The last years of the Hapsburg Empire provide the background for an outstanding novel, Joseph Roth's (1894-1939) The Radetzky March (1932). The Radetzky March begins with a key anecdote. During the battle of Solferino (1859), Lieutenant Joseph Trotta saves the life of the young Hapsburg emperor, Franz Joseph, by pushing him aside and taking a bullet in the shoulder. As a result, Trotta is knighted and glorified as the "Hero of Solferino," his deed, mythologized in elementary school textbooks. Basically a simple peasant at heart, he lives the rest of his life uneasy and unhappy with his fame and with his new status as a gentleman. His son, Franz, adjusting more readily to the new status, becomes a provincial district commissioner, a position of some importance in the far-flung Hapsburg Empire.

The Austrian military ideal is epitomized by "The Radetzky March"--a stirring march, composed by the elder Johann Strauss, that celebrates an Austrian field marshal who captured Venice in 1849. This tune, played every Sunday afternoon in the village where Franz resides, represents the glory and splendor of the empire and the military heroism that sustains it.

The major figure of the novel is Franz's son, Carl Joseph, who is commissioned in the army in the years immediately preceding 1914. Carl Joseph has no particular gift for, or interest in, army life. He is merely following his father's wishes. For a young officer, the prewar military world is one of meaningless drills, dissolute living, and mindless adherence to an outmoded code of behavior that involves heavy drinking, erotic escapades, and participation in duels of honor. Contrasted to the ideal depicted by "The Radetzky March" is the tawdry, stagnant reality of an empire and an army in dissolution. That contrast is further embodied in the figure of Franz Joseph himself, the divinely anointed sovereign, now a tired, unhappy, forgetful octogenarian with a runny nose.

When the war breaks out, Carl Joseph is killed during a battle in which he attempts to secure water for his troops. He dies "holding not a weapon but two pails." His heartbroken father, who has never been able to express his love for his son, comes to Vienna, waiting outside the imperial Schoenbrunn palace until he hears the news of the emperor's death. He returns to his village to die shortly after. At Trotta's funeral, his friend, Dr. Skowronneck, makes the novel's final point:

"I would have liked to have added," said the mayor, "that Herr von Trotta could not outlive the Kaiser. Don't you agree, Doctor?" "I don't know," Dr. Skowronnek replied. "I don't think either one of them could have outlived Austria."

As these lines suggest, the novel balances a clear-eyed critique of an empire whose end was inevitable with a sense of loss, felt all the more powerfully when the novel was written in 1932, with the threat of Nazism looming on the horizon. As that threat grew nearer, Roth, who was Jewish, became increasingly committed to the imperial ideal. He died in Paris in 1939, a refugee from his native land and a despairing but vehement supporter of the return of the Hapsburgs.

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