The Art of Taking a Walk

Flanerie, Literature, and Film in Weimar Culture

Anke Gleber

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691218069
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Storia e critica del cinema

Anke Gleber examines one of the most intriguing and characteristic figures of European urban modernity: the observing city stroller, or flaneur. In an age transformed by industrialism, the flaneur drifted through city streets, inspired and repelled by the surrounding scenes of splendor and squalor. Gleber examines this often elusive figure in the particular contexts of Weimar Germany and the intellectual sphere of Walter Benjamin, with whom the concept of flanerie is often associated. She sketches the European influences that produced the German flaneur and establishes the figure as a pervasive presence in Weimar culture, as well as a profound influence on modern perceptions of public space.
The book begins by exploring the theory of literary flanerie and the technological changes--street lighting, public transportation, and the emergence of film--that gave a new status to the activities of seeing and walking in the modern city. Gleber then assesses the place of flanerie in works by Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and other representatives of Weimar literature, arts, and theory. She draws particular attention to the works of Franz Hessel, a Berlin flaneur who argued that flanerie is a "reading" of the city that perceives passersby, streets, and fleeting impressions as the transitory signs of modernity. Gleber also examines connections between flanerie and Weimar film, and discusses female flanerie as a means of asserting female subjectivity in the public realm.
The book is a deeply original and searching reassessment of the complex intersections among modernity, vision, and public space.

Part One

LITERATURE, CULTURE, THEORY

CHAPTER 1

Walking Texts: Toward a Theory of Literary Flanerie

Have you ever reflected on everything contained in the term “flanerie,” this most enchanting word which is revered by the poets . . . ? Going on infinite investigations through the streets and promenades; drifting along, with your nose in the wind, with both hands in your pockets, and with an umbrella under your arm, as befits any open-minded spirit; walking along, with serendipity, without pondering where to and without urging to hurry . . . stopping in front of stores to regard their images, at street corners to read their signs, by the bouquinistes’ stands to touch their old books . . . giving yourself over, captivated and enraptured, with all your senses and all your mind, to the spectacle.

(Victor Fournel, Ce qu’on voit dans les rues de Paris)

WRITING of Paris, the city that Walter Benjamin would call the capital of the nineteenth century, Victor Fournel here approximates his own experience and understanding of urban modernity.¹ One of the earliest writers and theorists of flanerie, Fournel defined it as a new state of existence that inscribes a significant phenomenon of modernity into the intellectual and literary perspective of its times.² The flaneur’s mode of perception and his vision of exterior reality soon became manifest in a large number of literary and, later, filmic texts that followed the itinerary evoked here by one of its first practitioners. In “infinite investigations” through the inexhaustible realms and nuances of this new reality, these authors left their bourgeois interiors in order to encounter their materials of observation in a new sphere of public exteriors—jogging their creativity by traversing the “streets and promenades” of the city, and coming across imaginary spaces at every turn. “Drifting along” with the modern crowds, these authors and their texts attentively described the ways in which the flaneur’s literary dreams gradually take material shape. At the same time, they slowly pursue their own trajectories, considering reality with their own careful gaze.

Both expressing and exemplifying this flanerie, these authors-as-flaneurs approach the realities of their modern times in entirely open ways, “regard[ing]” the images they see in the streets with a renewed sense of amazement, gazing at the surroundings and books they find open before them as if for the first time, reading reality as a series of textual documents, images that ask to be approached and appreciated with care and respect. These walking writers enter the public sphere in order to “read” the texts of modernity within the continuum of their strolls, within the kaleidoscopic continuity offered at every street corner. As a modern author, the flaneur regards these new images as texts in their own right. With “all of [their] senses” and “all of [their] minds,” these flaneurs abandon themselves to the spectacle of the new reality appearing before them in the unfolding spaces of modernity. Flanerie assumes the sense of a contemporary disposition that becomes a privileged way of recording the exterior world and phenomena of its times. This innovative access to the world is reflected in the enthusiasm and fascination with which Fournel, as only one representative among many modern authors, begins to perceive these images and scenes as writings of the street, at once embracing the literary and visual sensitivities evoked by the figure of the flaneur.

If Fournel’s early flaneuristic visions suggest that flanerie is a word “revered by the poets,” the phenomenon of flanerie has long been overlooked in the history of modern perception offered by the chroniclers of literary and cultural history. It therefore remains to be seen how the various impulses of flanerie, as a privileged mode of perceiving modernity and its many realities, have always already been present in various forms in both literary and cinematic culture. That flanerie has been conspicuously absent from histories of perception and literature means that these histories need to be approached in new ways as a largely uncharted territory.³ The primary cue for these excursions can be taken from the eyewitnesses of early flanerie: “I would quite like to begin tracing the theory of flanerie here; the distinguishing factor between this one and any other theory, however, is the fact that it does not, or moreover, that it cannot exist at all. Flanerie, this amiable science . . . lives by what cannot be foreseen and by its immediate freedom of will.”⁴ The presumed incongruities to which Fournel reacted in his formulation of flanerie as a movement of impressionable impulses provide the point of departure for my investigation.

The aim of this investigation is to pursue those very imperceptible, yet significant traces of a cultural history and aesthetics of modernity that are captured through the eyes of the flaneur. Tracing the movement of this paradigmatically modern figure, I will suggest that the flaneur is the precursor of a particular form of inquiry that seeks to read the history of culture from its public spaces.⁵ This is why the point of departure for approaching the visual phenomena of flanerie within the spaces of literature and the images of modernity is decisive. Following Fournel, we can delineate not only certain preferred routes of investigation but also the more confined, one-way streets that we will want to avoid: “I might . . . begin to enumerate all the great names, all the beautiful works, the useful achievements and precious discoveries which flanerie is rightly entitled to claim its own. ... However, this would only be a pleading that follows by the rules. How heavy-handed and absurd an enterprise! I would much rather approach this matter in a much more facile way. The topic will not lose its pertinence, and the reader may even gain as many insights in this process as the author will. So let me therefore .. . convey to you the observations of a flaneur by way of flanerie itself.”⁶

The phenomenon of flanerie, I suggest, can only be approached by the very ways of the flaneur, that is to say, by looking at the texts of flanerie with an eye toward how they have inscribed themselves in the literature of modernity. Part 1 therefore reads texts that represent some of the possible stations on a historical tour aimed at following the path of flanerie from the beginnings of the nineteenth century through what we call modern culture. This part follows the outlines of tenuous yet prevailing connections that link the traces of flanerie to certain contours of cultural history. Taking its first steps, this excursion will return to a few precursors of flanerie in nineteenth-century literature, and situate these early urban dwellers within their specific time frame, that is, in relation to the industrial revolution and the ensuing evolution of cityscapes, urban constellations, and conditions of perception that surround them.

I will explore the foundations of a modern age that give rise to a movement that reaches well into the twentieth century. The visual phenomena of modernity and their related manifestations will be revisited in the specific social, material, and theoretical shapes that they take in the metropolitan sphere of the Weimar Republic, returning to a Berlin that is only beginning to become the pivotal urban center of early twentieth-century German culture. The return to this lost history of flanerie will be helped by the writings of such seminal thinkers as Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and of many other city dwellers, on the relation between flanerie and modernity. These writers view flanerie as a visible mode of writing, as an aesthetics of reflection in, through, and of images—as Denkbilder.⁷ For them, flanerie names a mode of thinking that gives shape to the unique theoretical and aesthetic approaches that Weimar thought and literature take in modernity. Significant predecessors to these writers of flanerie will be found by taking a closer look at the writings of Edouard Dujardin, a writer who exemplifies this modern urban approach with his texts about Paris, Benjamin’s proclaimed “capital of the nineteenth century.” As evidence of an impressionistic disposition, Dujardin illustrates some of the characteristic frames of vision and mind that have come to be regarded as constitutive of flanerie as a mode of perception and representation.

Within this extended lineage of modernity, the works of Franz Hessel hold a privileged position. His writings can be understood as the personal and literary companion pieces to the major theoretical constants in Benjamin’s oeuvre. The latter’s declaration of a “return of the flaneur” is based primarily on a reading of the urban and literary texts that his friend Hessel made accessible and disclosed to him. The too often neglected relations of Hessel’s writings to Benjamin’s theories lend renewed emphasis to the work of an author who moved at the center of cultural life in Berlin, surrounded by a circle of friends whose visions and debates helped shape important theoretical constructions of Weimar’s intellectual modernity. A consideration of Hessel’s long overlooked, decidedly marginal, yet hardly insignificant work substantiates my claim about the essential relation of flanerie to the literature of modernity in general and to Weimar culture in particular. As the course of the inquiry will show, flanerie is very closely related to other constructions of cultural modernity. Linked to the movements and images that belong to the processes of tourism, photography, and psychoanalysis, it ultimately charts an aesthetics of modernity that reveals its affinities to the medium of the cinema and its reception of exterior reality.

The flaneur personifies a perspective that links many of these phenomena of modernity, serving above all as a visual medium of perception and subjectivity in human form. He represents a disposition that is closely affiliated with the gaze of the camera, renders the sensitivity of a director who records his own vision, and repeats the spectatorship of a moviegoer who perceives the images of reality as an ongoing film of modernity. It should be said that this film of modernity includes women as well. This is why, in tracing the aspects and affinities of this disposition, we will follow this pivotal phenomenon of flanerie into an all but uncharted terrain in German culture, the “missing” phenomenon of female flanerie. Considering the seminal yet hidden contributions that modernist women brought to Weimar culture and thought, figures that appear as female pedestrians in Berlin, the Symphony of the City as well as in the writings of Weimar women authors such as Irmgard Keun and Charlotte Wolff, this exploration of cultural and visual phenomena will conclude by linking this significant absence to the eventual appearance of a “female flaneur.”⁸

PARIS, OR THE RISE OF FLANERIE

The beginnings of flanerie can be found long before the twentieth-century reflections of Benjamin, and even before the era of Baudelaire’s nineteenthcentury urban poetry. If flanerie predates many of its assumed origins, however, its consequences also move beyond the literature of early modernity into that of a certain postmodernity, transcending the efforts to record flanerie by way of written texts, and moving toward a flanerie that informs other media and new forms of “writing” by way of images. The very beginnings of this movement are nevertheless initiated by an intensive experience of new shocks in urban realities. For most German writers of the early nineteenth century, the pursuit of such novel experiences inevitably involves a journey to cities, and not just to any city but to Paris, the most advanced and pronouncedly modern city in Europe.⁹ The very first texts of flanerie in German literature therefore often come in the shape of travel writing and urban letters from abroad.

One of the earliest traces of an art of flanerie in German literature can be found in the letters that Heinrich von Kleist wrote from his sojourns and excursions to Paris, and later to Berlin. These texts represent notes of a flanerie quasi de negative, recorded by a disturbed and shocked observer who became a city traveller almost against his will. For the most part, Kleist deplores the effects of modernity, of a mobility that disturbs the travelling leisure of horse coaches and strolls in the countryside that he so often treasured and praised. He prefers to seek out sites that provide sweeping views of the city from above. Embedded in its landscape, the city becomes a cultural sign enshrined in nature. From the height of this removed perspective in May 1801, Kleist describes the sight of Dresden in its environs as an auratic work of art: “It lay there like a painting by Claude Lorrain beneath my feet ... it seemed to me embroidered like a landscape onto a tapestry.”¹⁰ Although he still privileges static forms of art and a perception that is derived from the spaces and textures of eighteenth-century culture—paintings, tapestries, landscapes—his sensitivity favors a process of walking that functions more as an introspective stroll than as a walking reflection of his time in its contemporary images.¹¹ As Kleist suggests to Wilhelmine von Zenge, the recipient of one of his letters written in the early months of the year 1800: “If tomorrow you will not decline a stroll, I could find out from you what you judge and think about this step.”¹² This process of walking moves decidedly within the confines and traditions of an eighteenth-century bourgeois society that expects to find its Enlightenment views reflected by the textures of the world. The members of this society set out on their expeditions in order to further civilized discourse, rather than to experience the changing and evolving life of their cities and times.¹³ From this perspective, Kleist finds little pleasure in dwelling on the energy of the emerging metropolises of his times. In the fall of 1800, he considers Berlin to be merely a limited distraction for the traveller in transit: “For a short time, Berlin may please, for a long one not, not me.”¹⁴ More than a year later, the disenchanted Kleist continues his verdict against the cities of modernity, this time against the Paris which presents an undisputed attraction for his contemporaries. He declares even the capital of the nineteenth century to be devoid of stimuli that might resonate in his mind and interests: “Furthermore, Paris does not captivate me through anything at all.”¹⁵ While these statements formulate one of the last, if lasting, manifestations of a sensitivity that is decidedly indebted to an eighteenth-century experience, Kleist’s letters already crossed paths with those of an avant-garde of German travellers who deliberately sought out the city of lights in order to further and renew the illumination of their own times.

With this next generation of travelling writers came a wave of reporting from Paris by authors who moved quickly to capture and appreciate the more recent, often conflicting, and decidedly confusing stimuli of urban life with all of their newly liberated senses. Around the time of the July Revolution in 1830, these expatriate Germans began to understand the shifting signs of ...