What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

About the Translator

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.

To date, he has published four books of poems and a collection of criticism, Behind the Lines, all with Faber & Faber. He edited (with James Lasdun) a book of contemporary versions of the Metamorphoses, called After Ovid, and is editing Rilke in English for Penguin.

Hofmann has translated works by Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, Wolfgang Koeppen, and Gert Hofmann, among others, and is the translator of the last six Joseph Roth titles to appear in English: Right and Left; The Legend of the Holy Drinker; The Tale of the 1002nd Night, for which he was awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize for translation in 1998; Rebellion, for which he was awarded the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize in 2000; The Wandering Jews; and The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth.

* Leu, plural lei: Romanian unit of currency.

* In Hungarian order, and to a German ear, “Fürst Geza” means “Prince Geza,” an ironic appellation for a penniless refugee.

* Not necessarily his real name. In The Wandering Jews, he appears as Herr Frohmann; that is also the version to which W. G. Sebald went for his account of the model temple, in the fourth part of his novel, The Emigrants (p. 176).

† The German word Kleinkunst, literally “small art,” contains an untranslatable pun on this religious miniaturist.

* Including Joseph Roth himself: As an Austrian journalist, he was required to pay regular calls on Prussia’s finest.

* A play on words: “middle” and the name of a Berlin district.

* From time to time, Roth comes quite close to Rilke. Cf. lines 16–17 of the first of the Duino Elegies: “und das verzogene Treusein einer Gewohnheit, / der es bei uns gefiel, und so blieb sie und ging nicht.”

* When last seen, (August 2001), it still did.

* Two more of those typographical references that appear so often in Roth’s journalism.

* Another passage that, to my ear, echoes Rilke in its unreliable fervor.

* Term from Greek tragedy usually given as “force” or “compulsion,” although a line from Sylvia Plath’s last poem, “Edge,” is perhaps the best rendering: “the illusion of a Greek necessity.”

* Novelist and poet Theodor Storm (1817–1888) and lyric poet Eduard Mörike (1804–1875).

* The German word Kratzbürste or “harridan” is used both for the wire brush and the woman wielding it.

* Many Berlin cafés featured racks of newspapers, domestic and foreign, available at a patron’s reqsuest; “serving” these was a specific waiter’s job, hence “newspaper waiter.”

* A rival establishment, to which Wolfgang Koeppen wrote an exquisite prose ode. It was widely known as “Café Grössenwahn,” or “Café Megalomania,” and its two rooms, one for celebrities, one for aspirants, were known respectively as “the swimming pool” and “the kiddy pool.”

* To be “air” to someone in German, Luft sein, is a usually terminal snub.

* The German idiom jemandem einen Strich durch die Rechnung machen literally refers to drawing a line through a bill, indicating that it has been paid (or cancelled).

* Tempelhof, Berlin’s first airport, received its concession in 1923. The first flights were to Munich and Königsberg.

* The panopticum, or exhibition of (topical) waxworks, was a subject always dear to Roth’s heart. The one collection of his feuilletons that was published in his lifetime — in 1928—was called The Panopticum on Sunday, and the subject and milieu also made an appearance in The Tale of the 1002nd Night, his last completed novel.

* This spelling accurately reflects the echt Berlinisch mispronunciation of Frederick the Great’s beloved French — especially of words ending in — ent and — ant (as in Restaurang).

* Another bit of Rilkean physics.

* UFA (Universum Film Aktien Gesellschaft), Germany’s leading film production company from 1917, had connections with MGM and Paramount, whose films it distributed in Germany as well as its own. The UFA Palace was a movie theater with more than two thousand seats, and a seventy-five-member orchestra.

* The Harold Lloyd film (not) discussed here is The Freshman.

* The “Siegessäule” was built to commemorate Prussian victories in the nineteenth century (in particular, those over Austria in 1866 and France in 1871), and originally stood directly in front of the Reichstag. In 1938 it was moved to its present location by the Nazis.

* Rathenau was the serving foreign minister at the time of his death, a German Jewish politician murdered by right-wing militants. The character “Arnhem” in Musil’s Man Without Qualities is supposed to be modeled on him.

* A compendium of Jewish rules and practices from the sixteenth century. The Weissenfelsische Songbook is a collection of some six hundred German hymns.

* Allgemeine Elektrizitäts Gesellschaft (General Electric Company).

* Literally, a forest of leaves, the expression for “the products of the press,” a Blatt being a newspaper as well as a leaf. The whole paragraph is an extended play on this analogy.

† The Wandervogel (or “ramblers”) movement began in turn-of-the century Germany.

* World War I general (1865–1937), who, like the slightly better known Hindenburg, despite losing the war, somehow retained his personal popularity during the twenties, and figured in right-wing Nationalist politics. Ultimately Hitler made monkeys of them both.

* The British Ambassador to Germany from 1920 to 1926.

* Bücherspeicher, an ugly word that Goebbels would have been proud of.

*Friedrich Ebert, (1871–1925), the leader of the Social Democratic Party, and president of the Weimar Republic from 1919 to 1925.

* The Masonic Funeral Music.

† The then chancellor, Wilhelm Marx.

* Two enormous — and, in the case of I.G. Farben, notorious — German petrochemical concerns. The organization of industries into enormous monoliths was one of the developments that attended the rise of Hitler. But even before that, Gustav Stresemann, the Weimar foreign minister for most of the mid-twenties, observed: “Without I.G. and coal, I could have no foreign policy.”

* “very desirous of new things,” besotted with the new and the fashionable.