Co-Implicated Literatures in East-Central Europe: Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March and Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge over the Drina

Abstract

World literature can only come into being against the background of what it excludes from its area, but in the form in which it is rendered today, it denies that its representatives are not easily implicated in their non-representative counterparts. To examine the asymmetric relationship between world literature’s uneven but co-implicated constituents, the article focuses on the East-Central European post-imperial constellation whose writers were traumatized by the collapse of their empires. It confronts two narratives of disaster, Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March written from the perspective of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s rulers, and Ivo Andrić’s novel The Bridge over the Drina written from the perspective of imperial subjects. For Roth, who focuses on a military Austrian family, the Empire entered its disintegration when its children renounced their fathers. For Andrić, who departs from the political family of the South Slavs, that took place when its authorities abandoned their subjects. The article analyses the two novels’ seemingly opposite but ultimately co-implicated answers to this trauma.