Reconstructing a self-destructive life

Richard Bratby is a classical music writer, critic and historian

Richard Bratby

JOSEPH ROTH LIVED HIS LIFE on the peripheries and between the gaps of European civilisation. He was born in Brody, now in Ukraine but then a shtetl at the easternmost edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He yearned to escape west to Vienna, where he arrived just in time for the outbreak of the Great War, and encountered prejudice and frustration. After the defeat and dismemberment of the multinational Habsburg monarchy he never really settled anywhere that could be called a home. “I shit on furniture. I hate houses,” he declared. Instead, he became what he called a “hotel patriot”, forever ready to check out and move on as political and professional borders closed in on him. In Vienna, Berlin, Marseilles, Amsterdam and above all Paris, he measured out his life in brandy…

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The Critic (Digital) - 1 Issue, November 2022

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