“Der rote Joseph”?

WHEN ROTH RETURNED to Vienna after the war in December 1918, it was to a place in which everything seemed radically altered. Vienna had suffered little physical damage in the war, but in both material and spiritual terms it was a vastly different place from the prewar Imperial capital: “auch ihre Seele schien verworren und krank nach den langen Kriegsjahren und dem chirurgischen Eingriff, der ihr die territorialen Glieder abgeschnitten hatte” (RB, 193). Newspaper headlines sounded an almost constant alarm with reports of strikes, rapid inflation, and coal and food shortages. At this time Roth was just embarking on what would become a brilliant career as a journalist. Employed by Der Neue Tag from April 1919 until the newspaper's collapse a year later (RB, 192), he responded to the chaos of early postwar Vienna in a series of feuilletons under the rubric “Wiener Symptome.” He favored the detail of everyday life over the big issues of state politics, penning minutely observed reflections on the hardship and misery of ordinary people in postwar Vienna, the black market, food shortages, and the fate of invalided returned servicemen, the unemployed, and the homeless. After moving to Berlin in June 1920, Roth continued to focus the bulk of his journalism on the fate of the little people he observed around him in a world of disarray.