Berlin

Author(s):  
Andrew Thacker

This chapter analyses how modernism in Berlin vacillates between utopian and dystopian modes and moods from the end of the nineteenth century to the conclusion of the Weimar years in 1933. It argues that the culture of modernism in the city is marked by the twin features of spaciousness and restlessness. It analyses the rise of Expressionism as a dominant form in the city, linking its particular mood to the technological modernity embraced by Berlin in the early twentieth century. It illustrates these arguments by considering how Expressionist artists (e.g. Ludwig Meidner) represented a particular space in the city (Potsdamer Platz), before discussing work by Walter Ruttmann, Alfred Döblin, the expatriate Russian community (e.g. Viktor Shklovsky), and the American magazine, Broom. It then discusses cafés and queer spaces in work by W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. It concludes by analysing the geographical emotions prompted by Berlin in two important memoirs by English visitors to the city: Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and Bryher’s The Heart to Artemis.

1997 ◽  
Vol 50 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 421-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret Notley

Late nineteenth-century journalistic criticism in Vienna offers many precedents for Paul Bekker's interpretation of the symphony. Beethoven's symphonies provided the model for an aesthetics of the genre-couched in metaphors connecting it to "the people"-that motivated the reception of works by Brahms and Bruckner. Activists who wished to inaugurate symphonic Volksconcerte in the city took the figurative utopian function of the genre literally. Though their efforts were confounded not only by institutionalized elitism but also by the preferences of the Viennese Volk for other kinds of music, their work bore fruit in the early twentieth century with the founding of the Wiener Konzertverein and the Arbeiter-Symphonie-Konzerte.


Author(s):  
Scott C. Esplin

Though Nauvoo was abandoned by most Latter-day Saints in the nineteenth century, Emma Smith, the widow of Church founder Joseph Smith, and her children remained in the city, maintaining a Mormon presence in western Illinois. This chapter examines the rise of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Community of Christ), founded by Smith’s children, and their use of family and historic sites in Nauvoo in the early twentieth century. It discusses the transformation of these sites from family residences to religious tourism centers used to proselytize people to the faith. It also introduces the competing views of Mormonism that developed between the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the Reorganized Church.


2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 262-290
Author(s):  
Matthew Bowman

AbstractThis article examines the rise of antirevivalism among a certain strain of American evangelicals in the first years of the twentieth century. It argues that, influenced by the new discipline of psychology of religion and growing fear of the chaotic environment of the early twentieth-century city, these evangelicals found revivalist evangelicalism to be psychologically damaging and destructive of the process of Christian conversion. Instead, they conceived of a form of evangelicalism they called “liberal evangelicalism,” which repudiated the emotional and cathartic revivalist style of worship and, instead, insisted that evangelicalism could be rational, moderate, and targeted toward the cultivation of socially acceptable virtues. The venue they chose to pursue this form of evangelicalism was the Sunday school. Throughout the nineteenth century, liberal evangelicals feared, the Sunday school had emerged as a revival in miniature, one in which teachers were encouraged to exhort their students to come to cathartic, emotional conversion experiences— a strategy that had found its apotheosis in the “Decision Day,” a regular event in which students were subjected to emotional preaching and encouraged to confess their faith in Christ. Though the Decision Day was itself an evangelical attempt to deal with the transient nature of the city, liberal evangelicals began, in the early twentieth century, to redefine it in ways that would better facilitate the sort of gradual and developmental form of conversion in which they placed their faith. Leading the effort was George Albert Coe, a professor and Sunday school organizer who used his school to experiment with such reforms.


2018 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 166-186
Author(s):  
Markian Prokopovych

It is generally acknowledged that museumswere an essential part of the national project in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Europe—and some retain this function even today. Classic works in nationalism studies, such as Eric Hobsbawm's, have highlighted the role they played in the birth of modern nations. Subsequent studies that focused on specific national contexts help us better understand the mechanisms by which museums contributed to the invention of national traditions as well as to the formation of historical consciousness, historical memory, and the functioning of modern states. As these and other scholars of museum history also demonstrate, museum founders, directors, curators, and the broader public were driven by agendas and aspirations other than nation-building within these larger processes. Analyzing how these agendas mixed with the aims of the national project in a specific locality in the making of museums can generate new insights into the formation of modern subjectivities in this period.


2019 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-288
Author(s):  
Tilo Amhoff

This article closely investigates the unique visual representations of the building plans of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Berlin, and emphasizes the agency of the paper plan in the profession and discipline of Städtebau. Following positions in German media theory, the paper plan is understood and theorized as a medium of bureaucracy and the plan drawing as a set of cultural techniques. In doing so, the article traces the refinement of the instruments for regulating the building of the city—from the building plan, to the building zones plan, to the town development plan. It is argued that the paper plans themselves have agency in seeing the city and hence thinking about the city (through their methods of visual representation), and agency in the formation of graphic terms and concepts (derived from the making of building plans). The paper plans mediated visual and verbal knowledge of the city that would have been inconceivable without them.


Author(s):  
Julian Wright

This chapter asks wider questions about the flow of time as it was explored in this historical writing. It focuses on Jaurès’ philosophy of history, initially through a brief discussion of his doctoral thesis and the essay entitled ‘Le bilan social du XIXème siècle’ that he provided at the end of the Histoire socialiste, then through the work of three of his collaborators, Gabriel Deville, Eugène Fournière, and Georges Renard. One of the most important challenges for socialists in the early twentieth century was to understand the damage and division caused by revolution, while not losing the transformative mission of their socialism. With these elements established, the chapter returns to Jaurès, and in particular the long study of nineteenth-century society in chapter 10 of L’Armée nouvelle. Jaurès advanced an original vision of the nineteenth century and its meaning for the socialist present.


1988 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Cobban

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Semarang was a major port city and administrative centre on Java. Attainment of this position was due partly to the expansion of its hinterland during the nineteenth century. This expansion was closely related to developments in the means of transportation and the consequent ability of plantation owners to bring the products of their plantations to the port for shipment to foreign markets. By the end of the century virtually the whole economic life of central Java focused upon Semarang. The city also exercised administrative functions in the Dutch colonial administration and generally had been responsible for Dutch interests in the middle and eastern parts of the island. The importance of Semarang as an administrative centre increased after 1906. In that year the government incorporated the city as an urban municipality (stadsgemeente). In 1914 it had consular representation from the United States, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, Norway, Germany, and Thailand. Subsequently, in 1926 it became the capital of the Province of Central Java under the terms of an administrative reform fostered by the colonial government at Batavia. Status as an urban municipality meant that local officials sitting on a city council would govern the domestic affairs of the city. The members of the city council at first were appointed from Batavia, subsequently some of them were elected by residents of the city. By the beginning of the twentieth century Semarang had enhanced its position as a major port on the north coast of the island of Java. It was one of the foremost cities of the Dutch East Indies, along with Batavia and Surabaya, a leading port and a centre of administration and trade. This article outlines the growth of the port of Semarang during the nineteenth century and discusses some of the conflict related to this growth over living conditions in parts of the city during the twentieth century, a conflict which smouldered for several decades among the government, members of the city council, and the non-European residents of the city, one which remained unresolved at the end of the colonial era.


1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-630 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. Caulk

Several centuries after firearms had been introduced, they were still of little importance in Ethiopia, where cavalry continued to dominate warfare until the second half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, they were much sought after by local leaders ambitious to secure their autonomy or to grasp supreme authority. The first of these warlords to make himself emperor, Tēwodros (1855–68), owed nothing to firearms. However, his successors, Yohannis IV (1872–89) and Minīlik (d. 1913), did. Both excelled in their mastery of the new technology and acquired large quantities of quick-firing weapons. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, possession of firearms — principally the breech loading rifle — had become a precondition for successfully contending for national leadership. Yet the wider revolution associated (as in Egypt) with the establishment of a European-style army did not follow. Nor was rearmament restricted to the following of the emperor. Despite the revival of imperial authority effected by Yohannis and Minīlik, rifles and even machine-guns were widely enough spread at the turn of the century to reinforce the fragmentation of power long characteristic of the Ethiopian state. Into the early twentieth century, it remained uncertain if the peculiar advantages of the capital in the import of arms would be made to serve centralization.


2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-190
Author(s):  
Stefan Knapik

Abstract The pedagogical treatise is generally understood to be a manual of singing or instrumental techniques that is largely practical in approach, yet a critique of violin tutor books dating from the early twentieth century, especially those written by the renowned violinists Joseph Joachim (writing in conjunction with Andreas Moser), Leopold Auer, and Carl Flesch, reveals an extensive engagement with a range of wider ideologies. In a bid to trump the supposedly deadening effects of both a historicism resulting from the availability of earlier treatises, as well as the overly scientific approach taken by contemporaneous treatises, these violinist-authors embrace metaphysical ideals of mind or vitality, and the result is a model of violin playing founded on the concept of “singing tone,” an idea developed out of nineteenth-century notions of song/melody as embodying a vital essence. As did Wagner, in his 1869 essay Über das Dirigiren, writers play with the idea that theoretical and performative categories, such as tempo, phrasing, dynamics, vibrato, and types of bow stroke, both conflict with each other and find a deeper unity in a subjectivist ideal of tone. The approach of these texts is not explorative, however, so much as a rather defensive championing of the idea of mind or vitality: ideologies of self, health, and nationalism ultimately prevail over an engagement with historical evidence in Moser's discussion of ornaments, and Auer's intolerance of any mitigating influence that might qualify the artist's final word on aesthetic matters is reminiscent of a reductive, Nietzschean ideal of vitality. Nevertheless, writers struggle to reconcile it with the messier realities of performing, as an embodied and collaborative activity, and subsequently what speaks louder in their texts are anxieties over affronts to notions of self, expressed using pathological notions common to the era. Whereas at times writers encourage students of the violin to share in their lauding of vitalistic ideals, more often than not they try to impose disciplinary measures as a means of inculcating them.


Author(s):  
David M. Rabban

Most American legal scholars have described their nineteenth-century predecessors as deductive formalists. In my recent book, Law’s History : American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History, I demonstrate instead that the first generation of professional legal scholars in the United States, who wrote during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, viewed law as a historically based inductive science. They constituted a distinctive historical school of American jurisprudence that was superseded by the development of sociological jurisprudence in the early twentieth century. This article focuses on the transatlantic context, involving connections between European and American scholars, in which the historical school of American jurisprudence emerged, flourished, and eventually declined.


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