Fontane's Wanderings through the Mark Brandenburg

German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin, follows German realist Theodor Fontane as he gambols through the Mark Brandenburg in a radio piece broadcast in its original in German for children, and here read in English by artist Corey McCorkle. The sprawling landscape of the Mark was fertile ground for the first wave of flower power embodied by the Vandervogel (the German youth movement). Casper David Friedrich too used the Mark as a departure point for his fantastic vistas. Here, transfixed listeners are invited to descriptions of dark ritual in psychedelic gardens.

Benjamin was an eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, he made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism.

Walter Benjamin’s radio broadcasts (1929 - 1932) are a selection of children stories written and read by Benjamin during his colossal research project The Arcades Project, an allegorical look into the birth of modernity in 19th Century Paris. Though the series of broadcasts and the Arcades in general are decisively incomplete, the two enterprises echo one another in content, replete with provocative digressions, and unlikely connections (or "secret affinities").

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