Where should I go, a Trotta?

"The Crypt of the Capuchins," the novel that completes Joseph Roth's masterpiece "The Radetzky March," is a melancholic, moving elegy for the lost world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It narrates the carefree life of a third-generation member of the famous Trotta family in the years before World War I, his enthusiastic enlistment, his inglorious capture and exile in Siberia, his escape, the loss of illusions about military ideals, his return, and his demobilization. In a post-war Vienna plagued by economic crisis, where old families have lost all their privileges, Trotta tries to revive a troubled marriage and come to terms with the harsh and complex social reality of Vienna, as the first signs of Nazi brutality loom threateningly.

The end is a stark self-portrait of Joseph Roth. It is not the face of a fictional hero in some imaginary situation. It is the emotion that Roth gives voice to in propria persona in all his writings of that era: the atmosphere of definitive collapse and despair, as experienced and expressed in his texts from 1935 to 1938.