Berlin in the Twentieth Century: A Cultural Topography

Webber, Andrew J. Berlin in the Twentieth Century: Cultural Topography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. 322 pp. $99.00 hardcover. The spatial or topographical turn in cultural studies has produced a number of investigations of Berlin's urban landscape. From Brian Ladd's The Ghosts of Berlin (1997) to Karen E. Till's The New Berlin (2005), scholars have charted the course of German history in the city's streets, architecture, and memorials. Other texts, such as Katharina Gerstenberger's Writing the New Berlin (2008), have focused on the ways that current works of fiction reflect the (re)construction and upheaval evident in the shifting landscape of the city. Andrew J. Webber's Berlin in the Twentieth Century (aptly subtitled A Cultural Topography) combines these two approaches. Less interested in the historic and architectural changes Berlin has experienced since 1900, Webber is concerned with the landmarks and spatial tropes that recur in the Berlin imaginary, as captured in literature and film of the long 20th century. Drawing on diverse authors and filmmakers, Webber focuses his investigation on epistemic topoi, spatial figures that also stand as models of how the city is thought or known (16), such as interiors, exteriors, and the gateways between them; surfaces; holes and the subterranean; the Wall; rubble and construction sites; fringe or subcultural spaces (278); theHof(both in the sense of court and courtyard); and streets and paths traveled (often at a run). The chapters are organized according to topographic and temporal shifts: thresholds and boundaries, inhabitations and accommodations, movements and stills, alterations and reconstructions, divisions and falls, and openings and closures. Webber also discusses a number of themes that are less spatially based but recurring Berlin images: the Berliner Luft, Berlin asa city built on sand, and having a suitcase in Berlin. Clearly ambitious in its aims, Berlin in the Twentieth Century succeeds in its impressive depth of analysis - impressive especially in light of the vast scope of this project. Webber relies on Walter Benjamin for the theoretical grounding of the book, as he considers Benjamin perhaps the most influential figure in discourses of urban space and culture in the twentieth century (50), and Webber thus models his book's structure on that of Benjamin's Passagen-Werk (Arcades Project) as another spatio-temporal exercise (55). …