He continued to travel and write incessantly for various Elevator Manufacturer, but he died sick and penniless in 1939. The Hotel Years, translated by Michael Hofmann, offers a glimpse into Roth's penetrating mind, as well as his enormous journalisticrange. He reports on geography, history, war and its effects, politics, exile, and communism. In 64 sketches, or feuilletons, Roth takes readers on treks through Germany, Austria, Russia, Albania and other countries. Wherever his assignments required that he explore, he went.
This volume assembles a bulk of those sketches brilliantly. As Hofmann writes in his introduction, organizing the pieces that make up The Hotel Years — while they don't adhere to any rigid structure — was an exercise in rhythm and pace. "There is no duty, no mission," he writes, "no set subject, no period, no place." But each sketch taps into a definite consciousness, that of a man aware of the difficulties his generation faced. "
The Currency-Reformed City," one of the shorter pieces, is about the strained European economy and what came about with the introduction of the Hamburg Gold Mark — a scrap of paper that, among other things, was sold on the black market to combat inflation. "
In no German city," Roth writes, "is there such fierce hatred of the poor. Nowhere is the obstinacy of the propertied classes stronger." In "Germany in Winter," Roth describes what he saw as the decline of Germany. The odd little gem is a first-person meditation on winter, his encounters at train stations abroad, and his conversations with locals. "In Leipzig I saw a man from a firm of undertakers," he writes. "