What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933 - Hardcover

Joseph Roth; Michael Bienert; Michael Hofmann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393051676 ISBN 13: 9780393051674

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2002

Synopsis

"[Joseph Roth] is now recognized as one of the twentieth century's great writers." ―Anthony Heilbut, Los Angeles Times Book Review

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, The 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 the 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.

About this title

About the Authors

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) was the great elegist of the cosmopolitan culture that flourished in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He published several books and articles before his untimely death at the age of 44. Roth’s writing has been admired by J. M. Coetzee, Jeffrey Eugenides, Elie Wiesel, and Nadine Gordimer, among many others.

The award-winning translator Michael Hofmann has also translated works by Jenny Erpenbeck, Gert Hofmann, Franz Kafka, Heinrich von Kleist, and Joseph Roth for New Directions. His translation of Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck was awarded the International Booker Prize in 2024.

Reviews

A Roth revival must be occurring. The writer's best novels from the 1920s and 1930s (e.g., The Radetzky March, 1932) remain in print. And first his short fiction (The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth [BKL F 15 02]) and now his journalism have been gathered together. A literally peripatetic writer--this volume's original German subtitle translates as "a reader for walkers"--Roth ambled about 1920s Berlin with an incisive eye for the German society of the time. Disordered by a devastating war, its live-for-the-day side is snared by Roth, as is the widespread contempt toward the Weimar Republic. His capturing of the zeitgeist is so different from, and deeper than, ordinary journalism that modern, quotation-hunting reporters could learn much from him. He didn't tell you Weimar was doomed, he showed you: in descriptions of the cultured interior of an assassinated minister's house; in portraits of Berlin's Jewish district; in a trip to the city morgue. Eminently deserving of a renaissance, Roth's articles are written with novelistic technique and will impress those who respect good writing. Gilbert Taylor
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Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393051676
• ISBN 13: 9780393051674
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224