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Flâneurs in Paris and Berlin
and regularity is his enemy. He is a hunter in search of the unexpected, the special,
the affective. For the flâneur the city is akin to what untamed nature was for the
Romantic soul: a place to wander and reflect. The flâneur approaches the city as if
it were a landscape. The flâneur goes “botanizing on the asphalt,” as Benjamin
quips. 13 The city is a hunting ground, risky and bizarre. Gas lamps and lampposts
appear as coconut palms, and the Arcade of Cairo, through its name and its
emporia, imports marketable foreignness into the city. There is no Romantic
sentimentality about lost nature. The city is more foreign and dangerous than the
colonies or wild nature, according to Charles Baudelaire’s morbid anthropology
of man as hunter:
What are the perils of jungle and prairie compared to the daily shocks and conflicts of
civilisation? Whether a man embraces his dupe on the boulevard, or spears his prey in
unknown forests, is he not eternal man – that is to say, the most highly perfected beast
of prey? 14
Primitivity is spied at the heart of civilisation: the urban scene as landscape. But
Walter Benjamin is keen to pinpoint the dialectical flipside of the city as wild plain,
identifying in nineteenth-century accounts of Parisian life reference to the street
as interior, where glossy enameled shop signs function as wall decoration,
newspaper stands as libraries, mailboxes as bronze busts, café terraces as balconies
and the sections of the railway tracks where rail workers hang up their jackets as
vestibules. 15 This is an exploded interior, for it is not an isolated shelter for
privatized domestic bliss. The flâneur is the tenant most at home in this city as
house, a world turned inside-out, where privacy is sneered at in favor of the life in
the mêlée:
The street becomes a dwelling for the flâneur; he is as much at home among the façades
of houses as a citizen is in his four walls. To him the shiny, enamelled signs of businesses
are at least as good a wall ornament as an oil painting is to the bourgeois in his salon.
The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his
libraries and the terraces of cafés are the balconies from which he looks down on his
household after his work is done. 16
To the flâneur, the city, its arcades and streets, formed a vast world in miniature,
through which the flâneur could wander unaccosted: Walter Benjamin labeled the
spatial sensation “now landscape, now a room.” 17 The coming of the department
store provided another version of this doubled scale, being both a space that
seemingly contains the whole world, an endlessly roamable landscape, varied as
the jungle, and yet, at the same time, comprised of rooms, with intimate, domestic
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