Berlin-Hamlet

Berlin-Hamlet evokes a stroll through one of the phantasmagoric shopping arcades described in Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk-but instead of the delirious image fragments of nineteenth-century European culture, we pass by disembodied scraps of written text, remnants as ghostly as their authors- primarily Franz Kafka but also Benjamin himself or the Hungarian poets Attila J zsef or Ern Szep. Paraphrases and reworked quotations, drawing upon the vanished prewar legacy, particularly its German Jewish aspects, appear in sharp juxtaposition with images of post-1989 Berlin frantically rebuilding itself in the wake of German unification.