Rebellion
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At the end of the Great War, Andreas Pum has lost a leg but at least he has a medal and a barrel-organ which he plays on the streets of Vienna. At first the simple-minded veteran is satisfied with his lot, and he even finds an ample widow to marry. But then a public quarrel with a respectable citizen on a tram turns Andreas's life onto a rapid downward trajectory. As he loses first his beggar's permit, then his new wife, and even his freedom, he is finally provoked into rejecting his blind faith in the benevolence of both government and God.
Joseph Roth, Austrian-Jewish novelist, was born in 1894 near Lemberg in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, now in Ukraine. He studied at Vienna University and in the years following World War I worked in Vienna, Berlin and Munich as a journalist, mostly for left-wing publications, which involved him in extensive European travel. He also began to write novels. For most of his life he had no fixed abode, preferring hotel rooms and writing at café tables. In 1932 his masterpiece, The Radetzky March, was published. In 1933 when Hitler came to power his position became dangerous and he moved to Paris; his books were amongst those burnt by the Nazis that year. He continued to travel and to write, but began to suffer poor health - partly as a result of alcoholism. He died prematurely in 1939. Carolin Duttlinger is Professor of German Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford, Fellow and Tutor of Wadham College and Co-Director of the Oxford Kafka Research Centre. She has worked on Kafka for over twenty years and is one of the leading authorities on his work, and author of Kafka and Photography (OUP 2007), The Cambridge Introduction to Franz Kafka (CUP 2013) and Franz Kafka in Context (CUP 2017).
In 2024 she will co-curate Kafka Global, a major public Kafka exhibition at the Bodleian Library Oxford and a Kafka arts festival featuring several newly commissioned works in drama, dance, literature and music.
Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet who writes in English. He has translated the works of Bertolt Brecht, Franza Kafka, Hans Fallada, and Joseph Roth, and teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville.