The Wandering Jews: Migration, Identity, and Bureaucracy

Joseph Roth

1927

VIENNA

[ . . . ] His first and most difficult call is on the police. The man behind the counter dislikes Jews in general, and Eastern Jews in particular. He will demand to see papers. Exotic, improbable papers. Papers the like of which are never required from Christian immigrants. Besides, Christian papers are in order. All Christians have sensible…

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After World War I, the collapse of empires and redrawn borders drove mass migration, including of many East European Jews. In the mid-1920s, writer Joseph Roth—himself from the fallen Habsburg Empire—chronicled these Jews’ displacement and insecurity. In essays for the Frankfurter Zeitung, later collected as The Wandering Jews, he described how immigration restrictions, identity papers, and police registration turned refugees into “unwanted” transmigrants, trapped in an “existential struggle against papers” across postwar Europe.

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Creator Bio

Joseph Roth

1894–1939

The German-language novelist and journalist Joseph Roth was born in the Austro-Hungarian town of Brody, Galicia (today in Ukraine) and attended university in Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine) and Vienna. Following military service in World War I, he estab­lished himself as a popular progressive journalist and feuilletonist in Vienna before migrating in 1919 to Berlin, where he became one of the best-paid, most cosmopolitan journalists in the German-speaking world. At the same time, he developed his craft as a novelist, focusing at first on urban tales of discontent and dislocation, often depicting demobilized soldiers and their difficulty in reintegrating in postwar society. From 1923 until his death he published fifteen novels; several short stories; and a constant stream of travel reports, feuilletons, and personal essays, including a book-length consideration of Jewish life in Europe, Juden auf Wanderschaft (Wandering Jews, 1926). Although he was known during the 1920s primarily as an urban modernist in the style of the Neue Sachlichkeit, he turned his writing decisively in the 1930s toward historical depictions of East European life before World War I. Because of his despair over the rise of nationalism and fascism during this era, Roth increasingly came to idealize the Habsburg Empire, even working with groups seeking to reestablish the Austrian monarchy from exile. His greatest novel, The Radetzky March (1932)—a historical saga of life in Vienna and the Austrian provinces during the second half of the nineteenth century—ranks among the most important novels of the 1930s. After 1933 Roth aban­doned Germany and began wandering among West European expatriate communities in France, Hol­land, Belgium, and Paris, laboring at times under des­perate financial circumstances. Although his literary output during this period of exile remained constant and enormous, it was of increasingly erratic quality as Roth sank deeper into alcoholism, the effects of which led to his death in Paris.