What I Saw: reports from Berlin 1920-33 by Joseph Roth (translated by Michael Hofmann)

Painting the portrait of a tormented age

Over the past decade, largely thanks to Michael Hofmann's new translations, British readers have come to know the German-Jewish writer Joseph Roth as the author of fine novels that are essentially elegies for the vanished Habsburg empire of his Austrian youth. This charming and moving volume of social comment will only widen Roth's reputation.

In 1920, after an active war, he moved from Vienna to Berlin, where he became the highest-paid journalist of his day. He was a feuilletonist, for which imagine the parliamentary sketch combined with the poet's week, written for the TLS. He said: "I paint the portrait of the age". Libraries and bookshops are instructed to shelve this book as history but, enhanced by Hofmann's elegant introduction, it is what no longer exists: belles-lettres.

In the politically tormented Weimar Republic, life is increasingly brutal. The most moving piece Roth published in a French paper in 1933, after fleeing the Nazis. It magnificently defends values that guided him through the German capital.

Roth's values are Jewish and Christian without conflict or distinction. They are literate and humane. From the fairground to the cocktail bar to the station he asks: where is humanity going? Yet his touch is always light.

He is less bitter than such graphic artists as Kollwitz, Beckmann and Grosz, and less radical. His sense of spiritual loss predominates – see the fine essay on Walter Rathenau, the assassinated Jewish foreign minister. Hofmann comments that Roth's rich prose can overwhelm his subjects. But that is the price to pay for writing that evokes the aesthetic-spiritual range of the age.

Roth's feelings about the automobile and the cult of speed, about trains and trams, about skyscrapers and newsprint, echo Italian Futurism and Russian Constructivism. He paints in words like the Cubist Léger, with his fragments of newspaper and lettering. The new technology is beautiful, but also the monster Fritz Lang will turn into a horror film. In Berlin, rich and poor seek out American sensations in drink and film. Berlin's German existence is unreal, but as a physical place it is brutish.

Roth's metaphors are a treat, and when Hofmann observes that two of their major sources lie in typography (railway lines as hyphens across the globe) and in the poetry of Rilke (the shrieks of the crowd dirtying the soundwaves) he underscores Roth's generous sensibility. At once irritable and ready to love, he is alert to the briskly modern but sweet on the fleshy immobility of the old.

There are hymns here to triangles of iron and crimson-lined stuffy rooms. The politicians strutting in the Reichstag are neo-Imperial clowns, but when President Ebert dies, the dark pageantry that covers the mirrors is impressively solemn.

The only fault of this lovely book lies with its production: misplaced asterisks and notes, pale pictures, photographs used twice, absent captions, an inexplicable blank page. Roth would not have stood for it.

The reviewer's novel 'Girl in a Garden' is published in July