Having fled to Paris in January 1933, symbolically on the very day Hitler seized power in Germany, Joseph Roth wrote a series of articles in that 'hour before the end of the world', that he foresaw was coming and which would see the exterminatory consolidation of Hitler's barbarism, the Second World War and most crucially for Roth, the final irreversible destruction of a pan European consciousness. The majority of this collection of Roth's haunting, acidly percipient, and sometimes blackly comic journalistic essays have never before been translated into English and they form the latest installment in Hesperus' bestselling On series. Incisive and ironic, the writing evokes Roth's bitterness, frustration and morbid despair at the coming annihilation of the free world while displaying his great nostalgia for the Hapsburg Empire into which he was born and his ingrained fear of nationalism in any form. Detailing the duplicities and grotesque criminalities of the Nazi regime, Roth denounces the terror sewn by Nazi storm troopers, the propaganda of Goebbels, the round ups, the assassinations and the construction of concentration camps, alongside the seeming blindness and somnambulism of the rest of Europe, which appeared paralysed in the face of Nazi radicalism and its relentless expansion. Following the Anchluss in 1938, Roth, cut off from his homeland, isolated in a Paris itself gradually darkening under the looming shadow of war, sunk into a self destructive alcoholism which led inexorably to his desolate end the following year in a Parisian hospital. Within twelve months the German blitzkrieg had overrun Paris.