Radetzky March
"Radetzky March" is Joseph Roth's best-known work. It was critically acclaimed after being first published in German in 1932 and then translated to English in 1933. In 2003, the German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki included it in "Der Kanon" ("The Canon") of the most important German-language literary novels. It is a novel of the ironies and humour inherent in the well-intentioned actions that led to the decline and fall of a family and an empire; the Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria-Hungary remains ignorant of the unintended, negative consequences of so rewarding his subjects, and he continues conferring great favors, as with Lt. Trotta, after the Battle of Solferino in 1859.