The Storyteller by Walter Benjamin

Author:Walter Benjamin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

CHAPTER 25

Review: Franz Hessel, Secret Berlin

Cat Lurking (Katze Lauert), 1939.

Franz Hessel, Secret Berlin, Berlin: Ernst Rowohlt Verlag, 1927

The small flights of stairs, the front halls supported by columns, the friezes and architraves of the villas in Tiergarten are taken at their word in this book. The ‘old’ West End has become the West of antiquity, whence the westerly winds reached the boatmen, who slowly floated their barges with the apples of the Hesperides up the Landwehr Canal in order to moor at the bridge of Heracles. This district lifts itself so unmistakably above the urban sea of houses that its entrance appears to be guarded by thresholds and gates. Its poet is well acquainted with thresholds in every sense – except for the dubious one upheld by experimental psychology, which he does not love. The thresholds, however, which separate and distinguish situations, minutes and words from each other, are felt more keenly by him under the soles of his feet than they are felt by anyone else.

And precisely because he feels the town in this way, one expects to find in his work descriptions or atmospheric portraits. What is ‘secret’ about this Berlin is not a windy whisper, no vexatious flirtation, but simply this strict and Classical image-being of a town, a street, a house, even a room, which, in the manner of a cell, accommodates the measure of events throughout the book, just as it does the moves in a dance.

Every architecture worthy of the name lets its best element fall not to mere views, but rather to the sense of space. That is also how that narrow strip of bank between the Landwehr Canal and Tiergartenstrasse exercises its power over people in a gentle and conducive way: hermetic and Hodegetric. In dialogues they stride off, every now and then, down the stony slope. And just as he did with the fourteen fictional figures of his Seven Dialogues,1 so here through these fragile children of the world does the author move the Roman heart to beat, the Greek tongue to speak. It is not Greeks or Romans in modern costumes, nor is it contemporaries in humanistic carnival dress; rather this book is close to photomontage in the technical sense: housewives, artists, worldly ladies, merchants and intellectuals are sharply overlapped by the shadowy outlines of Platonic and Menandric mask-wearers.

For this secret Berlin is the stage of an Alexandrine musical comedy. It inherits from Greek drama the unity of place and time: in twenty-four hours the entanglements of love are knotted and untied. From philosophy it inherits the great abrogated question of morality, which previously the poet has treated in its Classical formulation – with a piece of verse about the Matron of Ephesus.2 From the Greek language it inherited its musical instrumentation. Today there is no author who approaches the Germano-Greek inclination to composite words more freely and with more understanding than this one. In his mouth the words become magnets, which irresistibly attract other words. His prose is shot through with such magnetic chains.

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