Joseph Roth was the quintessential observer of cultures in collapse: as he travelled through Eastern Europe in the turbulent years after World War I and the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, while “all around stroll the war profiteers with their x-ray vision,” his attention is drawn to details: “a large blond moustache that went out into a couple of butcher’s hooks”; people in the now-divided city of Bruck “come in two types: those in blue shirts, and those in white shirts. The former are police spies, the latter communist agitators. (The locals wear no collars.)” At the seashore, “the wind that billows out the swastika banner does so in all innocence.” In The Hotel Years (New Directions), Michael Hofmann has collected and translated sixty-four short pieces written by Roth for the feuilleton sections of the Frankfurter Zeitung and other newspapers, in the course of which he touches on the aftermath of war, the inflation, the reparations and the French occupation of the Rhineland (a blondhaired African French soldier with a love of German culture), the unrest and instability in Weimar Germany; politics, crime, style, emigration and exile; Communism, Fascism and Hitlerism; train travel, fields of oil wells (“capitalism lurching into expressionism”), interior design, balconies and verandahs. There are singular pieces on two Roma girls met on the street, a musical clown, a near-matricide, a morphine murderess. He wanders the streets of Tirana fearlessly and with some trepidation, meets with the dictator-soon-to-be King Zog, journeys into Galicia and Soviet Russia—all the while compiling an entertaining study of hotel living. In “Fraternity Student,” written in 1924, Roth gives us the now familiar type of the hooligan nationalist found in the streets and, as he writes, “in bars, on dueling-grounds and at nationalist meetings. Askew on his closely cropped skull he sports a cap that would be the envy of any American messenger boy. Across his chest he wears a gaudy sash of two or three colours in which may be picked out a ringing phrase, as for example: With God for King and country! So he projects his innermost feelings and convictions, a slogan on two legs, nourished on beer and tradition… he creates tumults and affrays—in the mistaken view that acoustic effects entitle one to exist. Drunkenness that saps others gives him strength. He lives from the mould of the past and decay. His sheen is as that of a dead body that phosphoresces at night. He is a corpse that history has failed to bury. Ideals from the nursery deck out his walls and hang in his brain. One day a young beer drinker becomes an old fart… To his grieving fraternity, he bequeaths beer stein, sabre, swastika, cap, sash and whatever else he may possess in the way of student knick-knacks. Making haste to follow him, the next generation comes along, and plants their hopes, which to us are disappointments, on his grave.”