What I See, What I See…

Joseph Roth in Berlin

It feels like everyone’s blogging these days. What started in the late ‘90s as a way of sharing the often random thoughts that characterise a daily journal with a wider, online audience, soon morphed into thematically-based personal blogs, professional blogs, business blogs and niche blogs.

And then, of course, there are the freelance bloggers who provide professional content for other businesses.

Let’s focus for a moment on business blogs. They are rightly considered an essential part of a business’s marketing repertoire. And exist as a vehicle to generate more exposure for a company, drive traffic to its website, and, ultimately, increase business.

Some are excellent. The posts are stimulating, informative and a pleasure to read. Others are poorly researched. Mediocre in execution. Or clearly derivative.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

The more you read, the more you know 

I wonder if there’s anything we can learn from an older literary form, the feuilleton. Long out of fashion, at least in Anglo-Saxon circles. The feuilleton is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as, “A part of a newspaper or magazine devoted to fiction, criticism, or light literature.” Or “An article printed in a feuilleton.”

The term originated in mid-19th century France. Focusing on fragments of metropolitan life, often used to illuminate broader themes, the style offered considerable journalistic freedom. The tone was usually fresh, informal and humorous. A bit like a blog, really.

To my mind, one of the finest exponents of the feuilleton was the Austrian writer Joseph Roth. Best known for his novels – the Radetzky March is a critically acclaimed saga of the decline and fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire – there’s a respectable argument that his work as a literary journalist was where he really made his mark.

Born into a Jewish family in East Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he moved to Vienna in 1918 where he began writing for left-wing newspapers, using the pen name “Der Rote Joseph” (The Red Joseph). Moving to Berlin in 1920 he ended up working for a succession of other papers, including the liberal Frankfurter Zeitung.

A selection of his Berlin articles is collected in “What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920-33”, translated by Michael Hofmann. It offers a marvellous insight into both the character of the city at the time and his ability to make this literary style his own.

Roth was a newspaperman to his fingertips. And regarded the feuilleton as important to a newspaper as the political coverage. Not a garnish to parliamentary reports or the foreign news, but an opportunity to “paint the portrait of the age.” As he said, “I’m not a reporter, I’m a journalist; I’m not an editorial writer, I’m a poet.”

The poetry of the city

Roth had an ambivalent attitude towards Berlin. It was a city in search of an identity at a time when Germany faced significant political and economic challenges arising from the end of the First World War, the abolition of the monarchy and the Treaty of Versailles. He described it as “a young and unhappy city-in-waiting”. But it also nourished his creativity and provided a canvas for his writing.

He defined a feuilleton as ''saying true things on half a page.'' And his pieces were usually around one to two thousand words. But the word limit didn’t appear to present a challenge. Quite the opposite. It provided an opportunity to reflect large themes in the detail of urban life. As William Blake put it, “To see a world in a grain of sand/And a heaven in a wild flower,/Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/And eternity in an hour.”

Roth put his unique stamp on the form, as Michael Hofmann said, “Inversion, reversal, subversiveness seem to be built into it.”

He had the knack of capturing people in a glance. The newspaper waiter “whose soul wanders the hunting grounds of the past”.  The beggar who finds a lady’s nail file and “starts filing his nails – what else is he to do?”. The Russian-Polish Jewish business owner who “shows no interest in his clients… catching a greeting like a stray ball and tossing it back.”

He reflects on the human condition, “Sand is something that God invented specially for small children, so that in their wise innocence of what it is to play they may have a sense of the purposes and objectives of earthly activity.”

Roth was fascinated by the impact that new forms of transport have on society, “Sometimes a ride on the S-Bahn is more instructive than a voyage to distant lands. Experienced travellers will confirm that it is sufficient to see a single lilac shrub in a dusty city courtyard to understand the deep sadness of all the hidden lilac trees anywhere in the world.”  

He was intrigued by the human drama bound up in the sign on the railway carriage, “Passengers with Heavy Loads”.

And remarked on the commodification of the Berlin pleasure industry: “Sometimes in a fit of incurable melancholy, I go into one of the standard Berlin nightclubs, not to cheer myself up, you understand, but to take malicious pleasure at the phenomenon of so much industrialised merriment.”

Reflecting on the Nazi book-burning of 10 May 1933, he offered an impassioned defence of the Jewish literary culture of Germany: "The great gain to German literature from Jewish writers is the theme of the city… They have revealed the whole diversity of urban civilisation. They have discovered the café and the factory, the bar and the hotel, Berlin's bourgeoisie and its banks, the watering holes of the rich and the slums of the poor, sin and vice, the day of the city and the city by night, the character of the inhabitant of the metropolis.”

“What I see, what I see. What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality.” Roth helps us not just to see but to comprehend this vanished world. His compassion for those left behind by a rapidly changing society is palpable. His observations reflect the turmoil of everyday life, as well as its place in wider human history.

The infernal metropolis of the ill-fated Weimar Republic has never been captured better. Roth’s impressionistic reportage, combined with his lyrical prose, is a delight. And an object lesson in how to craft articles of this type.

As John Ruskin said, “To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion – all in one.” The brevity of the feuilleton was a perfect vehicle for Roth to reflect the febrile nature of the times. There is much that bloggers today can learn from their charm, wit and lightness of touch.