Austria — Radetzky March

Joseph Roth’s classic is very funny, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire was weird

I couldn’t find a contemporary Austrian novel that fit the bill so I went for a classic, probably the classic, of Austrian literature.

For reasons almost entirely independent from the text it took me nine months to read the first third, and then I read the second two thirds in about six days while part delirious from illness and tiredness. So this won’t be the most erudite review I ever write, in addition to which one cannot help but feel trite reviewing a work of this magnitude. I feel like I’m pointing out that the Mona Lisa has a strange smile or that Shakespeare clearly thought disguises were funny.

So just two quick points. Firstly, this book is hilarious. It took me a little while to realise that because I’m enough of a Swiss chauvinist that initially I wasn’t sure when Roth was joking and when he was just describing what Austrians are actually like. A young Lieutenant tumbles into bed with his Platoon Sargent's wife; afterwards they shake hands before he takes his leave. Is that a joke? Or is that just proper Austrian etiquette? After a while I concluded it was both: Austrians are — or at least were — like this, but Roth is inviting us to find them ridiculous.

Secondly, the Austro-Hungarian Empire c.1910 was fascinating. Technologically, it had railways, telephones, coffee makers etc… It looks and feels contemporary with the US or UK or France of that period. And crucially (for plot contrivances) one can travel hundreds of miles in a day with ease. But politically it was (or at least it is portrayed — I do not know how accurately — as) an anachronism that made Russia look positively modern by comparison. Not just in its quasi-feudal absolute monarchy, but in the manner in which that monarchy then has to accommodate the competing interests of Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and Orthodox Christian interest groups organised (or portrayed as being) almost like tribes, not to mention Austrian, Hungarian, Slovenian, Bosnian, Croatian, Czech, Slovakian, Polish, Italian and Ukrainian national movements and aristocracies. These interest groups are bought off or put down in a way that is almost more reminiscent of the early medieval period than anything later. The effect of all this on a reader who knows nothing of the time and place is that the setting feels almost steampunk: Franz Joseph as Tywin Lannister with an armoured train. We don’t quite get a zeppelin, but we absolutely could.

And the Austro-Hungarian Empire isn’t just anachronistic in the way that pretty much all the world’s powers were left with culture shock by the speed of the advancement of early 20th century technology. Roth’s thesis is that the Empire has been anachronistic for a while. The book starts with the 1859 Battle of Solferino; where 300,000 soldiers under the personal command of their respective Emperors (for the last time in history) had the sort of grand Mitteleuropean clash that would have seemed far more appropriate in the time of those protagonists’ grandfathers (our protagonists’ grandfathers’ grandfathers — this is very much a book about grandfathers) than just four years before Gettysburg.

It’s pretty lazy and crass to compare the book to some of Tolstoy’s, but it will get someone who hasn’t read it into the right ballpark. The main differences from Tolstoy are that it’s much tighter with almost no digressions, that there is more sex (not that Tolstoy is entirely chaste, but Roth is far more direct), and that Roth does occasionally allow himself extraordinary bursts of cheesiness, particularly when it comes to rain and thunder which turn up with almost Hemmingway like ferociousness and sense of dramatic timing.

Anyway the reason I mention Tolstoy is that reading Radetzky March with Tolstoy in mind really brings home the anachronism. Radetzky March is set pretty much 50 years after Anna Karenina, 100 after War and Peace, and in a far more technologically advanced country. But the politics, the culture and the attitude in Radetzky March seem if anything to lag behind those of the societies Tolstoy describes, which makes the moments where twentieth century technologies, aesthetics, and possibilities burst through all the more jarring.

And of course hanging over all of this, Roth’s biggest joke of them all, is the fact that no one, absolutely no one, not even the Emperor himself or any of his most fanatical devotees, thinks any of this is remotely sustainable. They all know they’re doomed and yet have resolved that all they can really do is sulk their way along to their doom. In fact, a smarter person who had read the book more attentively could probably make a compelling case for it as a found allegory for climate change.

Good book.