Strollers

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Paul Gavarni : Le Flâneur , 1842

The flaneur (from French strolling , strolling around, strolling around ) is a person who looks, enjoys walking , and wanders haphazardly - he strolls .

Object definition

The flaneur describes a literary figure who wanders ( strolls ) through the streets and passages of large cities with their anonymous crowd . This offers him material for reflection and narration. The strollers let themselves be driven through the crowd, swims with the flow, does not pause, greets other strollers at ease. The flaneur is intellectual and gets his reflections from small observations. He can be seen, but also sees, albeit with a slight indifference (by Georg Simmel in his essay Die Großstädte und die Geistesleben aptly identified as being blasé ). The flaneur in all his dandyism represents an important topic in - especially metropolitan - individualized art , including the art of living .

His female equivalent, the Passante (French. For "walker", comp. Passer ), occurs particularly in the works of Marcel Proust on which his female characters as elusive, passing (Engl. Passing ) figures portrayed that his obsessive and possessive Ignored perspective on them (cf. In search of lost time ). Increasing mobilization and strong social innovations (e.g. through industrialization ) made it possible for passers-by to become an active member within the metropolis of the late 19th century, whose social roles expanded from the domestication of the private to the public by becoming should increasingly free themselves from their sexual and identifying marginal status.

According to the writer Aminatta Forna , aimless, unaccompanied strolls were considered a sign of prostitution by women, an attribution that had to be overcome: “Walking, for a woman, can be an act of transgression against male authority… Virginia Woolf , Jean Rhys , George Sand , the flâneuses who recorded their flânerie were women who all defied male authority in other ways, too. ”(Translated for example:“ For a woman, walking can be an act of transgressing male authority ... Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, George Sand, die Flaneusen who recorded their strolling were women who all challenged male authority in other ways. ")

history

His former counterpart was the wanderer who roamed nature and articulated his thoughts and feelings by what he observed there.

With Edgar Allan Poe's story The Man in the Crowd , the flaneur found his way into literature .

James Wood sees in Flaubert's invention of the awake flaneur with a refined eye, whose perceptions the narrator reproduces, a basic feature of literary realism .

The concept of the flaneur in the 20th century was introduced by Walter Benjamin using the example of Parisian boulevard life. He took the terminology from Charles Baudelaire , through whom the amalgamation of artist and flaneur in the figure of the "painter of modern life" has become canonical. In Das Passagen-Werk (1940), Benjamin also deals with Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913) and sees there a development away from the romantic feeling of landscape towards a new feeling of a romantic “cityscape”.

“So now, completely outside of any literary intention and without a thought of it, I sometimes felt my attention suddenly caught by a roof, a reflection of the sun on a stone, the smell of a path, and they gave me a special pleasure, that is well hence it was that they looked as if they were hiding something behind what I saw, which they asked me to look for and which, despite my best efforts, I was unable to discover. "

- Marcel Proust : In search of lost time . Volume 1: On the way to Swann. (1913)

Guillaume Apollinaire takes up the flaneur at Baudelaire and develops the figure further. In Le Flâneur des deux rives (1918) he refers to a reality in which the bizarre combination of modern and idyllic elements catches his eye. Apollinaire describes, among other things, art dealerships and literary cafes and wanders through the melancholy, quiet streets of a Parisian suburb. Like later Dadaists, the author finds pleasure in random, bizarre banalities such as graffiti on crumbling house walls, which he can "poetry". The author develops further visual poetry from these objet trouvés .

Sociologically, the figure of the flaneur was prepared by Georg Simmel (the human being “at the intersection of social circles ”), modified by David Riesman using the example of New York ( Faces in the Crowd ) and updated and commented on by Jean Baudrillard . But authors like Joseph Roth can also be assigned to flânerie.

The flaneur of the 20th century, who mainly tried to drown in the crowd in order to be able to observe the social events, differs from the flaneur of the 19th century, who in his slow pace dandy presented himself to a public audience .

How a culture of walking develops as a critical alternative to mechanized mobility such as the railroad and the automobile and thereby ties in with traditions that discover connections between thinking, writing and walking can be traced in Robert Walser's The Walk . These traditions can be found in predecessors such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau , Friedrich Schiller or romantics such as William Wordsworth . Walser contrasts urban strollers like Walter Benjamin, Franz Hessel and Marcel Proust with a walk of their own that reflects on itself. Walser's approaches were further developed by Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke , among others, and are also the basis for promenadology .

In Minima Moralia (1951), the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno put the race as formerly vital in relation to road traffic, which has alienated bourgeois walking. Human dignity insisted on the right to walk, a rhythm that was not determined by horror, as is the case with running. Adorno saw strolling along with the liberal age, even where people don't drive.

In dealing with Søren Kierkegaard, Adorno refers to another form of strolling and refers to a youth publication by Kierkegaard, in which Johannes Climacus , the later pseudonym of Kierkegaard, who takes his point of view, reports on how his father forbade him to leave the apartment, and Instead, suggested that he make “exits in the room” and walk around the apartment: the strollers walking around the room. According to Adorno, reality is reflected here by inwardness. According to Adorno, the pictures of interiors in the early Kierkegaard speak of the power of things. The interior is the real space and at the same time indicates the metaphorical interior of the philosophy of Kierkegaard. The reflection here belongs directly to the interior. For Adorno, the interior is both a sign of deception and a heuristic instrument for establishing the truth. It is both a symptom of bias in bourgeois inwardness and a historical category that must be analyzed in order to gain knowledge. Walter Benjamin also mentions this form of strolling around the apartment.

Recently, there has also been talk of the end of strolling , for example in Handke (1980), which refers to the impossibility of strolling in the post-industrial, accelerated city.

The new medium of film, with its montage techniques, offers new possibilities to depict the perceptual conditions in time and space in the big city, also by quickly crowding together changing images. A new kind of intermedia perspective on the flaneur between film art, literature and poetry can be found in Wim Wenders and Peter Handke's film Der Himmel über Berlin (1987). The gaze of the angels, who can look into the houses and thoughts of people in their everyday life, is the wandering gaze of the strollers, as it is exemplarily described by Walter Benjamin: He is a loner who walks through the streets and takes notes and is looking for the meaning of his life or the meaning of a moment in his life. This moment is understood there not only as a sequence of past, present and future, but also as a moment of amazement at people's everyday lives regardless of time and place. This gaze is represented in the film by a large looking eye, which is faded in after the opening sequence with the hand writing the poem. Here clear references and further developments of the stroller can be seen in comparison to Peter Handke's The Weight of the World (1977), which is written in the form of diary entries of a traveling stroller. The strolling of angels through the city and the thoughts of mortals are contrasted by the figure of Homer, who is not a stroller but a narrator and as a memory researcher in search of lost time. It symbolizes the loss of meaning of coherent storytelling in modern times. The apartment of the angels in the film is the Berlin State Library , which is “ Hades ” and “Heaven” in Gottfried Benn's poem State Library (1925) . For Benn, encyclopaedic and narrative facts of the books are only of secondary importance in this poem, only their suggestive sound counts, the State Library is seen as an intoxicating “sentence brothel”. In the State Library, the angels stand behind the readers and watch them leaf through . As the narrator, Homer modifies the Iliad and, although also leafing through books, can - in contrast to the angels as strollers - be understood as the angel of the story, whose task is not to stroll but to remember the duty to tell.

Despite the proclaimed end of strolling, the flexible perspective within the big city remains in literature, even if it shifts towards postmodern needs. The aimless movement of the strollers turns into a movement in a labyrinthine city and the anonymous strollers into the identityless, as for example in Christian Krachts Faserland 1995. Albrecht Selge in Wach (2010) connects the figure of the stroller with insomnia. The sleepless old-fashioned flaneur has a modern form here. Even in the present, the stroll remains one of the great themes of art. Current video works use the most modern technical means to drift through city map worlds as their own images.

A new term related to the flaneur is the phoneur , which also moves in urban space with mobile technology. The Phoneur is an active user of the city's information network, which is fundamental to contemporary urbanism and as such is always connected to the data network and at the same time in virtual space. The new phenomenon of the phone course is being discussed today in the context of globalization discussions in sociology since the 1990s.

The writer Alain Claude Sulzer , among others, sees the development of the Internet as a new kind of digital flaneur, whose thoughts on the Internet get stuck on a wide variety of things due to the “flood of connections”. The digital flaneur hangs lost in the net and jumps from one object to another in the search engines and encyclopedias, which have meanwhile gone beyond the scope of world knowledge based on books.

In current cultural studies research, with reference to concepts such as the homo ludens, strolling is also examined in connection with new media such as computer games , in which one can wander aimlessly.

See also

literature

Secondary literature

  • Harald Neumeyer: The flaneur. Conceptions of Modernity (=  Epistemata. Series Literary Studies . Volume 252 ). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1999, ISBN 3-8260-1468-5 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  • Matthias Keidel: The return of the strollers . Literary strolling and strolling thinking between perception and reflection (=  Epistemata. Series Literary Studies . Volume 536 ). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2006, ISBN 3-8260-3193-8 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  • Jan Rhein: Strollers in contemporary literature. Réda , Wackwitz , Pamuk , Nooteboom (=  literature - culture - text. Small writings on literary studies . Volume 7 ). Tectum, Marburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-8288-2183-5 .
  • Felix Butzlaff , Robert Mueller-Stahl : Three clowns in Berlin. Strollers in the big city and society. In: Indes. Journal for Politics and Society , issue 2/2015, pp. 70–79.

Web links

Wiktionary: Flaneur  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Aminatta Forna: Power Walking . In: Literary Hub .
  2. ↑ James Wood, The Art of Storytelling. Reinbek 2011. Third chapter: Flaubert and the birth of the flaneur
  3. ↑ a b Max Beck: Joseph Roth, a flaneur? . In: literaturkritik.de . 19th of August 2013.
  4. ^ A b Patrick Bahners : Exhibition in the art museum. The flaneur is not rewarded in Bonn. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . October 1, 2018, accessed August 8, 2019 .
  5. ^ Walter Benjamin: The passage work . In: Rolf Tiedemann (Ed.): Walter Benjamin. Collected Writings . 1st edition. tape 5 , no. 1 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-518-28535-1 , pp. 530 ( 5 / page / n527 / mode / 1up Textarchiv - Internet Archive ).
  6. ↑ Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time . On the way to Swann. In: In Search of Lost Time . Frankfurt edition. 1st edition. tape 1 . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-518-74364-5 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  7. ↑ Hans-Horst Henschen : Apollinaire, Guillaume. The loiter on both banks . In: Walter Jens (Ed.): Kindlers New Literature Lexicon . tape 1 . Komet, Frechen 1988, ISBN 3-89836-214-0 .
  8. ↑ Ulrich Ernst: Experimental Macro Aesthetics . Book artistic cycles with Carmina figurata from Simias from Rhodes to Guillaume Apollinaire. In: Klaus Schenk, Anne Hultsch, Alice Stašková (eds.): Experimental poetry in Central Europe . Texts - contexts - material - space. V&R Unipress, Göttingen 2016, ISBN 978-3-8470-0364-9 , p. 62 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  9. ↑ Essay by Iris Bäcker (see web links), p. 105.
  10. ↑ Annie Pfeifer, Reto Sorg (ed.): "I have to go for a walk". Robert Walser and the culture of walking (=  Robert Walser Studies . Volume 1 ). 1st edition. Wilhelm Fink, Paderborn 2019, ISBN 978-3-8467-6377-3 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  11. ^ Theodor W. Adorno : Minima Moralia. Reflections from the damaged life . In: Collected writings in 20 volumes . tape 4 . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-518-75059-9 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  12. ^ Theoder W. Adorno: Kierkegaard. Construction of the aesthetic . Constitution of inwardness. In: Rolf Tiedemann (ed.): Theoder W. Adorno: Gesammelte Schriften . tape 2 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-518-07492-X , p. 60-61 .
  13. ↑ Annette Simonis: Literary Aestheticism . Theory of arabesque and hermetic communication in modern times. Ed .: Fritz Nies , Wilhelm Vosskamp , Yves Chevrel, Reinhart Koselleck (=  Communicatio. Studies on European literary and cultural history . Volume 23 ). De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-093396-3 , pp. 566 ( limited preview in the Google book search - reprint of the edition of Max Niemeyer Verlag Tübingen 2000).
  14. ^ Walter Benjamin: The passage work . In: Rolf Tiedemann (ed.): Walter Benjamin: Collected writings . 1st edition. tape 5 , no. 1 . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1991, ISBN 3-518-28535-1 , pp. 530 ( 5 / page / n527 / mode / 1up Das Passagen-Werk  in the  text archive - Internet Archive ).
  15. ^ A b Stephanie Wodianka, Juliane Ebert: Flaneur . In: Stephanie Wodianka, Juliane Ebert (Hrsg.): Metzler Lexicon of Modern Myths . Figures, concepts, events. JB Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2014, ISBN 978-3-476-02364-3 , p. 133–135 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  16. ↑ Harald Neumeyer: The Flaneur. Conceptions of Modernity (=  Epistemata. Series Literary Studies . Volume 252 ). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1999, ISBN 3-8260-1468-5 , p. 183 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  17. ↑ a b Simone Malaguti: Intermedial relationships in the film Der Himmel über Berlin . In: Revista Contingentia . tape 5 , no. 1 , 2010, ISSN  1980-7589 , p. 20–40 , urn : nbn: de: hebis: 30: 3-257943 .
  18. ^ Matthias Keidel: The return of the strollers . Literary strolling and strolling thinking between perception and reflection (=  Epistemata. Series Literary Studies . Volume 536 ). Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2006, ISBN 3-8260-3193-8 ( limited preview in the Google book search).
  19. ↑ a b c Michael Braun : The angel of the story. Wim Wenders “The Sky Over Berlin” . In: media observations . February 4, 2019. ISSN  1612-7315 , urn : nbn: de: 101: 1-2019020412395951594784 .
  20. ↑ Jan Rhein: Flaneurs in contemporary literature. Réda , Wackwitz , Pamuk , Nooteboom (=  literature - culture - text. Small writings on literary studies . Volume 7 ). Tectum, Marburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-8288-2183-5 .
  21. ↑ Wolfgang Emmerich : Benn's Bacchic Epiphanien and their denials . In: Friederike Reents (Ed.): Gottfried Benns Modernität . Wallstein, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 3-8353-0151-9 , p. 100 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  22. ↑ Isabel Maurer Queipo: Sleep in literature . In: Alfred Krovoza, Christine Walde (Ed.): Dream and sleep. An interdisciplinary manual . JB Metzler, Stuttgart 2018, ISBN 978-3-476-05356-5 , pp. 108 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  23. ↑ Ulrich Rüdenauer : Endless carriages. In Albrecht Selge's novel “Flying”, a woman spends her life on Deutsche Bahn trains. It is lost to the world in the process. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung . March 15, 2019, accessed August 8, 2019 .
  24. ^ Corinna Pape: Learning finds the city. The urban space as a transmedia playground . In: Gerhard Chr. Bukow, Benjamin Jörissen, Johannes Fromme (eds.): Space, Time, Media Education . Investigations into media changes in our relationship to space and time (= Johannes Fromme, Sonja Ganguin , Stefan Iske, Dorothee Meister , Uwe Sander [Eds.]: Medienbildung und Gesellschaft . Volume 23 ). Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2012, ISBN 978-3-531-18471-5 , p. 159–160 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  25. ↑ Robert Luke: The Phoneur. Mobile Commerce and the Digital Pedagogies of the Wireless Web . In: Peter Trifonas (Ed.): Communities of Difference. Culture, Language, Technology . Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2005, ISBN 1-4039-6326-6 , pp. 185–204 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  26. ^ John Rennie Short: Globalization, Modernity and the City (=  Routledge Studies in Human Geography . Volume 36 ). Routledge, New York 2012, ISBN 978-0-415-67692-2 , pp. 139 (English, limited preview in Google Book search).
  27. ↑ Alain Claude Sulzer: The flaneur has fun in the electric pool. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . October 17, 2019, accessed August 12, 2019 .
  28. ^ Steven E. Jones, The Meaning of Video Games . Gaming and Textual Strategies. Taylor & Francis, New York / London 2008, ISBN 978-0-203-92992-6 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search).
  29. ↑ Bernhard Runzheimer: The digital strolling as reflexive space exploration in computer games . In: Journal Film and Television Studies Colloquium ffk . No. 2 . Avinus-Verlag, 2017, ISSN  2512-8086 ( ffk-journal.de [PDF; 11.6 MB ]).