They were at rest beneath the soil,Īnd next spring violets would grow from theirīones. Sleep, we cursed Death who had vainly beckoned us Every morningĪs we woke up, every night as we lay down to Upon returning home after the War, Franz says:Īll lost position, rank and name, home and money andĮsteem, past, present and future. The Great War, which will see Franz, Joseph and Manes defeated in battle Reisiger, a Jewish wagon driver they seem more authentic to him than his With his cousin Joseph who sells chestnuts from a cart and his friend Manes Tomb, Franz Ferdinand Trotta seeks companionship among the peasantry, Pleasure even in those illnesses which love moreĪnd so, the specter of Death haunts these melancholy, elegiac novels,Īs the Trotta family rises to the respectable lower levels of the aristocracyĪfter Lieutenant Joseph Trotta fortuitously intervenes at the Battle of Lovemaking in quiet boxes at the Court Opera, in In the giant Ferris wheel, in Punch and Judy shows, Irony, unfettered criticism: pleasure in the Prater, Wine, girls food, long walks, eccentricities ofĮvery sort, senseless escapades, self-destructive Which asserted life: from pleasure in balls, new Heavy with the feeling that we were dedicated toĭeath, from a foolish pleasure in everything Wit and our frivolity came from hearts that were With him the Monarchy-not so much our FatherlandĪs our Empire something greater, broader, Hidden depths of our souls there slumbered thatĪwareness which is called foreboding, theĪwareness above all that the old Emperor was dying,ĭay by day with every day that he lived, and
Old, distant and omnipresent in the great andīrilliant pattern of the Empire, lived and ruled Which we drank, invisible Death was already crossingĪnd blasphemed without thought. The pride of the doomed, all signs of theĭisintegration which at that time we still did not
Melancholy curiosity, a wicked insouciance, and With them I shared a skeptical frivolity, a Of artists, I loved best under the old Empire. I lived in the cheerful, carefree company of youngĪristocrats whose company, second only to that Of beliefs and values that had contributed to the unthinking descent into Roth, in his multivolume, multigenerational saga of the extended von Trottaįamily, more accurately diagnosed the rot in his own generation, the lack War which no one really wanted and, as a result of this determination,ĭeclared themselves unalterably opposed to the antediluvian system. Many of the Post World War I generationĬonvinced themselves that the ancient regimes and institutions had leadĮurope, particularly the naive youth of Europe, into a self-destructive
It has aptly been noted that the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth was a My fatherland, and desire the return of the I am a conservative and a Catholic, consider Austria
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