The Radetzky March

At the Battle of Solferino in 1859, a Slovene infantryman saved the Emperor Franz Joseph's life by knocking him to the ground before he was shot. He was ennobled for this - became the Baron von Trotta, had his portrait painted, hung it in his house. Then he discovered that the school textbooks had transformed his act into a legend: a cavalry officer, a more heroic gesture, the story the empire required rather than the thing that had occurred. He petitioned the Emperor to correct the record. The Emperor declined. The Hero of Solferino withdrew from public life and never spoke of it again.

His son became a district captain - civil servant, not soldier, as the father had required. His grandson became a cavalry officer and then an infantry officer on the eastern frontier of the empire, where the Poles and Ukrainians and Jews and Germans lived in the specific proximity of a world organized around an imperial principle rather than a national one - and where everything was, by the time Carl Joseph von Trotta arrived to serve in it, already ending.

Joseph Roth serialized The Radetzky March in the spring and summer of 1932, as the Weimar Republic was collapsing and Hitler's rise to power was weeks away. He was writing an elegy for the Habsburg Empire - not the empire of operetta and waltzes but the specific political and cultural organization built on the principle that multiple nations and languages and religions could coexist within a single sovereign structure organized around an idea rather than an ethnicity - from the vantage point of a Europe demonstrating, with daily clarity, what the loss of that principle had cost. His readers understood what they were reading.

The Radetzky March - Strauss the Elder's march of 1848, the sound of the empire at its most ceremonial - moves through the novel at intervals, each occurrence carrying a slightly different weight, until it becomes the sound of everything ending: the ceremony maintained, the march still played, the substance already gone.

The Emperor ages. Carl Joseph loses his friends one by one and then loses everything else. The portrait of the Hero of Solferino - the painting of the man who had asked for the truth and been given the legend instead - hangs in every room his descendants inhabit.

One of the great novels of the twentieth century - the fullest and most honest elegy for a world whose loss made the worst of what followed possible.