What Joseph Roth saw

They're not crime, but Joseph Roth's newspaper reports from Berlin, collected under the title What I Saw: Reports From Berlin 1920-1933, are essential for readers and authors of the city-is-a-character school of crime writing. They are also very much more than that. A few examples, the first from the introduction by translator Michael Hofmann:

“`Berlin is freezing,' he said, `even when it’s sixty degrees.'”

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“Nor can I imagine nights in dives without...the police spy, in mufti but uniformed, incognito and unmistakable...”

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“Reese’s is an establishment you visit. The others are bars you drop in. When you go to Reese’s, you first take a deep breath. And generally you go after 8 p.m. And the band is called `orchestra.'”

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“(I)n the world of dives, even housebreakers’ tools have their nicknames. A picklock is a little alderman, a crowbar is a jimmy, and a drilling tool—which admittedly has become almost obsolete as a tool of civilization—is a ripper. A man who works with rippers cannot gain my respect. He’s a dinosaur. A self-respecting man earns his living with explosives, oxygen and dynamite. A ripper—get away!”

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“Anyone called upon to supervise misery will view criminality differently. All state officials should be required to spend a month serving in a homeless shelter to learn love.”

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“Grotesque-looking figures, as though hauled from the lower depths of world literature. People you wouldn’t believe. Old graybeards in rags, tramps hauling a motley collection of the past bundled up on their crooked backs. Their boots are powdered with the dust of decades...Some of these people have walked all their lives.”

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“I don’t know if people in hell look as ridiculous as they do here.” (From an essay on Berlin's bathhouses.)

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“The great historical error of the younger generation in Germany was that it subjected itself to the Prussian drill sergeant, instead of joining forces with the German intellect.” (Roth wrote that in 1933.)

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“I challenge the Third Reich to come up with a single example of a gifted `pure Aryan' poet, actor, or musician who was kept down by the Jews and emancipated by Herr Goebbels! It’s only the feeblest dilettantes who flourish in the swastika’s shadow, in the bloody glow cast by the ash heaps in which we are consumed.”

Now, before you say that the above reminds you of Cabaret and Berlin Stories, know that Hofmann refers to the Weimar Republic as “popularized by the somewhat superficial and touristic versions of Christopher Isherwood.”

A review of What I Saw says “Roth writes as if Walter Benjamin had teamed up with Monsieur Hulot,” and that seems about right. I don't know if writing like Roth's is even conceivable today. Certainly the United States can't have experienced upheavals like that of post-World War I Berlin, at least not since its own Civil War. And it's hard to imagine newspaper editors with the courage and reporters with the imagination to portray the grotesqueries that Roth did. And humor when portraying such grotesqueries would be verboten under the journalistic decorum that prevails today.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012