David Wagner
Why Walk When You Can Stroll?

David Wagner is a city walker, a flâneur. He writes about what he sees, experiences, perceives on his walks; about major projects like Berlin’s new retro airport, but also about a private detective who’s fallen asleep in his office.
 

By Holger Moos

© Verbrecher In literature, flâneurs are characters who stroll relatively aimlessly through cities, observing and reflecting on their surroundings. They pay homage to deceleration, resisting the dictates of purposeful movement and the need to reach a goal as quickly as possible.

David Wagner is just such a flâneur. He has lived in Berlin for about 30 years and loves taking walks. Following Welche Farbe hat Berlin (2011) and Mauer Park (2013), he’s published another Berlin book in which he puts his observations and experiences into literary form called Verlaufen in Berlin (Getting Lost in Berlin).

where’s he off to now?

Wagner walks through Berlin and watches lives, including his own. He sees dead birds at the retro airport, observes voucher distributors or overhears tradesmen talking about panorama cabins on cruise ships. He visits the Schlangenbader Straße motorway superstructure, popularly known as the Schlange, and the so-called Bierpinsel, a futuristic tower with a restaurant in Steglitz. Several times in his writing, he revels about Tegel Airport, closed in 2020, where one could so wonderfully walk in circles.

They are often melancholy, nostalgic glimpses into a present that remind the flâneur of the past and the transience of all things. A familiar Kaiser’s supermarket is transformed into an Edeka with a new assortment. But even the Edeka had no future: In 2020, the building, one of the last former East Berlin department stores, was demolished. In place of the Palace of the Republic, an architectural GDR relic, comes first the temporary Humboldt Box, which looks like “a nuclear power plant secured against leaking radiation,” before a replica of Berlin’s City Palace finally seals off the socialist past.

Light-footed and wide-ranging

We also learn about the circles in which David Wagner moves. Writer Michael Rutschky, who died in 2018, was one of Wagner’s walking companions. On their last walk together, Rutschky points to an old building where a man lives who often goes about shouting. Mostly it was about dogs or Angela Merkel. But with “resigned tolerance,” he could put up with it.

The bohemian and decadent nature of Berlin’s intellectual milieu shines through in another essay. Wagner is invited by acquaintances to a housewarming in a splendidly renovated old Kreuzberg flat with a so-called Berlin room – a room that connects the front building with the side wing or the side wing with the rear house. As is often the case on such occasions, there’s a lot of talk about flats in general and the luxury issues surrounding said Berlin rooms in particular. “You’ve got to make use of a passageway room somehow... Hansi put his grand piano there.” Some of us would like to have such problems.

In his light-footed and wide-ranging different sort of Berlin guidebook, Wagner takes us through the history of the city as well as stories from his own past. For him, the small things always mean just as much as the big.