Reflexions Of World War 1 in Joseph Roth’s Early Publicism

Abstract

This article deals with the speciality of J. Roth’s reception of the Great War, description of it in his early publicism. The object of this inverstigation were short writings of publicistic type, published in period 1915 – 1919, when the author participated at the war as an Austrian military reporter. This was the beginning of his journalistic career. The representation of World War 1 by young journalist was partly compared with that by older, more experienced novel-writer. The article analyzed J. Roth’s position to the war during its height and the cause-and-effect relations in his writings. The genres, used by J. Roth at that time, are considered, also the publishers of his texts. In this article the culture-historical method is used, a lot of attention is paid to the biographical analyze. As result of the analyses came the conclusion that J. Roth’s early publicism only partly belongs to the topic of war: there are only several Texts dedicated to the actual theme and some more texts, which contains any small mentions, reminiscences and parallels to the war. They are focused on the effects of the war for the society; which are absolutely negative. Despite of demonstrating no naturalistic battle-scenes, the writer shows the war as a catastrophic phenomenon, physically and mentally. Here comes J. Roth’s antimilitaristic position true.