ONE OF THE ESSAYS in Franz Hessel's 1929 collection Spazieren in Berlin includes a kaleidoscopic image of Berlin's press district (Zeitungsviertel) and introduces the flâneur in one of his quintessential roles: as a free-lance contributor to some of Germany's popular illustrated magazines and daily newspapers. The flâneur as author spends hours waiting in the reception areas of the publishing conglomerates in the hope of drawing the attention of the editors to his “charming short pieces” (reizende kleine Sachen). Here is how Hessel characterized this group of aspiring writers who shared the same fate in the waiting rooms of the press:

Two points in this short paragraph prompt a closer look. First, in a selfironic gesture Hessel draws our attention to a seemingly marginal genre (unter dem Strich), namely the feuilleton, the short prose form (die kleine Form) that gained extreme popularity in the Weimar years. As many scholars of the period have noticed, the feuilleton became the “ideal form for recounting the pointillist splendor” of the modern city, because feuilleton writers observed rather than explained, and they produced a large number of sketches, snapshots, and vignettes that captured the endless variety of the city experience. In addition, as Hessel points out, many aspiring women writers at the beginning of the century ventured to use feuilleton and fashion writing as a springboard to a literary career. In fact Hessel's wife, Helen Grund, is an excellent example of this connection between the medium of fashion writing and the transformation of modern literary forms. Her presence on the German literary and artistic scene from the early 1920s until the mid-1930s demonstrated how professional writing on fashion could be transformed into an idiosyncratic sphere of creativity where female flânerie, modernism, and surrealist experimentation crossed paths.