Berlin is an offstage location in Sartre’s analysis of the image, used to show how a person may be located in the real world and yet appear to consciousness as absent. It is not described as a setting for narrated action; its significance lies in the contrast between Pierre’s supposed present whereabouts and the different person or scene presented in an image.

Berlin as a Concrete Determination

Berlin first appears among the positive, relational facts that may enter a concrete concept of Pierre: Pierre may be on a trip there, just as he may be a lawyer in Rabat. Such details add determinations to the concept of a particular person. They do not, by themselves, make Pierre absent or nonexistent. For Sartre, absence has a different force: it becomes meaningful on the ground of sensory intuition, when an object is apprehended as not being available to perception.

That contrast distinguishes a location in a description from a location in an image. Thinking of Pierre through relations can include the fact that he is in Berlin without turning that fact into a privation. By contrast, an image of a dead loved one can bring the ache of absence with it, because the image presents its object as not being there. Berlin therefore helps clarify what a place-name alone cannot do: the same person can be positively situated by knowledge and, in an image, be given precisely as absent.

The Berlin Pierre and the Paris Image

The sharpest geographical contrast is between the Pierre said to be in Berlin and the Pierre shown at home in Paris. Sartre raises the question of whether the object of the image is the Pierre currently living in Berlin or the Pierre who lived in Paris the previous year, in a familiar room and seated on a familiar chair. The issue is not resolved by treating the pictured room as proof that the image concerns a different person. Rather, the example exposes a problem about how an image can intend the same Pierre through an appearance drawn from another time and place.

The image’s content is therefore not simply a smaller or less vivid perception of its object. Its Parisian scene supplies a finite set of determinations, while the person it intends may be the Pierre who is now elsewhere. Sartre marks this as a problem still requiring explanation: the account has described the image’s structure but has not yet established a full theory of the relation between image and object. Berlin gives that open question its concrete geographical form. It identifies the absent person whom the image may aim at without making the Paris room his present location.

Image, Memory, and the Present Elsewhere

Berlin also separates imagining Pierre now from remembering Pierre as he was. Recalling Pierre’s handshake the previous evening is, in Sartre’s account, an act of memory: the past event remains real, though past, and consciousness turns toward it as an event in the past. Imagining Pierre as he might be at this moment in Berlin does not retrieve that event. It posits someone not given to the observer, or given as out of reach. Sartre places this imagined Pierre closer to the imagined centaur than to the remembered handshake, because both the imagined Pierre and the centaur are presented in relation to nothingness rather than as past realities.

The example of Pierre walking on the Kurfürstendamm makes the distinction tangible without converting Berlin into a remembered scene. The imagined action supplies a possible picture of what Pierre is doing now; it is not evidence that he was seen there or that an actual event has been recalled. Likewise, a future that unfolds from a present perception differs from an imagined future posited as not yet. When a tennis player anticipates the ball’s trajectory from an opponent’s movement, the developing future belongs to the real situation. Imagining Pierre in Berlin instead concerns a person not presently given to perception.

Berlin and the Structure of a Situation

The absent Pierre can also define the observer’s situation. In Sartre’s example, the desire to see a friend who is not present makes the real world intelligible in relation to that absence: Pierre is the person in relation to whom the situation is apprehended. This is not the same as Pierre being present in the surroundings or being indicated by sounds outside the door. If he were given as present, he would belong to the real situation; the Pierre who defines the situation in his absence is precisely the absent Pierre.

Berlin thus names a possible elsewhere that helps distinguish an imagined object from a merely hidden or unperceived part of the present world. A covered detail in a perceived object may still be taken as existing behind an obstruction. An imaging act, by contrast, isolates what it presents and gives it as absent to the observer, even when the imagined person is assigned a definite place such as Berlin. The city’s role remains conceptual rather than scenic: it makes clear that an image can point toward a person located in the world while withholding that person’s presence. Sartre uses this contrast to show how imagining depends on a relation to absence, not simply on reproducing a place or person as though they were currently perceived.