The Austrian novelist Joseph Roth was not yet forty-five years old when he died in French exile in 1939. Six years earlier, when he was at the peak of his literary success, his books had been outlawed and burned in Nazi Germany. From that time until his death his works were inaccessible to German readers. When the Third Reich collapsed in 1945, Roth was all but forgotten. The older generation may have still recalled him, at best, as the author of the novels Hiob: Roman eines einfachen Mannes (1930; translated as Job: The Story of a Simple Man, 1931) and Radetzkymarsch (1932; translated as Radetzky March , 1932); to the generation that had grown to adulthood during the Hitler years he was unknown. This situation changed radically in 1956, when Kiepenheuer & Witsch in Cologne published its three-volume edition of Roth's works. The rediscovered author was universally acknowledged as one of the most accomplished prose stylists in...