The Emperor's Tomb Analysis

Die Kapuzinergruft, German for ‘The Capuchin Crypt’ describes the traditional burial ceremonies of the Imperial Hapsburgs. In his 1938 novel of the same name, author Joseph Roth describes the parallel symbolic death and burial of an Empire in the waning days of the Habsburg Monarchy. The Overlook Press published an English translation by John Hoare in 1984; The Emperor’s Tomb describes the life of a Slovenian national during the waning days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and through this use of a minority, he conveys the struggle for self identity that a great many states and countries went through as a result of their dissolutions at the end of the First World War. At the beginning of the book, Franz Ferdinand Trotta, or Herr Trotta, as he is referred to in much of the book, is a strong and decisive man. He leads a life of dignity and grace, never stepping too far from where he came, following the rules of society. But internally, he struggles almost constantly with an inner voice that wants him to explore his romantic and less realistic side. Despite a fierce pride of his heritage as a Slovenian, expressed through language and culture, the region of Slovenia does not have its own sovereignty, and Trotta is forced to identify as Austro-Hungarian. His father had long believed that the Empire would become three-headed, with a Slovenian crown rising up within the empire of the Austrians and Hungarians. But this was never to be. Slovenia would one day become a sovereign