On the End of the World

Joseph Roth, Will Stone

• Publisher: Pushkin Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781782274766
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782274902
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Dissertations littéraires

A powerful collection written on the eve of the destruction of Europe by the Second World War, by the great Joseph Roth In January 1933, on the very day Hitler seized power in Germany, Joseph Roth fled to Paris. There, in what he called the 'hour before the end of the world', he wrote a series of articles. The end he foresaw would soon come to pass in the full horror of Hitler's barbarism, the Second World War and most crucially for Roth, the final irreversible destruction of a pan-European consciousness. Incisive and ironic, the writing evokes Roth's bitterness, frustration and morbid despair at the coming annihilation of the free world while displaying his great nostalgia for the Habsburg Empire into which he was born and his ingrained fear of nationalism in any form. Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was an Austrian novelist best known for his family saga The Radetzky March and for his novel of Jewish life, Job. He fought in the Austrian army in the First World War, and worked as a novelist and journalist in Frankfurt, becoming a leading Jewish intellectual of the era. With the rise of Nazism, he lived the rest of his life in exile.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• The Dream of a Carnival Night
• Exchange of Children
• The Death of German Literature
• The Third Reich – Agency of Hell on Earth
• National Pyromania
• God in Germany
• In Lieu of an Article
• Pitiless Combat
• Europe is Only Possible Without the Third Reich
• The Myth of the German Soul
• Requiem Mass
• Orator of Apocalypse
• Letter to a Governor
• The Vienna Prater
• The Inexpressible
• The Muzzling of German Writers
• Rest While Viewing the Demolition
• When Heroes Tremble
• In the Bistro after Midnight
• Proof of Ancestry in the Isolation Cell
• Exhibition
• A Truly Free City
• Our Homeland, Our Epoch
• The Fall of Austria
• The Execution of Austria
• From the Black And Yellow Journal 12–13th March 1939
• Joseph Roth in Paris – A Seasonal Chronology (1933–39)
• Notes
• Biographical notes
• About the Author
• About the Publisher
• Copyright