Walking in Berlin: A Flaneur in the Capital

Memoir set in BERLIN of the 1920sA physically delightful book, the unusual pink and turquoise cover really caught my eye. A perfect book to take to Berlin to get under the granite and stones facades of this imposing and historically rich city, and gain a real sense of perspective of the legacy evident all around today.Franz Hessel saw himself as a flâneur, someone who sauntered about the capital on foot, and sometimes by car. He would observe the buildings and the people as they went about thei [...]

The is an essential guide for anyone interested in the city of Berlin and its history. Hessel is a great guide. His walks across the city combine a bit of everything. More to the point the fact that it was written in 1929 does not matter, since his accounts have a contemporary feel, and despite all the turmoil and upset that Berlin has endured, once cannot help but feel it is the same city described by Hessel all those years ago.

Franz Hessel. Guía para un mundo que desapareceráHemos leído libros sobre mundos que se pierden, irremediablemente. El peatón de París, editado también por Errata Naturae, podría ser uno de ellos. Son como cajitas en las que se guardan un montón de cosas con la certeza de que no estarán en breve o dejaron de estar no hace mucho. Con una especie de necesidad de preservar la ciudad, pero también los recuerdos. La infancia o aquellos sitios que significaron algo. Sitios que significaron a [...]

Just as Eugène Atget captured the disappearance of the old in a modernizing, late 19th-century Paris, so Franz Hessel apropos of Weimar-era Berlin, "a city that's always on the go, always in the middle of becoming something else". Reinventing the introspective meanderings of the flâneur figure, his travels detail a transient world with places and figures on the cusp of dematerializing into historical relics amidst the inexorable march of time. And yet, one yearns for a more penetrating insight [...]

"Let us learn a bit of idleness and indulgence, and look at the thing that is Berlin, in its combination of chaos and luxury and meanness, solidity and spuriousness, peculiarity and respectability, until we become fond of it and find it beautiful, until it is beautiful."This was another book that caught my eye at Daunt Books, with its lovely turquoise and pink cover. Berlin is on my list of cities to visit, so I thought, why not try this book? It is an interesting insight into what it was like i [...]

Putting it aside until back into the topic. Other projects call, and not just reading (big stack of NYers!). It is fun, at least, and even better after a half week walking around Berlin in his spirit. When thinking of one of those places I can now go to the section on it, for instance. It dragged down in "Rundfahrt", although there were some juicy bits, especially when he kept writing about a place after the silly guide who kept going after a cursory mention of that place. Or else spent a lot of [...]

Franz Hessel, der lange Zeit in Berlin lebte, brachte die in Paris verbreitete Persepktive des Flaneurs nach Berlin und liefert wunderbare Beschreibungen der Berliner Alltags in den 20er Jahren.

En muchas ocasiones echo en falta libros que no basen toda la intención de su trama en la necesidad de motivar al lector a base de giros y situaciones intrincadas. Echo en falta la prosa bella sin mayor intención que narrar, que contar algo por el mero hecho de contárselo al lector. Y eso es precisamente lo que ofrece Franz Hessel en este relato. El autor se dispone a coger al lector de la mano y llevarlo de paseo por Berlín, mientras le va narrando lo que ve, lo que siente, lo que vive. Sin [...]

It's a tragedy that more of Hessel's work isn't available in English translation. This is lumped in with other flaneur pieces that take a worm's eye view of interwar/ Weimar Germany, but Hessel's descriptive power, his sense of humor, and his knowledge of German history are too keen for this work to be limited or categorized. It's just great literature.The heart of the work is "The Tour," a long Feuilleton piece that describes a day trip the author took with several tourists through Berlin's gar [...]

sensemania/2012/0