With the Radetzky March, Joseph Roth published his first Austria novel in 1932 and had international success with it: the novel about the decline of the Danube monarchy ended in 1916 with the death of Emperor Franz Joseph I. This farewell to the k . u.k. Roth added monarchy to the Capuchin Crypt in 1938. In the form of the first-person narrative, he chose the perspective of a demoralized member of the generation returning from the war, melancholically mourning the past. The extra-poetic reality Roth had given a 'pointed' end to the novel with Austria's 'annexation' to National Socialist Germany and the end of Austria as an independent state.