Proponents of Europe and reason of the Enlightenment saw themselves as universal and often dismissed Jews as parochial.Footnote ¹ The appeal to reason compelled Jews into the modernizing discourse and politics as part of the tacit deal in exchange for civic improvements. Jews in Germany ultimately only acquired full equality in the newly created German nation state of 1871. Their incorporation coincided with Germany’s nation-building along with a pervasive social and cultural form of colonization of regional, social, and cultural and religious minorities on the margins of a largely Protestant German nation-state.Footnote ² Those who resisted the logic of colonization of their cultures became the object of bureaucratic pressure, social activism, and political action. In the midst of fashioning Germany’s first nation-state, the government, its bureaucracy and intellectuals unleashed an attempt to colonize Socialists, Catholics, and Jews.

For the German historian Detlev Peukert, the margin marked the boundary of the “modern project.” The margins occurred in what he called the “Gleichschaltung” of particularity and nonconformity and the “colonization of life-worlds” (Kolonisierung der Lebenswelten).Footnote ³ Peukert’s wording is not coincidental. The colonization of life-worlds, the erasure of particularities exhibited a totalitarian desire to establish homogeneity. National Socialist policy forged total coordination, control, and uniformity to establish as Peukert argued “an [sic] utopian Volksgemeinschaft … in which any attempt at nonconformist behavior, or even any hint or intention of such behavior, would be visited with terror.”Footnote ⁴ Arguing in a slightly different manner, Zygmunt Baumann in his Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) interprets the Holocaust not as an aberration, but sees modernity’s rationality and efficiency to have provided the necessary conditions.Footnote ⁵

Within these historical fault lines culminating in the Third Reich, Jews already are perceived to have inhabited the role as the quintessential Other. They function as the Other of Western Christian and German culture.Footnote ⁶ Contrary to these views, relations between Jews and Christians remained more ambiguous. The enlightened Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn aptly captured this when he defended Judaism against its enlightened challengers: “If it be true that the cornerstones of my house are dislodged, and the structure threatens to collapse, do I act wisely if I remove my belonging from the lower to the upper floor for safety?”Footnote ⁷ The occupant of the lower level is not an outsider. His status is that of an insider and outsider.

In the aftermath of the World War II and the Holocaust, postcolonialism and postmodernism questioned the epistemological foundation of modernity. Peukert’s view was informed by a historical discourse on Germany’s political left, which drew on the first critical responses of the Third Reich and the Holocaust, most notably the Frankfurt School and Hannah Arendt. These philosophers invariably furnished postcolonial thinkers with their critical perspective on modernity. The different strands of post-Holocaust philosophies illuminated the discursive practices and the coercive power of modernity. They called into question its foundation and unearthed moments of resistance. Even before the Holocaust, German Jews had investigated the limits of modernity and reason. Jewish philosophers like Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem all in their different ways questioned the universal claims of modernity. They belonged to a generation of German Jews in Germany that existed not solely as outsiders. Rather, as Peter Gay famously claimed, the outsiders were the true insiders of Weimar culture.Footnote ⁸

To Jews on the social margins of German society, the crisis of modernity during the Weimar Republic engendered deep social, political, and cultural changes, in addition to creating possibilities for social mobility. Boundaries between territories, masculinity, and femininity, in addition to popular and high culture, mark the many contentious lines of Weimar’s modernity. Problems of cultural modernity, social modernization, and mass political movement intersected and propelled writers to consider their relationship to the new mass culture of the world of consumer goods, as well as the new media and conflicting political ideologies.Footnote ⁹ Writing from the social margins but from the cultural center, German Jewish travelers often pluralized modernity on and from the borders. Their travelogues articulated their affection for Paris in the aftermath of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles, marking them as border crossers in multiple ways. Embracing Paris entailed a confession for Europe against nationalistic ideologies and the potential threat of Americanization or Soviet culture. Visiting Paris and writing longingly about the French capital in major German newspapers represented a thinly veiled attempt to remap Weimar’s modernity from across the French-German border. Far from being simply a pleasurable experience, visiting the French capital was not static and reflected the changing status of Berlin in their respective imaginations. Pleasure requires stability and certainty. This was neither attainable for the central European travelers of the highly politicized and conflicted Weimar Republic, nor was it for German Jews who had been forced into exile in the 1930s.

Nevertheless, crossing the Rhine and visiting Paris created temporarily new possibilities to think about modernity, communities, cultures, and identities. Notwithstanding the conflicts and tension and blurring of boundaries of high and popular cultures, the traveling writers remained confident in their ability to experience and represent their version of Paris. They did not question the status of a city, its multifaceted qualities and constantly changing nature, but largely believed that their individual experiences and observations authenticated and validated their representation of the city. Traveling thus became an important cultural practice for travelers and their readers and articulated a sense of belonging beyond the nation-state.

The encounter with the French capital was different for German Jews as compared to a visiting black Antillean, “who feels the call of Europe like a breath of fresh air.”Footnote ¹⁰ To this visitor, Paris was not only the “holy of holies” but also where “his departmental superiors, and innumerable little potentates came from. . . .” Visiting Paris is both potentially empowering and also always mutilating, Martinique-born Afro-Caribbean philosopher, Frantz Fanon, writes.Footnote ¹¹ Jamaican-American writer Claude McKay equally felt degraded and exploited in Paris. He remained unmoved by Paris, which, “has never stormed my stubborn heart/ And rushed like champagne to my head.” Seeing Paris not as a city of joyous adventures but as the center of an empire, the French capital is a city that builds “the Frenchmen and his mind complete/ And fit him for his civilizing part.”Footnote ¹²

For German Jews, visiting Paris provided a very different experience. For them it was reassuring and often liberating as much as the sociologist Georg Simmel noted that “wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and thus the conceptional opposite to fixation at such a point.”Footnote ¹³ What Simmel describes here—the key elements of the stranger who does not belong—often became a key feature of the traveler. Similarly, the perceptive sociologist of the Weimar Republic, Siegfried Kracauer, observed that travel “granted access to the Beyond.”Footnote ¹⁴ Walter Benjamin recounts an anecdote about Kant, where his assistant, who struggles to connect philosophy with theology, asks the philosopher for guidance. Kant advises his assistant in the following manner: “Read travel literature.”Footnote ¹⁵

Traveling was both a commodified leisure activity and held great promise to the Weimar Jewish travelers. The explorers and travelers intensely reflected on their practice to distinguish themselves from mere leisure travel. Egon Erwin Kisch, who was born in 1885 in Prague into a middle-class German Jewish family, wanted to unmask an alienated vision of reality with his travel exploration. Following a new tone of “new objectivity” (neue Sachlichkeit), his reports invited readers to participate in the process of constructing meaning by abstaining from logical interconnection, crafting surprising juxtapositions, and creating an atmosphere of separation and contrast.Footnote ¹⁶ Franz Hessel sought to resurrect nineteenth-century aesthetic experience of city strolls. Walter Benjamin’s writings critically investigate the figure of flaneur to overcome the aesthetic experimental quality of slumming that Hessel strove to revive. Joseph Roth believed that minute details of life are significant and allow exposing from the particular the general.Footnote ¹⁷ Roth captures in his strolls a disjointed montage of coexisting fragments that amount to a portrayal of “all its absurdity and triviality.”Footnote ¹⁸ These travelers’ shared concern for literature and sociological exploration made them critical of established patterns of commodified tours and travel writings. Their accounts provided not only important information for curious readers, but related and narrated multifaceted, highly individualized experiences.

Many of the famed Weimar flaneurs traversed the vaunted discourse of modernity by traveling and undoing links between space and people, countries and cities. Their crossing of borders and engagement with Paris sought to denaturalize links between territory and identity. Their explorations of Paris were part of their wider critical engagement with modernity through their travels and writings. Visiting Paris was one of the many destinations including London, the Soviet Union, America, and Palestine that represented different manifestations of modernity.Footnote ¹⁹ Together these routes and explorations aided what Aamir Mufti formulated in his Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (2009) to “question any settled identification of this place with this people and this language.”Footnote ²⁰

Following German Jewish travelers to Paris becomes a way to rethink the concept of diaspora that often is still conceptualized solely in relation to a former home.Footnote ²¹ The Boyarins charged critics like Stuart Hall for reducing the Jewish diaspora to the Zionist project. Instead, they advocate the extent to which the Zionists infused the diaspora and the ways in which Jews’ longing for Cordoba, Cairo, or Vilna served to celebrate Zion.Footnote ²² Less noticed is the extent to which diasporic traveling articulated alternating versions of modernity. Diasporas are in the words of Avtar Brah “ ‘inhabited’ not only by those who have migrated and their descendants but equally by those who are constructed and represented as indigenous. In other words, the concept of diaspora space (as opposed to that of diaspora) includes the entanglement of genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put.’”Footnote ²³

Writing about modern capitals like Paris became a way to temporarily belong to them, to reimagine modernity, and to fashion a new diverse and inclusive cosmopolitanism that grounded the itinerant identities of frequent Weimar travelers. Writing from Paris in 1925, the German Jewish journalist Kurt Tucholsky, who had become a foreign correspondent to the Weltbühne und die Vossische Zeitung, observes: “Emigrants. In Paris there are many of them.”Footnote ²⁴ For Germans, Paris, London, and New York played important roles as cultural, social, and economic markers of modernity to compare and contrast with Berlin.Footnote ²⁵

Visiting Paris and surveying cities during the modern period has often been associated with the figure of the flaneur, the observing city stroller, who drifted aimlessly through urban spaces, a fin-de-siècle dandy who explored European cities in search of bustle, gossip, and beauty. For Walter Benjamin, modern Paris had created the flaneur as a distinct social type.Footnote ²⁶ The flaneur appears as intimately tied up with the emergence of a new consumer culture and the creation of the city as a spectacle. Whereas the original flaneur assumed, in Mary Gluck’s distinction, “that Paris, or at any rate Europe, was the center of modernity and that he could not exist anywhere else in the world,” Charles Baudelaire’s “avant-garde flaneur” had become a “man of the world and . . . a great traveler, who felt at home in all parts of the globe.”Footnote ²⁷

Instead of the idealized version of mid-nineteenth-century flaneur, the explorer of cities of the turn of the century exhibited a problematic relationship to his surroundings and an almost “tragic belatedness.”Footnote ²⁸ Contrary to the stable subject position of the flaneur, the urban explorer of the twentieth century walks out of his subject position to experience and situates himself in a different manner. This quality is particularly visible in what came to be known as “slumming.”Footnote ²⁹ If already for the flaneur, the city and its goods had become increasingly a place of exotic goods, slumming involved mobility across class and ethnic divides. Slumming in a foreign city meant walking the boundaries of gender, class, and, nationality, and ethnicity.

Paris had already intrigued German Jews for almost a century. In the nineteenth century, Heinrich Heine had called the city on the Seine “the beautiful magical city.”Footnote ³⁰ In the French capital, Heine sought out museums, libraries, salons, cafes, and above all, the streets of the city: “In Paris, I experience many great things, I see world history with my own eyes, I freely associate with the greatest heroes,” as he proudly writes to Friedrich Merckel in 1832.Footnote ³¹ In letter from December 11, 1841, he also noted that Christmas shopping might provide pleasant pastime for the “idle flaneur.” In a more critical mode, he continues by saying that if the brains of the flaneur are not entirely vacant, he might also have some thoughts and notice the passers-by, whose faces are “ugly, serious, and suffering, impatient and threatening.” Heine thus critically engages the figure of the flaneur from the perspective of his self-absorption in the spectacle of commodities, while neglecting to see the misery that surrounds it.

Heine’s observations of the city are never devoid of political ambitions. In his Ludwig Börne: A Memorial (1840), composed in Paris, he imagines himself standing on the Rue Lafitte in rose-red tights at night. The self-fashioning in tights as Spartan leader Leonidas served Heine to reclaim literature’s political aspirations. In his dreamlike post, Heine is surrounded by “stock-jobbers, gamblers and many other low-lives” that the socially constructed and segregated city increasingly marginalizes.

His fantasy, inspired by Jacques-Louis David’s Leonidas aux Thermoplylae paintings, already knows of despair, when he is “awaiting the battle, and meanwhile the flowers are fading on my head.”Footnote ³² Employing the Spartan leader of the last three hundred warriors serves not to articulate the place of Jews in modernity, but rather Heine’s position on the street. Being on the street, Heine repopulates the city in the name of those who are marginalized. Taking the street and strolling was much more than an idle pastime; it was in fact an imminently political act.

The political nature of traveling to Paris became even more a truism for German Jewish visitors in the aftermath of World War I and the Treaty of Versailles. Franz Hessel, whose parents had converted to Protestantism, moved to the French capital in 1906. Visiting Paris at the end of World War I entailed confession for French culture. He recalls in his Pariser Romanze: Papiere eines Verschollenen (1920), a collection of letters written while serving during World War I, how he was always visiting Paris in his dreams. In his dreams he sought to recall an ideal of Paris.Footnote ³³ Hessel, who had during World War I commenced with his work Parisian Romances, likewise sought refuge in a city that he could not visit: “Can I not be in the world to which I belong, so I hear in the wires/railings, grids, grates spin myself in memories.”Footnote ³⁴ In his strolls through Paris, he preferred to find the old Paris, which had increasingly vanished and given way to the new Paris.Footnote ³⁵ Hessel’s imaginary recollection of Paris recalled the Parisian bohemia and avant-garde to counter the image of war and conflict. Notwithstanding the political desire that structures Hessel’s narrator’s, Arnold Waechter’s, strolls, wandering through the streets is conceptualized as an undirected experience. Contrary to Heine, Hessel’s strolls appear liberated from any purpose or responsibility. They aim to give solace and compensate in the face of historical and social challenges. “Paris is the city, where nothing ever ends, where the past continues to live. Paris is always present and memory.”Footnote ³⁶ The past never seemed to have quite the same reassuring quality for Benjamin. Viewing himself in a world in which ideologies like Marxism had already lost their appeal, Benjamin’s excavations of Paris during the 1930s were marked by an overwhelming and apocalyptic sense of crisis and despair. Despite these profound differences, Benjamin contemplated collaborating with Hessel. Their initial sketches included the Parisian ghetto, which remained part of Benjamin’s large and unfinished Arcades project.Footnote ³⁷

In the immediate aftermath of the war, there was an overarching sense of relief in travelogues as already evidenced by Hessel’s publication. Visiting France in the year of the Versailles Treaty, 1919, the German Jewish theater critic and writer Alfred Kerr confessed: “I have always loved France. It would be an idiocy, to deny the beauty of a country and a city once you had found it unspeakably lovely. The world war is not reason to cowardly cover it up.”Footnote ³⁸ Paris remained the most beautiful city on earth for Kerr, and he was more eager than ever to roam its streets after his years of absence from the French capital.Footnote ³⁹ The experience of war only intensified his longing for the past. What attracted Kerr to the French capital was the sense that the old still existed within its landscape. He saw something that came from Athens to Paris, which, however, he believed was doomed to fall victim to Anglicization and Americanization.Footnote ⁴⁰ Far from just presenting a city in tune with its past, traveling to Paris was liberating. To Kerr, Paris was also attractive in a very personal sense. He felt that he was able to say anything he wanted in Paris.Footnote ⁴¹

A few years later, he still believed that the city captured its visitors.Footnote ⁴² He regarded the many cards at Heine’s grave as indicative of the universal recognition of the German Jewish poet.Footnote ⁴³ His enchantment with Paris, however, made him wary of Germany and Berlin. To him Berlin was shrouded in uncertainty. Whereas everything is in the making in Berlin, Paris is already made.Footnote ⁴⁴ Returning finally to Germany, he wondered whether he might rather turn to Hamburg instead of Berlin. The capital, he believed, was an unfortunate “German mistake.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Kerr’s travelogue articulates the longing of crisis-ridden Berlin. Paris offered freedom and stability, whereas the politically charged and economic strained conditions of Berlin created uncertainty. Other German Jewish travelers like Siegfried Kracauer echoed Kerr’s observations. Paris exists in Kracauer’s imagination as the counterpart to Berlin. Whereas he critically assessed modern aesthetics and Berlin’s culture as a reflection of capitalist rational economy, Paris healed the visitor. It is impossible for people from Berlin to walk the streets and boulevards with the same speed. There is a “compulsion to be a flaneur” in Paris, which cannot be renewed in Berlin. When he returned in 1931 to Berlin after a few days in Paris, the German capital appears as dangerously looming and paradoxically alluring: “Slowly we are driving into the nightly city, which appears more threatening, tattered, massive, closed and promising than ever before.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Critical of mass culture as an aesthetic reflex of capitalist rationality, he viewed photography as the destroyer of tradition and memory, much like Walter Benjamin did. Kracauer noticed that larger metropolitan centers in the world increasingly appeared the same. Paris served to Kracauer as the nemesis of Berlin, where accelerated change created historical amnesia.Footnote ⁴⁷ In Paris he found alternatives to modernity’s ravages in the recovery of the city’s past.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the French capital, modernity revealed itself within its historical layers: “in Paris the present has the shimmer of the past.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Favoring poorer districts, he unearthed intersecting streets where he still encountered the past inside the present.Footnote ⁵⁰

The infatuation with Paris stems from a sense of crisis of radical modernity of Berlin. Ensuing Americanization of wider consumer culture, historical discontinuity and amnesia, political conflict, and economic difficulties rendered Berlin as less desirable. Being in Paris stabilizes the identity of the travelers and modern Europeans, whereas Berlin undermines this sense of themselves. Their fascination for Paris only heightened their critical perspective on Berlin. This was equally true for Tucholsky, who initially participated in the effort to fashion a democratic society, but became dismayed and withdrew. In 1923, in one of his smaller articles, he hinted at his desire to leave for Paris.Footnote ⁵¹ Like other Weimar travelers, Tucholsky became enamored. The entire city celebrated the July 14th holiday without any imperialistic or military posturing.Footnote ⁵² Moreover, it was a city that was composed of its past. Its modernization, he believed, had not erased older layers of the past. Tucholsky considered Haussmann’s profound transformation of the city very sensible, particularly in comparison to Berlin.Footnote ⁵³ He also identified more with the poorer districts of the city than with its more famous tourist sides. Yet in Paris he became at odds with the pervasive perception of the city on the Seine as the den of sexual iniquity.Footnote ⁵⁴ Traveling through France became for Tucholsky a process of self-discovery.Footnote ⁵⁵

Stefan Zweig echoed the joyous assessment, when he wrote in 1932 that only in Paris have people savored life encouraged from the “beauty of the surroundings, the mild climate, the wealth of and tradition.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Zweig shared with his Austrian fellowman, writer and journalist Joseph Roth, nostalgia for the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, a critical attitude toward America, and an unrestricted praise for Paris. To Joseph Roth, France appeared as a counterweight to Germany and represented continuity, tradition, and tolerance for cultural diversity.

When in 1925 Roth was assigned the role of foreign correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, he resided in Paris. Roth had become a very successful writer in the German capital. He chronicled in many of his writings the sights and sounds of Berlin’s modernity. Yet in 1924 he expressed his longing for both Paris and Prague. He wanted to reside on Sundays in Paris and during the week in Prague, a city where one does not have to have roots but which is the home of the homeless. In Berlin, he views his life as sitting in the waiting room of a train station, trying to make money to leave.Footnote ⁵⁷

Once he arrived in the French capital and France became the realm for his rediscovery, he moved increasingly closer to Catholicism. He viewed “Paris as the capital of the world” and exuberantly exclaimed, “Whoever has not been here is only half human, and no sort of European.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Paris represented bridges and crossing between cultures. The city was both French, free, Catholic and “a European expression of Judaism.”Footnote ⁵⁹ To him it was the “summit of European civilization.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Roth enlisted Jews into the culture of the capital that he partook to celebrate on Bastille Day. He enthusiastically recalled the celebration of July 14th in the French capital.Footnote ⁶¹ During the beginning of 1920s, Roth increasingly and with distance captured the growing presence of American culture in the German capital.Footnote ⁶² He became, however, increasingly critical of this trend and saw America as the nemesis of Paris. In an article on the celebration of July 14 in Paris, he described in 1925 “America over Paris” in the shape of a large advertisement balloon. The balloon became a haunting presence of America in Paris and made him feel “a sense of darkness.”Footnote ⁶³

In Roth’s account of Paris, Jews are prominently featured. Whereas for the other authors Paris became a means through which they asserted their modern European identities, Roth layered his narrative of Paris with descriptions of Eastern European Jews. To him, Paris, unlike Vienna or Berlin, had become a truly metropolitan city that was much more enjoyable than Berlin: “There’s no fun in Berlin. But fun rules in Paris” and the Jewish restaurants, which, unlike those of Berlin’s barn district, were “merry, warm, and noisy.”Footnote ⁶⁴ In the Jewish inns of Paris, Eastern European Jews spoke a cheerful “gibberish.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Gender too mattered here, when Roth singled out Jewish women for criticism. In Paris, he argued, pleasure came at a price, when Roth presented women as the major promoters of assimilation.Footnote ⁶⁶

Considering the importance of Paris for many traveling German Jewish writers of the Weimar Republic, it was only natural for many of them to leave Nazi Germany for Paris. They did not have to wait for the actual burning of books by Jewish, Communist, and pacifist writers on May 10, 1933. Overnight German Jewish literature was in exile and with that almost all of the famed Weimar travel writers. Travel eventually folded into exile, when Alfred Polgar, for example, published 1939 in the exiled German newspaper Pariser Tageszeitung an article titled “In der Fremde”; in it, he stated, “The longer you stay in a foreign place, the more foreign it becomes.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Many Weimar travel writers had already been uprooted and become permanently itinerant. Their travels and strolls had reflected their desires as well as their failures to locate a place for themselves anywhere. But to be uprooted is not identical to being exiled. Travel remains ultimately voluntary; exile is coerced and transforms the traveler into a refugee, whose status as Edward Said points out is legally defined.Footnote ⁶⁸ Leaving Nazi Germany was never voluntary but always political as the Jewish philosopher Günther Anders (1902–1992) acknowledged in 1933.Footnote ⁶⁹ During the 1920s, Joseph Roth aptly captured the difference between travelers and refugees, saying the latter were “travelers with a load.” Travelers’ luggage was marked not by their innate nature but rather by their destination. Train wagons dedicated to “travelers with a load” invoked a “philosophical definition” of homelessness, he surmised.Footnote ⁷⁰

During the 1930s, the new status of exile did not immediately become apparent. Exile rested not on legal statuses and political circumstances. It hinged on variables like socio-economic status, ability to travel, and finally the interpretation of the political events that unfolded in Nazi Germany. Together these shifting factors determined the sense of homelessness. Assuredly, exile became a legal and political status. Although it made all other criteria meaningless, it was not always visible to those travelers who remained trapped and without a permanent destination in a state of homelessness during the early 1930s.

Exile was mapped onto established traveling cultures. Routes of refugees initially followed the paths of previous leisure journeys. There was undoubtedly consolation in turning toward familiar cities. After 1933, Paris became the city of home and exile.Footnote ⁷¹ Keen observer Harry Kessler noted in June 1933 that the whole “Kurfürstendamm pours out over Paris.”Footnote ⁷² Many German Jewish writers and artists who had left Nazi Germany moved to Paris. Arriving in Paris brought relief as Herman Kesten writes in a letter to Ernst Toller: “I am enchanted by the city of Paris.” What a dream exile is.” Crossing the border from German to France, “the terror becomes ‘foreign.’”Footnote ⁷³ The city offered solace and reassurance. German Jews went home into exile when they fled to Paris. Many refugees fused past and current experiences to soften the blow of radically new circumstances. Their texts evoke and articulate that which is both foreign and home.Footnote ⁷⁴

Paris was not just exile. It was also political opposition to Nazi Germany. It appeared partly as choice. German exile papers recalled the lives of Heine, Boerne, Marx, and others, as well as their respective views of Paris as the home of liberty.Footnote ⁷⁵ Among the exiled Jews and other Germans, Paris was widely associated with the ideals of the French Revolution. In 1939, Alfred Wolfenstein published a larger collection of articles on Paris in which he celebrates the French as the capital of the spirit and human rights after the failure of the Socialists and Vommunists to effectively oppose Nazi Germany. His poem is a journey through one thousand years of history on liberty of the capital in which he traces Victor Hugo’s introduction to the guide to the Parisian World Exhibition of 1867 that views Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome as precursors to Paris.Footnote ⁷⁶

The famous roving reporter Egon Erwin Kisch turned to the French capital when he published in 1934 Geschichten aus sieben Ghettos with the Amsterdam-based émigrés publishing house Querido. Prague-born Kisch, who had been imprisoned by the Nazis after the fire of the national parliament and then expelled, had become homeless. The collection of essays on various ghettos entailed the short chapter titled “Notes from the Parisian Ghetto.” Organized in notes, Kisch’s travelogue in exile sketched the social, political, and religious diversity of immigrant Jews. Highlighting the diversity of the immigrants served to illustrate the internal differentiations of the community. His portrayal remained informed by his detachment from religious practice and his political orientation toward the political left. His almost ethnographic gaze created distance. This cultural and ideological gulf that had already existed in the previous decades only amplified his sense of exile. His style of report betrayed Kisch as a distant observer that could not fathom to overcome the space between himself and the Jews of the ghetto. They remained an object of his intellectual curiosity, when he painted in broad strokes a portrait of the economic and religious life of the community. He compared the Marais on Jewish high holidays to Poland and Romania with the notable difference that the synagogues in Paris were plagued by fluctuation and instability. The conservative spirit in the ghetto had its inhabitants entrenched in patriarchal thoughts. He chronicled how the high holidays brought together Jews of very divergent religious and political backgrounds.Footnote ⁷⁷ He dismissingly treated religious observance as an empty token of a small sacrifice on the high holidays, when all dance halls and apartments were temporarily converted into houses of worship.Footnote ⁷⁸ In Germanyc cultural, religious, and political differences between Jews increasingly became meaningless. Removed from the exclusionary politics of harassment and violence in Germany, Kisch continued to believe that class differences made ethnic loyalty impossible.Footnote ⁷⁹ The distance was only temporarily overcome when he recorded not the poverty of Jewish ragmen in Marais, but also the signs on their stores: “Les représentants de maisons allemandes ne sont pas recu,” repelling, apparently, German businessmen.Footnote ⁸⁰

During the 1930s, Hessel viewed the French capital through the prism of Berlin’s urbanism. He republished material from an earlier period without radical changes. Paris still appeared as the city in continuity with its past: “Paris is the city where nothing ends, where the past continuously lives on. Paris is always present and remembrance.”Footnote ⁸¹ Written most likely between 1935 and 1939,Footnote ⁸² the volume Women and Cities (Frauen und Städte) remained unpublished; in it, Hessel was less interested in the Parisian urban modernity, but his strolls from the suburbs to the city cemetery narrated his encounter with diversity of small quarters and suburbs.Footnote ⁸³ He identified with the less official version of Paris—a city that existed for him in the Bastille Day, July14th celebrations in small and removed streets.Footnote ⁸⁴ Never a great admirer of the Champs-Elysées, he ventured to the Rue Mouffetard and its market.Footnote ⁸⁵ Hessel also visited the ghetto, however, it remains unclear as to whether this reflected an appreciation of his Jewish background.Footnote ⁸⁶ His narrative on the ghetto represented the double image to his description of Berlin’s Eastern European Jewish immigrant quarter. Like in Berlin, he found Paris to be the “the presence of the older world, whose foreground is the Jewish lane.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Like Kisch, Hessel remained the outsider to the Parisian ghetto. Short sentences convey the mobility of the narrator, who nameed book titles and culinary offerings. His views remained detached and represent snapshots: “At a bar caftans and bearded heads with side locks appear.”Footnote ⁸⁸

The differences between the Weimar traveler and the exiled and stateless refugee remained blurry. Several of Hessel’s pieces that would comprise the unpublished volume Women and Cities appeared in print in the Pariser Tageszeitung. Republished in the papers of German exile, these articles resonated differently: “Paris is the home of the stranger.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Seemingly, the position of the distant flaneur overlaps with the experience of exile. The difference is intractable, when home and belonging still seemed attainable: “A stroller acquires here a little citizenship. The streets are the living space,” Hessel both observed and hoped.Footnote ⁹⁰ His observation reverberated with an urban stroller’s excitement. His reflections, though, resonated potentially with new meaning. Strolling the city became a way of acquiring the city in lieu of proper status. Hessel’s wording of small citizenship might communicate the difference.

It is not just the changed circumstances of the essay’s publication that make them prone to be interpreted in new ways. Hesselss choice of pseudonym furthers this interpretation. He published these essays as Ezekiel in the Pariser Tageszeitung. Articles such as his “Break in Paris” appeared originally in 1930, but now the exiled prophet took the reader to the Montparnasse and the Quartier Latin at night and to the Place Pigalle, where foreigners sat and observed the crowds “like on deck of a pleasure boat.”Footnote ⁹¹

The erstwhile Paris enthusiast Tucholsky, who had left the city on the Seine already in 1929, more clearly articulated in 1934 dismay at the experience of exile as opposed to flaneur in Paris “For the big city, I am finally lost. Everything is tiring, nothing makes me happy anymore, I do not care about anything anymore.”Footnote ⁹² Two days later, Tucholsky confided in a letter that there is “nothing that I like in the great city anymore.”Footnote ⁹³

After the fire in the German parliament, however, Benjamin went to Paris, where he lived the last seven years of his life; there he continued his surrealist project to uncover and document the essence of modernity. His project sketch “Paris—Capital of the Nineteenth Century” outlined the agenda for tracing the history of modernity.Footnote ⁹⁴ This perspective of Paris echoed two other German Jewish émigrés. Earlier in the nineteenth century, Ludwig Boerne had referred to Paris as the “capital of the nineteenth century” and in 1832 Heine had called the French city on the Seine the “capital of the entire civilized world.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Aside from this elevation of Paris, Benjamin’s critical distance to Baudelaire became more visible, and during the 1930s, Heine’s dream about taking the street to reclaim literature’s political aspiration became even as a dream increasingly impossible. The flaneur’s desire for pleasure had been predicated on walking the street and lines of divergent conflicted subject positions. To Benjamin, in Baudelaire’s Spleen of Paris, there are only “amorphous crowd of passers-by, the people of the street,” but no social classes.Footnote ⁹⁶ Moving against Baudelaire, Benjamin rejected the equation of the French poet’s flaneur with Poe’s “man of the crowd.”Footnote ⁹⁷ The flaneur in Baudelaire, Benjamin insisted, “demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forgo the life of a gentleman of leisure.”Footnote ⁹⁸ To illustrate the leisurely quality of the flaneur further, Benjamin refers to E. T. A. Hoffmann’s short essay, The Cousin’s Corner Window. Here, an immobile cousin observed the passing crowd. Without leaving his place in the interior of his private room, the cousin with the aid of binoculars followed the path of individuals. None of this could be any further from Benjamin’s city stroller. Benjamin’s flaneur in mid-century Paris experienced social isolation and alienation from excessive sensory bombardment of commodity culture. By the time of the Bauderlaire essay in 1938, the flaneur is isolated and has become as Susan Buck-Morss astutely notes the “salaried employee” of newspapers. Benjamin dismissed the “collective” of the people in the city’s streets as mere illusionary appearance: “The ‘crowd’ in which the flaneur takes delight, is just the empty mold with which, seventy years later, the Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community) was cast.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Mass political movements of the twentieth century had altered the people, and from the perspective of the 1930s the flaneur appear as “the first to fall victim to an ignis fatutus which since that time has blinded many millions.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Now the flaneur had become Henri Beraud, the antisemitic and fascist journalist.Footnote ¹⁰¹ This flaneur as a journalist and antisemitic agitator could already be found in Baudelaire’s diary. In his notes Benjamin dismissed Baudelaire’s anti-Semitic statement as a joke. Yet during the 1930s it was difficult if not impossible to view it as a joke, when Benjamin copied the following quote into his notes for the Arcades project from the French poet: “To organize a grand conspiracy for the extermination of the Jewish race./ The Jews who are librarian and bear witness to the Redemption.”Footnote ¹⁰²

Written in Paris between February and July 1939, Benjamin’s essay does not identify city strolling with pleasure. The city stroller was not simply experiencing sensory overload or alienation, but the subject position of the removed observer had become untenable in the highly politicized environment of the 1930s. For Benjamin the flaneur experienced alienation and social isolation much like the refugee, who roamed the city, or as he put in a late entry: “It is a very specific experience that the proletariat has in a big city—one in many aspects similar to that which the immigrant has there.”Footnote ¹⁰³

When World War II broke out in September 1939, Paris lost status as a potential space of residence. By the time Hitler toured Paris on June 23, 1940, 2 million Parisians had fled the city. The central European exiled flaneurs either dispersed or ended up in the grasp of the Nazi administration. For many, there was nowhere to escape to anymore. Tucholsky, all along dismayed, ended his temporary residence in Paris in 1930 when he moved to Sweden, where he committed suicide five years later. Like Tucholsky, Roth also entertained no hope. Even before the breakout of war, Roth sensed the imminent end of Europe. He feared that Europe was “to become a cemetery.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The book burning led Roth to note “the European mind is capitulating.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Learning of his friend Ernst Toller’s suicide in New York, Roth, a chronic alcoholic, died in 1939 after a period of excessive drinking in which he harbored a great sense of nostalgia for the pre-1914 Austrian-Hungarian empire. Döblin, who fled to Paris at the beginning of World War II, worked for the French Ministry of Information writing counter-propaganda against Nazi Germany. In 1940, he spent many weeks in a refugee camp in Mende, where he attended mass and converted the following year. In September 1940, he left France and embarked from Lisbon on a ship to New York. After his release, Benjamin also succeeded in obtaining a travel visa to America. Seeking to cross the border to Spain, but fearing that Spanish authorities would return him to Nazi France, Benjamin took his life with an overdose of morphine tablets on September 25, 1940. Having just being released, Hessel died in Sanary-sur-mer in 1941 of the effects of his internment.

From the perspective of 1933, since the 1920s German Jews already appeared as homeless and marginalized. Indeed, their infatuation with Paris testifies to a profound unease about Berlin and the Weimar Republic. Their description combined confidence with a sense of crisis, and most of the travel writers never fully committed themselves to any of the competing ideologies of liberalism, communism, and nationalism. Kisch’s endorsement of the Soviet Union had its limits also, and his political leftist orientation remained eclectic and unorthodox. Benjamin never resolved his relationship to the Soviet Union and Marxism, nor to Palestine or Zionism. Roth combined his celebration of Europe and his infatuation with Paris with his nostalgia for the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well as his dismissal of America with his ambivalent hopes for the Soviet Union. Hessel was almost equally estranged in Paris and Berlin. Kerr became enchanted with Palestine, America, and France—always to return to Berlin, while Tucholsky abandoned both Berlin and Paris. It is the very absence of identifiable ideologies during a period of heightened political conflicts that define these travelers. Their liminality resists classification and describes them at the same time.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Walking the streets fulfilled an important function and was far from providing an aesthetic pleasure, but marked an appeal to geographies of belonging beyond the nation-state. The fleeting attachment to Paris allowed travelers to differently think about themselves, culture, and politics. Their travelogues fashioned for themselves and other Germans not the diasporic space they inhabited, but represented the French capital to the diverse German readers in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles. In that sense, their travelogues were so immensely political and committed to European modernity that they partly sought to experience and represent in Paris.