NOT LONG AFTER COMPLETING Radetzkymarsch Roth is reported to have declared: “Der Leutnant Trotta, der bin ich” (RB, 398). This curious statement implies a congruence between Carl Joseph's fate and that of his creator that is perhaps not immediately apparent. Although Carl Joseph is not Jewish, his family's progression from Slovene peasants to “Österreicher, Diener und Beamte der Habsburger” puts him in a comparable position to Roth, the assimilated German-speaking Jew from the empire's periphery whose maternal grandfather was an Orthodox Jew (RB, 40): each has an assimilated Habsburg identity that is three generations old, and each is estranged from the traditions of his forebears. German-speaking Austrian Jews such as Roth had identified in Habsburg times simultaneously as subjects of the Austrian emperor, as German by culture, and as Jewish in terms of ethnicity and culture, and in addition often had a regional or provincial identity that implied a solidarity with the local Slavic population. After the collapse of the empire, the unspoken German bias in the idea of Austria that Roth exposed in Radetzkymarsch became explicit: “Austrian” implied German ethnicity and the idea of a multiethnic Austria was increasingly unpopular. With political parties of all hues championing the Anschluss of Austria to Germany, Austrian Jews, like their counterparts in the Weimar Republic, found themselves excluded from claiming identification with the German nation, since they were considered ethnically (and therefore nationally) non-German.