’Assimilitis.’ Joseph Roth – Eastern Jew, Cosmopolitan, European

Joseph Roth was a wanderer. Born in a Galizian shtetl, in the periphery of the Danube Monarchy, he went to Vienna, Berlin, and Paris, became socialist, monarchist, European, cosmopolitan. And yet remained East European Jew. Relentlessly on the move, and the embodiment of a Jewish and a modern destiny, Roth travelled through Europe and lived and wrote his novels and feuilletons in hotels and cafés, his very habitat, a microcosmos of European cosmopolitanism, of intellectual, psychic and cultural movement and exchange. This paper attempts to explore the life and work of Joseph Roth between realities. Roth experienced assimilitis when transgressing realities. Assimilitis also was what he lived off. It characterised his mental disposition, his very conduct of life, his essence. Conceptually, the interpretation refers to the works of Gottfried Benn (grimaces of reality), Hans Blumenberg (the problem of reality), Sigmund Freud (cultural discontent), Georg von Lukács (transcendental homelessness), Robert Musil (sense of reality, sense of possibility), Robert Ezra Park (marginal man), and Georg Simmel (transmutability, floating realities).