On the End of the World

Description

'What seething activity in this world, an hour before its end! The ministers, Europe's racing waiters, run from one lost position to another and fresh misfortune flourishes in the ruins!' Having fled to Paris in 1933, following Hitler's rise to power in Germany, Joseph Roth wrote a series of articles in that 'hour before the end of the world', that he foresaw was to come and which would culminate in the Second World War. This collection of Roth's haunting journalistic essays has never before been translated into English and forms the latest installment in Hesperus' bestselling On series. Incisive and ironic, the writing evokes Roth's bitterness and despair at the coming annihilation of the free world while displaying his great nostalgia for the Hapsburg Empire into which he was born and his ingrained fear of nationalism in any form. Detailing the duplicities and criminalities of the Nazi regime, Roth denounced the terror sewn by Nazi storm troopers, the propaganda of Goebbels, the round ups, the assassinations and the construction of concentration camps, alongside the seeming blindness of the rest of Europe, which appeared paralysed in the face of Nazi expansion. Following the Anchluss in 1938, Roth, isolated in Paris, sunk into morbid alcoholism which led to his death the following year. Within twelve months the Germans had overrun Paris.

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was an Austrian novelist best known for his family saga "Radetzky March" and for his novel of Jewish life, "Job." He fought in the Austrian army in World War I, and worked as a novelist and journalist in Frankfurt, becoming a leading Jewish intellectual of the era. With the rise of Nazism, he lived the rest of his life in exile. Will Stone is an award-winning poet and the translator of Stefan Zweig's "Journeys."