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, 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.
