Modernity and Crisis: Urban Germany 1890-1939

Anthony McElligott
Anthony.McElligott@ul.ie
Centre for Historical Research
University of Limerick
Limerick, Ireland, United Kingdom, Europe

Spring 2002

Introduction

This course explores - through text and image - the cultural experience of urban life in interwar Germany. From the late-nineteenth century Germany's cities (and above all Berlin) became synonymous with social and political change, cultural and sexual experiments, becoming also arenas for technological innovation in work and domestic life. These transformations appeared to challenge the structures around which society and politics in Germany had been traditionally organized, precipitating a climate of uncertainty and crisis among some sections of society. The responses and efforts of those in authority - reflected in public debates, regulatory administration, laws etc., to the challenges posed by this 'urban modernity', as well as the changes themselves, are the focus of discussion in this course as we explore the meaning and nature of 'urban modernity and crisis' in Germany during the early twentieth century.

Teaching arrangements

The weekly two-hour seminar will utilise texts, documents, and visual material, including film. You will thus be developing skills of critical textual analysis, and will need to consult the key and asterixed texts. These are on short loan, but you may wish to consider purchasing the essential texts. After an introductory outline of the specific topic, participants will lead discussion, usually by presenting a short paper based on one or more of the documentary texts. The seminar is planned as a continuous discursive workshop based on familiarity with the weekly readings. As such, a committed participation is essential.

The key texts (all available in paperback) for this course are:
Anthony McElligott, The German Urban Experience, 1900-1945: Modernity and Crisis (London; New York: Routledge, 2001)

Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament. Weimar Essays, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge Mass., London: 1995)

Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, Edward Dimenberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994)

Background texts include:
Detlev J. Peukert, The Weimar Republic. The Crisis of Classical Modernity (London: Penguin, 1991)

John Willett, The New Sobriety 1917-1933. Art and Politics in the Weimar Period (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978)

Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New. Art and the Century of Change (London: British Broadcasting Corp., 1980)

The following general texts can also be useful:
Lewis Mumford, The City in History (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961)

Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe 1000-1950 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985)

Specifically on Berlin:
Thomas Friedrich, Berlin between the Wars (New York: Vendome Press, 1991)

The following novels are also highly recommended:
Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Trains or The Berlin Stories (London: Hogarth Press, 1935)

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf, translated by Eugene Jolas with photographs from the film version by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (New York: Continuum, 1992)
[McElligott comments: "I also have used the 1931 film version of the book directed by Piel Jutzi and starring Heinrich George as Franz Biberkopf."]

1932)

Stephen Spender, The Temple (London; Boston: Faber, 1988)

You might wish to check if the library has:
Heinrich Mann's Professor Unrat oder Das Ende eines Tyrannen (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1998 [reprint, Leipzig: Kurt Wolff, 1905]), especially since this is the story on which the film The Blue Angel (1931) is based.

The art history section in the library (series N-NX) has a mass of books on the period with good visual material. Students are encouraged to spend time browsing the shelves. Theoretical questions relating to society and culture in the period can be found in the journals German Studies and New German Critique, both in the library.

Books on Short Loan in the University Library
Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, (Oxford, UK; New York, New York: Blackwell, 1988)

David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1989)

Charles W. Haxthausen, and Heidrun Suhr, eds., Berlin. Culture and Metropolis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990)

Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, Edward Dimenberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (1994)

Thomas W. Kniesche, and Stephen Brockmann, eds., Dancing on the Volcano. Essays on the Culture of the Weimar Republic (Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1994)

Brian Ladd, Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860-1914 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1990)

Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived. Urban Society in European and American Thought 1820-1940 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)

Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918-1945, 2nd edition (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985)

Anthony McElligott, The German Urban Experience 1900-1945: Modernity and Crisis (2001)

Assessment

1. an essay of around 3,000 words double-spaced, showing evidence of utilizing an extended bibliography, properly sourced with references; this essay is due no later than Wednesday, Week 6:
   Answer one of the following essays in approximately 3,000 words:
   1. Compare the representations of modernity in Lang's Metropolis with those in Ruttmann's Berlin, Symphony of a City.
   2. Critically assess Mary Nolan's proposition that 'for many, women came to symbolize all the contradictions and ambiguities, as well as the opportunities, of modernity.'
   3. Assess the advert 'Find it Again!' (McElligott, Doc. 9.3) in terms of a grammar of chaos and control.
   4. How do contemporary ideas on the 'part' and the 'whole' manifest themselves in terms of shaping a rational and funtional urban landscape?
   5. Is Herbert Marxen's caricature of body culture (McElligott, Doc. 5.21) a fair comment?
   
   
   
2. a shorter essay of around 2,000 words based on the class paper and making use of the relevant source texts due in the week following the presentation;



3. an in-class timed essay of around 1,500 words in the first hour of Week 12.

As a guide: a 'first class' essay may be judged on its having met the following criteria - though these are not exclusive:

1. awareness of issues and controversies
2. critical evaluation
3. insight and originality
4. rigour and relevance of bibliography

The examination will be a three-hour paper in January and will require you to answer three questions from nine.

The overall mark for the module is weighted 40:60 (coursework:exam)

Seminar Themes

1. Introduction to the course: Urban Modernity
2. The City as Hieroglyphic
3. Metropolis: Visions of the City
4. Discovering the Urban 'Other'
5. Sick City, Healthy Body
6. Capitals of Consumption
7. Tempo of the City, Map of the Nation
8. Masculine Women and Feminine Men
9. Dangerous Masculinities: Sex Murder
10. Files and Fingerprints: Controlling the City
11. Timed Essay: 'The Discursive City'

Note: Asterixed texts denote either essential or background reading and every effort must be made to read these. Articles marked 'Xerox Folder' are available for use in the History Class Library when the librarian is present

Week 1
Introduction to the course: Urban Modernity
Focus: 'Urbanization', 'urbanism', and 'urban modernity': are they the same?

Discussion Texts:
Anthony McElligott, The German Urban Experience 1900-1945: Modernity and Crisis (London: 2001), chapter 1

Background Reading:
Gerald D. Feldman, "The Weimar Republic: A Problem of Modernization?", Archiv fur Sozialgeschichte 26 (1986): 1-26, (Xerox folder)

Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: the Outsider as Insider (1969)

Jürgen Habermas, "Modernity - An Incomplete Project" in Thomas Docherty , ed., Postmodernism. A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 98-109

Peter Hall, Cities in Civilisation (1998)

David Harvey, The Urban Experience, Introduction

David Harvey, The Condition of Post-Modernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change (Oxford, England; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1989)

Samuel P. Hays, "From the History of the City to the History of the Urbanized Society", in Journal of Urban History 19:4 (August 1993): 3-25

Paul M Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe 1000-1950 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1985)

Wolfgang Köllmann, "The Process of Urbanization in Germany at the Height of the Industrialization Period", Journal of Contemporary History 4 (1969): 59-76

Eric E. Lampard, "Historical Contours of Contemporary Urban Society: a comparative view", Journal of Contemporary History 4:3 (July 1969): 3-25

Eric E. Lampard, "The Urbanizing World" in H.J. Dyos and M. Wolff, eds., The Victorian City: Images and Reality (London; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973)

Eric E. Lampard, "The nature of urbanization" in Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe, eds., The Pursuit of Urban History (London: E. Arnold, 1983), 3-53

Joseph Lee, "Aspects of Urbanization and Economic Development in Germany 1815-1914", in P. Abrams & E. A. Wrigley, eds., Towns in Societies. Essays in Economic History and Historical Sociology (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press,1978)

Horst Matzerath, "The influence of industrialization on urban growth in Prussia (1815-1914)", in H. Schmal , ed., Patterns of European Urbanization Since 1500 (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 145-79

Horst Matzerath, "Berlin, 1890-1940", in Anthony Sutcliffe, ed., Metropolis, 1890-1940 (London: Mansell, 1984), 289-318

Anthony McElligott, The German Urban Experience 1900-1945: Modernity and Crisis (London 2001), chapter 1

Lewis Mumford, The City in History (1967)

Detlev J.K. Peukert, "The Weimar Republic - Old and New Perspectives", German History (1988): 133-44

John Willett, The New Sobriety. Art and Politics in the Weimar Period 1917-1933 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978)

Louis Wirth, "Urbanism as a Way of Life American", Journal of Sociology 44 (1938): 1-24, reprinted in Richard Sennett, ed., Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1969)

Week 2
The City as Hieroglyphic
Focus: (i) What is meant by 'urban' as a social and cultural experience? (ii) Is there a 'language' of the city?

Discussion Texts:
McElligott, The German Urban Experience, chapter 1

Background Reading:
Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials. The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)

David Crew, "Definitions of modernity: social mobility in a German Town 1880-1901", Journal of Social History (1973): 51-72

David Crew, Town in the Ruhr: a social history of Bochum, 1860-1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979)

Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz: The Story of Franz Biberkopf (1992)

Richard J. Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera Years, 1830-1910 (Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Clarendon Press, 1987), chapters 1, 5

*David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin (Cambridge: Polity,1985)

*David Frisby, Simmel and Since. Essays on Georg Simmel's Theory (London; New York: Routledge, 1992)

*Hildegard Glass, "Responses to the urban challenge in German utopian literature 1871-1914", Ph.D. thesis, (Texas, 1992), (Xerox Folder)

Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow (1988), chapter 1

*David Harvey, The Urban Experience, chapter 1, pp. 17-34, 53-58 in particular, and chapters 4, 8

Jost Hermand, "Unity within diversity? The history of the concept 'Neue Sachlichkeit'", in Keith Bullivant, ed., Culture and Society in the Weimar Republic (1977)

Hohenberg and Lees, The Making of Urban Europe

James H. Jackson, "Overcrowding and Family Life: Working Class Families and the Housing Crisis in Late Nineteenth Century Duisburg" in R.J. Evans and W.R. Lees, eds., The German Family: Essays in the Social History of the Family in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Germany (1981)

Anton Kaes, "Leaving Home: Film, Migration and the Urban Experience", in New German Critique 74 (1998)

*Ira Katznelson, "The Centrality of the City in Social Theory", in Irit Rogoff, ed., The Divided Heritage: Themes and Problems in German Modernism (Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Rudy Koshar, "Against the "Frightful Leveller". Historic Preservation and German Cities 1890-1914", Journal of Urban History 19:3 (May 1993)

Brian Ladd, Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860-1914 (Cambridge Mass. 1990), chapters 1, 6

*Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived. Urban Society in European and American Thought 1820-1940 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)

Andrew Lees, "Debates About the Big City in Germany 1890-1914", Societas 5 (1975): 31-47

Andrew Lees, "Critics of Urban Society in Germany 1854-1914", Journal of the History of Ideas 40 (1979): 61-83

Hsi-Huey Liang, "Lower-Class Immigrants in Wilhelmine Berlin", Journal of the History of Ideas 3 (1970), (Xerox Folder)

McElligott, The German Urban Experience, chapter 2

Robert E. Park, "The City", in Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess, Roderick D. McKenzie, The City (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1925); reprinted in Sennett, Classic Essays on the Culture of Cities (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1969)

*Harold Poor, "Anti-Urbanism in the Weimar Republic", Societas 6 (1976), (Xerox folder)

Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces. Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), "Introduction"

Adna Ferrin Weber, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century. A Study in Statistics (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1967 [Repr. 1963])

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973)

Week 3
Metropolis: Visions of the City
Focus: What, chiefly, were the two key notions underlying contemporary visions and representations of the future city and its living forms.

Discussion texts:
Anthony McElligott, The German Urban Experience, chapter 3

Kaes, et al., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, Docs. 166-168, 170.

You must see the film:
Fritz Lang, Metropolis (1926) --- time by arrangement

Background reading:
Patrick Abercrombie, "Some Notes on German Garden Villages", The Town Planning Review 1:3 (October) 1910

*Gerd Albers, "Changes in German town planning. A review of the last sixty years", The Town Planning Review 57:1 (1986)

Franziska Bollerey and Kristina Hartmann, "A Patriarchal Utopia: The Garden City and Housing Reform in Germany at the Turn of the Century", Anthony Sutcliffe, ed., The Rise of Modern Urban Planning 1800-1914 (London: Mansell, 1980)

Nicholas Bullock and James Read, The Movement for Housing Reform in Germany and France 1840-1914 (Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), Part One and Conclusion

Karl Ditt, "Nature Conservation in England and Germany 1900-70: Forerunner of Environmental Protection?", Contemporary European History 5: Part 1 (March 1996)

Thomas Elsaesser, Metropolis (London: British Film Institute, 2000)

Gerhard Fehl, "The Niddatal Project" in Built Environment 9: 3/4 (1983)

Peter Fritzsche, "Landscape of Danger, Landscape of Design: Crisis and Modernism in Weimar Germany", in Dancing on the Volcano

*Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, chaps 3, 4, 6

Hildegard Glass, "Responses to the urban challenge in German utopian literature 1871-1914", Ph.D. thesis (Texas 1992), (Xerox Folder)

Stephen D. Helmer, Hitler's Berlin: The Speer Plans for Reshaping the Central City (Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1985)

Elaine S. Hochman, Architects of Fortune. Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990)

Hohenberg and Lees, The Making of Urban Europe,238-44

Michael Honhart, "Company Housing as Urban Planning in Germany 1870-1940" Journal of the History of Ideas 23:1 (March 1990)

*Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New (New York: Knopf [distributed by Random House], 1980), chapters 2, 4

McElligott, The German Urban Experience, chapter 3

Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918-1945 (2nd edition, 1985)

Barbara Miller Lane, "Architects in Power. Politics and Ideology in the Work of Ernst May and Albert Speer", Journal of Interdisciplinary History 17 (1986): 283-310

Dietrich Neumann, "The Urban Vision in Metropolis", in Thomas W. Kniesche & Stephen Brockmann, eds., Dancing on the Volcano (1994)

*Ladd, Urban Planning, chaps 2-4, 7

Jill Lloyd, "The Painted City as Nature and Artifice", in Rogoff, The Divided Heritage, op. cit.

*Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918-1945 (2nd edition, 1985), chapters 1-3, 5, 7, 8

*John Mullin, "City Planning in Frankfurt, Germany 1925-1932: A Study in Practical Utopianism", Journal of Urban History 4 (1977): 3-28

*John Mullin, "Ideology, Planning Theory and the German City in the Interwar Years", Parts 1 and 2, The Town Planning Review 53/2-3, (April-July 1982): 115-130, 257-272

*Manfredo Tafuri, The Sphere and the Labyrinth: Avant-gardes and Architecture from Piranesi to the 1970s, translated by Pellegrino d'Acierno and Robert Connolly (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1990), chapters 2-4 (Xerox Folder)

Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces, chapter 1

Iain Boyd White, "Berlin 1870-1945 - an Introduction Framed by Architecture", in Rogoff, The Divided Heritage, op. cit.

John Willett, The New Sobriety (1978)

Week 4
Discovering the Urban 'Other'
Focus: What was being 'discovered' by bourgeois society as it came into contact with the slums, their inhabitants and their lifestyles?

Discussion texts:
McElligott, The German Urban Experience, chapter 4

Kaes, et. al., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, Docs: 236, 238, 318, 322

You must see the film:
Josef von Sternberg, Der Blaue Engel (1931)

Background reading:
Stefan Bajohr, "Illegitimacy and the Working Class: Illegitimate Mothers in Brunswick, 1900-1933", in Richard J. Evans, ed., The German Working Class, 1888-1933: The Politics of Everyday Life (London: Croom Helm; Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1982), 142-173, (Xerox Folder)

Renate Berger, "Moments can change your life: Creative crises in the lives of dancers in the 1920s", in Marsha Meskimmon and Shearer West, eds., Visions of the 'Neue Frau': Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press; Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Pub. Co., 1995), chapters 7-9

*Evans, Death in Hamburg, chapters 2-4

M. Kay Flavell, "Über alles die Liebe: Food, Sex, and Money in the Work of George Grosz", Journal of European Studies 13 (1983)

Peter Fritzsche, "Vagabond in the Fugitive City: Hans Ostwald, Imperial Berlin and the Grossstadt-Dokumente", Journal of Contemporary History 29 (1994): 385-402

Peter Fritzsche, "Talk of the Town: The Murder of Lucie Berlin", Paper for the Symposium "The Criminal and his Scientists", Panel 6, European University Institute/Centro Studi CISL, Florence, 15-18 October 1998 (Xerox folder)

*Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, chapter 2

Christopher Isherwood, Mr Norris Changes Train/Berlin Stories

James H. Jackson, "Overcrowding and Family Life: Working Class Families and the Housing Crisis in Late Nineteenth Century Duisburg", in R. J. Evans and W. R. Lees, eds., The German Family: Essays in the Social History of the Family in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Germany (London: Croom Helm; Totowa, New Jersey: Barnes & Noble, 1981)

Peter Jelavich, "Modernity, Civic Identity, and Metropolitan Entertainment: Vaudeville, Cabaret, and Revue in Berlin, 1900-1933", in Charles W. Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr, eds., Berlin. Culture and Metropolis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990)

Anthony McElligott, Contested City: Municipal Politics and the Rise of Nazism in Altona 1917-1937 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), chapter 3

McElligott, The German Urban Experience, chapter 4

Nancy Nenno, "Femininity, the Primitive, and Modern Urban Space: Josephine Baker in Berlin", in Katharina von Ankum, ed., Women in the Metropolis. Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)

*Lutz Niethammer, "Some Elements of the Housing Reform Debate in Nineteenth Century Europe: Or, On the Making of a New Paradigm of Social Control", in Bruce M. Stave, ed., Modern Industrial Cities: History, Policy and Survival (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1981), (copy also in Xerox folder)

*Ladd, Urban Planning, chapter 5

*Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived, 15-90

Hsi-Huey Liang, "Lower-Class Immigrants in Wilhelmine Berlin", Journal of the History of Ideas 3 (1970), (Xerox Folder)

Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism. Primitivism and Modernity (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1991), chapter 6

Cornelius Partsch, "Hannibal ante Portas: Jazz in Weimar", in Dancing on the Volcano

Lisa Pine, "Hashude: The Imprisonment of 'Asocial' Families in the Third Reich", German History 13:2 (1995): 182-97

Erhard Schütz, "Beyond Glittering Reflections of Asphalt: Changing Images of Berlin in Weimar Literary Journalism", in Dancing on the Volcano

Beeke Sell Tower, ""Ultramodern and Ultraprimitive:" Shifting Meanings in the Imagery of Americanism in the Art of Weimar Germany", in Dancing on the Volcano

Stephen Spender, The Temple (1988)

Elaine Govka Spencer, "Policing Popular Amusements in German Cities. The Case of Prussia's Rhine Province 1815-1914", Journal of Urban History 16:4 (August) 1990

Weber, The Growth of Cities, chap 7

Week 5
Sick City, Healthy Body
Focus: In what ways were social reforms more than just positive responses to the ravages of urban decay, social degradation and moral depradation?

Discussion texts:
McElligott, The German Urban Experience, chapter 5

Kaes, et. al., Weimar Republic Sourcebook, Docs. 152, 157, 178, 180, 181, 183

Background reading:
Günter Berghaus, ""Girlkultur"-Feminism, Americanism and Popular Entertainment in Weimar", Journal of Design History 1:3 and 4 (1988)

*Nicholas Bullock, "Housing in Frankfurt 1925 to 1931 and the New Wohnkultur", The Architectural Review 168:976 (1978): 333-342

*Nicholas Bullock, "First the Kitchen - then the Facade", Journal of Design History 1:3 and 4 (1988)

*David Crew, "German Socialism, The State and Family Policy 1918-1933", Continuity and Change 1/2 (1986)

David Crew, Germans on Welfare: from Weimar to Hitler (1998)

Evans, Death in Hamburg, op. cit.

Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol.1 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978)

Ute Frevert, "Professional modeiciine and the working classes in Imperial Germany", Journal of Contemporary History 20 (1985)

Atina Grossman, "Girlkultur or Thoroughly Rationalized Female. A New Woman in Weimar Germany?" in Judith Friedlander, ed., Women in Culture and Politics: A Century of Change (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), (Xerox folder)

Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, chapter 4

*Harvey, Urban Experience, chapter 4, pp. 83-89, 117-124

E. P. Hennock, "Social Policy under the Empire - Myths and Evidence", German History 16:1 (1998): 58-74

Peter Labanyi, "Images of Fascism: Visualization and Aestheticization in the Third Reich", in Michael Laffan, ed., The Burden of German History: Essays for the Goethe Institute (London: Methuen London, 1988)

Alfons Labisch, "Doctors, workers and the scientific Cosmology of the industrial World: The Social Construction of 'Health' and the 'Homo Hygienicus'", Journal of Contemporary History 20, (1985)

Ladd, Urban Planning, chapter 5

Maud Lavin, "Photomontage, Mass Culture and, Modernity: Utopianism in the Circle of New Advertising Designers", in Matthew Teitelbaum, ed., Montage and modern life, 1919-1942 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press; Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1992)

Ben Lieberman, "Testing Peukert's Paradigm: The 'Crisis of Classical Modernity' in the 'New Frankfurt', 1925-1930", German Studies Review

Janet Lungstrum, "Metropolis and Technosexual Woman of German Modernity", in von Ankum, Women in the Metropolis

Charles Maier, "Between Taylorism and Technocracy: European Ideologies and the Vision of Industrial Productivity in the 1920s", Journal of Contemporary History 5:2 (1970)

Maria Makela, "The Misogynist Machine: Images of Technology in the Work of Hanna Hoch", in von Ankum, Women in the Metropolis

Anthony McElligott, "Workers' Culture and Workers' Politics on Weimar's New Housing Estates: A Response to Adelheid von Saldern", Social History 17/1 (1992)

McElligott, The German Urban Experience, chapter 5

Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics, chapter 4, pp. 101-113

Mary Nolan, "Housework Made Easy: The Talorized Housewife in Weimar Germany", Feminist Studies 16: 3 (1990): 549-77, (Xerox folder)

Mary Nolan, "Imagining America, Modernizing Germany", in Dancing on the Volcano

*Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity. American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)

Mark Peach, "'Der Architekt Denkt, Die Hausfrau Lenkt': German Modern Architecture and the Modern Woman", German Studies Review 18:3 (Oct. 1985): 441-63

Detlev J. Peukert, The Weimar Republic (1991)

Gerhard Ritter, Social Welfare in Germany and Britain: Origins and Development, translated from the German by Kim Traynor (Leamington Spa, Warwickshire, UK; New York: Berg, 1986), 17-130

Adelheid von Saldern, "The Workers' Movement and Cultural Patterns on Urban Housing Estates and in Rural Settlements in Germany and Austria During the 1920s", Social History 15/3 (1990)

Tafuri, The Sphere, chapter 7, (Xerox Folder)

Wilfried van der Will, "The Body and the Body Politic as Symptom and Metaphor in the Transition of German Culture to National Socialism," in Brandon Taylor and Wilfried van der Will, eds., The Nazification of Art. Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich (Winchester: Winchester School of Art Press, 1990), 14-52

Week 6
Capitals of Consumption
Focus: (i) Why was it that by the 1920s, the quintessence of modernity was increasingly seen in terms of a metropolitan-based conspicuous consumerism? (ii) Why was it viewed negatively?

Discussion texts:
McElligott, The German Urban Experience, chapter 6

You must also see the film:
Georg W. Pabst, Diary of a Lost Girl (1929)

Background reading:
Lynn Abrams, "From Control to Commercialization: The Triumph of Mass Entertainment in Germany 1900-1925", German History 8/3 (1990)

Lynn Abrams, Workers' Culture in Imperial Germany. Leisure and Recreation in the Rhineland and Westphalia (London; New York: Routledge, 1992)

Katharina von Ankum, "Gendered Urban Spaces in Irmgard Keun's Das Kunstseidene Mädchen", in von Ankum, Women in the Metropolis

John Benson and Gareth Shaw, eds., The Evolution of Retail Systems, c.1800-1914 (Leicester; New York: Leicester University Press, 1992), chapters 2, 5

Warren G. Breckman, "Disciplining Consumption: The Debate about luxury in Wilhelmine Germany, 1890-1914", Journal of Social History 24:3 (1990-91), (Xerox Folder)

Sandra Coyner, "Class Consciousness and Consumption: The New Middle Class During the Weimar Republic", Journal of Social History 3 (1977): 310-331, (Xerox Folder)

Mary Ann Doane, "The Erotic Barter: Pandora's Box (1929)", in Eric Rentschler, ed., The Films of G.W. Pabst (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990)

Thomas Elsaesser, "Lulu and the Meter Man: Pabst's Pandora's Box (1929)", in Eric Rentschler, ed., German Film and Literature (New York: Methuen, 1986)

*David Frisby and Mike Featherstone eds., Simmel on Culture: Selected Writings (London: Sage Publications, 1997), parts. 5-7

Anke Gleber, "Female Flanerie and the Symphony of the City", in von Ankum, Women in the Metropolis

Sabine Hake, "In the Mirror of Fashion", in von Ankum, Women in the Metropolis

Harvey, Urban Experience, chapters 6, 8

Kathleen James, "From Messel to Mendelsohn: German department store architecture indefence of urban and economic change", in Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of Consumption. The European department store 1850-1939 (Aldershot, Hants, England; Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1999)

Maud Lavin, "Photomontage, Mass Culture and, Modernity: Utopianism in the Circle of New Advertising Designers", in Matthew Teitelbaum, ed., Montage and modern life, 1919-1942 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press; Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1992)

McElligott, The German Urban Experience, chapter 6

Paul Monaco, Cinema and Society: France and Germany during the Twenties (New York: Elsevier, 1976)

Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets. Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989)

R.E. Sackett, "Antimodernism in the Popular Entertainment of Modern Munich: Attitude, Institution, Language", New German Critique 57 (Fall, 1992)

Joachim Schlör, Nights in the big city : Paris, Berlin, London 1840-1930 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998)

Uwe Spiekermann, "Theft and thieves in German department stores, 1895-1930: a discourse on morality, crime and gender", in Geoffrrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of Consumption. The European department store 1850-1939 (Aldershot, Hants, England; Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1999)

Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces, chapters 2-6

David Welch, "Cinema and Society in Imperial Germany 1905-1918", German History 8:1 (1990)

Week 7
Tempo of the City, Map of the Nation
Focus: What do the discourses on Germany's urban traffic tell us about 'urban modernity'?

Discussion texts:
McElligott, The German Urban Experience, chapter 7

Kaes, et al., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, Docs. 1, 164, 165.

You must see the film:
Walter Ruttmann: Berlin, Symphony of a City (1927)

Background reading:
Lawrence Baron, "Noise and Degeneration: Theodor Lessing's Crusade for Quiet", Journal of Contemporary History 17 (1982): 165-178

Richard Bessel, "Transport", in Colin Chant, ed., Science, Technology and Everyday Life 1870-1950 (London; New York: Routledge in association with the Open University, 1989)

Peter Fritzsche, A Nation of Flyers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1992)

Peter Fritzsche, "Machine Dreams: Airmindedness and the Reinvention of Germany", American Historical Review 98 (1993)

Sabine Hake, "Urban Spectacle in Walter Ruttmann's Berlin: Symphony of the Big City", in Kniesche & Brockmann, eds., Dancing on the Volcano

Harvey, The Urban Experience, chapter 6

Anthony McElligott, "Walter Ruttmann's 'Berlin Symphony of a City': Traffic-mindedness and the city in interwar Germany", in Malcolm Gee, Tim Kirk, Jill Steward, eds., The City in Central Europe: Culture and Society since 1800 (Aldershot, England; Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate, 1999)

McElligott, The German Urban Experience, chapter 7

Adelheid von Saldern, "Cultural Conflicts, Popular Mass Culture, and the Question of Nazi Success: The Eilenriede Motorcycle Races, 1924-39", German Studies Review 15:2 (May 1992)

Week 8
Masculine Women and Feminine Men
Focus: (i) Was modernity's 'New Woman' a figment of an urban imagination or real? (ii) Why was her 'existence' perceived as a destructive force?

Discussion texts:
McElligott, The German Urban Experience, chapter 8

Kaes, et al., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, 195-219.

You must also see the films:
Georg W. Pabst, Pandora's Box (Lulu) (1929)
von Sternberg, The Blue Angel
Fritz Lang, Metropolis

Background reading:
(see also previous readings: Berghaus, Doane, Elsaesser, Grossman etc)

Stephen Brockmann, "Weimar Sexual Cynicism", in Dancing on the Volcano

Renate Bridenthal, "Something Old, Something New: Women between the Two World Wars", in Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, Susan Stuard, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History, 2nd edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987)

Emmanuel Cooper, The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West, 2nd edition (London; New York: Routledge, 1994), chapter 10: "The New Woman"

Heide Fehrenbach "Die Sünderin or who killed the German male: Early Postwar German Cinema and the Betrayal of the Fatherland", in Sandra Frieden, Richard W. McCormick, Vibeke R. Petersen, Laurie Melissa Vogelsang, eds., Gender and German Cinema: Feminist Iinterventions (Providence, Rhode Island: Berg, 1993), vol. 2

Lynne Frame, "Gretchen, Girl Garconne? Weimar Science and Popular Culture in Search of the Ideal New Woman", in von Ankum, Women in the Metropolis

Ute Frevert, Women in German History (1989)

Elizabeth Heineman, "Gender Identity in the Wandervogel Movement", German Studies Review 12 (1989)

Andreas Huyssen, "The Vamp and the Machine: Fritz Lang's Metropolis" in Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986 [orig. published in New German Critique, 1981-82]), also available as Xerox

Christopher Isherwood, Christopher and His Kind, 1929-1939 (New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1977)

James W. Jones, 'We of the third sex': literary representations of homosexuality in Wilhelmine Germany (New York: Lang, 1990)

Ludmilla Jordanova, "Fritz Lang's Metropolis: Science, Machines and Gender", Radical Science 17 (1985), (Xerox Folder)

Barbara Kosta, "Unruly Daughters and Modernity: Irmagard Keun's Gilgi - eine von uns", The German Quarterly 68:3 (Summer 1995)

Gerhard Koch, "Between two Worlds: von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930)", in Eric Rentschler, German Film and Literature

Annelie Lütgens, "The Conspiracy of Women: Images of City Life in the Work of Jeanne Mammen", in von Ankum, Women in the Metropolis

Richard McCormick, "From Caligari to Dietrich: Sexual, Social and Cinematic Discourse in Weimar Film", Signs (Spring 1993)

McElligott, The German Urban Experience, chapter 8

Meskimmon and West, Visions of the 'Neue Frau', chapters 7-9

Tracy Myers, "History and Realism: Representations of Women in G.W. Pabst's The Joyless Street", in Freiden, Gender and German Cinema: Feminist Interventions, vol. 2

Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989)

Claudia Schoppmann, Days of Masquerade: Life Stories of Lesbians During the Third Reich (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996)

Claudia Schoppmann, "National Socialist policies towards female homosexuality", in Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Harvey, eds., Gender Relations in German History: Power, Agency and Experience from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (London: UCL Press, 1996)

Stephen Spender, The Temple (1988)

Brandon Taylor and Wilfried van der Will, eds., The Nazification of Art. Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich (Winchester: Winchester School of Art Press, 1990), chapter 3

Cornelia Usborne, "The Christian churches and the regulation of sexuality in Weimar Germany", in Jim Obelkevich, Lyndal Roper, Raphael Samuel, eds., Disciplines of Faith. Studies in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy (London; New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987)

Cornelia Usborne, The Politics of the Body in Weimar Germany: Women's Reproductive Rights and Duties (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992)

Cornelia Usborne, "The New Woman and generational conflict: perceptions of young women's sexual mores in the Weimar Republic", in Mark Roseman, ed., Generations in Conflict. Youth revolt and generation formation in Germany 1770-1968 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 137-163

Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City. Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992)

Week 9
Dangerous Masculinities: Sex Murder
Focus: What do either visual representations of or psychiatric-medical discourses on masculinity and the male libido tell us about modernity and its 'crisis'?

Discussion texts:
Anthony McElligott, The German Urban Experience, chapter 8

You must see the film:
Fritz Lang, M

Background reading:
See also the readings on male homosexuality from last week.

Susan C. Anderson, "Otto Weininger's Masculine Utopia", German Studies Review 19:3 (Oct. 1996): 433-53

Arnold I. Davidson, "Sex and the Emergence of Sexuality", Critical Inquiry (Autumn 1987)

Richard Evans, Rituals of Retribution. Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600-1987 (Oxford [England]; New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), chapters 12-13

Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol.1

John C. Fout, "Sexual Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Male Gender Crisis, Moral Purity, and Homophobia", Journal of the History of Sexuality 2:3 (1992), (Xerox folder)

Misha Kavka, "The Alluring Abyss of Nothingness: Misogyny and (Male) Hysteria in Otto Weininger", New German Critique 66 (Fall 1995): 123-45

Beth Irwin Lewis, "Lustmord: Inside the Windows of the Metropolis", in Charles W. Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr, eds., Berlin. Culture and Metropolis (1990); this is also reprinted in von Ankum, Women in the Metropolis

*McElligott, The German Urban Experience, chapter 8

Laurence Rickels, "War Neurosis and Weimar Cinema", in Dancing on the Volcano

Gary D. Stark, "Pornography, Society, and the Law in Imperial Germany", Journal of the History of Ideas 14 (1981): 200-29.

Maria Tatar, Lustmord Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995)

Taylor and van der Will, The Nazification of Art, chapter 2

Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2 vols., translated by Stephen Conway in collaboration with Erica Carter and Chris Turner (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1987; 1989)

Week 10
Files and Fingerprints: Controlling the City
Focus: Regulating chaos: is this the quintessence of 'modernity'?

Discussion texts:
Anthony McElligott, The German Urban Experience, chapter 9

Background reading:
You will note that there is very little secondary literature that touches directly on this question. We are required, therefore, to work mainly with the texts in the course reader.

*Frisby, Fragments of Modernity

Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Fundamental Reason, translated by Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987)

David Harvey, The Condition of Post-Modernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change (Oxford [England]; Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1989)

Anton Kaes, "The Cold Gaze: Notes on Mobilization and Modernity", New German Critique 59 (Spring/Summer 1993)

McElligott, The German Urban Experience, chapter 9

John Sandford, "Chaos and Control in The Weimar Film", German Life and Letters 48:3 (July 1995)

Week 11
Timed Essay: "The Discursive City"
Focus: In what ways can the various discourses of 'urban modernity' in the period covered by the course be understood as a surrogate discourse on the 'condition of the nation'?

Background Reading:
Dieter K. Buse, "Urban and National Identity: Bremen, 1860-1920", Journal of Social History 26 (1993): 521-37

Thomas W. Kniesche, Stephen Brockmann, "Introduction: Weimar Today"; and Jochen Vogt, "The Weimar Republic as the "Heritage of our Time," in Dancing on the Volcano.

Peter S. Fisher, Fantasy and Politics. Visions of the Future in the Weimar Republic (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991)

Ira Katznelson, "The Centrality of the City in Social Theory", in Irit Rogoff, ed., The Divided Heritage, Themes and Problems in German Modernism (Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991)

Andrew Lees, "Berlin and Modern Urbanity in German Discourse 1845-1945", Journal of Urban History 17:2 (Feb. 1991)

Detlev J. K. Peukert, "The Weimar Republic - Old and New Perspectives", German History (1988): 133-144

Harold Poor, "Anti-Urbanism in the Weimar republic", Societas 6 (1976): 177-92, (Xerox folder)

Eve Rosenhaft, "Brecht's Germany: 1898-1933", in Peter Thomson and Glendyr Sacks, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Brecht (Cambridge [England]; New York, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994)

R.L. Rutsky, "The Mediation of Technology and Gender: Metropolis, Nazism, Modernism", New German Critique 60 (1993): 3-32

James Sheehan, "Liberalism and the city in Nineteenth Century Germany", Past and Present 51 (1971): 116-37