Term Paper on Emperor's Tomb
Franz Josef understood that in order to rule an ethnically and culturally
heterogeneous empire, a multi-national kingdom, the Hapsburgs needed to be seen
as standing above the profound differences that divided their subjects into
rival constituencies.
It is no small part of Roth's stylistic accomplishment that the tone and the
texture of his novels, from early books about returning war veterans such as
Rebellion, Hotel Savoy (both from 1924) and Flight Without End (1927), in which
there is no trace of nostalgia for the vanished empire, to the late Hapsburg
threnodies such as The Radetzky March (1932) and The Emperor's Tomb (1938),
persuaded readers that the writer possessed an intimate knowledge of the
imperial army and its debacles during World War I. Roth did everything he could
to feed such an impression, never mentioning that his actual postings were first
to the press corps and then to the censorship department, where he was charged
with reading letters from soldiers in the ranks.
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Roth's success at creating a lasting image of the final years of imperial
Austria has obscured just how tenuous his own experience of Franz Josef's Vienna
really was. He reached the capital as another gifted and money-less provincial
in 1913, enrolled at the university just as the war was about to break out, and
joined the army in 1916, three months before the death of the old emperor. The
prosperous high-bourgeois world that Stefan Zweig memorably called "the Golden
Age of Security, " when "everything in our almost thousand-year-old Austrian
monarchy seemed based on permanency and the State was the chief guarantor of
this stability," corresponded to very little in Roth's experience. “For the
shtetl Jews especially, as Sperber notes, the Emperor Franz Josef I meant more
than he did for anyone else. He was the guarantor of their civil rights, their
only shield against the coming of hatred and despotism. As Sperber's own father
lamented in 1916, upon hearing of the old Emperor's death: "Austria has died
with him. He was a good emperor for us. Now everything will be uncertain! It is
a great misfortune for us Jews." It was.” (Judt, 1996)
Equally important, it was a thoroughly belated passion. Nothing in Roth's early
writings, while he was still a Hapsburg subject, shows any special regard for
the dynasty or any fondness for imperial institutions. For Roth, the Hapsburg
Empire did not become a subject of longing until a decade after it had ceased to
exist. It was the melancholy story of its slow but supposedly inevitable
dissolution that Roth found imaginatively compelling, and in his account the
shadow of the approaching catastrophe darkens the entirety of Franz Josef's
sixty- eight-year reign. A relentless, deterministic back shadowing orchestrates
Roth's Hapsburg narratives. It finds its exact rhetorical embodiment in the
repetition of phrases such as "Death crossed his bony hands above our glasses as
we drank, but we did not suspect it" (The Emperor' s Tomb), and in the
sententious moralizing that regularly interrupts the narrative of The Radetzky
March: "Nowadays the notions of honor- -personal, family, and professional--by
which Herr von Trotta lived are the nearest relics of childish, superstitious
legends."
To a remarkable extent, much of the current soft-edged fascination with the
final years of imperial Austria is often cast in similar terms. Images of Franz
Josef and his wife, the Empress Elisabeth (" Sissi"), are omnipresent in Vienna
today, used to sell everything from boxes of chocolate to tickets for concerts,
and a visitor could be excused for believing that nothing of importance had
occurred since the end of their reign. The endless proliferation of
reproductions of Klimt paintings, Thonet chairs, and Wiener Werkstatte jewelry
and furniture has turned them into glamorous memorabilia of the Hapsburg era,
feeding the same nostalgic commercialism as the formulaic court portraits of the
imperial family. And it is not only the Nazi period that is being elided: the
country's entire post-World War I experience, including such important
developments as the groundbreaking social legislation passed during the first
Austrian democratic republic, and the anti-Nazi clerical fascism of Dolfuss and
Schuschnigg, is neglected in favor of an apparently inexhaustible fascination
with Franz Josef's glory years. The consonance between contemporary reactions
and Roth's own judgment certainly helps to account for his resurgent
popularity--but it also blinds us to his limitations as a writer. “Second, fleet
loyalty of both officers and crews was synonymous with their loyalty to the
long-lived and venerable Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef I, who ruled for sixty-
eight years until his death in 1916. In the iconoclastic late twentieth century,
this kind of dynastic attachment is most difficult to comprehend.” (Harbron,
1996)
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Throughout his work, Roth portrayed the Galician Jewry of his childhood with
affection; but never after The Wandering Jews, with the exception of Hiob (Job:
The Story of a Simple Man), a novel that appeared in 1930, did Roth make Jewish
life the central theme of a whole book. The melancholy tone of nostalgia that
Roth was to make his own in books such as The Radetzky March and The Emperor's
Tomb received its first sustained trial in The Wandering Jews; and in the long
run the vanished Dual Monarchy proved a deeper and more fruitful focus for his
emotional life than did the shtetl life of Eastern Europe.
When ulrich, the protagonist of The Man Without Qualities, Musil's matchless
novel about the last year of prewar Austria, is made secretary of a committee
casting about for ways to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of Emperor Franz
Josef's coronation, suggestions about what the empire needs pour in from
everywhere. Ruefully, Ulrich concludes that all of these proposals can be
divided into two mutually canceling groups, one beginning with "Back to--," the
other "Forward to--," since "one half of mankind is looking for salvation in the
future and the other half in the past." In the course of his life, Joseph Roth
could have sent in submissions fitting both of Ulrich's classifications. For the
present never exerted a powerful hold on Roth's imagination or desires; and if
he started out looking for the possibility of happiness in a conventional
socialist utopia, he soon swerved towards finding it in an equally utopian, but
even more unrealizable, imperial past. In the 1930s, his Legitimist politics and
his Hapsburg nostalgia were signs that Roth had stopped thinking seriously about
the social and political problems that, at least as a journalist, he was still
attempting to address.
“In order to preserve his empire, Emperor Franz Josef made a deal in 1867 with
the Hungarians, who were the strongest of the empire's non-German ethnic groups.
The Compromise of 1867 (Ausgleich) established a mode of relationship between
the Habsburgs and their Hungarian subjects, after which the Empire of Austria
was reorganized as the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, that is, the Empire of
Austria and the Kingdom of Hungary” (Shema, 1991)
But surely, it is only reasonable to claim, novels are a different matter
altogether. Transposed into a personal myth, and embodied in sufficiently
persuasive characters and scenes, what might be sheer absurdities in politics or
in history can become the stuff of deeply persuasive fiction. In Roth's case,
though, the situation is too complicated to be resolved by such a tidy
dichotomy. To defend him along these lines ignores more problems than is
generally acknowledged. There is little pleasure in being troubled by what so
many scrupulous readers have found deeply moving; and yet it seems to me that
what is most interesting about books such as The Radetzky March and The Emperor'
s Tomb is the extent to which they succeed--in spite of passages of genuinely
mediocre writing and formulaic story-telling that ought to have sunk them
utterly, but somehow did not.
Works Cited
Harbron, John, Fran Josef's forgotten U-boat captains. (The Austro-Hungarian
Empire’s navy of multi-national personnel including Ritter von Trapp were
all-loyal to the Emperor Franz Josef I). Vol. 46, History Today, 06-01-1996, pp
51(6)
Judt, Tony, A hero of his times. (Jewish author Manes Sperber) Vol 214, The New
Republic, 04-01-1996, pp 34(5)
Shema, Jean Coutts Austria: Chapter 2B. Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867-1918) ,
Countries of the World, 01-01-1991
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