Taking a Walk with Joseph Roth

The former Cafe Dalles, Volkskaffeehaus. It's the only building I found that still looks like it did when Joseph Roth wrote about it.

One of my projects here this summer has been to walk in the steps of one of the great German language writers, the Austrian Jew Joseph Roth. While in Berlin, Roth worked as a newspaper journalist and wrote, among other things, about the migrant Eastern European Jews who passed through Berlin, some on their way to America, in the 20s and early 30s. These people constituted part of what made Berlin cosmopolitan and multicultural.

There's an interesting book researched and compiled by Michael Bienert called Joseph Roth in Berlin. Ein Lesebuch fuer Spaziergaenger (J. R. in Berlin: A Reader for Pedestrians. It's available in English under the title "What I Saw. Joseph Roth in Berlin 1919-1933"). This book came about as part of the 100th birthday recognition of Roth in 2004, and it tempts the reader to retrace the author's steps, even though the streets he saw no longer resemble what is actually there.

Bienert documents these changes exhaustively in the German version of his book and makes it clear that it's hard to find the streets in Roth's texts in part because the names have been changed. The old Jewish quarter of Berlin, known as the Scheunenviertel, was scheduled to be torn down even before World War I in order to replace the buildings with newer ones. Not the last time housing for minorities failed and was condemned by powers that be. So the descriptions published in Roth's feuilleton articles in the early 20s were already describing a world that was nearly gone. Add in two world wars and 40+ years of the German Democratic Republic and the face of this part of town would barely be recognized by a resident from a century before.




This building, for example, had been the location of the Jewish Hotel on the corner of Grenadierstrasse and Hirtenstrasse. Well, Grenadierstrasse is now called Almstadtstrasse, and, as you can see from the picture, there is nothing that remains of the hotel. The building is vintage GDR and the entire street leaves not a hint of what had been a place full of life and commerce. It's pretty barren and only residential now.



Only a block away (just down the Hirtenstrasse away from Almstadtstrasse) there is the old Babylon Theater, in front of which some important history took place, and which is close to the same as it was 80 years ago. The other night they showed the old silent film Berlin: Symphonie einer Stadt with live music to accompany it. So, from block to block, you can indeed find landmarks where the time traveler in you has an anchor point. You just have to take the walk.