Before Joseph Roth became fixed in literary memory as the novelist of the vanished Habsburg world, he was one of the great journalists of Weimar Berlin. 

What I Saw gathers his short reports, sketches and feuilletons from 1920 to 1933. These are tiny pieces of urban observation that move through railway stations, cafés, department stores, bars, steam baths, immigrant quarters, homeless shelters and police morgues. 

Roth truly writes at street level. A restaurant is distinguished from a dive by how one enters it; music arrives through cigar smoke; the dead become a photographic archive of people otherwise erased from the city. His pieces operate somewhere between reportage, essay and miniature literature — observational enough to document Berlin, stylised enough to make the city itself feel like a character. One contemporary review rather nicely described the form as something between the parliamentary sketch and the poet’s weekly column. 

And of course we know what Roth could only watch approaching. The pieces span almost exactly the life of the Weimar Republic, ending in 1933 as Hitler came to power and Roth, who was Jewish, left Germany. Read together, their crowded modern city gradually acquires another register.

Edition & condition: Granta Books, London, 2013. Paperback edition; first published in Great Britain by Granta in 2003. Paperback. Very light shelf wear and rubbing to covers and edges; internally clean and bright from the pages shown, binding firm. Very good to near fine condition.