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chapter 4 Walking in the Metropolis: The City Texts of Franz Hessel and Siegfried Kracauer While architects such as Gropius, Mendelsohn, and Hilberseimer were directly involved in organizing the modern masses, the representatives of the literary feuilleton turned to architecture for entirely different reasons: to examine the crisis of modern subjectivity and to respond to the threat of deindividualization through the literary forms and means available to them. In their critical engagement with architecture, they did not limit themselves to the signature buildings that have come to represent the New Berlin. Instead, in staging the drama of modern subjectivity, their city texts—or textual cities—engaged the entire range of architectural culture: the new commercial structures and façade renovations in the city center, the modernist styles in light advertising, shopwindow design, and cinema architecture, and the architectural tropes that, on the pages of the feuilleton , functioned as metaphors of mass culture and allegories of modernity . All three levels come together in the trope of walking, which will serve in this chapter to shed light on the role of the city text within Weimar discourse on modern architecture and mass society: ‹rst through a study on the Kurfürstendamm, the famous boulevard where modern architecture entered into a new alliance with commodity culture and mass entertainment , and then through the writings of Franz Hessel and Siegfried Kracauer , two quintessential Weimar strollers or, to use the richer critical term, ›aneurs. In “Walking in the City,” Michel de Certeau describes moving inside the cityscape as a complex, creative activity. It is only through the presence of pedestrians that the heterogeneous spaces of the city are brought to life, through walkers “whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban ‘text’ they write without being able to read it. . . . The networks of these moving, intersecting writings compose a manifold story that has neither 134 author nor spectator, shaped out of fragments of trajectories and alternations of spaces: in relation to representations, it remains daily and inde‹nitely other.”1 These pedestrians, strollers, and ›aneurs turn spaces into places, endowing them with individual meaning and social purpose. Experiencing the city at the ground level, one step at a time, the pedestrians actualize the hidden urban text that makes up the city in the popular imagination, that resonates in literary and ‹lmic representations of the metropolis , and that ‹nds its clearest expression in the spatial interventions of architects and city planners. Given their diversity and ›uidity as a social body and urban phenomenon, these pedestrians at ‹rst glance appear to have little in common with the rational organization of urban space envisioned by Wagner, Gropius, and Hilberseimer, not to mention their postwar successors worldwide. However, even de Certeau’s fantasy of walking as a subversive act remains fundamentally dependent on the totalizing vision provided by architecture, as con‹rmed by his privileged view from the World Trade Center in New York that, in this particular text, allows him to imagine the pedestrians below as unconscious agents of a city text seemingly writing itself. Walking or strolling in the city text indeed represents one of the most immediate ways of exploring the urban environment and of negotiating the place of the individual in the crowd. Yet writing as a ›aneur not only means articulating the problem of modern subjectivity within the imaginary spaces and architectural tropes of the city text, it also means staging the sociospatial dialectic under certain historical conditions and in classspeci ‹c and gendered terms. To continue lines of argumentation started in chapter 1, the central problematic addressed through Weimar ›anerie is the relationship between architecture and class, a point downplayed in the extensive scholarship on the representation of Berlin in the Weimar feuilleton .2 More speci‹cally, it is the connection between New Building and white-collar society that informs the urban excursions of Kracauer and Hessel especially in their strategies of resistance and denial. Both respond to the provocation of modern mass society as typical representatives of the educated middle class and, more speci‹cally, the literary intelligentsia. Through walking, they demarcate a textual space within which to confront their increasing marginalization as a social class and to develop new strategies for surviving in modern mass culture. As a literary trope and heuristic device, walking thus allows them to uphold individual agency and sense perception against the abstract principles of mass organization. Walking validates coincidence and contingency over the predetermined order of the Walking in the Metropolis 135 [3.145...

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