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| Photo: Friedrich Seidenstücker |
Excerpt of a piece by Pierre Deshusses, writer, germanist and translator:
For
a long time, German literature has neglected the world of the city,
preferring the Heimat, synonymous with countryside. It was not until
the beginning of the 20th century that writers such as Alfred Döblin,
Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht really brought the city into
literature, relayed in the field of painting by artists such as
George Grosz and Otto Dix. Berlin, which became the capital of the
first German republic in the aftermath of the defeat of 1918,
naturally occupies the first place; but as the threat of the Third
Reich became clearer, writers came to travel more and more, and
Paris, Marseille and Nice, places of refuge or exile, were also the
object of descriptions and evocations often published under form of
reports for the newspapers to which they collaborate. Thus, the
essayist Siegfried Kracauer (1889-1966) wrote for the Frankfurter
Zeitung, and the novelist Joseph Roth (1894-1939), an eternal exile
from hotel to hotel, fa chronicler for various German and Austrian
newspapers.
"A well-ordered confusion; a precisely planned arbitrariness; an absence of goals under an appearance of finality. Never has so much order been applied to disorder.“ Thus in 1930 Roth apprehended Berlin, a symbol in his eyes of a German history marked by split. Fascinating and repulsive, the capital concentrates all the defects and all the qualities of a democratic interlude dazzling but fragile. In the same year, Kracauer visited the Berlin employment offices where the unemployed are crowded and where "waiting becomes an end in itself". They come here to escape from solitude, as one goes to cabarets and cafes "where you seem the lifeless protagonist of neglected times".
Both of them set out to paint the portrait of a quivering city which was soon to become the cauldron of barbarism. Kracauer is subtle and sometimes sententious; Roth is the man who looks and tells what he sees, even if he knocks. But, each in its own way, they deploy the panorama of a universe where a beauty in the Blaise Cendrars nestles in the midst of dangers. "A journey by subway is sometimes richer in lessons than traveling on the seas or in distant lands," writes Roth.
"A well-ordered confusion; a precisely planned arbitrariness; an absence of goals under an appearance of finality. Never has so much order been applied to disorder.“ Thus in 1930 Roth apprehended Berlin, a symbol in his eyes of a German history marked by split. Fascinating and repulsive, the capital concentrates all the defects and all the qualities of a democratic interlude dazzling but fragile. In the same year, Kracauer visited the Berlin employment offices where the unemployed are crowded and where "waiting becomes an end in itself". They come here to escape from solitude, as one goes to cabarets and cafes "where you seem the lifeless protagonist of neglected times".
Both of them set out to paint the portrait of a quivering city which was soon to become the cauldron of barbarism. Kracauer is subtle and sometimes sententious; Roth is the man who looks and tells what he sees, even if he knocks. But, each in its own way, they deploy the panorama of a universe where a beauty in the Blaise Cendrars nestles in the midst of dangers. "A journey by subway is sometimes richer in lessons than traveling on the seas or in distant lands," writes Roth.
Le Monde Diplomatique, february 2014
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