The Hotel Years - Wanderings in Europe between the Wars by Joseph Roth, Michael Hofmann

By Joseph Roth, Michael Hofmann

The inn that i like like a native land is positioned in a single of the good port towns of Europe, and the heavy gold Antiqua letters within which its banal identify is spelled out shining around the roofs of the lightly banked homes are in my eye steel flags, steel bannerets that rather than fluttering shine out their greeting.

In the Nineteen Twenties and 30s, Joseph Roth travelled largely in Europe, major a peripatetic existence residing in motels and writing concerning the cities by which he handed. Incisive, nostalgic, curious and sharply saw - and picked up jointly right here for the 1st time - his items paint an image of a continent racked through switch but clinging to culture. From the 'compulsive' workout regime of the Albanian military, the rickety of the hot oil capital of Galicia, and 'split and scalped' homes of Tirana compelled into modernity, to the person and idiosyncratic characters that Roth encounters in his resort remains, those delicate and quietly wonderful vignettes shape a sequence of literary postcards written from a bygone global, creeping in the direction of global conflict; brought and exquisitely translated via Michael Hofmann.

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One city like the next. Each street like the next. Climb on the tram. In half an hour you’ll be in the next place. Is there any difference? Smoke over the world! You go to Oberhausen, and then Mülheim, and then to Recklinghausen, to Bochum, to Gladbeck, to Buer, to Hamborn, to Bottrop. Smoke over the world! No sky, no clouds. Rain precipitated from smoke: black rain. A hundred chimneys, so many fingers, pillars of the smoke sky, altars of the Almighty Smoke. Rails along the ground, corresponding wires through the air.

His Fatherland and fellow-beings could only hurt him. He has them to thank for being watched over by a dog. Sign of the times! Once there were sheepdogs who watched herds of sheep, and guard-dogs that guarded houses. Today there are mandogs who watch invalids, mandogs the logical consequence of submissive men. The scene struck me with the force of a revelation: a dog seated on a man. When he remembers what happened when he relied on other men, a man is happy to put his trust in a dog. Is there anything so sad as this sight, which seems so emblematic?

Who laughs about large, well-off families in Germany making their own money? And using it to buy bread with? It’s a grotesque implausibility in the column of “other news”. A dismal twopenny romance twines round death by starvation. In the West End of Berlin I saw two high-school kids. They were walking along the wide, busy road, arm in arm, like a pair of drunks, and singing: Down, down, down with the Jewish republic, Filthy Yids, Filthy Yids! And passers-by got out of their way. No one stopped to slap their faces.

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