Fashion and nationalism in Berlin novels, 1870--1895 (Germany)

This dissertation explores the thematic and narrative coincidences between German nationhood and modern fashion in six novels and two shorter prose texts set in Berlin during the second half of the nineteenth century. When the dream of unification was finally realized after Germany's victory in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, many contemporary authors struggled with the literary documentation of their country's shift from Kulturnation to political entity. I argue that authors of this period posit Berlin as a “test kitchen” for German modernity, and that their attention to fashionable culture enables an examination of the tension between the traditional rhetoric of authenticity and the fluidity of modern cosmopolitanism in the literary forging of a post-unification German identity.; In my introduction (Section I), I survey some significant literary and cultural moments in Germany leading up to unification that illustrate the incompatibility between modern nationhood as concept and the traditional linguistic emphasis upon straightforward definition. Section II features a chapter on Paul Lindau's Der Zug nach dem Westen (1886), which begins to document the shift from conventional idealism to a universal seduction of the population by elegance and fashionable consumer goods. Chapters Two and Three are contained with Section III of the dissertation. Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Die Ideale unserer Zeit (1875) and Julius Stinde's Die Familie Buchholz (1886) offer comedic approaches to fashion as it encounters the no-nonsense, earnest provincial underpinnings of the German character. Section IV narrows its focus to the ways in which German modernity proves harmful to specific segments of the population. In Chapter Four, Max Kretzer's Die Betrogenen (1882) and “Das Opfer eines Frauenhutes” (1885) employs fashion to make his point that exploitation acts as the defining force dictating all aspects of modern capitalist urban society. Hedwig Dohm's Plein air (1890) and Fanny Lewald's “Der Magnetberg” make a similar argument concerning women in Chapter Five, illustrate that women become necessarily inscribed within an objectifying fashion system when in an urban context. Section VI considers Marie von Bunsen's Gegen den Strom (1892) as it concludes that Germany has finally succumbed to the nondescript cosmopolitanism of a modernity dictated by the impersonal forces of fashion.; My project considers the female body as a repository for and fashion as an articulation of both the tenuousness of class or gender identity and increase in cultural self-reflexivity that accompanied the project of German nationhood. In addition, it focuses on the ways in which realism and naturalism as formal and substantive categories employ the modern incarnations of fetishism, taste and charisma in the quest to define “the real” in literature.