feuilleton and psychogeography

 

I came across a fascinating reference in Michael Bienert’s Die eingebildete Metrople – a study of Berlin the the feuilleton of the Weimar Republic – which led me to the Berlin Tageblatt for January 1, 1929. The editor, in a little burst of genius, had the newspaper pay eight writers to take rides on different routes of different buses going through Berlin from Potsdamer Platz to the Halensee neighborhood in Charlottenberg. The headline was “a relay race of writers”: in affect, these writers were to jot down their impressions, in whatever style and whatever way they wanted to. To use a term invented in the 1950s, they were given the task of writing short psychogeographies.

The eight writers were Alfred Doeblin, Alfred Polgar, Oskar Loerke, Arnolt Bronnen, Walter Mering, Walter von Mole, Alice Berend, and Arnold Zweig.

I can imagine some paper, say the Brooklyn Rail, doing the same kind of thing in present day New York. It would be cool.

Walter von Mole was a liberal writer whose sad fate was to have defended Jews in Weimar Germany against Nazis, to have tried to surrender after Hitler’s accession to power, and to be practically destituted by the Nazis in spite of this. His heart was not in pledging loyalty to Hitler, and the brownshirts could smell that. But in 1929, he was a big bestselling author. The little piece he wrote about Potsdamer Platz was a dialogue between a man and a woman who were going to see divorce lawyers, and exchanging spicy barbs about their mutually unsatisfactory sex lives on the way. It is a perfect little piece of mock eavesdropping, which ends at Potsdamer Bridge, where they get off. In the brief argument one gets a sort of precis of the post-war German breakup of sexual and family assumptions. This is the Berlin of decadence, Berlin Babylon, but in a minor key. Doeblin, of course, writes about Alexanderplatz. There are observations about the passing stores, monuments, and prices of goods. But the trip is also about the way the bus shakes, and its big engine – a Maybach engine. The voice is all about such things, the machines that make up the modern metro.

The only woman – Alice Berend – is given Tauenzienstrasse. As Mel Gordon, whose Feral House classic Voluptuous Panic is all about erotic Berlin, “TAUENTZIENGIRLS [were] Bubikopfed streetwalkers in the latest fashions (sometimes in mother-and-daughter teams), who silently solicited customers on Tauentzienstrasse, south of the Memorial Church.” Berend was a figure in the expressionist avant -garde, and a fairly well known novelist. One of her novels was a roman a clef about Carl Schmitt, who she knew in Munich, and who apparently filled her in with the sexual details of his relationship with his wife (Schmitt was the kind of guy who toted up his ejaculations in  his diary – for what that is worth). Her account is of the usual Berlin miseries, the socially come down, the former piano teachers selling postcards, etc., but no hint of Tauentziengirls, unless this is a distant reference: “Women in furs, with red lips, all young, however old they might be…”

Bienert’s thesis is that the feuilleton was an essential part of the metropole. His book is full of fascinating facts. Did you know, Frankfurt School groupies, that Kracauer’s paper, the Frankfurter Zeitung, was financed by I.G. Farben? We ponder the cracks and gaps in which the left intelligentsia had its say. We wonder: is this all going to be horribly relevant?