SOURCE: Seeba, Hinrich C. “‘Keine Systematie’: Heine in Berlin and the Origin of the Urban Gaze.” In Heinrich Heine's Contested Identities: Politics, Religion, and Nationalism in Nineteenth-Century Germany, edited by Jost Hermand and Robert C. Holub, pp. 89-108. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

[In the following essay, Seeba credits Heine with a crucial role in developing the “urban gaze” that would emerge in later literature.]

Few critics commenting on contested identities and the modern crisis of identity formation can avoid quoting Heinrich Heine's ironically pompous dictum in The Baths of Lucca (1829) that “the great schism of the world” (“der große Weltriß”) runs through the middle of his heart (2: 405). Claiming to be the center of the world and therefore more torn apart than anybody, Heine paradoxically restored the post-romantic craze of subjectivity, being torn (“Zerrissenheit”), to the more objective realm of contradiction (“Widerspruch”), which to him means both the logical contradiction and the oppositional, if not dialectical, discourse. What I will present on the following pages is meant as a response to a claim made by Gerhard Wolf in his collection of Heine texts, Heine in Berlin (1980), that all documents of the time Heine spent in Berlin from 1821 to 1823 point mainly to his state of being torn apart both inside and outside,¹ as if his writing on Berlin were nothing but an early expression of his own personal contradictions. I will try to show instead how already in Berlin Heine, using the contradictions of urban experience, began to construct an oppositional discourse by shifting the burden of contested identities from his psyche to the city. Implicitly, my talk will be as much about the identity of Berlin as a city in transition as about Heine's identity as an aspiring political writer who as early as 1822 encodes his emerging agenda in the crafty construction of a poetic argument. In the attempt to reconstruct the rhetorical buildup I will start where, I believe, Heine eventually takes his urban discourse: the promise of culinary pleasure.

The Cheeseboard, a social-minded cooperative in Berkeley's so-called gourmet ghetto, has a staggered price list for senior citizens, with a blackboard telling the rare customers over 100 years of age: “What you see is what you get,” indicating that they will get for free anything they want. It wouldn't be Berkeley if even this innocent promise did not carry some intellectually and socially redeeming message. In a socialist utopia seeing is validated as an act of taking possession without having to pay for it—and not just for the centenarians. Against the background of mythological and metaphorical references to the possessive gaze, from the Medusa's petrifying eyes to the magic phrase of a devouring glance, obsessive fixation may either turn into a feeding frenzy or mellow to what Nicholas Green has called, with regard to urban perception, the “consuming gaze.”² A cheerfully attentive outlook that takes in the sights of the city to live on and to get strength from the urban energy, the consuming gaze is contrasted with the pessimist's “environmentalist eye,” which sees nothing but the pollution of the city and the ensuing potential for disease, both physical and moral. It is between heavenly Jerusalem and Armageddon, no less, that the mythical battle for the redemptive interaction of “seeing” and “having” takes shape in the city, as if the utopian dream, in which the rules of capitalism are suspended, consisted of seeing, devouring, swallowing up the commodities of urban life without having to pay the price for it.

The gaze without the intent—or the means—to buy is, of course, another, more mundane kind of disinterested pleasure, which Kant had put at the center of his aesthetics. It is, in fact, the etymological quintessence of aesthetics, as the Greek verb aisthanomai means the process of seeing, perception, and contemplation without partaking in the action observed. As the mode of the vita contemplativa the gaze has always been seen in opposition to the vita activa and thus been defined as detached. Such binary oppositions, however, are much too simple to account for the critical involvement of the viewer, however inactive he or she may appear. The consuming urban gaze, as I will try to demonstrate with regard to Heine, is not without its interest in changing the underlying social structure of what the flâneur perceives as merely visual dynamics.

The flâneur has come to represent the crisis of modernity in an urban attitude that seems only to record, rather than control, the explosion of sensual stimuli tearing at the city dweller's identity. Casually watching and contemplating significant details, the flâneur often flaunts his or her individuality by aimlessly strolling through the city, by enjoying the sights and sounds of the hustle of an emerging metropolis, be it Paris in the past or Berlin, possibly, in the future. As Paris and Berlin are the two places most often mentioned in discussions of the urban gaze, writers such as Walter Benjamin who lived in both cities to observe the accelerating changes in the cityscape have become celebrated witnesses—and critics—of the metonymic construction of urban space. Ever since the Italian architect Aldo Rossi published The Architecture of the City in 1966,³ the interest, both historical and current, in urban renewal has surged. While Paris in the age of the self-proclaimed “artiste démolisseur” Georges-Eugène Haussmann, at least in Benjamin's perceptive view, was the undisputed “capital of the nineteenth century,”⁴ Berlin in a grandiose scheme of construction and reconstruction is now preparing to become the capital of the twenty-first century. At least, city planners, not known for their modesty, hope for this outcome. Not unlike Paris after 1859, Berlin after 1989 has been a city in transition, desperately trying to reinvent itself, literally to build a new identity and marking time by advertising the largest “construction site” (Baustelle) of the world as “viewing site” (Schaustelle Berlin), with tour buses taking visitors from one unruly construction site to another. A major tourist attraction, Berlin's reconstruction zone has become a sideshow as if it were arranged by a “showman” (Schausteller) in a country fair. The unintended pun confirms the circus-like display of showing and viewing itself in this unparalleled urban spectacle. The desperate call of Berlin's Lord Mayor, Ernst Reuter, during the Berlin Blockade of 1949, “peoples of the world, look at this city,” has been answered in an entirely unexpected way. The whole nation, it seems, if not the world is fixated on Berlin in an urban gaze that, for lack of a finished product to look at, has become self-referential. The eyes of the spectators are turned inward to look at their own act of viewing as a truly “constructivist” gesture. In the best postmodern manner, the process of viewing the building process is both concentrated and displayed in the red Infobox, a visual anchor in the vast sea of construction where there once was the most traveled square of the world, Potsdamer Platz. In a sense, the constructivist urban gaze, which has to first create what it wants to see as its own object, meets the requirements of Friedrich Schlegel's transcendental poetry in that it represents the act of producing as well as the actual product,⁵ thus evoking the city of the mind in a kind of urban poetics, as Italo Calvino invented it in his Le città invisibili (1972), where Kublai Khan has Marco Polo tell him stories about the imagined cities of his empire: “Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages.”⁶ The urban gaze creates a narrative as if the city were a chapter in a book: “Tell me another city.”⁷

No wonder that there is a booming interest in, to give but two recent titles of urban poetics, Reading Berlin and The Imagined Metropolis⁸—Berlin as it once was, or rather, as it was perceived by those who first invented and “read” it in their initial gaze. Reading the city like a text was first propagated, with regard to Paris, by Ludwig Börne (“Paris can be called an open book, strolling through the streets means reading.”)⁹ and applied to Berlin a century later in Franz Hessel's Spazieren in Berlin (1929): “Strolling is a kind of reading the street, with faces, exhibits, display windows, terraces of cafés, street cars, cars, trees becoming equitable letters that combine to make up the words, sentences and pages of an ever new book.”¹⁰ There is a uniform understanding that the city as the site (and the text) of modernity may have been discovered theoretically by Georg Simmel in his famous essay of 1903, “The Metropolis and Intellectual Life”, but that the true philosopher of the modern city was Walter Benjamin. While Simmel defined urban identity individually by the intensity of nervous energy and collectively by protective indifference conditioned by monetary exchange,¹¹ Benjamin came to be seen as the paragon of a melancholy chronicler of urban experience forever lost. Moving back and forth between Berlin and Paris, Benjamin had written both A Berlin Childhood (1938) and Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century as the centerpiece of his posthumous Passagenwerk and thus was the ideal intellectual to conceptualize in urban vignettes the complexity of living in the city.

But the critical concentration on Benjamin has eclipsed two other flâneurs who preceded him in learning their vocation in Berlin and in transferring it to their exile in Paris. One is Franz Hessel, on whom the role of Jules in Truffaut's classic film Jules et Jim is modeled,¹² the influential editor of the Rowohlt Verlag from 1919 to 1933 and Benjamin's mentor, whose city walks through Berlin represent, in the words of Benjamin's review, remembering by strolling.¹³ And the other flâneur is, of course, Heinrich Heine, who lived in Berlin from 1821 to 1823. Long before Benjamin, Hessel and Siegfried Kracauer Heine, too, lived in exile in Paris, recalling the Berlin of his youth as if to admit, to modify Catharina Valente's hit song of the Fifties, “Das hab ich in—Berlin gelernt” (“I learned that—in Berlin”). Heine, the first famous German exile in Paris and one of the first flâneurs ever, would have to be seen in his many street scenes as equally indebted to Berlin. It was, indeed, Heine, as I intend to show, who started the urban gaze with which Benjamin and, only recently, also Hessel have been credited. But Heine not only preceded the others by a full century, but also superseded them in his determination to turn the urban spectacle into a political lesson.

Heine clearly belongs at the beginning of the tradition of ocularcentric explorations of the emerging metropolis which, strangely enough, Benjamin himself has traced to the year of Heine's Letters from Berlin, 1822, without even mentioning Heine. Instead, Benjamin welcomes E. T. A. Hoffmann's last narrative, Des Vetters Eckfenster (1822), as “one of the first attempts to grasp the street scene of a bigger city.”¹⁴ As Hoffmann used the protagonist's view from the window to introduce the principles of gazing,¹⁵ this narrative can, indeed, be considered a seminal text in the history of the fictionalized urban gaze. More surprising is the fact that the parallel urban text by Heine, published in the same year and advancing a similar concept of the interaction of gazing (“Schauen”) and writing (“Schreiben”), has been widely overlooked. Brushed aside by Max Brod as nonsense,¹⁶ Heine's early urban text was even hidden in the footnotes of Ernst Elster's authoritative edition of Heine's works.¹⁷ Had he known Heine's Letters from Berlin, Benjamin could have made a stronger case for his interest in the representation of the masses of people milling in the streets, or in Hoffmann's case, in a market square, the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin. Comparing Hoffmann's street scenes to E. A. Poe's famous Man of the Crowd (1845), he complained that Hoffmann failed to record the uncanny of urban experience.¹⁸ But even if Poe can be credited with introducing the new type of a city dweller without traits who “refuses to live alone”¹⁹ and who is obsessed with the anonymity of the urban crowd, Heine eventually gave the uncanny lure of the city a social edge by emphasizing “the uncanny contrast” between the crowd and the city's window displays. The social contradiction of “seeing” and “having” inspired his urban fantasy. Going far beyond Poe's clandestine and eventually failing pursuit of mystery in the throngs of London's busy streets, Heine openly gleaned from this contrast, and perhaps even enhanced, the uncanny potential for social revolt and political revolution he sensed while walking the equally busy boulevards of Paris.

Almost a century before the strolling spectators of the urban crowd made their celebrated comeback in the streets of Berlin and Paris, Heine, who came to Berlin the very year Baudelaire was born, developed nothing less than a social theory of the flâneur from his musings about the window display of elegant shops in Paris during Christmas in 1841: “The sight of them can offer the leisurely stroller the most pleasant pastime,” Heine ponders in Lutetia (1854), lulling the unsuspecting reader with the appearance of a merely entertaining gaze, one which may help the “flaneur”, this unfocused gentleman of leisure, kill time. But Heine continues on a more serious, almost devious note: “if his mind is not quite empty, he may sometimes get ideas when he views behind the shining glass panels the colorful array of luxury and art items and possibly takes a glance also at the people standing next to him.” As the viewing itself becomes thematic, with the viewer taking the place of the luxury items on display, the occasional thoughts take off in an alarming direction. For through such seemingly innocent associations, called “Assoziation der Ideen” (2: 10) already in Heine's first urban text, Letters from Berlin, the leisurely stroller turns out to be an observant social critic drawing some ominous conclusions from the juxtapositions he carefully staged. He highlights the contrast between luxury commodities and those who cannot afford them to emphasize the point he wants to make: In the social reality of the city “seeing” certainly does not mean “having” and, in the end, the “have-nots” will no longer be content with just “seeing” what is not meant for their consumption: “The faces of these people are so hideously serious and pained, so impatient and threatening that they contrast uncannily with the objects at which they stare. We begin to fear that these people might suddenly start swinging their balled fists and reduce to pitiful ruins all the colorful, noisy toys of this elegant world, and this elegant world itself along with them.” Here the social critic becomes a prophet projecting the revolutionary potential of a consuming gaze without consumption: “Someone who is no great politician, but, rather, a common flaneur who concerns himself with the expressions of people in the street, will be firmly convinced that sooner or later the whole bourgeois comedy in France, and its parliamentary stars and extras along with it, will end terribly amidst hisses, and it will be followed by a piece called the communist regime!” (5: 373).

Whether or not we agree with Heine's prophetic view that the communist regime will be an imperative, “genuine tragedy,” however short-lived, we can only marvel at the rhetorical construction of his argument centered on the ominous social “contrast”: Gradually the flâneur's leisurely gaze at the promise of material bliss is questioned by the gaping eyes of less fortunate people, who some day will realize the reasons for their exclusion from the spectacle of leisure; then they will smash much more than just the glass of the display windows keeping them outside for the time being. The urban gaze, whose temporal mode is the present, has become a foreboding look into the future, to the last act of the “bourgeois comedy” (Bürgerkomödie) and its “terrible end amidst hisses.” Against the background of similar stagings of apocalyptic visions of revolution,²⁰ Heine's “flaneur” clearly sheds the image of a detached observer to become the partisan prophet of most spectacular scenes in the drama of politics.

The vision of Heine's “flaneur,”—considering Heine's qualifier: if he is not empty-minded and not lacking social conscience—is much stronger than the cautiously utopian outlook into an uncertain future that marks the last sentence of the most famous account of a modern flâneur, Siegfried Kracauer's Abschied von der Lindenpassage (1930): “What role was there left for a passage in a society which itself is nothing but a passage?”²¹ However vaguely formulated in playing on the homonym of passage for both “galleria” and “historical change,” the rhetorical question points in a similar direction as Heine's prophecy. For Kracauer the dismantling—or, rather, modernist refurbishing—of Berlin's notorious gallery between Unter den Linden and Friedrichstraße, the former Kaiserpassage, anticipates the passing of the bourgeois society he both desires and fears; for as the sanctuary of an alternate culture which is not accepted in standard society, the window displays of this passage question the very norms of this society: “Thus the passage through the bourgeois world criticized this very world in a way that every true flaneur understood.”²² What Kracauer invokes as historical change is at the same time mourned as a future loss: “The time of the passages has passed.”²³ There is an obvious melancholy permeating the musings of the flâneur as Kracauer or, for that matter, Walter Benjamin perceived him.

But even if Heine's urban gaze, with its revolutionary zeal, lacks the gloom so typical of the modern flâneur, it comes as a surprise that Heine, who explicitly counts himself among the “genuine flaneurs” (5: 376), does not figure prominently, if at all, in the recent surge of studies in urban culture. From most of the recent collections of urban studies dealing with the textual construction of the city, especially Berlin, from Helmuth Kühn's Preußen. Dein Spree-Athen (1981), Klaus Scherpe's Unwirklichkeit der Städte (1988), Heidrun Suhr's Berlin: Culture and Metropolis (1990), Tilo Schabert's Die Welt der Stadt (1990) to Katharina von Ankum's Women in the Metropolis (1997) Heine's name is strikingly absent or, as in the latter, mentioned only as a gendered backdrop to the even more suppressed “female flanerie.”²⁴ Even after Jost Hermand had tried in 1969 to rescue from oblivion Heine's more obvious and, considering the times, rather daring political insinuations,²⁵ Klaus Hermsdorf, writing on Heine's Letters from Berlin in 1987 from the perspective of the GDR, surprisingly restored the conventional notion that this text is nothing but a trivial, even dubious “Chronique scandaleuse” of the cultural life in the capital.²⁶ But even where Heine's anecdotal musings on Berlin's culture were recognized, his ingenious street scenes, as Klaus Briegleb remarked in 1986, have gone largely unnoticed: “Heine's street scenes have found only fleeting interest among literary scholars.” Yet these street scenes, Briegleb continues, “permeate his writings as a real and imagined site, a narrative space, in which the observer encounters the reality of the cities. Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Berlin, London, Munich, Lucca, Paris—in their streets we can read their world of signs, join in the observation and be absorbed in a dramaturgy of signs.”²⁷ Briegleb implies not only that Heine “reads” the text of the city streets, as Börne and Hessel did, but also that he constructs his reading—in my view in a dramaturgy of political action.

Therefore, it seems appropriate to look at the semiotic significance of Heine's first street scenes, when he adopted for the first of his Letters from Berlin the fictional role of a Berlin city guide to captivate the attention of the presumably provincial readers of the Rheinisch-westfälischer Anzeiger, where his letters were published. These readers were considered disadvantaged and in need of some cultural tutoring, because it was only seven years earlier that their Western province had become part of the Prussian territory and thus subject to Berlin, the new and rapidly expanding capital. Allusions to the present situation are obvious—and intentional: Taken over by the Prussians, the “Wessies” of the 1820's in Bonn, Cologne and Düsseldorf had to learn quickly the ways of the “Ossis” of the time; Heine's role as a correspondent from the new capital Berlin was to narrow the information gap between West and East and to familiarize the people in the new provinces with Berlin's emerging claim to a metropolis which in Karl Friedrich Schinkel's classicist masterplan was only beginning to take shape. Schinkel's Neue Wache was completed in 1818, his Schauspielhaus am Gendarmenmarkt in 1821, his Schloßbrücke in 1823, his Torhäuser am Leipziger Platz in 1824 and his Altes Museum in 1828. When Heine came to Berlin in 1821, Berlin was as much a construction zone as it is today, with Schinkel being the equivalent of today's Josef Paul Kleihues; an earlier “Schaustelle Berlin” commanded an urban gaze to grasp the rapid changes of a city in the process of reinventing itself as the capital of recently united and vastly enlarged Prussia: “I saw the new stock market … Unter den Linden, the construction sites through which Wilhelmstraße is being extended are moving forward rapidly. Terrific colonnades are springing up. During these days also the foundation stone of the new bridge was set” (2: 59). With construction going on everywhere, Berlin was—as it is today—a site of constant upheaval when Heine arrived in 1821 to inspect and to use it as a backdrop for his own aspirations.

After his third and last visit to Berlin in 1829 Heine confessed in Journey from Munich to Genoa (1830) that it is mainly for political reasons, i.e. in the pursuit of a particular political interest, that he celebrates or denigrates a city, adding, however, that Berliners cannot be bribed with literary praise because they don't care too much about a visitor's reaction to their city: “No city has less local pride than Berlin” (2: 316-17). Thus ironically relieved of the consequences if he were to denounce Berlin, Heine can pursue his political interest by projecting onto the Berliners the fact that he himself does not care much about this non-city:

Berlin is not a city, it only provides the place where a lot of people, among them many cultured people, gather even though they don't care at all about the place. One truly needs several bottles of poetry to see in Berlin anything but dead houses and Berliners. Here it is difficult to see spirits. The city contains so little antiquity and is quite new; and yet, this new is already so old, so wilted and dead. For the city emerged, as mentioned before, not from the convictions of the masses, but of individuals.

(2: 317)

Considering Benjamin's praise for E. T. A. Hoffmann for introducing to the urban gaze the notion of “masses,” we cannot easily overlook Heine's emphasis on “a lot of people” (“eine Menge Menschen”) and “conviction of the masses” (“Gesinnung der Masse”), especially since the latter, the mindset of the dynamic urban masses, is seen in striking contrast to the stagnant architecture that is a relic of the Prussian ruler, Frederick II. For the sake of contrastive argument Heine conveniently overlooked the more recent building boom he was witnessing in his time. The older and unattractive row houses in what is appropriately called Friedrichstadt constituted a better contrast than the splendid public buildings, most of them by Schinkel, going up in the 1820's. Already in Berlin Heine's carefully constructed argument alludes to the “uncanny contrast” that he would later stage in Paris as part of his more outspoken social agenda.

Before Heine's arrival, Berlin was an unlikely place for the kind of awe we have become accustomed to associate with the urban gaze. Rahel Levin Varnhagen complained already in 1793: “Is it possible for a decent person to accept that Berlin presents itself as the world?”²⁸; and Madame de Staël was similarly unimpressed during her visit to Berlin in 1804: “This is a country which does not inspire fantasy, the society is lined up in a Prussian way.”²⁹ Only in her later recollection of the Berlin visit in De l'Allemande (1813) did Madame de Staël acknowledge that the active social and intellectual life had made Berlin “the true capital of the new, the enlightened Germany.”³⁰ But what a century later became an asset of modernity, was seen by Madame de Staël as an uninspiring lack of history: “Berlin is a big city with wide, straight streets and built quite regularly. As most of it is newly built, there are few traces of older times.” If there is anything attractive about Berlin, it does not offer itself to visual pleasure: “Berlin, this very modern city, as beautiful as it might be, does not produce a festive, serious effect; it is shaped neither by the history of the country nor by the character of the population.”³¹

Heine, of course, was so familiar with this lackluster report on Berlin that some of his own observations seem to be taken almost verbatim from Madame de Staël's famous book on Germany. But he gives the notion of unimaginative rows of uniform houses, this topos of contemporary travel accounts of Berlin, an ironic twist. He turns it into an indictment of the autocratic rule that does not adequately represent the masses living under the king's jurisdiction: “The foreigner who travels through the city sees only the expansive, uniform houses, the long, wide streets, which form rows and are, for the most part, built according to the will of a single individual” (2: 317). If the visitor to Berlin needs to be drunk from poetic fantasy to see more than “dead houses,” the singular ruler who built the unvarying row houses according to the rule of Prussian uniformity (“nach der Schnur”), is relegated to the figurative realm of death where even the newest buildings seem dead or by-gone (“abgestorben”) as Heine wants any political system to appear that is unrepresentative of the emerging urban masses. This “uncanny contrast” between the king of the past and the masses of the future could spur some radical energy. As Heine writes “mainly for political reasons,” even when the rhetorical construction of his argument only faintly suggests his agenda, it is not merely playful caution if he wants to defer his more candid writing on Berlin to his prospective exile from Germany: “What I presently think about the intellectual Berlin,” he writes on May 4, 1823 in a letter to Julius M. Schottky, a folklorist and professor of German in Posen, “I am not allowed to have printed; but you will read it some time when I am no longer in Germany” (HSA 20: 84). Yet we know, of course, that Heine did write and publish on Berlin long before he left Germany. In fact at the time when he wrote this letter, he had just published his Letters from Berlin, Should we, then, assume that this epistolary probe of urban space does not reflect Heine's critical thoughts on Berlin because such remarks might not have been publishable? What, then, is the disguise he chose to advance his subversive and, as we know from his later assertions, potentially revolutionary ideas about Berlin?

At the outset he defines the Letters from Berlin as a text that includes its own unwritten countertext: “Upon receiving your letter I immediately got out paper and pen and am already—writing. There is no shortage of notes, and the only question is: What shouldn't I write? i.e., what does the public know already, what leaves it indifferent, and what is it not permitted to know?” (2: 9). In delineating the well-known, the tedious, and the forbidden as subjects not to be covered, it becomes clear that writing is as much about what is not written as about what is. Underscoring the opposition of “writing” and “not writing,” Heine makes the former an oppositional form of the latter. But he goes one step further: Just as his writing suggests the unwritten, the new mode in which he does write is negatively defined by what it is not: “Just do not demand of me any kind of system, because that is the angel of death for all correspondence” (2: 10). Rather than merely advancing, as has been generally assumed,³² the new style of casual journalistic prose for which Heine was to become famous and scolded by Karl Kraus,³³ this exclusionary remark draws the reader's attention precisely to what seems to be excluded, i.e. to the systematic construction of unwritten thoughts in a political agenda that would be strangled by the censors. The rhetorical dialectics of Heine's argument promise the “public” an implicit answer to the central question: “what is it not permitted to know.”

Therefore, it is important to understand how Heine both poses and handles the fictional questions that remain better unanswered so as not to provoke the unnamed authorities, but that at the same time must be raised to question this very authority. He invents an urban dialog with a visitor who needs to be taken on a fantasy tour of Berlin, and includes a fictional exchange of questions assumed and answers suppressed: “I see you asking already: Why isn't the post office on Poststraße and the black eagle on Königstraße?” (2: 10). What, on the surface, seems like a fairly harmless inquiry about the location of hotels requires an answer that just may involve, we suspect, a political taboo and therefore is pointedly avoided: “I will answer this question at another time; but now I want to walk through the city, and invite you to keep me company” (2: 10). In deferring the answer to some other time, as he deferred his true thoughts on Berlin to his prospective exile, Heine keeps us guessing as to what the unwritten implications are, clearly assigning the casual city walk the place of the potentially risky answer. Only as a critical flâneur, who reads the city as a text, will Heine inscribe the urban space with the answer the public is not supposed to know.

While the cognitive, the rational, the systematic probe is suppressed because it may lead to dangerous conclusions, it is supplanted with another mode of critical perception. The phrase “I see you asking already” is very unusual and rather revealing: It is the first time in this text, so replete with references to the urban gaze, that the word “see” (sehen) is used. Taking the place of “hearing,” “seeing” is introduced as a more sensual alternative to rational perception. Where systematic questioning is banned, the impressionistic gaze of the flâneur suggests the unwritten answer. The urban stroll turns out to be a political venture in disguise. In this light the programmatic statement “association of ideas shall always prevail” appears as a displaced call for exactly what Heine purports to reject, namely “systemic thought” (“Systematie”), i.e. the focused organization of thoughts that will logically lead to daring consequences. In a warped chronology, the prophet of social upheaval Heine strives to be emerges from the kind of flâneur Heine will place in front of the window display on the Boulevard Montmartre almost twenty years later: “if his mind is not quite empty, he may sometimes get ideas.” What sometimes comes to mind, in deceiving nonchalance, as “association of ideas” turns out to be, in the end, the focal point of a gaze that is not at all detached, be it a revolution in Lutetia on the one hand or the less radical sensualism in Letters from Berlin on the other. Tracing the sequence of displacements, we have found, I believe, the origin of Heine's urban gaze: seeing what is not written and what must not be questioned as an oppositional act that defies censure.

As a flâneur boasting his critical gaze, Heine benefitted from—and contributed to—the emerging visual interest in the recently upgraded capital, which was in the process of becoming an urban spectacle to marvel at when Heine came to Berlin in 1821.³⁴ While other cities were represented in their medieval quaintness, Berlin was the only place in Germany where aspiring artists of the 1820s concentrated on contemporary buildings gracing spacious new boulevards and plazas. Featuring the brand-new architecture of classicist Spree-Athen, these splendid representations of urban development dwarfed scattered groups of minute men and women of society in elegant Biedermeier attire, who probably gathered only to inspect and admire the grandiose public buildings. After the first panorama of Berlin, painted by Johann Friedrich Tielker, was shown in 1802, the panorama craze started in earnest in 1808 when Schinkel joined Wilhelm Gropius, a producer of masks and himself a puppeteer, to paint so-called “optic-perspectival panoramas” (“optisch-perspektivische Schaubilder”) of Berlin and other cities, which subsequently were staged during the Christmas season in the display windows of shops and coffee houses.³⁵ The first printed Panorama vom Königlichen Schloß bis zum Brandenburger Tor, a visual strip of the architectural façades Unter den Linden just ten centimeters high but almost eight meters long, was advertised by the art dealer Jacobi (address: Unter den Linden 35) in all newspapers of Berlin on November 18, 1820.³⁶ Such displays proved so popular that Carl Wilhelm Gropius, Wilhelm's son who, starting in 1820, painted Schinkel's set designs for the new Royal Theater on the Gendarmenmarkt, opened a separate diorama building in 1827, five years after the famous Diorama by Daguerre and Bouton in Paris. This building, complete with an art shop and a book store featuring only Berolinensia, marked the early commercialization of the “Schaustelle Berlin.” Dramatically staged, the urban gaze became a marketable perspective represented by painters such as Carl Gropius (1793-1870), Wilhelm Brücke (1800-1874), Johann Heinrich Hintze (1800-1861), Friedrich Wilhelm Klose (1804-1874) and, most of all, by Eduard Gaertner (1801-1877). Gaertner's many street scenes include Unter den Linden (1853), one version of which was exhibited in the Galerie der Romantik of Schloß Charlottenburg and another in the Sammlung Oskar Reinhart in Winterthur. Gaertner left the Königliche Porzellan-Manufaktur in 1821, where he had learned the art of painting city scenes on porcelain in so-called Veduten, to become the best known genre painter of Berlin. He, like Heine, would take the visitor by his hand and guide him through the sites of recently completed construction, especially along the boulevard Unter den Linden.

But unlike the genre painters who cultivated the urban gaze to propagate the emerging metropolis as a site of spectacular new buildings, Heine was much too shrewd to be so easily co-opted in what today would be called a public relations project. In his fictional guided tour of Berlin Heine seems to retrace the famous panorama of 1820, but the visual tour de force he imposes on his fictional companion takes them beyond the usual tourist attractions: “Follow me … Look around … Look up … But look … Just look … If you want to feast your eyes, look at the pictures … Or if you would see … Look at the beautiful buildings … Here to the right you can see something new … Notice there … Notice … Notice …” (2: 10-20). Constantly feeding the hungry urban gaze, Heine takes the visitor on a walking tour from the Royal Castle to the Brandenburg Gate and back, now in a rented carriage, to the real destination, the Café Royal, thus setting up an ironic balance between the aesthetic and the culinary pleasures. It is among the tempting dishes of this coffee house that the urban gaze reveals the city's sensual underbelly: Disregarding luminaries such as Friedrich August Wolf and E. T. A. Hoffmann, who are holding court in the Café Royal, Heine remarks: “But of what concern are all these gentlemen to me? I am hungry. Garcon, la charte! Look at all these magnificent dishes!” (2: 20). Thus summoned for the last time during the guided city tour, the urban gaze turns out to be, indeed, a “consuming gaze” one which overcomes the spatial difference between subject and object, swallowing up the distinction of “seeing” and “having.” In sharp contrast to the spectators on the Boulevard Montmartre, Heine clearly belongs to the fortunate few who can have what he sees, without losing sight of those who may not.

Even more so than E. T. A. Hoffmann in the same year or E. A. Poe twenty years later, Heine takes notice of the danger the emerging urban masses might pose to the individual: “But I see that you are being pushed from all sides. On this bridge there is an eternal crowd” (2: 11). Using the new concept for uncontrollable urban crowds, he even mentions “the turbulent masses” populating the open-air stock market (2: 12),³⁷ which ironically is located directly next to the cathedral and thus an urban marker of a historic paradigm shift from the transcendental to the monetary exchange. Already at the beginning of his tour even before he turns to the nearby Royal Castle, Heine directs the gaze of his companion to an elegant street, “where one department store boarders on another, and the colorful, luminous exhibited wares are almost blinding” (2: 11). Heine thus foregrounds the more conventional city tour of the imposing architectural sites by focusing the urban gaze on the brilliant display of commodities in department stores—exactly forty years before the advent of bigger grands magazins like Bon Marché in Paris: “Here the ocularcentric spectacle of desire,” Martin Jay commented on the department stores in the 1860s, “was removed from the aristocratic court and given its bourgeois equivalent in the massive sheet glass windows displaying a wealth of commodities to be coveted and, if money allowed, consumed.”³⁸ The name of this street, where the truly consuming gaze engages in unroyal commerce so far removed from the aristocratic court nearby, is of all names, “Königstraße,” the very street to which Heine had just drawn our attention only to frustrate it.

It is in this ironic name of the commercial kingdom that we may find the deeply hidden answer to the question Heine had pushed aside when he started the walking tour instead of engaging in a debate about street names and proper locations: “I see you asking already: Why isn't the post office on Poststraße and the black eagle on Königstraße?” Now we know that the Schwarze Adler, Heine's cheap hotel at Poststraße 30 (as it is listed in the Adreß-Kalender of 1826), does not belong in the elegant “great magnificent street” named after the king in general, any king, even if it is no longer a Hohenzollern; for who nowadays but the customer of the many department stores located in the Königstraße is “king” here? The twilight of the monarch—the “individual” who had outlined the blueprint of Berlin with its uniform houses—is anticipated by the masses who would try to fill their needs in the department stores and, if they can't, eventually turn their anger against the king. The inappropriate naming carries its own irony—as in the example Heine cites explicitly: “We are standing on the ‘Long Bridge.’ Bemused, you ask: ‘But it is not very long?’ It is irony, my dear sir” (2: 10). As the Lange Brücke is not long and the Lustgarten nothing but an empty square without any trace of pleasure (Lust) (“Dear Lord! Don't you see that it is irony again?”), the Königstraße, we can infer from Heine's instruction, is no longer royal; it has become bourgeois. It is a business street no longer reserved for the king for whom the black eagle stands as Prussia's national symbol. To Heine, as he later concedes in Caput III of Germany, A Winter's Tale (1844), the black eagle is “so deeply hated” that he wants it shot in a revolutionary act: “Whoever shoots the bird for me / Will win the offering / Of crown and scepter. Trumpets will blow, / We'll cry, ‘Long live the King!’” (4: 583). If anyone can be king if he is only willing to kill and replace the black eagle, the Königstraße will eventually turn into the republican staging area for the last act of the “bourgeois comedy,” as it did in November 1918. What Heine calls irony is a contradiction he places into the object itself, thus hiding his own ironic effort to let the visual sites reveal their own paradox, i.e. the contrast between name and significance, between word and meaning. It is the same “uncanny contrast” from which he expects the social energy for political change to unfold, the contrast between “seeing” the luxurious “displays of commodities” and “having” the means to obtain the merchandise on display. Only if the masses, we are to assume, can afford the consuming gaze that pulled Heine with his companion, the imagined addressee and reader of his fictional letters, into the elegant eatery Unter den Linden, on the corner of Charlottenstraße, where E. T. A. Hoffmann lived and died the same year, can Heine's flâneur be as carefree as his more detached successors, who were careful enough—or too bourgeois—not to predict or even urge a “communist regime.”

But, then, let's not get our hopes up. We may have to reach the age of one hundred to feed our own consuming gaze and to get for free what we see in Berkeley's gourmet ghetto. Obviously, the nostalgic, mourning gesture sported by this century's flâneurs in their fragmented, but highly individualized gaze has prevailed over the more daring, carefully orchestrated and potentially collective agenda of the nineteenth century's first flâneur, Heinrich Heine in Berlin. At the same time that he demanded “no systemic thought,” he started engaging in a very systematic buildup of a poetic argument based on images, metaphors, allusions and anecdotal scenes, of an urban “dramaturgy of signs” that leaves little doubt about the intended signified. But if the “systematic thought” Heine invoked by denying it failed on the political stage of our time, thus breaking the ground for Berlin's urban wasteland to become another “Schaustelle Berlin,” we can only conclude by saying with Heine: “It is irony, my dear sir!”

Notes

1. Gerhard Wolf, “Heine in Berlin,” Und grüß mich nicht Unter den Linden. Heine in Berlin. Gedichte und Prosa, ed. Gerhard Wolf (Berlin, 1980), pp. 275-301: “die Zerrissenheit seines äußeren und inneren Befindens in diesem großen Krähwinkel” (p. 287).

2. Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France (Manchester, 1990), p. 66.

3. Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City (Cambridge, Mass., 1982).

4. Walter Benjamin, “Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts,” Das Passagen-Werk, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 2 vols. (Frankfurt/Main, 1983), pp. 45-59.

5. Friedrich Schlegel, “Athenäums-Fragment 238,” Kritische Schriften, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch (Munich, ²1964), p. 53: “auch das Produzierende mit dem Produkt.”

6. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, trans. William Weaver (San Diego, 1974), p. 14.

7. Ibid., p. 85.

8. Peter Fritsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), p. 1: “In an age of urban mass literacy, the city as a place and the city as text defined each other in mutually constitutive ways. The crush of people and welter of things in the modern city revised ways of reading and writing, and these representational acts, in turn, constructed a second-hand metropolis which gave a narrative to the concrete one and choreographed its encounters.” Michael Bienert, Die eingebildete Metropole. Berlin im Feuilleton der Weimarer Republik (Stuttgart, 1992).

9. Ludwig Börne, “Der Greve-Platz [Schilderungen aus Paris, 1822-24],” Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Inge and Peter Rippmann, vol. 2 (Düsseldorf, 1964), pp. 34-39, here p. 34.

10. Franz Hessel, Ein Flaneur in Berlin (Berlin, 1984) p. 145.

11. Georg Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben,” Gesamtausgabe, ed. Otthein Rammstedt, vol. 7/I, Aufsätze und Abhandlungen 1901-1908 (Frankfurt/Main, 1995), pp. 116-131, here p. 116.

12. Cf. Manfred Flügge, Gesprungene Liebe. Die wahre Geschichte zu “Jules und Jim” (Berlin, 1993). The film was based on a real-life ménage à trois between Hessel (1880-1942), his wife Helen Grund (1886-1982) and his friend Henri-Pierre Roché (who wrote the story).

13. Walter Benjamin, “Die Wiederkehr des Flaneurs,” Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 3, Kritiken und Rezensionen, ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels (Frankfurt/Main, 1991), pp. 194-199: “ein Memorieren im Schlendern, ein Buch, für das Erinnerung nicht die Quelle, sondern die Muse war,” p. 194. On Hessel cf. Jörg Plath, Liebhaber der Großstadt. Ästhetische Konzeptionen im Werk Franz Hessels (Paderborn, 1994); Michael Opitz and Jörg Plath, eds., Genieße froh, was du nicht hast. Der Flaneur Franz Hessel (Würzburg, 1997).

14. Walter Benjamin, “Über einige Motive bei Baudelaire [1939],” Schriften, vol. 1 (Frankfurt/Main, 1955), p. 446.

15. E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Des Vetters Eckfenster,” Späte Werke (Stuttgart, n.d.), pp. 597-622: “die Primizien der Kunst zu schauen,” p. 600.

16. Max Brod, Heinrich Heine (Amsterdam, 1935), p. 134: “Klatsch und Quatsch.”

17. Heinrich Heines Sämtliche Werke, ed. Ernst Elster, vol. 7 (Leipzig, [1890]), pp. 560-597.

18. Benjamin, p. 446: “das Unheimliche herauszustellen, das andere Physiognomen der großen Stadt gespürt haben.”

19. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” The Works of Edgar Allan Poe (New York, 1857), vol. 2, Poems and Tales, pp. 398-407, here p. 406.

20. “Es wird ein Stück aufgeführt werden in Deutschland, wogegen die französische Revolution nur wie eine harmlose Idylle erscheinen möchte” (3: 640).

21. Siegfried Kracauer, “Abschied von der Lindenpassage,” Der verbotene Blick. Beobachtungen, Analysen, Kritiken, ed. Johanna Rosenberg (Leipzig, 1992), pp. 49-55, here p. 55. Cf. Michael Schaper, Der gläserne Himmel. Die Passagen des 19. Jahrhunderts als Sujet der Literatur (Frankfurt/Main, 1988), pp. 205 ff.

22. Ibid., p. 55.

23. Ibid., p. 50: “Die Zeit der Passagen ist abgelaufen.”

24. Anke Gleber, “Female Flanerie and the Symphony of the City,” Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed. Katharina von Ankum (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 67-88, here pp. 67-68.

25. Jost Hermand, “Heines ‘Briefe aus Berlin’. Politische Tendenz und feuilletonistische Form,” Gestaltungsgeschichte und Gesellschaftsgeschichte. Literatur-, Kunst- und Musikwissenschaftliche Studien, ed. Helmut Kreuzer (Stuttgart, 1969), pp. 284-305.

26. Klaus Hermsdorf, Literarisches Leben in Berlin. Aufklärer und Romantiker (Berlin, 1987), p. 348.

27. Klaus Briegleb, Opfer Heine. Versuche über Schriftzüge der Revolution (Frankfurt/Main, 1986), p. 154.

28. Rahel Levin Varnhagen, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Konrad Feilchenfeldt, Uwe Schweikert and Rahel E. Steiner (Munich, 1983), vol. 7/1, p. 12.

29. Madame de Staël in a letter to Goethe, March 1804, quoted from Monika Bosse, “Nachwort,” Anne Germaine de Staël, Über Deutschland, ed. Monika Bosse (Frankfurt/Main, 1985), p. 840.

30. de Staël, Über Deutschland, p. 110.

31. Ibid., p. 107.

32. In addition to the article mentioned above by Jost Hermand, cf. Klaus Pabel's chapter on “Briefe aus Berlin: Das Assoziationsprinzip als literarische Strategie zur Darstellung der partikularisierten Gesellschaft and zur Überwindung der Zensur” in Heines “Reisebilder”. Ästhetisches Bedürfnis and politisches Interesse am Ende der Kunstperiode (Munich, 1977), pp. 52-73); or, more recently on the epistolary form, Elke Frederiksen, “Heinrich Heine and Rahel Levin Varnhagen. Zur Beziehung and Differenz zweier Autoren im frühen 19. Jahrhundert,” Heine-Jahrbuch 29 (1990), pp. 9-38.

33. Karl Kraus, “Heine and die Folgen,” Ausgewählte Werke, ed. Dietrich Simon (Munich, n.d.), vol. 1, pp. 290-312.

34. Cf. Sybille Gramlich, “Königliches Spree-Athen. Berlin im Biedermeier,” Stadtbilder. Berlin in der Malerei vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin, 1987), pp. 95-172, here p. 108-9.

35. Cf. Stephan Oettermann, Das Panorama. Die Geschichte eines Massenmediums (Frankfurt/Main, 1980). For contemporary reactions to the “Schaubilder” cf. Mario Zadow, Karl Friedrich Schinkel (Berlin, 1980), pp. 51-56.

36. Cf. another “Lindenpanorama” from around 1847, with references to the first one from 1820, in Panorama der Straße Unter den Linden, ed. Winfried Löschburg (Hanau, 1987).

37. Cf. Karl Riha, “Menschen in Massen. Ein spezifisches Großstadtsujet and seine Herausforderung an die Literatur,” Die Welt der Stadt, ed. Tilo Schabert (Munich, 1990), pp. 117-143.

38. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, 1993), p. 120.

Note on Bibliographical References

All references to Heine's writings are cited parenthetically in the text by volume and page number from Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb, 6 volumes (Munich, 1968-1976). All correspondence is cited with volume and page number from Heinrich Heine, Werke, Briefwechsel, Lebenszeugnisse. Säkularausgabe (Berlin and Paris, 1970ff.) (HSA). All German from Heine's works and letters was translated into English for this volume.