Self-Ridiculing Nostalgia: Joseph Roth’sDie Kapuzinergruft

Abstract

This article argues for a reinterpretation of the role of Habsburg nostalgia in Die Kapuzinergruft, the final novel by the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. From the early 1930s onward, Roth had been an enthusiastic proponent of the Habsburg myth, and the tenor of his pro-Habsburg journalism became particularly adulatory during the final years of his life. Partly as a result of this, Die Kapuzinergruft is frequently read as a heavy-handed endorsement of Austria’s imperial past, although several valuable contra-nostalgic interpretations of the text have appeared in recent years. This article reconciles the differences between these two views of the novel by arguing that in fact the work dramatizes Roth’s inner conflict between the solace offered by Habsburg nostalgia and his own awareness of the perceptual, psychological, and moral weaknesses that such nostalgia entailed.