The Radetzky March

How the Habsburg Empire met its end, bouncing along to a jaunty beat

This is not a book I would have picked up if it hadn’t been strongly recommended by a friend whose judgment I trust. Written in 1932 by Joseph Roth, it tells the tale of the rise and fall over three generations of the military Trotta family, from 1860 to 1914. But this of course also makes it the story of the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire - once the second largest country in Europe at 240 thousand square miles, and the third most populous.

It was presided over by the once great Emperor Franz Joseph, but was now spinning irrevocably towards the Great War which would lead to its disintegration. In his work on the Habsburg Monarchy, the great historian AJP Taylor wrote ‘No other family has endured so long or left so deep a mark upon Europe: the Hapsburgs were the greatest dynasty of modern history, and the history of central Europe revolves around them, not they around it.’ But Franz Joseph was aware that he belonged to a past century, and said to Theodore Roosevelt ‘You see in me the last monarch of the old school.’

Franz Joseph I

The reasons that the Empire could not survive are all embedded within this tale of the Trotta family - the jealousies and incompatibilities of the constituent nationalities, the rise of the socialists and trade unionists, the complete stagnation and dysfunction of the bureaucracy and the Imperial Court it was designed to preserve, and the ludicrous code of honour and behaviour that was crippling the Army. The plot is driven by these outdated rules of conduct, making some of the dilemmas which face the principal players as incomprehensible to modern eyes as any novel of Victorian courtship and morality. On the outer edges of the Empire, the military and the bureaucrats struggle with boredom, have affairs, fight duels, gamble and drink. There are no heroes. They are easy targets for exploitation by unscrupulous men and tempting women who offer an escape from apathy.

In those days, there were a lot of men like Kapturak on the borders of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. They began to circle around the old empire like those black cowardly birds that ogle a dying man from infinitely far away. Dark and impatient, beating their wings, they wait for his end. Their slanting beaks jab into their prey. No one knows where they came from or where they fly off to. They are the feathered brethren of enigmatic Death, they are his harbingers, his escorts and his successors.

The language even in translation is beautiful, and the overwhelming sensation that one is being dragged along towards inevitable disaster is skilfully created. And why ‘The Radetzky March’? If you play the sample I’ve imported below, you will instantly recognise it. Yes, it is the tune by Strauss that the military band of Trotta’s regiment plays to amuse the townsfolk every Sunday. But surely its jaunty beat also represents the complete obliviousness of the Austrian people to the disaster heading their way.

Joseph Roth was a journalist, born in Galicia, now part of Ukraine, to a Jewish family. He fought in the First World War, and died in Paris in 1939, suffering the painful and humiliating death of an alcoholic. The Radetzky March is seen as his masterpiece.

A recent biography suggests that he was a deeply unpleasant individual. Philip Hensher wrote in a recent review in The Spectator:

Nowadays people seem to want their novels to be written by nice, or at any rate personally admirable, authors. They should read this biography, and then The Radetzky March, to see just how great a book a frighteningly unpleasant person could produce.

The men of the Trotta family are, to my mind, also weak and unattractive, they find it hard to be honest with each other, and they have only the most cursory relationships with women, none of whom have any voice or real character in the book. Father and son trade constantly on past glories, or to be accurate, just on one past glory, which turns out to have been a lot less heroic or glorious than the stories which had been created about it. All contributions to the myth of Empire were gratefully received and cultivated by the Court of the Emperor. I don’t want to tell you the plot, in my view the least interesting thing about the novel, but I do want to encourage you to try The Radetzky March, to appreciate the use of language, the dreamlike quality of pre-War Austria that Roth invokes, and the powerful images of the approaching catastrophe.