Scenes from Windows: Urban Rhythms, Improvisation and Memory

This paper, presented here very much as work-in-progress, brings together and juxtaposes three rather different texts which share a common title and point of departure – the mundane experience of looking out of an apartment window onto the metropolitan environment below.  In his 1992 chapter ‘De ma fenêtre’ [‘From my Window’’] the renowned French social and culturist theorist Henri Lefebvre (1992) attends to the polyphonic rhythms of the rue R. and the plaza in front of the Pompidou Centre in Paris; in ‘Aus dem Fenster gesehen’ [‘Seen from the Window’] a 1931 feuilleton piece published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, the Critical Theorist Siegfried Kracauer (1931) observes the hustle and bustle of an anonymous square and traffic junction in Berlin during the Weimar Republic; in ‘To look out the window: a story’, a short semi-autobiographical tale by the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk set in the affluent Nisantasi area of Istanbul in the year 1958, a young boy watches as his father waves a last goodbye to the home and family he is leaving for good.

The paper brings these texts together both to explore key motifs in the works of these writers (rhythm, improvisation, memory and melancholy) and to reflect upon their correspondences and contradictions in terms of: envisioning urban space and everyday embodied ‘lived experience’; spectatorship and differently situated observers; cityscape and landscape; marginality and liminality; multiple and overlapping temporalities.