The symphony of the metropolis: Berlin as ‘Newlin’ in the twentieth century

In 1929 the journal Das Neue Berlin (The New Berlin) was established by Berlin’s chief town planner Martin Wagner and the famous art critic Adolf Behne, who in 1926 had published the programmatic book Der Moderne Zweckbau (The Modern Functional Building) (Figure 1.1).1 Behne, in a letter to the avant-garde Dada artist Hannah Hoech, ended with the words: ‘with best regards from Neulin’, which can be translated as ‘Newlin’.2 The New Berlin was an issue that people believed in, and it was the mirror of a city which had just started to find its own identity. In this sense, Siegfried Kracauer could claim that ‘Spatial images are the dreams of society. Wherever the hieroglyphics of any spatial image are deciphered, there the basis of reality represents itself.’3