Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany - Townsend Humanities Lab

126 / Electric Stimulations
Figure 32. Proposal to install pedestrian barriers (Gehbahn-Schranken) bearing
advertisements at street intersections in Stuttgart (1929).
all Weimar Germans, however, were thick-skinned to a perceptual boiling
point, that is to say as well suited to the shock of modernity and its breakingdown
of the humanist individual as were the survivor-protagonists of mid-
Weimar literature—the “driver” types, 161 or what Helmut Lethen has
defined as the “cold personae” fostered by New Objectivity 162 —like Kracauer’s
Ginster, Baum’s Baron von Gaigern, Musil’s Ulrich, Rudolf
Braune’s Erna, Erich Kästner’s Fabian, or Ernst Jünger’s Worker. When
hapless Franz Biberkopf emerges in 1928 from Tegel after his four years of
imprisonment for murder, he has to play catch-up with the advances of the
New Objectivity years that have passed him by. His psychic shock in the
initial chapter of Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz is a WWI trauma reactivated
by the montage-effects experienced visually and aurally by the
pedestrian and tram-traveler of Weimar Berlin’s city streets; it is also a
memorable literary acting-out of the modernist collapse of subjecthood
and of transcendental representational beliefs. 163
Biberkopf’s tram journey can be contrasted with the ride, in F. W. Murnau’s
Sunrise (1927), that is shot from the trolleycar as it travels into the
city: while the former deconstructs the mind of the out-of-synch traveler,