The Radetzky March

Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March, first published in 1932, is one of the greatest and most admired novels of the 20th century. An early critic said it “contained the perfect formula for the historical novel.” It is an elegy to a lost world—the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary, which ruled most of Central Europe for centuries but which collapsed after its defeat in World War I (a war it had started itself) in 1918.

The Radetzky March tells of the fortunes of three generations of the Trotta family, ennobled after the family’s founder saved the life of the Austrian emperor Francis Joseph in a battle. This varied and richly textured story takes us through three generations of Trottas: the grandfather, the original hero; his son, a sober district commissioner in the imperial bureaucracy; and his grandson, a ne’er-do-well military officer whose adventures lead him to the brink of financial ruin.

But the novel is about more than a single family. It also reveals two other characters: Francis Joseph, who rescues the Trottas from disaster more than once, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire itself—vast, encompassing territories that today include Austria, Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Bosnia, and parts of Romania, Poland, and Ukraine, but tottering on the brink of collapse, as the characters come to realize.

Nevertheless, these figures, some venal, some admirable, stumble their way through the life they have always known: one that is highly restricted and controlled, but which offers the security of a known place in a world that they know will soon vanish.

Joseph Roth (1894–1939) was an Austro-Hungarian journalist who produced many works of fiction and nonfiction, of which The Radetzky March is the best-known and most admired. While writing this novel, he lived in Berlin, with numerous trips abroad. The ascendancy of the Third Reich in 1933 forced him to leave Germany. He ended up in Paris. His death was caused by double tuberculosis, activated by delirium tremens that ensued after he stopped his heavy abuse of alcohol.

This, the original translation by Geoffrey Dunlop, brings this deathless classic to a whole new audience.