What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

Translator’sIntroduction

The name “Weimar Republic” has a whiff of fragility, of scandal, of doom about it. It denotes a tiny period of German history, the years from 1918 to 1933; an interval of tremulous republican government, between monarchy and dictatorship, between one catastrophic war and the approach of another; but most of all a period that was fast and febrile and fun, and — popularized by the somewhat superficial and touristic versions of Christopher Isherwood — became practically synonymous with the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties. Historically, though, it was a form of government and a constitution. There is some pathos and idealism in the name “Weimar,” the little statelet of Goethe and Schiller. One has to imagine the United States or Britain defeated in war, having taken enormous casualties, under part-occupation, and saddled with reparations in a punitive peace treaty that assigned them the guilt for the war, then, bethinking themselves of their finer traditions, naming their government and new constitution after a town that seemed to offer some literary precedent, as it might be “Walden” or “Stratford-on-Avon.” In the end the literary and idealistic connotations of the name did nothing. The government was established (and occasionally maintained) by force of arms. The diplomat Count Kessler wrote witheringly: “The paradox of a republican-social-democratic government allowing itself and the capitalists’ safes to be defended by hired unemployed and royalist officers, is simply too insane.” But so it went, and the Weimar period as a whole was characterized by political violence, assassinations, inflation, unemployment, crisis, and instability. There were seventeen governments in fewer than fifteen years, as an anguished center fought off numerical and decibel encroachments from both flanks. Weimar was always unloved, always friendless. To quote the historian Peter Gay: “The Republic was born in defeat, lived in turmoil, and died in disaster.”

BERLIN WAS BOTH a pendant and a totem for Weimar. It was the seat of government, and the place that made the government ner-vous like no other. It was where the Communist martyrs Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered in 1919, and the Jewish foreign minister Walther Rathenau (see “A Visit to the Rathenau Museum”) in 1922; and yet it was never a Brown — a Nazi — town. It may have celebrated its five hundredth anniversary some time in the 1980s, but it was only really around the turn of 1900 that its combined agglomeration and expansion began to exert the pull — in federated Germany, with its clutch of older, sometimes more beautiful cities — of a center. “To go to Berlin,” writes Gay, “was the aspiration of the composer, the journalist, the actor; with its superb orchestras, its hundred and twenty newspapers, its forty theaters, Berlin was the place for the ambitious, the energetic, the talented. Wherever they started, it was in Berlin that they became, and Berlin that made them, famous.” And yet there was something ungainly and sprawling and fermenting about it. It was a capital city that, like some horrible adolescent, had yet to grow into its role. In some ways it was even worse — a sort of golem — something that had been created for the purpose of existing, like Weimar, a bubble, and a hyperventilating bubble at that. (Read Roth on the Kurfürstendamm, an arrow going nowhere, but not a place one can be.) It is a very curious thing that the extraterritoriality that (West) Berlin had later, as an island-city in the Cold War, seemed already to exist in the 1920s, as witness the following tirade against Berlin, by the hero of Joseph Roth’s 1927 novel, Flight Without End (translated by David Le Vay with Beatrice Musgrave):

“This city,” he said, “exists outside Germany, outside Europe. It is its own capital. It does not draw its supplies from the land. It obtains nothing from the earth on which it is built. It converts this earth into asphalt, bricks and walls. It shades the plain with its houses, it supplies the plain with bread from its factories, it determines the plain’s dialect, its national mores, its national costume. It is the very embodiment of a city. . It has its own animal kingdom in the Zoological Gardens and the Aquarium, the Aviary and the Monkey House, its own vegetation in the Botanic Garden, its own stretches of sand on which foundations are laid and factories erected, it even has its own harbor, its river is a sea, it is a continent. . It nourishes the natives of Düsseldorf, of Cologne, of Breslau, and draws nourishment from them. It has no culture of its own as have Breslau, Cologne, Frankfurt, Königsberg. It has no religion. It has the most hideous churches in the world. It has no society. But it has everything that society alone provides in every other city: theaters, art, a stock-exchange, trade, cinema, subways.”

THIS BOOK — THE first collection of Joseph Roth’s journalism to appear in English — is a direct translation of a German selection made in 1996 by Michael Bienert: Joseph Roth in Berlin, subtitled Ein Lesebuch fur Spaziergänger (a reader for walkers). It is, I think, an admirable selection, not least because Bienert is fully qualified to serve two masters: He has literary training, and he works, or has worked, as a tour guide in Berlin. He knows the city like the proverbial back of his hand. That said, the interests of the English-speaking reader, as I seek to represent them, are not fully identical with Bienert’s. That reader is unlikely to turn up in Berlin with the Lesebuch in his or her hand, hoping to follow in Roth’s footsteps and scope out his haunts; the practical dimension of the selection lapses in translation. It is still literary but no longer a guide, and I have not included Bienert’s notes or introduction. (Perhaps I can further comfort American and English readers by observing that in most of these materials, he observes how irrecoverable and built over Roth’s Berlin is: not surprising, given that even something as recent and physical as the Berlin Wall seems to have left no trace of itself after just twelve years.) Still, the selection stands. It is varied and purposive, stops long enough on occasion to allow Roth to contradict himself — though hardly ever to repeat himself — and covers the breadth of his perspectives admirably. It even seems to pick out a sort of narrative line in terms of mood and subject, widening and darkening from airily whimsical beginnings to take in exile, assassination, the spread of fascism, and the uncertain prospects for German-Jewish civilization.

JOSEPH ROTH WAS a newspaperman all his life. Of the two dozen or so photographs that exist of him, a surprising number show him holding a newspaper or reading one. He was a lifelong reader, writer, thinker, and apologist for the press, of almost whatever stripe. “But these newspapers find only vendors,” he writes of enemy — nationalist — newspapers in “Election Campaign in Berlin.” “I am their only buyer.” In a sardonic note from his early days as a journalist in Berlin, he described himself as probably the only staffer who went out on the street after his shift, to hawk the paper! When he was a star writer for the Frankfurter Zeitung, earning one deutsche mark per line (he never sold himself short!), he still thought of himself as an “orchestra member.” It was — not coincidentally — one of the great periods of German journalism. Even a selection like the present one, which can hardly have intended anything of the kind, seems to be full of references to newspapers — often aesthetic ones, on the effects of certain type designs and sizes. The note of anguish at the unceasing round of editions in Berlin in the “Kurfürstendamm” piece sounds utterly real to me; Roth had an advanced newspaper dependency, in several senses. In his life, he wrote hundreds and hundreds of articles for dozens of different papers. It was necessity and survival, but it was also more. No one who didn’t believe in the trade as a vocation could have been so consumed by it, or would have written as he did in 1926, in his peppery letter style, to his Frankfurter editor, Benno Reifenberg:

It’s not possible to write feuilletons with your left hand, and one shouldn’t allow oneself to write them on the side. That’s a serious slight to the whole form. The feuilleton is as important as politics are to the newspaper, and to the reader it’s vastly more important. The modern newspaper is formed by everything but politics. The modern newspaper needs reporters more than it needs editorial writers. I’m not a garnish, not a dessert, I’m the main course. . What people pick up the newspaper for is me. Not the parliamentary report. Not the lead article. Not the foreign news. And yet, in the editorial offices, they go around thinking of Roth as a sort of eccentric chatterbox that they can just about afford as they’re such a great newspaper. They are so mistaken. I don’t write “witty columns.” I paint the portrait of the age. That’s what great newspapers are there for. I’m not a reporter, I’m a journalist; I’m not an editorial writer, I’m a poet.

Roth was a maximalist of the short form. Even at the very end, in exile in Paris, he was still contributing to émigré newspapers, in which he was read by colleagues and by a few handfuls of like-minded readers. It is a partial, and an interested, but to my mind a perfectly respectable opinion (held to by some readers and critics at the time) that Roth’s masterpieces were not his novels but his feuilletons, in much the same way, say, that the American poet Randall Jarrell was said, by Helen Vendler and others, to have used his talent in his poems and his genius in his book reviews.

How he began is a little more mysterious. It is possible that he worked for the army newspaper in his time with the Austrian military, from 1916 to 1918. When he returned from the war in 1919, aged twenty-five, with nothing to his name but an unfinished degree, a few published poems and short stories, and his army experience — whatever it was — he settled into journalism as if to the manner born. His undated short story “Rare and ever rarer in this world of empirical facts. .,” with its ironic account of a demobilized and disoriented officer falling effortlessly into a rather inadequate career in journalism, may be a jocular reflection of what happened to Roth himself. Another, this time more swaggering, account is in his rightly celebrated letter to his publisher, Gustav Kiepenheuer, on the occasion of the latter’s fiftieth birthday, on June 10, 1930, in which Roth remarks: “[Till I reached] Vienna, where, because I was broke, I started writing for the papers. They published my nonsense. It made me a living. I became a writer.” In 1919 Roth wrote a hundred pieces for the newly founded Viennese paper Der Neue Tag. When it folded in April 1920, he moved to Berlin — home at the time to a dozen daily newspapers, and with a calmer rate of inflation than Austria’s — and his production continued practically uninterrupted, for the Neue Berliner Zeitung—12-Uhr-Blatt, the Berliner Tageblatt, the Berliner Börsen-Courier, and others. And when in January 1923, newly married, he was signed up by the Frankfurter Zeitung, and with his first novel on the way, Roth had reached the peak of personal and professional contentment.

IT IS A SIMPLIFICATION, but not much of one, to say that Roth hated Berlin but permitted it to exercise him. Its inorganic history, its manic growth spurts, its indifferent aesthetics, its centralized pomp, its sporadic veneer of modernity, its human coldness, its callous officialdom—“Berlin is freezing,” he said, “even when it’s sixty degrees”—all variously appalled him, coming from Vienna and before that from Galicia. It is not surprising that the perspectives he seeks out are those of the unfortunates, the people who fall between the cracks, the immigrants, the Jews, the released lifer (a perspective taken up again in his novel Rebellion), the homeless living, and the nameless dead. And, conversely, that those that appall him are those of organized Berlin, as a center of fun, of transport, of government, of nightlife and literary life, and of sports. His natural sympathies were always with the outcast and the underdog, and Berlin gave him plenty.

Berlin is the metropolis as villain. It was always a sort of Moloch — Potsdamer Platz was the busiest square in Europe in 1914—and, then as now, a kind of ungovernable building site. A sort of moral ugliness and chaos seem to set it apart even from other negatively portrayed cities of the time as Paris (in Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and later dubbed “manic depressive capital of the world” by Henry Miller), as New York (in Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep), as London (in Conrad’s The Secret Agent), and as Oslo (in Hamsun’s Hunger). “Who in all the world goes to Berlin voluntarily?” Roth asks in The Wandering Jews. Berlin is where people are forced to come, and then — like Geza Fürst in “Refugees from the East”—unhappily get stuck. The genetic code of its sprawl is simply abhorrent. This is not the conventional view of Berlin, which sees its size and roughness and celebrates them. That view is the one expressed by Hans Flesch von Brünningen, which was posted on the wall of an exhibition around Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s painting of Potsdamer Platz: gleeful awe, a presentiment of thrills, delirious hyperbole, a quivering response to an electromagnet of sin and careerism:

The year was 1913. You have to realize what Berlin meant to us back then in Vienna. It was everything to us, really. For us, Berlin was crazy, debauched, metropolitan, anonymous, gargantuan, futuristic. It was literary and political and artistic (the city for painters). In short: an infernal cesspool and paradise in one. Together with a friend of mine I climbed the Glorietta Hill behind Vienna. It was nighttime. To the north, the sky was aglow. “That’s Berlin,” I said. That was where we would have to go.

Roth, one might surmise, felt somewhat similar in 1920 when he arrived, prepared, if need be, to live on cherries and sleep on park benches. Berlin, then, was where he was based until 1925, when he moved to Paris, although he remained a frequent visitor until the Nazis took power in 1933. However, only once (and only for a few months) did he and his wife have anywhere to call home; the rest of the time they stayed in hotels or with friends. This was admittedly a lifelong propensity of Roth’s, but in the case of Berlin it perhaps lends a little further chill and exposure to his views. Anyway, the city became the altar on which his spontaneous humanity, his left-leaning politics, and his belief in progress were sacrificed.

HIS STORY OF disillusion and antipathy might promise to make for dreary reading, but in fact one’s experience of these pieces is utterly unlike that. Not only is writing (and writing for immediate publication even more) a terrific discipline — Roth said the only way he understood the world at all was when he was holding a pen in his hand and had to write about it — more, the particular form, the feuilleton, in the hands of a master like Roth, seems to be a counterform. Inversion, reversal, subversiveness seem to be built into it. What is small is inevitably made to seem vast, and vast things are shrunk into a witty perspective. (Such subjects as the waxworks and the small-scale model of Solomon’s temple are obviously quintessential Roth; but no less, perhaps, is the very large department store.) “Saying true things on half a page” was his working definition of the feuilleton, nothing more restrictive than that. It seems, in Randall Jarrell’s tremendous phrase, “professionally surprising,” so much observation, mobility, and unexpectedness inhere in it.

One proceeds by indirection: not Palestine but Grenadierstrasse; not the celebration of Berlin nightlife but a melancholy, serious, and Marxist analysis of mass-produced “fun”; not the successful and much-touted American film comedy but the potency of the cheap music playing beforehand; not nostalgia but the Gleisdreieck; nowhere celebrated but the little oasis called the Schiller Park, “a park in exile”; the six-day races, yes, but also the chauffeurs freezing outside. In this form Roth identifies and liberates unlooked for qualities in Berlin and the Weimar Republic: the sadness of Ebert’s death and the unexpected decency of the mourning public; the shattering glory of technical accomplishments; the sternly unglamorous — Isherwood! — tawdriness of crooks and whores. Partly it is his position — he seems prepared to go anywhere, talk to anyone, write about anything, in the most exhilarating way — partly it is the unpredictability of the direction he will take. This, the East German poet Heinz Czechowski reminded me in his own fine selection of Roth’s occasional writing, called Orte (places), comes down to “interest,” Interesse in German, inter plus esse, being between, in the midst, in the thick of things. And that, too, is the best word for Roth, and for Roth in Berlin — curving around past people’s front rooms on the S-Bahn, talking to a czarist colonel, composing a memorial for Red Richard.

Michael Hofmann

London, December 2001