A poignant resurrection of pre-war Germany

By ARNOLD AGES

What I Saw: Reports from Berlin 1920-1933. By Joseph Roth. W.W. Norton. 226 pages. $23.95.

At age 25 and newly demobilized after the conclusion of the First World War, Joseph Roth returned to his native Vienna and began what translator Michael Hofmann refers to as “newspaper dependency.”

This positive addiction to German language tabloids and broadsheets eventually enriched the world of journalism and literature because Roth was one of the leading wordsmiths in that late lamented period known as Weimar days—the twilight period of exuberant if chaotic democracy which flourished in Germany from 1919 to 1933 when the brown plague overran the nation of Goethe, Schiller, and Beethoven.

In Vienna and later Berlin, Roth wrote hundreds of articles from his vantage point as culture critic. He left Berlin in 1925 (for reasons which are not entirely clear) but continued to visit Berlin regularly. At one time he was contributing essays and what we would call today “think pieces” to half a dozen Berlin daily newspapers.

Roth’s reportage is an extremely important phenomenon because it represents a view of Germany before, in his own phrase, the “Auto Da Fé” of the mind took over a highly advanced civilization. Hofmann’s English translation of Roth’s essays are smooth and suggest the acerbic potency of the German original.

Although the introduction to this anthology does not focus on Roth’s religious disposition, it is obvious that he was an assimilated Jew, perhaps even one who, at one point, had gone over to Christianity. Nonetheless, Roth displays a predilection for analyzing civilizational issues with rabbinic acumen. He has, moreover, a gift for splicing words together in new and original compounds. “The skyscraper,” he writes, “is the incarnate rebellion against the supposedly unattainable; against the mystery of altitude, against the otherworldliness of the cerulean.”
What does Roth write about as he roams around the Berlin of the interwar years? He inevitably chooses the mundane over the dramatic. He is fascinated by the refugee quarter and by construction gangs on Berlin streets. Traffic congestion preoccupies him as does old peoples’ homes. Roth waxes eloquent on the appearances of skyscrapers in his Berlin and whether they represent human arrogance or a new partnership with nature.

Roth has an essay on a newly released convict and how his 50 years behind walls has robbed him of the possibility of conceiving or understanding modernity. In another piece, he reconstructs and recaptures the sights, sounds, and smells of a popular German café. He is one of the few writers who can examine the arrival of the department store concept and show how escalators force clients to view (and buy) merchandise they were not interested in!

With regard to issues more germane to Jews, several of his essays highlight forays into Jewish sections of Berlin and feature meditations on the plight of immigrants from eastern Europe. Roth writes with a mixture of humor and irony as he describes a miniature Temple of Solomon which an enterprising Hungarian Jew built and for which he charged admission to see.

In his remarks about the Jewish quarter (Grenadierstrasse—a series of “wailing walls” says Roth) he jumps from the sardonic to the sarcastic but he does so with rare eloquence. This is what Roth says of the Ten Commandments: “With the help of these terrible jagged letters, he gave the Jews the first terrible moral law for them to spread among the cheerful, blithe peoples of the world. It takes, I thought, a truly divine love to choose these people. There were so many others that were nice, malleable, and well trained: happy, balanced Greeks, adventurous Phoenicians, artful Egyptians, Assyrians with strange imaginations, northern tribes with beautiful, blond-haired, as it were, ethical primitiveness and refreshing forest smells. But none of the above! The weakest and far from loveliest of peoples was given the most dreadful curse and most dreadful blessing, the hardest law and the most difficult mission: to sow love on earth, and to reap hatred.”

Roth was totally unsympathetic to Zionism, but his understanding of it was restricted to very narrow focus. Referring to newspaper accounts of fighting between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, Roth censures what he believed to be the triumphalism behind Zionist reports of those encounters because it reminds him of the odious military rhetoric he had been exposed to in World War I. For Roth Zionism was “an experiment, a temporary, opportune degradation of Judaism, or perhaps merely the reversion to a primal, long since outmoded, form of national existence.”

Four years after he published this statement, the Nazis took power and proceeded to transform Zionism into the only viable option for Jews. This is not acknowledged by Roth, but his 1933 essay is a searing statement about “the apotheosis of the barbarians, the mechanized march of mechanized orangutans.” He writes that the triumph of Nazism means the “capitulation of the European mind.” Roth notes that Jewish writers in Germany, having been banished and victimized, represent the true strain of German democracy—not their Aryan counterparts.

In what is perhaps a non sequitur, Roth comes down hard on German Jews who sought acceptance by describing themselves as “German citizens of the Jewish faith.” Why, asks Roth, did they use the word “citizen” and not simply say “Germans.” The very formulation of their identity thus emphasized that German Jews never felt themselves to be part of the German nation or people. Even their attempts to “baptize Judaism” in order to make it more accommodating to the German folk was doomed to failure.

The final point which Roth makes in this indictment of Nazism pivots on his recitation of the contribution of Jewish writers in Germany whose insights helped refine, among other things, the importance of urban civilization with its bars, factories, cafés, and hotels. Roth then notes ironically that this German-Jewish literature of the city was cited by the antisemites as proof that Jews had no rootedness in the soil of Germany.

Roth died in Paris in 1939 two months before the Nazis unleashed the war that eventually destroyed the civilization that he has resurrected for us so poignantly in this series of essays.

Updated 3/19/03