Many have remarked over the decades on how ugly Berlin is. As the novelist Daniel Kehlmann wrote: “Berlin is not pretty. You should know that beforehand.” Even before World War II, commentators found the German metropolis repulsive: smog-choked, industrial, garish.
But not the designer and architect August Endell (1871-1925), a probing writer who lived in Berlin during its Wilhelmine boom. Originally translated for the now-defunct Rixdorf Editions, Endell’s The Beauty of the Metropolis is being given new life. His lengthy essay takes in Berlin’s bustling intersections, streets teeming with working-class tenements, jangling tram lines.
He observes with the eye of a naturalist and artist – Endell was among the founders of the Jungendstil arts movement – and embraces modernity in a rejection of jingoistic nostalgia for village life. This isn’t a roving report on Berlin streetlife (for that, I recommend Franz Hessel) but a meditation on aesthetics, shot through with theoretical musings and engaged in turn-of-the-century debates.
It’s an intriguing if tricky inquiry into a Berlin that’s both wildly foreign – horse-pulled coaches clank across the cobblestones, the kaiser looms about town – and still familiar.
- The Beauty of the Metropolis by August Endell (trans. James J Conway) is available from University of Toronto Press, details.
