The Austrian Novelist Joseph Roth is best known for Radetzkymarsch (The Radetzky March, 1932) a wryly nostalgic evocation of the Habsburg Empire in decline, and Hiob (Job, 1930) a novel about the lost world of the eastern European Jews. As a journalist in the 1920s, however, he was one of the most politically astute and socially aware observers of life in Berlin, and indeed elsewhere in Germany, during the Weimar Republic. His observations were published in the German, Viennese, and Prague press in articles and essays whose literary quality and reader appeal made him, at a Mark a line, the highest paid journalist working for the Frankfurter Zeitung. His work appeared unter dem Strich in the so-called “Feuilleton,” the arts section, below the line that marked off news from comment. Committed throughout his life to discovering and communicating underlying truths, as opposed to documentary fact, Roth saw his contributions as more substantial than the ephemeral daily political reports. In a letter to his editor in 1926 he asserted with characteristic rhetorical élan, “Ich bin nicht eine Zugabe, nicht eine Mehlspeise, sondern eine Hauptmahlzeit” (I'm not a garnish, not a dessert, I'm the main course), continuing, “Ich zeichne das Gesicht der Zeit” (I paint the portrait of the age). The main reason for his conviction that his articles had a greater impact was their literary quality. In another letter in 1927 he explains that by his writing he is trying to show the Germans that art is no decorative optional extra: it is as crucial to survival in the modern world as machinery, a winter coat, and medication.