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Joseph Roth unterwegs in Europa ed. by Artur Pełka and Christian Poik

2022; Austrian Studies Association; Volume: 55; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/oas.2022.0055

2327-1809

Rares Piloiu,

Reviewed by: Joseph Roth unterwegs in Europa ed. by Artur Pełka and Christian Poik Rares Piloiu Artur Pełka and Christian Poik, eds., Joseph Roth unterwegs in Europa. Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2021. 171 pp. Joseph Roth is still a household name in modern German and Austrian Studies in part because so much of what he wrote lends itself very well to the debates around nationhood, religion, modernity, and identity in the twenty-first century. The recurring presence of his name in a multitude of studies devoted to migration, mobility, postcolonialism, exile, political identity, otherness, etc. in the last five years alone bears testimony to this fact. It is therefore understandable that Artur Pełka and Christian Poik frame their edited volume Joseph Roth unterwegs in Europa around the theme of movement. The articles themselves, however, are thematically heterogenous and only partially reflect the purported main theme. Heinz Lunzer addresses the need for a new, annotated, and updated edition of Roth’s works, one structured along chronological lines and not by genre. This edition would incorporate organically the princeps and subsequent editions of his works, as well as the manuscripts, annotations, editorial comments, author’s own notes, critical-historical notes, and so forth. The purpose is to both correct the textual errors that occurred at the publication of the texts and to offer the reader a better sense of the historical Roth, not a modernized, updated one. The International Joseph Roth Society in Vienna’s anniversary booklets of 2018 and 2019 offer an example of this approach. Similarly, Armin Eidherr supports a new edition of Roth’s works, emphasizing the importance of Roth’s Jewish background and his constant dialogue with the Yiddish and Judaic traditions. It is, however, questionable whether a new edition that highlights Roth’s Yiddish and Hebrew intertextuality would be justified, since Judaism and the Jewish identity played a role for Roth mostly as fictional loci in a dialogue with a primarily Western, non-Jewish readership. [End Page 134] Roth’s own biography demonstrates that, as an assimilated German-speaking Jew with cosmopolitan aspirations, his own familiarity with the world of the shtetl and Judaism was fairly limited. Iris Hermann and Aneta Jachimowicz offer a comparative interpretation of Roth’s novels Job and The Hundred Days. For Hermann, the tragedy of the Eastern European Jewish migration in the twentieth century, which Roth depicts in Job and Wandering Jews, strikes similar notes to the one present in Jenny Erpenbeck’s Aller Tage Abend. Jachimowicz considers the similarities and differences between The Hundred Days and the identically titled play co-written by none other than the Italian “duce,” Benito Mussolini. The author argues that while Roth’s novel hovers between conservative-Catholic ideas about humility and power and the modern preoccupations with subjectivity, time, and mass psychology, Mussolini’s play offers a justification for the “strongman” theory of charismatic leadership. Hans Richard Brittnacher’s article takes a point of departure in Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Storyteller.” Brittnacher looks at three narrative genres that Roth favored in his later career—confession, tale, and legend—with examples from The Confession of a Murderer, The Tale of the 1002nd Night, and “The Legend of the Holy Drinker” and concludes that they are not what they pretend to be. The confession is lacking in contrition, the tale has no happy ending, and the legend fails to entrench an exemplary story. Hence, Brittnacher argues that Roth’s late narratives fail the storytelling test: they offer no meaningful experience, no existential fulfillment, but live on as empty forms, as ghosts of a bygone age in a modern era of meaningless ruin. Although Brittnacher’s argument is solid, there also exists a possibility that Roth deceived the reader’s expectations intentionally, in the tradition of the Hasidic tales and legends. As Martin Buber points out, the Hasidic tales assert the possibility of redemption “from the midst of uncleanness,” through the purification not of the world but of the soul. Rainer-Joachim Siegel makes an interesting argument about Roth’s complex relationship with film, based on newly discovered documents that reveal that although Roth notoriously associated film, especially Hollywood-style commercial films, with the...