What must it have been like to live in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s?  As you went about your everyday life, reading the newspapers and paying attention to politics as a good, conscientious citizen should, how clearly would you have seen the edge?  Would you have known that your country and its leaders were heading towards it, that the momentum was unstoppable, and that just beyond the edge was the slow fall into hell?  How visible were the signs, how loud were the alarm bells?  Would it have been possible, if you had been paying attention, to put the puzzle together, to see the whole picture as each piece was revealed?

On January 30th, 1933, the very same day that Hitler became Chancellor, Joseph Roth, a celebrated journalist for the Frankfurter Zeitung, took a train from Berlin to Paris and never set foot again in Germany.  The Hotel Years collects some of Roth’s journalism from the 1920s and 1930s. These sixty-four mostly short pieces (known as feuilletons, a lovely word I’d never heard previously), catch Germany and much of central Europe on the brink of catastrophe.

It wasn’t Roth’s style to write explicitly political pieces.  His feuilletons are mostly exquisite observations – of people sitting alone in hotel lobbies, of a traffic accident, of migrants waving to strangers on a quayside – perfect miniature lenses through which an entire society is glimpsed.  Did his contemporaries, perhaps sitting down over their morning coffee and reading those frequent articles in the Frankfurter Zeitung, sense anything of what we see so clearly 90 years later – a world disappearing, a way of life on the brink of extinction?