What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

by Joseph Roth

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393325822
• ISBN13: 9780393325829
• Release Date: August 2004
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 227 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Serendipity versus Fascism

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

A masterpiece of journalistic force and observation

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.

What Journalism Can Be

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.

Gorgeous

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.

Thirty-four well-written essays on Berliners

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.