This Sunday: The Brooklyn Book Festival

Next Sunday,  September 21, is the main day of the week-long Brooklyn Book Festival! Berlinica will have a table in the 1000 area, the number is 132. It is shared with Pink Tree Press and Under the BQE. You will see our signature fleece banner from afar (or so I hope). The festival takes place in Downtown Brooklyn, at Cadman Plaza / Columbus Park, near the 2/3 Borough Hall and the R Court Street subway station, right at the Brooklyn Court House and Borough Hall, from 10 am to 6 pm, rain or shine.

We will be there with all our English-language books, and a handful of German books. Most of them will be sold at half-price! We have a special new edition of our Bruce Springsteen book with glossy paper and color photos, as well as a few advance copies of our newest book, New York and London, by Alfred Kerr, and also, our Berlin Cookbook and our Mark Twain in Berlin book. As always, we will have copies of all our Kurt Tucholsky books, the famed Weimar writer who foresaw the Nazis in the 1920s.

 

Evidently, there is an app with a code to lead your way. You can get it here.

https://www.bloombergconnects.org

We have a few advanced copies of Alfred Kerr's book about his journey to America at the Festival. Kerr visits the Broadway theaters and Wall Street, and marvels at Times Square and Pennsylvania Station. He talks to the satirist Henry Louis Mencken, the railroad magnate W. Averell Harriman and Adolph Ochs, the publisher of The New York Times. In London, he meets the poet George Bernard Shaw. But the book, written concisely and wittily, is much more than just a travelogue. Kerr is also on a mission to ask for sympathy and help for the fragile Weimar democracy. 

 

New York and London
Author: Alfred Kerr
Translator: Professor Alan Bance
Cover Picture: Berenice Abbott
Genre: Narrative Nonfiction
Softcover; 172 pp.
Dimensions: 5.5 x 8.5’’
ISBN USA: 978-1-935902-64-5 
Suggested retail $13.95
Release: 2025

Today in 1945, Alexander Roda Roda left us

On this day in History, on August 20, 1945, Alexander Roda Roda died in New York City. Roda Roda, whose full name was Alexander Friedrich Ladislaus Roda Roda, was born in 1872 as Sándor Friedrich Rosenfeld. He thought of himself as the "quintessential poet of Austria-Hungary". Roda Roda was born in Moravia, went to school Slovakia, was drafted into the military in Croatia, wrote for papers in Hungary, and lived in Vienna.

In the Austrian capital, he became a correspondent for Neue Freie Presse, the paper Karl Kraus loved to hate. During WWI, the satirist ran into trouble with the military censors of Austria who did not like his comedy Der Feldherrnhügel (In translation: Grandstand for General Staff). After the war, he performed in cabarets in Berlin and Munich and he became tremendously successful.

Shortly before the annexation of Austria, the Jewish satirist fled the Nazis to Switzerland, where he got expelled in 1940. He emigrated to New York soonafter. Sadly, he was unable to regain his career; he died impoverished in New York City in 1945. Friends brought his ashes back to Vienna.

When Roda Roda entered the USA in 1940, this was not his first trip. He had visited America, mostly New York City, in 1923 and wrote a book about this, Frühling in America, Springtime in America. It is filled with many funny, and also some serious observations. Berlinica will publish the book at the end of this year!

In fall, we will publish a book by another Weimar author traveling to New York in the 1920s; Alfred Kerr's New York and London, translated by Alan Bance, Professor emeritus of German, University of Southampton, England. Stay tuned, we will keep you posted!

Springtime in America
Author: Alexander Roda Roda

Translator: Cindy Opitz
Cover Picture: Berenice Abbott
Genre: Narrative Nonfiction
Softcover; ca 140 pp.
Dimensions: 5.5’’ x 8.5’’

ISBN USA: 978-1-935902-01-0 

ISBN Germany: 978-3-96026-056-1
Suggested retail: $ 13.95
Release: 2025