The Radetzky March

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.

The hero of Solferino

Solferino

1859

At Solferino the obscure Lieutenant Trotta saves the Emperor Franz Joseph's life and is ennobled for it, becoming the Hero of Solferino, only to spend his later years appalled at how the schoolbooks turn his real deed into a lie. That founding act, and his disillusion with the empire's self-mythologising, sets the family and the book on their long road to ruin.

The opening

explicit The family's fortunes begin at the real Battle of Solferino in northern Italy in 1859, where an infantry lieutenant named Trotta throws the young Emperor to the ground and takes the bullet meant for him.

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