Das Spinnennetz [The Spider Web]

The Spider's Web, published in 1923 in the Viennese Arbeiter-Zeitung, is an eerie novel. Its theme is the formation of right-wing extremism and anti-Semitism, the spread of which Roth commented on in the newspaper articles of those years with ever-growing concern. While he follows these events from the outside as a journalist, he describes them in his novel from the perspective of a 'perpetrator' who gets entangled in the web of secret societies, organizations and feme murders. The text is reproduced here for the first time in the newspaper version. A detailed commentary sheds light on the historical background and allusions.