Joseph Roth - What I Saw - Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

Mulackstrasse, 58–59

Munich, 145 n

Münzstrasse, 46, 53

Musil, Robert, 183 n

Mussolini, Benito, 215

Neue Schönhauser Strasse, 53, 54

Neumann, Alfred, 213

Neumann, Robert, 213

New York, N.Y., 18, 89, 112, 148

Offenbach, Jacques, 169

Oslo, 18

Palestine, 19, 37, 47, 49–50

panopticum (waxworks), 152, 153–56, 153 n

Panter, Peter, 213

Paris, 16, 18, 148, 171

Paul (Albert’s Cellar regular), 56

Paula (prostitute), 56

Picard, Max, 214

Plath, Sylvia, 108 n

Plutarch, 184

Polgar, Alfred, 214

Potsdamer Platz, 17–18, 86, 87, 97, 190, 191

Potsdam Station, 81, 203

Prenzlauer Allee, 65

Prussia, 66, 80 n, 210, 213

Rathenau, Walther, 12, 183–87, 183 n, 193

Rathenau Museum, 12, 182, 183–87

Redslob, 201

Reese’s Restaurant, 55–56

Regine (Albert’s Cellar regular), 56

Reifenberg, Benno, 15–16

Rhineland, 66

Richard the Red (Red Richard) (newspaper waiter), 20, 135, 136, 137–39

Riga, 67

Rilke, Rainer Maria, 18, 95 n, 107 n, 164 n, 213

Romania, 35

Romanisches Café, 135–36, 138

Rudel, Hugo, 202

Rudolf (Therese’s former friend), 57

Rummelsburg, 85–88

Russia, 67

S-Bahn, 20, 31, 87, 89–92, 90, 94

passengers on, 93–96, 94

Schiller, Friedrich von, 11

Schiller Park, 20, 74, 75–77

Schillings, Max von, 202

Schönhauser Strasse, 58

Schönhauser Tor, 60

Schwannecke’s, 140, 141–45

Schwarzbach, L., 42

Sebald, W. G., 42 n

Shakespeare, William, 135

“Siegessäule” (Victory Column), 178, 179–81

Simsonstrasse, 194

Slovakia, 35

Solomon, King, 41–44

Spain, 85

Spandauer Strasse, 81, 82

Spree, the, 81

State Opera House, 201–2

Sternheim, Carl, 213

Sternkucker’s bookstore, 42

Storm, Theodor, 131, 131 n, 134

Stratford-on-Avon, 11

Stresemann, Gustav, 208 n

Tegeler Willy (Café Dalles denizen), 54

Tempelhof, 145 n

Therese (prostitute), 57

Tieck, Johann Ludwig, 184

Tiergarten, 77, 81, 180

Tippel Pub, 59–60

Toller, Ernst, 213

Tolstoy, Leo, 215

Trier, Walter, 136

Trischke, Herr (barber), 132–33

Trotsky, Leon, 215

Tyre, 41

U-Bahn, 31

UFA Palace, 84, 166, 167–69, 167 n

Ukraine, 37

Ungar, Hermann, 214

United States, 11, 17, 148, 196, 202

Vendler, Helen, 16

Victory Column (“Siegessäule”), 178, 179–81

Vienna, 16–17, 18, 56, 139

Voltaire, 126

Wagner, Richard, 80

Wassermann, Jakob, 214, 216

Wedding, 77

Weimar Republic, 11–12, 13

Weinmeisterstrasse, 53, 56

Weiss, Ernst, 214

Weissensee, 63

Weitig, Robert, 201

Werfel, Franz, 214

Wiesenstrasse, 37, 38

Wilde, Oscar, 44

Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany, 137, 194, 209, 210

Wilhelmstrasse, 199–200

Willy’s bodega, 58–59

Wölfling, Leopold, 139

Wolfskehl, Karl, 214

Zion, 50

Zoologischer Garten, 147

Zuckermann, H., 216

Zuckmayer, Carl, 214, 216

Zweig, Arnold, 214

Zweig, Stefan, 214

Joseph Roth was born Moses Joseph Roth to Jewish parents on September 2, 1894, in Brody in Galicia, in the extreme east of the then Habsburg Empire; he died on May 27, 1939, in Paris. He never saw his father — who disappeared before he was born and later died insane — but grew up with his mother and her relatives. After completing school in Brody, he matriculated at the University of Lemberg (variously Lvov or Lviv), before transferring to the University of Vienna in 1914. He served for a year or two with the Austro-Hungarian Army on the Eastern Front — though possibly only as an army journalist or censor. Later he was to write: “My strongest experience was the War and the destruction of my fatherland, the only one I ever had, the Dual Monarchy of Austria-Hungary.”

In 1918 he returned to Vienna, where he began writing for left-wing papers, occasionally as “Red Roth,” “ der rote Roth. ” In 1920 he moved to Berlin, and in 1923 he began his distinguished association with the Frankfurter Zeitung. In the following years he traveled throughout Europe, filing copy for the Frankfurter from the south of France, the USSR, Albania, Germany, Poland, and Italy. He was one of the most distinguished and best-paid journalists of the period — being paid at the dream rate of one deutsche mark per line. Some of his pieces were collected under the title of one of them, The Panopticum on Sunday (1928), while some of his reportage from the Soviet Union went into The Wandering Jews. His gifts of style and perception could, on occasion, overwhelm his subjects, but he was a journalist of singular compassion. He observed and warned of the rising Nazi scene in Germany (Hitler actually appears by name in Roth’s first novel, in 1923), and his 1926 visit to the USSR disabused him of most — but not quite all — of his sympathy for Communism.

When the Nazis took power in Germany in 1933, Roth immediately severed all his ties with the country. He lived in Paris — where he had been based for some years — but also in Amsterdam, Ostend, and the south of France, and wrote for émigré publications. His royalist politics were mainly a mask for his pessimism; his last article was called “Goethe’s Oak at Buchenwald.” His final years were difficult; he moved from hotel to hotel, drinking heavily, worried about money and the future. What precipitated his final collapse was hearing the news that the playwright Ernst Toller had hanged himself in New York. An invitation from the American PEN Club (the organization that had brought Thomas Mann and many others to the States) was found among Roth’s papers. It is tantalizing but ultimately impossible to imagine him taking ship to the New World, and continuing to live and to write: His world was the old one, and he’d used it all up.

Roth’s fiction came into being alongside his journalism, and in the same way: at café tables, at odd hours and all hours, peripatetically, chaotically, charmedly. His first novel, The Spider’s Web, was published in installments in 1923. There followed Hotel Savoy and Rebellion (both 1924), hard-hitting books about contemporary society and politics; then Flight Without End, Zipper and His Father, and Right and Left (all Heimkehrerromane —novels about soldiers returning home after the war). Job (1930) was his first book to draw considerably on his Jewish past in the East. The Radetzky March (1932) has the biggest scope of all his books and is commonly reckoned his masterpiece. There follow the books he wrote in exile, books with a stronger fabulist streak in them, full of melancholy beauty: Tarabas, The Hundred Days, Confession of a Murderer, Weights and Measures, The Emperor’s Tomb , and The Tale of the 1002nd Night.

Michael Hofmann, the son of the German novelist Gert Hofmann, was born in 1957 in Freiburg. At the age of four, he moved to England, where he has lived off and on ever since. After studying English at Cambridge and comparative literature on his own, he moved to London in 1983. He has published poems and reviews widely in England and in the United States. In 1993, he was appointed Distinguished Lecturer in the English Department of the University of Florida at Gainesville.