Berlin: Flesh and Stone, Space and Time

Abstract

In Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization, Richard Sennett explores the history of cities by analysing people’s ‘physical sensations in urban space’ that are defined, then as now, by the built environment (Sennett 1996, p. 15). When discussing literary Berlin since the nineteenth century, this is a key prompt: a city that experienced historical ruptures at regular intervals is bound to reflect, time and again, the role of the individual in the metropolis. In doing so, literature characterizes by means of observation what may be considered to be distinctive for particular periods. In 1926 this approach of the observer found fitting artistic expression when Otto Umbehr (UMBO) created a photomontage of Egon Erwin Kisch: ‘The Racing Reporter’ depicted the new post-war journalist. In Umbehr’s montage the signs of his trade make up the body parts; the chest is a typewriter, the legs each an aeroplane and a car, the eye a camera, hearing is enhanced by gramophone horns. Kisch, it seems, has mastered both space and time. He is representative of an age that relished the impact of new media and technologies: sound (in the movies, on the roads, at the train stations) and images (with photographs, films and newsreels). 1920s Berlin provided these in abundance, and the authors concerned with urban life were busy translating these sensory experiences into appropriate aesthetic patterns. Umbehr’s depiction of Kisch’s journalistic ambition holds true for many of the writers associated with the city: Theodor Fontane, Gabriele Tergit and Peter Schneider engaged both in journalism and in creative writing. Their contributions explore Berlin’s rapid expansion from the last third of the nineteenth century until the early 1930s; devastating destruction in the Second World War; the division along the Cold War’s ideological borders, right through Berlin; and finally unification in 1990 when the former death strip remained visible throughout the transitional years of the 1990s. It is telling that in discussion of the phenomenon of the metropolis Berlin past and present has been associated, contrasted and compared with Babylon, Carthage, Rome, Paris, Vienna, Moscow, New York and Chicago—but also Jerusalem, Moscow and Buenos Aires.