September 8, 2010
The Radetzky March
“He saw people shuffling by with deranged faces and gruesomely contorted limbs, but for the district captain madness held little terror, even though this was his first visit to an insane asylum. Only death was terrible. Too bad! thought Herr von Trotta. If Carl Joseph had gone crazy instead of dying in action, I would have brought him back to his senses. And if I hadn’t succeeded, then I would have come to see him every day! Perhaps he would have contorted his arm as horribly as this lieutenant here that they’re walking past me. But it would have been only his arm, and you can caress a contorted arm. You can also look into twisted eyes! So long as they’re my son’s eyes. Happy the fathers whose sons are crazy!”
— Joseph Roth (translated by Joachim Neugroschel; Overlook Press, p. 325)
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I will have to read this at last. So often I have read Roth’s name in tandem with that of Bruno Schulz, whom I greatly admire. No idea whether the linkages are circumstantial or something more.
I used to play in a mounted band (on horseback) every summer for the Milwaukee Circus Parade and we always played the Radetzky March. Fun times.
Jozef Roth (not to be confused with Philip Roth, who based a story on Schulz but was ignorant of the region’s history, see his interview with Singer) was a Galician (south-east Poland while under Austrian control) and a true writer. A Polish-Jew like Bruno Schulz (1892-1942) who escaped to Paris. See Muse & Messiah: The Life, Imagination and Legacy of Bruno Schulz by Brian R. Banks (Inkermen Press 2006) for the first international study of the region’s writers and artists. Schulz corresponded with Roth, who tried to get his stories translated but failed in the late 1930s.