Joseph Roth, Michael J. Hoffmann (TRN), Michael J. Hoffmann (INT) What I Saw

Annotation

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.