It’s curious, for a book purportedly about walking, how much Hessel enjoys whizzing around the city in fast cars and on public transport. During the book’s centrepiece, a longer section called “The Tour”, he hops on a tourist bus to take in some main sights (Potsdamer Platz, Gendarmenmarkt, Schlossplatz, Museum Island), supplementing the journey with his own insider insights. His apparently limitless enthusiasm for bridges, sculptures, and architectural ornamentation — arabesques, catyrids, cherubs, and atlantids — can become cloying, but his disdain for stuffy Wilhelminian-era buildings offers some amusing moments: after huffily refusing to enter the Berliner Dom on the basis that it “offends every religious and humanistic sentiment with its sheer quantity, materiality and poorly applied erudition”, he expresses distracted, child-like delight at the appearance of an ice cream vendor.
