Joseph Roth's March into History is an enormously important author study growing out of a dissertation supervised by Peter Morgan at the University of Western Australia, where the author is now a lecturer in German. What makes the work so significant is Kati Tonkin's willingness to take on Roth as a working author in an era of profound historical change, not simply as a representative of Central European identity politics in the first half of the twentieth century. Her introduction surveys major approaches to Roth, so that she can specify the problem she will address: reconciling the early and late works, which seem to many critics not to cohere, but which do in her expositions.

The study's first chapter begins with Roth's return from World War I and, citing a nice mix of historical sources and author quotations, makes the case that Roth felt himself an outsider in postwar Berlin and Germany. Its centerpiece is a long interpretation of Juden auf Wanderschaft (1927), a description of Jewish displacement in the era's political chaos. Tonkin uses this essay to argue for Roth's rejection of nationalism, based on his position as an assimilated Jewish citizen of Habsburg Galicia. Roth faced circumstances that forced him to pick one identity out of the several he thought he had at his disposal. According to Roth, to choose any one national identity—Austrian or German, in his case—meant to flatten out one's other multiple identities and the region's cultural traditions: “The nation is for Roth both an artificial construct and a corruptor of individuality” (29).

Europe's Jewish populations are for Roth heimatlos (30), lacking a homeland, or their own Scholle (clod of earth), but hence also freer to embrace multiple identities, change, and modernization. “For Roth it is a virtue not to be a nation” (31), and hence being “auf Wanderschaft” has the virtue of evolving individuals (32). Here, Tonkin identifies Roth's Jewish populations almost as Deleuzian nomads, as he equates freedom of motion with self-determination (35).

After this groundwork, Chapter 2 turns to three of Roth's early novels: Das Spinnennetz, Hotel Savoy, and Die Rebellion. The question for Roth in the interwar years is how to find a way forward out of Austria's chaos and Germany's inflexibility. Although interested in Socialism, Roth will not declare himself a Socialist because he rejects the notion of programmatic literature. Spinnennetz appeared in 1923 in the Arbeiterzeitung, with a hero in the mold of Henrich Mann's Untertan (1918), a Weimar German with distinct anti-Semitic tendencies. In Tonkin's reading, the novel tracks the evolution of the authoritarian personality, showing how childhood experience, including education, determines an individual and subjects that individual to the flattening effects of group thought, robbing him or her of the ability to function independently (54). The second novel, Hotel Savoy (1924), shows that Socialism is not a solution to Europe's problems, as symbolized in the fates of the motley crew inhabiting the hotel, waiting for Bloomfield, an American millionaire (73), and hence failing to take responsibility for themselves. Die Rebellion (1924), the third novel, protests against social injustice and points out the futility of individual rebellion.

Tonkin's third chapter approaches Radetzkymarsch (1932) as a historical novel, which she understands in opposition to the aesthetics of Neue Sachlichkeit. She argues compellingly for the novel as thematizing the discrepancy between reality and appearance and hence with a distinct political subtext (114). By tracing the historical references to Radetzky and the Austrian situation in a close reading of the text, Tonkin demonstrates how the text is designed to undercut the characters' points of view and hence to recover a complexity of regional identities. Chapter 4 extends this argument into the later Kapuzinergruft (1938), casting it as a dialogue between past and present (200), and as a case of historical meditation in decisively different terms from Hegelian history.

Tonkin hence argues compellingly against an interpretation that finds a nostalgia and Habsburg hagiography in Roth's work, rather drawing the conclusion that he tried not to idealize the monarchy, but rather to figure out why it failed. The synthesis that Tonkin offers in her elegant prose and copious documentation should open up a new generation of scholarship on Roth, built on her strong presentations of the limitations of existing scholarship and Roth's engagement with his era. Tonkin's Roth is a much more politically informed and interested author than we have seen to date, making this study a “must have” for every library.