Radetzky March

Joseph Roth, Austrian-Jewish novelist, was born in 1894 near Lemberg in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, now in Ukraine. He studied at Vienna University and in the years following World War I worked in Vienna, Berlin and Munich as a journalist, mostly for left-wing publications, which involved him in extensive European travel. He also began to write novels. For most of his life he had no fixed abode, preferring hotel rooms and writing at café tables. In 1932 his masterpiece, The Radetzky March, was published. In 1933 when Hitler came to power his position became dangerous and he moved to Paris; his books were amongst those burnt by the Nazis that year. He continued to travel and to write, but began to suffer poor health – partly as a result of alcoholism. He died prematurely in 1939.

Joachim Neugroschel has won three PEN translation awards and the French-American translation prize. He has also translated Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, both for Penguin Classics. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.