Joseph Roth, translator of A lost empire

Abstract

This article discusses a journalistic Feuielleton by Austrian novelist Joseph Roth that deals with a miniature of Salomon’s Temple, which he found in a café in Berlin’s Hirtenstrasse, in the heart of what was the neighborhood inhabited by Eastern European Jews in Germany’s capital. This miniature has been built under the sign of nostalgia, and this nostalgia becomes a metaphor of Roth’s nostalgia for the lost Austro-Hungarian Empire, a key for the understanding of his oeuvre. At the same time, this feeling is contextualized in the realm of mystical and metaphysical beliefs, central to traditional Judaism.