But The Emperor’s Tomb was one of Roth’s last works, published only the year before he died, the year of the next war for which all that was unresolved in the previous one was preparing in his world, his time. Although he wrote at least two more novels after this one, he concludes this phase, and—for me—the summation of his work, with a scene in which Trotta is in a café. On that night “my friends’ excitement… seemed to me superfluous”—as it does to the reader, since it is not explained until, with Roth’s power to shatter a scene with a blow of history:
the moment when the door of the café flew open and an oddly dressed young man appeared on the threshold. He was in fact wearing black leather gaiters… and a kind of military cap which reminded me at one and the same time of a bedpan and a caricature of our old Austrian caps.
The Anschluss has arrived. The café empties of everyone, including the Jewish proprietor. In an inspired fusion of form with content, there follows a dazedly disoriented piece of writing that expresses the splintering of all values, including emotional values, so that the trivial and accidental, the twitching involuntary, takes over. Trotta sits on in the deserted café, approached only by the watchdog. “Franz, the bill!” he calls to the vanished waiter. “Franz, the bill!” he says to the dog. The dog follows him in the dawn breaking over “uncanny crosses” that have been scrawled on walls. He finds himself at the Kapuzinergruft, the Emperor’s tomb, “where my emperors lay buried in iron sarcophagi.”
“I want to visit the sarcophagus of my Emperor, Franz Joseph… Long live the Emperor!” The Capuchin brother in charge hushes him and turns him away. “So where could I go now, I, a Trotta?”
I know enough of the facts of Joseph Roth’s life to be aware that, for his own death, he collapsed in a café, a station of exile’s calvary.
1. In a letter to his translator, Blanche Gidon, quoted by Beatrice Musgrave in her introduction to Weights And Measures (Everyman’s Library, 1983), p. 9. Roth lived in Paris for some years and two of his novels, Le Triomphe de la beauté and Le Buste de L’Empereur, were published first in French. Le Triomphe de la beauté probably was written in French; it appears not to have been published in German.
2. Robert Musil, The Man without Qualities, Vol. I (Seeker and Warburg, 1961), p. 64, translated by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser. Musil was born in 1880, and though long neglected as a writer outside German-speaking culture, was not forgotten as long as Roth. Musil became a figure in world literature in the Fifties; Roth’s work had to wait another twenty years before it was reissued in Germany, let alone in translation.
3. The Silent Prophet was edited from unpublished work, with the exception of fragments published in 24 Neue Deutsche Erzähler and Die Neue Rundschau in 1929, and published after Roth’s death, in 1966. The English translation by David Le Vay was published in the United States by The Overlook Press in 1980. The work appears to have been written, with interruptions, over several years. The central character, Kargan, is supposedly, modeled on Trotsky.
4. Czeslaw Milosz, “To Raja Rao,” Selected Poems (Ecco Press, 1980), p. 29.
5. The dates I give are generally the dates of first publication, in the original German.
6. Walter Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, edited and with an introduction by Peter Demetz, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Schocken, 1986), p. 83.
PART ONE
Chapter 1
THE TROTTAS WERE a young dynasty.
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