The flaneur in the Borsig locomotive works: Walter Benjamin, the Berlin Radio Youth Hour, and sound as pedagogy

Abstract

Walter Benjamin's radio addresses for young people remain a comparatively neglected part of his work. New scholarship and translations have begun to address this, however. This article argues that the radio addresses, and particularly the address on the Borsig locomotive and machine works, deserve a prominent place within the critical and intellectual trajectory of Benjamin's career. A close reading of “Borsig” demonstrates how the addresses model the modes of experience mediated by and through Benjamin's master figure of the flaneur and generate the possibility for a historical pedagogy adequate to modernity. In the radio addresses, in general, and in “Borsig,” in particular, the mediation of experience entirely through sound and the narrating voice requires the simultaneity of past, present, and future that resolves into Benjamin's theory of history. “Borsig” thus points directly toward the stakes of the Passagen‐Werk and Benjamin's later theoretical essays.