The DC has suffered a father withdrawn by disillusion: he himself knows only to treat his own son, in turn, in the same formula of stunted exchanges, but for the reader, though not the boy. Roth conveys the sense of something withheld, longing for release within the DC.

Brooded over by the portrait of his grandfather, the Hero of Solferino, lonely Carl Joseph is home from the cadet cavalry school where he has been sent to compensate the DC for his own deprivation of military prestige. The boy is seduced by the voluptuous wife of the sergeant-major at the DC’s gendarmerie post. When she dies in childbirth, Carl Joseph, concealing his immense distress from his father, has to pay a visit of condolence to the sergeant-major, and is given by him the packet of love letters he wrote to the man’s wife. “This is for you Herr Baron,… Please excuse me. I have orders from the district captain. I took it to him right away.” There follows a wonderful scene written with the dramatic narrative restraint that Roth mastered for these later books. Devastated, Carl Joseph goes into the village café for a brandy: his father is there and looks up from a newspaper. “‘She’s given you a cheap brandy… Tell the girl’ he remarks to the waiter, ‘that we only drink Hennessy.’”

One has hardly breathed again after this scene when there is another tightening of poignantly ironic resolution. Father and son walk home together.

From the entrance to the district headquarters, Sergeant Slama emerges in a helmet, with a rifle and a fixed bayonet plus a rule book under his arm.

“Good day, my dear Slama!” says old Herr von Trotta. “No news, eh?”

“No news,” the sergeant echoes.

Carl Joseph is haunted by the portrait of the Hero of Solferino, and though inept and undistinguished in his military career, dreams of saving the Emperor’s life as his grandfather did. A failure, haunted as well by the death of Slama’s wife (Roth leaves us to draw our own conclusion that the child she died giving birth to may have been Carl Joseph’s) and his inadvertent responsibility for the death of his only friend in a duel. Carl Joseph fulfills this dream only when, incensed by the desecration, he tears from a brothel wall a cheap reproduction of the official portrait of the Emperor—that other image which haunts his life.

Roth reconceives this small scene at full scale when, at a bacchanalian ball that might have been staged by Fellini on a plan by Musil’s Diotima for her “Collateral Campaign” to celebrate Emperor Franz Joseph’s seventy-year reign, the news comes of the assassination of the Emperor’s heir at Sarajevo. Some Hungarians raucously celebrate: “We are in agreement, my countrymen and I: we can be glad the bastard is gone!” Trotta, drunk, takes “heroic” exception—

“… my grandfather saved the Kaiser’s life. And I, his grandson, will not allow anyone to insult the House of our Supreme Commander in Chief.”

He is forced to leave ignominiously.

As the District Commissioner’s son deteriorates through gambling and drink, Roth unfolds with marvelous subtlety what was withheld, and longing for release, in the father. The old District Commissioner’s unrealized bond with his old valet, Jacques, is perfectly conveyed in one of the two superlative set pieces of the novel, when Jacques’s dying is, first, merely a class annoyance because the servant fails to deliver the mail to the breakfast table, and then becomes a dissolution of class differences in the humanity of two old men who are all that is left, to one another, of a vanished social order: their life.

The second set piece both echoes this one and brings back a scene that has been present always, beneath the consequences that have richly overlaid it. The leveling of age and social dissolution respects no rank. The DC not only now is at one with his former servant; he also, at the other end of the ancient order, has come to have the same bond with his exalted Emperor. In an audience recalling that of the Hero of Solferino, he too has gone to ask for the Emperor’s intercession. This time it is to ask that Carl Joseph not be discharged in disgrace from the army. The doddering Emperor says of Carl Joseph, “ ‘That’s the young man I saw at the most recent maneuvers.’… And because his thoughts were slightly scrambled, he added, ‘He nearly saved my life. Or was that you?’ ”

A stranger seeing them at this moment could have easily mistaken them for two brothers’… And one thought he had changed into a district captain. And the other thought he had changed into the Kaiser.

The unity of Roth’s masterwork is achieved in that highest faculty of the imagination Walter Benjamin6 speaks of as “an extensiveness… of the folded fan, which only in spreading draws breath and flourishes.”

Carl Joseph, firing on striking workers, hears them sing a song he has never heard before, the “Internationale.” At the same time, he has a yearning to escape to the peasant origins of the Trotta family. Unable to retreat to the “innocent” past, superfluous between the power of the doomed empire and the power of the revolution to come, he is given by Roth a solution that is both intensely ironic and at the same time a strangely moving assertion of the persistence of a kind of naked humanity, flagellated by all sides. Leading his men in 1914, he walks into enemy fire to find something for them to drink. “Lieutenant Trotta died holding not a weapon but two pails.”

Carl Joseph’s cousin, of The Emperor’s Tomb, has never met him although Roth knows how to give the reader a frisson by casually dropping the fact that they were both in the battle at which Carl Joseph was killed. But this Trotta links with the peasant branch of the family, through his taking up, first as a form of radical chic, another cousin, Joseph Branco, an itinerant chestnut roaster from Roth’s familiar frontier town. Emotionally frozen between a mother who, like the DC, cannot express her love, and a young wife who turns lesbian after he leaves her alone on their wedding night while he sits with a dying servant (the vigil of the DC with Jacques composed in a new key), Trotta forms his warmest relationship with Branco and Branco’s friend, the Jewish cab driver. They go to war together, live together as escaped prisoners of war in Siberia, and in this phase of Roth’s deepest reflection on the elements of his meganovel, exemplify brilliantly his perception that consistency in human relations is not a virtue but an invention of lesser novelists. The ideal camaraderie of the three men cracks along unpredictable lines, just as the complexity of Trotta’s love for and indifference to his wife, and her constant breaking out of what has seemed to be emotional resolutions to their life, are consonant with the jarring shifts of war and postwar that contain them.

As with all Roth’s work, this phase is as wonderfully populous as any nineteenth-century novel, psychologically masterly, particularly in the person of Trotta’s mother and the tangents of distress and illogical fulfillment in the relationship between him and her.