Introduction
Berlin was the city which gave a context for Georg Simmel’s essay on The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), being also the birthplace of Walter Benjamin and of Franz Hessel, who attempted to be a flâneur in the city. Simmel the sociologist and Benjamin the critic, who wrote Berlin Childhood around 1900(1932–1938), are two of the most decisive writers for considering cities as creating new modes of experience, and of being, and that idea gives a special color to Berlin, alongside Paris, the city with which Berlin competed. It is perhaps one of the most mythicized cities in literature and history and culture. Its streets and buildings have been the most renamed, on account of its several histories: as a young capital (1871) in contrast with others in Europe; as a city which has been seen as very Prussian – Prussia as a separate territory was abolished in 1947 – as German, especially by the Nazis, who wanted to call it “Germania,” and who planned huge building works, of...
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References
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Tambling, J. (2020). Berlin: An Overview. In: Tambling, J. (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62592-8_149-1
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