Recreating Habsburg borders

the later fiction of Joseph Roth

pp. 66-99

in: Richard Robinson, Narratives of the European border, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Abstract

Joseph Roth was born near the town of Brody, almost a thousand kilometres from Trieste, at an opposite border of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Now within Ukraine, Brody was part of the Galician province of Lemberg, situated on the frontier which ran between Habsburg Austria and Romanov Russia. Although Svevo's prosperous Mediterranean port and Roth's landlocked township were unalike in most ways, they were both polymorphous European borders. Just as "Austrian" Triest and its Julian hinterland was mainly Italo-Slovene (Trieste, Trst), so the province of "Austrian" Lemberg was Polish and Russian and Ukrainian (Lwów, L"vov now L"viv) — though all of these labels fail to name the town's mainly Jewish identity.¹ Excessively named and claimed, these Central and Eastern European border places define what is heterotopian about atopia, and vice versa.