Brecht and Benjamin at a Berlin cabaret? One could dream (about a moment in 1925)
killed (stole!) so much time at work reading through snippets of PDFs, articles, chapters, etc., trying to pin-down a definitive date for ol' Walty B's residency at Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft (a couple months? in 1924-1925?) just so i could make a single half-assed but (and this is important) accurately-cited joke about transsexuals in Berlin jazz venues being foundational to critical theory.
but joke canceled, since it's hard to pin-down the dates. joke also cancelled because i got genuinely saddened (niederschmetternd, even) by thought-tangents of the unceasing police/state crushing of German organizing and radicalism 1918-1933 (and beyond, of course). also factored into joke cancellation: "am i doing that, y'know, kind of thing where twenty-first-century observers wistfully (re-)imagine a half-mythology of a pop-historical idealized Golden/Roaring Twenties, as if it were mere nostalgic entertainment for an intellectual tourist contemplating bifurcated modernism and destitution, grieving the loss of one of history's supposedly-key windows of revolutionary opportunity?"
anyway, though Einstein was in town at the beginning of the decade, Josephine Baker was visiting in 1926, and Adorno would be hanging out by the time of the market crash, the critical moment (for joking purposes) would be at the mid-point of the decade, in which case the joke would've made use of this confluence in the city:
on some brisk and cloudy day in Berlin in 1925, it might've been possible (however unlikely, and depending on those dates!) that you could've seen some cabaret seated alongside newly-anointed dramaturg Bertolt Brecht and then chilled on a patio with Walter Benjamin, who rented a room for a time at Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science.
joke-potential now entirely dissolved. all that remains: the desire--the will--to be the transsexual in the tavern booth. is she sullen? or instead is she--am i--smirking?
