The Spider's Web and Zipper and His Father

Two novellas of rare energy and insight, The Spider's Web and Zipper and His Father are filled with Joseph Roth's surprising political foresight and compassionate sensitivity to the tremors of a world on the brink of collapse. The Spider's Web paints a chillingly realistic picture of the conspiracies of the radical right that were to undermine the Weimar Republic and pave the way for Hitler and National Socialism to take root among the disenchanted middle classes. Through the eyes of Theodor Lohse, a frustrated and disappointed veteran recently returned from the Great War, Roth shows the dark and powerful attraction of secret right-wing organizations to a man deprived of comradeship and military glory by the ennui of civilian life. Driven by anti-Semitism and an intense hatred of communism, Lohse assumes various disguises in an underground terrorist network, spreading the evil message of National Socialism through random acts of violence and intimidation. Zipper and his Father is a melancholy evocation of the seedy, unsuccessful lives of lowly clerks lounging in Viennese coffee houses and dreaming of what might have been. Roth charts the shared eccentricities and erratic progress of a father and son in the febrile world of German cinema in the late 1920s.