约瑟夫·罗特

约瑟夫·罗特（Joseph Roth，1894年9月2日—1939年5月27日），奥地利作家，政治记者。出生于东加利西亚地区的布罗德。

Moses Joseph Roth (Austrian German: [roːt]; 2 September 1894 – 27 May 1939) was an Austro-Hungarian journalist and novelist, best known for his family saga Radetzky March (1932), about the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, his novel of Jewish life Job (1930) and his seminal essay "Juden auf Wanderschaft" (1927; translated into English as The Wandering Jews), a fragmented account of the Jewish migrations from eastern to western Europe in the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution. In the 21st century, publications in English of Radetzky March and of collections of his journalism from Berlin and Paris created a revival of interest in Roth.

Biography

Joseph Roth was born into a Jewish family and grew up in Brody (currently in Ukraine), a small town near Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine) in East Galicia, in the easternmost reaches of what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire. Jewish culture played an important role in the life of the town, which had a large Jewish population. Roth grew up with his mother and her relatives; he never saw his father, who had disappeared before he was born.

After secondary school, Joseph Roth moved to Lemberg to begin his university studies in 1913, before transferring to the University of Vienna in 1914 to study philosophy and German literature. In 1916, Roth broke off his university studies and volunteered to serve in the Austro-Hungarian Army on the Eastern Front, "though possibly only as an army journalist or censor". This experience had a major and long-lasting influence on his life. So, too, did the collapse in 1918 of the Habsburg Empire, which marked the beginning of a pronounced sense of "homelessness" that was to feature regularly in his work. As he wrote: "My strongest experience was the War and the destruction of my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary."

Roth married Friederike (Friedl) Reichler in 1922. In the late 1920s, his wife became schizophrenic, which threw Roth into a deep crisis, both emotionally and financially. She lived for years in a sanatorium and was later murdered in the Nazis' Aktion T4 programme.

In 1929 he met Andrea Manga Bell, born in Hamburg and unhappily married to Alexandre Douala Manga Bell, Prince of Douala in Cameroon. Her husband had returned to Cameroon while she and their children stayed in Europe. When Roth met her, she was editor of the Ullstein magazine Gebrauchsgraphik.

Being a prominent liberal Jewish journalist, Roth left Germany when Adolf Hitler became Reich Chancellor on 30 January 1933. Andrea Manga Bell accompanied him with her children. He spent most of the next six years in Paris, a city he loved. His essays written in France display a delight in the city and its culture.

Shortly after Hitler's rise to power, in February 1933, Roth wrote in a prophetic letter to his friend, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig:

You will have realized by now that we are drifting towards great catastrophes. Apart from the private—our literary and financial existence is destroyed—it all leads to a new war. I won't bet a penny on our lives. They have succeeded in establishing a reign of barbarity. Do not fool yourself. Hell reigns.

The relationship with Andrea Manga Bell failed due to financial problems and Roth's jealousy. From 1936 to 1938, Roth had a romantic relationship with Irmgard Keun. They worked together, traveling to Paris, Wilna, Lemberg, Warsaw, Vienna, Salzburg, Brussels and Amsterdam.

Without denying his Jewish origins, Roth considered his relationship to Catholicism very important. In the final years of his life, he may have converted: Michael Hofmann states in the preface to the collection of essays The White Cities (also published as Report from a Parisian Paradise) that Roth "was said to have had two funerals, one Jewish, one Catholic".