Phenomenology of Absence: Benjamin, Nietzsche and History in Cees Nooteboom's All Souls Day

Contemporary Berlin novels commonly anchor representations of post-unification Berlin within an ethics of remembering in which the city's mottled topography is frequently portrayed as a historically saturated site. Invariably, this historical focus is supported by an aesthetics in which representing Berlin is concomitant with an ethical obligation to address in some form the city's pasts. It is argued in this paper that through an engaged comparison of Walter Benjamin's theory of critical pedestrianism with Nietzsche's "The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life," Dutch novelist Cees Nooteboom's novel All Souls Day questions the possibility of representing the city as a discursive space in which the past and the present can mutually co-exist. Nooteboom's text offers a singular and unique perspective on the ethical burden the recently unified cities faces in the post-unification era, namely the obligation to remember the division and pre-division German pasts, by questioning whether it is at all possible for the city to fulfill this duty of historical remembering.