ancient cities

70 Berlin, Germany
Writings on Film and Baudelaire
During the 1930s, the ill-fated Arcades Project
formed the sun that gave life to, and around which
circulated, a plethora of much shorter studies. Two
of these are of particular relevance for urban theory:
Benjamin’s famous 1935–1936 essay “The Work of
Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”
and his essays (1938–1940) on the nineteenth-century
Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire.
The “Work of Art” essay constitutes Benjamin’s
most sustained and coherent discussion of the new
medium of film, and as such, articulated most
explicitly an idea that finds more indistinct and
undeveloped expression in a number of Benjamin’s
writings: the “elective affinity” between film as the
quintessential new mass medium and the city as the
definitive modern environment. For Benjamin, film
was a privileged medium for capturing the flux and
dynamism of the cityscape, for penetrating deeply
into its obscure crevices, for illuminating its dark
and hidden secrets, and, above all, for bringing the
city’s own revolutionary energies and tendencies to
the point of critical tension and explosion.
Benjamin’s studies of Baudelaire emerged from,
and were intended to provide a model in miniature
of, the wider Arcades Project. For Benjamin,
Baudelaire was the first true poet of the modern
metropolis, a melancholy figure who sought to
give voice to the novel and traumatic urban experiences
of his time. Baudelaire demanded a new
aesthetic of the fleeting present, modernité, one
that insisted upon the representation of the contemporary
as the vital subject matter of the genuine
modern artist. His own poetry drew upon the
vernacular of Paris to evoke the shock encounter
with the milling urban crowd, the bohemian life of
the boulevards, the fate of the artwork turned
commodity, the destitution of the outcasts of the
city—heroic figures like flâneurs, prostitutes, ragpickers,
and, of course, poets. Of these, the figure
of the flâneur, the aloof and aimless stroller in the
city, and a self-image not only of Baudelaire but
also of Benjamin, has become a key motif for writers
and urban theorists today.
Indeed, Benjamin’s critical studies in metropolitan
experience and representation are now essential reading
for scholars and students of the modern city.
See also Arcade; Berlin, Germany; Paris, France
Graeme Gilloch
Further Readings
Benjamin, Walter. 1973. Charles Baudelaire. A Lyric
Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. London: Fontana.
———. 1985. One-way Street and Other Writings London:
Verso.
———. 1999. The Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Buck-Morss, Susan. 1989. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter
Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT
Press.
Frisby, David. 1988. Fragments of Modernity: Theories
of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer and
Benjamin. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Gilloch, Graeme. 1996. Myth and Metropolis: Walter
Benjamin and the City. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Be r l i n, Ge r M a n y
Berlin today is the “capital of memory.” Six different
political systems have left their imprints in
public spaces: the kingdom of Prussia from the
eighteenth century, the imperial German Reich
(1871–1918), the first democratic system (1918–
1933), the Nazi period (1933–1945), the communist
period in East Berlin (comprising the old city
center), and the most recent democratic period
after 1990 (often referred to as the Berlin
Republic).
Divided Berlin
In all these diverse contexts, Berlin was assigned
the central position of state capital. During the
so-called Third Reich, the Nazi regime made farreaching
plans for transforming Berlin into a city
that would match their vision of a “world capital
Germania.” Keys to these urban development
plans were the monumental buildings planned by
the architect Albert Speer of whose work few
traces remain. At the end of World War II and the
beginning of the cold war, Berlin was divided into
four sectors, each of which was under the control
of one of the four Allied powers (the United
States, France, Great Britain, and the Soviet
Union), corresponding to the Allied control of
Germany as a whole. Due to Berlin’s geographical
location within Germany, it became a space of
shared Allied control surrounded by Sovietcontrolled
territory. When the United States,