Main entry:

Fritzsche, Peter, 1959-

Title & Author:

Reading Berlin 1900 / Peter Fritzsche.

Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1996.

Description:

x, 308 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 255-301) and index.
1. The Word City -- 2. Readers and Metropolitans -- 3. Physiognomy of the City -- 4. The City as Spectacle -- 5. Illegible Texts -- 6. Plot Lines -- 7. Other Texts of Exploration.

Summary:

Berlin in 1900 attracted writers, artists, and filmmakers whose fascination with the city manufactured an elaborate urban culture that insinuated itself into the most casual metropolitan encounters. The newspapers' daily versions fabricated Berlin into a sensational place, transforming city dwellers into flaneurs, browsers, and spectators. Paying more attention to the kaleidoscope of urban life than to singular world events, the print media reconstituted the metropolis into an extraordinary field of visual pleasure. At the same time, thanks to the extravagant and dramatic operations of the media, Berlin began to look more like the sensational front pages. Almost all Berliners were readers, and each day they took inventory of boulevards and alleyways, princes and prostitutes, the latest fashions and vanished landmarks. They consumed the city's sights as well as its commodities. Their city was an unending serial of surprise. Berlin's print culture enchanted the metropolis and thereby anticipated a modernist sensibility that celebrated the urban experience of discontinuity, instability, and transience. Fritzsche carefully explores this coming modernity, disentangling its myths from the modern experience itself and yielding an urban enclave at odds with its intended imperial destiny. It's a sharp-edged story with cameo appearances by Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, and Alfred Doblin. This sumptuous history of a metropolis and its social and literary texts, of furtive glances and passersby, provides a rich evocation of a particularly exuberant, particularly fleeting moment in history.

Resources:
Table of contents
Table of contents
Book review (H-Net)
Book review (H-Net)
Book review (H-Net)
Book review (H-Net)

ISBN:

0674748816
9780674748811
0674748824
9780674748828

Subject:

German newspapers Germany Berlin History.
Journaux allemands Allemagne Berlin Histoire.
German newspapers
Press coverage
Stadtleben
Zeitung
Dagbladen.
Stadscultuur.
German newspapers Berlin History.
Tidningar historia Tyskland Berlin sekelskiftet 1900.
Berlin (Germany) Press coverage.
Germany Berlin
Berlin
Berlin i pressen.

Form/genre:

History

Added entries:

Reading Berlin neunzehnhundert

Holdings:

Location: Library main 191858
Call No.: ID PN5219.B59.F75; ID:97-B2898
Status: Available