The World of
the Habsburgs

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1914
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Medium

Joseph Roth in training in the one-year voluntary school of the 21st Rifleman’s Battalion, detail from a photograph, 1916

Partner 
Dokumentationsstelle für neuere österreichische Literatur im Literaturhaus Wien – Documentation Centre for Modern Austrian Literature
Copyright 
Dokumentationsstelle Literaturhaus Wien

Verwendet bei

  • Person

    Joseph Roth

    Roth was a major Austrian journalist and novelist. He grew up in the east Galician town of Brody, moved to Vienna after finishing school and began studying German in 1914. In May 1916, he volunteered for military service. He served in Galicia, where he was probably allocated to the Press Service up to the end of the war. Even during the war and in the years after, Roth worked for a number of newspapers in Austria and Germany to make his living, before emigrating to France in 1933. A central element of his work as a novelist is the collapse of Austria-Hungary.

  • Chapter

    Melancholy Men in Uniform – How Masculinity Becomes a Problem

    In his novel Die Kapuzinergruft (The Capuchins’ Crypt, published in English as The Emperor’s Tomb) (1938) Joseph Roth formulates a literary diagnosis of the superficial and foolish profile of soldiers from Vienna, the city of the waltz: ‘They were all too spoiled in Vienna, this city fed incessantly by the crown lands of the Monarchy, these harmless, almost ridiculously harmless, children of the capital and imperial residence, pampered and sung about much too often.’