Reading Berlin 1900 [Paperback]

The great cities at the turn of the century were mediated by words--newspapers, advertisements, signs, and schedules--by which the inhabitants lived, dreamed, and imagined their surroundings. In this original study of the classic text of urban modernism--the newspaper page--Peter Fritzsche analyzes how reading and writing dramatized Imperial Berlin and anticipated the modernist sensibility that celebrated discontinuity, instability, and transience. It is a sharp-edged story with cameo appearances by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Alfred D?blin. This sumptuous history of a metropolis and its social and literary texts provides a rich evocation of a particularly exuberant and fleeting moment in history.Fritzsche...does a nice job of reconstructing the city of words that Ullstein and other publishers reared in the newspaper district on the Kochstrasse.Peter Fritzsche's book engages in marvelous explorations of interactions between turn-of-the-century Berlin, the deluge of contemporary texts about it, and the metropolitan personality that grew in its frenzied environment...Not only an acute observer of urban texts, he draws extensively on current theory about spectatorship, cultural history, and urban studies, demonstrating, as with his earlier books, an admirable ability to think widely about an emergent mass society...This book, and the word-city it explores, will produce a plurality of readings that disorganize and reorganize urban phenomena and their relation to German history. Its major strengths lie in the profusion of Fritzsche's ideas about the German metropolis and in the exhilarating instruction he gives to historians about learning better to use their eyes and imaginations.InReading Berlin, Peter Fritzsche admirably captures the sense of dizzying change, excitement, despair, titillation, and disgust whichaccompanied Berlin's emergence as a self-proclaimedWeltstadtinthe years before World War One. His decision to focus his study on thenewspapel£!