Your Cart

Walking in Berlin: A Flaneur in the Capital

Walking in Berlin: A Flaneur in the Capital

Walking in Berlin: A Flaneur in the Capital

$24.95

Hessel, Franz. Walking in Berlin: A Flaneur in the Capital

MIT Press

Cl. 2017

Book ID: 101026

Franz Hessel (1880Ð1941), a German-born writer, grew up in Berlin, studied in Munich, and then lived in Paris, where he moved in artistic and literary circles. His relationship with the fashion journalist Helen Grund was the inspiration for Henri-Pierre Roches novel Jules et Jim (made into a celebrated 1962 film by Francois Truffaut). In collaboration with Walter Benjamin, Hessel reinvented the Parisian figure of the flaneur. This 1929 book here in its first English translation offers Hessels version of a flaneur in Berlin. In Walking in Berlin, Hessel captures the rhythm of Weimar-era Berlin, recording the seismic shifts in German culture. Nearly all of the essays take the form of a walk or outing, focusing on either a theme or part of the city, and many end at a theater, cinema, or club. Hessel deftly weaves the past with the present, walking through the citys history as well as its neighborhoods. Even today, his walks in the city, from the Alexanderplatz to Kreuzberg, can guide would-be flaneurs.

296 pp. English