Joseph Roth was born near Brody in East Galicia, then in Austria-Hungary. During World War I Roth volunteered for service in the Austrian army and became an officer. He was captured by the Russians and held prisoner until the end of the war. After the war he turned to writing and started his career in journalism, and as a novelist. From 1923 to 1933 he worked for the Frankfurter Zeitung. He fought for a new Humanism and was a strenuous opponent of German militarism. Roth left his Germany, when Hitler came to power in 1933. He found it difficult to establish roots and he finally sought refuge in Paris. During his short life Roth wrote many newspaper articles and short stories. He wrote fourteen novels, notable for their lucid style. At first he wrote as a psychological realist in the tradition of Stendhal and Dostoevsky. Roth was later influenced by the Viennese impressionists, such as von Hofmannstahl and Arthur Schnitzler. Roth always projected recollections of his own unhappy and impoverished youth, and was affected by the suffering of others. This is mostly reflected in his best known novel Hiob (1930), Job (translation 1931), in which he describes the bitter life of an East European Jewish family. Other novels such as Die Flucht ohne Ende (1927) and Rechts und Links (1929) depict the social consequences of war and the decomposition of the old order through revolution and inflation. His last novel, Die Legende vom heiligen Trinker (1939), is a kind of self portrait and reflects some of the author’s own disappointments. The essay Juden auf Wanderschaft (1927) deal with the social position of East European Jewry.
A different atmosphere prevails in Roth’s historical novels. The best known of these, Radetzkymarsch (1932), nostalgically portrays Austria and the imperial army under Emperor Franz Joseph. Three other novels were Die hundert Tage (1936), Die Geschichte von der 1002 Nacht (1939), and Der Laviathan (1940). In a fit of depression he tried to commit suicide and died in a hospital for the poor. Many years after his death Der stumme Prophet, a work full of foreboding about totalitarianism, was published in 1966. Roth’s collected works were published with an introduction by Hermann Kesten, and he has gained late recognition as one of Austria’s outstanding novelists.