the words weren't mine

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”. read more

IMAGE: Agnès Varda