What I Saw – Reports from Berlin 1920–1933 - Hardcover

Roth, Joseph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393051676 ISBN 13: 9780393051674

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003

Synopsis

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

Review

Roth's reports form Weimar-era Berlin capture in diamond-glitter prose the booming, brash capital. Here they are returned to life for English-language readers in Michael Hoffmann's splendid translation. --Boyd Tonkin, Independent

About the Author

Joseph Roth's (1894-1939) books include The Legend of the Holy Drinker, Right and Left, The Emperor's Tomb, The String of Pearis and The Radetzky March Michael Hofmann is a poet. As a translator his work includes Kafka's The Man who Disappeared (Amerika). He has also translated Joseph Roth's The Legend of the Holy Drinker, Right and Left and The String of Pearls.

Edition details

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co.
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0393051676
• ISBN 13: 9780393051674
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 224