Joseph Roth

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the great writers on Central Europe after the first world war and on the dying of the old orders with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. As a German speaking Jew from Brody in the north-eastern edge of that Empire, which was then in Galicia, next in Poland and is now in Ukraine, Roth (1894 - 1939) was to spend his short life moving first to Lviv then to Vienna and finally to Paris via Berlin without ever finding a settled home. Roth explored the loss of homeland and anticipated the dangers of the new nationalism through his journalism and in his novels including Radetzky March, Job, Rebellion and Flight Without End, and his books were among the first the Nazis burned. With Helen Chambers Emeritus Professor of German at the University of St Andrews Deborah Holmes Associate Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Salzburg And Jon Hughes Reader in German and Cultural Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London Producer: Simon Tillotson Reading list: Jon Hughes, Facing Modernity: Fragmentation, Culture and Identity in Joseph Roth's Writing in the 1920s (MHRA, 2006) Heinz Lunzer and Victoria Lunzer-Talos, Joseph Roth: Leben und Werk in Bildern (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994) Keiron Pim, Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth (Granta, 2022) Joseph Roth (trans. Deborah Holmes, ed. Helen Constantine), Vienna Tales (Oxford University Press, 2014) Joseph Roth (trans. and ed. Michael Hofmann), A Life in Letters (Granta, 2012) Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), Collected Shorter Fiction (Granta, 2001) Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), Rebellion (Granta, 2000) Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Radetzky March (Granta, 2022) Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Legend of the Holy Drinker (Granta, 2022) Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Wandering Jews (Granta, 2001) Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933 (Granta, 2022) Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Hotel Years: Wanderings in Europe Between the Wars (Granta, 2015) Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), Reports from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France 1925-1939 (Granta, 2004) Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Emperor’s Tomb (Granta, 2013) Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The String of Pearls (Granta, 1999) Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The White Cities: Reports From France 1925-1939 (Granta, 2013) Joseph Roth (trans. David Le Vay), Weights and Measures (Pushkin Press, 2024) Joseph Roth (trans. Daved Le Vay and Beatrice Musgrave), Flight Without End (Pushkin Press, 2024) Joseph Roth (trans. Ruth Martin), The Coral Merchant: Essential Stories (Pushkin Press, 2020) Joseph Roth (trans Will Stone), On the End of the World (Pushkin Press, 2019) Joseph Roth (trans. Dorothy Thompson), Job: The Story of a Simple Man (Granta, 2022) Wilhelm Von Sternburg, Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009) In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

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  This is In Our Time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find in the In Our Time archive. A reading list for this edition can be found in the episode description wherever you're listening. I hope you enjoy the programme.

• 1:59Speaker 05

  Hallo. Josef Roth (1894-1939) war einer der großen Schriftsteller für den Tod des alten Ordners in Südeuropa nach der Erde des Ersten Weltkrieges, den Verlust der Heimatstadt und den Horror von dem, was kommt. Die meisten Englischsprachigen nennen ihn Josef Roth. In seinem Journalismus und in Arbeiten wie "Radetzky March", "Job", "Rebellion" und "Flight Without End" untersuchte Roth den Auswirkungen des Austro-Hungarischen Empires auf die Welt um ihn herum. Und als deutschsprachiger Juden aus dem nordostenen Ende dieses Empires, dessen Bücher die Nazis brüllten, musste Roth seine Leben westwärts verbringen, ohne je ein Zuhause zu finden.

• 2:44Speaker 05

  Mit mir, um Josef Roth oder Roth zu diskutieren, sind Helen Chambers, ehemalige Professor Deutschlands an der Universität St. Andrews, Deborah Holmes, Anwalt der modernen deutschen Literatur an der Universität Salzburg, und John Hughes, Leser in Deutsch- und Kulturstudien an der Royal Holloway University of London. Und John, es ist zu dir, ich möchte zuerst kommen. Kannst du uns ein bisschen über die Kindheit von Roth in Brody, dann im Austro-Hungarischen Empire, natürlich, aber es ist jetzt auf der selben Grenze zu der Ukraine?

• 3:17Speaker 06

  Ja, genau. Also, ich meine, viele Zuhörer, wenn sie überhaupt Roth kennen, werden ihm wahrscheinlich als Austro-Wirtschaftsberater denken, aber seine Ursprungs stammen weit von Österreich, wie wir es heute kennen. Er wurde in Brody geboren, das war an seiner Geburt in Galicia, die größte, die größte Provinz in Österreich-Hungary, dem Habsburg Empire. Galicia, wie du es erwähnt hast, besitzt eine sehr große Region, die jetzt in Südwestpolen und im Westen der Ukraine liegt. Und wenn du dir Brody auf dem Karteikarten anschaust, findest du, es ist dort, im Westen der Ukraine, vielleicht 100 Kilometer östlich von Lviv oder Lemberg, wie es in Deutschlands in der Zeit von Roth bekannt war.

• 4:01Speaker 06

  Aber im Jahr seiner Geburt, 1894, war Brody sehr viel eine Grenzstadt. Es war direkt auf der Grenze zu dem... Austro-Hungarian Empire, close to the border with Russia. And because of that, it had flourished as a sort of trading centre for the previous century or so. And, you know, perhaps as a consequence of that, it was quite a mixed community, multi-ethnic, multilingual, multicultural. Roth himself was born to a German-speaking Jewish family and so grew up speaking one of the languages of empire, high German. But he would have been very familiar with the sound of Polish, Yiddish, Ukrainian, Russian also during his childhood.

• 4:44Speaker 06

  And I think he also had a working knowledge of all of those languages. Despite that, I think Roth had felt that Brody was quite a provincial place. He spent his childhood often wishing he could get away, even though later in life it became so important to him and in his work. He was brought up by a single mother, who by all accounts was quite protective, overprotective even. He never knew his father, who had abandoned the family when Roth was quite young. In later life, Roth tended to fabricate fantastical stories about this absent father. He often sort of claimed, for example, that the father had been some sort of high-ranking military officer.

• 5:23Speaker 06

  But in truth, he was a Jewish businessman, a failed businessman really, who later became mentally ill and was institutionalised. And Roth, you know, never really came to terms with that. It was not a detail which he confided really to anyone in his lifetime. At any rate, he did get away from Brody eventually. He studied first in Lviv and then transferred to Vienna before his studies were interrupted by the First World War, the outbreak of war.

• 5:50Speaker 05

  And he was a very intelligent young boy. He did well at school, right?

• 5:55Speaker 06

  Yes, he attended the gymnasium, so the sort of grammar school in Brody, excelled really academically, although by all accounts was something of a loner. From an early age, enjoyed literature, German literature in particular. This was at the tail end of when German was one of the teaching languages actually in Brody. And shortly after he completed his secondary education, I think the language of instruction switched. Almost entirely to Polish. So it was a change, it was changing really during his lifetime.

• 6:22Speaker 05

  So he moves to Vienna, the imperial capital, on the very eve of the of the First World War. With the defeat of the Central Powers in in nineteen eighteen, the empire collapses too. How abrupt were the changes which he experienced after nineteen eighteen?

• 6:43Speaker 06

  He'd served in the war, although not not in on the front line. We don't think he served in frontline combat, although he, again, it's something, he he claimed various things to the contrary later in life. So he finished the war, demobbed really from from the army, returning to Vienna. Brody, his hometown from nineteen nineteen, became part of the new Polish Republic. And so really was not really recognisable as the place in which he'd grown up and which with which he had identified. German was no longer one of the languages spoken there, not a recognised one. For a time, I think then he he was ready to embrace the post-war world. He was quite open to the opportunities that might be offered by the the new democracies that were emerging.

• 7:26Speaker 06

  But that gradually started to change during the course of the next decade or so.

• 7:32Speaker 05

  Well, let me follow on with Helen Chambers. Helen, he stays in Vienna and starts work as a journalist. What were the opportunities there like? Because there must have been some stiff competition. I mean, the Austrian capital boasted a rich array of novelists and commentators at the time.

• 7:51Speaker 07

  Yes, it's quite hard to know how he got into it, except that there are reports from editors in the offices that he turned up at. And they report that this young man appeared very skinny in a ragged military shirt, very proud and handed over his short texts, which were then received and indeed published. And he had a quite remarkable output and success. And in that first year nineteen nineteen, when he'd filled in his registration card with occupation journalist, which he wasn't really, he then published a hundred and seventy eight articles in nineteen nineteen as a twenty four year old.

• 8:34Speaker 07

  And already in these articles, and you ask me why and how he succeeded.

• 8:40Speaker 07

  Perhaps sheer bloody mindedness, but also the quality of his work is absolutely clear from the outset. I mean, not every article is a gem, but very many of them do all the things that he was later to do in his novels.

• 8:55Speaker 05

  And one of the things that characterises that journalism is he has an eye for the underdog, details that at first glance appear insignificant, but actually perhaps something that really matters.

• 9:09Speaker 07

  Yes, I mean, he was very concerned with injustice, with the underdog, with the veterans coming back with nowhere to go, unemployed, no income. And he watched them and he saw them. And he went to military hospital and he saw people whose faces had been shot away, jaws shot away, and they weren't allowed to look in the mirror. And they weren't allowed to see plaster casts of themselves, although these existed. And Roth wrote a really hard hitting piece saying, they should show these photographs before the newsreels, they should put them on the advertising pillars. And people wouldn't

• 9:51Speaker 07

  fight wars again was, I mean, he didn't say explicitly, people wouldn't fight wars again, but that was very much what he, you know, he could see that these people were suffering dreadful injustice.

• 10:02Speaker 05

  Deborah Holmes, let me ask you about Roth as a feuilleton writer. So can you explain what a feuilleton is, very important in Austrian and German culture, and why they were so important? Certainly, yes. I mean, I think one of the reasons why Yorozef Roth, even at this very, very dynamic period in cultural history, was able to be such an immediate success, I think it's fair to say, is that we're in, despite the end of the war and shortage of paper and a shortage of healthy manpower, we're still in a period that's a golden age of print media.

• 10:39Speaker 07

  And the daily papers, there were, you know, scores of daily papers in each big city, each big German-speaking city. And they had two and three editions a day. I mean, that's, that's a lot of newspaper to fill. And the photon was both a part of the newspaper, it was the cultural arts section of the newspaper, but the word photon was also used to describe short texts that could be subjective, descriptive, narrative, question mark, they could be purely descriptive. But the photonist, so Roth thought of himself as a journalist, but as a photonist. They would churn them out day on day about anything and everything that they saw walking around the city. And the idea was, or the tradition was, is that the style could or should be subjective.

• 11:20Speaker 07

  And it was in the newspaper partly as a commentary on current affairs and on, on politics and, and business and other daily news. But also as a part of the newspaper that would outlive current affairs. So the, the original photon was published under a thick black line on the bottom third of the page. And the idea was that you cut off that bit of the page and kept it. Because although this writing was subjective and personal, it was going to be what, what outlived the daily news, these, these little perceptions and descriptions of daily life.

• 11:50Speaker 05

  Sounds a bit like in our time. He before long started experimenting with novels as, as well. And one of the early ones is called Rebellion, and it encapsulates quite a lot of Roth's outlook on life. Can you tell us about that?

• 12:07Speaker 07

  Certainly, yeah. It's, it's a fabulous novel. It's of his earlier novels. So we're talking nineteen twenty four. In nineteen twenty three, twenty four, he actually wrote and published three novels, which is also quite a considerable feat. When you consider that he's, as I, you know, as we've said, he's churning out journalism the whole time as well. So Rebellion, Rebellion is actually based on a, on a true story. It was based on a court case from nineteen twenty three that Karl Krauss, a famous Viennese satirist and commentator, talks about in his one-man periodical Defacue, so The Torch, which saw itself as a sort of antidote to the daily press. And Roth takes up this story. It's about a veteran who returns from the front and he's lost a leg.

• 12:51Speaker 07

  But he feels totally content. He feels that the, the government must know what it's doing. He's going to get a prosthetic leg. He's going to get some way of supporting himself. It's all fine and he did his duty. And the story basically takes that mindset apart. And there's one disaster after another that happens to this poor man. So the story from the, the actual sort of true story that it's based on was of an invalid who gets back from the war and is given a licence to play a barrel organ on the street to earn money, and that's what happens in the novel as well. But then the barrel organ owner is confronted with someone who thinks that they are just pretending to be an invalid, that they are playing the system, and an argument ensues,

• 13:31Speaker 07

  and the police are involved, and the barrel organ licence gets taken away from the invalid. And that happens in the novel as well. And then he loses his wife, loses his family, loses his source of income, and by the end of the novel is left railing at, at God and at providence. And from the beginning of the novel, where he's quite happy to fit in with the, with the existing order, to the end of the novel where he's saying, I want to go to hell, I'm, you know, but the typical road, we have this sort of scene that seems to be taking place in the afterlife, but the last that we hear about, um, the war invalid is, he wasn't sure whether he was in heaven or hell. But the rebellion itself is the point of the novel, this realisation that actually maybe it wasn't enough to do your duty, or it wasn't, uh, the government's not, doesn't

• 14:16Speaker 07

  actually know what it's doing, you know, maybe the war was senseless.

• 14:20Speaker 05

  So, John, he has this experience of Vienna, of declined disappointment, decides fairly quickly to move to Berlin. What is it about Berlin that attracts him?

• 14:30Speaker 06

  Well, I think he moves to Berlin in 1920, so, um, as you say, fairly quickly. Um, he's hugely productive in, in Vienna, but he moves to Berlin, I think primarily as a sort of economic migrant. He goes there because he thinks there'll be better opportunities for him and a, a better chance that he will establish himself as a writer there. And Berlin in this period is becoming something of a mecca or a cultural magnet, I think, for people from all around German-speaking Europe and beyond. It's growing very quickly. I think by the end of the twenties, there's more than four million people living in Berlin, which means it was bigger then than it is today. Um, it has an incredibly productive and thriving newspaper and public

• 15:12Speaker 06

  Industry even more so than was the case in Vienna. Dozens of daily newspapers in multiple editions, as Deborah said, as well as weekly magazines. So there are plenty of opportunities for Ford in a place like Berlin. Of course, there's also the arts scene there, theatre, music, cabaret, the emerging film industry in Weimar Germany as well. So there's a lot happening in Berlin, but it's also a place of extremes as well, political, cultural, social. And he's very sensitive to those extremes as well.

• 15:42Speaker 05

  And he gets, he gets good work. He starts working for the Frankfurt Zeitung, the forerunner of the Frankfurt Algemeiner Zeitung, which is as good as it gets at that time.

• 15:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, it was the Frankfurt Zeitung where he eventually becomes one of the key names, publishing regularly in the Foyton section. It was one of the prestige titles in the Weimar Republic, headquartered in Frankfurt am Main. But he, he was the sort of Berlin cultural correspondent for a time. And he was correspondingly well paid. He was a prominent figure by the middle of the nineteen twenties. So Berlin gives him the chance to establish himself first as a journalist and then building on that as a, as an author of fiction from nineteen twenty three.

• 16:24Speaker 05

  Thank you, John. So Helen Chambers, he's doing rather well in Berlin, but he's moving around a lot. Seems to be a bit of a restless soul. His writing is also quite unpredictable. It goes off in different directions. Is that right?

• 16:42Speaker 07

  Up to a point. I mean, he was, just to perhaps go on from what John was saying, he was at one time the best paid journalist on the Frankfurt Zeitung. And he wrote his articles exactly the same size as the column inches on the paper. And he earned a mark, a line. So he, he was earning a lot of money, but he said that Berlin was like waiting room in a big station. And he was, he was.

• 17:08Speaker 05

  What did he mean by that?

• 17:09Speaker 07

  Well, he meant he was wait, he didn't like Berlin very much. And well, I mean, it got worse and worse, of course, with the Nazi violence and with what was going on in the courts, which he saw very early on. But he, he said it was. Like this waiting room, it was a kind of no man's land. And I think he said, I'm trading in books and newspapers to get the money to get my ticket out of here. And you're quite right. I mean, he travelled a lot. He wanted to be the Paris correspondent for the Frankfurt Zeitung, but they gave it to another guy for reasons that we won't go into and wrote it a thing or two to say about that. But to kind of compensate for that, they sent him to Russia to report on Soviet Russia,

• 17:51Speaker 07

  on the new Russia for four months in nineteen twenty six. So he did travel a lot, but he also did other trips for Frankfurt Zeitung. And that was the kind of thing they published in the press. You know, I've travelled to Galicia or to the Ruhr-Gebiet or wherever it happened to be.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Ledge. How does music actually enter your mind?

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  I'm not sure why or how the music comes to me, but I think people who love music and write music, our brains are just filled with music. Like, we have listened to so much music. We've been a part of so much music. I think of the story that I want to tell, the mood that I want to create with the music, start playing chords, see where they lead me.

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  Sometimes I'm just not even thinking about music, right? And I hear this little thing and I go, oh, that could be this.

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  You know, you just have to be ready for when the inspiration hits.

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• 21:14Speaker 05

  Deborah, he is, in literary terms, a master of the poignant. Would you agree?

• 21:21Speaker 06

  Yes, although it's very difficult to pin down how he does it. It's quite often been said that he writes simply, but that's deceptively simple somehow. I mean, we've said that he, you know, he champions the underdog, he looks at the small details, everyday life. So it's partly that, but he's not afraid to combine small details with very big ideas. So he's looking for the universal, he's looking for, he can be quite, not exactly kitschy, but he can be quite sentimental. I'm thinking of a passage in Rebellion that we've just been talking about, where the main character, Andreas Pum, has to sell his donkey. And it's a very,

• 22:05Speaker 06

  very sad scene. And the donkey is described as having grey fur and a human soul. And that, you know, poignant, sentimental, bit of both. But in the context of the novel as a whole, it really works, or it works for me, anyway. So it's often, he's very good at children, on childlike figures. And he's also, I think, what makes it poignant to me is that he manages to make these figures convincing, you're invested in them, but they're not, they're not made into heroes in any way. And they don't become sort of unrealistically perceptive, or they remain ordinary people.

• 22:41Speaker 05

  No, I would say there's an absence of clear heroes in Roth's work. Which brings us on, John, to his major work, the one that he's best known for, Rodecky March, a fun farewell to life in the empire. What's he up to here?

• 23:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, Rodecky March, or The Rodecky March, as I think it's been translated into English, it's certainly his longest novel. It's the one which is most acclaimed and for which he's probably best remembered. It's the one which established him as the great chronicler of the end of empire. It's actually quite different to many of his previous novels, certainly the ones he published in the 1920s, many of which, with a partial exception of Rebellion, actually, have quite fragmentary, quite open endings. A good example would be Flight Without End from 1927, which includes with a protagonist feeling completely lost, alive, but not knowing what to do with his life. And we don't know what happens next.

• 23:42Speaker 06

  The Riedetschi march, by contrast, has a great, a real sense of finality in its conclusion. It concludes with the deaths of its main characters, but also with the end of the empire that has shaped them. And the two are sort of intertwined in the novel. So as you say, it's the moments in his career that he really firmly looks back and tries to take stock of what happened at the end of empire and why it mattered to him. So it's a generational novel in which the story of a single family somehow stands as a metaphor for the decline of the empire as a whole, under the leadership of the aging Kaiser Franz Joseph, who actually appears several times as a character in

• 24:23Speaker 06

  the novel. The story's focused on three male members of the von Trotter family. It begins with the, a grandfather figure who, as a young man, saves the life of the emperor at the Battle of Solferino, which took place in 1859, which makes him a sort of hero of the empire, but also elevates the family into the aristocracy. We meet his son, who is a sort of patrician bureaucrat, very, very conservative and controlling. And finally, his son Karl Joseph, who is the last in the line, if you like. And Karl Joseph is characterized as somehow sort of paralyzed by life, doesn't really know what to do with himself, or

• 25:06Speaker 06

  seems incapable often of making decisions for himself. He, in particular, he's intimidated by the idea of living up to the memory of that heroic grandfather. He grows up looking at the portrait of this grandfather, so literally having to try and live up to the image of the grandfather and failing to do that mainly. He becomes a career soldier, but seems wholly unsuitable for that role, unsuited for that role. And he seems also incapable of making any lasting relationships in his life. So there were some quite negative or almost morbid themes that run through, through the novel, which, and it also plays with the musical motif of the title, which is of course a reference to Johann Strauss senior's famous

• 25:48Speaker 06

  Victory March. But in the novel, it functions almost in ironic accompaniment to the terminal decline of the empire.

• 25:55Speaker 05

  So Helen Chambers, what do you ascribe the success of the novel? And do you see in it the work of Virginia's?

• 26:06Speaker 07

  Yes, I do. And I mean, I think it's got great humanity. It's it's also very funny despite what John has has said. I mean, it's it's morbid, but there is this conflict between officialdom and the army, which trains people to obey. And then these characters, and you usually, and this is part of of Roth's magic, really, you usually see the characters from their own perspective. So you know what they're thinking. And young Carol Joseph, the third one along, he's a sixteen year old who's seduced by the local sergeant's wife, the beautiful Frau Slama. And she unbuttons his uniform and he's sitting there thinking,

• 26:50Speaker 07

  don't think there's anything at the cadet school that told me what to do in this situation. So there are things like that happen. And the emperor is indeed in it. And he's he he well, he kind of misses the battles in a way because he's an old soldier. So he thinks I'll have some maneuvers out in the eastern borderlands. And he draws them all up. And he's sitting there on his horse. And everybody's gaping because there's a drip on the end of his nose. So Roth's showing you the frailty of this old man and that he doesn't know what's going on. And he's a human being. And that's part of, I think, Roth's great art, that he shows you human beings, he takes you close to their noses,

• 27:32Speaker 07

  their nostrils, their ears, their eyes, the back of their mouth. I mean, there's a great concrete precision about these things.

• 27:42Speaker 05

  And would you say that it's a nostalgic novel?

• 27:46Speaker 07

  Um, well, I mean, Roth himself said, I'm looking back, but not uncritically. So it's kind of nostalgic because he he misses this multinational land.

• 27:58Speaker 05

  Yes, you do get a sense. I mean, Austria-Hungary towards its end was often described as the prison of nations. And you get a sense that he's trying to modify that that view of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

• 28:11Speaker 07

  Well, he would like it not to have been thus, but he knew it was thus. And he does show the decadence of the frivolity and what the the terrible officers get up to. I mean, fiddling with as Rome burns, has got nothing on Joseph Road. So, yeah.

• 28:27Speaker 05

  John, you wanted to come in.

• 28:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, just briefly, I mean, on what, you know, what makes the novel great. The, what I enjoy really about it, despite those negative themes, it's the evocation of a lost world, really. It's there are those incredibly detailed descriptions of formal occasions, of the sort of rituals of empire and the military. We get descriptions of uniforms, parades, duels, formal dinners, drunken parties, but also a sense of place as well. So Vienna in its sort of imperial pomp. And also Brody as well. I mean, the second half of the novel is essentially set in a Galician border town that draws on all of those memories of Roth's childhood.

• 29:13Speaker 05

  Helen, what's extraordinary is his ability to write clear, clean copy. And I mean, for his novels as well, he's not a writer who is endlessly revising his work.

• 29:28Speaker 07

  No, that's fairly remarkable, although there may be things that were lost. I should perhaps say about his writing practices that when he was writing Rodezki March and he drank it quite a lot, he left chapter four in a taxi. And he never got it back. So he had to write it again. And it's an extremely good chapter. I mean, all of the chapters are good, but that is also remarkable in its way in terms of his working practice. But he kind of held court, you know, people gathered round him and they would not want to interrupt him. And he was saying, oh, on you go, on you go. And then sometimes he would just join the conversation, but he'd be writing the rest of the time. Yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 05

  Deborah, I'm going to move us on from Rodezki March onto a very important subject. What about women in Roth's novels and also in his life? Because we haven't mentioned it, but fairly early on, he married in Vienna, and that was a very, very important part of his narrative.

• 30:32Speaker 04

  Yes, although it's surprisingly often not commented on, or commented on far too much in the wrong way. I mean, it's a difficult topic. I mean, Helen has already referred to Frau Slama. In the novels, women are never major characters. There are no main female characters in Roth, but they quite often play quite a decisive role. The power dynamics are always uneven. There are no balanced gender relations in Roth. There are no colleagues or comrades of different sexes. Either the women are much more powerful than the men somehow, or they are a long way below them, and they're either protecting the men, or they need protecting. There's nothing, there's no balance in between. And it's an obvious temptation to equate these literary figures with the women in Roth's

• 31:16Speaker 04

  life, if I can lump them together like that. So his wife, Friedel, whom he married in 1922, was an acquaintance from a coffee house in Vienna, very typically for Roth. We haven't talked about bars or coffee houses yet, but...

• 31:31Speaker 05

  That's where he seems to have spent most of his life.

• 31:34Speaker 04

  That's where he spent most of his life, and where he did a lot of his writing as well, of course. And he learnt Friedel from one café table to the next. She was the daughter of a shopkeeper in Vienna's Jewish district, very pretty, as we can see from the photos. And they married when they were both still very young. She was six years younger than him. And he does not prevent the marriage, doesn't let the marriage prevent him from living the life that he wishes to lead as a travelling journalist.

• 32:02Speaker 05

  The two of them basically live out of a suitcase, as far as I know.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  Yes and no. It quite often is said of Roth that he never had a flat, that he never had a home, that he never settled. I think that he twice shared a flat, once with Friedel and once with a later partner, Andrea Mangabel, in Berlin. So there were attempts at domesticity, but they never lasted for long, and they were always very strained.

• 32:24Speaker 05

  And what happens to Friedel in the end? Because I think this is quite important.

• 32:29Speaker 04

  It's an extremely sad story, and it must have been very stressful and tragic for Roth himself. Friedel becomes... Increasingly, at first he thinks increasingly unable to cope with the with the life travelling around with with moving so often with living out of a suitcase. Uh, and then it becomes clear that she is mentally unstable and she is taken into psychiatric care. I think already from nineteen twenty five, twenty six onwards.

• 32:55Speaker 06

  I think she's not in care at that point, but by the end of the twenties, yes.

• 32:58Speaker 04

  But but ill, yeah, and re- re- re- repeatedly ill. And then is taken into full-time psychiatric care or is living at home but with a with a full-time nurse. Is not really verbalizing anymore, is not really eating. And she then remains in care until the end of her life, although care becomes a misnomer. As under the Nazis in nineteen forty, she is then murdered as a long-term psychiatric patient. At one of the um, in in Heidheim in Upper Austria, in one of the parts of the Nazis' so-called T four programme to uh. To kill psychiatric patients and and the mentally um unfit.

• 33:37Speaker 05

  Uh, and Roth is uh refers to Friedel and her illness in some of his work.

• 33:45Speaker 04

  In some of his, I'm not sure, that's a good, I'm not sure about the work, certainly repeatedly in the letters. I'm not sure to what extent she.

• 33:52Speaker 05

  Well, let me take it on to John Hughes in that case and and talk about Job, The Story of a Simple Man, which is what I think.

• 33:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:00Speaker 05

  Uh, where he maybe does reference Friedel. Can you tell us about about this novel? Because as I understand it, Marlene Dietrich thought it was fabulous.

• 34:09Speaker 06

  She did. I mean, it it was actually the novel that preceded Rodecky March, uh, as it happens. Uh, and could be said to have been the artistic turning point for for him, the one that allowed him to. Gave him the confidence, I think, to write the Rodecky March. Uh, so it was published in nineteen thirty.

• 34:25Speaker 05

  Before.

• 34:26Speaker 06

  Came before Rodecky March, although we've already discussed the perhaps the most famous novel, but Job is perhaps a close second, certainly. Uh, looking at his reputation around the world. It's a very widely read, translated, much-loved novel. Uh, it give it its full title, it's Job, The Story or The Novel of a Simple Man, and. And in a way, it reprises some of the things that made Rebellion a great novel. It has a sort of simplicity about it, a sort of fable-like structure. It plays loosely with the story of the Book of Job. But unlike Rebellion, it's firmly set in the past. It's the first novel in which he sets the story firmly in the pre-war world in Central Europe, in which he'd grown up.

• 35:11Speaker 06

  And it's also unusually amongst Roth's works. It's firmly set in a Jewish milieu, which is not something he did that often. So the main character, Mendel Singer, the simple man of the title, is an embodiment of the Hasidic Eastern Jews, the Ostjuden. And he's presented as a pious man, as a village teacher, who lives just on the other side of the border with the Russian Empire, so just outside of the geographical limits of Galicia. And in the course of the story, he suffers misfortune after misfortune, both him personally and his family, starting with the birth of a son with disabilities, Menohim.

• 35:54Speaker 06

  He then becomes alienated from his older sons. He then loses them during the war. His wife, Deborah, dies, and his oldest daughter, Miriam, becomes mentally ill. And the description of Miriam's sort of mental collapse and institutionalization, writing in 1930, shortly after the same thing had happened to Friedl, is indeed, you know, very, it's a tough read. It's based on personal experience in the novel. So the novel ends with, I should say that the other thing that haunts the character is the fact that he's abandoned the disabled son when the family moved to America, all of which results in him essentially turning his back on his Jewish identity, his faith.

• 36:36Speaker 06

  He rages at the God in whom he's always believed at the end of the novel. But unusually for Roth, and different to Rebellion, he gives us a twist, a happy ending, a rather sentimental turn of events at the end. So the abandoned son, Menohim, it turns out, has miraculously recovered from his disabilities, has grown up to become a Successful composer and musician and he's on tour in America. And so the novel ends up with the two men being reunited and gives us this happy ending. Roth, I think, had some doubts about that sentimentality.

• 37:08Speaker 05

  I was going to say, it's so unruthy of that.

• 37:10Speaker 06

  It is very, very, and he didn't quite disown the novel, but he was a bit reluctant to sort of praise it. But he was happy that it was a success because the ending was a winner for readers. And as you mentioned, Marlene Dietrich, in an interview in nineteen thirty one, I think, with an American film magazine, she was asked for her favorite novel and she named Job, which had just appeared in English translation. And Roth was so delighted, he wrote to her to thank her. And so that's a nice little story.

• 37:38Speaker 05

  Helen Chambers, we've heard how he had a rather stellar career in the nineteen twenties, certainly in the first half. But with the nineteen thirties onwards, after the illness of his wife, his health starts to decline. He has an unreliable stream of income, no fixed abode really, yet he remains very prolific. How does he sustain all this?

• 38:05Speaker 07

  Well, should we say that he left Germany in nineteen thirty three and went into exile?

• 38:12Speaker 05

  For obvious reasons.

• 38:13Speaker 07

  Because his books were being burnt, but I mean, he, how did he live? Well, he borrowed money. He bought in nineteen twenty seven, Stefan Zweig, who was a great bestseller, major literary figure, pots of money, wrote to Josef Roth and said, I've just read Your Wandering Jews, it's wonderful.

• 38:32Speaker 05

  Those are his essays about the Eastern Jews, the Ostjordan.

• 38:37Speaker 07

  And Roth got back to him and sort of sponged off him for the rest of his life. Although Zweig didn't manage to pay for all that Roth needed, although he did put him up quite often in South of France or sometimes they were in Austria, I think, sometimes they were in Ostend. But Roth, he needed the money. He got big advances, but he often didn't deliver in time. He commanded a lot of money, but he spent a lot of money and he didn't just spend it on himself. He was always giving money away, giving it away to people who were worse off than him, exiles, emigres, refugees. And he also, when he had money, he would live in smart hotels. He liked the smart hotels.

• 39:20Speaker 07

  He liked the Hotel Bristol in Vienna. He liked the Hotel Foyot where he ended up, well, didn't end up in Paris because, and this is part of Roth's fate, that his worlds were destroyed one after the other. And this included the Hotel Foyot, where he had a room, which is just opposite Le Jardin de Luxembourg, a fine hotel. Anyway, it turned out that it was not fit for purpose and it was demolished. So where he'd been living for years was demolished. Before his very eyes, he sat in the café across the road. But he worked, I don't know if I've answered, I mean, he drank all day and he needed to drink in order to work.

• 40:02Speaker 07

  And he did work at café tables and he needed people around him to work. He couldn't work without the people around him.

• 40:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, I mean, he was drinking very heavily.

• 40:14Speaker 07

  Very heavily.

• 40:14Speaker 05

  Nonetheless, writing at the same time, I don't know about all of you, but the experience of trying to write when you've had a drink is really, I mean, for me, it just doesn't work, but he appeared to be inspired by it. Deborah, by the late 30s, he was drinking himself to death. What was, what were the ghosts he was struggling with all that?

• 40:36Speaker 04

  Well, I mean, he was, as we said, a highly functional alcoholic, but very definitely a, you know, sort of terminal alcoholic. And that had been clear for a long time. I mean, it's, I sometimes wonder whether it stemmed from the war years, from the First World War, because, I mean, as we know, on both sides of the front, you know, soldiers were being plied with alcohol to make the war possible at all. I mean, that might well be part of the roots of his heavy drinking. Then later on, I think it's partly because of the lifestyle. He's having to keep deadlines, he's up late at night, he's living in hotels and bars. Drink is readily available. It's also part of the sort of journalistic camaraderie, inviting people for drinks.

• 41:19Speaker 04

  And then comes Friedel and the marriage and the problems and the feelings of guilt and having to earn also to support Friedel and her care. And I think that, you know, sort of under Lines or cements this sort of turning to alcohol to to to find relief for that. And then comes National Socialism, which Roth had very early on seen coming with a with a clear sightedness that's very interesting compared to others of his generation who were hoping that it wouldn't be as bad as all that. You know, it's kind of altogether, it's enough to make anyone turn to drink perhaps.

• 41:51Speaker 05

  And towards the end, of course, the Nazis invade Austria. So he loses Austria. Is there a sense of abandonment running through his work? I mean, perhaps starting with his father. I don't want to over.

• 42:09Speaker 06

  As a theme in the work, I think probably yes. And there certainly as a in terms of his personal life and his view of the world. Yes, I mean, he I think in the later years, he starts to think of the the old empire in near utopian terms at times. And it's a way, I think, of compensating for the world that was collapsing around him. The idea that there may once have been a place, a supranational place where national identities were somehow less important than some sort of collective identity.

• 42:41Speaker 05

  Because he does see nationalism as a fundamental evil.

• 42:44Speaker 06

  Nationalism is something he totally rejected in all its forms. He rejected Zionism as well, incidentally. He saw it as a form of nationalism. So no matter the motive, no matter what the motivation was, he would reject nationalism and sees it as pernicious.

• 42:59Speaker 05

  So two final questions for you all. But Helen, let me start with you. How appropriate is it that his final work was The Legend of the Holy Drinker? And what was that about? Was that was that basically him saying, this is me?

• 43:17Speaker 07

  Yes, and he did say as much. I mean, one's reluctant to look at biographical sort of reasons for text, but he said this. And I mean, it's the story of a. A tramp in Paris who was originally a coal miner in Silesia and came to Paris for work and that's quite typical, an economic traveller, migrant if you like, and the tramp ends up sleeping under the bridges in Paris. But one day, a well-dressed gentleman, and some people say that might have been modelled on Stefan Zweig, arrives and gives him 200 francs and says it's in gratitude at his finding conversion to the church. And the

• 44:00Speaker 07

  tramp takes it and says, "Thank you very much, I'll pay it back to you." And there are several attempts in the course of this short narrative. Well, he drinks the money, he loses the money, people make him part with the money, and he always gets it back again. And he's always saying, "I'm going to..." And how he's going to pay it back is to give it to the church in Batignolle where Saint Thérèse is there. And she was a very modest saint with a humble life, an unshowy sort of person, but in a Catholic church. And at the very end, oh, I don't know that I want to spoil the end, but at the very end...

• 44:40Speaker 05

  Spoiler alert.

• 44:41Speaker 07

  The drunkard, who again, well, he's in a very bad state physically, but he dies and he thinks that the little saint has taken the money and he's paid it back and it's all, grace has descended upon him. And he says, "God give all of us drinkers such a good and easy death." And so, in the story, the man finds grace, the drinker. But of course, Joseph Roth, in his own life, had a terrible death, did not have what he wished

• 45:21Speaker 07

  for himself, but he collapsed, face down on the table in the café. He had lots of friends who didn't have money but looked after him, took him to hospital. They didn't diagnose it properly. He withdrew alcohol completely and he had terrible delirium. He had to be strapped to the bed and indeed died the very opposite kind of death from his own literary creation.

• 45:51Speaker 05

  Well, on that sad note, a quickfire last round, literally in half a sentence each. How well do Roth's works stand the test of time? Debra?

• 46:05Speaker 04

  Surprisingly well. It's about the human cost of war and it's about individual dignity.

• 46:10Speaker 05

  John?

• 46:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, I would agree. There's something he says in one of his early Foytton articles, Going for a Walk, where he says it's the minutia, it's only the minutiae in life that count. And it's the little details that he's captured and made permanent in his, in his work that, that makes it still sort of sing today, I would say.

• 46:29Speaker 05

  Helen?

• 46:30Speaker 07

  Well, it's the human condition in bright, beautiful colours in quite short works. And I think they're wonderful.

• 46:38Speaker 05

  My thanks to Deborah Holmes, Helen Chambers and John Hughes. Next week, the African civilisation on the edge of the Roman Empire. That's the Garamantes. Thank you for listening.

• 46:52Speaker 04

  And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Misha and his guests.

• 47:00Speaker 05

  And now the podcast bit where we can relax slightly. So let me, the first thing I ask is, what did we miss out?

• 47:10Speaker 06

  Perhaps we could say a little bit more about Roth's own Jewishness. I mean, he had a somewhat, perhaps it's no surprise, but he had a slightly sort of contradictory sense of himself as a Jew. As Helen mentioned, he did write quite extensively about the Jewish community and the lives of the Eastern Jews in the 1920s. And that, the collection of essays, The Wandering Jews, was published in 1927. But what's interesting about it, or one of the things that's interesting about it, is that he never identifies himself as a Jew. He observes the community almost as an anthropologist might, you know, without actually mentioning that he'd grown up pretty much within that community in Galicia.

• 47:51Speaker 06

  As I mentioned in our main discussion, he rejected Zionism, for example. He was also quite critical of Jews who had assimilated. And westernised themselves, even though he himself was a very much a westernised, assimilated Jew. So it was quite contradictory. What did he say? He said he was a sort of an eastern Jew with a Catholic brain. And there were two sides to his personality.

• 48:15Speaker 05

  And he did, did he not actually at one point, if not join the Catholic Church then?

• 48:20Speaker 06

  He also said he was a Frenchman from the East. Yes, he had various, various ways of characterising himself.

• 48:25Speaker 07

  I mean, I might say something about his funeral. Can I say something about that?

• 48:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a great story.

• 48:30Speaker 07

  So he was buried in, in the cemetery, which is in the south of Paris, because nobody had enough money to put him in Perla Chez, where Heine was, and he really should have belonged. But at the gravesite, he was never baptized, but he went to the Catholic Church in, in Paris, the Austrian Catholic Church. So there was, there was a Catholic priest officiating, and there were a lot of eastern Jewish friends there at the gravesite. And then there was Igor and Kish, the great communist, who turned up with his red communist banner and his red carnations. And then there was also a Talmudic scholar, Gottferstein, who

• 49:13Speaker 07

  Roth spent a lot of time with in Paris, and he was prepared to pronounce the Kaddish. And some people wanted the Kaddish. Oh, and I've missed out the Austrian legitimist monarchist, because Otto von Habsburg had sent a wreath, which would have had the yellow and black ribbons on it, because Roth wanted to restore the monarchy. And he actually had fairly concrete plans to do that before things got really bad. So there were monarchist communists, eastern Jews, and Catholics at the graveside. And they were kind of, I mean, it nearly came to ugly scenes. And then the chap that was going to say Kaddish was with his friend Soma Morganstern, also an eastern Jew. And they said, no, we won't do this here. No, we'll just let it be.

• 49:57Speaker 05

  How, how dedicated was he to the Habsburg?

• 50:00Speaker 07

  He was very dedicated to the Habsburg cause. And he met Otto von Habsburg, who was the heir to the throne that had kind of gone. He met him in, in his court in Exile in Belgium and he got together with these Austrian legitimists. And they had a, well, they had a plan to smuggle Otto von Habsburg back into Vienna in a coffin. And they had to find a dead Austrian in order to do that. And Roth thought, well, in any case, I'm going to Vienna to talk to, well, he wanted to talk to Schuschnik, who was head of the government at the time.

• 50:38Speaker 05

  The Austrian fascist dictator of the dictator of Austro fascism.

• 50:43Speaker 07

  So this was.

• 50:44Speaker 05

  It was after, it was after the death of.

• 50:47Speaker 07

  Schuschnik was in charge. It was, it was, it was just before the Anschluss.

• 50:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, Schuschnik is in charge, he's certainly.

• 50:53Speaker 07

  Schuschnik's in charge, but was there already a Gauliter there? No, no, no, no. But that was just after.

• 51:00Speaker 05

  That comes after.

• 51:01Speaker 07

  So he went in just before the Anschluss and wanted to talk to Schuschnik and say, we'll get Otto von Habsburg back and this is how we're going to do it. And he had the blessing of the Habsburg monarchists. And he went to Vienna, which was a very dangerous thing for him to do. And he, he never got to see the highest instance. He did get to see a chief of police, I think. And the chief of police said, you better get out of here fast. And he did get out of here fast, but, but he was, he was very hands on. I mean, he wanted to, and, and he thought the reason he wanted to do this was he could see this as the only solution to getting rid of the Nazis.

• 51:41Speaker 05

  Sounds like a pretty harebrained scheme though.

• 51:43Speaker 07

  Harebrained is indeed the word for it. Not entirely realistic.

• 51:48Speaker 05

  One of the things that really interests me is the parallels between Stefan Zweig and Joseph Roth. So they sort of run alongside each other. They're very aware of each other, as you said, Zweig gave Roth quite a lot of money. But who is the better writer?

• 52:09Speaker 07

  Well, Joseph Roth is definitely the better writer. I think there's no dis... Well, I don't know, you might want to dispute with me.

• 52:16Speaker 06

  Stefan Zweig also agreed that Roth was the better writer. He was always quite willing to admit.

• 52:23Speaker 07

  He was.

• 52:23Speaker 04

  I think the differences are very interesting. I think it's a very fruitful comparison for the literature of the time. One of the things that Zweig does that Roth doesn't, as we said, is that Zweig has heroes. Zweig has goodies and baddies, and Zweig has heroes and he hero worships. And that's not something that Roth does at all. Roth is much, much more... He's ironic in a way that Stefan Zweig seemingly can't or doesn't want to achieve.

• 52:49Speaker 06

  And that, of course, made Zweig a bestselling author in a way which... Well, Roth did sell books, but he never earned the big books like Stefan Zweig did.

• 52:59Speaker 04

  Roth's timing was unfortunate, wasn't it? I mean, in a typically kind of Rothian fashion. It's to do with chance and contingency. And Redetsky Marsh could have been an immense success, but it came out just before the National Socialists took over.

• 53:13Speaker 06

  In fact, it was published in 32. So when the... Just at the point the royalties were coming in, in early 1933, Hitler's already taken over. Roth's in Paris in exile. He never really seized the money that he was due.

• 53:28Speaker 05

  And he was one of those few people. I think his first novel, Spinnen Nets...

• 53:35Speaker 06

  Spider's Web.

• 53:36Speaker 05

  The Spider's Web actually engages with Hitler himself, even though this is in 1923, 1924.

• 53:46Speaker 04

  Twenty-three.

• 53:47Speaker 05

  Extraordinary prescience.

• 53:49Speaker 07

  Yes, it came out just before the Hitler putsch, and it's a novel about...

• 53:54Speaker 05

  The Beer Hall putsch.

• 53:55Speaker 06

  The Beer Hall putsch.

• 53:56Speaker 07

  The Beer Hall putsch, that's right. When Hitler was put in prison. And they actually finished publishing the last part of it in the newspaper days before that happened. And in Roth's novel, there's a terrorist attempt planned. So that he saw very clearly what was going on from a very early time.

• 54:16Speaker 06

  I think it's the novel with the first explicit reference to Hitler. There isn't another work of literary fiction, an earlier work of literary fiction, that names Hitler.

• 54:26Speaker 05

  Deborah, tell us a bit about... The coffeehouse culture that we we we skipped over because he did spend a lot of time and.

• 54:36Speaker 04

  Which, to be fair, I mean, it's he he did, but many, many other newspaper men and women of the time did, you know, it was a lot.

• 54:46Speaker 05

  They still do in my.

• 54:47Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, yes, let's put that in a different tense. Yeah, but it was very much, it's partly to do with the with the problems of the time. It was difficult to heat your house at home, you know, in the immediate post-war period. It was a place to go where you could be sure of being warm enough to, you know, to sort of move a pen on paper. And it was also where where you could meet and mix and and keep up to date and have all of the daily newspapers at your disposal because, you know, a Viennese coffeehouse also today typically has a, you know, a fine array of newspapers, international, national newspapers.

• 55:20Speaker 05

  And I think it's worth pointing out that in nineteen eighteen, nineteen nineteen, Vienna was in a terrible state.

• 55:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, Vienna was literally starving. There was a survey done by a children's doctor at the time that that over ninety percent of Viennese children were suffering malnutrition after World War One. Yeah.

• 55:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, the same, a lot of the same applies to Berlin, of course, where he continues the same habits. And the coffeehouses and the bars were also places to network. So there were good career reasons for spending time, you know, a place like the Romanisches Café in Berlin where he was an habitual customer. It was the place to be seen. It was well known that that the prominent people there would prominent people would be there. And so it wasn't just a place to work, it was a place to see and be seen. And yeah, Kish was often there.

• 56:09Speaker 04

  And a place where someone was going to pick you up off the floor if you fell off your stool in a drunken stupor.

• 56:14Speaker 05

  And you mentioned that Radetzky March was unique, but he did then write a sequel, The Emperor's Tomb.

• 56:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, nineteen thirty eight.

• 56:23Speaker 05

  What was, why did he do that?

• 56:26Speaker 06

  Well, I think he did it, you know, for commercial reasons. He wanted to build on the success of Radetzky March. But after nineteen thirty three, he he writes quite a lot of novels and novellas.

• 56:39Speaker 06

  In difficult circumstances, not only is his lifestyle, you know, working against him, but he's, he's working to tight deadlines. He's never quite sure, you know, where, you know, he's working with different publishing houses in, all based in exile now, many of them in, in the Netherlands. And he's desperate really to just make ends meet. So the sequel, The Emperor's Tomb, Die Kapuzinergruft, it follows a sort of a separate branch of the von Toter family and tries to bring the story up to the point of the Anschluss of Austria to Nazi Germany in 1938. And it's an interesting read and anyone that's enjoyed, enjoyed Rodecky Marshall should probably read it. But it isn't the same. It is not, it isn't of the same quality. It's not, it's not accomplished.

• 57:21Speaker 06

  It's written in the first person as well, isn't it? Which is not, not so common amongst his novels. It was, he, he, he sort of rushed it as well in 1938, as events were happening in Austria, he thought, I better get this out quickly as well.

• 57:34Speaker 07

  And I think it's looked to by students of German as a kind of set text because it's got all this history in. But actually he wrote a, a far better novel in 1937 called Weights and Measures in English, which picks up a lot of the characters from Rodecky Marshall and indeed Mendelssohn, from Heob pops up in it as well.

• 57:55Speaker 06

  At least the name does.

• 57:57Speaker 07

  And, and it's, it's a story about a move from west to, to east and an inspector of weights and measures, an honest man who's been forced to leave the army and get out of his uniform by his wife. And he's lost when he gets out of his uniform. And, and he, he has a kind of slide into, well, maybe it's sin and maybe it's grace. It's a bit hard to tell. But, but it's, it's a beautiful novel that picks up a lot of his other themes and, and evokes the landscape back in the east again. And we haven't mentioned the larks in the sky and the frogs in the swamps and, and the crickets chirping. But he opens up

• 58:42Speaker 07

  this, this huge space that's full of life and full of animals and human beings responding to them. But I would recommend Weights and Measures as a, a better composed novel than, than The Emperor's Tomb, which is historically perhaps more interesting.

• 59:00Speaker 05

  So, well, thank you very much. I think not only are we going to be offered tea, but Martha baked me a lemon drizzle cake for my birthday. And so we also have exceptionally lemon drizzle cake. Simon, to go with... Tea or coffee?

• 59:18Speaker 07

  Tea, please.

• 59:19Speaker 06

  I'll have a coffee, please.

• 59:21Speaker 07

  Coffee, please.

• 59:22Speaker 05

  Tea, please.

• 59:23Speaker 07

  In Our Time with Mischa Glennie is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios production.

• 59:29Speaker 04

  If you've got a scrolling problem, then this is the podcast for you. It's called Top Comment with me, Matt Shea. And me, Mariana Spring. We both investigate social media for a living. Whether it's disinformation, conspiracy theories, internet culture, memes. We're going to be getting behind the stuff that is popping up on your feed on this podcast. That's Top Comment on BBC Sounds.

• 59:52Speaker 05

  Hello, Mischa Glennie here. Did you know you can get episodes of In Our Time 28 days early with a subscription to the BBC website and app? Just head to bbc.com/subscribe to find out more.