This chapter draws on a year of fieldwork with housing activists in Berlin to examine law as a cultural archive of putatively long-defunct utopian visions, and at once as the key for resurrecting these visions in the present. In the German elections of September 2021 a referendum for expropriating hundreds of thousands of apartments owned by real-estate multinationals in the federal state of Berlin won by a resounding majority, to the surprise of both supporters and detractors. The inclusion of the referendum on the Berlin ballot represented the successful culmination of several years of intensive organizing and campaigning by a grassroots movement facing a largely uncooperative and antagonistic government led by the Social Democrats. The movement based its campaign on an article in the German constitution that grants federal as well as state governments the power to “socialize” private property on a massive scale. Included in the 1949 constitution with the support not only of the Social Democrats who now oppose it but also of many conservatives, the article reflects a bygone time when competing visions of how best to structure Germany’s economy had not yet reached a political resolution, when ideas about the supremacy of public over private interests held sway over broad constituencies, and when aspirations for the collective ownership of the means of production were central to working-class discourses. Notably for how these struggles panned out, this article has never been used in the history of the Federal Republic. The chapter examines how contemporary housing activists seek to reanimate such past futurities through their legal afterlives, locating in the law the potential for a radical change that in contrast with the largely ineffective impact of existing rent regulations and city ordinances would fundamentally transform the nature of the real-estate market from the ground up. The chapter argues that far from naively staking their hopes on law, these activists elaborate creative strategies for reckoning with the limits that an antagonistic political conjuncture as well as enduring hegemonic ideologies about the market place upon it.

This chapter examines the long-held belief that Arnold Schoenberg endured dire financial hardship for most of his life, due in large part to his unwavering and highly principled commitment to modern music. Schoenberg can be compared to Mozart with regard to his money woes: both composers apparently struggled to support themselves and their families and were tragically under-appreciated and under-compensated during their lifetimes, despite the enormity of their artistic significance. In each case, however, the situation is more nuanced: for both composers, money came and went, for a variety of reasons. In the chapter, the popular mythos of Schoenberg’s ‘perpetual insolvency’ is contextualized and challenged by considering his constantly changing personal and professional circumstances, and the different ways in which he earned money.

The chapter looks at fin-de-siècle Vienna, and reviews its cultural politics, the impact of its city life on writing and artistic expression and, above all, the new attention to language that was absorbed into literature and poetry emanating from French Symbolism. The dangers of lapsing into an aestheticism that denied political reality is discussed, and there is a focus on the importance of the indirect impact such perceived changes in expression and the value of poetic language had on Schoenberg, and indeed on Berg and Webern. Key figures included here include Rilke, Schnitzler and, above, all Hofmannsthal and Stephen George, taken here as writing in crucially different modernist modes, but both directly influential.

Schoenberg’s years in Berlin (1901–3, 1911–15, 1926–33) can be written on the city as an evolving network of people, places and institutions that shifted from the margins to the centres of cultural life, only to be erased when he left for the last time in 1933. These three periods were marked by profound changes in his life and works, mirroring the cataclysmic transformations of Berlin and Germany as a whole. This chapter sketches out the story of Schoenberg’s three Berlins, using a map for each period to chart the changing locales of his life in the city as well as the dramatically expanding artistic and cultural spheres in which he operated. While Schoenberg often embraced the image of an isolated, misunderstood prophet, the reality was a person deeply engaged with the people and places around him.

This chapter discusses Sean O’Casey’s drama performed in Germany, Austria, and German-speaking Switzerland. The main focus is on plays addressing political turmoil and revolutionary upheaval. Some German-speaking audiences for these plays were confronted with similar crises at the time that the plays were produced in the German language. As a hotspot of the East–West conflict, O’Casey’s plays performed in Berlin are of particular interest, and this chapter concludes with an appendix that lists key Germanophone premieres.

Examining rescue during 1940–1945, this chapter asks what possibilities of self-help were available and what strategies were developed to take action? Could Jewish organizations continue to operate under the Nazi regime? What forms of cooperation were forged with non-Jewish organizations and individuals, such as members of the Christian churches, and did these raise chances of survival?

This chapter explores broader cultural European trends following the First World War, including the consequences of currency dynamics and market speculation. These postwar changes culminated in a heightened financialisation of the culture of the art market, reflecting broader shifts in capitalist economies towards financial forms of revenue and profit. The saturation of financial language that accompanies financialisation processes was also a characteristic of this period: the aftermath of the war saw debates revolving around themes of profit, money-making, and an inflation of art production. This chapter parallels previous chapters by examining how cultural and artistic changes were linked to socio-economic developments. The war had acted as a catalyst and accelerator, inflaming cultural tensions within the art markets. It continued to shape market discourses, embedding wartime mentalities into post-war cultural landscapes.

This chapter explores the major auction landscapes before 1914 and also describes the defining elements of the fin-de-siècle European market: integration, free trade, and cosmopolitanism. Examining societies’ approaches to artwork acquisition unveils contradictions and frictions within a milieu united by an international collecting class. France contended with an international, yet conservative, nationalist art world, while Germany’s bourgeoisie tried to control the world of luxury and consumption. In contrast, Britain grappled with questions about free trade and the preservation of art that challenged its laissez-faire tradition. It is precisely these tensions, which directly reflect the challenges posed by the commercialisation of art, that provide a framework for analysing the impact of the war. By emphasising the shared features of an integrated trade sphere, this chapter paints a balanced portrayal of a European market, where art mirrored the complex integration of both socioeconomic and cultural frameworks.

An opening chapter that addresses literary issues in the first book of the Bible, along with a review of some major works of influence scholarship that have shaped the field.

The moment that Albert the Bear conquered the Wends is often viewed as foundational. So too are the moments when the two settlements of Cölln and Berlin are first mentioned in written records. The chapter sketches the development of the emerging twin trading towns during the medieval centuries, marked by continuing immigration and punctuated by periodic violence and bouts of plague. It concludes with the advent of Hohenzollern rule, when citizens lost their powers of self-government and the city began to be transformed into a courtly residence.

In the 1940s and early 1950s, the Cold War convention of containment, which undergirded American involvement in Vietnam, was broadly shared, internalized, at times even fostered, by the United States European allies. This consensus broke down by the 1960s, as successive US administrations saw themselves locked ever more rigidly into Cold War logic which seemed to require going to war to preserve a noncommunist South Vietnam. By contrast, the United States transatlantic allies and partners increasingly came to question the very rationale of US intervention. By the mid-1960s there was a remarkable consensus among government officials across Western Europe on the futility of the central objective of the American intervention in Vietnam of defending and stabilizing a noncommunist (South) Vietnam. European governments refused to send troops to Vietnam. However, West European governments differed considerably in the public attitude they displayed toward US involvement in Vietnam, ranging from France’s vocal opposition to strong if not limitless public support by the British and West German governments. Across Western Europe, the Vietnam War cut deeply into West European domestic politics, aggravated political and societal tensions and diminished the righteousness of the American cause.

The chapter discusses the history of the Berlin housing system, the Kantian roots of the German Constitution (Grundgesetz) and the events leading to the emergence of Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen (DWE). It explains the origins of the liberal notion of property and how corporate property is premised on ‘blasting the atom of property open’, that is, destroying the links between person and a thing that constitute classical liberal understanding of property.

Berlin is often described as the site of sexual innovation in both popular and scholarly accounts of the history of sexuality in the twentieth century. Particularly in the inter-war period, the metropolis became an iconic symbol of gender-bending nightlife, an organizational centre for myriad movements of sexual emancipation, and a nexus of scholarly efforts to catalogue and understand human sexual comportment and identity. This chapter argues, however, that while there was certainly an explosion of public, literary, and medical interest in sex, sexuality, and sexual identity in early twentieth-century Berlin, the terms ‘invention’ and ‘discovery’ can oversimplify what was actually a very complex and contentious historical process. Focusing on a few examples of the divisions within queer communities – particularly the conflicts between feminist, lesbian, and transgender activists and the arguments emanating from the masculinist branch of the gay rights movement – it tracks how discourses about the morality of prostitution, the social impact of same-sex love, and racialized biological knowledge shaped definitions of citizenship in ways that still resonate and are still debated. It is this debate, rather than some kind of definitive invention of sexual identity, that makes this period relevant for our present.

This chapter examines the impact of anticlericalism and secularism on German politics. It charts the significance of secularism in the relations between radicals, revisionists and liberals in the period between the church-leaving campaign 1906-14 and the end of the German revolution in 1923. It examines how factions of the SPD clashed over the church-leaving movement of 1909 to 1914. Special attention will be given to the cooperation of secularist revisionists around Eduard Bernstein with left liberals and anti-political leaders of cultural reform efforts, such as Eugen Diederichs.

This chapter maps secularism as a culture, using the example of Berlin. It takes the reader through all of the venues that provided materialist monism and establishes their relationship to the socialist milieu. It begins in Free Religion, and then analyzes the city’s chief popular scientific institutions. It looks in detail at the offerings of each to illuminate how monism was communicated. This chapter argues that despite political polarization among the secularist organizations, there was nonetheless a great deal of ideological and personnel coherence across the secularist spectrum

Berlin’s grand hotel scene developed late and fast, with the first such property opening in 1875 and a dozen or so in operation by 1914. Four factors contributed to this expansion: First, the availability of credit and capital on a limited liability basis ensured that huge, expensive physical plants could be erected and maintained at a lower risk than before. Second, the technologies that such investment and innovation produced allowed grand hotels to offer more than their smaller counterparts ever could. Third, an increasingly mobile bourgeois society produced a growing demand for services and accommodations that only grand hotels could provide. And fourth, the maintenance of strict hierarchies, and hierarchies within hierarchies, kept these large businesses running. Inequities inside grand hotels mirrored in microcosm classed power relations outside, though with some distortion. The superior control enjoyed by grand hoteliers, through surveillance and the social and gendered divisions of space, allowed the grand hotel to flourish as a social system, unimpeded by protest or resistance, well into the twentieth century. It was only in the decade after 1914 that the heterogeneity of grand hotel society became impossible to manage.

This book on Berlin’s grand hotels is a cultural and business history of the fate of liberalism in Germany. Board members of the corporations that owned the grand hotels, as well as hotel managers and hotel experts, through their daily efforts to keep the industry afloat amid the vicissitudes of modern German history, ultimately abandoned liberalism and acquiesced to Nazi rule. Their correspondence among each other and with staff, the authorities, and the public, reveal how and why this multi-generational group of German businessmen, many of them involved in heavy industry and finance, too, embraced and then rejected liberal politics and culture in Germany. Weaknesses in the business model, present since the 1870s, had converged with a tendency toward anti-republicanism after the hyperinflation of 1923, resulting in the belief among most hoteliers that democracy was bad for business.

This chapter is the second of three to consider Puccini’s travels, both for work and leisure. It covers his extensive travels throughout central Europe, primarily throughout Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The author notes that Puccini did not visit Russia, which had been a vital destination for many of his predecessors and indeed some contemporaries. Vienna and Munich were preferred destinations for Puccini, both for business and pleasure, though his reception in the Austrian capital was ambivalent. Budapest gave the composer a warmer welcome. Puccini visited locations around central Europe in order to supervise the performance of his own works (particularly La bohème), or to listen to the works of others – his first trip to Germany was to attend the Bayreuth Festival and hear the works of Wagner. He also keenly followed the career of his contemporary Richard Strauss, attending the premieres of his works in cities around the region. In Vienna, meanwhile, he became friendly with Erich Wolfgang Korngold and his father Julius. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Puccini’s travels for health and leisure, and his interest in the technology of travel.

Agnes Smedley was an American writer, journalist, activist, and spy who traveled North America, Europe, and Asia in pursuit of her anti-imperialist and communist agendas. She came to anticolonial transnationalism through her personal and often intimate ties to India’s diasporic revolutionaries in the US (1912–1919) and Germany (1920–1929), as well as Chinese communists and Soviet spies in Shanghai (1929–1937). The chapter traces Smedley’s global crossings as a prism for exploring the power of intimacy in the making (and unmaking) of transnational solidarities, while also considering the gendered experiences of revolutionary women like her who were critical to shaping transnational anticolonialism. The chapter argues that Smedley’s most revolutionary acts were often intimate and private ones, including interracial marriage and romantic ties to leading luminaries of transnational anticolonialism during the interwar period.