1929 was a consequential year for Germany. For one, it was the year of the Wall Street Crash; as the US recalled its loans, Germany became one of the worst-hit victims, plunging head-first into the Great Depression. Thousands of businesses declared bankruptcy and millions found themselves joining the unemployment lines.

Political trouble had also been brewing in the capital for much of that year. In May, illegal demonstrations held by the German Communist Party resulted in what became known as Blutmai (Bloody May) with over thirty civilians killed following a police crackdown, and more than two hundred injured. A few weeks later, the Young Plan for settling Germany’s World War I reparations was agreed; this became yet another source of public resentment against the wavering Weimar Republic, playing — like much of the era’s political turbulence — into the hands of the National Socialists.

Barely a trace of these events are to be found in Franz Hessel’s cult book Spazieren in Berlin (Walking in Berlin), which was also released in 1929 — a great year for German publishing, incidentally, what with Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Remarque’s All Quiet On the Western Front, Tucholsky’s Deutschland, Deutschland über alles and Piscator’s Das politische Theater joining the usual (for the time) stream of articles, feuilletons, and reviews emerging from Berlin by critics and intellectuals such as Joseph Roth, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin.

Indeed, Hessel’s book was preceded by a glowing review from Benjamin entitled “The Return of the Flâneur”.¹ Benjamin was by then already good friends with Hessel, who at that point was working as an editor at Rowohlt Verlag, publisher of Benjamin’s One-Way Street and Origin of the German Trauerspiel (both 1928). It was Hessel who introduced Benjamin to Paris and the pair worked together on a translation of some of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. Benjamin, in turn, connected Hessel with the likes of Ernst Bloch, Ernst Schoen, and Kracauer. In his review, Benjamin claimed Hessel’s book had done more than any other to re-introduce Baudelaire’s concept of the flâneur into Weimar society; he would later draw on Hessel’s approach for his own (posthumously published) works, Berlin Childhood around 1900 and The Arcades Project.

Hessel was born, like Benjamin, into a wealthy Jewish family, in Stettin (now Polish Szczecin). The Hessel family were well-assimilated — young Franz was baptised a Protestant — and they moved to Berlin in 1888 when Hessel was still a young child. He graduated from high school in 1899 and wound up studying law and then Oriental Studies in Munich, finishing neither. When his father died in 1900, he inherited a considerable amount of money, which afforded him the financial freedom to write poetry, novellas, and novels; his Der Kramladen des Glücks (The Junk Shop of Happiness, 1913) fictionalised the bohemian lifestyle he had established (and partly paid for) with friends such as Karl Wolfskehl and Stefan George (both poets) and cultural powerhouse Franziska zu Reventlow. A photo from around 1910 shows Hessel looking very much the bourgeois bohème: well-dressed and handsome, a cigarette dangling with Camus-esque casualness from sensuous lips.

In 1906, he embarked on a debut trip to Paris where he hung out at the Café du Dôme and met artistic celebrities such as Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso as well as the art dealer Henri-Pierre Roché. It was with Roché that he would later enter into a ménage a trois with a young painter named Helen Grund — a love triangle that formed the basis of Roché’s novel Jules et Jim (1953) and was later turned into an eponymous film by François Truffaut in which Jules, based on Hessel, was played by Oskar Werner. When Hessel met Grund, a Berliner who had studied under Käthe Kollwitz, he allegedly told her: “You have eyes like middle-aged Goethe.”² They married in 1913.

Their first son, Ulrich, was born in 1914; their second, Stéphane, three years later. By this time, they had moved back to Berlin but were also spending time in Switzerland and eventually moved to Munich. In the early 1920s, the relationship was breaking down and the hyperinflation at the start of that decade meant that Hessel’s funds were quickly becoming worthless. Hessel returned to Berlin in 1927 and took on work with Rowohlt as a reader, editor, and translator.

Alongside overseeing the publication (and part of the translation) of Balzac’s La Comédie humaine, Hessel translated the Memoirs of Casanova as well as works by Stendhal, Baudelaire, Julien Green, and others. He found time to edit a literary journal (Vers und Prosa), write reviews of books by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, André Gide, and John Dos Passos, and churn out portraits of celebrities such as Marlene Dietrich and Elisabeth Bergner.

But the two works he is known for now, at least in Germany, are a short novel titled Heimliches Berlin (Secret Berlin), which was published in 1927 and remains untranslated in English; and the more well-known, yet still fairly niche, Spazieren in Berlin. The latter’s popularity is thanks, in part, to Benjamin’s review, which frothed: “A thoroughly epic book . . . a memorization while strolling, a book for which memory was not the source but the muse. . . . His steps create an astonishing resonance in the asphalt he walks over. . . . The city as a mnemonic device for the lonely walker, it evokes more than his childhood and youth, more than his own history.”³

It’s difficult to argue with the thrust of this analysis: Spazieren in Berlin is not merely an enjoyable and erudite romp through the capital but an astute and ambitious journey through layers of personal and local history. Glancing over the chapter headings — “The North”, “The Southwest”, “Kreuzberg”, “Friedrichstadt”, “Hasenheide” — you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re about to read a conventional guidebook. But other sections offer intriguing titles such as “I Learn a Thing or Two”, “Lust For Life”, “A Bit of Work”, and “The Animal Palaces”, while the opening chapter (“The Suspect”) sets a decidedly unusual tone. The author declares his love of strolling and then complains about the suspicious nature of the locals as he walks around gazing at “firm, big-city girls”, staring intently into the windows of general stores, and loitering in tenement courtyards.

And then we’re away, hanging onto Herr Hessel’s coat-tails as he rushes breathlessly around, visiting factories, offices, and theatres, ducking into restaurants and bookshops, and detouring into markets and fashion boutiques all over the city. We get sketches of locals from time to time — “the hunched gent there at the circular saw, who grimaces imperiously each time the blade tears into the wood under his hand”; a woman “with an enormous hairstyle from the previous century”; a man on the street hawking photos of nude women.⁴ We also get oodles of fascinating detail, often lyrically composed, that would never make it into a conventional guidebook: construction sites where “cement sacks shimmer springtime green on the autumn street”, lingering depictions of mannequins in shop windows, an esoteric exhibition about whales located inside a barge on the Spree.⁵

Part of the thrill for contemporary readers is recognising places that still exist today. These include the Landwehr Canal, Tempelhof airport, Viktoriapark, the Invalidenstrasse war cemetery, Ullstein House. . . But we also experience that peculiar sense of nostalgia known as anemoia for all the long-gone places that we have never known: the beer and coffee gardens in Hasenheide, Cafe Vaterland, Tiergarten’s Siegesallee, Monbijou Palace, Luna Park, The Scala and The Eldorado, Schinkel’s Bauakademie, the Hallesches Tor gasworks, the Bolle dairy, Kreuzberg’s Tivoli. . . For Hessel, Berlin serves as a juicy Proustian madeleine and allows him to excavate his own childhood as he leads us through the city, remembering “palatial staircases where one climbed steeply to a mezzanine level with imitation marble and ostentatious stained glass” as well as “sweet dawns and dusks over the [Landwehr] canal’s spring and autumn foliage.”⁶

Not content using Berlin as a personal aide-mémoire, Hessel dives in deeper still. In “I Learn a Thing or Two”, after being driven around by a local architect to explore future building plans for Potsdamer Platz, Alexanderplatz, and parts of West Berlin, we are suddenly — with no explanation or notice — inside the home of a well-heeled elderly lady, examining and admiring her keepsakes and curiosities (dolls, plates, agate tobacco tins, grand pianos, candlesticks) that transport us to a time beyond Hessel’s existence. He then browses one of his host’s books, Felix Eberty’s Jugenderinnerungen Eines Alten Berliners (Childhood Memories of an Old Berliner, 1878), creating yet another time portal within the past-within-a-past that we’re already in.

He also draws on folktales and historical anecdotes to carry us back farther than his memory can take him — back to the city’s fourteenth-century public baths, for example, to the white and black monks, and to stories like one featuring a man who nailed a winning lottery ticket to his front door and was then forced to carry the entire door through the city to claim his prize. He recounts how King Friedrich Wilhelm I, while showing off his new execution gallows to a visiting Peter the Great, indignantly refused the latter’s excitable suggestion to try them out on a random Prussian soldier — or on one of his own men.

It’s curious, for a book purportedly about walking, how much Hessel enjoys whizzing around the city in fast cars and on public transport. During the book’s centrepiece, a longer section called “The Tour”, he hops on a tourist bus to take in some main sights (Potsdamer Platz, Gendarmenmarkt, Schlossplatz, Museum Island), supplementing the journey with his own insider insights. His apparently limitless enthusiasm for bridges, sculptures, and architectural ornamentation — arabesques, catyrids, cherubs, and atlantids — can become cloying, but his disdain for stuffy Wilhelminian-era buildings offers some amusing moments: after huffily refusing to enter the Berliner Dom on the basis that it “offends every religious and humanistic sentiment with its sheer quantity, materiality and poorly applied erudition”, he expresses distracted, child-like delight at the appearance of an ice cream vendor.⁷

Hessel’s love of all things Parisian and glamorous — he enjoyed fast cars and lobster lunches, which could also be found in Berlin — becomes quickly obvious in the book, though he does exhibit a wide-eyed curiosity for the city’s edgier side too. Hessel takes us briefly inside The Eldorado, famed for its risqué cabaret, ballrooms with table telephones set-up for flirting, and 24-hour restaurants where the drinking can continue through the night; he also doesn’t shy away from describing outdoor sex workers purchasing linen undergarments to keep warm. In one disturbing scene, a woman is punched to the ground by a man in public and nobody (including the author) dares or bothers to intervene. And in another, an unemployed youth leads Hessel to an underground dancing area beneath Alexanderplatz and we get a sense of the murky Berlin underworld so brilliantly depicted by Döblin and Ernst Hafner.

But there are some curious omissions. For someone supposedly in thrall to modernity, it’s striking how Hessel gives repeated space to painters like Adolph von Menzel, Max Liebermann, and Lesser Ury, but, despite mentioning artist hangout Cafe Josty, ignores the subversive artistic revolutions that turned the city’s cultural life upside down throughout the early twentieth century: readers will search in vain for Grosz, Dix, Brecht, Höch, Lang, Berber, and Boldt, or mentions of Dada, New Objectivity, Epic Theatre, or even Expressionism.

Hessel’s distaste for real poverty is also keenly evident. For all his attempts to be open-minded and visually “democratic”, he cannot help but bring some of his aristocratic baggage along with him. While he praises Neukölln’s new “horseshoe estate” — part of the social housing movement led by urban planning chief Martin Wagner — as “the most important thing happening to Berlin now”, he shows snobby disdain for the shadowy tenements and crowded courtyards in the same district, as well as other working-class areas such as Wedding and Tegel.⁸ “There’s really no reason to visit Neukölln for its own sake”, he sniffs. “I’ve always just ridden the tram through [it] to get elsewhere”.⁹ In Köpenick, he complains about how “you have to walk through the typical tedium of dismal housing blocks”.¹⁰ Schöneberg makes him “extraordinarily sad”.¹¹

The political issues permeating, if not dominating, the city are barely present, though there are some light traces. National Socialists make a brief appearance during a visit to Schöneberg’s Sportpalast before being shrugged off. The brutal murder of Rosa Luxemburg is treated sympathetically — “They threw the dying body of a noble fighter into the water a few paces from here, a woman who had to atone for her goodness and bravery with her life” — and he recalls a Communist march where “grenades were flying through the air” during the Spartacus uprising.¹² Hessel also notes how Mitte’s Jewish Quarter (the Scheunenviertel) is “about to be wiped from the face of the earth” — by Weimar urban planners rather than Nazis at that point, but he was doubtless aware that the latter were not far behind.¹³

Less forgivable is how Hessel describes, but fails to comment on, the blatantly racist phenomenon of “wild peoples” (Somalis and Tripolitanians) living among the animals at Berlin Zoo as tourist attractions — an oversight that translator Amanda DeMarco is compelled to address in a footnote, later explaining in an interview how the author “just doesn’t draw certain political or social conclusions.”¹⁴ This raises an obvious question about whether the figure of the flâneur could or should be political. Baudelaire, who coined the term in his long poem Les Fleurs du Mal, was a peripatetic dandy who blew hot and cold politically but was writing during a relatively sedate time (Second Empire Paris). Benjamin’s version mixes in the Marxist concept of alienation but also remains passive — his disinterested browser is attracted to the strange and unknown but informed more by the cultural than the moral.

Some have argued that the concept of the flâneur actually predates Baudelaire, appearing in the works of Honoré de Balzac, Edgar Allan Poe, and Anäis Bazin, and perhaps even harks back to the heady political milieu of the French Revolution. Subsequent activists such as Guy Debord in 1960s Paris certainly demonstrated how the idea can be utilised to create political engagement. By all accounts, Hessel was generally oblivious to politics. In his own words: “To correctly play the flâneur, you can’t have anything too particular in mind”, which certainly suggests a deliberate attempt to remove politics from his worldview, or at least minimise them in an attempt at neutrality.¹⁵

There’s clearly something paradoxical about an author writing a book about seeing the city yet failing to report on what was happening right under his nose, but Hessel wasn’t alone. Despite many of the era’s finest walker-writers — those already mentioned, as well as Christopher Isherwood, who moved to “sad” Schöneberg in 1929 — expressing their (usually left-leaning) political views as they tried to capture the fast-changing climate, others stayed silently disappointed with the failed promises of socialism and the Weimar Republic, even if they detested the racist bombast of the Nazis. Döblin was one such — his Biberkopf was a “man between classes”, and even briefly wore a Swastika on his arm — while Billy Wilder’s Menschen Am Sonntag (People On Sunday) follows a group of youth through the summer of 1929 as they flirt, swim, and enjoy their young lives in the sunshine with nary a care for what’s happening around them. Not for them the Luxemburg mantra that “the most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening”.¹⁶

When the Nazis did come to power in 1933, Hessel was banned from working as an author due to his Jewish background. He continued to work as a translator for Rowohlt, however, right up until 1938, refusing to leave despite exhortations from his friends and family that he was in danger. He finally left for France in 1940, moving with his family to the Côte d’Azur. Shortly afterward, he was arrested and placed in Les Milles camp near Avignon with his son Ulrich. The pair were eventually released, perhaps because Franz was in ill health and fighting an infectious intestinal disease; he died shortly after from a stroke, on January 6, 1941 — just a few months after Benjamin committed suicide at the French-Spanish border.

Franz’s older son, Stéphane, joined the French resistance shortly after his father died. He was captured by the Gestapo in 1944 and deported to various camps, including Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora, where he was tortured by waterboarding and worked as a forced labourer. Having managed to evade execution by swapping identities with a dying prisoner, he then escaped from a rail transport en route to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Following the escape, Hessel was found by United States Army troops and returned to France. He went on to have a distinguished career, helping draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and becoming an influential voice for social justice and human rights — most notably in his 2010 book Time for Outrage! (Indignez-vous!) in which he railed loudly against the dangers of indifference. He did not, as far as we know, describe himself as a flâneur.