Boltzplatz

Keep walking down the path.

Now slip a few decades and a few hundred meters to Kantstraße, where Sadegh Hedayat – the Iranian exile with the haunted eyes, once drifted through Berlin. He wrote about cities as places that gnaw at you from the inside, streets that echo with languages you only half-understand, the way a tram window can become more real than your own face in the glass. Hedayat would have understood Barth at once: the park as a machine for a very soft kind of displacement, where you are both here and elsewhere, Berlin and Tehran, Berlin and St. Petersberg, Berlin and Denver… Present and permanently on the verge of departure.

Across the river of theory, Guy Debord is busy drawing arrows on a map of Paris. He just starts walking without purpose, following only atmospheres, colours, and the pull of a side street. He would probably despise this well-behaved bourgeois park and yet secretly admire it. Barth has already built a ready-made dérive into the ground plan: the paths refuse to be purely functional, the sightlines glitch, the official plaques fail to explain what you actually feel.

Turn right ahead and follow the path as it hugs the lake.

You’ll see an old tree with a small plaque in front, on the right.

I'll meet you there.