What I Saw PA

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.

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