Joseph Roth was born into a
Jewish family and grew up in
Brody (currently in Ukraine), a small town near
Lemberg (now
Lviv, Ukraine) in
East Galicia, in the easternmost reaches of what was then the
Austro-Hungarian empire.
Jewish culture played an important role in the life of the town, which
had a large Jewish population. Roth grew up with his mother and her relatives; he never saw his father, who had disappeared before he was born. After secondary school, Joseph Roth moved to Lemberg to begin his university studies in 1913, before transferring to the
University of Vienna in 1914 to study philosophy and
German literature. In 1916, Roth broke off his university studies and volunteered to serve in the
Austro-Hungarian Army on the
Eastern Front, "though possibly only as an army journalist or censor". Roth married Friederike (Friedl) Reichler in 1922. In the late 1920s, his wife became
schizophrenic, which threw Roth into a deep crisis, both emotionally and financially. She lived for years in a sanatorium and was later murdered in the Nazis'
Aktion T4 programme. In 1929 he met Andrea Manga Bell, born in Hamburg and unhappily married to
Alexandre Douala Manga Bell, Prince of
Douala in
Cameroon. Her husband had returned to Cameroon while she and their children stayed in Europe. When Roth met her, she was editor of the Ullstein magazine
Gebrauchsgraphik. Being a prominent liberal Jewish journalist, Roth left Germany when
Adolf Hitler became
Reich Chancellor on
30 January 1933. Andrea Manga Bell accompanied him with her children. He spent most of the next six years in Paris, a city he loved. His essays written in France display a delight in the city and its culture. Shortly after Hitler's rise to power, in February 1933, Roth wrote in a prophetic letter to his friend, the Austrian writer
Stefan Zweig: The relationship with Andrea Manga Bell failed due to financial problems and Roth's jealousy. From 1936 to 1938, Roth had a romantic relationship with
Irmgard Keun. They worked together, traveling to Paris,
Wilna,
Lemberg, Warsaw, Vienna, Salzburg, Brussels and Amsterdam. Without denying his Jewish origins, Roth considered his relationship to
Catholicism very important. In the final years of his life, he may have converted: Michael Hofmann states in the preface to the collection of essays
The White Cities (also published as
Report from a Parisian Paradise) that Roth "was said to have had two funerals, one Jewish, one Catholic". In his last years, he moved from hotel to hotel, drinking heavily and becoming increasingly anxious about money and the future. Despite suffering from chronic
alcoholism, he remained prolific until his death in Paris in 1939. His novella
The Legend of the Holy Drinker (1939) chronicles the attempts made by an alcoholic vagrant to regain his dignity and honor a debt. Roth's final collapse apparently was precipitated by learning that playwright
Ernst Toller had hanged himself in New York on 22 May. Roth died on 27 May from double pneumonia, aggravated by abrupt withdrawal of alcohol that produced
delirium tremens, and was buried on 30 May at the
Cimetière de Thiais south of Paris. ==Journalism and literary career==