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What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

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Joseph Roth was a master journalist from Vienna who moved to Berlin on 1920 to investigate and report first hand on what he feared was a doomed megapolis. WHAT I SAW: REPORTS FROM BERLIN 1920-1933 is one of the most refreshingly original books to grace our shores in years. Roth was concerned with newspaper writing but he was also a poet of rare distinction and courage. These 'feuilletons' or short essays on observations reveal insights into the Berlin from the fall of the Weimar Republic to the rise of the Nazi reqime. Calling these small essays 'readers for walkers' Roth wanders the streets and mass transportation of Berlin, looking into the backyards of common day people, the Jewish neighborhoods/ghettoes, the photographs in the police files of the unknown dead victims found in the gutters, the high wired clubs of decadent diversions, buildings of history and of future, and all the while he maintains a beautiful descriptive, poetic style while keeping his eyes wide open to the pathetic prophecy of the doom of the great city of Berlin. His words: 'The story of how absolutism and corruption, tyranny and speculation, the knout and shabby real estate dealings, cruelty and greed, the pretense of tough law-abidingness and blathering wheeler-dealer stood shoulder to shoulder, digging foundations and building streets, and of how ignorance, poor taste, disaster, bad intentions and the occassional very happy accident have come together in building the capital of the German Reich...' are balanced on other pages of describing the beauty of the sky above Berlin, the pathos of the lonely and neglected poor people on the trains, and the wonder of the vaguely temporary air that surrounded the bulding of a city after The Great War.

Roth is able to tell us so much history in so brief a space. Here are the beginnings of Isherwood's BERLIN STORIES, the birth of the style of the recent works of WG Sebald's books, and even the writings of Edmund White in THE FLANEUR. Would that our newspapers could find the space AND the talent to place such insightful observations in our poetically vapid journalism of today! This is a rare book of beautiful writing and we are indebted to translator Michael Hofmann not only for his lyrical English style, but also for his own insightful essay about the man who wrote these 'feuilletons'. A sad parting note is that Joseph Roth died in Paris in 1939 from the effects of his alcoholism. Such was the influence of Berlin on many artists of thetime.

Joseph Roth, What I Saw; Reports from Berlin 1920-1933. Translated by Michael Hofmann. I enjoy walking around cities, noticing people, activities, and places, especially the five boroughs of my New York. This new book collects and translates some thirty-four essays Joseph Roth penned for newspaper readers between 1920 and 1933. He was a young outsider from Lemberg (Lviv) and Vienna, but he is obviously a Berliner, a man fascinated by its people and scenes. We tend to know Berlin of this period from history books or "Cabaret." This book engaged me because each essay is a fresh look at an aspect of life in the German capital during this crucial period. For example, as U.S. newspapers now report the ever-growing Wal-Marts, Roth's essay, "The Very Large Department Store," looks at the trend as a poet does, with notice to the way crowds are swept upwards, almost against their will, to further displays. Moreover, the displays are so numerous that the multiplicity of the offerings devalues each item. Note also the essay, "With the Homeless" (1920), for his sensitive description of people. Roth observed well, wrote well. Whoever chose the accompanying photographs, added meaningful and helpful images, on theme, even if sometimes off-date. Dating some photographs was smart.

The first 'feuilleton' in this thoughtful selection of Joseph Roth's newspaper articles from the 1920s sets the agenda. Roth wrote:
"Strolling around on a May morning, what do I care about the vast issues of world history.. or even the fate of some individual [who] in some way 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. I no longer have any use for the sweeping gestures of heroes on the global stage. I'm going for a walk." There's a hint of Robert Walser, the happy-go-lucky flaneur, in this agenda, but Roth is too earnest to mean exactly what he says. All of us, himself included, spend most of our attention of the mere objects we encounter with our senses as we stroll through life. The unplanted vine curling up a wire fence holds our thoughts more than the fact that the fence surrounds a hospital. The sound of a civil defense siren being tested at noon on Wednesday occupies our mind more than the inevitability of atomic war. "In the face of the sunshine that spreads ruthlessly over the walls... anything puffed up and inessential can have no being. In the end ... I come to believe that everything we take seriously... is unimportant." Life, in other words, is a constant stroll through the immediate, through fleeting interactions with trivia. I dare say I agree; sitting at this keyboard, I'm more engrossed with the color of a strange wall than I am with world affairs. I have to assign my mind the task of thinking about Iran or global warming.

Joseph Roth was one of the best-known and highest paid journalists of the German-language press in the 1920s, essentially a roving columnist/correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung and other papers. He wrote hundreds of such brief reports, seldom even 1000 words in length, of which 34 are included in "What I Saw". This is NOT a selection Joseph Roth made from his own work; the 34 'Feuilletons' were chosen by editor Michael Beinert in 1996 and published in German under the title "Joseph Roth in Berlin". "What I Saw" is a title picked by translator Michael Hofmann in 2003, 64 years after Roth's death in Paris in 1939. All but the final selection were originally published in ephemeral daily papers in the early 1920s, so the subtitle "1920-1933" might unfortunately mislead American readers looking for an account of the rise of Nazism. Roth described that phenomenon with painful vividness in his novels, but these little journalistic impressions were never intended to be analytic history. Their worth as 'literature' comes from their sparks of poetic language and their sly insights into ordinary life: the Jewish refugee who builds a miniature "Temple of Solomon" for display; the Berlin steam baths where travelers spend the night when they can't find a hotel; the special car for wood-gatherers on the Berlin subway; the hunch-backed waiter whose job was to distribute newspapers to customers in a famous coffee house; the six-day bicycle race and the crowd that attends it. It's fun for a reader like me -- as much a 'stroller' as Roth or Walser or as W.G. Sebald -- to find that Roth's minutia have remained unchanged along the streets of my times.

But in the end, even the "unpolitical observer" that journalist Roth pretended to be could not remain aloof from "great events." The last three or four feuilletons of this collection expose Roth's despair and anger at the calamity engulfing Germany with the rise of the National Socialist thugs to power. The final selection here, "The Auto-da-fe of the Mind" written in exile in France in 1933, is perhaps the most ferocious and eloquent denunciation of Fascism I've ever read. The anger in it seethes and scalds. In no other writing did Roth so passionately identify himself with the Jewish culture of Europe, or so prophetically lament its fate. It's as if, in this editor's selection, we had taken an off-beat but interesting tour of Weimar Berlin with our ever-ironic guide Joseph, and come at the end of our stroll upon a scene of horrible brutality.

Not everyone likes Berlin. Joseph Roth didn't. He had moved there from Vienna in 1920 to make a career as a journalist and novelist. He succeeded, he became a well known `feuilleton' writer and he found a publisher for his novels. But his heart was not in the place. By 1925 he was happy to get an assignment to Paris. He still visited Berlin regularly until events in 1933 made emigration final.
He wrote articles for several papers. He saw his job as feuilletonist in the synthesis of facts and artful language. This is Wiki's definition of the term:

Feuilleton ( a diminutive of French: feuillet, the leaf of a book) was originally a kind of supplement attached to the political portion of French newspapers, consisting chiefly of non-political news and gossip, literature and art criticism, a chronicle of the latest fashions, and epigrams, charades and other literary trifles. The feuilleton may be described as a "talk of the town", and a contemporary English-language example of the form is the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker.

In other words, he could write about whatever he pleased, and he did. This book collects articles that were published during his time in Berlin. He walked about and watched and listened and wrote. A feuilleton is not a political analysis, nor is it investigative reporting. We can't expect disclosures nor sharp analytical insights or political prophecies, but we do get astute observations and brilliant descriptions. He visits the Jewish quarters, meets refugees and asylum seekers, catches the mood in traffic and construction, visits places of culture and entertainment, including those where politics are made.
His visit to the place of the homeless reminded me of the totally different way that Orwell used in approaching the subject. Orwell submerged himself and thus achieved an effect that Roth couldn't come near to.
In a way, the `feuilleton' is not a fully satisfactory genre, and Roth should be remembered for his novels, stories, and essays, not for his little leaflets.
The book has wonderful photographic illustrations from the period, especially on the Jewish quarter. I can't see in the `search inside' function of the amazon page on the translation whether the English language edition has kept them all. Would be a pity if not.

It's true, there's poetry on every page. Beautifully rendered portraits of a city and a culture. Roth's poetic imagination and powers of observation are only matched by his compassion. A must read-for anyone interested in the development of the 20th century human in Europe.

Joseph Roth's Berlin after the Great War was a urban blend of the homeless, the displaced, Jews escaping from the East, "passengers with heavy loads," bourgeosie, bohemians and Reichstag politicians with their "reservoirs of asininity." His feuilletons, rich in colorful writing, unexpected phrases and observations, describe Berlin as alive, amusing, sad; a photo gallery of the dead including children who die without identification; their photographs "the only trace of themselves they bequeath to posterity." Its architecture giving up "the soft and vanishing treads of its past" through its stone. The dark symbolic burial of Weimer's Frederich Ebert in 1925, the last chapter entitled "the auto da fe of the mind" in which he decries the private silent censorship of the twenties of Jewish writers, whose theme was the city. One soon and rewardingly realizes that Roth is the true north for looking back at that Berlin and not Fosse's Berlin in "Cabaret, " a fin de siecle café society peopled by the likes of Liza Minelli and its cross dressing performers. Hoffman's translation and introduction are superb.

Although he was not exterminated directly by the Nazis (he died of alcoholism in Paris in 1939 at the age of 44), Joseph Roth surely was yet another of the victims of the insanity and inhumanity that convulsed Europe in the quarter century after WWI. In the 34 newspaper essays collected in this volume, Roth provides a mosaic portrayal of the aimless and bankrupt life (ethically and aesthetically) of Berlin that was the immediate precursor to the Nazi cataclysm.

The book has an unusual provenance. Roth began his career as a journalist in Vienna after getting out of the Austrian military at the end of WWI (he was born in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire). In 1920 he moved from Vienna to Berlin, which remained his base of operations until 1933, when the Nazis came to power and Roth moved on to Paris. In the years 1920 to 1933, Roth was a widely-read and highly-paid journalist for several German newspapers; his specialty was the feuilleton, a short literary sketch or essay, often light in tone. Of the undoubtedly hundreds he penned during those years, these 34 were selected and published in German in 1996 as a walker's guide to Berlin. Then, in 2003, with the growing recognition in the English-speaking world of Roth's literary stature, they were translated by Michael Hoffman and published in English. I believe the book represents the first appearance in English of Roth's journalism, and while it certainly is a very valuable introduction, one can't help but wonder to what extent it is less than it might have been, both as an introduction to Roth's journalism and as a picture of Weimar Berlin, due to its genesis as a walking guide to 1990s Berlin.

Even so, it gives us a remarkable and impressionistic picture of Berlin between WWI and the Nazis -- more instructive and memorable, I suspect, than any history book. Even more lasting is its protrayal of the human flotsam and jetsam that had washed into Berlin in the wake of WWI, including hordes of Eastern European Jews. Although the book as constituted does not dwell on the plight of the Jews, the growing "Jewish question" (for Roth, an extraordinarily complicated subject) pervades the book. Roth was both Jewish and a highly cultured European and one can tell that he senses grave trouble for both his lineages in the near future.

But to me the book is most significant and valuable for its writing. Roth relates his keen social observations with a distinct voice and in an engaging style (oft-times pointillistic), and there are numerous brilliant turns of phrase, paragraphs, and vignettes -- although some of the humor is either out-dated or does not survive translation. I have not read any of Roth's novels, but now I shall make a point of doing so in the near future.

The book is short (just over 200 pages) and the writing crisp, so it is no great chore to read the entire work. But for those who want to skim the high points, I commend the excellent Introduction by the translator Michael Hofmann, and the essays "Refugees from the East", "Wailing Wall", "The Unnamed Dead", "Architecture", "The Word at Schwannecke's", "The Twelfth Berlin Six-Day Races", "A Visit to the Rathenau Museum", "An Apolitical Observer Goes to the Reichstag", and the concluding essay (written in Paris in 1933) "The Auto-da-Fe of the Mind".

Joseph Roth was a journalist and novelist of great talent, but where he shines is in his short pieces, which he published in many dailies in Germany, Austria and France throughout the decline of the fragile Weimar Republic. His collected pieces, seemingly casual and chatty observations on everything from the Berlin high-rise craze to the Jewish quarter and its inhabitants, form an accretion I can't quite explain. Brilliant little sentences--almost throwaway comments on the passing scene--build to a picture so much richer than if he'd "explained" the unease and its causes. After all, when Roth wrote these feuilletons (sp??), the "scene" was all around him and other Berliners. And sometimes, his observations are scathing and frightened, as in his gorgeous anger in "An Auto-de-Fée of the Mind"---and we feel the National Socialist noose tighten. Roth wrote (and published) that particular piece from the relative safety of Paris. It would not be safe for long. I'm thankful this new collection has been published, or I would have gone to my grave without being introduced to one of Berlin's most astute watchers.

The prose is quick and lively, entertaining but chilling. The sense of foreboding never eases. His class of society is broader than Berlin Alexanderplatz, but there is the same grittiness.
On the other hand, the description and picture of the all night baths showed a refinement that we could emulate. It was a happy marriage of a Russian sauna and a upscale YMCA.
The photos are excellent, and add to the sense of the GegangendeZeit.

I lived in Berlin in the 70's, and wanted to read about the local history there. It turned out that this book was more about the attitudes of people as they moved towards nazism. The writing is poetic. Some of his descriptions of the absurdity of city life could apply to people in any large city.