Early in Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March a scene plays out in a country orchard in Bohemia. The year is something close to 1870. Joseph von Trotta, a captain in the Austro-Hungarian army, is brandishing a school book belonging to his son, Franz. In it he has just read an account of the event for which he was decorated: the split second during the Battle of Solferino in 1859 in which he, then merely a lieutenant of Slovenian peasant stock, pushed the Emperor Franz Joseph I out of the path of a sniper’s bullet. Here in the school book, however, the tale has been grossly exaggerated. Trotta is depicted decimating the ranks of enemy soldiers around the young emperor, and taking a lance to the chest in the process. The deceit offends his sense of honour. He storms out to find his wife strolling under the fruit trees. Did she know of this fabrication?
Roth continues: “She nodded and smiled. ‘It’s a lie!’ yelled the captain, flinging the book onto the wet earth. ‘It’s for children,’ his wife mildly replied. The Captain turned on this heel. He was shaking with rage.” Trotta requests an audience with the emperor at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna. “There’s a lot of lying goes on,” Franz Joseph concedes. Austria-Hungary, the reader realises early in the story, is an elaborate artifice. Or as the author Keiron Pim puts it in his 2022 biography of Roth: “A crumbling institution propped up by patriotic mythology and anachronistic codes of behaviour… Its rulers must hope that Austrians who realise they’ve been duped will agree the lies were worth telling to sustain the monarchy.”
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