Because it makes the actor look ridiculous. It undermines him, and Woodcutters as a whole is about undermining people. It is about, in some sense, telling the truth.

“For years, perhaps for decades, we may have wanted to tell someone the truth to his face, the truth that he has never heard because no one has dared to tell it to him to his face, and then at last someone does it for us.”

It is only, obliterated by another person, that we can ever reflect upon ourselves honestly and turn away from the incorrect path that we are on. Sometimes, not even that is enough. In another moment that had me write “big oof” in the margins the narrator turns to a very drunken Auersberger, quite randomly after the dinner, and say

“that he had made a mess of his life and dragged his genius in the dirt for the sake of a rich wife and high living, that he had destroyed himself in the process and made drinking the be-all and end-all of his life, that he had exchanged one misfortune, that of his youth, for a second misfortune, that of old age, that he had sacrificed his musical genius for his revolting socializing, and intellectual freedom for the bondage of wealth.”

Big oof indeed.

Can we ever break out of the cycles that we are in? Are we condemned to them until at last, confronted with the sheer awfulness of other people, we finally snap? The cynicism of the narrator is not without its purpose. There is at least a kind of hope, if only for himself, that life can be better than an artistic dinner in Vienna. And as the novel ends he runs – literally runs – determined to make something of his experience that isn’t just a complaint. There is something to be valued here.

Conclusion

Woodcutters is the first work of fiction by Bernhard that I have read. I remember once starting Frost and stopping, but after Woodcutters I have already ordered another novel. Woodcutters is not quite the closed-box I thought it was. It is hilarious in a way that is relevant to us all, living as we do in a bourgeois cultural milieu (you are on this blog, after all). It is not too long either, and easy to read. Bernhard’s style has his narrator constantly going in circles, searching for perfect barb with which to pierce his old friends’ bubbles. And these barbs are not the end. There is a sense, a limited sense, that underneath the cynicism and the misanthropy there is a good world and a good life to be found, just not the one we live in and not the one we’re living.

But that’s what we have books for. To show the way to something better.

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.