The defining moment in Thomas Levenson's Einstein in Berlin (Random House of Canada, 486 pages, $39.95) comes when in December 1932, Albert Einstein, one step ahead of the Nazis, is leaving for his American exile after almost 20 years in Berlin. "Take a good look," he says to his wife. "You will never see it again."
He was referring to their actual residence, but with historically charged hindsight, we can take "it" as Berlin during the Weimar Republic. Then his intent seems to become "You'll never see its like again," for indeed that was a remarkable place and time. The setting was much romanticized for English audiences in the writings of Christopher Isherwood. It was toned down even more for Cabaret, the play and film made from them, until there was only a suggestion of what Germans of the time called Girlkultur and only the broadest hint that Adolf Hitler was waiting in the wings.
During the Weimar interregnum-1918-1933-urban modernism, against a background of almost unimaginable political, social and economic chaos, was given its own cultural face. The playwright Bertolt Brecht, the architect Walter Gropius and visual artists such as Max Beckmann and George Grosz all emerged from the mess. Pop entertainment was recast as well. The cinematic signatures of Germany in this era are The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by Robert Wiene and Metropolis and M by Fritz Lang, not to mention the trademark creepiness of Peter Lorre and the then-shocking gender-bending of Marlene Dietrich.
We're accustomed to remembering the period from such perspectives. We get a different but complementary one from What I Saw, an irresistible collection of feuilletons (or newspaper prose-sketches) by Joseph Roth (pronounced Rote), who earned his living with such pieces while writing fiction, which the feuilleton form closely mimics in diction and technique.
The Weimar Republic is what emerged, unsteadily, from Germany's defeat in the Great War, when the old Empire was dead and there was nothing to replace it but an unworkable coalition of extremists who kept stealing power from one another. "The Republic was born in defeat, lived in turmoil, and died in disaster," Peter Gay, the cultural historian and Freud biographer, has written, "and from the beginning there were many who saw its travail with superb indifference or with that unholy delight in the suffering of others for which the Germans have coined that evocative term Schandenfreude." Gay has also called it the triumph of Expressionism (popular but not necessarily democratic) over Impressionism (so inherently bourgeois). The transition took place as rightists assassinated leftists and vice versa, and inflation was calculated in the thousands of percent.
Berlin at the time had an astounding 140 newspapers, no two of which seemed to agree on anything, and Roth wrote for many of them about what "hasn't made it into the Baedeker." To be sure, he deals with Berlin's notorious nightlife, for he can scarcely avoid doing so. He writes: "The epicenter of the phenomenon known to us as the dive or joint is the Alexanderplatz station (exit Mnzstrasse), from where it spreads over the east end of Berlin, and, from there, ultimately over the rest of the world."
He then goes on to review some of these nightspots, especially those along the Weinmeisterstrasse, "whose corners are always thick with bad characters. And certainly not without the police spy, in mufti but uniformed, incognito and unmistakable, the tips of his moustache giving away his loyal service and watchman's vigilance, authority and certainty in his expression, looking out for anyone with any hesitation about him. And even if he were less obtrusive, better camouflaged than he is, I would still know him by his footfall and his expression, by the fearlessness of his looming up suddenly from a bar or a back wall."
Using prose-poetry as a reporting tool is risky. What we admire here is Roth's delicate touch on the keyboard-that and the subtlety of his observations in a minor key, as when he describes a horse, "harnessed to a cab, staring with lowered head into its nose bag, not knowing that horses originally came into the world without cabs."
He loiters at the central police station where photos of bodies unclaimed in the morgue are displayed in an ever-changing gallery. "It's a grisly exhibition drawn from the whole grisly city, in whose asphalt streets, gray-shaded parks, and blue canals death lurks with revolver, chloroform, and gag. This is the hidden side, its anonymous misery. [The subjects] stumble unconsciously into one of the numberless graves that have been dug beside the path of their lives, and the only trace of themselves they bequeath to posterity is their photograph, snapped at the so-called scene of the incident by a police photographer." People hurry by without bothering to look.
Berlin's all-night steam baths, shut during the war, have now reopened but with a different function. Instead of promoting health and curing hangovers, they now provide, for only 20 marks, shelter for the homeless, including visitors "arriving from the nearby Friedrichstrasse station at midnight, with suitcases," who can't afford hotels. Naked in the steam rooms, they make "a grotesque spectacle [] trying to sweat out the soot and coal smoke of a train journey [and suggest] a positively infernal range of interpretations. A series of illustrations, say, to Dante's journey in the underworld."
Or consider this, which might almost be a caption for a George Grosz caricature: "This personage-well, his real name is something different, but we'll call him Baruch. Baruch is dressed in a very European manner, high style winds itself around his belly in the form of a belt, such a belt as no Kurfrstendamm Baruch would be ashamed to be seen in. [He] is fat, clean shaven, with a black-rimmed pince-nez, and his job is that of a middleman."
The first exhibition of Grosz's work in North America was organized in the window of a Chicago bookshop in the early 1920s by Ben Hecht, the journalist (and future German Expressionist-style filmmaker). Hecht had been posted to Germany in 1918 by the Chicago Daily News. He was 24 when he arrived in Berlin with, he wrote years later, "a youthful delight for the preposterous. Political zanies, quibblers and adventurers-mindless and paranoid-performed around me [and] I had no notion that its humorless and macabre atmosphere was to become the air of the world [] I reported them with the enthusiasm I had brought in Chicago to four-eleven fires, basement stabbings, love-nest suicides and all the other hi-de-ho doings outside the norm of living."
Hecht also claimed that shortly after his arrival, only a few months before the Spartacist leader Karl Liebknecht was assassinated, he witnessed Liebknecht strip to his underwear and jump into the Kaiser's bed to symbolize the change of regime.
In any case, Hecht went back to America and became a serious writer and tried, most famously in a column and later a book, both called 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, to emulate the kind of feuilleton at which Roth was so adept. The influence travelled in both directions. If Hecht tried to make Chicago sound like Berlin, the German artists of Weimar times looked round them and tried to conjure up what they imagined places like Chicago were like. Brecht was the absolute master of this imaginative cross-pollination. Roth mentions the building of Berlin's first skyscraper, in 1923, and this is an important symbol of the combined awe and fear with which artists and writers of the day were approaching the machine and other symbols of late modernity. This view of what a city is like-pitiless and exciting and inhuman in scale-was longlived, even as the urban reality changed.
Indeed, if any of the stuff in What I Saw sounds trite today it is only because Hollywood, benefiting from so many European exiles in the 1930s, and the Jimmy Breslin school of journalism, derived ultimately from Hecht, have made it so. Roth, however, is the real thing, the original. True, he is a hopeless romantic (or anti-romantic), but this is a pose he adopts to mask the hopelessness he observes and the helplessness he feels.
In the middle 1920s, Roth withdrew his base to Paris while continuing to spend much of his time in Berlin, writing for the papers there. The tone of his pieces began to change. As early as 1920, Roth, a Jew, was writing of Jewish refugees: "Many of the men arrived straight from Russian POW camps. Their garments were a weird and wonderful hodgepodge of uniforms. In their eyes I saw millennial sorrow. There were women there too. They carried their children on their backs like bundles of dirty washing. Other children, who were scrabbling through a rickety world on crooked legs, gnawed on dry crusts." After Hitler took power, his tone became fierce rather than merely sympathetic. "Very few observers anywhere in the world seem to have understood what the Third Reich's burning of books, the expulsion of Jewish writers, and all its other crazy assaults on the intellect actually mean," he writes in 1933 in the last piece in the collection. "Let me say it loud and clear: The European mind is capitulating. It is capitulating out of weakness, out of sloth, out of apathy, out of lack of imagination (it will be the task of some future generation to establish the reason for this disgraceful capitulation)."
Then he grew more personal: "Have German writers of Jewish extraction-or for that matter German writers-ever felt at home in the German Reich? There is a justifiable sense that German authors, of Jewish or non-Jewish origins, have at all times been strangers in Germany, immigrants on home ground, consumed with longing for their real fatherland even when they were within its borders."
The words were published in a paper in Paris, where he thought he was safe from reprisal, as in a sense he was. He was dead by the time the Nazis invaded France, a victim of alcoholism.