Browsing by Subject "Berlin (Germany) -- Social conditions -- 19th century"

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    Einführung in die Weltstadt: Guiding Berliners to Cosmopolitanism, Imperialism, and Race, 1896-1900
    (2014) Gavigan, Ian Noah; Gerstein, Linda
    After the founding of the German nation-state in 1871, millions of people from the German countryside moved to Berlin, ethnologists articulated a global geography of race through their studies of "native" people, and new cultures of print, advertising, and consumption positioned the city and its residents at the center of the globe. Together, these developments helped produce a Weltstadtgefühl, a sense or sensibility of the "global city" that was defined by its technological modernity, imperial centralization, and scientific categorization. In this period, race began to take on new cultural and scientific meanings; through popular media and mass exhibitions, it became a category that inflected the ways the city itself was conceived and portrayed. Grounded by a discussion of urban consumption, this thesis' two case studies examine how the 1896 Colonial Exhibition's Exhibition of Natives and the popular Berliner Morgenpost newspaper's reporting on race used multiple strategies to guide new Berliners through the city. They were offered visions of Berlin that defined itself in terms of race, science, and empire. This thesis traces some of the linkages between imperialism, the world expansion of German capital, human scientific networks, ethnological/ anthropological ideas about race, educational institutions, and representations of the modern city. By examining narratives of Berlin, stories about ownership over the city and participation in its cosmopolitan grandeur, these analyses show some of the ways working class and white-collar Berliners were guided through the city and enlisted in the imperialist project. Both archives present real sites of popular interaction with ideas about race and imperialism; examining them offers an exciting opportunity to understand the actual circulation of racial ideas, intimately linked to nationalism and imperialism, as it occurred at the close of the nineteenth century in Germany's capital. They help show that the spread of racial ideas happened not necessarily through didactic explanations of race, but rather, in and through stories and feelings about the exciting spectacle of Berlin and the wonders of being and becoming Berliner.