According to Marshall Berman, the twentieth century may be conceived of as ‘the third and final phase’ in the development of the condition we think of as ‘modernity’. Though he allows that this ‘developing world culture of modernism achieves spectacular triumphs in art and thought’, there is a price to be paid.¹ Culture and identity, for so long invariable from the cradle to the grave, are no longer certainties in the age of urban expansion, migration, industrialization, and total war. Berman writes:

as the modern public expands, it shatters into a multitude of fragments, speaking incommensurable private languages; the idea...

Noah Isenberg has suggested that Modernism, as theorized and practised in Germany between the First World War and the National Socialists’ rise to power in 1933, ‘has much to do with redefining a sense of community (national, cultural, social, and racial) and, by extension, with forging a new identity’.¹ If we accept this, then nowhere is Joseph Roth’s ambivalent engagement with the complex of discourses shaping the Modernist project more evident than in the literary text which was the fruit of his first real experience of a non-Germanic culture. Die weißen Städte, the short book inspired by his travels in...

The last twenty or so years have seen increased interest in the problematic notion of ‘gender’. Though much of the theory in this field has been developed by feminists, concerned to deconstruct traditionally accepted definitions of femininity, their ideas are of equal relevance and equally applicable to masculinity. I have already suggested in the introduction that the ‘modern period’ in general, and the 1920s in particular, saw a crisis, produced by the effects of urbanization, industrialization, war, and societal and class change, in the construction of personal identities.

For over a century the citizens of Germany, and to some extent...

In almost all of Roth’s fictional texts the male protagonist at some point entertains the hope that he may find fulfilment in sexual and emotional union with a woman, and these hopes inevitably lead to disappointment. Male–female relations are seldom presented positively in Roth’s texts, as his colourful and somewhat patronizing dismissal of romantic love, in the letter to the 24-year-old Brentano, quoted above, might lead us to expect. His opinion of them was undoubtedly further coloured by the appalling experience of his own wife’s mental illness in the late 1920s. Feelings of resentment and betrayal surrounding this period,...

In 1921, as part of the expansion of Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse railway station, a design competition for architects was held. Their task was to produce a design for a skyscraper, a building form which was already well-established in American cities such as New York and Chicago, to provide Berlin with an ‘einprägsames Wahrzeichen’.² Joseph Roth, writing for the Neue Berliner Zeitung — 12-Uhr-Blatt and the Berliner Börsen-Courier, focuses twice, in 1921 and 1922, on the city’s growing (but ultimately fruitless) interest in this most technological and American of architectural styles. The articles express only admiration for ‘Wolkenkratzer’; he approves of them not...

The discussion of Roth’s understanding of technology and modernity in the modern city finds a natural concomitant in an area which has already been anticipated on a number of occasions. The discourses surrounding the cinema, as a physical space, a new medium, a new art form, a new technology, and a new industry, should be viewed, in many ways, as a strand within the debates concerning America, industry, and technology generally. However, as a theme which, in his writing in the 1920s, was a major preoccupation for Roth, which in many ways may be viewed as an intersection for many...

The end of the 1920s also marks the end of Roth’s sustained interest in contemporary society. His journalistic output decreases markedly, and his fiction begins to explore the realm which was to define his reputation: Austria’s imperial past. The change of direction was not, of course, random; it coincided with his wife’s descent into dementia, the great depression, his worsening alcoholism, and the National Socialists’ gradual rise to power. Of course, there was no neat caesura or Wendepunkt, a moment in which Roth ceased to be the writer I have been concerned with in the bulk of this study. Yet...