The double bind of self-narration: Joseph Roth, Jewish identity and the undercurrents of European modernity

Abstract

This article deals with the infamous ‘mythomania’, or elaborate role-playing, of the Galician Jewish journalist and novelist Joseph Roth (1894–1939) during the two decades of his mature intellectual life, when he traversed interwar Europe first as a nomadic cosmopolitan, later as a political exile in the context of the narrowing horizon of Jewish life in Europe in the 1930s. It understands his intellectual quandaries, and the various narratives of self that Roth developed during his lifetime, as an on-going reaction against the catastrophes that characterised his private life as well as his historical times. As such, this paper addresses the undercurrents of German-Jewish modernity as they emerged in the form of the multiple expressions, as well as the negation or even the ultimate destruction, of Jewish identity.