Ends and Means in Prewar Europe : RIGHT AND LEFT and THE LEGEND OF THE HOLY DRINKER, <i> By Joseph Roth Translated by Michael Hofmann (The Overlook Press: $23.95; 291 pp.)</i>

Although the Hapsburg dynasty ruled the Austro-Hungarian empire for nearly 650 years, it was only after it finally collapsed in 1918 that it found a court portraitist capable of celebrating the quasi-mystical authority with which it had governed Eastern Europe for so many centuries. As a disaffected socialist and an outspoken leader of the Nazi opposition movement, the Austrian novelist Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was obsessed with the demise of this decadent monarchy, whose spectacular decline into social and political obsolescence he recorded with a peculiar blend of nostalgia and contempt. Even when his fiction is set well after the end of the last emperor’s reign, the fading of the Hapsburg’s imperial splendor provides the ideological background of novels in which dutiful servants of the “Supreme War Lord,” “the august person of His Majesty the Emperor Francis Joseph,” parade around Vienna like relics, addressing their sovereign with preposterous honorifics that seem to hark back to the titles of another era.

In “The Radetzky March,” Roth’s masterpiece, the feudal anachronisms of an extinct social order based on rank and station give way to the greed and militarism of the self-aggrandizing philistines Roth is constantly juxtaposing with the absurd yet steadfast retainers of the ancien regime . Vividly evoking this world of rampant opportunism, “Right and Left” is a scathing indictment of the political profiteers who swarmed over the remains of the Hapsburg Empire, plastering the streets with swastikas and pillaging the monarchy’s dilapidated bureaucracy for purposes of their own self-advancement.

Set in Berlin in the 1920s, the novel focuses on two sons of a wealthy banker, both of whom restore their dwindling fortunes by flattering the messianic ambitions of warmongering politicians and businessmen. Paul Bernheim is a pompous dandy who dabbles in socialist causes and then, in a cynical about-face after rash financial speculations bring him to the brink of ruin, wins back the money he so frivolously squandered on cars and clothing by marrying into the family of a Nazi industrialist.

His envious brother Theodor, on the other hand, becomes famous for his shrill extremism as a far-right journalist after a Russian Jew, a department-store magnate, secures him a position at a newspaper (an act typical of the perversity of Roth’s Jewish characters, who often seem to take active pleasure in contributing to the convictionless anarchy of this tumultuous period in European history). Having at last achieved the glamour for which he once loathed his brother, the nattily dressed Theodor uses his columns to foment social unrest by striking antisemitic poses and launching into delirious Aryan diatribes about the restoration of racial purity in the Fatherland, all the while groveling before his Jewish patron.

The novel’s central theme (as well as a possible explanation of its otherwise mysterious title) is the interchangeability of social causes in a world in which ends take precedence over means, in which political beliefs are simply vehicles for furthering one’s own interests, and in which egotism supplants duty as the reigning principle governing the behavior of a new breed of fascist mercenaries. Although less widely known than many of Roth’s novels, “Right and Left” is a superb example of his anatomy of the psychology of fascism, especially in his chilling portrait of the despicable Theodore who, cowering resentfully in Paul’s shadow, exemplifies the petty egotism of the typical Nazi whose thirst for power over other men is a direct function of his desperate, nihilistic conviction of his own worthlessness.

“Right and Left” also contains many of Roth’s most characteristic themes, in particular that of the eternal vagabond who lives an aimless and picaresque existence languishing for a homeland swept away by the disintegration of the Hapsburg Empire. The victims of acute nostalgia for the former regime, his characters are perpetually bivouacking under bridges and camping out in fleabag hotels, leading makeshift lives as career itinerants who dream about the quiet childhoods they had under the protection of stern patriarchs.

Roth’s fiction is as fixated on fathers as is Kafka’s, with the metaphor of paternity reverberating throughout stories in which the rigid patriarchal mandates of obedience determine the character of virtually every relationship. He makes a direct analogy between the unquestioning submission of the son to the father and the submission of the entire nation to the decrees of “His Majesty” Francis Joseph, an allegiance that unravels as European society descends into the chaos of modernity at the end of the Hapsburg reign. His books are full of characters like Paul who long for the ultimate paternal authority, the wooden patriarch of the Supreme War Lord Himself, whose autocratic relations with his subjects echo the disenchanted love many of Roth’s fathers feel for the faithless sons who take center stage in this grim portrait of social and generational decay.

Couched in entirely different terms, this theme of homesick rootlessness finds one of its most charming expressions in his novella “The Legend of the Holy Drinker,” a drunken fairy tale about a good-natured lush who lurches around the Paris quays, sleeping on newspapers and guzzling cheap wine. As deep in his cups as Roth himself was when he wrote the story at the tail end of an intensely alcoholic literary career, its panhandling protagonist meets a mysterious patron who gives him 200 francs on condition that he eventually repay it to the Church. This unanticipated bonanza leads to a succession of windfalls whose profits he drinks away over liquid lunches, finally collapsing into a stupor before he can meet the obligations of his debt.

Unlike “Right and Left,” which is one of his least mannered novels, “The Legend of the Holy Drinker” is written in a heavily cadenced style whose schematic rhythms derive from clusters of syntactically minimal sentences that create a distinctly unreal, folkloric atmosphere. Even in stories less capricious than this novella, Roth’s prose has a ritualistic quality, a chanting, recitative tone that turns even his most unflinching descriptions of Nazi atrocities into perverse fables stripped to their bare essentials.

As a narrator, Roth is a self-conscious faux-naif who adopts the manner of a bitterly ironic primitivist, telling his often brutal parables in an austere style so free of rhetorical embellishments that the mere repetition of proper names constitutes a kind of incantation, a summons or a mantra. In books like “Job,” “Tarabas,” “Weights and Measures” and “The Spider’s Web,” the caustic primitivism of this ferocious minimalist becomes a distinctly menacing weapon, a strategy for at once containing and intensifying the abhorrence he felt for the genocidal events his novels so ominously presage.