Walking In Berlin

By Franz Hessel

Scribe, £12.99

Review by Malcolm Forbes

IN 1929, two new novels showed that Berlin was a different city for different writers. Vicki Baum’s sumptuous Grand Hotel depicted an oasis of relative calm and prosperity; Alfred Döblin’s seamy Berlin Alexanderplatz inhabited an underworld of crime and desperation. In one book it seemed the glow of the Goldene Zwanziger, or Golden 1920s, would burn on; in the other, their faded sheen presaged an even darker decade ahead.

A non-fiction work published that same year exhibited both the rough and the smooth of Weimar-era Berlin. Franz Hessel’s Walking In Berlin took the reader on an exciting and absorbing city tour, one that encompassed its widespread flair, glamour and cultural enlightenment but also its localised struggle, privation and political uncertainty. Eighty-seven years later, following the city’s destruction and rebirth, division and reunification, the book is available in English for the first time.

Hessel (1880-1941) grew up in Berlin and was an expert on its contours and history, but as he traverses the place on foot, by touring car and even by steamship, he alternates his perspective from fact-filled guide to outsider looking in. Flitting between these roles proves effective, and through Hessel’s imparted knowledge and innocent eye we come to experience and appreciate Berlin’s “aged, ever-ageing yet animated secrets and observable mysteries”.

For the most part, Hessel devotes each chapter to a particular section of the city. He covers sightseeing staples: palaces, galleries, museums and theatres, key arteries and the beating heart. He visits the zoo (“a magnificent children’s kingdom”) and enthuses about “the touching microcosm of the Berlin Christmas market”. After introducing a notable point of interest, Hessel regales us with traditions, folklore or tall tales tied to it. “Such tales are plentiful in our storied city.”

But Hessel also makes a point of getting off the well-beaten tourist track to explore factories and cemeteries, markets and slaughterhouses, inner courtyards and outer districts. He acknowledges that Berlin has individual, unconventional beauty that is not always found in obvious places. “You have to go looking for it in its temples of machinery, in its churches of precision.”

However, Hessel is at his most entertaining when he isn’t looking for anything. An admirer of French culture (he co-translated Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time with his close friend Walter Benjamin), Hessel was taken by the concept of flâneurie, and much of his walking in the book is in fact aimless meandering. As he ambles along boulevards, alleys and canals “on hazard’s little voyages of discovery”, or takes a twilight stroll through the Tiergarten, he comes upon unexpected features which arouse surprise or wonderment.

Occasionally a sight will trigger shock. “A woman is lying on the ground in front of the tavern. Hovering over her, still in a boxer’s stance, is one of those fellows in cap and sweater who are so prevalent around here. Bystanders look on with interest. No-one dares to intervene.” Such instances of Hessel noticing detail rather than reciting facts make for stimulating reading.

This was a decade of urban expansion and modernisation, and on his travels Hessel talks to architects about their grand designs for the future. Armed with hindsight, we know what the future brought, and what happened to most of Berlin’s best laid plans. We read with a sense of unease as Hessel describes the Ministry of War building as “outmoded”, admires an old but “intact” Jewish residential area in Jüdenstrasse, or simply praises structures and landmarks that would be razed or crudely repurposed.

For Hessel, Berlin is “incessantly on the go, always in the middle of becoming something different and never at rest in yesterday’s form”. Times are already changing before his eyes. Previously “sinful” nightlife now consists of sedate parties (“mellow orgies”). In the east, crumbling tenements are giving way to sleek high-rises. When he writes that in the overhauled villas of the west “we recognise the old world under the layers of the new”, he might as well be talking about the streets outside. Berlin then is Berlin now: a palimpsest whose fresh surfaces can’t quite obliterate past traces.

Walking in Berlin is a magical mystery tour of a city on the brink of upheaval. Hessel may have wandered haphazardly but he wrote with purpose, never once losing his way.