Weimar Berlin: Cultural Critique Flashcards
Roth - “Going for a Walk”
What impressions do you get of Roth as a “flaneur”
Flaneur as a privileged role.
Observing what others don’t see
Condescending
What does he see?
Absurdity and triviality
Supposedly important things are trivial
Trivial things are important
The horse and the child in the beginning
The girl trapped in the window
The horse and the child in the beginning
Romantic ideas, Rousseau
Reminders of the outside world and time beyond that of the modern city
The child as perfection, as more/most natural
Development is not progress, perverted through the process of growing up and perhaps growing up in the city
The girl trapped in the window
The city as a prison
Forces people into structures that are not natural
The horse and the cab
The child hitched to inevitable adulthood
Pressed into the shadows
The structures of the city act as violent oppressors of the people of the city
He’s clearly very poor, poverty is represented
The grease spot
Critical of the rich
Not a big fan of capitalism
Immediate contrast with the poor guy collecting paper
He’s the antagonist
Something that he wants to remove
Everything would be put back in its natural order without
Themes “Going for a Walk”
The city as a prison
Class differences
Nature vs. city life
Media
Advertisements
Nature - the idea of nature
Critique of mankind and civilization and progress
Media
Newspapers
Reduces them to entertainment
They’re all talking about individuals
Without fact or value
Not reality, so I’m going for a walk
Adverts
The cigarettes
The image of products
Ubiquitous
Telling us something about a world that doesn’t exist
Telling us to perceive something
Telling us to do or buy something
“Nothing is, everything claims to be”
Objects win their reality through claims, adverts, ect…
Adverts tell us what to make of things
But really it is fake
There is nothing genuine
Creating narratives
Critique of the system which creates a specific kind of meaning and governs our perceptions
Nature
It’s just another consumer good
It’s a tool, it’s something to take advantage of
Nature is degraded
It’s a recreation of what humanity declares nature should be
People just seeing a reproduction
Nature serves us
- Like the horse that draws the cab
It no longer exists for its own sake
We’re exploiting it
Even in an aesthetic sense
The Berlin Pleasure Industry
Hessel vs. Roth
Hessel stays with the upper class joints
- Describes the titillating, guide-book worthy places
- Places for people that have money and want to experience an exciting, standardized nightlife
Roth visits all the different locals of all the different social classes
- Highest to lowest
Hessel’s enjoyment of life vs. Roth’s lack of pleasure, everything is mechanical
The Berlin Pleasure Industry
It’s the systematized manufacturing of pleasure
Mechanization
Dehumanization
- People as facsimiles, production line product
People become products
Imitation of life
The clubs are fabricated and the people who go to these clubs are fabricated
The money side
- It caters to all of social classes
Monotony of international nightlife
Nostalgia
people become products, mechanized
Musicians = marionettes
Couples who get up simultaneously
People behave like puppets
Uncanny image
The mechanized smiles
Commercializations of women’s bodies
“Willingness to be bought”
monotony of international nightlife
It is the same wherever you go
Same drinks, cocktails, women, music, food, ect..
Early critique of globalization
Completely different from Hessel’s view where he’s all stoked that Berlin isn’t so provincial and is cool like Paris now (the aperitifs)
Nostalgia
Looking for something but he can’t find it
Tries to find authenticity somewhere but not capable of finding it in the city
