In 1929, Franz Hessel published Spazieren in Berlin — a book Walter Benjamin called “a memorization while strolling,” praising its steps as creating “an astonishing resonance in the asphalt he walks over.” It was a great year for German publishing, and a catastrophic one for Germany. Paul Sullivan’s essay reads Hessel’s Berlin against what his Berlin left out.

The year Hessel’s book appeared:

  • The Wall Street Crash hit Germany harder than almost anyone, as recalled US loans collapsed into mass bankruptcy and unemployment lines
  • In May, a police crackdown on illegal Communist demonstrations became Blutmai — more than thirty civilians killed, over two hundred injured
  • Weeks later the Young Plan settled war reparations, feeding resentment that the National Socialists harvested
  • Hessel shared the year’s shelf with Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, and Tucholsky’s Deutschland, Deutschland über alles

Almost none of that reaches the page. What reaches the page instead is gorgeous: mannequins in shop windows, an esoteric whale exhibition on a barge, “cement sacks shimmer[ing] springtime green on the autumn street,” and Berlin treated as a Proustian madeleine that unlocks the author’s own childhood. The chapter list reads like a guidebook and veers off like a memoir — “I Learn a Thing or Two,” “Lust For Life,” “The Animal Palaces.”

The blind spots are the essay’s real subject. Hessel praises Neukölln’s new social housing estate as “the most important thing happening to Berlin now” and then sniffs that there’s “really no reason to visit Neukölln for its own sake.” He walks past the Jewish Quarter as a world “about to be wiped from the face of the earth” without alarm, notes a Nazi rally long enough to shrug it off, and describes “wild peoples” displayed among the animals at Berlin Zoo as a tourist attraction with no comment at all — a gap his translator has to flag in a footnote.

Hessel’s own rule gives him away: “To correctly play the flâneur, you can’t have anything too particular in mind.” Sullivan is fair about the tradition — Baudelaire’s dandy was politically erratic, Benjamin’s observer stays passive, and it took Debord’s Situationists to show the figure could be turned toward engagement. But the counterweight to all that street-level observation is Rosa Luxemburg’s line, quoted here as a verdict: “the most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.”

Hessel was banned from publishing in 1933, kept translating for Rowohlt until 1938, fled to France in 1940, and died in 1941 a few months after Benjamin. His son Stéphane went the other way entirely — Resistance, Buchenwald, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and finally Indignez-vous!, a book-length attack on indifference published when he was ninety-three.