Karsten Witte: The Passenger and the Critical Critic

Abstract

The Passenger For Karsten Witte the passenger was an intrepid figure, person between stations, for whom time and space constitute sites of transit.1 Himself a passenger who shifted with ease and enthusiasm between languages, discourses, and cultures, Karsten Witte relished the experience of the unfamiliar and the foreign. It was indeed central to his own expansive sense of person and place. He liked living in Berlin and knew the surface manifestations and subterranean reaches of that metropolis as few others. After his formative years in Frankfurt, Berlin would become Witte's domicile of choice, his final port of entry into German intellectual affairs. It represented less a home than a fixed address, a base of operations as well as a point of departure for a life that considered the liminal and the extraterritorial to be special (albeit precarious) states of being.2 If there is a memory image that captures the presence of this fldneur in motion, it might well be a snapshot that shows him exiting the Bovril, a restaurant on the Kurffirstendamm, bespectacled and clad in a natty dark overcoat, descending the stairs, heading for the