Reading Berlin 1900. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1998 by Warren Breckman

Berliners have long assumed that their city is unique among metropolises for the changeability and fluidity of the cityscape itself. Berlin, said one observer, is condemned always to become, never to be. While this may seem prosaically true in the light of Berlin's rebirths after 1945 and 1989, it was a disorienting truth at the end of the nineteenth century, when the city was in the throes of its greatest period of growth. In Reading Berlin, Peter Fritzsche admirably captures the sense of dizzying change, excitement, despair, titillation, and disgust which accompanied Berlin's emergence as a self-proclaimed Weltstadt in the years before World War One. His decision to focus his study on the newspaper culture of Wilhelmine Berlin is salutary, for the city's mass-circulation press gives him a window onto the processes by which the city was perceived, interpreted and represented by its denizens.

By 1900, Berlin was a city figuratively and literally papered over, boasting innumerable boulevard kiosks and advertising pillars and, most significantly the greatest newspaper density of any European city. Fritzsche argues convincingly for reciprocity between the great industrial metropolis and the ubiquitous print media that it spawned, between the "built city" and the "word city" that provided a social text for the reading of the city as a geographical, cultural, social, and political site. The "word city" performed a number of crucial tasks, which Fritzsche analyzes with great verve. At a basic level, newspapers interpreted the city, stabilized its fluidities, typologized its citizens, and mapped its expanding terrain, although Fritzsche maintains that the size and dynamism of Berlin made elusive the goal of rendering the city "legible." Papers helped to make the city "usable" for the growing ranks of white- and blue-collar workers by advertising jobs and by cataloguing the diversions and pleasures of the big city for a mass readership avid to enjoy the first fruits of higher wages and increased leisure time.

Newspapers also sensationalized the city by perfecting the practices of tabloid journalism, where stories became commodities retailed to augment the most enticing angle. Feeding on sensationalism, the popular press contributed to the experience of the city as "spectacle" through its relentless urban voyeurism, its repeated presentation of the city and its inhabitants as objects to be observed and classified. Fritzsche stresses that such newspapers tended to ignore the harsh realities of social problems in favor of slices of life drawn from the busy city, and they preferred to evoke the ephemeral encounters and the inexhaustible diversity of city people rather than to engage in social analysis. In thus celebrating change and diversity, the popular press effaced what Fritzsche, following Walter Benjamin, calls the "paradox of modernism," that is, the blurring of the "ever-different" into the "ever-same," the slipping of"fabulous alternation" into "endless iteration." (p. 203) Newspapers also rendered the city "spectacular" more aggressively by actually organizing media events that insinuated the city and the community of readers into journalistic narratives. In sections on media involvement in events such as the first Zeppelin fly-over or air and car races, Fritzsche engagingly demonstrates the symbiosis of news and commercialization, event and representation, lived experience and media orchestration.

As a study of the role of the print media in what Fritzsche calls the "inner urbanization" of the citizens of the new metropolis, Reading Berlin is illuminating in many ways. However, its broader depiction of the city, with its speed, crowds, pleasures and monstrosities, and the city's effect upon the consciousness of ordinary urbanites, artists, and intellectuals is derivative of a literature reaching back to pioneers of city sensibilities like Baudelaire, Benjamin and Simmel. Fritzsche's dependence on this long critical tradition connecting urbanism and modernism is not in itself a problem. Indeed, he has performed a useful service by applying to Berlin themes that have been much more fully explored in the context of nineteenth-century Paris. Nonetheless, Fritzsche's generous acknowledgement of the flaneurs who have strolled before him does nothing to curb his breathless volubility before the flux and diversity of the big city. Hence, the genuinely interesting and original parts of the book threaten to disappear beneath repetitive and familiar depictions of the city as a really busy, crowded, and diverse place. Fritzsche would have done well to remember the words of Baudelaire, that boulevard philosopher, who urged that the flaneur's endless capacity for wonderment at the city's ephemera be tempered by the dandy's blase detachment from the spectacle of the ever-same.

Warren Breckman University of Pennsylvania