Reading Berlin 1900 / / Peter Fritzsche.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter HUP eBook Package Archive 1893-1999
• VerfasserIn: Fritzsche, Peter,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2022]; ©1996
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (320 p.)

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 Döblin. 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- CONTENTS -- ILLUSTRATIONS -- Introduction -- 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 -- ABBREVIATIONS -- NOTES -- INDEX