Author, humorist, playwright and translator
Alexander Roda Roda was born as Sandor Friedrich Rosenfeld in Puszta Zdenci, Slovakia, son of a Jewish landowner and a non-Jewess. He studied law at the University of Vienna. From 1891 he served for a year as a volunteer, and later as a second and then first lieutenant in the Austrian-Hungarian Army Reserves. He became a teacher at the officer’s riding school. In 1902 he was dishonorably discharged from the Imperial Army because of his unacceptable opinions. He then became a correspondent and a journalist and started to travel throughout Europe.
In 1904 he lived in Pomerania, Germany, in 1905 in Berlin, and then moved to Munich. In 1909 he was a newspaper correspondent in Belgrade, Serbia. During World War I Roda Roda served in the press quarters of the Austrian-Hungarian Army supreme command. After the war he again changed places of residence: from 1920 to 1923 he lived in Munich, then moved to Berlin. He joined the Union of German Dramatists; the P.E.N. (Publicists, Essayists and Novelists) and the S.D.S. (Schwitzerband Deutscher Schriftsteller). He contributed to Die Weltbuehne. In 1933, due to a satire he published about Adolf Hitler, he was expelled from Germany and settled in Austria. In 1938, with the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, he escaped to Switzerland and ssttled in Vevey and then in Geneva. He co-signed the declaration calling for the establishment of the Liga fuer das geistige Oesterreich (The League for Intellectual Austria). In 1940 Roda Roda emigrated to the USA via France, Spain and Portugal. He lived to see the downfall of the Third Reich but soon after, in August 1945, he died in New York.
Roda Roda wrote comedies, satirical novels and short stories. He contributed to the Neue Freie Presse and to Simplicissimus and also wrote for cabarets and variete clubs. Roda Roda, known as “the man with the red vest”, was an outstanding exponent of the Viennese comic art. His well known comic play Die Feldherrnhuegel was much appreciated in Germany but banned by the Austrian censor. His other works include Der Schnaps, Der Rauchtabak und die verfluchte Liebe (1908), a best selling novel; the autobiographical Roda Roda Roman (1925, 1950); Die Panduren (1935); and Die rote Weste (1945). A collection of his works, in three volumes, appeared during 1932-1934.