Joseph Roth

Roth left Germany for Paris the day Hitler became chancellor in 1933 and never returned, spending his last years as one of the most visible anti-Nazi voices among the émigré community while supporting himself as a star feuilleton writer for German newspapers. His wife, Friederike, developed schizophrenia in the 1920s and was eventually institutionalized; she would later be murdered under the Nazi euthanasia program, a grief Roth carried through the rest of his itinerant life.

He lived out of hotel rooms by choice and drank in the cafés of Paris with a discipline that matched his prose, mourning a Habsburg empire he had watched dissolve in his own lifetime. The Radetzky March, his elegy for a world of uniforms and loyalty oaths already gone, appeared in 1932; Job, his tender retelling of the biblical story as an immigrant's fable, carried the same grief into a gentler key. He collapsed in a Paris café in 1939 and died days later, not yet forty-five.