Exile between Shtetl and the twilight: Joseph Roth and judaism in fin-de siècle in Austria.

Author(s)

Luis Sergio Krausz

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2007-03-06

Examining board members

Nancy Rozenchan; Elcio Loureiro Cornelsen; Helmut Paul Erich Galle; Márcio Orlando Seligmann Silva; Berta Waldman

• Advisor: Nancy Rozenchan

Abstract

This thesis discusses the oeuvre of the Jewish Austrian writer Joseph Roth, and aims at an understanding of his critique of modernity, which is seen as a result of a unique point of view, determined by the encounter between two worlds: the traditional world of Eastern European Jewry on one hand and the world of the final years of the Habsburg Monarchy on the other. I try to show that Roth takes a skeptical look at modernity and at post-World War I Europe using the paradigms of these two lost worlds.At the same time I aim at demonstrating how the concept of exile is deeply rooted in his critique of modernity. However he is dealing with an exile in time here, as opposed to a purely geographical exile - an exile that is far more tragic, since it is irreversible. Exile is also a core theme in traditional Jewish mystical and philosophical thought and I try to point to coincidences in the treatment of this topic in Roth and in traditional Jewish doctrines.The concept of exile has the idea of Heimat or homeland as its opposite, and in Roth Heimat becomes an abstract category, pertaining to the universe of metaphysics and memory, in the light of which he interprets European civilization of the 1920´s and 1930´s.I conclude by showing how this fictive Heimat turns into one of his literary obsessions, around which he will build an oeuvre, which is, more then anything else, an attempt at restoring a vanished human landscape, anchored in the Middle Ages and buried by time and by wars. (AU)