Introduction -- Urban spleen and the terror of Paris in Baudelaire and Rilke -- Kafka's Betrachtung in the force-field of photography and film -- Benn in occupied Brussels: the Rönne novellas -- Photography and emblem in Kracauer and Benjamin's street texts -- Double exposure Berlin: photomontage and narrative -- Benjamin and Aragon: Le paysan de Berlin -- War and metropolis in Jünger -- Musil's posthumous modernism -- Coda: diving into the wreck: Adorno's Minima moralia
Summary
Andreas Huyssen explores the history and theory of metropolitan miniatures--short prose pieces about urban life written for European newspapers. His fine-grained readings open vistas into German critical theory and the visual arts, revealing the miniature to be one of the few genuinely innovative modes of spatialized writing created by modernism
