Dokumentarische Literatur und polizeiliche Dokumentation: Joseph Roths »Die Flucht ohne Ende« und »Der stumme Prophet«

The article examines the connection between literary and policing documentation in Joseph Roth’s novels »Die Flucht ohne Ende« and »Der stumme Prophet«. Both texts belong to the creative phase during which Roth was most intensely concerned with documentary writing. In both novels, state documents and bureaucratic institutions play an essential role in the narration. The article reveals how Roth interweaves literary and police documents to investigate narrative agency. On this basis, Roth’s poetics of the late 1920s is described as an unique form of documentary literature that positions the document as a necessary starting point for disrupting a given order.