walter benjamin platz.
When I visited Berlin last year, my friend A told me that not far from his apartment in Charlottenburg was Walter Benjamin Platz, and would I like to check it out. I was a little dumbfounded. Benjamin played a central role in my dissertation, and though I’m no longer an academic, his ideas still resonate with me. And now I discover that there’s a square named for him? But of course I’d like to see it! So on a drizzly February day we headed over there, where after we saw the lovely street sign above, we encountered, well, this:
Fittingly monumental and depressing, no? And, like Benjamin, completely out of place with its surroundings.