Who Belongs to Which World: Walking Through Berlin in the Mid-1920s

If you wanted to understand Weimar Berlin properly, you would begin not with party programmes or election tables but with the street. You would stand still for ten minutes on Friedrichstrasse, or outside one of the stations, or on the Ku’damm, or near one of the better hotels, and you would watch people go by. Not vaguely. Not sentimentally. Properly. You would look at cut, cloth, hat brim, gloves, shoes, companions, cigarette case, newspaper, walking pace, whether they glanced into shop windows or through them, whether they hailed a taxi or counted coins for the tram. And very quickly you would realise that Berlin, for all its noise and modernity, was still a city that wore class and caste on the body. 

Not perfectly. Never perfectly. That is what makes it interesting. A clever city always teaches people how to imitate status, rent it for an evening, or hide 

I want to teach you to read them.

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Jason Collings
May 2026