Yes, I live in Berlin. I know because you seem to have one-track minds when it comes to my adopted home. My favorite of them , by Robert F. But can I write about the other Berlin without coming across as a total prude? I do sometimes like to think that I draw on the cloud of cool attributed to Berlin simply by living here. But let me try it anyway, because I object to the city I call home being reduced to a one-dimensional pleasure dome.
But there is a cure for this distorted image of Berlin. If we look at the art and writing that emerged from the Weimar period, rather than these retro-narratives, we get a far broader picture.
Many Berliners wanted to forget their daily grind, and from the beginning of the 20th century, they found opportunities to do so in countless bars, beer gardens on the edges of town, dancehalls, music halls, variety theaters, and gloriously over-the-top cinemas.
But after a policeman, the first people we see are early-morning revelers, swaying home with tired balloons in tow. There is beer and champagne drinking, boxing and gambling. But there is also a boy begging, men mending tram tracks and before this long evening section, we have seen a great deal of hard work going on. The Berliners have been scolded as addicted to distraction; the accusation is petit-bourgeois. Certainly the demand for distraction is greater here than in the provinces, but also greater and more tangible is the tension of the working massesβan essential formal tension, which occupies the day without filling it.
Kracauer is hard to read; his dense early essays from the s and 30s tend to make my head swim. They are fiercely intellectual but also seem to change their basic premises as he reacts to new theories he has come across. Only a year later, however, craving distraction is fine by him.
