Reading Berlin 1900 Paperback by Peter Fritzsche

Product Details

• Publisher: Harvard University Press (1998-01-20)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 320 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780674748828
• Item Weight: 368.55 grams
• Dimensions: 0.0 x 0.0 x 0.0 cm

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.

About the Author

Peter Fritzsche is Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.