Writing the Asphalt Jungle: Berlin and the Performance of Classical Modernity 1900–33

In this paper I explore the textual performance of Berlin in the early 20th century, focusing on the multiple spaces of classical German modernity (1900–33) as they are described and reinvented within the poetics of a rapidly modernizing metropolis. It is argued that writing Berlin cannot offer a unifying text or conceptual system which arranges the city ipso facto into a single territory, a generalise space of selected indices and icons. Alternatively, the writing of the city explores the ongoing transformation of the city in text. My purpose in this paper is, therefore, irrefutably bound up with the capacity of the urban text to remap imaginatively the changing condition of the city onto the text itself—hence the fashioning of textual presences as surrogate city spaces. The notion of performance is furthermore deployed to account for the immediacy and evanescence characterizing the Berlin of classical modernity, a period that rehearsed the contradictions of modernization in accelerated form. From journalistic reportage to novels, the textual performance of Berlin necessitates an enabling reception and adaptation to the destabilizing nature of urban industrial modernity, which in turn can be plotted in two interrelated ways: first, in the proliferation of textual strategies which approximate the montage effect of the incipient modernization of the city; second, in the writerly anticipation of cinematic innovations as the scripting of a ‘moving’ urban culture of modernity. Taken together, these writings inhabit traveling geographies which provide models of performative identification for appropriating and embracing the complexity of the modern city.