However, it was his editor, Gustav Kiepenheuer, who chose the ironic title The Radetzky March-ostensibly compressing the novel’s content in one short phrase, but in reality, turning the meaning of the old march upside down Roth’s novel was about death and demise, rather than victory and rebirth. In 1930, Roth, inspired by Austria’s past and no small amount of alcohol, finally got to work on the novel, which he finished in September 1932.

More important to Roth, the old general singularly rekindled and solidified Austria’s neoabsolutist identity around the Habsburg dynasty after the revolutionary years of the Napoleonic Wars. The poet Franz Grillparzer waxes eloquently about this longest-serving, imperial Austrian officer (who served more than seventy years in total) in his poem, In deinem Lager ist Oesterreich (“In your camp is Austria”). Radetzky was the epitome of Austria’s imperial Heldenzeitalter (heroic age). Legend has it that in 1928, while living in Berlin, a dispirited Roth asked the band at the Hotel Adlon to play the Radetzky March-a march composed by Johann Strauss Senior in 1848 and dedicated to Field Marshal Radetzky in honor of the old soldier’s victory at Custozza-while the Austro-Jewish author was reminiscing about the past. Talking about his life, Roth notes: 'My strongest experience was the War and the destruction of my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.' He studied in Vienna, served in the Habsburg army, witnessed the dissolution of the empire, became a writer, moved from Berlin to Paris, and finally succumbed to alcoholism in 1939.

Joseph Roth was born in 1894 in Brody, modern-day Western Ukraine, which was then part of the easternmost province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria.

The radetzky march by joseph roth