September 5, 2023, 7:05 pm
In the 1920s, writer and journalist Joseph Roth traveled to the young Soviet Union and areas that are now part of Ukraine – such as Galicia – on behalf of the Frankfurter Zeitung. There, in the town of Brody, near Lemberg, Roth was born in 1894. Until the end of the First World War, Galicia was part of the Habsburg Empire. When Roth visited it was part of Poland. He was particularly interested in the local Ukrainian minority. But he was also concerned about the broader geopolitical context. Roth could not understand why the Ukrainians, then a nation of 30 million people, were not given their own state. In general, much of what the writer described in his travelogues of the East almost 100 years ago is depressingly current.