What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933

By Joseph Roth
Translated by Michael Hoffmann

"Nonstop brilliance, irresistible charm and continuing relevance."—Jeffrey Eugenides, New York Times Book Review

"A singular achievement of both journalism and literature, a travel guide composed by a...poet who captured a city at its most cosmopolitan—and on the brink of collapse."—Thane Rosenbaum, Washington Post Book World

"There is a poem on every page of Joseph Roth."—Joseph Brodsky

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.  As if anticipating Christopher Isherwood, the book re-creates the tragicomic world of 1920s Berlin as seen by its greatest journalistic eyewitness. Against the traditional portrayal of Berlin as an entrepôt of fun and transport, of government, nightlife, and literary glamour, Joseph Roth’s gritty depiction chronicles the lives of the city’s forgotten inhabitants: the war cripples, the Jewish immigrants from the Pale, the criminals, the bathhouse denizens, and the nameless dead who filled the morgues.

Paperback
240 pages
W.W. Norton & Co., 2004
Originally Published in 1984
5.5 x 0.7 x 8.3 inches
ISBN 9780393325829
History, German History