Third reading: D.W. Buffa on Otto Friedrich’s "Before The Deluge"

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Buffa's latest take in his "Third Reading" series covers Otto Friedrich’s Before The Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920s. It begins:

Otto Friedrich distinguishes himself from the typical historians who specialize, compartmentalize and would “mistrust any journalistic attempt to include movie stars and generals and bankers and poets in the same chronicle.” The story he wants to tell, “the story of Berlin in the 1920s permits no other approach.” What Friedrich calls his “journalistic attempt,” however, is precisely what a truly great historian tries to achieve. And that is what Otto Friedrich really was, a great historian, perhaps the greatest American writer of European history in the twentieth century. Like Jacob Burckhardt in his classic The Civilization of the Renaissance In Italy, Friedrich gives more than a chronology of interesting events and biographies of important people; he paints a portrait of a place and time, a work of art that, in a way nothing else can, shows what it was like to live in Berlin, a city that before we have read the first page we know is doomed to destruction, and something more than that in the memory of those who remember what the Third Reich did to the world.

Otto Friedrich was not a professional historian, but he majored in history at Harvard, where his father, Carl Friedrich taught government, and became one of the best read men of his generation, a generation that still took reading seriously. In one of his other works, City of Nets, which tells the story Hollywood in the 1940s, he read five hundred books before he started to write; he read more than three hundred in preparation for Before The Deluge. This gave him the kind of familiarity with things - the different colors, and the different shades of colors - with which to paint the most vivid picture of Berlin in the 1920s we will ever have. It begins with...[read on]

Visit D.W. Buffa's website.

Buffa's previous third reading essays: The Great Gatsby; Brave New World; Lord Jim; Death in the Afternoon; Parade's End; The Idiot; The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; The Scarlet Letter; Justine; Patriotic Gore; Anna Karenina; The Charterhouse of Parma; Emile; War and Peace; The Sorrows of Young Werther; Bread and Wine; “The Crisis of the Mind” and A Man Without Qualities; Eugene Onegin; The Collected Works of Thomas Babington Macaulay; The Europeans; The House of Mirth and The Writing of Fiction; Doctor Faustus; the reading list of John F. Kennedy; Jorge Luis Borges; History of the Peloponnesian War; Mansfield Park; To Each His Own; A Passage To India; Seven Pillars of Wisdom; The Letters of T.E. Lawrence; All The King’s Men; The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus; Naguib Mahfouz’s novels of ancient Egypt; Main Street; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part I; Theodore H. White's The Making of the President series, part II; Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Fiction's Failure; Hermann Hesse's Demian; Frederick Douglass, Slavery, and The Fourth of July; Caesar’s Ghost; The American Constitution; A Tale of Two Cities; The Leopard; Madame Bovary; The Sheltering Sky; Tocqueville’s America and Ours; American Statesmen; Ancient and Modern Writers Reconsidered; Père Goriot; The Remarkable Edmund Burke; The Novels of W.H. Hudson; America Revised; The City And Man; "The Use And Abuse Of History"; I, Claudius; The Closing of The American Mind; History of Rome; Before The Deluge.

--Marshal Zeringue