Street Scenes: Brecht, Benjamin and Berlin (review)

Reviewed by: Street Scenes: Brecht, Benjamin and Berlin Petra Kuppers Nicolas Whybrow . Street Scenes: Brecht, Benjamin and Berlin. Bristol: Intellect, 2005. Pp. 182, illustrated. $39.95/£19.95 (Pb). Memorial, site of accidents, museum, and destination point of a flight – Whybrow stages Berlin as an encounter zone, as a space through which he rambles [End Page 854] and in which he picks up connections. Whybrow collages and montages. He takes seriously the conditions of city living and modernity set out by the two figures who enigmatically weave through this text: Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. As a reader, I am invited to join Whybrow as he moves through Berlin and experience with him the epiphany of theoretical connections as well as the differently heady delights of street encounters and small scenes. The text is accompanied by Whybrow's photos of Berlin, shots of street signs, panoramas, monuments, architecture, and other images that clearly connote the snapshot, the tourist's gaze. The images are made en passant, minor because of their small size and of the way that they are inserted into the running texts. I find them personal and intriguing, since they are so clearly dialogic, rather than illustrative, in character. Potential dialogue, heteroglossia, and (missed) connections create for me the atmosphere of reading Whybrow's book. It is hard to say who this book is aimed at. This is not an introductory academic text, as it is hard to pick up a coherent authorial vision of either Brecht or Benjamin (or the history of their criticism) from these pages. Neither Brecht's and Benjamin's own voices ring out loud and clear over this text or even appear in a conversation with Whybrow's writing: we hear a lot more of what critics other than Whybrow think of them and made of them in their own arguments than of the two authors themselves. But while the refusal to make monoliths out of either of these two, or out of the author's perspective, is a very respectable move, fully in keeping with the collagist attitude of Brecht, a more developed introduction would have made me more inclined to put the text on a reading list. And while there is a sound inner logic to refusing to "introduce" Brecht and Benjamin, some other omissions seem to point to blind spots rather than rhetorical maneuvers. Even so many years after Benjamin's flânerie, Whybrow does not, at times, seem too aware of his own sociocultural position within the Berlin city scene: foreigner, tourist, academic, person mobile enough to cross borders. Benjamin criticism has often homed in on those spots where Ben-jamin's vision renders invisible his own position – and I desire to see more reflection on the sociopolitical aspects of crossing space. Unsurprisingly, when reading the book, my own persona intrudes – for instance, when Whybrow talks about some of the "funny things" about Berlin, he points to the weird ol' habit of numbering houses in unusual ways (i.e., different from what he is used to). Is my patronization alarm ringing only because I am German and huffy at this Brit's Grand Tour or because I do actually know some of the reasons for the supposedly "strange" numbering, reasons that he cannot be bothered to go and look up, leaving the numbering as native quaintness in the wake of his travelogue? He clearly gets my back up with his decisions, and that's interesting. The book is to me most successful when Whybrow goes ambling and [End Page 855] allows me insights into his magpie mind, binding together his own experience of witnessing an accident while on the way to a wedding party with Brecht's poem "On Everyday Theatre" and the core position and responsibility of a street accident witness within this. At other times, his wandering brings him to a bluish light, like a will-o'-the-wisp, and I am invited to come upon the site of Goebbels' book burning, now a lit window into a subterranean library room with empty shelves, sending out its light into Berlin, attracting people like moths. But in order to get to these wonderful moments in Whybrow's writing...

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