Reading the other Berlin: Flanerie, vision and the poetics of urban space

This dissertation surveys various practices of urban poetics in the late Weimar era which attempt to integrate an "other" Berlin into a reading of the city. The various readings of Berlin which I consider cover many different genres, methods, forms and conflicting ideologies. All of these texts do, however, have one thing in common: from Heym to Hessel, from Pastor to Fritz Lang and from Hegemann to Benjamin: each text approaches the places and practices in the city which have the power to elude the hermeneutic practices of the reader of the urban text. These texts share a meta-discourse of the possibility of accessing the "other" Berlin which seems to exist beyond, behind and throughout the visible and empirical city. In Chapter One, I begin with a broad survey of Weimar texts which focus upon the practices of reading and understanding the city of Berlin. In a review of Werner Hegemann's Das steinerne Berlin (1930), Walter Benjamin calls for a new urban poetics that can access and utilize the potential power that is a part of the city's hidden and obscure passages. Calling upon a specific tradition of Berlin flaneurs, Benjamin resurrects for modernism a self-conscious urban poetics which has the ability to sense and incorporate the invisible acts of everyday life into its dialectical reading practices. After establishing important elements of Benjamin's poetics of the urban "other" in the first chapter, I continue through the remaining chapters of the dissertation to follow certain nineteenth- and early twentieth-century authors and artists from Berlin's flaneur tradition as they develop an urban poetics that subverts the city's dominant visual culture of rationalism. Relying upon several of Benjamin's specific references to the poetic practices of Berlin Flaneurs, I trace the way that authors and artists such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Heinrich Zille and Franz Hessel usher in the visual culture of Modernism as they perceive, understand and represent the urban spaces around them.