3 - Radetzkymarsch as Historical Novel

Summary

Ich kenne, glaube ich, die Welt nur, wenn ich schreibe, und, wenn ich die Feder weglege, bin ich verloren.

— Joseph Roth

1930 IS GENERALLY HELD to mark Roth's final break from a critical engagement with the problems of the present and his turn to an escapist recreation of the lost worlds of the Habsburg Empire and the shtetl. In the same year as he published Hiob and began work on Radetzkymarsch (RB, 392), Roth penned a lengthy critical essay on the relationship between form and content in narrative: “Schluß mit der ‘Neuen Sachlichkeit’!” This essay is a diatribe against the literary movement Neue Sachlichkeit, which Roth considers responsible for the poverty of writing in contemporary German. Roth “rejects the then widely accepted claim of the writer-reporter to objectivity, and with it the tenet of Neue Sachlichkeit that genuine literature must be documentary” (UJR, 35). The formless, artless texts pretending to be literature claim to be eyewitness accounts and therefore to represent “reality,” yet they are far removed from being able to represent “life as it is”: “[Die] ‘dokumentarische’ Mitteilung, die ‘das Leben’ selbst zu bezeugen scheint, ist weit entfernt, nicht nur von der ‘inneren’ oder ‘höheren Wahrheit,’ sondern auch von der Kraft der Wirklichkeit. Und erst das ‘Kunstwerk’ ist ‘echt wie das Leben’ ” (3:156). Both writers and readers are laboring under the delusion that facts and details suffice to produce a true account of a given event, when these are merely the raw material.