When I read The Radetzky March, it occurred to me that I had read a disparaging remark on the Sunday dinner of District Captain Herr von Trotta und Sipolje, something to the effect that Tafelspitz was not what someone would have consumed on a Sunday. I don't know why this bothered me: however little Joseph Roth knew of the lives of the Hapsburg bureaucrats, it was far more that I know or wish to know. Still, I looked for the reference. It was not in Stephen Brook's The Double Eagle: Vienna, Budapest, Prague, which seemed a reasonable place to look. It was nowhere in Milosz's To Begin Where I Am or Milosz's ABCs, which no longer seem reasonable places to look--what would his friends have had to do with Moravia? I may have looked in Peter Demetz's Prague in Black and Gold. Nothing yielded the information I wanted.
Then last week, looking for something quite different in Victor Klemper's diaries, I Will Bear Witness: 1933-1941, I found the passage that I must have remembered, in an entry for February 13, 1935. The Radetzky March has just been removed from the public library:
... Roth, the Austrian officer novel from Solferino to the World War--I can't remember the name. Maria Lazar made an amusing remark about this work. She said: The man knows his Galician ghetto, but he does not have a clue about Austrian aristocrats and officers. Proof: The General has beef for his Sunday roast. But that is an almost plebeian everyday meal and never a Sunday dish.
Maria Lazar was then living in Copenhagen, but I suppose her sources of information were sound. Klemperer makes no indication of doubt.
No comments:
Post a Comment