Radetzkymarsch · 1932
The Radetzky March
Joseph Roth's masterpiece — a elegy for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, told through three generations of a single family as the world they were born for crumbles beneath them.
Published in 1932, when the world Roth described had been dead for fourteen years, The Radetzky March is one of the great novels of the twentieth century. It tells the story of the von Trotta family across three generations — from the grandfather who saves Emperor Franz Joseph's life at the Battle of Solferino, to the grandson who dies fetching water in the first days of the World War that destroys everything the Trottas were. It is a novel about endings: the end of an empire, the end of a class, the end of a world. And it is a novel about what comes after — the void that opens when the old certainties collapse, and nothing rises to take their place.