This was published in 1939, and is set in 1930s Berlin. I’m not sure how much this book is real events and how much is fiction. The main character is the author, although he is mostly just an observer of interesting characters. Each chapter is a different subject, or a diary entry of a different time.
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking…
It felt like a George Orwell novel to me, showing the underbelly of a place with a sense of compassion and regret. There’s some anti-semitism all throughout, not always by the Nazis. By the end of the novel the Nazis are prominent in the streets though.
Over there, in the city, the votes were being counted. I thought of Natalia: she has escaped – none too soon, perhaps. However often the decision may be delayed, all these people are ultimately doomed. This evening is the dress-rehearsal of a disaster. It is like the last night of an epoch.
‘Sometimes I almost despair,’ he added. ‘It seems as if there were a kind of badness, a disease, infecting the world today.’