Reading Berlin 1900

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.