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What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-1933
What I Saw Reports from Berlin 19201933 Author:Joseph Roth, Michael Bienert Finally available in English, the dizzying world of 1920s Berlin as seen by one of its greatest journalistic eyewitnesses. 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 generati... more »on 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 beautya memorable portrait of a city and a time of commingled hope and chaos. 35 photographs.« less