What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

by Joseph Roth

The Joseph Roth revival has finally gone mainstream with the thunderous reception for What I Saw, a book that has become a classic with five hardcover printings. Glowingly reviewed, What I Saw introduces a new generation to the genius of this tortured author with its "nonstop brilliance, irresistible charm and continuing relevance" (Jeffrey Eugenides, New York Times Book Review). As if anticipating Christopher Isherwood, the book re-creates the tragicomic world of 1920s Berlin as seen by its greatest journalistic eyewitness. In 1920, Joseph Roth, the most renowned German correspondent of his age, arrived in Berlin, the capital of the Weimar Republic. He produced a series of impressionistic and political essays that influenced an entire generation of writers, including Thomas Mann, and a young Christopher Isherwood. Translated and collected here for the first time, these pieces record the violent social and political paroxysms that constantly threatened to undo the fragile democracy that was the Weimar Republic. Roth, like no other German writer of his time, ventured beyond Berlin's official veneer to the heart of the city, chronicling the lives of its forgotten inhabitants: the war cripples, the Jewish immigrants from the Pale, the criminals, the bathhouse denizens, and the nameless dead who filled the morgues. Warning early on of the dangers posed by the Nazis, Roth evoked a landscape of moral bankruptcy and debauched beauty—a memorable portrait of a city and a time of commingled hope and chaos. What I Saw, like no other existing work, records the violent social and political paroxysms that compromised and ultimately destroyed the precarious democracy that was the Weimar Republic.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Germany, Essays, German Literature, Memoir, 20th Century

227 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Joseph Roth, journalist and novelist, was born and grew up in Brody, a small town near Lemberg in East Galicia, part of the easternmost reaches of what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire and is now Ukraine. Roth was born into a Jewish family. He died in Paris after living there in exile.

http://www.josephroth.de/

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

From within the heart of the Weimar Republic, this fascinating book is made up of thirty-four brief Sketches on a wide range of subjects, from homelessness, steam baths, department stores, traffic and architecture, to barbershops, amusement parks, six-day races, museums and election campaigns.

Joseph Roth, who in 1920, after active war participation, moved from Vienna to Berlin, becoming the best paid journalist of his time, uses his remarkable writing talent to illuminate a politically tormented Berlin in the decade before the Third Reich took power. And, as Roth points out, he can almost feel it in his bones what lies ahead, as each sketch carries with it a sign of the menace gathering pace. Even before Hitler and his cronies, it's a place that echoes brutishness.

Roth's eye for detail here is quite astonishing, even turning something as simple as a person getting a haircut into something interesting. And in a most moving piece which was published in a French paper after fleeing the Nazis, he admirably defends the values that guided him through Berlin at the time.

He touches on Berliners seeking out american film, about a future featuring fancy Skyscrapers and high-speed trains, and all the while his use of metaphor is meticulously good. This was a superb translation as well, can't fault it at all, and the book also featuring a small scattering of photographs from the day. I only wish there were more of them. He writes with a mixture of puzzlement, excitement, and sometimes sadness, and come the last page I was simply craving for more.

I Liked this so much I managed to get hold of 'Report from a Parisian Paradise: Essays from France 1925-1939, which I will likely read in the coming weeks. Hopefully it's just as good.

[William2 · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is my main take away: the world of Weimar Berlin that Joseph Roth writes about here was harshly divided. In this case it’s between fascists and communists, but that’s just by the way. It reminds me of the divisions in the USA right now. And in that sense it’s frightening.

Joseph Roth was a journalist in Weimar-era Berlin, a city with more than forty newspapers. Some of the best feuilletons here are about journalism itself. One piece, “The Word at Schwannecke’s,” is about this kind of Algonquin Roundtable for journalists of the day. Ruthless competitors all. Another, “Richard Without a Kingdom,” is about one of the habitués of such places. At times the pieces are too specifically local. Like “Affirmation of the Triangular Railway,“ which is about commuter issues. Footnotes would have been welcome. BTW, I’m reading this as a kind of addendum to Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories. Joseph Roth was a major novelist, too, with masterpieces to his credit like The Radetsky March.

[Lyn Elliott · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection of Roth’s feuilleton writings dates from the years of Germany’s Weimar Republic, mostly from newspapers in Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich in the early 1920s .

Translator Michael Hoffmann describes the Weimar Republic as a tiny period of history, (1918-1933) with ‘a whiff of fragility, of scandal, of doom about it. … an interval of tremulous republican government, between monarchy and dictatorship, between one catastrophic war and the approach of another; but most of all a period that was fast and febrile and fun’.

It was characterised by political violence, assassinations, unemployment, crisis and instability.

Berlin, the setting for most of these pieces, was sprawling, ungainly, a place ‘created for the purpose of existing’, already an island city well before the 1960s, outside the rest of Germany and Europe, morally ugly and chaotic.

Popularised by Isherwood, it became practically synonymous with the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties and a totem for Weimar.

Roth, a journalist all his life, was passionately committed to ‘saying true things on half a page’ in the feuilleton form and saw himself as painting the portrait of his age through them.

Originally from Galicia then Vienna, Roth moved to Berlin which he hated ‘but permitted it to exercise him. … the perspectives he seeks out are those of the unfortunates, the people who fall between the cracks, the immigrants, the Jews, the released lifer…, the homeless living and the nameless dead. Those who appalled him were those ‘of organized Berlin, as a centre of fun, of transport, of government, of nightlife and literary life, and of sports. His natural sympathies were with the outcast and the underdog and Berlin gave him plenty’. (p17)

Hoffmann notes that the collection is ‘varied and purposive, … and covers the breadths of his concerns admirably. It even seems to pick out a sort of narrative line, widening and darkening from airily whimsical beginnings to take in exile, assassination, the spread of fascism and the uncertain prospects for German-Jewish civilization’ (p13).

Perhaps it's a difference in approaches to humour, but I found the humour heavy rather than whimsical, borne down by the weight of Roth’s disillusion, whether the subject is nature, railway junctions, skyscrapers or nightlife.

It’s clear from the first story that Roth does not love this city. As I read further, antipathy towards Berlin, its government and society, is the dominant tone. His prevailing mood is dark. In the first piece 'Going for a Walk’, he describes himself as a curmudgeonly soul. Throughout, the writings tell a story of disillusion and antipathy, his emotions ranging through melancholy, outrage, anger, despair.

Roth’s writing is brilliant. The vivid pictures he created in words are wonderfully enhanced in this collection by archival photographs that connect with the subjects of the feuilletons.

[Steffi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Das Buch versammelt einige der besten Zeitungsartikel Joseph Roths aus den 20er Jahren über Berlin. Besonders interessant sind seine Beschreibungen des Scheunenviertels und der verschiedenen Lokale. Wirklich witzig ist aber seine Schilderung des Berliner Verkehrschaos, inklusive Baustellen, Straßenbahnunfällen, überforderten Verkehrspolizisten und bestreikter U-Bahn – das könnte man mit wenigen Veränderungen heute wieder in die Zeitung setzen.

Für mich ist das Glanzstück die Besprechung eines Architekturbuches, in der Roth, der Berlin nie mochte, gründlich vom Leder zieht. Die zusammengewürfelten Bauwerke Berlins beschreibt er folgendermaßen:
Noch nie ward so viel Ordnung auf Unordnung verwandt, so viel Verschwendung auf Kargheit, so viel Überlegung auf Unverstand, so viel System auf Wahnwitz.

Und weiter:
Als hätte es noch eines Beweises bedurft, dass wir das geduldigste unter den Völkern der Welt sind – oder boshaft und medizinisch ausgedrückt: ein masochistisches. Wie in der Geschichte Berlins Absolutismus und Korruption, Tyrannei und Spekulation, Prügelstrafe und Bodenwucher, Grausamkeit und Gewinnsucht, Maskerade einer harten Korrektheit und windiger Schacher Schulter an Schulter Fundamente graben und Straßen bauen, und wie also aus Unkenntnis, Geschmacklosigkeit, Unglück, Bosheit und nur in selten günstigem Zufall die Hauptstadt des Deutschen Reiches entsteht, erzählt in fesselnder Weise Werner Hegemanns Buch ‚Das steinerne Berlin’.

Den Texten Roths sind sehr gute Einführungen zu verschiedenen Themen vorangestellt, allerdings merkt man ihnen an, dass Berlin sich auch heute schnell verändert. Das Panoptikum, dass zurzeit des Erscheinens am Kurfürstendamm lag – und eben nicht mehr in der Lindenpassage, in der Roth sie beschrieb – existiert heute nicht mehr und wurde durch ein Madame Tussauds ersetzt – heute wieder Unter den Linden.

Nachtrag 06.09.2024: Zwei neue Likes haben diese Review noch einmal hochgespült. Das veranlasst mich, einen weiteren Stern zu vergeben, denn dieses Buch gehört zu den Werken, an die ich oft sehr gerne denke und die ich gerne weiterempfehle.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

These newspaper pieces are incredible, in some ways so much more approachable than his fiction. HIs novels, so wrapped up in bitterness and irony, are somewhat less affecting than his sharply observed journalistic pieces. Roth saw and noted everything in Weimar Berlin, and his observations are frequently chilling. One piece in particular jumped out at me: in The Steam Baths at Night, from 1920, Roth anticipates with sickening clarity the events in WWII that he did not live to see:

"The grotesque spectacle of a hot room at night, containing sixteen naked homeless people, trying to sweat out the soot and coal smoke of a train journey, gives rise to a positively infernal range of interpretations. A series of illustrations, say, to Dante's journeys in the underworld. The only creature permitted to be fully clothed, standing there purposefully and conscientiously with scrubbing brush and torturer's gauntlet in hand, could quite easily be some underdevil, if you happened not to know that his infernal character will be appeased, and his true character revealed by a small tip, once you have withstood his torments."

Later, in the 1929 essay Architecture, he writes:

"It happens from time to time that I fail to distinguish a cabaret from a crematorium, and pass certain scenes actually intended to be amusing, with the quiet shudder that the attributes of death still elicit."

Roth's vision was horribly accurate, but it's a mercy that he did not live to see his visions come to pass.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had to read a number of these short essays (although I almost want to call them prose poems) twice in order to appreciate them, and a smaller number of them I read more than twice. Joseph Roth, who was born in Eastern Galicia in 1894, in modern-day western Ukraine (maybe he knew my great-grandparents), was apparently a world-class observer of life in its minutest detail. If you happen to be having trouble in your reading or writing with your ability to pay attention to language, I recommend this book; I recommend it anyway, but Roth really forces you to slow down, one sentence at a time. With the exception of "The Auto-Da-Fé of the Mind" (1933), these pieces span the 1920s in Berlin, and are for the most part not explicitly political, but it's certainly possible for a reader who initially didn't know anything about Roth (like me) to detect an ethos with political and social implications. Attention to the degree Roth offers it is a form of reverence after all, or at least of empathy, and Roth pays attention to the downtrodden: to Jewish refugees from pogroms in the east, to pimps and prostitutes and the "tired homeward trudge of a Friedrichstrasse whore who's had a bad night and is going home penniless", to the lyrics of a song sung by a 16-year-old Hungarian ex-Red Guard who can't go back to Budapest, to dive bar regulars "...of such fixed habits that they even have their mail sent there", to homeless "middle-aged men with sunburned faces, chiseled by hunger and toughness", and to photographs of the anonymous dead of the city: "On May 1922, this young man with a rapt expression died, on a bench on Arminiusplatz. He must owe his peaceful countenance to that wonderful May night...probably a nightingale was singing when he died..."

Roth's spiritual ethos (although, as his writing reminds me, it's not easy to draw a clear line between the political and the spiritual, the spiritual and the material) is revealed negatively in a mural of a society of entertainment and spectation, alienated from itself and from the sacred. This is a society of ubiquitous advertisement, in which a billboard for a brand of chocolate is "...placed so that its sudden flash on our retina (yellow and blue) will make an indelible impression on our memory"; in which human beings build skyscrapers and "...clouds wander past the brows of mortal man as previously only around the brows of Olympians", and yet the skyscrapers contain "great entertainment palaces", suggesting that "...if it were possible for us to build a 'planet-scraper' and to construct settlements on Mars, the expeditions of scientists and engineers would be accompanied by a delegation of bartenders." The sacred and the profound, which Roth perceives in small details everywhere, isn't enough for this society; in fact, people seem driven to conquer and remake the natural world in order to serve their needs, primarily the great god entertainment. It even seems to Roth that "...too much has been printed about nature for it to remain what it used to be...nature has acquired a purpose where we are concerned. Its task is to amuse us."

I was initially resolved to not describe this collection as "haunting" or "prophetic", both in the hopes of avoiding cliche and because just about anything written in 1920s Berlin is bound to seem haunting, but there are pages here that, no way around it, brilliantly conjure the Third Reich out of everyday life. I doubt Roth consciously knew what kind of evil was coming, and yet his collection is a reminder that prescience is often a matter of paying attention, even if truly paying attention is difficult...and getting more difficult all the time, I would say. But die welt von morgen doesn't spring up out of nowhere- a poet like Roth understands that there's a subtle interplay back and forth between a waiter swatting a fly, or the resemblance between a cigarette and an ultimatum for that matter, and the great world events of our time. The Third Reich that didn't yet exist is unmissable in Roth's description of the uniformity of items and the crowding of the "very large" Karstadt department store (this particular essay accompanied by a photo of the same department store in 1939, swastika flags flying from the rooftop, which just goes to show that any faith in the morality of very large department stores is misplaced). The Third Reich is there on the bus on page 102, where

...everyone is at odds with everyone else. People send one another furious looks. This one is taken for a Jew, that one for a 'Bolshie'...you are your neighbor's not keeper but policeman. If he stumbles, you shout at him to hold on to something...if everyone causes their own individual catastrophes, how can there fail to be more general catastrophes? After all, the passengers on a bus or a streetcar make up a community of a kind. But they don't see it that way...As they see it, they are bound always to be the others' enemy: for political, social, all sorts of reasons. Where so much hate has been bottled up, it is vented on inanimate things, and provokes the celebrated perversity of inanimate things.

And it's there, the transfiguration of the religious impulse and the human being into something mechanistic, in something as common as a triangular railway junction.

Iron landscape, magnificent temple of technology open to the air, to which the mile-high factory chimneys make their sacrifice of living, broody, energizing smoke. Eternal worship of machines, in the wide arena of this landscape of iron and steel, whose end no eye can see, in the horizon's steely grip. Such is the realm of the new life, whose laws are immune to chance and unaffected by mood, whose course is merciless regularity, in whose wheels the brain works, sober but not cold...what holds sway in the arena of my triangular railway junction is the decision of the logical brain, which, to be sure of success, has implanted itself in the body of unconditional certainty: in the body of a machine.

That's why everything human in this metal arena is small and feeble and lost, reduced to an insignificant supporting role in the grand enterprise...a man in uniform wanders about among bewildering systems of tracks, a tiny human, in this context functioning only as machine. In this world, every human form of expression counts for less than the mechanical indication of an instrument...here it is not passion that is omnipotent but regulation and law.

Can little heartbeats still make themselves heard where a big booming one deafens a world? Look at the triangular railroad junction on a still night, its vale silvered by the light of ten thousand lamps...it is beginning and stopping-off point, the introduction to a beautiful and audible future music...the world to come will be like this triangular railroad junction, raised to some unknown power.

Hard for me to believe, but Roth wrote that in 1924. He left Germany about a decade later, on January 30th, 1933, clearly under no illusions about Hitler. That February, he wrote a letter to his friend Stefan Zweig (neither of them would live through the war):

You will have realized by now that we are drifting towards great catastrophes. Apart from the private — our literary and financial existence is destroyed — it all leads to a new war. I won't bet a penny on our lives. They have succeeded in establishing a reign of barbarity. Do not fool yourself. Hell reigns.

[Evi * · Rating 4 out of 5]

PROCEDURA DI AVVICINAMENTO A BERLINO
Se in Google si digita Roth senza il nome di battesimo la prima occorrenza è Philip, solo dopo a seguire Joseph Roth.
Cosa vorrà dire.
Che l'opera di Philip Roth è più letta di quella di Joseph Roth? Forse, ma non è detto, perché se consideriamo che Joseph precede Philip di almeno trent'anni anni, statisticamente dovrebbe avere al suo attivo molti più lettori che hanno avuto l'occasione di leggerlo.

Roth è austriaco, in realtà nato in una città dell'Ucraina, ma nasce come giornalista e in qualità di giornalista soggiorna per qualche tempo a Berlino dove collabora con un famoso quotidiano tedesco la «Frankfurter Zeitung», pubblicando una serie di articoli che diventano un vero e proprio reportage letterario "d'autore" attraverso Berlino.
Siamo negli anni venti della Repubblica di Weimar, tra la fine della Grande Guerra e la depressione del ’29.
Roth vede Berlino con lo spirito del flaneur, ma non ne ha lo stesso sguardo annoiato o da perditempo eterno, il suo è uno sguardo lucido, "sul pezzo" si direbbe se non fossimo negli anni '20.
Una decina di articoli che restituiscono un'immagine vivida della capitale tedesca, melt polt di culture ed etnie diverse, dove turchi, russi, armeni, greci ebrei convivevano con i loro colori usi e costumi, una città inquieta e in avanti che si offre a continue riflessioni sull'architettura, l'urbanistica, il suo traffico, l'industria del divertimento nei suoi cafè e teatri, la moda, i grandi magazzini emergenti.

L'occhio di Roth è lungimirante e si allunga come un canocchiale non risparmiando anche una acuta riflessione sulla questione ebraica nel magnifico articolo, assolutamente programmatico, intitolato Il muro del pianto

Gli ebrei non sono affatto una nazione, sono una sorta di sovranazione, forse davvero la forma anticipata, futura di nazione. Cercando una casa, essi si rivoltano contro la loro stessa natura.
Dove si ferma un ebreo, si solleva un muro del pianto, dovunque si stabilisca un ebreo si solleva un progrom.
Si deve definitivamente capire che il sionismo può essere solo un doloroso esperimento, una momentanea forse necessaria degenerazione dell'ebraismo, o perlomeno il ritorno a una primigenia forma di esistenza nazionale già superata.

A Roth verrà risparmiata l'abiezione e la distruzione che di lì a pochi lustri colpirà Berlino,
La Berlino che ci racconta non esisterà più, se non completamente trasformata.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the wonderful selection of essays by Joseph Roth collected as What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933. In this selection of "reports" by the novelist and journalist Joseph Roth, best known for his masterpiece The Radetzky March, we are presented with a picture of the Weimar Republic through the eyes of one of the finest writers of the twentieth century. Roth was a young foreign correspondent for various newspapers, only twenty-six years old, when the earliest of these pieces was written. During the period he would also write some of the novels that have brought him posthumous fame.

The reports in this selection chronicle the underside of Berlin including Jewish immigrants, criminals and others. There are 34 pieces organized by topics such as Displaced Persons, Bourgeoisie and Bohemians, Berlin's Pleasure Industry and Look Back in Anger. In the essay "The Kurfurstendamm" he writes, "In the evening I walk along the Kurferstendamm. I slink along the walls like a dog. I am on my own, but I have a certain sense that destiny has me on a leash. . . . And so the Kurfurstendamm stretches out endlessly day and night. Also, it's being renovated. These two facts need to be emphasized, because of the way it's continually ceding particles of its true self to its designated cultural-historical role."

It is the essay of the last section, "The Auto-da-Fe of the Mind" that resonates in my memory looking back on my reading of this book. Let me quote:
"Let me say it loud and clear: The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination . . . Now, as the smoke of our burned books rises into the sky, we German writers of Jewish descent must acknowledge above all that we have been defeated."

The essays in this book ring loud and clear over the decades and they bring home to the twenty-first century a sense of the life and decay of the era witnessed by Joseph Roth.

[AC · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book consists of a collection of 34 of Roth's feuilletons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feuilleton), each of which runs roughly 3 or 4 pages, mostly from the early 20's, tiny slices of daily life in Berlin, with the last from 1933 discussing the plight of Jewish writers in the "Auto-da-Fé of the Mind" of Nazi book-burning. Many of the pieces are charming, but they are light - though the first one ("What I Saw") contains a remarkably concise statement of the spectacularization/commodification of nature that Dubord himself must have read and admired. It is quite interesting. Michael Hofmann's introduction is also quite interesting.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Βασικά δεν έχω να προσθέσω περισσότερα από την παρουσιάση στο οπισθόφυλλο του βιβλίου. Ο Ροτ με απίστευτη προσιτή, λυρική αλλά και σκληρή γραφή προσεγίζει την εποχή εκείνη σε όλα τα επίπεδα. Γίνεται χρονικογράφος με τόσο ποιητικό αλλά ταυτόχρονα ρεαλιστικό λόγο.

Μπαίνει στα άδυτα των μπαρ, των κουρείων και των λουτρών, περιγράφει καίρια σημεία της πόλης αλλα και την επίδραση του καπιταλισμού στην εξέλιξη της. Αφουγκράζεται την πολιτική αναταραχή της εποχής και αυτοαποκαλείται ο απολιτίκ της εποχής. Κλείνει με ένα δυνατό κείμενο για το κάψιμο των βιβλίων από τους Ναζί που πρέπει να διαβάσει κάθε αναγνώστης.

¨... Πρέπει να το αναγνωρίσουμε και να το πούμε ανοικτά: Η πνευματική ευρώπη παραδίνεται... Εμείς, που αποτελούσαμε την πρώτη γραμμή των στρατιωτών οι οποίοι πολέμησαν κάτω από τα λάβαρα του ευρωπαικού πνεύματος, ας πληρώσουμε το ευγενέστερο καθήκον του εν τιμή νικημένου πολεμιστή: ας ομολογήσουμε την ήττα μας. Ναι, νικηθήκαμε. ¨

[Phrodrick slowed his growing backlog · Rating 4 out of 5]

Joseph Roth’s What I Saw is an almost insider’s view of Berlin, Germany in the years of the Wiemar Republic. These are highly personal journalistic essays. They are more about how he experienced Berlin than about reporting “The Facts”. These essays were written for one or another contemporary news papers and the assignment was to be personal. As such they are short, running into a few pages each and we are not expected to take each thought as an objective statement of facts. Throughout his point of view is made clear. I found them fascinating.

For most Americans our introduction to this period is the famous musical/movie Cabaret. This may have led some into the source material the writings of Christopher Isherwood. Most likely, the I am a Camera play (written by John Van Druten) then to its source novella; Goodbye to Berlin or as far as the Berlin Stories. These are wonderful, largely fictionalized accounts of the authors experience. Isherwood as a gay, Anglo-American was writing s a non-native while Roth as a German-Austrian was more of an insider, and unlike Isherwood, Roth was writing to his fellow German speakers.

Almost is important in at least two ways. He was Jewish. Given that German anti-Antisemitism long predates Nazism, he would have had both ingrained and conscious habits making him aware of his surroundings and behaviors in much the same way as Isherwood as a gay person. Second, he was to some extent from the sticks. This is a more visible aspect of these essays. He often relates to the grandeur of the big city and the emergence of capitalism over religion. He may have just been playing to his reader, but his opinions often shaded towards that of the rural citizen in the metropolitan world. He is particularly resentful of how banks and theaters have architecture that intentionally mimics that more historically reserved for cathedrals.

As a reporter and observer the word images he has the time to project of, for example the Twelfth Berlin six Day Race can be as overwhelming to the reader as indeed they must have been. He projects the small town cynic’s worry of the obvious waste and flashes of ostentatious wealth. He is a visitor and connoisseur of the Berlin bar scene, unflinchingly taking us from the most elite to the roughest. He is as amazed with the new machine called the department store and as nearly overwhelmed at things like traffic lights and skyscrapers. How do you explain the modern world to those not yet electrified or motorized?

He is also a reporter. As such he tells us in more forthright ways about the slums and the not yet risen Fascist Party. Being written at the time he speaks of himself as an apolitical observer of the elections and of the institution of the Reichstag. For a modern reader it is something of a notion to think of the Reichstag as other than a platform for and rally spot for Hitler and his.

By the end of the collection we and Roth are aware that the Weimer Republic is a phase. That history will overtake it and the overtaking will be a storm.

Mine is an illustrate Kindle edition. These can be hard to see contemporary black and white newspaper images. But they add considerably to a reader’s appreciation of the locations and people as they would have bees seen by the original readers

[Murtaza · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book consists of a number of short newspaper vignettes published by Joseph Roth when he was working as a journalist in early 20th century Berlin. Having said that, this is not "journalism" in the sense that we usually think of today. Rather, they are simply Roth's observations from walking around town and visiting the various small and large sites of interest in his city.

As he writes in "Going for a Walk," one of the first vignettes:

"It is only the minutiae of life that are important. Strolling around on a May morning, what do I care about the vast issues of world history as expressed in newspaper editorials? Or even the fate of some individual, a potential tragic hero, someone who has lost his wife or come into an inheritance or cheated on his wife or in one way or another makes some lofty appeal to us? Confronted with the truly microscopic, all loftiness is hopeless, completely meaningless. The diminutive of the parts is more impressive than the monumentality of the whole."

Roth really does have a gift for observing the small details of life. He sorts through the clutter of the modern world, observing all its small absurdities and trivialities, and proclaims that, "in the face of a sunshine that spreads ruthlessly....whatever is heralded our touted can only be of little weight or consequence." The ultimate task of an artist is to have their finger on the pulse of reality and give expression to what they observe, and he does that impeccably in many of these short essays. My favorite ones were "Going for a Walk," "The Resurrection," a vignette about of old man encountering the machinistic clamor of the modern world after spending 50 years in prison, and "The Large Department Store," which as its title suggests is simply Roth's reflections on the architectural and moral implications of such a store opening in his city. Roth also has a well-established gift for depicting the lost Eastern Jewish communities of Germany, and does so again here to great effect in the "The Orient on the Hirsenstrasse," the product of an evening spent observing the traffic in the city's Jewish quarter.

The vignettes provide a fascinating insight into how an intelligent and observant person viewed changes in their society during the 1920s and early 1930s. But what really distinguishes them are the beautiful writing and metaphor that Roth employs in making his observations. Light doesn't just come into the room through the blinds, it pools in like "bars of gold bullion." The mute objects of daily life are enchantingly anthropomorphized. Traffic lights throw "temper tantrums" of green and red, while the lives of the city's passerby are imagined in a way that transcends "the inaudible, sleeping melody of a distant, even unreal life." This is a rare gift for a writer and it is a pleasure to read.

None of these reports were never written with any intended larger purpose or aim. They were merely Roth's daily observations for local newspapers. But they are arranged here in a way that forms a teleology of German history of that period. Roth starts the book carefree, walking through a city he clearly loves and which he feels himself to belong to. But as time passes, the vignettes show a foreboding of the dark times ahead for his city and for Jewish intellectuals like himself. Beginning with the assassination of Walter Rathenau (a deeply intellectual and sensitive man who is movingly eulogized in one of the vignettes), before heading to a visit to the Reichstag to observe the competing political factions, the book concludes with a final essay written from Paris that serves as a j'accuse towards the Nazi Party and Germany as a whole. The Nazis ended up burning the books of Roth and other German Jews on pyres in the middle of the same Berlin that he once walked and lovingly depicted. Through his anger Roth saw the irony of this, but he also saw, somewhere in the yawning distance, that he and his contemporaries would one day be vindicated by history - as they were.

All in all this is a fascinating slice of life of a very important time and place in 20th century history. But for those who write or simply enjoy good writing, there is a lot of aesthetic beauty to reflect on here.

[Boyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a superb collection of Roth's impressionistic newspaper dispatches from Weimar-era Berlin. It's a sort of walking tour of the city, but unlike writers of other such works, who tend to be warmly appreciative, Roth displays a real ambivalence and even antipathy toward Berlin. Many of the his sketches are little vignettes of human unhappiness and dislocation, yet despite his crabby pessimism his prose is beautiful and full of poignant and funny images. In "The Steambaths at Night," a fat man "might be advised to borrow the equator from the earth as a belt for his dressing gown." In "The Very Large Department Store," the merchandise assumes a doleful character because "where there are so many things close together, they can hardly help not thinking of themselves as precious. In their own eyes they shrink, and they lower their prices, and they become humble, for humility in goods expresses itself as cheapness." (This must explain Walmart.)

Roth displays scorn for many of the trappings of modernity while writing about one of the most radically modern cities of the time. He despises urban traffic and the mechanical conveyances that snarl it; he sees the city itself as "a distressing agglomeration of squares, streets, blocks of tenements, churches, and palaces"; he visits a Berlin nightclub "not to cheer [himself:] up... but to take a malicious pleasure at the phenomenon of so much industrialized merriment." Yet his portraits are sensitive and nuanced, and the early photographs of the city are wonderful.

A fabulous, deceptively complex little book.

[Al Maki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Roth's reports of life in Berlin in the aftermath of the Great War. Like his other work, it contains a mix of the humane, the sardonic and the funny. There were two currents in the book that I was particularly struck by. It's partly an account of the lives of the people whose lives were shattered by the collapse of three European empires: the German, the Russian and the Austrian-Hungarian. I was struck by how much their lives resemble those of the people fleeing the chaos in the middle east today. I hope they find a writer of Roth's gifts to describe their situation. It's also an account of a city in the process of modernization: traffic jams, giant department stores and mass entertainment were new phenomena at the time and Roth's descriptions of them are worth reading for their freshness and insight.
I have imagined this period in German history as little more than a cabaret show, a prelude to Nazism, but reading a contemporary account it comes across quite differently, as a vibrant world, confusing, crass, harsh, but full of possibilities that were not realized.

[Νίκος Μ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Δηλώνω fan του Γιόζεφ!Είναι το τρίτο δικό του που διάβασα,ο άνθρωπος πρέπει να ήταν τρελή μορφή... Θα προσπαθήσω να βρώ και το Hotel Savoy (εξαντλημένο)

[Sharon Barrow Wilfong · Rating 4 out of 5]

These brief chapters are written as though Roth had a Go Pro camera strapped to his forehead. He describes all the sights, sounds, smells and people he sees as he walks through the streets, shops, bath houses, police stations and morgues of Berlin in the years between the World Wars.

He starts with the Jewish Quarter, then takes us to see the homeless. He describes the modernization of Berlin with the development of skyscrapers and architecture. This was written in the early 1920s. Little could he realize that any further development would come to a standstill for the next eighty years when East Berlin became part of a Soviet Bloc country.

Roth describes bourgeoisie and Bohemians and amusement parks and museums.

He ends with foreshadowing the rumblings of the rise of Hitler and makes some acute observations about the capitulation of the Protestant and Catholic churches and the ousting of Jews. He asks, do these "Christians" not realize that Hitler is murdering Christ when he murders the people who produced Him?

He makes an interesting comment about President Hindenburg. Hindenburg bragged that he never read a book. Roth comments, if someone doesn't read, is book burning far behind? He also asserts that the majority of the German literati were Jewish.

When the Nazis rose to power, Roth left for Paris in 1933. He lived there until his death in 1939. He drank himself to death, due to his disillusionment and hopelessness over the condition of his beloved Germany.

It's too bad. If he could have held out, he would have seen Hitler's ultimate demise and the fall of the Reich six years later.

[Lazaros Karavasilis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Μερικές φορές η πραγματικότητα είναι αρκετά βαρετή.

Που σημαίνει πως οφείλουμε να αποδώσουμε νόημα, χρώμα, υφή και ύφος προκειμένου να λάβει υπόσταση και να έχει κάποια σημασία.

Αυτό το έργο επιτελεί και ο Γιόζεφ Ροτ προσπαθώντας να περιγράψει την βερολινεζικη ζωή της Δημοκρατίας της Βαϊμάρης. Αναφέρεται στα ασήμαντα (ένα τυχαίο γεγονός, όπως ένας ποδηλατικός αγώνας) και στα σημαντικά (η κηδεία του Φρίντριχ Έμπερτ) με ένα αστείρευτο ενδιαφέρον που ζωντανεύει το Βερολίνο του 1920-1930 στα μάτια του αναγνώστη, 100 χρόνια μετά. Θέλει ταλέντο για κάτι τέτοιο και ο Ροτ έχει μπόλικο.

Δεν επιδιώκει να καταγράψει, αλλά να ζωγραφίσει την ζωή στο Βερολίνο με τα δικά του χρώματα, πιάνοντας πολύ εύκολα τις διάφορες υφές της καθημερινότητας. Χαρακτηριστικό παράδειγμα η ιστορία του κρατούμενου που αποφυλακίστηκε μετά από 50 χρόνια σε ένα Βερολίνο που του ήταν άγνωστο πλέον, λόγο της ραγδαίας βιομηχανοποίησης, της αστικοποίησης και των αυξανόμενων αυτοκινήτων.

Με περισσότερο λυρισμό από ότι έκανε ο σύγχρονος του Όργουελ για το Παρίσι και το Λονδίνο, αλλά με την ίδια ζεση για αφήγηση, βρήκα στον Ροτ έναν ακόμη συγγραφέα του οποίου τα μη λογοτεχνικά γραπτά θα διαβάσω με μεγάλη ευχαρίστηση. Από ότι είδα όμως, η γραφή του δεν αφήνει περιθώρια αμφιβολίας για το λογοτεχνικό επίπεδο του

[Vassiliki Dass · Rating 5 out of 5]

Τι να πει κανείς για τον Ροτ; Και για το βιβλίο αυτό ειδικά που είναι μια συλλογή άρθρων του σε μεγάλες εφημερίδες της εποχής; Μου άρεσε περισσότερο από όσα έχω διαβάσει μέχρι τώρα. Βέβαια δεν έχω πιάσει ακόμη το Σαβόυ και το Εμβατήριο. Όμως όσο κι αν από την βιογραφία του αντιλαμβάνεται κανείς πόσο εξέχον μυαλό ήταν, αυτός που εκτίμησε σωστά τον ναζιστικό κίνδυνο (το τελευταίο άρθρο που γράφτηκε αμέσως μετά το κάψιμο των βιβλίων Εβραίων συγγραφέων το 1933 είναι τόσο οξυδερκές και μελλοντολογικό που αναρωτιέται κανείς πώς ο συγγραφέας είχε τέτοια διαύγεια πνεύματος σε αντίθεση με τόσους συμπατριώτες του ) εκπλήσσεται παρόλα αυτά διαβάζοντας τα άρθρα του που αφορούν πληθώρα θεμάτων από το εύστοχο πνεύμα, από το κριτικό μάτι, από την ευρυμάθεια του, από τον διαφορετικό του τρόπο να αντιλαμβάνεται την πραγματικότητα. Η έκδοση επίσης και η μετάφραση είναι αξιολογότατες και η εργογραφία του συγγραφέα στο τέλος συμπληρώνει τις απαραίτητες πληροφορίες για τον αναγνώστη ως προς την κατανόηση της ζωής του Ροτ.

[Shelley Diamond · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book should be required reading for voters in the U.S. 2016 election and for anyone interested in history and the essay form of writing. This is not a history book, per se, it is a collection of short essays published in Berlin newspapers, but it gives a rare view of a certain time period that has relevance to today's political situation.

I don't know if it's partly the art of translation or what, but the writing itself is beautiful. Not at all like our typical cut and dried just the facts style of newspaper writing. Mr. Roth wrote novels in addition to writing newspaper reports so I guess that's why his writing is a big step up from the usual journalism.

His sensitivity and sensibilities seem very modern. Many of these pieces would be believable as blog posts from the current era. He simply spent time walking around the city and documenting his feelings and experiences.

Mr. Roth focuses on the real life experiences of people and places in Berlin at that time, everything from the cabarets to the department stores to the homeless shelters. His work documents German nationalist violence and hostility towards Jews in the 1920's, way before the time we usually think of it starting.

Mr. Roth died in 1939. I wish we could have read his news reports when he wrote them in the 1920's, so we could have perhaps better prepared for what happened later.

[Paul Toth · Rating 5 out of 5]

So you want to know what it was like? This is the book for you.

Lately, I've become a friend of the "walking" book, wanderings physical and later transcribed, literally. Sebald comes to mind, and Roth simply had to have been a Sebaldian (well worth the suffix) influence. Finally, if you want to learn how to render character and setting by "showing," this is better than any "Show, Don't Tell" advice you'll ever read.

[S. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Would rate it 5 stars if it wasn't for the occasional sexist remarks.

[Ellie Midwood · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What I Saw” is a collection of newspaper articles written by an Austrian-born German journalist, Joseph Roth, which captured perfectly the atmosphere and the spirit of Weimar Berlin. Through these short vignettes, the reader is immersed into a world of immigrants and Bohemians, politicians and crooks, cabaret patrons and journalists, in short, ordinary people living in the most extraordinary, cosmopolitan city of 1920s’ Europe. Roth doesn’t let anything go unnoticed and through the tiniest details (a barefoot boy playing on the steps of the Reichstag; a Lieutenant Colonel from the czarist Army proudly displaying his officer’s cap on a wall of a dormitory for the refugees and the homeless; road workers digging into the ground as if searching for treasure) he paints Berlin as it appeared before his eyes in those turbulent years.

He starts with the Jewish slums, takes the reader on a walk along Kurfürstendamm, and ends up in the Reichstag - all in a span of more than ten years. But it’s the very last chapter, written already in exile, in France, which strikes such an emotional chord with the reader’s heart - the Nazis in power and the biggest sin committed against the intellect - the burning of the books. There’s so much emotion, so much pain and devastation in that very last chapter that serves as a sinister warning against the things yet to come, it’s a perfect ending for an era that had too much freedom to last. It’s wistful and tragic, and one can only imagine the emotional state of the author as he was writing it.

A truly invaluable eyewitness account, “What I Saw” is a must-read for everyone interested in the European history of the 20th century.

[Ourania Topa · Rating 4 out of 5]

5 ***** στο υπέροχο πορτραίτο "Ριχάρδος, βασιλιάς χωρίς βασίλειο" και στο ανατριχιαστικά προφητικό "Το Auto-da-fé του πνεύματος" του 1933, με το οποίο κλείνει και η ανθολογία .

[Liv Townsend · Rating 4 out of 5]

Big rec for anyone who likes Christopher Isherwood !! I felt like this was even more photographic and realistic than 'Goodbye to Berlin' - Roth comes across as a bit grumpy about the city, but at the same time will then write the most gorgeous description of roads/buildings/people.

[Steve Middendorf · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joseph Roth, to paraphrase the man, wrote what he saw.

His reporting between the wars let me see what he saw in Europe; what led inevitably from WWI to WWII, what led inevitably to the rise of Hitler. I cannot describe that. You have to read him.

Of the few collections of his reporting that I have read, this one has the least internal consistency; the chapters don't seem to add up the way they do in Wandering Jews or The Hotel Years. And the "reporter" has much more presence here than there.

The final chapter is Roth's personal view of the rise and rise of the Third Reich. It's worth recounting:

Very few observers anywhere in the world seem to have understood what the Third Reich’s burning of books, the expulsion of Jewish writers, and all its other crazy assaults on the intellect actually mean. The technical apotheosis of the barbarians, the terrible march of the mechanized orangutans, armed with hand grenades, poison gas, ammonia, and nitroglycerine, with gas masks and airplanes, the return of the spiritual (if not the actual) descendants of the Cimbri and Teutoni—all this means far more than the threatened and terrorized world seems to realize: It must be understood. Let me say it loud and clear: The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination (it will be the task of some future generation to establish the reasons for this disgraceful capitulation). Now, as the smoke of our burned books rises into the sky, we German writers of Jewish descent must acknowledge above all that we have been defeated. Let us, who were fighting on the front line, under the banner of the European mind, let us fulfill the noblest duty of the defeated warrior: Let us concede our defeat. Yes, we have been beaten. Now is not the time to reach for the laurels that will one day be ours. It would be childish to predict the ultimate victory of the human spirit over the rampant denizens of the Leuna-Werke, the “I.G. Farbenwerke”* and other chemical and industrial giants. We are proud of our defeat. We stood in the front row of the defenders of Europe, and we were the first to be defeated. Our comrades “of Aryan descent” can still hope to be pardoned (always assuming that they will be prepared to make some concession to the language of Goebbels and Göring). There is even a chance that the vandals of the Third Reich will try to exploit such “Aryan” writers of great renown as Thomas Mann and Gerhart Hauptmann (currently persecuted) for a while, in order to trick mankind into believing that National Socialism has some respect for the human spirit. But we writers of Jewish descent are, thank God, safe from any temptation to take the side of the barbarians in any way. We are the only representatives of Europe who are debarred from returning to Germany. Even if there were in our ranks a traitor, who, from personal ambition, stupidity, and blindness, wanted to conclude a shameful peace with the destroyers of Europe—he couldn’t do it! That “Asiatic” and “Oriental” blood which the current wielders of power in the German Reich hold against us will quite certainly not permit us to desert from the noble ranks of the European army. God himself—and we are proud of the fact—will not allow us to betray Europe, Christendom, and Judaism. God is with the vanquished, not with the victors! At a time when His Holiness, the infallible Pope of Christendom, is concluding a peace agreement, a Concordat, with the enemies of Christ, when the Protestants are establishing a “German church” and censoring the Bible, we descendants of the old Jews, the forefathers of European culture, are the only legitimate German representatives of that culture. Thanks to inscrutable divine wisdom, we are physically incapable of betraying it to the heathen civilization of poison gases, to the ammonia-breathing Germanic war god. Have German writers of Jewish extraction—or for that matter German writers—ever felt at home in the German Reich? There is a justifiable sense that German authors, of Jewish or non-Jewish origins, have at all times been strangers in Germany, immigrants on home ground, consumed with longing for their real fatherland even when they were within its borders. From the time that Bismarck’s Second Reich gave physical, materialist, and military forces precedence over the life of the intellect, when the character of the drill sergeant was proposed and recognized by the world as the typical representative of Germany, from that time German writers have felt they were living in moral banishment and exile. Behind the sergeant stood the engineer who supplied him with weapons, the chemist who brewed poison gas to destroy the human brain, and at the same time formulated the drug to relieve his migraine; the German professor, falsely depicted in German humorous satirical magazines as an absent-minded dreamer who forgets his umbrella, but who is in fact the most dangerous (the most dogmatic) enemy of European civilization: the inventor of the philological equivalent of poison gas, who is paid to disseminate the idea of Prussian superiority, the noncommissioned officer of the university, which in the time of Wilhelm II became a barracks.

In the new German Reich the only free and independent people, the only revolutionaries in the proper sense, were the writers. Which is why, long before the advent of Hitler, they felt themselves to be émigrés and expatriates in that empire of technology, of corporals, of parades, and of standing at attention. If you want to understand the burning of the books, you must understand that the current Third Reich is a logical extension of the Prussian empire of Bismarck and the Hohenzollerns, and not any sort of reaction to the poor German republic with its feeble German Democrats and Social Democrats. Prussia, the ruler of Germany, was always an enemy of the intellect, of books, of the Book of Books—that is, the Bible—of Jews and Christians, of humanism and Europe. Hitler’s Third Reich is only so alarming to the rest of Europe because it sets itself to put into action what was always the Prussian project anyway: to burn the books, to murder the Jews, and to revise Christianity. The great historical error of the younger generation in Germany was that it subjected itself to the Prussian drill sergeant, instead of joining forces with the German intellect. About 1900 Jews started to appear in Germany who were classified as “Kaiser Wilhelm’s Jews,” or “Jewish Prussians,” or “Jewish lieutenants of the reserve,” or even “Sunday Jews.” Without setting aside their religion, they tried to transform it into a kind of Protestantism, and their temples into Prussian barracks. They referred to themselves as “German citizens of the Jewish faith” and the fact that they chose the term “German citizens” instead of merely “Germans” goes to show that they themselves sensed that citizenship was a different category from people and nation. They had just about enough willpower not to repudiate the thousand-year-old tradition of their forefathers, but they lacked the strength not to falsify this tradition. Because they didn’t have the courage to convert, they preferred instead to have the entire Jewish religion baptized. The result was Jewish priests with a Protestant bearing and in Protestant costume; “Reformed Israelite communities” that worshiped on Sundays instead of the Sabbath; Jews who had themselves driven to temple—the house of a betrayed God—on Yom Kippur in luxurious carriages, dressed in the uniforms of Prussian lieutenants of the reserve; Jews who eventually came to view the “Jewish confession” as a state-authorized concession to Jehovah as a kind of twin of the Prussian god. . . . They felt entitled to take out a lease on “German civilization”; inconstant and fickle as they were, to introduce and to support literary and other “fashions”; undiscriminating as they had become, novarum rerum cupidissimi,* to admire every version of corruption in literature, in the visual arts, in the theater, because they had forgotten Jehovah; to profess liberalism and freethinking. It would be true to say that, from about 1900, German cultural life was largely defined, if not dominated by this “top class” of German Jews. To be fair, what they did was not wholly bad. Even their errors were sometimes salutary. In the whole of that large kingdom with a population of sixty million, among all those industrialists, there was—individual exceptions aside—no class that was actively interested in art and intellect. As far as the Prussian Junkers are concerned, the civilized world will know that they were just about able to read and write. One of their representatives, President Hindenburg, openly admitted that he had never read a book in his life. And, incidentally, it was this icon, ancient from early youth, that the workers, Social Democrats, journalists, artists, and Jews worshipped during the war, and that the German people (workers, Jews, journalists, artists, Social Democrats, and the rest of them) then reelected president. Is a people that elects as its president an icon that has never read a book all that far away from burning books itself? And are the Jewish writers, scholars, and philosophers who voted for Hindenburg really entitled to complain about the bonfire in which our thoughts are consumed? As for the industrialists—their minds were taken up by iron and steel, by guns and “Big Berthas”; they were smelting the modern version of “Siegfried’s sword.” The big businesspeople were producing the cheap junk labeled “Made in Germany” with which they flooded an unhappy world. Only the German Jews (doctors, lawyers, tradesmen, department store owners, artisans, or manufacturers) were interested in books, theater, museums, music. Even if they were occasionally guilty of bad taste, it remains a fact that there was no one else in the whole of Germany capable of pointing out and correcting their errors. The magazines and newspapers were edited by Jews, managed by Jews, read by Jews! A swarm of intellectual Jewish critics and reviewers discovered and promoted numerous “pure Aryan” poets, writers, and actors! Does there exist—now that theater and literature have been “cleansed”—a single outstanding actor or writer who was not recognized and praised at a time when reviewing and public opinion were in the hands of Jews? I challenge the Third Reich to come up with a single example of a gifted “pure Aryan” poet, actor, or musician who was kept down by the Jews and emancipated by Herr Goebbels! It’s only the feeblest dilettantes who flourish in the swastika’s shadow, in the bloody glow cast by the ash heaps in which we are consumed. . . .

From the beginning of the twentieth century, the following writers—Jews, half Jews, and quarter Jews (“of Semitic origin,” to adopt the parlance of the Third Reich)—have made their contribution to German literature!

[PARAGRAPH OMITTED]

I hope other German Jewish writers not on my list will forgive me for having omitted them. May those who do appear not be offended by finding their names next to those of some enemy or rival. They have all fallen on the intellect’s field of honor. All of them, in the eyes of the German murderer and arsonist, share a common fault: their Jewish blood and their European intellect. The threatened and terrorized world must understand that the arrival on the scene of Corporal Hitler does not mark the beginning of any new chapter in the history of anti-Semitism: Far from it! What the arsonists tell us is true, though not in the way they intended: This Third Reich is only the beginning of the end! By destroying Jews they are persecuting Christ. For the first time the Jews are not being murdered for crucifying Christ but for having produced him from their midst. If the books of Jewish or supposed Jewish authors are burned, what is really set fire to is the Book of Books: the Bible. If Jewish judges and attorneys are expelled or locked up, it represents a symbolic assault on law and justice. If authors with European reputations are exiled, it is a way of proclaiming one’s contempt for France and Britain. If communists are tortured, it carries the fight to the Russian and Slavic world, which is always far more that of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky than that of Lenin and Trotsky. By making Austria a laughingstock, it makes a mockery of German Catholicism; and if one sets out to conquer or annex it, that is a threat to the whole of the Adriatic. Mussolini is mistaken; he has failed to understand his Cimbri and Teutoni; ages ago another Roman allowed himself similarly to be taken in by barbarians: Mussolini should have studied his Roman history more closely! By making up to the fascists, one shows one’s contempt for “Roman law.” One day the world will realize with astonishment that it was conquered by a corporal (albeit one who already had a field marshal to do his bidding!). We German writers of Jewish extraction are the first to have been vanquished for Europe. We at least are not guilty of blindness or falsehood. All we have is honor . . .! The great gain to German literature from Jewish writers is the theme of the city. Jews have discovered and written about the urban scene and the spiritual landscape of the city dweller. They have revealed the whole diversity of urban civilisation. They have discovered the café and the factory, the bar and the hotel, Berlin’s bourgeoisie and its banks, the watering holes of the rich and the slums of the poor, sin and vice, the city by day and the city by night, the character of the inhabitant of the metropolis. This theme was almost imposed on the gifted Jewish writers by the urban milieu from which most of them came, to which their parents had been forced to move, and also by their more highly evolved sensibility and their Jewish aptitude for cosmopolitanism. The majority of non-Jewish German writers concentrated on the description of the rural landscapes that to them were home. In Germany, more than any other country, there is a “folk literature” based on region, landscape, tribe, often of high literary value, but necessarily inaccessible to a wider European public. As far as “abroad” was concerned, there was only that “Germany” whose literary mouthpieces were predominantly Jewish writers. It is through them that the French, the English, the American reader gain their sense of German reality. But this precisely is the basis for further accusations from narrow-minded nationalists and historians against Jewish writers. In the most infantile and jejeune manner, they took the subject matter, the setting, for the author’s personal character. A Jewish writer was “remote from the soil” when he wrote about the city; a “café house writer” when he discovered bars; a “traitor to the fatherland” when he depicted the world; a “superficial scribbler” when he found more sensual forms than the dry, abstract language of the German provincial dilettante; a “feuilletonist” if he happened to have charm and lightness of touch; a “joker” if he was witty; and if he happened to take on the description of the countryside, it was straightway objected that “he saw with his head and not his heart.” Jakob Wassermann’s moving testimonial, My Career as a German and a Jew, was vilified; it was forgotten that the one and only German war song was written by an Austrian Jew who died on the battlefield, Lieutnant H. Zuckermann. They forgot the patriotic poems of Ernst Lissauer; they repudiated the Rhenish dramas of the half Jewish Zuckmayer, so popular with the theatergoing public. Literary anti-Semitism has existed in Germany since 1900. The racist anti-Semite Adolf Barthels, the moderate anti-Semite Paul Fechter, and many others attack the literary works of Jewish writers, often with personal invective. Certainly coarse and tasteless individuals may also be found among Jewish scribblers. But it is always these who are offered as the typical representatives of the Jewish writer! As early as 1918, before putting a book on display in their windows, provincial bookshop owners would ask if an author was Jewish—not even bothering to read it. And never—even though literary anti-Semitism was growing ever more virulent—did a Jewish author say anything publicly against it. There are strong and deep friendships between German Jewish writers and the best of the non-Jewish writers. A fine German stylist like Hans Carossa (not a Jew) was discovered and promoted by an admirable Jewish writer (though not one who wants to be named in this context). Let us remind our readers that Hans Carossa was the only non-Jewish German writer who refused to belong to the academy of the “Third Reich.” The German press was silent about this refusal, so nothing is known about it abroad either. Many of us served in the war, many died. We have written for Germany, we have died for Germany. We have spilled our blood for Germany in two ways: the blood that runs in our veins, and the blood with which we write. We have sung Germany, the real Germany! And that is why today we are being burned by Germany!

Cahiers Juifs (Paris), September/November 1933 (from the French)

[Sophia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This blew my mind. Way more than I could have ever expected from a non-fiction of the 20's.
Very much looking forward to reading Roth's novels.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a rare opportunity to read first hand accounts of Berlin in the 1920s. History has a tendency to focus on "the Nazis", but what was it like in Berlin when people had no idea there would be a second World War? Joseph Roth presents interesting vignettes about everything from immigration to bicycle races. It was a turbulent, violent, horrible time filled with riots, death and inflation, but all the while people were leading "normal" lives as best as they could and trying to get by. A worthwhile read for history lovers.

[Carlton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Over a couple of months I have read this uneven collection of newspaper articles by Joseph Roth, famous to me as the author of The Radetsky March The articles are mainly from the Frankfurter Zeitung about Berlin in the 1920's. These are not political, but more about everyday events or, better, random musings.
The book starts with some articles about Jews - refugees from the East (Poland, Hungary and many from Russian POW camps following WWI) and their area in Berlin, including an article about a model miniature rebuilding of the Temple of Solomon.
There are then a series of articles on various locations or events in Berlin that have caught Roth's attention - night dives (cafes etc), the homeless refugees, the steam baths, the police morgue, the traffic system, new buildings and the pleasure industry.
These sometimes soar, such as the article on skyscrapers:
"It is impossible for the proximity of clouds to have no effect on human beings. The view out of the window, taking in the full boundlessness of the horizon, works on both heart and soul. The lungs take in the air of heaven. Clouds wander past the brows of mortal man as previously only around the brows of Olympians."
and
"Oh— and already you hear that the first skyscraper in Berlin is to contain a great entertainment palace, with cinemas, dance hall, bar, Negro bands, vaudeville, jazz. Because human nature will not deny its weaknesses, even where it is seemingly in the process of overcoming them. And if it were possible for us to build a “planet scraper” and to construct settlements on Mars, the expeditions of scientists and engineers would be accompanied by a delegation of bartenders. I have a shining vision of a bar in the clouds. It’s raining champagne cocktails."
Sometimes the effect is far more prosaic, but still enlightening of a different time.

The final, longer essay written in 1933 and published in Paris after Roth's "voluntary" exile when the Nazis came to power is about the Nazi rise to power. This is a powerful essay and although it is easy to be clever with hindsight, this was wise at the time. The article opens:
"Very few observers anywhere in the world seem to have understood what the Third Reich’s burning of books, the expulsion of Jewish writers, and all its other crazy assaults on the intellect actually mean. The technical apotheosis of the barbarians, the terrible march of the mechanized orangutans, armed with hand grenades, poison gas, ammonia, and nitroglycerine, with gas masks and airplanes, the return of the spiritual (if not the actual) descendants of the Cimbri and Teutoni— all this means far more than the threatened and terrorized world seems to realize: It must be understood. Let me say it loud and clear: The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination (it will be the task of some future generation to establish the reasons for this disgraceful capitulation)."

Overall it is a powerful collection and, through the overall impression of the times it portrays, is more than the sum of its uneven parts.

[Liam · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It's only the minutiae of life that are important." (24)

"Residents. Resident homeless. The provisional or the contingent has become their normal way of life, and they are at home -- in their homelessness." (68)

"They shovel the sand into a tin pail, then carry it to a different place, and pour it our. And then some other children come along and reverse the process, taking the sand back whence it came. And that's all life its." (76)

"Man, surrounded by machines, is compelled to become a machine himself." (88)

"He is strict with himself in order to be violent with others. He runs that he may whip others. He fries that others may broil. He wants war so that others may die. He gives up half his hard-earned fortune so that others may work." (of fascists, 133)

"Twentieth-century man can turn ducats out of all sorts of trash." (156)

[Terry Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Roth has been called bombastic by other reviewers. He is not bombastic, but descriptive. For example: "we are children and we are parents: there is no dissolution of these states except death." Or, for another, while he describes the city of Berlin: "it has no society. But it has everything that society alone provides in every other city: theaters, art, trade, cinema, subways." In the authors words. "I don't write witty columns. I paint the portrait of the age."

Roth is a maximalist of the short form in his astute and descriptive observations. This book is a treasure and I fail to understand why he is not part of High School literature.