(scattered observations:)

At risk of sewing the wrong expectations, I would say there’s a certain noirishness in Joseph Roth’s depiction of Anselm Eibenschütz’s stint as inspector of weights and measures on the eastern border of the Austro-Hungarian empire, where his earnest commitment to order comes up against the customs of locals (some sinister, others just trying to make a living) and his own obsessive passion for the mistress of a very shady innkeeper. Not to mention: a little bit of sleuthing (about his wife’s infidelity), a couple of bodies found frozen in the forest…

There are shared thematic preoccupations with the Radetzky March. For example, in addition to a floating sense of loneliness and homesickness, there is a paradoxical exploration of freedom: Eibenschütz, perhaps more starkly than von Trotta, exchanges the rigid/predetermined structure of the military, which gives him a sort of freedom (from the need to structure his own life), for a civilian existence in which his unmooring from said structure opens him to new experiences (e.g., of love and of nature) that he can scarcely articulate, yet at the same time resembles submission to fate, with disorder, erotic obsession/jealousy and of course alcohol sweeping him helplessly along. (Not without symbolism does Roth repeatedly return to the image of a frozen river cracking open.)

The world of Radetzky March is also, more concretely, present in recurrent characters and locales. For this reason, perhaps a bit fancifully, it occurred to me that some kind of analogy could be made between the disintegrating Austro-Hungarian empire (with its center and border regions, etc.) and Roth’s interconnected oeuvre that has its own center (the neatly structured and -sorry- almost staid familial/historical epic of the Radetzky March) and disintegrates, with haunting beauty, into its own margins.

Weights and Measures

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