Al Volkscafè. Note su Joseph Roth

Similar to hotels and taverns, cafés are a recurring motif in Joseph Roth’s work, representing detachment from home and domestic interiority. The representation of this space undergoes significant changes over the years, allowing for a clear reconstruction of the author’s poetic and political evolution. One constant, however, seems to be Roth’s tendency to distance himself from the widespread celebration of the coffee house as a place of refined intellectual elaboration, in order to discover its value as a place of existential refuge and encounter, and thus as a place of narrative opportunities, as can be seen in the early prose dedicated to a Volkscafe (1919), which is the subject of particular attention in this article