What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

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.

Joseph Roth was a practitioner of the art of the feuilleton - a part of a newspaper or magazine devoted to fiction, criticism, or light literature. As such, you wouldn’t expect a lot of real depth. But given the title, you’d expect something of importance from a critical observer writing in that horrendous period of world history.What I saw was interesting in a number of ways – but not in the ways I expected before reading it. I had hoped to gain some insight into Germany’s plunge into insanity during the years of the Weimar republic. There was little in the text that rang true in that regard.The only enlightenment in that arena was Roth’s seeming insistence that it was Germany's rejection of its intellectual (literary) history that led to its sickness and demise. Roth reports, Hitler’s main ally was von Hindenburg – a man who boasted of never having read a book. Roth further cited the Nazi book burning as proof of their anti-intellectual position. Not a really penetrating analysis – but one you might expect from a writer of the feuilleton.What was interesting was this. First, we saw Roth evolving as a human being. When we “meet” him in around 1920 he seemed to have no real sensitivity for what was going on around him. He records the waves of migration moving west and reports them as though they were some scabrous film coating the continent. He makes no identification with the immigrants as fellow Jews or as fellow human beings.In fact, he tries to conceal his relation to them. In one article, he tries to “pass himself off” as Christian, talking about how in his “religious phase” he would sometimes go to early mass. He highlights the Weimar Republic’s assassinated foreign minister - Walther Rathenau – as a Jew who tried to reconcile Jewish and Christian thought.The bulk of Roth’s vignettes deal with Berlin as it enters modernity. It parades a series of quirky scenes and characters to pique the reader’s attention. For example, we learn that in some of the more fashionable Berlin dinner clubs there were “newspaper” waiters that would bring selections of the finest journals and literary output to the club’s guests. We learn of the rise of mass-market appeal in the giant department stores and how the side-by-side display of goods cheapened them without regard to quality. Roth shows us portraits of the city’s very wealthy and its very poor, the burgers and the criminals. Only a twisted cross here and there reminds us of approaching tragedy.What was even more important was something Roth could never anticipate – the similarity of the Weimar Republic with America today. Read “Deutschland Uber Alles” as “America First.” What about leaders with no intellectual or literary grounding (like von Hindenburg and our current crop of administration bureaucrats.) Think about the book burning as a reaction to an “intellectual elite.” The “immigration” crisis clearly has modern overtones.It is only in the last feuilleton that Roth has a major realization of the meaning of his Jewish inheritance. He could never be a full member of German society as it stood early in the last century. Rathenau’s view of being “German first Jew second” was impossible. This last piece was written in Paris in 1933. Hitler had come to power and Roth was lucky enough to escape with his life. Even so, Roth blames the situation on the failure of the average German to rely on his or her glorious literary heritage – Jews and all.So, while I didn’t think I learned much of what I set out to learn, I thought the portrait of Roth as he developed through some of the darkest periods of human existence was well worth the read.I do have a few niggling issues. The text was poorly proofed and the sentence structure of the translation was rather awkward. As the same awkward structure was used in the preface, I think the issue was with the translator and not with Roth. Also, despite the translator’s words to the contrary, if you are interested in Weimar Germany, go through the whole Cabaret trilogy. Read Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, see Broadway’s “I am a Camera” and finally, see the movie itself. There’s more insight in that than in most of the historical record you come across.

Insightful impressions of a time a place that eventually destroyed Europe, leading the the worst genocide in history.