What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-33 [Paperback]

‘This is a marvellous book...he is as brilliant and original a journalist as he is a storyteller'

'It is the eye for the telling detail that ends up astonishing us the most...a splendid and necessary book'

‘Roth was the poet of Berlin streetlife in the 1920s'

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 writings 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 crippies, the Jewish immigrants, the criminals, the bathhouse denizens, and the nameless dead who filled the morgues - as well as the more whimsical aspects of the city - the public parks and the burgeoning entertainment industry. Warning early on of the threat posed by the Nazis, Roth evoked a landscape of moral bankruptcy and debauched beauty, creating in the process a memorable portrait of a city.

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.