Joseph Roth (edit name/settings)

Born Moses Joseph Roth in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire (his birthplace is now located in the Ukraine), Joseph Roth was a journalist who struggled with alcoholism and exile for much of his life. He never met his father but grew up with his mother and her family. He attended the universities of Lemberg (Lvov) and Vienna before serving in the Austrian army during World War I. After the war he became a journalist in Vienna. In 1920, he moved to Berlin, and in 1923 became a foreign correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Many of his non-fiction and fiction books began coming out during the 1920s. A true story about a man who escaped from a prisoner of war camp during World War I made such an impression on him that he told the story at least twice, in a non-fiction version, "Flight Witout End" (1927), and a fictional version, "The Emperor's Tomb" (1938).  

When Hitler came to power in 1933, Roth was living in Paris. Being Jewish, he decided to remain in France where he died in 1939. His last years were marked by financial and health problems. His books were banned in all German-speaking countries, especially after Germany invaded Austria in 1938. His last books were published in the Netherlands and had only a limited audience of ex-patriot Germans. He was invited to move to New York shortly before his death but he was discouraged by the news that the German writer, Ernst Toller, who had accepted a similar invitation, had hanged himself there.

"The Tale of the 1002nd Night," his last published novel, came out the same year he died but was actually written two years earlier, in 1937. When Germany invaded the Netherlands in 1940, all copies of the novel that were found were destroyed.

Roth on himself: "My strongest experience was the War and the destruction of my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy." Ironically, his novels seem to illustrate the inevitability of its decline.