Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth

Author: BBC Radio 4 June 4, 2026 Duration: 55:06

Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the great writers on Central Europe after the first world war and on the dying of the old orders with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire. As a German speaking Jew from Brody in the north-eastern edge of that Empire, which was then in Galicia, next in Poland and is now in Ukraine, Roth (1894 - 1939) was to spend his short life moving first to Lviv then to Vienna and finally to Paris via Berlin without ever finding a settled home. Roth explored the loss of homeland and anticipated the dangers of the new nationalism through his journalism and in his novels including Radetzky March, Job, Rebellion and Flight Without End, and his books were among the first the Nazis burned.

With

Helen Chambers Emeritus Professor of German at the University of St Andrews

Deborah Holmes Associate Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Salzburg

And

Jon Hughes Reader in German and Cultural Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Reading list:

Jon Hughes, Facing Modernity: Fragmentation, Culture and Identity in Joseph Roth's Writing in the 1920s (MHRA, 2006)

Heinz Lunzer and Victoria Lunzer-Talos, Joseph Roth: Leben und Werk in Bildern (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1994)

Keiron Pim, Endless Flight: The Life of Joseph Roth (Granta, 2022)

Joseph Roth (trans. Deborah Holmes, ed. Helen Constantine), Vienna Tales (Oxford University Press, 2014)

Joseph Roth (trans. and ed. Michael Hofmann), A Life in Letters (Granta, 2012)

Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), Collected Shorter Fiction (Granta, 2001)

Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), Rebellion (Granta, 2000)

Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Radetzky March (Granta, 2022)

Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Legend of the Holy Drinker (Granta, 2022)

Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Wandering Jews (Granta, 2001)

Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933 (Granta, 2022)

Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Hotel Years: Wanderings in Europe Between the Wars (Granta, 2015)

Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), Reports from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France 1925-1939 (Granta, 2004)

Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The Emperor’s Tomb (Granta, 2013)

Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The String of Pearls (Granta, 1999)

Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann), The White Cities: Reports From France 1925-1939 (Granta, 2013)

Joseph Roth (trans. David Le Vay), Weights and Measures (Pushkin Press, 2024)

Joseph Roth (trans. Daved Le Vay and Beatrice Musgrave), Flight Without End (Pushkin Press, 2024)

Joseph Roth (trans. Ruth Martin), The Coral Merchant: Essential Stories (Pushkin Press, 2020)

Joseph Roth (trans Will Stone), On the End of the World (Pushkin Press, 2019)

Joseph Roth (trans. Dorothy Thompson), Job: The Story of a Simple Man (Granta, 2022)

Wilhelm Von Sternburg, Joseph Roth: Eine Biographie (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios Production

Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.


For anyone with a restless mind, the weekly In Our Time podcast from BBC Radio 4 offers a deep and engaging conversation across the vast terrain of human thought and experience. Host Misha Glenny guides a panel of distinguished academics, not in lecture format, but through a lively, accessible discussion where ideas genuinely collide and unfold. You might find yourself immersed in the complex legacy of a figure like Napoleon one week, and the next be untangling the scientific principles of photosynthesis or the philosophical arguments of the Enlightenment. The scope is deliberately broad, covering history, religion, culture, science, and philosophy, because understanding one often requires context from another. What you hear is the genuine process of exploration-the questions, the debates, and the connections made in real time by leading experts. It’s the kind of podcast that doesn’t just recount the Sack of Rome or the intricacies of Russian court politics, but examines why these moments mattered and how their echoes are still felt. The result is a consistently stimulating hour that treats listeners as curious equals, offering the intellectual satisfaction of following a great conversation to its illuminating conclusion.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 100

In Our Time
Podcast Episodes
Cybernetics [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:38
Misha Glenny and guests discuss cybernetics – the field of study which gave us the prefix ‘cyber’ and helped lay the foundations for the information age. After the Second World War, cybernetics emerged as the study of co…
Indian Indentured Labour [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 51:35
Misha Glenny and guests discuss how, after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1833, sugar planters recruited workers from India to replace or compete with their formerly enslaved labourers. Over the next 9…
M.C. Escher [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:08
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the work of Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898-1972), the graphic artist and printmaker best known for his impossible buildings, paradoxical perspectives, and repeating geometric patterns. Born…
Handel's Messiah [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:05
Misha Glenny and his guests discuss the most famous oratorio of George Frideric Handel (1685-1759) and his librettist Charles Jennens (1700-1773). For his libretto, Jennens drew from Old and New Testament texts: propheci…
The Spanish-American War 1898 [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 55:22
Misha Glenny and guests discuss a turning point in world affairs in 1898 that left Spain greatly reduced as an imperial power and the US the owner of the Philippines, Guam and Puerto Rico, with a significant influence ov…
Silicon [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:50
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the physics, biology and chemistry of the element silicon which is at the heart of some of the most useful and beautiful objects on the planet. While it is still being created throughout t…
Dadaism [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 50:58
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the provocative artistic phenomenon that first startled audiences in 1916 in Zurich. There, at the Cabaret Voltaire at the Holländische Meierei on the Spiegelgasse, Emmy Hennings and Hugo…
Archaea [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 53:07
Misha Glenny and guests discuss one of the most remarkable scientific discoveries of the 20th century: the archaea microorganisms. In the 1970s the American microbiologist Carl Woese (1928-2012) realised that the tiny ba…
Margaret Beaufort [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 54:06
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the woman who, as a child bride, became mother to the boy who would eventually become the first king in the Tudor dynasty. Lady Margaret Beaufort (c1443-1509) was twelve when she married E…
The Columbian Exchange [not-audio_url] [/not-audio_url]

Duration: 52:40
Misha Glenny and guests discuss the exchange of cultures and biology across the Atlantic and Pacific after 1492. That was when Columbus reached the Bahamas, a time when Europe had no potatoes, tomatoes, sunflowers or, ar…