Die Lust zu gehen. Weibliche Flanerie in Literatur und Film ed. by Georgiana Banita, Judith Ellenbürger, and Jörn Glas (review)

Building on thirty years of Anglo-American scholarship on the Flaneuse, the female strolling poet of urban spaces, the ten essays collected by Georgiana Banita, Judith Ellenbürger, and Jörn Glas in Die Lust zu gehen. Weibliche Flanerie in Literatur und Film offer insights from a West German scholarly perspective. The contributors in literature and media studies seek to reinforce female Flanerie within gender studies as a theoretical apparatus in its own right, against the seemingly perpetual need for legitimization against the (male) Flaneur of Charles Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and Franz Hessel. The frequent mention of these authors' names in the essays is evidence enough of how difficult that task can be. In their brief introduction, the editors place special emphasis on the intermedial and comparative perspectives of film and literature, citing classic examples such as Irmgard Keun's Das kunstseidene Mädchen (1932) and Walter Ruttmann's Berlin—Die Symphonie der Großstadt (1927), both explored in later essays, in comparison to newer examples of Flanerie in films that feature Audrey Hepburn and directed by Agnès Vardas, Joel Schumacher, and Béla Tarr. A welcome shift in the study of the Flaneuse as racial/ethnic other appears in essays that explore authors with east-west migration experience.

The essays cover mainly German-language fiction and films that span from the 1930s to roughly 2010, with some exceptions. In the first chapter, Maren Lickhardt offers a comparison of female Flaneurs in texts by Irmgard Keun and Klaus Mann. The difference in experience hinges on female protagonists' skills of perception, some of which miss the mark, with Mann's female protagonist ultimately more limited than Keun's. Banita lends insight into a relatively unexplored domain that links female Flanerie to the consumption of alcohol, exploring Jean Rhys's Good Morning, Midnight (1939) via Wayne Koestenbaum's Hotel Theory (2007) and Avital Ronell's Crack Wars: Literature, Addiction, Mania (2004). Rita Morrien and Caroline Rosenthal review a rekindled interest in the Flaneuse via recent theories of space and place. Morrien views texts by Herta Müller and Angela Krauß as falsely placed within the tradition of Benjamin, and turns instead to the spatial theories of Martina Löw and Michel de Certeau, as well as the nomadic theory of Rosi Braidotti. In her solid, but abbreviated overview of Flanerie's history, Rosenthal continues Morrien's expansion of the genre in her contemplation of the immigrant Flaneuse in 1990s fiction by Siri Hustvedt and Tessa McWatts. Leonhard Fuest's complex discussion of Yoko Tawada's posthuman Flaneur-protagonists considers the mouse/rat, sparrow, and dog within what he calls the "monströse Kulturtechnik" (101) of twenty-first century Flanerie. Andrea Bartl explores the possibility of the amok-running-Flaneur with analogies to the black Flaneur in Joel Schumacher's film Falling Down (1993), with only brief mention of female amok-runners. The possibility of the black Flaneuse remains entirely absent, although Nigerian-German director Sheri Hagen's 2012 film Auf dem zweiten Blick could have provided a rich opportunity for comparison in this context. Judith Ellenbürger discusses the discourses of "Blickökonomie, Prostitution, Konsum, Shopping oder auch die Praktikabilität von Schuhwerk und Kleidung" (135) as fleeting moments of empowerment that ultimately leave Hepburn as Flaneuse locked in a state of nomadic oscillation. In Felix Lenz's thorough discussion of Agnès Varda's film Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), Cléo wandering as a terminal cancer patient serves as metaphor for both the classic fear of death and for the modern struggle with patriarchal structures. Lenz's analysis is fresh in its comparisons to the fairytale narrative of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which also links his chapter to Bartl's analysis of Falling Down. Natalie Lettenwich draws on the word Beute (prizes, spoils, loot) from...