The Radetzky March

When an infantry lieutenant saves Emperor Franz Joseph at the Battle of Solferino in 1859, his reward is a title that elevates the Trotta family above its peasant origins and seals its slow undoing. Roth follows three generations, from the ennobled grandfather to a district commissioner devoted to the empire to a young officer who drinks and gambles his way toward a meaningless death, as the Austro-Hungarian world decays around them. The novel reads the whole society through the family, the garrison routines, the imperial ceremonies, the loyalty that curdles into futility, until the young Trotta is killed in the first days of World War I and the empire he served dies just behind him.