Syncopations: Beats, New Yorkers, and Writers in the Dark Book

This collection of Roth's feuilleton writings dates from the years of Germany's Weimar Republic, mostly from newspapers in Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich in the early 1920s .

Translator Michael Hoffmann describes the Weimar Republic as a tiny period of history, (1918-1933) with 'a whiff of fragility, of scandal, of doom about it. … an interval of tremulous republican government, between monarchy and dictatorship, between one catastrophic war and the approach of another; but most of all a period that was fast and febrile and fun'.

It was characterised by political violence, assassinations, unemployment, crisis and instability.

Berlin, the setting for most of these pieces, was sprawling, ungainly, a place 'created for the purpose of existing', already an island city well before the 1960s, outside the rest of Germany and Europe, morally ugly and chaotic.

Popularised by Isherwood, it became practically synonymous with the Jazz Age or the Roaring Twenties and a totem for Weimar.

Roth, a journalist all his life, was passionately committed to 'saying true things on half a page' in the feuilleton form and saw himself as painting the portrait of his age through them.

Originally from Galicia then Vienna, Roth moved to Berlin which he hated 'but permitted it to exercise him. … the perspectives he seeks out are those of the unfortunates, the people who fall between the cracks, the immigrants, the Jews, the released lifer…, the homeless living and the nameless dead. Those who appalled him were those 'of organized Berlin, as a centre of fun, of transport, of government, of nightlife and literary life, and of sports. His natural sympathies were with the outcast and the underdog and Berlin gave him plenty'. (p17)

Hoffmann notes that the collection is 'varied and purposive, … and covers the breadths of his concerns admirably. It even seems to pick out a sort of narrative line, widening and darkening from airily whimsical beginnings to take in exile, assassination, the spread of fascism and the uncertain prospects for German-Jewish civilization' (p13).

Perhaps it's a difference in approaches to humour, but I found the humour heavy rather than whimsical, borne down by the weight of Roth's disillusion, whether the subject is nature, railway junctions, skyscrapers or nightlife.

It's clear from the first story that Roth does not love this city. As I read further, antipathy towards Berlin, its government and society, is the dominant tone. His prevailing mood is dark. In the first piece 'Going for a Walk', he describes himself as a curmudgeonly soul. Throughout, the writings tell a story of disillusion and antipathy, his emotions ranging through melancholy, outrage, anger, despair;

Roth's writing is brilliant. The vivid pictures he created in words are wonderfully enhanced in this collection by archival photographs that connect with the subjects of the feuilletons.