The Grace of Misery : Joseph Roth and the politics of exile, 1919–1939

The book confronts the life and intellectual heritage of the Galician-Jewish exiled journalist and writer Joseph Roth (1894–1939). Through the quandaries that occupied his mature writings—nostalgia, suffering, European culture, Judaism, exile, self-narration—the book analyses the greater Central European literary culture of the interwar European years through the lens of modern displacement and Jewish identity. Moving between his journalism, novels and correspondence, Lazaroms follows Roth's life as it rapidly disintegrated alongside radicalized politics, exile, the rise of Nazism, and Europe’s descent into another world war. Despite these tragedies, which forced him into homelessness, Roth confronted his predicament with an ever-growing political intensity. The Grace of Misery is an intellectual portrait of a profoundly modern writer whose works have gained a renewed readership in the last decade.Life on the Tip of a Pen: Preface Chapter 1 - Mental Captivity. Re-imagining a Lost Heritage Chapter 2 - Opening up the Crypt. The Political Potential of Nostalgia Chapter 3 - The Lamentations of an “Old Jew.” The Artist as Exemplary Sufferer Chapter 4 - The Double Bind of Self-Narration. Jewish Identity and the Undercurrents of German-Jewish Modernity Chapter 5 - Prophecies of Unrest. Interwar Europe under an Apocalyptic Lens PostscriptPublished version of EUI PhD thesis, 201

Against the Great : Joseph Roth (1894-1939) and the dilemma of Jewish anchorage

Defence date: 1 October 2010Examining Board: Prof. Martin van Gelderen, Supervisor, European University Institute; Prof. Antony Molho, European University Institute; Prof. Sander L. Gilman, Emory University; Prof. Raphael Gross, Frankfurt am Main / Leo Baeck Institute London.First made available 24 July 2017Joseph Roth possessed a sharply observant eye which allowed him to clearly read the signs of his times – those divided years of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe – a quality that has earned him the dubious epitaph “prophet”; a drunken prophet, as Europe’s demise into another world war went hand in hand with his own physical decline through alcoholism. Roth, his black coat draped around his shoulders, newspaper under his arm, cigarette and drink in hand while slowly moving from one hotel to another, was a border crosser, a train traveller, an observer and a hotel patriot.2 He was a literary exile who chose an itinerant existence; a highly prolific journalist and novelist who entertained friends and acquaintances at his café table in Paris and who drank himself to death at the early age of 44. Often noted for his cosmopolitan flair, Roth received extraordinarily high book advances but spent most of his time in a perpetual financial worry; a man who, in line with his skilled journalistic eye for detail, had a great passion for the miniature universe of watches and clocks, a predilection mirrored in his miniscule and delicate handwriting