First thoughts: The Hotel Years

THROUGHOUT the 1920s and ’30s, the Austrian novelist, Joseph Roth, travelled extensively throughout Europe, leading a nomadic life, living in various hotels across the continent.

Roth wrote and lived in exceptionally turbulent times in European history. He witnessed the disastrous consequences of the newly-formed centrally planned economy in the Soviet Union, when he travelled there as reporter. He also saw how the rise of fascism turned Germany in the 1930s into a super-nationalistic xenophobic state.

Roth, a Galician Jew, who never quite assimilated into any society, died tragically of alcoholism, almost penniless, in Paris in 1939, at just 44 years of age.