Original scientific paper
The Habsburg Heritage in Josph Roth's Novels Hotel Savoy and Flight Without End
Slavija Kabić
; University of Zadar
Abstract
The Austrian-Jewish journalist and novelist Joseph Roth (1894–1939) focuses in his novels Hotel Savoy (1924) and Flight Without End (Flucht ohne Ende; 1927) on the return of the soldiers and prisoners of war from World War One. After the downfall of their fatherland, the Habsburg Empire, these homeless wanderers feel a melancholic nostalgia for the good old times in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The characters, most of them Jews, see in the hotel (Hotel Savoy) the replacement for the true native land (“Heimat”), yet the terrible resplendent place represents a false shtetl, which has nothing to do with their now lost shtetl-homeland in Galicia, in the eastern part of the Empire. In the postimperial era after 1918 the Habsburg myth is depicted in the case of Franz Tunda (Flucht ohne Ende), as well. His restlessness and homelessness resemble the features of the Eternal Jew who like nearly all other figures in these works by Roth stand for the Wandering Jew on the way from the East to the West, mourning over the happy past in the multinational state.
Keywords
Joseph Roth; Hotel Savoy; Flight Without End; the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy; the Wandering Jew; postimperial era
Hrčak ID:
210837
URI
Publication date:
4.12.2018.
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