Walking in Berlin: A Flaneur in the Capital (MIT Press) by Franz Hessel & Walter Benjamin & Amanda DeMarco

Author:Franz Hessel & Walter Benjamin & Amanda DeMarco
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780262036351
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2017-04-28T06:00:00+00:00

Berlin’s Boulevard

Tauentzienstraße and Kurfürstendamm have the important cultural task of teaching the Berliner to be a flaneur, unless this urban pastime should at some point become unfashionable. But maybe it’s not too late. The flaneur reads the street, and human faces, displays, window dressings, café terraces, trains, cars, and trees become letters that yield the words, sentences, and pages of a book that is always new. To correctly play the flaneur, you can’t have anything too particular in mind. On the stretch of road between Wittenbergplatz and Halensee, there are now so many possibilities to run errands, eat, drink, to go to a theater, film, or cabaret, that it’s easy to promenade without the risk of developing a set goal, leaving oneself to the unforeseen adventures of the eyes. Glass and artificial light are two great helps, the latter especially when it’s combined with a bit of remaining daylight and twilight. Then everything becomes multiple, new nearnesses and distances come into being, the happiest mixture “où l’indécis au précis se joint.”1

Incandescent advertisements light up and disappear, scroll away and return, altering the height, depth, or shape of their buildings. That’s all to the good, especially on the parts of Kurfürstendamm where many dreadful towers, protrusions, and overhangs remain from the darkest days of the private-building boom. Only now do we have the opportunity to crowd them out. These horrid zigzagging additions to the “mutilated houses” (as we used to call them) disappear behind the new architecture of advertising. In these palaces, the excessively high-ceilinged public rooms face the street, and the dark back rooms are for private life, but we can besiege their facades by installing shops in them, liberally simplifying the ground floor. And there are always new shops, because the department stores open gleaming branches here, which simply absorb the best retail shops. New purposes are invented for glass, metal, and wood, giving color to the old-Berlin gray and pale yellow. As soon as one of the buildings becomes dilapidated, or even just needs repair, the new architecture shaves every braid and tress from its boyish head, leaving a clear, linear facade. In front of many cafés, the terraces extend far onto the sidewalk, unifying the building with the street. One of them even has a Parisian-style brazier, to sustain this unity in winter.

Our boulevard’s increasingly southern lifestyle also displays the rudiments of democratic urban joyousness, as Wilhelm Speyer put it in his new-Berlin novel, Charlott, a Little Crazy:

In the limbs of this once so ungainly city, this city full of protestant national philosophy and military philosophy, a faintly glimmering fire flashes. A will to lightness, especially in the spring and summer months, began to direct the body of the metropolis in its first, increasingly adroit movements. Even the policemen had learned to laugh at confusion. No longer did they bellow through their bristling mustaches above curling lips. They were enormous figures, gesticulating with their arms raised, disciplined and yet unmilitaristic in the old-fashioned sense. Ever in motion,

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