The Emperor's Tomb

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The Emperor’s Tomb — in German Die Kapuzinergruft, “The Crypt of the Capuchins” (the eerie underground burial place of the Habsburgs on the Neuer Markt in the middle of Vienna), and before that variously “The Cup of Life” and “A Man Seeks His Fatherland” — was the last novel Joseph Roth wrote, and the last he actually saw in print, in December 1938 or January 1939. The String of Pearls was published after his death in May 1939, but was written rather earlier, in 1935 and 1936, only to be overtaken in Roth’s gruelling and chaotic final years by this more political and more commercially promising and up-to-the-minute “sequel” to Roth’s most successful novel, The Radetzky March of 1932. Both were published (in German) by the tiny Dutch Catholic press, de Gemeenschap, of Bilthoven, Roth having exhausted the few other, more conventional émigré possibilities through a combination of need, under-payment, market-saturation and all-round prickliness.

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