Journal of Urban History 2003 Jazbinsek 102 25

10.1177/0096144203258342 ARTICLEJOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2003Jazbinsek / GEORG SIMMEL

THE METROPOLIS AND THEMENTAL LIFE OF GEORG SIMMEL

On the History of an Antipathy

DIETMAR JAZBINSEKWissenschaftszentrum Berlin

German sociologist and cultural philosopher Georg Simmel’s contribution to Europe’s urban history hashad an enduring influence, due in no part to the validity of his empirical approach. In his texts, however,Simmel manages to capture quite accurately the feeling of life in modern urban centers—so his readers at-test—due to his own experiences as a city dweller. This article asks what kind of experiences he had in the bigcity, or could have had, particularly in Berlin.

Keywords: urban sociology; cultural pessimism; Berlin; Großstadt-Dokumente

In the landscape of publicationson the history of European cities in thetwentieth century, the contribution by the German sociologist and cultural phi-losopher Georg Simmel towers above the urban silhouette. Scarcely any dis-course on the nature of urbanism and the social impacts of urbanization goeswithout one of the classical citations of Simmel’s observations about the“intensification of nervous stimulation” in the city or the “specifically metro-politan extravagances of mannerism.” This enduring influence is certainly notdue to the validity of his empirical approach. Except for the first scholarlywork that Simmel published—his 1879 survey on yodeling—he never dealtwith social research. His texts about cities, however, are equally incomparablewith the historical studies as published in that age by other prominent figuresin German sociology, above all Werner Sombart and Max Weber (in whoseworks the modern city is not treated).

If Simmel has managed to capture the feeling of life in modern urban cen-ters as accurately as his readers repeatedly attest, it can only be due to his ownexperience as a city dweller, which he later brought into his theoretical consid-erations. The question in this article is, therefore, what kind of experiences hehad in the big city, or could have had, particularly in Berlin. This approach isnot unusually original. Even while Simmel lived, one of his students, Theodor

102

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I thank David Antal for this translation of my German manuscript into English.Marcus Funck, Bernward Joerges, Jörg Potthast, Heinz Reif, Gert Schmidt, Erhard Stölting, and Ralf Thieshave my gratitude for their support on earlier versions of this article. I owe special thanks to Ani Difranco.

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY, Vol. 30 No. 1, November 2003 102-125DOI: 10.1177/0096144203258342© 2003 Sage Publications

at University of Sydney on March 22, 2015juh.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://juh.sagepub.com/

Lessing, made an initial attempt to relate the way of life in his own hometownto the thinking of his philosophical teacher. Lessing’s essay began with the daySimmel was born, March 1, 1858:

No holy star promising peace shown over his birthplace (on the corner ofLeipzigerstrasse and Friedrichstrasse) as it had over Bethlehem’s manger. No!Garish illuminated signboards boasted about a smutty world of metropolitan sexorgies. Trams clanked! Omnibuses chugged by. And the commercial vehiclespiled up in the four criss-crossing densely inhabited streets, whose slick side-walks reflected the poisonous green gas light from hundreds of street lampsevery evening. And instead of the hallelujah of blessed angels from on high washeard the insane din from an appalling crowd of people. Loiterers[Pflastertreter], con men, demimondes, all the scum of Europe streamed alongprecisely this building, like hell as defined by St. Theresa: “This is the fetid placewithout love.” Little Georg, however, slept in probably the noisiest cradle that aphilosopher had ever rocked in.1

Clearly, the story was intended to suggest that Simmel was predestined tobecome a theoretician of the urban setting because he had been steeped in theflair of the city from his childhood on. But the lullaby that Lessing intonedwith his expressionist tremolo was flawed, for the street corner on which littleGeorg’s birthplace stood was still relatively tranquil in 1858. Friedrichstrassedid not have a bus line until a decade later, at which time it still operated withhorse-drawn vehicles. The road could not reasonably be called a thoroughfareuntil March 22, 1873, when the first shopping arcade opened on the corner ofFriedrichstrasse and Behrenstrasse in celebration of the birthday of EmperorWilliam I.2 The elegant Café Bauer in 1884 courted customers with the firstilluminated signboards far and wide after the German Edison Company forApplied Electricity set up a signal box in the cellar of the building next door.

The list of examples illustrating the fundamental change in the streetscapein the area of Friedrichstrasse and Leipzigerstrasse in the second half of thenineteenth century could go on,3 but the point is that Lessing plainly was notdescribing the urban atmosphere of the year in which Simmel was born.Instead, he was unabashedly projecting the Berlin of 1912 and 1913, the yearswhen he wrote the text, more than half a century into the past. This anachro-nism is salient because it skims over one of Berlin’s peculiarities in the Euro-pean context: the boom in the beginning years of the Second German Empire.Granted, other major European cities, too, experienced heady growth duringthat period, but the qualitative basis from which it started was decidedly differ-ent. As the centers of the great colonial powers, London and Paris were alreadyworld-class cities when Berlin was still just the residence of the Prussian mon-archs. In other words, the place where Simmel was active as a sociologist nolonger had much at all in common with the city of his childhood. Contrary toLessing, I therefore assert that Simmel was called to be the theoretician of theurban setting precisely because he had not become accustomed to the “tumultof the metropolis”4 from early life on but rather had been confronted again and

Jazbinsek / GEORG SIMMEL 103



again with what was new and what needed getting used to. He had been con-fronted with the strangeness of a city in which nothing today is like it had beenyesterday. Simmel himself conceded that this circumstance had cruciallyinfluenced his intellectual development: “Berlin’s development from a cityinto a world metropolis in the years around and after the turn of the centurycoincides with my own broadest and most intense development.”5

To understand what Simmel could have really meant by that statement, Iexamine his writings on urban sociology through a biographical lens in thisarticle. Each of the following four sections recapitulates Simmel’s relationshipto his hometown from a different perspective: (1) Berlin as a city of workers,(2) Berlin’s amusement culture, (3) Berlin as seen from Rome, and (4) wartimeBerlin. But before attempting to understand Simmel’s texts about citiesthrough his biography (and vice versa), I return to what he himself wrote aboutthe impact that cities have on intellectual life.

THE URBANIST MANIFESTO

Having now indicated the special position that Simmel’s sociology enjoysin academic literature on the city, I hasten to add that this exceptional status isnot based on his life’s work or even on a multivolume standard collection. Itrests instead on a revised lecture manuscript, the original of which was no lon-ger than twenty-one pages. In 1903, Simmel was invited by the foundation ofthe pharmaceutical wholesaler Franz Ludwig Gehe to come to Dresden andgive a lecture, “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” In 1925, the published ver-sion of the lecture was hailed by the Chicago sociologist Louis Wirth as the“most important single article on the city from the sociological standpoint.”6

That claim is still viable, nearly a century after its appearance, especiallybecause the text has become so central to urban sociologists and urban histori-ans alike. In lieu of long paraphrases, I attempt to summarize Simmel’s reason-ing (see Table 1), in which he tried to give urbanism contour as a way of life byconstantly making comparisons with other forms of sociation, which are tenta-tively subsumable in the generic expression “traditional way of life.”

Despite the self-contained appearance of Table 1, it does not completelyconvey the many layers and ambiguities of the original text. Simmel’s essay onbig cities defies a straightforward summary for three reasons.

1. Lack of a systematic approach: the inconsistencies in his juxtaposition of the“urban” and “traditional” ways of life arise from a perpetual shift in the yard-stick of comparison. Sometimes, Simmel compares the city with the country-side; at other times, he compares the metropolis with the town; and in between,he continually compares modern urban centers with the cities of earlier epochs.

2. A break with conventional thinking about causality: the imprecision in Simmel’sargumentation does not necessarily have to do with intellectual carelessness. As

104 JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2003



his colleague Heinrich Rickert stressed, Simmel deliberately avoided systembuilding.7 This practice is illustrated particularly well by Simmel’s responses tothe question about the determining factors of social change. In one place, he says


TABLE 1

Synopsis of Simmel’s Lecture Titled “The Metropolis and Mental Life”

Unit of Comparison Urban Way of Life Traditional Way of Life

Main metaphor Long chains Small circles

Dominant economic system Goods production and Subsistence productionmoney economy and barter economy

Detailed division of labor Little division of labor

Core economic problem Fight for mana Fight with naturea

(instill new needs) (satisfy elementary needs)

Consumer’s relation to the Orientation to exchange Orientation to utility valueproduct value

Blasé attitude toward thingsa Sensitivity to differencesConsumption of final Consumer’s input

products

Consumer’s relation to the Dependence on many people Dependence on a few peoplemanufacturer the consumer does not know the consumer knows

Positive: predictability Positive: latitude for judgmentNegative: inexorability Negative: arbitrariness

General etiquette Brevity and rarity of meetingsa Length and frequency ofencounters

Slight aversiona Solidarity

Benefit to the individual Individual freedom Collective support

Danger to the individual Social isolation Social control

Leveling of people Adaptation to formal Adaptation to group normsprocedures (e.g., theobligation to be punctual)

Differentiation of people Stylization of individuality Knowledge of individualitiesin public in the groupa

Rhythm of life Tempo LeisurelinessContrasts EvennessIncessant change Constancy

Personality patterns Intellectualitya EmotionalityTolerance Philistinisma

Flexibility of roles played Stability of character

Life horizon The near is far; the far is near The near is near; the far is farCosmopolitanisma Provincialism

a. Translations of Simmel’s own expressions. The present translation departs in places from ear-lier English versions, which are not free from serious errors.For example, the contrast between theurban and the traditional way of life is described by Simmel as follows: “Das Entscheidende ist, daßdas Stadtleben den Kampf für den Nahrungserwerb mit der Natur in einem Kampf um denMenschen verwandelt hat, daß der umkämpfte Gewinn hier nicht von der Natur, sondern vomMenschen gewährt wird.” The formulation “Kampf um den Menschen” is translated by H. H. Gerthand C. W. Mills in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York, 1964), 420, as“inter-human struggle” and by E. Shils in Donald N. Levine, ed., Georg Simmel: On Individualityand Social Forms (Chicago, 1971), 336, as “conflict with human beings.”



it results from urbanization—the individual’s expanded freedom, for example.In another place, he explains that social change develops from the money econ-omy. Simmel only superficially suspends this contradiction by declaring that theurban center’s specific nature resides in its being the “seat of the money econ-omy.” Simmel’s whole purpose is to take unilinear causalities such as “town-air-makes-you-free” and dissolve them in a web of interactions. He wants to expressthat the city is both “cause and effect.”

3. A relish for paradoxes: the essay’scoincidentia oppositorium, its unity in oppo-sites, is a pattern of thinking characteristic of Simmel’s texts. Urbanization is nottreated as a zero-sum accounting of gains and losses but rather as a processwhose impacts come across as paradoxical at first glance: the simultaneous risein the level of the individual’s dependence and independence, the simultaneousincrease in anonymity and intimacy in interpersonal relations as one sharpensthe differentiation between them.8

But for all the ambiguity resonating in Simmel’s theory of urbanism, he isdefinite on one matter. The final sentence of the essay contains the reminderthat “it is not our task either to accuse or to pardon, but only to understand”9 thecity as an entity. The degree to which Simmel himself adhered to this precept isexamined in the following sections.

THE NO-GO AREAS AT THETURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

As Berlin developed into a center of trade, banking, and finance, old resi-dential neighborhoods in the downtown area had to give way to new commer-cial buildings. After the creation of the Second German Empire in 1871, labormigrated to the city, notably from the eastern parts of the country, findingemployment in the new industrial complexes located on the outskirts of thecapital. To cope with the ever more urgent housing problem, it was necessaryto resort to a kind of accommodation introduced earlier by Fredrick the Great,one that was to become a trademark of modernism in Berlin: tenements(mietskasernen). In 1908, Albert Südekum, a deputy of the Social DemocraticParty in Germany’s federal diet, published a report summarizing the results ofhis “research trips” to the proletarian quarters in the northern part of the capi-tal. He began by describing the examination of mass accommodations in theblock demarcated by Müllerstrasse and Reinickendorferstrasse. Südekumaccompanied a physician friend of his on a call to a couple who had to share asingle kitchen room with their three children. It was a hot, humid afternoon inAugust, and the stench in the tenement was wretched:

The smell of diapers is typical of all proletarian dwellings. And just as the smallchildren contribute most to the bad air, they also suffer most from it. What drivesthe father to the bar drives the child to the grave.10




Hell is a fetid place without love.Südekum’s arrangement of the empirical material draws attention to the

influence of his lifelong friend, the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies. One waySüdekum demonstrated the representativeness of his reported individual caseswas to cite a school physician’s statistics according to which nearly half of allBerlin school children had to sleep in one room with more than three people.11

These others were not necessarily family members, either. In many cases, theywere people (schlafleute) with whom workers and their families had to sharetheir dwellings because they could not pay the rent on their own. It takes littleempathy to imagine that most of the attributes that Simmel regarded as charac-teristic of city life—the individual’s greater independence, the “elaboration ofindividuality,” the surfeit of goods that made life “infinitely easy”12—appliedat most to the quarters of Berlin’s well to do, not to the involuntary communi-ties in the tenements.

To Südekum, increased “self-responsibility of the individual” in moderntimes was one of the “trite Manchester phrases.”13 As a local politician, heheard it most from deputies of the city assembly who considered the fightagainst poverty to be a question of police strategy. Alluding to Nietzsche,Südekum referred to his own report on the conditions in the suburbs as“thoughts out of season,” by which he wanted to say that public preoccupationwith “the miserable conditions of urban housing” had already passed someyears earlier. Sarcasm permeated his commentary about the response of theintellectuals to the situation in the workers’quarters and about their influenceon the entire development of the discussion about the social problem:

For a while they put up with the “housing issue,” too, though preferably the onein London’s Eastend or New York’s Bowery rather than that in Berlin’sScheunenviertel or in Recklinghausen; then enough’s enough! That’s just theway things are. Not only do such people know the least about what is right underour noses, they don’t evenwant to familiarize themselves with it.14

What is near is far; what is far is near. Taking what Simmel wrote about the lifehorizon of urbanites, Südekum transferred it to the level of social policy, driv-ing home the chill of the social climate prevailing in Berlin in those years.15

The reproach about the ephemeral interest in the iniquities of one’s own cityapplied to Simmel the sociologist as well. Around 1890, he sympathized for atime with the Social Democratic Party and, under a pseudonym, submittedarticles to journals that shared the party’s views. In later years, he counted thisinvolvement as one of his “youthful transgressions.”16 Unlike other Berlinintellectuals who went over to the next philosophical fashion after a phase ofsolidarity with the proletariat, Simmel retrospectively offered an explanationfor their ignorance:

Personal contact between educated people and workers often so vigorouslyadvocated for the social development of the present, the rapprochement of the





two worlds “of which the one does not know how the other lives” also advocatedby the educated classes as an ethical ideal, fails simply because of the insupe-rability of impressions of smell.17

In Simmel’s opinion, asking the well to do to sacrifice personal comfort, togo without “lobster, lawn-tennis, and chaises longues,” is easier than askingthem to engage in “physical contact with people to whom ‘the sweat of honesttoil’clings. The social question is not only an ethical one, but also a question ofsmell [eine Nasenfrage].” 18

Simmel did not write his commentary “Sociology of the Senses” from theperspective—or better, wind direction—of the person smelling of sweat butrather from that of the person disgusted by the odor. What he wrote about theaffectations of educated people who approach reality with “retracted finger-tips” at most can be read as autobiographical information. This suggestion isby no means meant as a denunciation. After all, Simmel’s thoughts about theconnection between “fear of contact” and loss of reality provide an authenticanswer to the fundamental methodological question of what effects the objectsof observation elicit in the observer and what influence this reaction has on thecognitive process.19 But when one interprets the manifestation of disgustcognitively, not morally, a contradiction arises. Although Simmel stressed theinherent selectivity of perception, which results from perception’s “emphasisupon liking and disliking,” he blithely makes his own hypersensitivity theyardstick of modernity: “The modern person is shocked by innumerablethings, and innumerable things appear intolerable to their [sic] senses whichless differentiated, more robust modes of feeling would tolerate without anysuch reaction.”20 The refinement of taste and an attendant, somewhat asepticrejection of what is felt to be unaesthetic were what Simmel saw as modern.The inhabitants of the tenements were thereby furtively excluded from mod-ern humanity. Life in stench, noise, and filth appeared as something pre-modern or, as Südekum aptly put it, “out of season.”

MODERN AMUSEMENT CULTURE

The misery that existed just a few blocks away, yet seemingly on a differentplanet, was something that the young Simmel became familiar with throughthe literary dramas and novels of German naturalism. After witnessing an1892 performance of Gerhart Hauptmann’sThe Weaversattended by “Berlin’sintellectual circles,” he emphasized the utility of the piece for their “social edu-cation.” This appraisal only heightened his indignation at the decision to cen-sure the play shortly thereafter:

The police permitted performance only for a private association [and] bannedpublic stagings. Year after year, though, they let the Berlin Residenz Theaterperform the most vulgar French buffoonery, allowing it to exert its educationaleffects on our people by titillating sexual feelings and centering all life’s



interests on the attendant pleasures. In the waxworks there is permission to showthe public a series of bloody acts under the title “For Viewers with Strong Nerves,”which thereby systematically brutalizes the young, who are keen on it, begets wan-ton lust for cruelty, and breeds in humans the instincts of the wild animal.21

To show the absurdity of censoring the workers’ drama, this passage bySimmel reproduced the cliches of the cultural criticism in his day. This criti-cism can be read as an answer to the question of what individuals do with theexpanded freedom granted them by the relaxation of social controls in the ano-nymity of the city. The conservative elites of the empire, such as the big land-owners and the clerics, were convinced that urbanites would use their freedomfor criminal or sexual escapades.22 To the delinquents’ credit, however, it wasrecognized that they did not stray from the path of virtue on their own accord. Itwas acknowledged that they had been seduced by a newly arisen amusementculture running the gamut from the subtle decoration in the department storesto the parade of feminine enticements on vaudeville stages. The Residenz the-ater and the Castan brothers’ wax museum were star attractions of Berlin’searly culture industry, which underwent a remake in the golden twenties.

The scandal surrounding the censorship ofThe Weaversin 1892 was not theonly occasion on which Simmel used the stimulus-response pattern to modelthe effect that the new kinds of diversion had on their public. Utter vitriolagainst the “hollow splendour of modern amusements” burst forth in the dia-tribe titled “Infelices possidentes,” which Simmel published under the pseud-onym Paul Liesegang in 1893. The temples of light entertainment such as theApollo Theater in Berlin and the Ronach Theater in Vienna were portrayed bySimmel as incubators of infection from which the rage for pleasure wasspreading like an epidemic throughout the population:

The terrible and tragic aspect of such domination by the shallow and the com-mon is that it not only takes hold of those of a bad or base disposition, who wouldgive in to it in any case, but also the better and more noble ones.23

Simmel saw the causes of this susceptibility in the intensification and monot-ony of work. Compulsive concentration on occupational life, he asserted, wascompensated for by compulsive diversion during leisure. As Simmel saw it,this behavioral pattern was particularly true of the well to do, who were able toafford everything but could scarcely really enjoy anything. The worker, forwhom entry to the pleasure palaces of Friedrichstadt was beyond reach, wasnevertheless supposed to be consoled by the knowledge that the jeunesse doréeof the fin de siècle type only sought to camouflage its inner emptiness bymeans of external opulence.

Simmel believed he recognized the contagious nature of this “craving forpleasure” (genußsucht) also in its capacity to erupt in social contexts havingnothing to do with entertainment at first glance. The Berlin Trade Exhibitionof 1896, for example, was by no means exclusively a commercial fair and a




showcase of German industry’s prowess. What arose on the grounds ofTreptow Park on the banks of the Spree River was a Prussian Disneyland with anostalgic little set-piece town named “Old Berlin”; a giant telescope and a pan-orama of the Alps; a thirty-six-meter-high model of the Great Pyramid ofCheops, complete with built-in elevator; and an artificial reservoir for stagingsea battles, all of which were won by the German fleet, the pride of EmperorWilliam II. 24 When Simmel contrasted the “exhibition style” with the “monu-mental style” in contemporary architecture and saw the proof of “aestheticproductivity” in the way the buildings on the exhibition grounds called atten-tion to their own transience, he momentarily succumbed to the characteristiclogic of this early form of pop culture.25

However, the tenor of Simmel’s sociological feuilleton was different.Arranging every conceivable product into one gigantic ensemble led to a“paralysis of the senses” in Simmel when he visited the exhibition. The cre-ators of the exhibition transferred the stimulating dimension of what isurban—“the richness and variety of fleeting impressions”—to a media envi-ronment. Simmel the viewer felt like someone who zaps the programs of pri-vate television for the first time. And he did not like what he saw. “Every fineand sensitive feeling, however, is violated and seems deranged by the masseffect of the merchandise offered.”26 He also conceded that the effect ofmassive quantity can indeed be experienced by less sensitive people as“amusement.” He remarked that great care was invested in design and decorbecause in the “struggle for the consumer,” the main thing was increasinglythe “shop-window quality ofthings.”27To Simmel, the economy proved in thisrespect to be merely a superstructure of cognitive psychology. Freely trans-lated, “There’s no business without show business.”

Only people who are already satiated can be coaxed to continue consumingby means of polished glamour alone. One can therefore assume that Simmelhad the wealthy uppermost in mind when he castigated the “slaves of the prod-ucts,” who have lost contact with their inner selves because of “endless habits,endless distractions and endless superficial needs.”28 In this critique of deca-dence, too, Simmel drew on a cliche common around the turn of the century.One of the most hated social characters to take the stage of German social lifein the era after 1870 was the parvenu. According to a widely quoted statementby Walther Rathenau, modern Berlin was considered not only the “parvenuamong capital cities” but also the “capital of parvenus.”29 Modernization’swinners included corporate founders, engineers, and executives right alongwith natural scientists and media intellectuals. There were in fact many newlyrich people in Berlin then, and Simmel, who had inherited a significant sumafter the death of his uncle, Julius Friedländer, was able to describe quite pre-cisely what it is like to suddenly come into money:

As long as we are not yet in a position to buy things, they affect us with their par-ticular distinctive charms. Yet as soon as we easily acquire them with our money,




those charms fade away, not only because we now own and enjoy them, but alsobecause we acquired them by an indifferent method which effaces their specificvalue.30

Note, however, that Simmel’s criticism of this dulling of the capacity tofully discriminate, this blasé attitude, is directed only at those well-off peoplewhose consumption no longer satisfied any need that could be taken seriously,such as the development of character. It was aimed at consumption that haddegenerated into an end in itself, into mere consumerism.31 Declaring this dis-tinct form of blasé attitude to be the universal trait of urban life clearly showshow much Simmel’s image of the city was shaped by Berlin’s Westend, wherethe sociologist spent most of his life. If Berlin was the capital of parvenus atthat time, then the western part of the city was dead center.32 To Simmel, thenouveau riche of Berlin’s western quarters were superficiality in person.Remembering also what Simmel pointed out as the “titillation of the senses”33

by indecent illuminated signboards and the olfactory impact of masses of peo-ple, one begins to suspect that he cannot have felt altogether at ease in his partof the city. Unsurprisingly, he regarded it as Richard Wagner’s “master stroke”that the composer moved performance of his operas to the Bavarian town ofBayreuth, for in Simmel’s opinion the seriousness of serious art could really beappreciated only in a place remote from modern life.34 Simmel himself, too,searched for a place of refuge outside the big city.

FROM ETERNAL ICEINTO THE ETERNAL CITY

Simmel the Berliner had a very special relation to the Alps. Again andagain, he sought out the solitude of the Swiss mountains with his family so thathe could devote himself to writing in peace. Some of his texts are said to sug-gest their alpine origins because, for instance, they speak of the “loftiestpeaks” that the author set about climbing in the history of thought. Yet themountains were more to Simmel than just a backdrop to and a symbol of hisown thinking. They helped him keenly experience contrast, helped himachieve a “feeling of being delivered” from the shallowness of the everydayworld.35 It was primarily the “absolutely ‘unhistorical’ landscape” of the gla-cier regions that enraptured him. In thePhilosophy of Money, he conveyed theintensity of this experience of nature as a symptom of modernism, as a specificperceptual mode of the urbanite. As Simmel explained, the bond that countrydwellers have to nature was precisely what made it impossible for them to see alandscape from purely aesthetic perspectives.36

The idyll in the Swiss alpine mountains began to cloud in the 1890s. Newstreets and railroad connections brought more and more city dwellers into theremote areas near Mürren and Adelboden. Simmel protested that alpine tour-ism became a “wholesale opening up.” Annoyed, he added,




The concentration and convergence of the masses—colourful but therefore as awhole colourless—suggesting to us an average sensibility. Like all social aver-ages this depresses those disposed to the higher and finer values without elevat-ing those at the base to the same degree.37

The philosopher fled the city, but the city pursued him. The daredevil climbingparties of the Alpine Club were a downright scandal to Simmel because “therisking of life as mere enjoyment is unethical.”38 In the final analysis, theaddiction to pleasure seeking for which he had criticized the mindless con-sumer back home was the same malady for which he now rebuked the moun-tain climbers. With his words, “those at the base” (den niedrig Veranlagten),he did not mean the workers, who around 1900 could not yet afford any alpinetrips, but rather the parvenus on vacation.

Simmel’s criticism of vacation culture suggests a family quarrel, for hisolder brother Eugen had published a book titledWalks in the Alps, whichrecounted the expeditions of Berlin’s Alpine Club as adventure stories.39 Thebook’s final chapter contained photographs of the “icy graves” in whichthe corpses of the excessively daring among these pioneers of today’sErlebnisgesellschaft (society oriented toward the enrichment of personalexperience). In spite of, or rather precisely because of, such misfortunes,Eugen Simmel tried to deny the appearance of the sensational and to presentmountain climbing as a unique educational experience. With Kant’sCritiqueof Judgmentin his backpack, Eugen climbed the Piz Bernina and held forth onthe fortitude of the fearless in the face of natural forces. This educational solic-itude found no mercy from his brother. The family expert on Kant categori-cally stated that the experience of nature was far too brief to contribute to anabiding enrichment of intellectual life. “The uplift which a view of the highAlps gives is followed very quickly by the return to the mood of the mun-dane.”40The superficiality of the alpine journeys would be immediately clear ifthey were compared with a true educational experience—“with Italian jour-neys.”41

In 1898, Georg Simmel visited Rome for the first time since his youth. Thethemes that were to occupy him in his lecture titled “The Metropolis and Men-tal Life” five years later do not appear in his travel report. As emphasized bythe report’s subtitle, Simmel’s observations were an “aesthetic analysis,” not asociological one. To Simmel, the aesthetics of the Italian capital consisted inthe way the disparate details of the urban structure fit together into a harmonicwhole. In a footnote, he stated that he owed this holistic impression to a care-fully delimited scope: “I may disregard the parts of Rome that are of unremit-ting modernity and equally unremitting atrociousness. Fortunately, they liewhere, with a bit of caution, they will be of relatively little concern to thestranger.”42 Rome was (and is?) the paragon of the ancient city, whereas Berlinthen (as now?) was perceived as a giant construction site.43 One of the mostinfluential depictions of Berlin as a test-tube city without tradition is found in




Julius Langbehn’s bookRembrandt als Erzieher(Rembrandt as an Educator).Reviewing this bestseller in 1890, Simmel did remonstrate that its authorlacked a higher order perspective. As long as the eye is fixated on this or thatdiscrete phenomenon of modernism, “one would like to think that telephones,mountain railroads, factory smokestacks, and the city’s endless monotonousstreets lined with houses are the most antipoetic things in the world.”44 Buteight years later, he adopted Langbehn’s stance and was no longer able to seetelephones, factory smokestacks, or asphalt streets as manifestations of “poetryrooted in reality.”

Simmel’s text on Rome deals with what he misses at home, what “oppresses”him there.45At the sight of the Roman ruins, the present merges with the past inthe eyes of their beholder from Berlin. The panorama of the eternal city evokesin him a feeling similar to that brought on by the sight of the eternal ice: being“free from all here and now.” But at the very moment Simmel declares—inpathos typical of the period—how overcome he is with emotion, his field ofvision is violated by that irksome element, a tourist. Although Simmel is atourist, too, he is not the “typical pleasure traveler.” Already feeling himselfunpleasantly affected elsewhere by human beings of this species, Simmelfinds them “more stylistically incongruous and intolerable in Rome than oth-erwise.”46 The typical thing about typical pleasure travelers is that they onlypay attention to individual sights: “The subhuman and primitive human con-sciousness is stuck in the isolation of its notions; the sign of higher [humanconsciousness] and the proof of its freedom and supremacy is that it drawsconnections between the particulars.”47

Nor was Simmel spared the irritation about “primitive human conscious-ness” while in Florence, where he often spent his semester breaks. From travelguides in circulation around the turn of the century,48 one gathers that Michel-angelo’s sculptures in the Medici’s family tomb in Florence were among themusts for the Tuscany faction of Germany’s educated middle class. Simmel, anadmirer of Michelangelo, was therefore unable to devote himself to enjoyingart in peace there. In a diary entry after a social evening on October 3, 1903,historian Kurt Breysig noted, “Simmel complains about the public in themuseums; 7½ minutes long in the Medici chapel—meaning: nonetheless havea vague yearning for beauty.”49 The most profound reason for the resentmentthat Simmel the sociologist felt toward the German capital may be that regard-less of where he fled, he always came across his unloved neighbors fromBerlin.

SIMMEL’S STUDENT JULIUS BAB ANDTHE GROßSTADT-DOKUMENTE SERIES

After never rising above the rank of associate professor (extraordinarius) atthe Royal Friedrich–Wilhelm University in Berlin, Simmel accepted a chair at




the University of Strasbourg in April 1914. When the news of his imminentdeparture became public, the journalDie Gegenwartprinted an editorial,“Berlin without Simmel,” lamenting that the city was “losing one of its mostspirited forces—a truly extraordinary scholar whom an entire dozen of the fullprofessors do not make up for.” Simmel and his family were highly gratified toread this article, though it did strengthen the doubts about whether the decisionto leave Berlin for the provinces was the right one.50 The author of the article,the thirty-four-year-old theater critic Julius Bab, had regularly attended Simmel’slectures as a student and had maintained amicable relations with his teacher inthe years thereafter.51

The publication that had made Bab known overnight was his 1904 portrait,Berlin bohemia.52 Whereas a year earlier Simmel’s famous lecture had charac-terized cities as places in which the “most tendentious peculiarities” of self-aggrandizement thrived, Bab noted how far the cultivation of eccentric deport-ment had advanced in Germany. Bab was personal friends with “probably themost conspicuously shabby and unruly [looking]”53 of all Berlin bohemians,the anarchist Erich Mühsam. Bab asserted that the egocentrism of “culturalgypsies” such as Mühsam acquires a new dimension in the city because theloners there can join together as a community:

The bohemian is a child of the city, conceived and born of these centers of mod-ern culture, which endeavor to gather all talents within them. . . . There havealways been individual bohemians, but a “bohemia” has existed only since theadvent of modern metropolises.54

Only in a city of millions does the number of dissidents reach the level neededto establish their own meeting places, publications, group rituals, and clothingstyles.

This train of thought may be obvious today, but in the early twentiethcentury, it was unusual and confusing. The prevailing image of the city inGermany around 1900 was one of disorder. Invoking Tönnies, observers asso-ciated the process of urbanization primarily with the dissolution of traditionalcommunities. Simmel, too, posited a loss of community ties in the city but jux-taposed it with gains in individual freedom and came up with mixed results.Bab, by contrast, associated individualism as a lifestyle with the emergence ofnew, modern forms of group formation. His overall judgment of urban culturewas correspondingly positive, especially because he accorded the outsidercommunities an important social function. He saw no cause for censure in theirattack on the “society’s habitual and convenient lies.” To him, it was insteadcreative destruction, an engine of modernization.

Julius Bab considered his chronicle of the Berlin bohemia only an initialsketch, a “preliminary study for a great, historically critical work”55 in whichhe also wanted to study criminal and professional communities to determinewhat influence the city exerted on the search for identity among marginalized




groups. Bab thereby anticipated a principle that Claude S. Fischer elaboratedseventy years later in his subcultural theory of urbanism.56 Fischer’s centralthesis was that deviations from the norm in an agglomeration can reach a “crit-ical mass” that lends the very quantity of rule violations a new quality, thequality of an independent subculture.57

Although Bab himself did not follow up on his research program, at leastparts of it were pursued later in the series in which he had published his bookon the Berlin bohemia. From 1904 through 1908, fifty-one monographsappeared in this series, which carried the title Großstadt-Dokumente. Its edi-tor, Hans Ostwald, chose the study on the bohemia as the second volume afterhe himself had scouted the “dark corners” of Berlin in the first volume, albeitwithout attempting to stake out a theoretical position.58 This decision is inter-pretable as an indication that Ostwald saw Bab’s ideas on the sociology of thesocial outsider to be a systematic outline for the entire urban research project.To be sure, the series went on to include studies not only on the subculture ofbohemians but also on gamblers, esoterics, pimps, athletes, professional crim-inals, anarchists, and homosexuals.59 Among the forty authors who worked onthe project, Ostwald was surrounded by a core group of scholars who had closecontact with each other through their mutual affiliation with artistic circles,press editorial departments, and associations for social reform. It is this intel-lectual milieu of the Berlin bohemia that Julius Bab described so vividly,which is why his contribution to the series can also be read as a self-portrait ofthe authors’ community.

When writing about the city, Simmel confined himself to the segment ofreality he knew from his own everyday world. Ostwald and his coauthors,however, predicated their work on the systematic inquiry into unfamiliar areasof the city, using various observational and descriptive methods ranging fromwalking tours to biographical interviews and the printing of personal docu-ments.60 Most of the procedures would be classified today as qualitative socialresearch, butsociological naturalismseems a more appropriate term for com-municating both the pathos of authenticity and the predilection for marginalexistence that were reflected in the Großstadt-Dokumente series. Indeed,Emile Zola and the German naturalists exerted great influence on the Berlincommunity of authors.

Given the project’s vast range of methods and spectrum of topics, it isexceedingly difficult to find a similarly encompassing early-twentieth-centuryundertaking classifiable as urban research—in the broadest sense. The closestcontending body of work is that of the Chicago school of urban sociology,which was started approximately a decade later under the direction of RobertE. Park, though the methodology involved was far more refined and the theo-ries more sophisticated. There were in fact many indications that the Ostwaldseries was closely studied by the founding generation of the Chicago school.61

In Louis Wirth’s famous 1925 bibliography of scientific literature on urbansociology, for example, Bab’s article was praised as a “unique contribution to




the mentality of city life.”62Beyond this tribute, almost all other individual vol-umes of the Großstadt-Dokumente series were listed and commentated, withWirth expounding on some of their leitmotifs and translating them into the ter-minology of Chicago urban sociology. In so doing, Wirth tackled a task thathad been neglected by the Berlin authors: the analytical penetration of the“factual material” that was spread over more than five thousand pages of text inGroßstadt-Dokumente. What Park had done in Chicago with the prefaces forthe classical studies of his doctoral students was far beyond what had beenmanageable in Berlin by Ostwald, who was a goldsmith by trade and a self-taught journalist. Ostwald had instead trusted that his readers would relievehim of the work of analyzing and synthesizing. A characteristic passageexpressing this approach is Ostwald’s introduction to volume 33, in which thediary of a convict is printed: “I deliberately refrain from further comment—butexpect that psychologists, criminologists, sociologists, politicians, philan-thropists, and misanthropes will appreciate the value of this document andextract the pulp from the rind.”63

In purely theoretical terms, Georg Simmel could have been the sociologistfor that job, particularly because personal contact to the Berlin community ofauthors existed through Julius Bab.64 Realistically speaking, however, theOstwald project came at least ten years too late for Simmel. By the time his stu-dent’s bohemia essay appeared, Simmel had long since made “the switch fromsocial involvement to ‘formal’ sociological analysis, from naturalism andsocial democracy to aestheticism and the circle surrounding George, fromsociology to metaphysics.”65 There is hardly a greater contrast than thatbetween Ostwald’s fascination with the “diversity of city life”66 and Simmel’sdistaste for Berlin’s “titillation of the senses and intoxication of the nerves.”This difference is apparent, among other things, from the style of the socialgatherings that Simmel cultivated with his friends and acquaintances inBerlin’s Westend. Part of the genteel etiquette in Simmel’s salon meant ensur-ing that conversation avoided mention of the surrounding city. As reported byElly Heuss-Knapp, a firsthand witness of thejours in Simmel’s private apart-ment in 1906: “There is never talk of what is currently occupying Berlin, butrather of the special rhetoric used by the French in the Dauphiné against thenorthern French or of other things no one else knows about. I like listening.”67

Such words express once again the notion that what is near is far, and what isfar is near. There were other exclusive salons in Berlin that existed at the turn ofthe twentieth century, but Simmel considered them more trivial forms of fel-lowship, as he stressed in an invitation to Stefan George, his most prominentguest: “The Berlin world reposes in dinner parties, social gatherings, and otherthings one can buy, and that makes a good periphery for our ever quieter andmore concentrated life.”68 To the rest of the world, the big city became nothingmore than a distant background noise helping the intellectual elite to achievean even more intense feeling of turning away from the world. It may be the




appropriate setting for a poet of the transcendental, but is it for an observer ofmodern times?

BABYLON BERLIN IN THE GREAT WAR

“1 August, war! The greatest shock of my life.. . . Thefuror teutonicusisunleashed and rages in me as well.”69 This entry in the memoirs that HansSimmel wrote in American exile during World War II describes his father’sreaction to the outbreak of World War I. As long as Georg Simmel’s strengthpermitted, that is, until he fell ill with cancer at the turn of 1917 and 1918, hetried to contribute nonmaterially to the self-assertion of the German Empire ina world of enemies. He worked late in the evenings at the censor’s bureau of theStrasbourg telegraph office, took a hand in foreign propaganda, and agitatedagainst the French policy of retaliation and revenge and against “England’shunger for gold.” On speaking tours within Germany, he made a point ofdeclaring his love for the fatherland, and he gave university lectures at thewestern front.

Simmel’s activism did not differ markedly from that of the other Germansociologists, who did not hesitate long to volunteer for the combat patrols ofideological warfare.70 But coming from an author with a fondness for suchniceties as coquetry and sake bowls, the crudeness of the belligerent is moresurprising with Simmel than with the other representatives of the field. It iseven more startling than with Sombart, Tönnies, and Weber, who, for alltheir proclamations about freedom from value judgment, seldom shunnedthe opportunity to interfere in daily politics. With Simmel, the shift fromtheorizing about individualism to rooting for the nation comes across as aradical break with his own past. The patriotic tones in his writing duringthe war are new when compared with the tenor of his earlier texts. He neverused to think about what sets “Teutonism” apart from the “Romanesque” andhad never before tried to distinguish between genuine German “cosmopolitan-ism” and the globetrotter’s “diffuse gushing about foreignness” (verblaseneAusländerei).71 Such phrases suggest that Simmel’s enthusiasm for the war beequated with a temporally localizablesacrificium intellectusand that his workbe regarded as essentially unscathed by the causes and consequences of Ger-man militarism.

This conclusion amounts to a serious misinterpretation, as demonstrated bySimmel’s first wartime speech, which he gave on November 7, 1914, inAubette Hall in Strasbourg. Simmel expressed his deep relief that the “epochsince 1870,” the era of Berlin modernism, had irrevocably come to an end,linking the hope for a renaissance of the German people and culture in the formof a “new man.” Just as the war of 1870-1871 helped the German nationachieve its economic potential, the new Great War could—so he asserted—lead to the mobilization of their spiritual reserves by eliminating one of the




root evils of Wilhelmine society, “mammonism,” which he defined as “theworship of money and of the monetary value of things.”72 Mammonism wasthus nothing other than a new, more concise formulation of Simmel’s old con-viction that money had ceased being a mere means of payment and had madeitself the ultimate purpose of human existence. Furthermore, the statement“that this development of the golden calf into something transcendent . . .became endemic in our major cities” ought to sound familiar to the readers ofSimmel’s 1903 essay on the city. In the lecture “The Crisis of Culture,” whichwas delivered in January 1916, Simmel reiterated the same basic idea moresystematically and more abstractly: life—the protagonist in Simmel’s meta-physics—finally defends itself against its rape by the mechanics of modern-ism. He stated with unmistakable clarity in the endnote to the printed versionof the lecture that “the foundations of the historiocultural and historio-philosophical bases of these considerations are thoroughly described in mybookThe Philosophy of Money.”73

How far the equating of war and catharsis removed Simmel from the con-ceptual world of his countrymen is shown by the fact that he based his hopesnot on possible victory but rather on the probability that Germany would beimpoverished. Remarkably, Simmel was persuaded of the latter scenariowithin just four months after the war broke out. “Germany will be a poor lag-gard by comparison.”74 He deleted an additional clause—“even if a happy endto the war restores billions to her”—from the 1917 reissue of his first wartimetext, for by then a happy outcome was no longer likely. From the outset, mak-ing a virtue out of necessity had been more important to Simmel than victoryor defeat. The privations of the war economy were to teach Germany “a moresensitive, less blasé—I would even go so far as to say a more reverent—rela-tionship to the commodities which we consume daily.”75 The state indicatesthat Simmel’s antipathy, as in his prewar texts, once again railed primarilyagainst the “craving for pleasure” of people with a blasé attitude. People whocould barely afford the simplest articles of daily consumption already existedin Germany during peacetime, but now those who used to be guilty of mam-monism were expected to sacrifice what they cherished most—their money.

In February 1915, Simmel called for this sacrifice by launching a head-strong “food campaign” that was to occupy him for more than two years. His“Lenten sermon” to the wealthy, which was circulated in newspapers and jour-nals, laid down the law on the heresy that misconceived thrift constituted:“Today, the catchword ‘savings’ is leading former consumers of sole, arti-chokes, and beef filet to eat haddock, white cabbage, and roast knucklesinstead.”76 The examples varied: “People who had been used to lobster salad,young carrots, and partridge were suddenly eating green herring, old carrots,and hash made of calf’s lung.”77The message was the same, however: whoevercould afford the most expensive food should continue eating it during the waras well so that the inexpensive foods remained available for the other groups inthe population.




Simmel thereby addressed the chief problems of Germany’s war economy,the bottlenecks in the supply of food to the population, especially in the big cit-ies and above all in Berlin. He greatly welcomed the decision to ration staplefood, a measure born of necessity. Beginning on February 22, 1915, flour andgrain in Berlin were allocated by means of “bread ration-cards.” This distribu-tion system was typical of so-called wartime socialism and was soon expectedto extend to other everyday goods and other regions of the German Empire.Simmel rejoiced,

The bread ration-card symbolizes the uselessness of even the greatest wealth. . . .At last people are again being asked to economize with meat and butter, breadand wool, for the sake of these commodities themselves. This change may soundsimple, but it totally reverses a sense of economic value which has been nurturedfor centuries in the civilized world.78

The sense of economic values characteristic of the barter economy is what wasfinally supposed to reassert itself. What Simmel the Lenten preacher had inmind is tantamount to a revival of the traditional way of life79 on an urban scaleand at a national level.

Simmel’s vision took no account of the everyday world in the regionsbehind the war of position. Each person with a bread ration-card was to receiveabout eight ounces of flour a day, which, if stretched with a potato additive,corresponded to a little more than four pounds of bread.80 Approximately800,000 people, most of them in the capital, are estimated to have starved todeath in Germany during the years of the Allied economic blockade of thecountry. In the midst of the war, Berlin’s topography began to deurbanize, witha bizarre form of the barter economy eventually taking over within the city.Potatoes were cultivated in parks and open areas, balconies were used forgrowing tomatoes, and chickens and rabbits were raised in back courtyards.The universities feverishly conducted experiments with new, synthetic foods,such as flour made from finely ground tree bark, pudding powder made fromgluten, and pepper made from ash. Supply gaps opened the way for the blackmarket and the underground economy. Only solvent customers could pay theexorbitant prices for illegally procured goods. A wartime version of the par-venu arose with the profiteer of black marketeering and the chain trade. “Cor-ruption existed everywhere, but only in Berlin did it emerge into a way of life,highlighting the extreme inequality of access to food in the German capital.”81

In far-off Strasbourg, Georg Simmel eventually also began to note the cata-strophic conditions in his hometown. A footnote to a collection of articles pub-lished in the book titledDer Krieg und die geistigen Entscheidungen(The Warand the Decisions of the Mind), which appeared in mid-1917, he conceded,“The war years that have meanwhile elapsed, with profiteering and overcharg-ing, hoarding, and methods of war-tax evasion, have shown that there can beno talk of a general endeavor to overcome mammonism.”82 But even then he




could not yet bring himself to give up the idea that the war was accomplishing a“metaphysical feat”: “The war has brought life a tremendous increase ofintensity that which the wonderful people have become even more wonder-ful and the knaves even more knavish.” At the same time, the revision of hisoriginal expectations was associated with their radicalization into a fantasyof annihilation: “The cozy tranquility of peace can perhaps afford to carryalong what is superfluous, what is innerly dead[.] . . . This is no longer compat-ible with the toughness and decisiveness to which the war has hammered outour existence.”83 And uppermost on Simmel’s list of what is innerly dead—superfluous people. It is that “which is without right to the future: People andinstitutions, world views, and concepts of morality.”

He thus seemed to have sensed that the war would not meet his desire forannihilation. When he works himself up over the “old mammonistic Adam,” itsounds more like a curse than like philosophy. His Old Testament wrath is notdirected solely at the materialism of the “monied classes” but also at the bigcity, at Berlin, where culture “suffered the fate of the Tower of Babel”84 andwhere “the golden calf became transcendent.” In Simmel’s religion of educa-tion, modern Berlin is what ancient Rome was according to Augustinianallegory85—the hotbed of vice, the city of vulgarity and idolization of money—with modern Rome taking the place of biblical Jerusalem.

BERLIN, SIMMELSTRASSE, MARCH 2001

In late 1914, Simmel had been able to extemporize, as it were, a meaningfor the war because he had spent years in mental mobilization. It would bean injustice to him to regard his radicalization ofThe Philosophy of Moneyinto a uniquely Simmelian variant of the German “steel-bath philosophies”(stahlbadphilosophien) as a misinterpretation of his own work, as a retrospec-tive prophecy belatedly claiming to have seen from the outset how thingswould turn out. Simmel had actually foretold much earlier that the “pathologyof culture” would inexorably lead to the “outbreak of the crisis.”86

On the walls of the Berlin entertainment establishments there stands themenemene tekel; the marble and the paintings, the gold and the satin that cover themseek in vain to cover the writing, it penetrates through the present, and today’sseers know how to interpret it.

Two decades before Verdun, these words marked the start of “Infelices possi-dentes.” A few lines later, Simmel added an oracle: “A terrible seriousness willnot only replace this gleaming intoxication.”87 The seer from Friedrichstrassedid not merely divine the terrible seriousness; he longed for it: “Give us, oonrushing times, give to us reverence again.” In 1900, he wrote a poeminspired by the turn of the century, concluding it with this prayer formula to




express a feeling unmistakably stressed from the very title through to the punc-tuation: “A yearning.”88 That same year, Simmel made a statement inThe Phi-losophy of Moneythat has puzzled many a scholar studying his works: “Mod-ern times, particularly the most recent, are permeated by a feeling of tension,expectation, and unreleased intense desires—as if in anticipation of what isessential, of the definitive[,] of the specific meaning and central point of lifeand things.”89 The passage sounds less puzzling if one reads one sentence fur-ther, for Simmel mentions there the “most striking example,” aside frommoney, of “mere preparation, a latent energy, a contingency.” He meant theregular army and the “negation of its end”: to wage war.

The fact that Simmel secretly understood himself as a prophet of impendingdoom already in peacetime was not lost on his contemporaries. His studentTheodor Lessing, for example, intended this very message when he had “littleGeorg” grow up amid a hallucinated “filthy world of metropolitan sex orgies”and stylized him into a new messiah called to take a whip and drive the moneychangers from the Holy Temple.90 To Simmel, this moment of reckoningseemed to have come with the outbreak of the Great War, the dawn of the“great era.” What used to displease him about “urban culture” he now inter-preted as degeneration resulting from the “culture of peace.”91 And quiet aver-sions then became vociferous aggressions.

Why has the link between Simmel’s wartime texts and urban texts been sorarely discerned since that time? Why have so few observers seen the per-fumed Nietzscheanism of a man who combined the refinement of his own,“higher” mental life with the contempt of all people he classified as “lowerhuman beings”—a man who is considered an urbanist (and a modernist) parexcellence, although he bequeathed a work clearly laced with antiurbanist(and antimodernist) affects? There are a kind explanation and an unkind expla-nation of the usual interpretation of Simmel’s urban sociology, in which hispitch-black cultural pessimism is perceived at best as a gray veil. According tothe unkind version, what Simmel wrote of Julius Langbehn’s success appliesto his own:

I mean the success achieved everywhere by pure “brilliance” as such. That thepeople to whom we owe what is true and deep in content were often also capableof brilliant form, astonishing analogies, the ability to capture colorful appear-ances in a fitting word—that has generated the utterly wrong opinion that theseformal characteristics already have the value of truth and depth. What contrib-utes to this is the vast number of literary productions and the cursoriness of thereading caused thereby.92

The kind explanation for the one-sided reception of Simmel’s work amounts tosaying that his texts have been read as he wished his readers to read them: “Oneshould gratefully absorb from a book what is edifying and simply pass over theother.”93Should one? Can one not be grateful for everything there is yet to learn




from Simmel’s books and nevertheless refuse simply to pass over “the other,”sociologically dubious aspects in his work?

Along with several works that were brilliant only in form, Simmel theman left a great deal that was true and deep, and the city of Berlin showed itsthanks by naming a street after him.94 Of course, traffic arteries such asFriedrichstrasse and Leipzigerstrasse were out of the question for this purpose.But streets with less tradition, such as Nussbaumallee and Lindenallee in thenoble Westend quarter, were not considered, either, although they would havebeen fitting for Simmel because he had felt the area to be his home for a while.The street that was ultimately chosen lies in the far north of the city, in whatused to be a proletarian residential part of Reinickendorf, a vicinity thatSimmel probably never would have voluntarily set foot in. When I asked a resi-dent of Simmelstrasse about the person after whom the road was named, sheshook her shoulders in perplexity. The only metropolitan sound drowning outthe birds chirping in the trees lining the street is the noise of the passenger air-lines taking off and landing at nearby Tegel airport at regular intervals. Nam-ing this urban village street after the world-famous professor may still havebeen a way of showing deference, but it is also a kind of vengeance for the con-siderable antipathy lining Simmel’s ambivalence toward his hometown. Itwould be unusual if the author’s extensive work were to contain no quotationin keeping with this sublime form of revenge: “It is the subtlest and often mostineluctable revenge exacted by powers of fate that they grant us the substanceof our desires and completely reverse it into its caricature merely by grantingmore of it or less.”95

1. “Dies ist der Ort, wo es stinkt und man nicht liebt,” Theodor Lessing,Philosphie als Tat, Erster Teil(Göttingen, 1914), 303.

2. The biggest attraction of this “Imperial Gallery” became the wax museum by the brothers Louis andGustav Castan, whose exhibits included not only famous figures such as Napoleon Bonaparte but infamousones such as Jack the Ripper (much to Simmel’s consternation, as shown later in this article).

3. Ralph Hoppe,Die Friedrichstraße: Pflaster der Extreme(Berlin, 1999).4. Georg Simmel,The Philosophy of Money(1900), translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby

(London, 1990), 484.5. Hans Simmel, “Auszüge aus den Lebenserinnerungen,” in Hannes Böhringer and Karlfried Gründer,

eds.,Ästhetik und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende: Georg Simmel(Frankfurt am Main, 1976), 265.What is true of Simmel is, of course, also true of the other classical thinkers of early German sociology whotackled the topic of urbanization. Weber (born in 1864), Sombart (born in 1863), and Ferdinand Tönnies(born in 1855) all belonged to this generation of sociologists, for whom “Berlin modernism” became a keyexperience, though some of them discussed it only from afar. I am unable to judge whether this relationshipto the urban environment justifies the conclusion that the idea of the modern city is aninvention typiquementallemande. See Stéphane Jonas, “La métropolisation de la société dans l’oeuvre de Georg Simmel,” in JeanRémy, ed.,Georg Simmel: Ville et modernité(Paris, 1995), 53.

6. Louis Wirth, “A Bibliography of the Urban Community,” in R. E. Park, E. W. Burgess, and R. D.McKenzie, eds.,The City(Chicago, 1925), 219.

7. Heinrich Rickert,Die Philosophie des Lebens(Tübingen, 1920), 26.




8. The latter aspect, the appreciation of the value attached to privacy in the city, is one of the few basicthoughts on urbanism inThe Philosophy of Moneythat Simmel did not mention in his Dresden lecture (seeIbid., 469). Apart from that difference, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” can be read as a summary of thesecond, “synthetic” part of his magnum opus. See Otthein Rammstedt, “Simmels Philosophie des Geldes,”in Jeff Kintzelé and Peter Schneider, eds.,Georg Simmels Philosophie des Geldes(Frankfurt am Main,1995), 34.

9. Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903, trans. by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills),in Kurt H. Wolff, The Sociology of Georg Simmel(New York, 1964), 424.

10. Albert Südekum,Großstädtisches Wohnungselend, Großstadt-Dokumente, vol. 45 (Berlin, 1908),34.

11. Ibid., 46.12. Simmel, “Metropolis and Mental Life,” 422.13. Südekum,Großstädtisches Wohnungselend, 7.14. Ibid., 6.15. In subject matter and sometimes in tone, Südekum’s ridicule of the “lovers of pressed raspberry lem-

onade” evokes Tom Wolfe’s coverage of the radical chic of New York high society in the late 1960s. See TomWolfe, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers(New York, 1970).

16. Klaus Christian Köhnke,Der junge Simmel in Theoriebeziehungen und sozialen Bewegungen(Frankfurt am Main, 1996), 23-24.

17. Georg Simmel, “Sociology of the Senses” (1907, trans. by Mark Ritter and David Frisby), in DavidFrisby and Mike Featherstone, eds.,Simmel on Culture(London, 1997), 118.

18. Ibid. See also Georg Simmel, “Soziologische Ästhetik” (1896), in Georg Simmel,Gesamtausgabe(GSG) (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), vol. 5, 205.

19. Georges Devereux,From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences(Paris, 1967).20. Georg Simmel, “Sociology of the Senses,” 117-19.21. Georg Simmel, “Gerhart Hauptmanns ‘Weber’ ” (1892), in Werner Jung, ed.,Georg Simmel: Vom

Wesen der Moderne(Hamburg, 1990), 166.22. Ralf Stremmel,Modell und Moloch. Berlin in der Wahrnehmung deutscher Politiker vom Ende des

19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg(Bonn, 1992), 100-104.23. Georg Simmel, “Infelices possidentes!” (1893, trans. by Mark Ritter and David Frisby), in David

Frisby and Mike Featherstone, eds.,Simmel on Culture, 261.24. Paul Thiel, “Berlin präsentiert sich der Welt. Die Treptower Gewerbeausstellung 1896,” in Jochen

Boberg, Tilman Fichter, and Eckhart Gillen, eds.,Die Metropole. Industriekultur in Berlin im 20. Jahrhundert(Munich, 1986), 16-27.

25. Georg Simmel, “The Berlin Trade Exhibition” (1896, trans. by Sam Whimster),Theory, Culture, &Society8 (1991): 121.

26. Ibid., 119-20.27. Ibid., 122.28. Simmel,Philosophy of Money, 483.29. Walther Rathenau, “Die schönste Stadt der Welt,” in Jürgen Schutte and Peter Sprengel, eds.,Die

Berliner Moderne 1885-1914(Stuttgart, 1987), 100.30. Simmel,Philosophy of Money, 257.31. The blasé people whom Simmel identified as a type thus have nothing to do with colloquial expres-

sions might be associated with this label, say, an “arrogant snot,” or someone fixated on being “cool.”32. Edmund Edel,Neu-Berlin, Großstadt-Dokumente (Berlin, 1908), vol. 50.33. Simmel, “Infelices possidentes!” 259.34. Ibid., 260.35. Georg Simmel, “Die Alpen” (1918), inGSG, vol. 14 (1996), 296-97.36. Simmel,Philosophy of Money, 478.37. Georg Simmel, “The Alpine Journey” (1895, trans. by Sam Whimster),Theory, Culture, & Society8

(1991): 95.38. Ibid., 97.39. Eugen Simmel,Spaziergänge in den Alpen(Leipzig, 1880).40. Georg Simmel, “Alpine Journey,” 96.41. This is an allusion to Goethe’sItalian Journey(published 1816-1817).42. Georg Simmel, “Rom. Eine ästhetische Analyse” (1898), inGSG, vol. 5 (1992), 303.




43. Ralf Thies and Dietmar Jazbinsek, “Berlin-das europäische Chicago. Über ein Leitmotiv derAmerikanisierungsdebattezu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts,” in Clemens Zimmermannand Jürgen Reulecke,eds.,Die Stadt als Moloch? Das Land als Kraftquell?(Berlin, 1999), 53-94.

44. Georg Simmel, “Rembrandt als Erzieher” (1890), inGSG, vol. 1 (1999), 237.45. Simmel, “Rom,” 308.46. Ibid., 306.47. Ibid., 309.48. See, for example, the various editions of Grieben’s “Ober-Italien” (northern Italy).49. Typescript “Kurt Breysig,” in Staatsbibliothek Berlin, NL 125 (Michael Landmann), box 1.50. Hans Simmel, “Auszüge aus den Lebenserinnerungen,” 226.51. See, for instance, Simmel’s letter of recommendation for Bab, July 9, 1910, in Kurt Gassen and

Michael Landmann, eds.,Buch des Dankes an Georg Simmel(Berlin, 1958), 107.52. Julius Bab,Die Berliner Bohème, Großstadt-Dokumente (Berlin, 1904), vol. 2.53. Ibid., 79.54. Ibid., 40.55. Ibid., 3.56. Bab went uncited, however. See Claude S. Fischer, “Toward a Subcultural Theory of Urbanism,”

American Journal of Sociology80 (May 1975): 1319-41.57. Even if no statistically significant differences between the rural and urban population are discernible

in terms of sex and crime, a change in the form of sexuality and criminality is likely in the city. I presume itwas this change that elicited the rampant fear of sex and crime that Berlin triggered by virtue of its new exis-tence as a major urban center.

58. Hans Ostwald,Dunkle Winkel in Berlin, Großstadt-Dokumente (Berlin, 1904), vol. 1.59. The greatest sensation was stirred at that time by the report titled “Berlin’s Third Sex” (“Berlins

Drittes Geschlecht”), in which the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld toured the homosexual scene of the impe-rial capital, and a volume containing the case histories by a gynecologist writing about female homosexual-ity. The latter book was banned by the Berlin county court and subsequently confiscated.

60. An instructive example of this early form of urban ethnography is Albert Südekum’s study on the liv-ing conditions in the tenements (see the third section of this article), which appeared as volume 45 ofGroßstadt-Dokumente.

61. Dietmar Jazbinsek, Berward Joerges, and Ralf Thies,The Berlin “Großstadt-Dokumente”: A For-gotten Precursor of the Chicago School of Sociology, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung,Discussion Paper FS II 01-502 (Berlin, 2001).

62. Wirth, “Bibliography of the Urban Community,” 188.63. In the Working Group on Metropolitan Studies at the Social Science Research Center Berlin

(Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung), my colleagues and I are endeavoring to continue whereLouis Wirth stopped seventy-five years ago—with the search for the leitmotifs in Ostwald’s project of urbanresearch. Although a few of the volumes are still frequently cited, especiallyBerlins Drittes GeschlechtbyMagnus Hirschfeld, the series as a whole was forgotten after World War I.

64. A letter written by Simmel in 1913 and preserved in the Julius Bab Collection of the Leo Baeck Insti-tute in New York indicates that Bab kept Simmel informed of his publications.

65. Köhnke,Der junge Simmel, 144. Stefan George (1866-1933), one of the most influential and eccen-tric lyricists of Wilhelminian society, is meant.

66. Ostwald,Dunkle Winkel in Berlin, 3.67. Typescript “Elly Heuss-Knapp,” Staatsbibliothek Berlin, NL 125 (Michael Landmann), box 1.

Another ground rule of this “ludic form of sociation” was that “no one was allowed to bring his idiosyncra-sies, problems, and needs along” (Margarete Susman, in Gassen and Landmann,Buch des Dankes, 281).

68. Georg Simmel to Stefan George, letter of February 9, 1899. Stefan George archive,Würrtembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart.

69. Hans Simmel, “Auszüge aus den Lebenserinnerungen,” 266.70. Hans Joas, “Die Klassiker der Soziologie und der Erste Weltkrieg,” in Hans Joas and Helmut Steiner,

eds.,Machtpolitischer Realismus und pazifistische Utopie: Krieg und Frieden in der Geschichte derSozialwissenschaften(Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 179-210. Sven Papcke, “Dienst am Sieg: DieSozialwissenschaften im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Sven Papcke, ed.,Vernunft und Chaos. Essays zur sozialenIdeengeschichte(Frankfurt am Main, 1985), 125-42. Incidentally, most of the authors of Großstadt-Dokumente allowed themselves to be infected by German jingoism. Hans Ostwald worked in the War Pressand Information Office. Julius Bab concocted chauvinistic verse. Magnus Hirschfeld attacked the Anglo-




Saxon “smoking culture.” According to the history written in the former German Democratic Republic,Albert Südekum, the ethnographerof the tenements, contributed in no small way to the outbreak of the worldwar by steering German social democracy, along with a few other “traitors to the workers,” toward a trucewith the military and approval of war credits.

71. Georg Simmel, “Die Dialektik des deutschen Geistes” (1917), inGSG, vol. 16 (1999), 36.72. Georg Simmel,Deutschlands innere Wandlung(Straßburg, 1914), 6.73. Georg Simmel, “Die Krisis der Kultur” (1917), inGSG, vol. 16 (1999), 53. The endnote is absent in

the English translation. See Georg Simmel, “The Crisis of Culture” (trans. by D. E. Jenkinson), in DavidFrisby and Mike Featherstone, eds.,Simmel on Culture, 101.

74. Simmel,Deutschlands innere Wandlung, 5.75. Simmel, “The Crisis of Culture,” 97-98.76. Georg Simmel, “Die Umwertung der Werte. Ein Wort an die Wohlhabenden,”Frankfurter Zeitung,

March 5, 1915; Georg Simmel, “Eine Fastenpredigt. Von dem Opfer der Wohlhabenden,”FrankfurterZeitung, March 18, 1917.

77. Georg Simmel, “Geld und Nahrung” (1915), inGSG, vol. 13 (2000), 120.78. Simmel, “The Crisis of Culture,” 97.79. The attributes associated with the “traditional way of life” are shown in Table 1.80. On this point and the following passages, see Dieter and Ruth Glatzer,Berliner Leben 1914-1918

(Berlin, 1983), 83-87, 202-10; Thierry Bonzon and Belinda Davis, “Feeding the Cities,” in Jay Winter andJean Louis Robert, eds.,Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914-1919(Cambridge, UK, 1997),305-41.

81. Bonzon and Davis, “Feeding the Cities,” 341.82. Georg Simmel, “Deutschlands innere Wandlung” (1917, reprint), inGSG, vol. 16 (1999), 18.83. Ibid., 21.84. Simmel, “The Crisis of Culture,” 100.85. James Dougherty, “Exiles in the Earthly City: The Heritage of St. Augustine,” in Peter S. Hawkins,

ed.,Civitas. Religious Interpretations of the City(Atlanta, 1986), 105-22.86. Simmel, “The Crisis of Culture,” 92.87. Simmel, “Infelices possidentes!” 259.88. Georg Simmel, “Eine Sehnsucht” (1900), in Christian Wehlte, ed.,Georg Simmel: Momentbilder sub

specie aeternitatis(Heidelberg, 1998), 101.89. Simmel,Philosophy of Money, 481.90. See the introduction of this article. At the end of his biographical essay, Lessing reveals himself to be

Judas when, full of love and hate, he realizes that “Georg Simmel’s Philosophy is the triumph of a dogmaticmind over a personality of Protean fluidity” (Lessing,Philosophie als Tat, 335).

91. Simmel, “Die Krisis der Kultur,” 50. The expression “peace culture” (friedenskultur) does not appearin the English translation cited above.

92. Simmel, “Rembrandt als Erzieher,” 242.93. Georg Simmel,Fragmente und Aufsätze aus dem Nachlaß(Munich, 1923), 28.94. This honor was bestowed on October 20, 1932, under circumstances that cannot be reconstructed, for

the corresponding files of the responsibledistrict office were destroyed in World War II. Oddly, the street wasnot renamed after the national socialists seized power.

95. Georg Simmel, “Rache” (1902), in Christian Wehlte, ed.,Georg Simmel: Momentbilder sub specieaeternitatis(Heidelberg, 1998), 45.

Dietmar Jazbinsek is a research assistant at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. Inter-ested in the history and theoretical foundation of modern metropolis since the latenineteenth century, he has published various articles on that topic. Among them are“Berlin—Chicago 1914. Die Berliner Großstadt-Dokumente und ihre rezeption durchdie Gründergeneration der Chicago School of Sociology,” inSchriftenreihe derForschungsgruppe “Metropolenforschung” des Forschungsschwerpunktes Technik—Arbeit—Umwelt am Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung.




Journal of Urban History 2003 Jazbinsek 102 25

Documents

Transcript of Journal of Urban History 2003 Jazbinsek 102 25