CRITICS HAVE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO RECONCILE Roth's early writing with his most famous novel, Radetzkymarsch, and its sequel Die Kapuzinergruft. According to the widely accepted periodic-thematic divisions of Roth's work, the early fiction is grouped under the rubric “socialist” and the later works are interpreted as manifestations of the idealizing nostalgia of an alcoholic monarchist with a decreasing grip on reality. This categorization can be traced back to Roth's friend Hermann Kesten, who published the first collection of Roth's works in 1956:

Kesten's dualistic assessment of Roth's writing was adopted and developed by Ingeborg Sültemeyer in the late 1960s in the first major study of Roth's early work, before which very little critical attention was paid to the early novels. As a result Roth was viewed as a conservative writer. Since Sültemeyer's ground-breaking study, Roth's early works of fiction and journalism have been the subject of greater scholarly interest, with a majority of critics concurring with Sültemeyer that the early work in general is characterized by a leftist political engagement that is strikingly absent from later texts.