He keeps disappearing. Ten years ago I thought that I had found him, on the wrong side of the tracks in the little town of Brody, on the dusty eastern edge of Europe, where the Empire of the Habsburgs once dissolved into the Empire of the Romanovs.

I was led to expect weighty historical events distilled into the tale of a single imperial family. Instead I was taken on a wild goose chase from one provincial garrison to another in the company of officers who had nothing better to do than drink, gamble, get into debt and beguile the time with desultory affairs. Between its opening in 1859 and its final pages set six decades later almost nothing happened. There were two sexual encounters, a duel and an industrial strike, but they were all left unresolved. Even the Great War and the death of the longest surviving European monarch were brushed aside with casual disregard. It was the least epic historical novel I had ever read and I was totally seduced by it. I was captivated by its glimpses of a vanished world seen through the wrong end of a telescope and framed in dreamlike prose which kept slipping out of reach. It was elusive and ironic and it stuck like a burr in my brain. I knew little of Habsburg history and even less of the author. I soon discovered that I was not alone.

Even today there is no English biography of Joseph Roth and only a couple of academic studies, one of which is currently remaindered. His personal life is cloaked in mist. Yet the landscape he described was unforgettable and I was impatient to encounter it at first hand. I swore that one day I would follow the novel’s sad and confused hero Carl Joseph von Trotta along the margins of Mitteleuropa. I would drink in faded cafés across the road from crumbling opera houses. I would buy second-class tickets in Kaiser-yellow railway stations and take rickety trains from Slovenia and Moravia in the west to the dank marshes of Galicia in the east. It was fifteen years before I could keep my promise to myself. Three decades ago the borders of Europe and Russia were still in Neville Chamberlain’s words ‘a faraway country of which we know little’.

Then in the late 1980s the landscape of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Ukraine was radically transformed. The Iron Curtain lifted to reveal one perfectly preserved stage set after another, all painted in faded pastels – the pink, green and gold favoured by Emperor Franz Joseph. Beyond the urban scenery of Mitteleuropa sat the smudged landscape of muddy plains, framed by dense wooded hills, familiar to me from the journeys taken by Carl Joseph during the novel. Much of it had scarcely changed since he crossed it with his mistress in a wagon lit just before the First World War.

As I followed the railway tracks eastward through towns with evocatively unpronounceable names like Brno, Cluj and Przemysl, I could see how fifty years of communist paralysis had frozen the frame. Across the Great Hungarian Plain and through the forests of Trans-Carpathia, where farmers wearing embroidered smocks drove ox carts loaded with logs along tracks crowded with geese, I seemed to be watching a 1930s movie played in reverse.

Surely now I could match Roth’s misty hypnotic descriptions of Galicia with the reality which inspired them. Perhaps, when I reached his birthplace, I might even be able to construct a psycho-geography of the author – what German speakers call his seelenlandschaft, his spiritual landscape.

But when I arrived in his homeland another promise was broken. The scenery was intact but the screenwriter had left the set. It might have helped if I had known that I was being led through the swamps by one of literature’s most prodigious liars. Joseph Roth, born in 1894 in what is now Western Ukraine and buried in the Paris suburbs a mere forty-five years later, the victim of drink and despair, lived a life as clouded and obscure as his remarkable fiction. In his diaries and letters, in his reported conversations and his confessional journalism, he scattered falsehoods like a Ruthenian peasant sowing corn.

As a novelist, he constantly blurs historical truth and hallucination. As a reporter, his documentary accounts of the years after the Great War are bent out of true by his wounded subjectivity. At first glance, his sidelong descriptions of the end of three European empires seem almost cinematic. That is another illusion. If there is anything filmic about Roth’s work, it is its debt to the expressionist German movies which he reviewed in the smoky Berlin picture houses of the 1920s. Like the films of Murnau and Pabst and the paintings of Grosz and Dix and Beckmann, his stories belong in the world of Die Neue Sachlichkeit – the ‘new objectivity’ which was the house style of Weimar Germany.

That term is also misleading. Grosz’s drawings are no more objective than Roth’s writing. In his published work, every phrase, each observation bears witness to the fragility of fact. His accounts of his own life are even more flimsy. Nothing stands up to close examination. His biographer David Bronsen calls him a mythomaniac. The Ukrainian scholar Larisa Cybenko prefers the term ‘fantasist’. The English literary critic Jon Hughes argues that even his narrative voice is a fabrication. In several of his stories he introduces a character with the name Joseph Roth who simultaneously acts in the drama and observes it from the edge of frame. I soon learned that the writer I had chosen as a tour guide through Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall was a compulsive falsifier.

Consider the bald facts of his life. He was born a hundred and twenty years ago on the borders of Austria and Russia. He studied in Lemberg and Vienna and enlisted in the imperial army during the Great War. He worked as a journalist in Berlin during the Weimar Republic, in post-revolutionary Russia and in Paris when it was Europe’s creative fulcrum. Yet the further he travelled from his birthplace, the more his fiction returned to the eastern provinces of Franz Joseph’s former empire.

The little Jewish town where he spent the first eighteen years of his life appears under one fictitious name or another in nine of his fifteen novels. It is peopled with deserting soldiers, Hasidic Jews, dealers in drink and contraband, human traffickers, revolutionaries, prostitutes, and all the other flotsam which drifted across Western Ukraine during and after the Great War.

Most of his characters are compulsive shape-changers. Their identities are as diffuse and slippery as the surrounding marshes. Even the solid Habsburg cities where some of them settle have a history of constant flux. Between the two world wars, the regional capital of Galicia changed its name and nationality four times. When Roth was born, it was Austrian Lemberg. In 1918, during the short-lived Ukrainian Republic it was called Lviv. After the Treaty of Saint Germain it was incorporated into Poland under its old name of Lwow. When the Russians invaded in 1941 it was submerged in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine as Lvov.

Almost all the eastern Habsburg cities changed their names. Tarnopol became Ternopil and Czernovitz was first Cernauti then briefly Chernovtsy, briefly Cernauti and finally Chernivtsi once again as it passed from Austria to Romania to Poland to the Soviet Union. Today these bi-polar towns are all in the Republic of Ukraine and that word contains the secret of their fluid identity. In Russian and in Ruthenian – the nineteenth-century term for the local Slavic vernacular – U kraina means ‘at the border’. It is neither in one place nor another.

Ukraine is one of the most displaced places in Europe and Joseph Roth was its unreliable laureate. When you survey the fragments of autobiography he scattered throughout his writing and conversation you can see his mythomania in action. He told his friends and colleagues that he was born in Schwabendorf, a German colony in Volhynia. When at the end of his life he toyed with conversion to Catholicism, he persuaded a priest to furnish a baptism certificate which named his birthplace as Schwaby. He claimed to be Austrian on his father’s side and Russian on his mother’s side. He manufactured a dozen different identities for his father. In one version he was the son of a celebrated Viennese armament maker known as ‘Le Cartouche Rouge’. In another he was the illegitimate offspring of a high Austrian civil servant. Sometimes he claimed that his mother’s husband was not his father and that he was of noble descent – ‘the natural son of a Polish Count’.

Alternatively he was the son of a painter or an officer with a girl in every garrison. He often signed himself ‘Joseph Roth former lieutenant in the 24th Lancers of the imperial royal army’. He insisted that when Franz Joseph was buried, he had been part of the military escort. He spoke of being captured and transported to the eastern front in the Great War and of serving time as a prisoner of war in Siberia. He said that for his military achievements he had been decorated with the silver medal of the order of Charles I. Not one of these statements is true.

To begin at the beginning (which Roth rarely does), he falsified his birthplace. Schwabendorf, which means ‘Swabian settlement’, does not exist. There may have been Swabian colonies in these borderlands but they were almost certainly not in Volhynia. If you consult a map of Eastern Europe in the early 1900s, you will see that Volyn is the old name for the northern half of Galicia where Russian was spoken and not Ukrainian. Roth’s homeland was firmly in the Ruthenian southern part of the province.

I know this to my cost. When I first visited Galicia I wasted an entire day in search of Schwabendorf. I asked the eager young travel agent who was organising my journey to help me locate the town and we pottered around the Lviv oblast trying to find it. It was a trip back in time as well as in space. We saw low vernacular cottages and decrepit inns which had been untouched for fifty years. In a particularly muddy tangle of villages we were becalmed in our car for forty minutes by a slow-moving herd of cattle and an ill-tempered flock of geese. However, we found no trace of Schwaby or Schwabendorf. After searching for hours in the gathering dusk for a petrol station to fill our almost empty tank, we returned to my hotel none the wiser. It was only then that I discovered we had driven a hundred and fifty kilometres in the wrong direction.

After dinner I fell into conversation with an English couple at the next table. They told me that the previous day they had travelled to Brody to visit the house of their Polish grandfather. En route they had passed the Rudolf Gymnasium, where he was educated, and noticed a rather primitive sculpture on the grass outside commemorating four celebrated alumni. One of these local heroes was Joseph Roth. He was identified not as a novelist or journalist but as a ‘famous anti-fascist’. Armed with this information and reassured that something had survived from Roth’s youth we set off the following day in the correct direction.

This time we were much more successful in our search. A room inside the Gymnasium was set aside as a miniature Joseph Roth museum. There were faded photographs, copies of his work in German and a couple of Ukrainian translations. Unfortunately that was all. There were no memorabilia, no documents and nothing to guide us to his birthplace. Municipal and synagogue records had perished during the Second World War when Brody was pulverised by invading armies from east and west. The charming nineteenth-century buildings pictured in yellowing photographs were gone and in their place were rain-streaked concrete flat blocks. There was scarcely a house surviving from the 1930s, let alone from four decades earlier. As for Schwabendorf, no one had ever heard of it. Someone suggested that Roth might have been referring to a district to the south of the railway tracks called Schwaby. So we mooched around the streets behind the station looking for hints.

It was no easy task. The old Kaiser-yellow station, second cousin to every terminus from Zagreb to Oradea, had been blown up by the Russians when they drove out the Nazis in 1945 and the Soviets had replaced it with a functional red-brick box. I had almost given up the search when I stumbled across the one street in town which carried the writer’s name – Vulitsa Josefa Rotha. It was only a few metres from the railway sidings and it petered out into the dust and scrub on the edge of the rusty tracks. This was a little more encouraging.

If this desultory no-man’s-land was his real birthplace then it might offer an explanation for all the contradictions and false trails which crowded his life. Perhaps he was ashamed of being born on the wrong side of the tracks. It would interlock neatly with his invention of a fantasy father and a genealogy of Polish counts and Austrian arms manufacturers. I clung to this hypothesis for several years and even incorporated it into a BBC radio series I made about the Habsburg borderlands.

At one point I drew the inevitable comparison between Roth and Gustav Mahler, the son of a Jewish publican who grew up in the equally nondescript provincial Moravian town of Jihlava. It was a seductive comparison. There are indeed superficial similarities between the Galician author and the Moravian composer. They each incorporate traces of their early experience into their art. The barracks and the dance hall are rarely absent from Mahler’s symphonies and they provide a backdrop to many of Roth’s stories. However, the resemblance ends there.

While Mahler commanded the heights of Austrian cultural life, Roth retreated to its margins. A visit to Vienna’s House of Literature confirmed that Vulitsa Josefa Rotha was yet another blind alley. Heinz Lünzer, Austria’s principal living Roth scholar, showed me maps of Brody in the 1890s. He pointed out a crossroads with a few scribbled notes beside it. Most scholars now agree that Roth grew up not in Schwaby, let alone the fictitious Schwabendorf, but in an unidentified and long-abandoned rooming house on the main road leading north from the central marketplace.

It was clear that I had little hope of finding Roth’s origins by searching in the railway sidings or tramping through the muddy borderlands. I had even less faith in what survived in the archives. Roth systematically obscured almost every aspect of his early life, beginning with his name. Before he left Brody to study in Lemberg, every document refers to him as Moses Joseph Roth. However in 1916, when he enlisted at the age of twenty-two to serve in the Kaiser’s army, he suppressed his first name. Moses vanished and its place was taken by Joseph.

His fakery did not end there. When he was with friends and family, he replaced Joseph with his childhood diminutive of ‘Mu’, explaining that Mu was short for Muniu, which he claimed was a diminutive of the name Solomon. Then to complicate matters still further, he enlarged Muniu into ‘Muniu faktisch’. According to his biographer David Bronsen, he acquired this pseudonym as a child because he was in the habit of adding the word faktisch, which is the German for ‘in fact’ or ‘really’, to his fanciful table talk.

This gives us a vivid picture of an imaginative child spinning stories in adult company. It does not explain why he obliterated Moses and persisted with faktisch into adult life. Of course Jews have regularly altered their names. In 1939 my own father changed his surname from Yarsakovitch to Marks in response to army clerks who had difficulty pronouncing foreign words. In Roth’s extended collection of essays about the life of Eastern Jews, published under the title The Wandering Jews, he devotes several paragraphs to the subject of unstable Jewish names. In a characteristic tongue-in-cheek passage he explains how for the authorities they were nothing but trouble: All Christians have sensible, European names. Jewish names are mad and Jewish. Nor is that all. They have two or three surnames . . . You never know what to call them.

However, there is nothing mad or even complicated about the name Moses. If, as some scholars have suggested, Roth was in denial about his Jewish origins it seems rather eccentric to replace an Old Testament prophet with a biblical king. When he added the word ‘faktisch’ to ‘Muniu’, it was almost as if he was challenging his hearers to contradict him just as he did at his mother’s dinner table. His later distortions are even more difficult to understand. When he married a pretty young Galician girl in Vienna in 1922, why did he fake his mother’s name on the marriage certificate? His wife Friedl was also of Jewish stock and they married in a synagogue, so it cannot have been simply to hide his origins. Why did he remove his debut novel The Spider’s Web from his published list of works and later insist that his first work of fiction was Hotel Savoy? Was it to dissociate himself from its fascist central character when fascism was on the rise in Austria? It is hard to believe that the Austrian censors would have been fooled for a second. Or was it simply that for Roth, falsehood was always more interesting than reality?

When we scrape the surface of these untruths we can just detect the reality behind them. Roth’s friend Soma Morgenstern published a collection of reminiscences on the centenary of Roth’s birth which casts revealing shafts of light on his later years. One intriguing memory relates to his final days in Paris. He tells us that in the late 1930s the novelist regularly burned the midnight oil with a Lithuanian friend Joseph Gottfarstein and in their late-night conversations Roth offered up an alternative version of his origins. By then his memory was blurred with drink and depression but it has the ring of truth to it. The Austrian officer, the arms manufacturer and the Viennese painter of his imagination are replaced by Nochum Roth, a failed businessman with a loveless marriage and a fragile grasp of reality who abandoned his son at the age of eighteen months. Nochum had ambitions to be a prosperous timber merchant and hop trader but he was no more successful as an entrepreneur than as a husband.

The final chapter of this tale is rather confused but it appears that he had some kind of nervous breakdown during a trip to Hamburg. After failing to close a business deal, he set off back to Galicia. His behaviour in the railway carriage became increasingly bizarre and aggressive and in Berlin he was forcibly removed from the train. His fellow passengers arranged for him to be admitted temporarily to a Prussian mental hospital whose director managed to contact his in-laws. They moved him to the house of a Hasidic rabbi with a reputation as a miracle healer.

According to Gottfarstein, Nochum died insane in the rabbi’s home. Through this story we can glimpse a possible psychological explanation of Roth’s mythomania. He had every reason to conceal his father’s mental illness. He may well have feared that his father’s paranoia was clinical and possibly hereditary. This is speculation of course.

We are on firmer ground when we consider the social motive for his fabrications. In the 1880s, when his parents married, Brody was a prosperous town, crowded with Jewish visitors from every corner of the Empire. It attracted migrants for two reasons. To begin with, it was a major junction on the direct route between Russia and Poland. In 1773, the Emperor Joseph II visited Brody and elevated it to a Habsburg freistadt. As it was less than twelve kilometres from the Russian border and on two major trade routes – east/west from Kiev to Warsaw and Vienna and north/south down to Odessa and Istanbul – it was ideally placed to be a free port. The Kaiser confirmed the town’s new status in 1779 and for almost a century anything exported and imported through Brody was free of customs duty. Over the next century the little stetl grew into a substantial town and it became a magnet for eastern Jews.

We should remember that until 1867 Jews were forbidden to join guilds or reside in Vienna. However, in free towns like Brody they could trade and raise capital to support commerce and manufacture. By the 1880s the number of Jews in the town had risen to 20,000 – more than 65 per cent of the population. Because of its commercial significance it became known as the Trieste of the east. Apart from its prosperity, Brody also had a spiritual reputation. For many years, it had been an important centre of Hebraic learning, which earned it the title of ‘the Polish Jerusalem’.

Among those drawn to the town were growing numbers of Hasidic Jews, followers of the mystic rabbi Baal Shem Tov, who had settled there in the late eighteenth century. Hasidim, with their characteristic long black gabardine coats and florid side-locks, make a regular appearance in many of Roth’s novels. In his collection of essays The Wandering Jews, he includes a moving section describing the celebration of the Jewish Day of Atonement in Galicia, and in The Radetzky March there is a crucial encounter between Franz Joseph and the Hasidim of the border stetl where Carl Joseph is stationed. The followers of Baal Shem Tov were conspicuous not only for their striking dress but also for their noisy and exhibitionist public displays of faith.

The indigenous Christian population – Russian Orthodox, Polish Catholics and Ukrainian Uniats – were very hostile to the Hasidim, not only because of their histrionic behaviour but also because they envied their economic success. Brody became something of an anti-Semitic joke and its ultra-Orthodox population were soon known as the narunim or fools of Brody. This would have been enough to embarrass Roth when he looked hungrily towards cosmopolitan Vienna. Then in 1883 Brody suffered further misfortune. Its freistadt status was withdrawn. Its economy collapsed and it ceased to be an important crossroads. The railway line was redirected and Brody began the slow decline from Jerusalem into a ghost town. Without a father and with an impoverished fatherland, it is hardly surprising that Roth should have been restless and eager to leave his birthplace.

He also had an ambitious, protective and controlling mother. Like so many provincial Jews in the Empire, she surely knew that her son’s future would be more secure away from the underprivileged east. For Habsburg provincials, particularly Jews, success meant reaching the imperial capital. Austria- Hungary may have been the multi-ethnic home to more than twelve nationalities but at heart the Empire was centripetal. Vienna was a magnet for Czechs, Hungarians, South Slavs and Ruthenians.

This was particularly true for Galicians in the years after Roth matriculated from the Rudolf Gymnasium. Although the Ruthenes were among the Emperor’s most loyal subjects, this loyalty was bought at a price. The local gentry were predominantly Polish and the regional capital Lemberg was a particularly Polish town. Its architecture, its customs and its culture all looked back to the years before the Polish partitions when it was part of the great Lithuanian- Polish commonwealth.

Franz Joseph wished to maintain multicultural equilibrium in Galicia and recognise its indigenous languages and traditions. So when the teaching medium in schools was suddenly switched from German to Polish, Roth found himself becalmed in a Polish/Ruthenian/ Jewish backwater. He was not the first writer to wish to draw a double line under his provincial past. After secondary school, he passed quickly through Lemberg University and then continued his graduate studies in the grand neoclassical pile on Vienna’s Ringstrasse.

In the accounts of his Viennese contemporaries and the few surviving photographs, we can see a rather inhibited lower-middle-class provincial stetl boy transforming himself into a literary dandy. His tastes in clothes, food and drink, not to mention politics and literature, show him comprehensively airbrushing out his Galician past. Indeed, between his arrival in Vienna in 1913 and his death twenty-six years later he returned to Ruthenia only three times on very brief visits. Yet his writing tells a totally different tale.

From his very beginnings as an author, first in Vienna and then in Berlin and Paris, his fiction and his journalism were constantly drawn back to his homeland. Galicia makes its first appearance in his second novel, Hotel Savoy, published in 1924. This takes place in a border town described as ‘the gateway to the West’. Critics have often assumed that it is Lodz because of an incident in the novel describing the violent suppression of industrial action. Roth encouraged this when he later confessed to stealing the story of the strike from a fellow writer. However, Lodz was never a border town, and apart from the presence of industry everything else in the book smells and tastes of Lemberg. In the opening chapters of the novel, the hero Gabriel Dan describes his impressions of the town during his first evening on the western side of the Russian border.

When I first visited Lviv, I decided to stay in the distressed elegance of the Hotel Zhorzh, which made up in historical resonance what it lacked in hot water and reliable electricity. Unable to shower or shave, I strolled round the corner to the central market square. Every scent and sound – the cries of headscarfed babushkas, the pickled cabbage and the honey in the comb – echoed Roth’s description of a Galician regional capital:

"It must have been market day. Hay and chaff were scattered about the pavements, shops were just being shut, locks were clicking, chains were rattling, householders were making for home with little handcarts, women wearing bright headscarves were hurrying, carefully carrying full pots in front of them and bursting market bags over their arms with wooden spoons sticking out of the top. A few lanterns cast their silvery light into the dusk, the pavements turned into a parade where men in uniform and civilian clothes twirled their slender canes and waves of Russian scent ebbed and flowed."

Similar border towns recur constantly in his fiction. His next novel, Flight Without End, begins in the fictitious Galician town of Shmerinka, just over the Russian side of the border. In The Wandering Jews, written between these two novels, Roth devotes a long chapter to a description of a typical stetl on the Russian/Polish border where Jews were compelled to live during the empire of the Romanov tsars:

"The little town lies in the middle of a great plain, not bounded by any hill or forest or river. It runs out into the plain. It begins with little huts and ends with them. After a while the huts are replaced by houses. Streets begin. One runs from north to south, the other from east to west. Where they intersect is the marketplace. At the far end of the north-south street is the railway station."

A similar small Jewish town in the Pale of Settlement is the setting for his first commercially successful full-length work, Job: The Story of a Simple Man, where it goes by the name of Zuchnow. The garrison town in The Radetzky March is never named but its central marketplace, railway station and hotel are first cousins to those in Brody. The nearby fictional village of Burdlaki is placed only a few miles from the Russian frontier.

Throughout the 1930s almost every work has Galician links and Roth no longer tries to conceal them. Weights and Measures takes place in a hamlet which is actually called Schwaby. The novel’s preoccupation with contraband and commercial crime suggests exactly the kind of freistadt Roth inhabited during his childhood:

"Leibusch Jadlowker owned the border tavern and no one knew how it came into his possession . . . Ne’er do wells and criminals frequented Jadlowker’s frontier tavern; he harboured vagrants, beggars, thieves and robbers and his cunning was such that the law could not touch him. His papers and those of his guests were always in order. The official informers, who swarmed near the frontier like flies, could report nothing detrimental, nothing immoral, about his way of life."

In Tarabas we are in Koropta, described as Russian but to all intents and purposes Ruthenian. Brody itself makes a brief appearance in The Bust of the Emperor, like Alfred Hitchcock creeping into the corner of frame in one of his films. The small town of Lopatyny where it takes place is described as being off the railway line between Brody and Przemysl.

Although much of The Capuchin Crypt (also published in English translation under the title The Emperor’s Tomb) occurs in Vienna, Slovenia, Baden and even Siberia, it constantly returns to Zlotogrod, the invented Galician town that regularly stands in for Brody in his later work. Just to reinforce the biographical link, the name ‘Zlotogrod’, which means ‘golden town’ in both Russian and Polish, echoes the name of Brody’s main thoroughfare which today is still called Golden Street. His birthplace even haunts Roth’s writing after his death. His posthumously published novella Leviathan tells the story of a coral trader in a Galician stetl. All these Brody lookalikes share the same landmarks: a central crossroads with a market square, a tavern managed by a Jew, a hotel with a café where the officers drink and a station buffet where they lunch. At one end of town is a barracks and at the other is a cemetery. On the edge are marshes where frogs croak and mosquitoes bite and in the distance is a low curtain of hills.

This raises an obvious question about Roth’s ambivalent relationship with Galicia. If he was compelled to conceal and distort his own past, why does his writing constantly revisit it? In his absorbing study Understanding Joseph Roth, Sidney Rosenfeld has no doubt that the answer is autobiographical. He argues that Roth’s entire life and work are a spiritual quest for a lost father and fatherland.

He reminds us that The Capuchin Crypt, the sequel to The Radetzky March which takes the story of the Trotta family up to the eve of the Anschluss, was originally entitled ‘A Man Seeks his Fatherland’. At the very end of the novel, its central character – Carl Joseph Trotta’s cousin – is left adrift in Vienna without a home or a purpose in life. His final words – ‘So where could I go now, I, a Trotta’ – echo Roth’s own sense of displacement. Rosenfeld concludes that the melancholy which permeates all his fiction and much of his journalism is the product not only of the loss of his homeland but also the betrayal of his Jewish identity after he abandoned his Galician comfort zone.

This is a tempting path to follow but it is a dangerous one. It risks confining his work to a box marked ‘Habsburg Jewish nostalgia’. However, his characters tell a different story. They are as self- contradictory as their creator. His imperial functionaries are locked in a dysfunctional empire and his stetl Jews are often canny and unprincipled survivors. Carl Joseph’s father, a provincial Habsburg bureaucrat, has his tender and touching moments but for the most part he is a remote anachronism, personifying the self-destructive rigidity of Austria- Hungary’s final years. The Jewish human-trafficker Kapturak is clever and resourceful but he is also quick to exploit and if necessary betray his fellow Jews.

Roth knew from his youth that victims could also be predators. His fictionalised Galicia is a tapestry in which the positive and negative strands of the dying monarchy are interwoven. Roth’s own statehood was as complex and ambiguous as the home territory of his fiction. He is usually described as an ‘Austrian’ writer but this is an over-simplification.

It is true that he was born and died an Austrian. However, when his Austro- Hungarian homeland was dismembered in 1918 and Galicia was annexed by Poland after the Treaty of Versailles, Roth found himself with an unwanted Polish passport. His response was instant. He quixotically applied for Austrian citizenship. He then perversely abandoned Vienna and spent his twenties and early thirties as an itinerant scribbler in Berlin, Paris, Russia, Albania and the south of France. At no point in his post-war adult life did he really inhabit the country which today we call Austria.

He was the archetypal displaced person and an Austrian in name only. In 1933 when Hitler rose to power he went into permanent exile. His very restlessness makes him impossible to pin down. His writing is as fluid as his nationality. His language is German, but his subject matter is often Slavic, sometimes Jewish and always extra-territorial. It is this sense of perpetual motion both in his prose and his subject matter which characterises his vision of the world rather than the subconscious guilt at betraying his Jewish origins diagnosed by Rosenfeld.

In his displaced sensibility he is a true son of the borderland. Wherever he sets his narrative – in Germany, Austria, France or Russia – he speaks in the accents of Galicia. His love of paradox and contradiction, which makes his novels so haunting, is buried deep in his homeland’s history and geography.

Galicia certainly had more than its fair share of both. In its Habsburg high season at the beginning of the twentieth century it stretched from the Polish border west of Przemysl to Tarnopol on the frontier with Tsarist Russia, up to Sandomir in the north and down to the border with Romanian Bukovina. In its marketplaces and trading inns Polish, Russian, Romanian, Ukrainian, German and Yiddish were all spoken by the local population. These languages took root during half a millennium of occupation by neighbouring kingdoms and empires.

The most prominent historian of Western Ukraine, Jaroslav Hrytsak, has unearthed early records which explain its complex demography. The first references to Galicia describe it as a region of White Croatia. Then at the end of the tenth century it became the easternmost extension of Moravia. In the twelfth century it sat on the frontier between Ukrainians and Poles. By the turn of the fourteenth century it was controlled by Hungarians – hence the Habsburgs’ claim to the territory. It crossed religious and cultural frontiers as well as political ones. In its early days, it was the point where the Mongol invasion halted. After the Mongols retreated it was the dividing line between Roman and Orthodox Christianity. For the next four centuries, during the rule of Polish kings and Habsburg emperors, it remained a region of restless displacement. Even after the Treaty of Versailles it continued to be tossed backwards and forwards between Russia, Ukraine and Poland before it was finally incorporated into the enlarged Polish nation state. It was everywhere and nowhere, the archetypical borderland.

Hrytsak goes even further; he argues that Galicia never really existed. Before the 1800s, no one described themselves as a Galitzianer. The region was a Habsburg construct; it was invented at the end of the eighteenth century to confront Russian Orthodoxy with Austrian Enlightenment. The Habsburg monarchy intended it to be a kind of eastern Switzerland, ethnically and religiously mixed but culturally enlightened, with German as its lingua franca.

This offers another explanation of Roth’s ambivalent relationship with his homeland. In his imagination he remodelled Austria-Hungary into a kind of anti-nation-state – a composite of everything that was uprooted by the Treaty of Versailles – and a sanctuary for all the orphaned peoples scattered in the wake of the Great War. It was defined by being both multicultural and extra-territorial.

Roth’s most eloquent expression of this alternative reality is in his late novella The Bust of the Emperor. Its central character is Count Morstin, the former governor of a Galician province. He is so traumatised by the Kaiser’s death that he invents an elaborate daily ceremony in which he salutes a rough vernacular stone image of the deceased Franz Joseph. When the local Polish gentry mock and criticise him he arranges a formal burial for the Emperor’s bust and delivers a passionate threnody for the dead Empire:

"I hate nationalism and nation states. My old home the Monarchy alone was a great mansion with many doors and many chambers, for every condition of men. This mansion has been divided, split up, splintered. I have nothing more to seek for there. I am used to living in a home, not in cabins."

This passage is sometimes dismissed as a symptom of Roth’s retreat into alcohol-induced nostalgia. However, read in the context of Hrytsak’s thesis it is powerfully symbolic. Count Morstin’s panegyric is a plea for a tolerant future to preserve the multicultural past. By extension Roth’s fictional borderlands can be seen as a vision of an alternative homeland for displaced persons everywhere.

The same principle underpins Roth’s own flexible identity and that of his characters. Shape-changing is a strategy for survival in a world where borders have always been blurred and nation states have regularly died one evening only to be reborn as somewhere different the next morning. In order to survive, the displaced need multiple identities. Roth once admitted to friends that ‘I lived several different existences.’

This reveals more than just a penchant for invention and elaboration. It is a declaration of kinship with all the displaced people who surrounded him in his youth and accompanied him throughout his years of exile. Roth fabricates from political necessity as much as personal loss. If we wish to find Muniu faktisch, he is sitting in a Paris café or a Berlin kneipe observing his fellow exiles and turning them into literature. He knows that he is an unreliable narrator. When he inserts a fictitious Joseph Roth into Flight Without End, he is glorying in his own unreliability. He is Muniu nicht faktisch.

As D. H. Lawrence once remarked, ‘Never trust the teller, trust the tale.’ Roth invites us to bypass historical fact and trust his untrustworthy characters – Gabriel Dan and Franz Tunda, the returning Russian prisoners of war, Friedrich Kargan the revolutionary agent provocateur, Eibenschütz the inspector of weights and measures, Kapturak the moneylender and people-trafficker, Fallmerayer the stationmaster and Golubchik the political assassin. They each reinvent themselves in order to take their place in a fluid world. And to do so, they must all cross borders, either through compulsion, choice, profession or passion.

Visiting Western Ukraine in the early twenty-first century one can see how little has changed in Roth’s smudged birthplace. Seventy years after his death it is once again the natural habitat of the displaced. Hitler may have removed all of the Jews and Stalin most of the Poles and Romanians but others have taken their place. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union Ukraine has been a soft border for economic migrants and sex-traffickers, just as it was when Jadlowker’s tavern was a place of passage on the Tsarist frontier. It is the same covert marketplace for decommissioned weapons as it was when Tunda and Kargan smuggled bombs and small arms past the border guards for their revolutionary colleagues. It is also a huge factory for computer viruses, some of which are designed to destabilise entire economies.

If we find some of Roth’s plotlines far-fetched, we only have to export them into Moldova or Belorus or any other remnant of the USSR to see the consequences of displacement after an empire dies. When Ukraine turned its back on the Soviet Empire to the east, correspondents observed agents provocateurs pouring into frontier cities. The shouts of freedom in the baroque squares of Lviv echoed northwards into the Baltic states and south into Ossetia and Georgia.

But as Joseph Roth revealed eight decades earlier, such newly discovered liberties are often paper-thin. Since the Orange Revolution, Ukraine has drifted backwards and forwards between Russia and the west, compelled by its historic identity as the land ‘by the border’. This constant sense of being stranded between somewhere and nowhere goes some way towards explaining the elusive nature of Roth’s fiction.

It also explains another paradox which has puzzled me ever since I first finished The Radetzky March in the mid-1970s. For thirty years I hunted in vain for an English biography or a decent critical study of Roth. My repeated proposals for a documentary film about him were met with a blank stare. Outside continental Europe he had slipped under the radar. How could an author whose work has been filmed both for cinema and television in Austria, Germany and even Italy, still be so marginalised? How could the best-known journalist writing in German in the 1920s have left no legacy in the Anglophone world? His accounts of political culture in the Weimar Republic and early Soviet Russia are years ahead of their time. Yet he is never mentioned in the two most substantial accounts of Weimar culture, by Peter Gay and John Willett. In his prescient fiction, he warned of the dangers of burgeoning Nazism as early as 1922.

So why does hardly anyone read let alone teach The Spider’s Web or The Silent Prophet, which respectively describe the totalitarian threats of fascism and communism? It was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall that I began to understand the reasons for this neglect. We had simply forgotten the world he evoked. Perhaps, once it emerged from the Soviet ice age which had preserved it for half a century, its most potent chronicler would at last find his proper place. And for a brief moment that seemed possible. The novels and journalism were finally reissued in decent translations. Roth’s Galician birthplace even aspired briefly to unity with Western Europe. Then the caravan moved on and its chronicler slipped back into the shadows. But then brevity always was and still remains the fate of Roth’s unstable homeland.