Roth was a political journalist and novelist - the most well- known of his novels, “The Radetsky March”, set in the final years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is itself a literary treat. After studying in Vienna, and serving in the Austrian army during the first world war, he moved to Berlin, from where he travelled extensively all over Europe, writing for the Frankfurter Zeitung or – following his removal to France when the Nazis came to power - for the Pariser Tageblatt.

The articles collected in “The Hotel Years” span the many countries he visited during the inter-war years. They are vignettes - of countries, people and places - which focus on minute details, described sometimes in a hyper-realistic way; these almost-caricatures serve to point out something essential, to make an important and astute commentary on what he observes, or sometimes just to elevate and highlight the commonplace or the absurd. The language – as it has been rendered in English by the translator, is vivid and colloquial, as if it had been written yesterday, not anywhere from 90 to 100 years ago. Sometimes these vignettes remain just that – a vivid glimpse of a vanished era; and sometimes they serve to make some some broader observation that still resonates in our times.

The one I found the most poignant is "Germany in Winter", published in 1923, when Germany was suffering acute economic depression and hyper-inflation, following its defeat in the 1914-18 war. The author describes a country that receives aid parcels from other countries, but where the trains still run on time - even if travellers don't have enough to eat - and where the lines of people queuing outside food shops are neat and orderly. In each of a number of cameos, he identifies something that is wrong or incongruent; the impeccably outfitted and solemn undertaker whose only means of transportation is a bicycle; a muscular middle-aged train conductor, so desperate for something to eat, that he is finishing off some "frivolous" confectionary left on the train by a young lady; the policeman who has to hold his trousers up with a piece of string; two high school kids singing an anti-semitic song out loud and passers-by do nothing other than avoid them. There is something wrong here, says Roth, something missing, as in the ravings of a mentally ill person; what is missing in Germany, he says, is the “regulating consciousness." Roth published this just a month after the Munich beer hall putsch in 1923 that eventually propelled Hitler into national prominence; but that is still a long way in the future. He does not have the benefit of the post-war writers who - with hindsight - are able to look back and pinpoint the danger signals. Roth's acute contemporary observations enabled him to identify in real time just how serious was Germany's sickness.

In “The Third Reich, a Dependency of Hell on Earth”- written in Paris 11 years later -the concerned musings of Roth’s earlier piece have turned to blazing anger. His wrath is directed not just at Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, who “has caused official truth to walk with the limp he has himself,” but also at the many journalists – German and foreign – who blindly accept the lies and ignore the brutal crimes of the regime. He rages against the “false news” – something which sounds all too contemporary – and blasts “the pathetic remnant of the world that still has an opinion” for naively believing it.

Roth's gift of pithy observation serves comic purposes too - laugh out loud funny. In "The 'Romance' of Travel" he describes the discomfort of train travel. "What's the point of a platform ticket? A man who sets foot on the platform in order not to travel is doubly left behind. You might as well ask everyone in the whole station to have a ticket." ".. we (passengers) look at each other continuously: while cutting apples, eating sausages, peeling oranges. Of course we squirt juice into the other's eyes." "Conductors.. are there to draw lines on tickets. Just lines. For that purpose, they like to wake me up. Head conductors like to check up on the lines left by the conductors."

In another series of cameos, he describes the various figures who he encounters at an anonymous luxury hotel “in one of the great port cities of Europe”. The doorman who welcomes him “as though he were my father”, and discreetly pays the taxi out of his own pocket; the chief receptionist “a kind of gold-braid and mobile saint in an iconostasis”; The Old Waiter “a deity of the hotel and tourist trade.. no longer capable of braving the street.. like an old grandfather clock, he stayed in the hotel;” and the cook “his festive material palpable optimism.. the creator of roast chickens that go flying in your mouth…small darting eyes that pursue the movements of the long spoons.. his capacious and benevolent belly, where a second heart would find room.”

The beauty of this book is that you can pick it up at any time – without any commitment - and read one or two pieces. There is definitely a feeling of wanting to ration oneself, not to read the whole thing too quickly, because then the delicious morsel will be all gone. However, I am happy to say that the pleasure is renewable; you will enjoy re-reading the articles yourself and sharing them with others. ( )

Joseph Roth was Austrian and Jewish. He fought in the Austrian army during WWI, then became a journalist. Much of his work was published by the left-wing paper, Frankfurter Zeitung, and he was one of the most famous and well-paid journalists in Europe. Roth left Germany permanently in 1933 when Hitler came to power and died at 48, apparently from alcoholism, in 1939. His best-known novel is The Radetsky March.

Roth wrote thousands of these short articles, called feuilletons, some of which have been collected previously. This selection was made by [[Michael Hoffman],who has translated a lot of Roth's work. It includes articles about individuals, some famous and some not e.g. a hotel waiter, the prime minister of Albania. He wrote about the cities and countries where he travelled, including Albania, the USSR, and Germany. There are feuilletons about commonplace things - listening to music, observations of the inhabitants of a seaside town, a cafe, a hotel, travellers on a train. He sees past the surface and writes with precision and lightness, but the tone is melancholy, increasingly so.

This is history from someone who was there, and I recommend it. However, What I Saw, reports from Berlin 1920 -1933, is even better. ( )

My last book of 2015. What a beauty. ( )

Antonio Muñoz Molina, Babelia 2 junio 2017: Joseph Roth, el patriota de los hoteles, http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2017/05/30/babelia/1496156883_773366.html

A very melancholy collection of short essays written by Joseph Roth between the first and second world wars, full of longing and romantic nostalgia, which he at times tries to clothe in objectivity.
I especially enjoyed the set of essays about hotels and their employees, although I will admit I was thinking of a less grand version of The Grand Budapest Hotel, which was apparently inspired by the writings of Stefan Zweig.
Not where to start with this fascinating writer, but for those who enjoy his other books, it extends our knowledge of the man and his times. ( )