Berlin – antologia z ograniczoną odpowiedzialnością

Edward Soja used Borges`s idea of El Alleph (a set of all places) to describe Los Angeles. I refer to El Alleph as a starting point in order to reveal the phenomenon of Berlin and I propose to read this city as a palimpsest and a magic set of signs. This perspective is related to the rapid transformations that occurred in the present capital of Germany in the 19th and 20th centuries. In an essay The Poem of the City, devoted to New York, John Hollander points out that the city is a figure of poetry and compares the metropolis of New York to an anthology. Similarly, my text was conceived as an anthology of the most interesting statements on Berlin, (among others: the cover of “Der Spiegel”, Brecht’s letters, opinions by Walter Ruttmann, Franz Hessel, Gottfried Benn, Friedrich Seidenstucker, Robert Walser, Julian Tuwim, Witold Gombrowicz), the “city-symphony”.