Enter your email Address

ENTROPY
  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: Bruises Around the Heart

      February 24, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Radio Days

      February 23, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: The Old and the Flightless

      February 22, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Daddy Rocked the Baby, Mother Said Amen

      February 20, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Radio Days

      February 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Daddy Rocked the Baby, Mother Said Amen

      February 20, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: The End of the World

      February 9, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: I almost lost my calloused skin

      February 2, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Cain, Knocking

      February 24, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: A Bird Heart for Forgiveness

      February 19, 2021

      Fiction

      New Skin

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Skittering

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      Variations on a Theme: Larger Than Life

      February 6, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Review: Nudes by Elle Nash

      February 22, 2021

      Review

      Burials Free of Sharks: Review of Xandria Phillips’ Hull

      February 18, 2021

      Review

      Review: Censorettes by Elizabeth Bales Frank

      February 4, 2021

      Review

      Review: Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino by Julián Herbert

      February 1, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

      Small Press

      Abalone Mountain Press

      February 3, 2021

      Small Press

      Gordon Hill Press

      December 8, 2020

      Small Press

      Evidence House

      November 24, 2020

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch

ENTROPY

  • About
    • About
    • Masthead
    • Advertising
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Info on Book Reviews
  • Essays
    • All Introspection
      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      WOVEN: Bruises Around the Heart

      February 24, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Radio Days

      February 23, 2021

      Creative Nonfiction / Essay

      The Birds: The Old and the Flightless

      February 22, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Daddy Rocked the Baby, Mother Said Amen

      February 20, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Radio Days

      February 23, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: Daddy Rocked the Baby, Mother Said Amen

      February 20, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: The End of the World

      February 9, 2021

      Introspection

      Variations on a Theme: I almost lost my calloused skin

      February 2, 2021

  • Fiction
    • Fiction

      BLACKCACKLE: Cain, Knocking

      February 24, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: A Bird Heart for Forgiveness

      February 19, 2021

      Fiction

      New Skin

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      The Birds: Skittering

      February 17, 2021

      Fiction

      Variations on a Theme: Larger Than Life

      February 6, 2021

  • Reviews
    • All Collaborative Review Video Review
      Review

      Review: Nudes by Elle Nash

      February 22, 2021

      Review

      Burials Free of Sharks: Review of Xandria Phillips’ Hull

      February 18, 2021

      Review

      Review: Censorettes by Elizabeth Bales Frank

      February 4, 2021

      Review

      Review: Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino by Julián Herbert

      February 1, 2021

      Collaborative Review

      Attention to the Real: A Conversation

      September 3, 2020

      Collaborative Review

      A Street Car Named Whatever

      February 22, 2016

      Collaborative Review

      Black Gum: A Conversational Review

      August 7, 2015

      Collaborative Review

      Lords of Waterdeep in Conversation

      February 25, 2015

      Video Review

      Entropy’s Super Mario Level

      September 15, 2015

      Video Review

      Flash Portraits of Link: Part 7 – In Weakness, Find Strength

      January 2, 2015

      Video Review

      Basal Ganglia by Matthew Revert

      March 31, 2014

      Video Review

      The Desert Places by Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss, Illustrated by Matt Kish

      March 21, 2014

  • Small Press
    • Small Press

      OOMPH! Press

      February 24, 2021

      Small Press

      Dynamo Verlag

      February 17, 2021

      Small Press

      Abalone Mountain Press

      February 3, 2021

      Small Press

      Gordon Hill Press

      December 8, 2020

      Small Press

      Evidence House

      November 24, 2020

  • Where to Submit
  • More
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Games
      • All Board Games Video Games
        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Creative Nonfiction / Essay

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Victoriana and Optimism

        December 14, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: Lady of the West

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Session Report: Paperback and Anomia

        July 27, 2019

        Board Games

        Ludic Writing: The Real Leeds Part 12 (Once in a Lifetime)

        November 10, 2018

        Video Games

        HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC

        February 12, 2021

        Video Games

        How Zelda Saved Me: The Inspiration, Feminism, and Empowerment of Hyrule

        November 2, 2020

        Video Games

        Best of 2019: Video Games

        December 13, 2019

        Video Games

        Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is the Spirit of Generosity

        December 31, 2018

    • Food
    • Small Press Releases
    • Film
    • Music
    • Paranormal
    • Travel
    • Art
    • Graphic Novels
    • Comics
    • Current Events
    • Astrology
    • Random
  • RESOURCES
  • The Accomplices
    • THE ACCOMPLICES
    • Enclave
    • Trumpwatch
Review

Don’t Forget To Walk*: San Francisco After Franz Hessel’s “Walking in Berlin”

written by Patrick James Dunagan July 27, 2018

Walking in Berlin: A Flaneur in the Capital by Franz Hessel
The MIT Press, 2017
304 pages / MIT

 

la forme d’une ville / Change plus vite, hélas ! que le coeur d’un mortel

–Charles Baudelaire

 

Berlin, Paris, San Francisco, Barcelona, Istanbul… great cities of the world entreat walking. San Francisco however is perhaps the only city so contained by water to be conceivably walkable in a single day. Of course to properly walk any city is not to get from Point A to Point B. It is to discover your surroundings anew. Interpreting how the action comes across—whatever the business of the day-to-day this set of trees is up to in the corner of some park, or how that shrill sounding group of pesky birds goes about bombing passersby—intersects with and expands upon one’s own affairs. It is to further understand one’s own place in a particular time alongside so many others going about their daily lives. To learn bits of what happens in the buildings and on the streets of the city every day along with possessing an appreciation for what has happened in the distant and not so distant past. Franz Hessel’s Walking in Berlin reassures that you’re keeping good company pursuing such activity.

City walking and observing—epitomized by Baudelaire’s “Flaneur” (as the poet found him in Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd”) directly named in Hessel’s title—does come with its own bit of paranoia. As Hessel notes in his opening chapter “The Suspect”: “I attract wary glances whenever I try to play the flaneur among the industrious; I believe they take me for a pickpocket.” And yet “Walking slowly down bustling streets is a particular pleasure. Awash in the haste of others, it’s a dip in the surf.” There’s certainly nothing quite like it. Coming after Hessel’s encouraging nod I’ve always found plenty to reflect upon with my own city strolling over the years.

When I first came to San Francisco in 1997 to attend the Poetics program at New College of California on Valencia street the city was on the verge of what’s now recognized as having been the dot com bubble followed later by the current boom. Yet while there was change happening in town at the time things felt downright homey compared to now. Much of Valencia street, including all of the old New College buildings themselves, have been turned over to boutique shops and restaurants. There’s a massive chocolate shop that was packed last Saturday night on the site, or anyway quite near to, what once was a mechanics garage. A red ledge out front beneath a window was where smokers used to sit and I remember managing to grind across on a few impromptu skate sessions between classes and readings. Where a straying would-be anarchist keyed a car yelling out at the pained and bewildered mechanic the rather antedated “go home yuppies!”

The city transitions ever faster. New condos are everywhere on Valencia, it has the feel of a little west coast Brooklyn—or what’s worse: the next Marina district, i.e. white rich frat types; or wait, isn’t that what Western Addition’s Divisadero street is now? Small Press Traffic was housed at New College back then. The then director Dodie Bellamy joined in with Poetics faculty to address incoming students on orientation day. There were regular readings on both sides of Valencia between 18th and 19th, often in the theatre that is now known as The Chapel where Peter Brötzmann has rather frequently played an annual gig of late. Valencia, no less than Divisadero, in its current manifestation really trips me out, like they say. I just have that “what in hell happened here” feeling every time I step out. As Walter Benjamin paraphrases a favorite French poet-daddy: “Baudelaire spoke cruel words for the city, which changes faster than the human heart.” It sure does!

And Benjamin would know, being a flanuer among flaneurs; the ultimate streetwalking small-time philosopher, he was a pal of Hessel’s and reviewed Walking In Berlin when it first appeared in 1929. Benjamin’s review is reproduced in this first English edition. Which comes at a good time for those who live in this thing called the city that is in such an ongoing state of change, for as Benjamin remarks “Hessel’s book is full of consoling forms of valediction for its inhabitants.” Not to say it’s bon voyage for the rest of us! But rather that while the streets will indeed undergo alteration right under our feet, we might still walk them in our way, taking it all in stumbling stride.

Even if, as Hessel remarks on the Alexanderplatz in the east of Berlin, “it will have disappeared by the time these lines are printed. The trams, buses, and crowds of people must already bypass the fenced construction sites and deep lacerations in the earth.” Those of us who get out and about, digging the scene, have access, as we always have, to the pounding vitality of life flowing all around. That streaming throng of humanity trafficking by foot, bike, car, and train—Hessel includes car trips (you can’t walk all of huge metropolis Berlin, even in the 1920s). So round San Francisco, Hessel’s work encourages trips down to San Mateo on Caltrain or hitting up those new tunnels on a drive down Highway 1 to Half Moon Bay. Most important of all, his work reminds us that writing requires not only living with(in) the wider world surrounding but likewise continually informing ourselves afresh of new discoveries regarding it.

Hessel’s narrative carves its own path—including nifty historical snippets along with trends current in his own time, surveying a broad cross section of buildings, parks, and businesses from nearly every territory of Berlin’s colossus zones. The mixture of the contemporary with the historical presents an eye-opening take on a multi-leveled reading of walking city streets. As when he references writing by the previous generation’s Jules Laforgue while reflecting upon strolling across the Schinkelplatz:

Laforgue superbly describes the military appearance and essence of this square, and of the street Unter den Linden, and all of Berlin in the 1880s. Once he froze in a moment de torpeur involontaire as in a dream, on the corner of Lindenstraße and Friedrichstraße. All he could hear was the sound of which dominated the street: that of a dragging saber. This era—when the military greeting was common practice for every rank with the exception of the dregs, and even the little cadets greeted each other stiffly on Unter den Linden—has since then come to a close.

To be this aware of a previous “era” of a place come and gone is to fully inhabit the space in the moment of one’s own experience. It is to merge with the physical locale itself, observing the accrued measure of events across many years, discerning the stains of archival lore passed on via the accumulated vestiges of time.

Little surprise then that Benjamin wagers Hessel’s book might best be seen as “…an inventory, an Egyptian dream book for the waking.” I myself find that it is most definitely a book for that dedicated streetwalker who, as Benjamin writes, “looks for other allures in [our] city than those promised by the neon signs,” whether the signs be that purple lyft in the front windows of oncoming cars or the Twitter label running down the side of the corporate headquarters building. The most recent attempt at renovating the middle stretch of San Francisco’s iconic Market St. Hessel pushes us one step further into the future moment that is happening now in the present, without disinheriting past enrichments which have led the way forward. We owe it to both ourselves and the city itself to bear witness at once to its past, its future, and its present. And, what’s more, to recognize our ongoing role interacting with features from each epoch.

 

* this writing, as well as Hessel’s book, is fully supportive of enabling all. “Walking” takes many forms and none should feel excluded. I regularly “walk” when riding muni (city transportation) due to swelling from gout flare-ups myself.

Don’t Forget To Walk*: San Francisco After Franz Hessel’s “Walking in Berlin” was last modified: July 21st, 2018 by Patrick James Dunagan
BaudelaireBenjaminBerlinFlaneursan franciscourban lifewalking
0 comment
0
Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Avatar
Patrick James Dunagan

Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works at Gleeson Library for the University of San Francisco. His recent books include: from Book of Kings (Bird and Beckett Books), Drops of Rain / Drops of Wine (Spuyten Duyvil) and The Duncan Era: One Reader's Cosmology (Spuyten Duyvil).

previous post
The Fools, The Naïve, The Betrayed, The Open Hearted, The Desperate, The Hungry: A Letter to Those Who Knew Anna March,
next post
Here Are the Albums I Listened to This Week (7/27/18)

You may also like

Review: The Courage of Hopelessness: A Year of Acting Dangerously by Slavoj Zizek

June 7, 2018

30 Years of Ghibli: The Cat Returns

April 2, 2015

A Look Back: Heartbeats, Xavier Dolan

April 20, 2017

Short Film of the Week: Invention of Love by Andrey Shushkov

August 30, 2014
Facebook Twitter Instagram

Recent Comments

  • furiousvexation Loved this. Killer first line and such a painted picture. Bravo!

    The Birds: a poem ·  February 17, 2021

  • Deidra Brown Wonderful, moving work!

    The Birds: a poem ·  February 15, 2021

  • Ceres Growing up in a rural area, I've observed first-hand the disparate outlooks between urban children with environmentalist parents and children raised in the country. Modern agricultural practices...

    HOW VIDEO GAMES MADE ME BIOPHILIC ·  February 13, 2021

Featured Columns & Series

  • The Birds
  • Dinnerview
  • WOVEN
  • Variations on a Theme
  • BLACKCACKLE
  • Literacy Narrative
  • COVID-19
  • Mini-Syllabus
  • Their Days Are Numbered
  • On Weather
  • Disarticulations
  • The Waters
  • Session Report series
  • Birdwolf
  • Comics I've Been Geeking Out On
  • Small Press Releases
  • Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like)
  • The Poetics of Spaces
  • Tales From the End of the Bus Line
  • Fog or a Cloud
  • 30 Years of Ghibli
  • Cooking Origin Stories
  • YOU MAKE ME FEEL
  • Ludic Writing
  • Best of 2019
  • The Talking Cure
  • Food and Covid-19
  • Stars to Stories
  • DRAGONS ARE REAL OR THEY ARE DEAD
  • Foster Care
  • LEAKY CULTURE
  • Jem and the Holographic Feminisms
  • D&D with Entropy

Find Us On Facebook

Entropy
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

©2014-2021 The Accomplices LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Read our updated Privacy Policy.


Back To Top