Anke Gleber,
The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature and Film in Weimar Culture.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
ISBN 0-691-00238-X
304pp.
US$19.95 (paper)
(Review copy supplied by Princeton University Press)

Uploaded 12 November 1999 | 905 words

The flaneur has been described as the quintessential figure of modernity, a figure linked to modernity’s changing modes of observation, subjectivity, spectatorship and literary production and illustrative of the urbanization, industrialization and technologization of the modern era. In particular, flanerie has been treated as a privileged site for examining visual culture in the early twentieth century and, although there is some confusion as to its limits, origins, evolution and epistemological foundations, flanerie has almost universally been recognized in recent years as a significant place to begin questioning our contemporary theoretical fascinations with spectatorship, the gaze and perception. While covering all of these areas, Anke Gleber’s The Art of Taking a Walk: Flanerie, Literature and Film in Weimar Culture enters into the discourse of flanerie in a directed fashion: her project is focused on an investigation of the flaneur in Weimar culture. As professional spectator, observer and recorder, the flaneur, Gleber argues, registers the excitement and innovation of Weimar modernity; he acts as a kind of barometer for measuring the impact of railroads, street lighting, photography, cinema and political and economic change. However, this is not the usual treatment of Weimar modernism; within this German focus, there is a secondary project that concentrates on bringing to light those Weimar figures less frequently discussed in relation to flanerie, like Irmgard Keun, Charlotte Wolff and the lesser known friend and contemporary of Walter Benjamin, Franz Hessel.

While Benjamin’s connections to flanerie are by now well-known and well-documented, Franz Hessel’s much more direct, if less theoretically developed, relationship to flanerie is often overlooked. Gleber addresses this neglect with approximately 40 pages, apportioned into three chapters, devoted to Hessel alone. The focus on Hessel is reflected in both the title, which is derived from Hessel’s The Difficult Art of Taking a Walk, and the structure of the book, which, apart from the sections on Hessel, gives very little attention to individual authors and figures. For Gleber, Hessel offers both a significant model for flanerie, based on a literary construct of “reading” the city, and an instructive case study. Through an examination of Hessel’s biography, essays, reviews and literary works, Gleber suggests that we can “trace a genealogy of the forms of perception that anticipate the conditions of flanerie,” (85) can engage “the stroll as the metatext of his writing” (110) and can recognize the ways in which his work can “extend the terrain of flanerie.” (109)

The attention to Hessel is framed by brief discussions of Benjamin and Kracauer and longer considerations of the history of flanerie, film and flanerie and the female flaneur. Throughout these sections Gleber tackles a massive amount of material with great knowledge, ease and seriousness. The book is wide-ranging in its scope and is impeccably documented with extensive footnotes and a useful bibliography (although one might like to see a greater number of more recent works on flanerie). There is a lot of terrain covered here and, as Gleber claims in the opening, her style often acquires an ambulatory form of presentation. This stroll offers an overview of the flaneur and the literature of flanerie and, most importantly perhaps, points the way towards new directions for future strolls.

However, this ambulatory style works better at some points than others and occasionally the reader wishes that Gleber would slow down her stroll to consider some of the details. There is a tendency to present information and material without sufficient theoretical or analytical discussion. The Hessel and Keun sections achieve this kind of analytical depth at some points but some of the other chapters tend to cover too much ground in too little time. For instance, although Gleber claims to be resituating Benjamin in a Weimar context of flanerie, there is little in depth discussion of his works and, while Kracauer receives more attention, there is not a great deal of analysis of his role in Weimar flanerie. Nor is there a great amount of attention to film, despite its being mentioned in the title. There are numerous references to the significance of film in Weimar culture, to the flaneur’s intimate connections to cinema (she calls the flaneur a human personification of the cinema at one point) and to the connection between cinema and the role of women in the public sphere. But aside from the brief analysis of Berlin, Symphony of a City (Germany, 1927) there is very little discussion of Weimar films, filmmakers or film culture. In fact, the references to film in the early portions of the text often feel forced (as do the references to Derrida, Virilio and Foucault) and, while the later discussion offers many significant insights, it seems underdeveloped and undertheorized.

As these comments might indicate, The Art of Taking a Walk is best when it is dealing with specific authors, like Hessel, Keun, Wolff, and it seems that primarily Gleber is interested in a literary model of flanerie, a model that evidently works given her excellent discussion of Hessel’s readerly and writerly flanerie. However frustrating the ambulatory journey across film, Benjamin and Kracauer might occasionally be, it still remains an extremely learned and extensive journey and, for that, a very generous one: Gleber points the way for future strolls by offering us a map of what is out there waiting for us to stop and ponder. In her own way, like Hessel, Gleber both illustrates and extends the terrain of flanerie and offers us her own kind of “Secret Berlin.”

Lisa Coulthard