ABSTRACT
When joseph Roth's first novel was being serialized in a Viennese newspaper in 1923, life uncannily began to imitate art. Das Spinnennetz (The Spider'S Web) tells of a young man's rise to power and influence aided by the antidemocratic and anti-Semitic prejudices he shares with others, of the way his ruthlessness is fueled by his own cowardice and fear of retribution, and of how the climate of mutual manipulation in the early 1920S makes life in its entirety come to resemble a "web" of machination and double-dealing suspended above a void. Publication was halted by the news of Hitler's Munich putsch. This episode in Roth's early writing career illustrates both his flair for identifying the decisive factors at work in Central European society in the aftermath of World War I, which Roth had developed by working as a journalist, and also his talent for finding the expressive imagery with which to evoke a world suddenly bereft of any sense of fundamental value and legitimizing authority.
