What I Saw PA

by Roth,Joseph

• ISBN13: 9780393325829
• ISBN10: 0393325822
• Edition: 00
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-08-17
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Summary

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 entrepot 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. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Joseph Roth (1894-1939) is the author of such classics as The Radetzky March and The Collected Stories of Joseph Roth Michael Hofmann won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize for his translation of Roth's The Tale of the 1002nd Night

Table of Contents

Translator's Introduction	11	(12)
Part I What I Saw
1 Going for a Walk	23	(8)
Part II The Jewish Quarter
2 The Orient on Hirtenstrasse	31	(4)
3 Refugees from the East	35	(6)
4 Solomon's Temple in Berlin	41	(4)
5 Wailing Wall	45	(8)
Part III Displaced Persons
6 Nights in Dives	53	(10)
7 With the Homeless	63	(6)
8 The Steam Baths at Night	69	(6)
9 Schiller Park	75	(4)
10 The Unnamed Dead	79	(6)
Part IV Traffic
11 The Resurrection	85	(4)
12 The Ride Past the Houses	89	(4)
13 Passengers with Heavy Loads	93	(4)
14 Some Reflections on Traffic	97	(8)
15 Affirmation of the Triangular Railway Junction	105	(6)
Part V Berlin Under Construction
16 Skyscrapers	111	(4)
17 Architecture	115	(4)
18 The Very Large Department Store	119	(6)
19 "Stone Berlin"	125	(6)
Part VI Bourgeoisie and Bohemians
20 The Man in the Barbershop	131	(104)
21 Richard Without a Kingdom	235
22 The Word at Schwannecke's	142	(5)
23 The Kurfurstendamni	147	(6)
Part VII Berlin's Pleasure Industry
24 The Philosophy of the Panopticum	153	(4)
25 An Hour at the Amusement Park	157	(4)
26 The Twelfth Berlin Six-Day Races	161	(6)
27 The Conversion of a Sinner in Berlin's UFA Palace	167	(4)
28 The Berlin Pleasure Industry	171	(8)
Part VIII An Apolitical Observer Goes to the Reichstag
29 The Tour Around the Victory Column	179	(4)
30 A Visit to the Rathenau Museum	183	(6)
31 Election Campaign in Berlin	189	(4)
32 An Apolitical Observer Goes to the Reichstag	193	(6)
33 Farewell to the Dead	199	(8)
Part IX. Look Back in Anger
34 The Auto-do-Fe of the Mind	207	(12)
Credits and Sources	219	(2)
Index	221	(4)
About the Author	225	(2)
About the Translator	227