Joseph Roth was an Austrian-Jewish journalist and novelist. He was born in the shtetl of Brody, near Lemberg (Lviv, Lvov) in Galicia, in the easternmost part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Quitting his studies in philosophy and German literature in Lemberg and Vienna, he volunteered for the army in 1916. During military service he started reporting for various periodicals. After moving to Berlin in 1920, he achieved success as a socially engaged journalist, occasionally writing as ‘Der rote Roth’. He wrote for Die neue Berliner Zeitung, the Berliner Börsen-Courier, the social democratic newspaper Vorwärts, and the renowned liberal Frankfurter Zeitung, for which he reported from all over Europe.