Galician frontier · 1932 · citedThe Radetzky March
Joseph Roth
Roth's elegy for the Austro-Hungarian Empire follows three generations of the Trotta family, ennobled after the first Trotta saves the young Emperor's life at Solferino, down to the aimless grandson Carl Joseph, an officer posted to a dreary garrison on the empire's eastern edge as it drifts toward 1914. The heart of the book is that Galician frontier near the Russian border, drawn from Roth's own Brody: the border garrison, the shabby town of gambling and debt, and the front where the last Trotta dies, while Solferino and imperial Vienna stand at the empire's other poles.
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