Kilchberg—a picturesque, quiet suburb of Zurich—is getting more attention in the Swiss media these days than it really deserves. One of the most important Schwingen tournaments will take place soon: the Kilchberger Schwinget, which is held only once every six years. And I love Schwingen. However, if I end up going to Kilchberg in the near future (I haven’t decided yet), it won’t be for that reason, but rather for the Joseph Roth reading at the C. F. Meyer House. Joseph Roth is a criminally neglected author. “A Brief History of the German Novel,” for example, doesn’t mention him even once. Not because he was Austrian—Max Frisch (CH) gets plenty of coverage. The taste of the German-language literary scene is definitely hard for outsiders to understand. For me, Roth is one of the true greats of German-language literature—a profound, multifaceted author with an enormous poetic gift. His writing is sensitive, European (he lived in Paris for a long time and often wrote about Galicia), wonderfully Jewish ("Job"), and anti-modernist. Unlike Simone Weil, for example, he paid little attention to the totalitarian modernist movements of his time—Nazism, Bolshevism. The Habsburg Empire era, with its penchant for tradition, decorum, and respect for what earlier generations had built, as well as its restrained sentimentality—that was Roth’s world, and it remained so even after its end in 1918. By the way, the reading will be from “The Emperor’s Bust,” a short story imbued with hypnotic nostalgia. A good introduction to the work of the author of «Radetzky March» and «Job». #literature #JewishLiterature #books #JosephRoth #germanlanguage