Walking in Berlin: a flaneur in the capital - Hardcover

Franz Hessel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1925228355 ISBN 13: 9781925228359

Publisher: Scribe UK, 2016

Synopsis

A timeless guide to one of the world’s greatest cities.

Franz Hessel was an observer par excellence of the increasingly hectic metropolis that was Berlin in the late 1920s. In Walking in Berlin, originally published in Germany in 1929, he captures the rhythm of Weimar-era Berlin, recording evidence of the seismic shifts shaking German culture at the time.

Nearly all of the pieces take the form of a walk or outing, focusing either on a theme or part of the city, and many end at a theatre, cinema, or club. Hessel effortlessly weaves historical information into his observations, displaying his extensive knowledge of the city. Today, many years after the Nazi era and the postwar reconstruction that followed, the areas he visited are all still prominent and interesting. From the Alexanderplatz to Kreuzberg, his record of them has become priceless. Superbly written, and as fresh today as when it first appeared, this is a book to be savoured.

About this title

About the Author

Franz Hessel, Berlin-born son of a Jewish banking family, was a writer and translator, translating works by Casanova, Stendhal, and Balzac, as well as collaborating with Walter Benjamin on a translation of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu into German. Hessel died in early 1941, shortly after his release from an internment camp.

Review

Hessel describes the small joys and ephemeral pleasures of big-city life in the age of commodity display. The Berlin that comes alive on these pages was destroyed in the last world war, which took as its victims both Hessel and his comrade in flanerie, Walter Benjamin. Hence the poignancy of this beautifully written book. Today we know the fragility of urban dreamworlds, drawn into the orbit of fashion's temporality. The urban pleasures captured here come to us with a sense of foreboding.

(Susan Buck-Morss, Distinguished Professor, CUNY Graduate Center)

This is a lively translation of Franz Hessel's literary peregrinations through Weimar Berlin, as he takes in the historically saturated sights and sounds of the most self-consciously modern of the early twentieth-century metropolises, from its boulevards, parks, cafés, and courtyards to its department stores, theaters, dance halls, and slaughterhouses.

(Howard Eiland, Literature Section, MIT; cotranslator of The Arcades Project)

Hessel's psychic geography, channeled by subterranean laws, sees neon and reflective glass though the eyes of a lover of antiquity. His Pantheon -- the gasometer in Wilmersdorf. Drifting us through a Berlin we know and no longer know, we move as Hessel in search of lost or other types of elsewhere.

(Esther Leslie, Professor of Political Aesthetics, Birkbeck, University of London)

Reading Walking in Berlin is the next best thing to traveling back in time to visit the capital of the Weimar Republic as it was in 1929.

(PopMatters)

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribe UK
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1925228355
• ISBN 13: 9781925228359
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 260