Metamorphoses: Urban space and modern identity, Berlin, 1870--1933

After Berlin became the German capital in 1871, the city was rapidly transformed into a major industrial centre with a population that reached four million in 1920. During these years architects and city planners singled out a series of urban sites as central to the creation of a modern identity for the city. Potsdamer Platz and Auguste-Viktoria Platz, for instance, became contested territories in which civic leaders debated the essential nature of the modern city and experimented with strategies to stabilize the meaning of urban space.;During the last decades of the nineteenth century, imperial officials and Berlin architects sought to create monumental spaces that would ground the urban environment in a firm structure of national identity. After 1900, however, the effectiveness of these monuments was increasingly undermined by the circulatory force of modern traffic and commerce. As the street was redefined as a functional traffic conduit, architects adapted their designs to conform to the rhythms of modern transportation and police officials encouraged Berliners to adjust to the accelerated tempo of modern traffic.;After 1918, the nature of urban space in the German capital was reshaped by the techniques of visual spectacle developed in modern film and advertising. While modern architects acknowledged the importance of the building facade as an advertising billboard, Berlin's chief urban planner tried to use the dynamic images produced by modern traffic and illuminated advertising to create a new collective identity for Weimar Berlin. In these years of social and political crisis, municipal officials encouraged Berliners to embrace this new metropolitan identity by consuming the spectacle of the modern street.;Given the importance of Weimar Germany in analyses of the nature of European modernity, this thesis seeks to chart the local geography of modern Berlin and to illuminate the ways in which Berliners sought to resolve the contradictions of modern urban life in spatial terms. Both the innovations of Berlin's modern architects and the theories of metropolitan culture produced by Georg Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer must be seen as part of this long-standing struggle to come to terms with the fluid nature of the modern city.