Endless Flight:
The Life of Joseph Roth
by Keiron Pim
Granta £25


In 1936 Joseph Roth, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, wrote of himself in a letter, “Humiliated, disgraced, indebted, smiling, smiling through gritted teeth... a man who’s half madman, half corpse.”

He was in a terrible state: an alcoholic, a refugee, in poor health, married to a chronic schizophrenic, struggling to make a living. He had only a few years to live. In 1939, he died, still only 44. But he had written more than a dozen novels, many short stories and thousands of articles that established him as one of the pre-eminent chroniclers of the interwar years.

In the past 20 years there has been a huge revival of interest in Roth’s life and work, largely thanks to Michael Hofmann, who has translated many of Roth’s novels as well as his letters; and Dennis Marks, author of a fascinating study, Wandering Jew: The Search for Joseph Roth.

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Keiron Pim's book

Now we have a new biography, Endless Flight, by Keiron Pim, published by Granta, which has done so much to champion Roth’s writing.

Pim’s title is revealing. Roth spent much of his life on the move. Born in Brody in the east of Galicia in 1894, 54 miles from Lviv (now in Ukraine), he never met his father, Nachum, and was brought up by his mother, Maria. Much of his best writing is set in similar small towns on the borders of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

If his friend Stefan Zweig writes about the Austrian empire from the centre, Vienna, Roth always give us the view from the periphery, where, as Pim writes, “the Viennese sun never sets”. In his masterpiece, The Radetzky March, Roth describes how Carl Joseph takes the train to “the most easterly station in the Austrian monarchy”.

In 1913, Roth moved to Vienna. From then on, he kept on the move, from Vienna to Berlin, then his beloved Paris, with brief stays in Moscow, Amsterdam and Ostend.
“Everything I own,” he wrote to Stefan Zweig, “fits into three suitcases.” He is never at home anywhere. Increasingly, he lived in hotels. “Where do I belong?” he asks. The answer is nowhere.

He was “a double outsider”, writes Pim, part east European Jew, part Austrian man of letters, friend of Walter Benjamin, Stefan Zweig and Ernst Toller.
Perhaps that’s why he was always drawn to the world of Jews, soldiers, smugglers and refugees, people on the move, without a home.

Pim is particularly good on Roth’s Jewishness, his fascination with the east European Jews of his childhood, the antisemitism in wartime Galicia, in early 20th-century Vienna and, of course, in Nazi Germany. As with everything in Roth the issue is complicated. He was Jewish but also prone to antisemitic outbursts.

In the 1920s and 30s Roth came into his own as a writer. One of the best chapters in Endless Flight is about The Radetzky March, perhaps because its subject, the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was so important to him.

Decline is at the heart of Pim’s biography. The decline of Austria, of liberal Europe but, above all, his own terrible decline.Roth’s life was increasingly a battle against debt, alcoholism and illness. Belligerent, paranoid and profligate, Roth became completely impossible.

His wife, Friedl, went mad, spent years in and out of institutions, a serious drain on Roth’s resources, and was later killed by the Nazis, a victim of their euthanasia campaign.

The last chapters make desperate reading as Roth flees the Nazis. Drink finally killed him. He died in a Paris hospital, strapped to a hospital bed so he couldn’t escape. It’s a dark story, movingly told.