Bury the Old World Order
The great Austrian novelist Joseph Roth died a few months before the Hitlerian cataclysm that he foresaw. At his end, in 1939, Roth was living in exile in Paris, penniless and alcoholic, broken by the extinguishment of the mitteleuropa of his childhood. Roth had been born in 1894 in a place called Brody, a small town in what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire but is now Ukraine. Today, this little town of Roth’s childhood is under threat once more.
Roth is best-known for his novel The Radetzky March, chronicling the end of the Habsburg empire—a tragedy as far as he was concerned. But The Bust, another of his melancholy works, feels more prophetic today, as the Russian army across Ukraine.In this novella,Roth takes the reader to the land of his childhood, before it was washed away in the swells of European nationalism, war, and savagery.
