Nostalgia for the Storyteller: Joseph Roth's Narratology in Beichte eines Mörders erzählt in einer Nacht

Abstract

Borrowing from Svetlana Boym's concept of “reflective nostalgia,” this article advances a specific understanding of nostalgia in Joseph Roth's late literary work, conceptualizing it not in a psychological or political sense, but as a poetics of storytelling. At the center of this discussion is the notion of narrative performativity in Beichte eines Mörders erzählt in einer Nacht (1936), and I argue that the practice of storytelling can be read as a nostalgic and ironic gesture that comments on the modern crisis of the perception of time. While the hypodiegetic narrator of Beichte is stylized as an authentic oral storyteller, who nostalgically recounts his experiences and opens up a space that transcends the chronological notion of time, his nostalgia is undermined by the ironic frame narrative in which it is embedded. The metaleptic structure at the end of the novel breaks the narrative illusion of a realistic plot and negates any nostalgic appropriations. Experiencing the storyteller does not create a meaningful community of listeners, but instead forms strange echoes—doublings—that confuse the narrative order. This reading shows Roth as a genuine modern writer who provides a model for the function of literature as an answer to the modern obsession with progress and newness.

Engaged Humanities

“…It should not be dismissed as simple conservatism but approached as a "complex phenomenon in which multiple nostalgias layer each other in an often reflexive manner" (Bijl, 2013, p. 128). Longing for shtetl life also predates the Holocaust, for example in the work of Joseph Roth (Battegay, 2016):…”