Love, Mobility, and Fate in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin

2020 ◽  
pp. 75-90
Author(s):  
Tyler Carrington
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
New Approaches ◽  
Romantic Movement

This chapter examines dating in turn-of-the-century Berlin as mobility. Whereas the fluidity of the metropolis set in motion potential relationships every minute, the strictures of hegemonic middle-class virtue vis-à-vis love and intimacy formed countless roadblocks to men and women looking for connection. Dating offered the promise of upward mobility, and yet the current of modern, urban life made it hard for those on the margins of society (women, the petit bourgeoisie) to stay afloat and avoid going under. New approaches to dating emerged as a way of counteracting the barriers to romantic movement, however, and this chapter focuses on one common and contested version—chance meetings on the street that blossomed into relationships—as a way of examining the interplay of love and mobility.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Tyler Carrington
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Intimate Relationships ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Key Terms

The book opens by introducing readers to the central drama of the book—Frieda Kliem’s life and murder—and laying out the methodological and theoretical approach of the book. After taking apart the idea of middle-classness, or the compulsions of gaining and maintaining middle-class respectability, it then argues that love, dating, and the navigation of intimate relationships reveal more clearly than anything else the tensions of modern, urban life. Finally, it explores turn-of-the-century and contemporary meanings of the key terms of the book—love, intimacy, sex—and contends that battles over their definitions in Berlin represented a city coming to terms with the possibilities and risks of the modern, twentieth-century world.

scholarly journals Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852098222
Author(s):  
Sam Friedman ◽  
Dave O’Brien ◽  
Ian McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Privileged Class

Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class? We address this question by drawing on 175 interviews with those working in professional and managerial occupations, 36 of whom are from middle-class backgrounds but identify as working class or long-range upwardly mobile. Our findings indicate that this misidentification is rooted in a self-understanding built on particular ‘origin stories’ which act to downplay interviewees’ own, fairly privileged, upbringings and instead forge affinities to working-class extended family histories. Yet while this ‘intergenerational self’ partially reflects the lived experience of multigenerational upward mobility, it also acts – we argue – as a means of deflecting and obscuring class privilege. By positioning themselves as ascending from humble origins, we show how these interviewees are able to tell an upward story of career success ‘against the odds’ that simultaneously casts their progression as unusually meritocratically legitimate while erasing the structural privileges that have shaped key moments in their trajectory.

DELIGHTFUL COXCOMBS TO INDUSTRIOUS MEN: FASHIONABLE POLITICS IN CECIL AND PENDENNIS

2002 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 289-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Nicolay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Class A ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
A Site ◽  
Trade Office

THOMAS CARLYLE’S CONTEMPTUOUS DESCRIPTION of the dandy as “a Clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes” (313) has survived as the best-known definition of dandyism, which is generally equated with the foppery of eighteenth-century beaux and late nineteenth-century aesthetes. Actually, however, George Brummell (1778–1840), the primary architect of dandyism, developed not only a style of dress, but also a mode of behavior and style of wit that opposed ostentation. Brummell insisted that he was completely self-made, and his audacious self-transformation served as an example for both parvenus and dissatisfied nobles: the bourgeois might achieve upward mobility by distinguishing himself from his peers, and the noble could bolster his faltering status while retaining illusions of exclusivity. Aristocrats like Byron, Bulwer, and Wellington might effortlessly cultivate themselves and indulge their taste for luxury, while at the same time ambitious social climbers like Brummell, Disraeli, and Dickens might employ the codes of dandyism in order to establish places for themselves in the urban world. Thus, dandyism served as a nexus for the declining aristocratic elite and the rising middle class, a site where each was transformed by the dialectic interplay of aristocratic and individualistic ideals.

Breaking the Trance: Moving beyond the Straight, white, Middle-Class Male Script

1991 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 365-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul G. Schurman
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Pastoral Counselors ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Privileged Position ◽  
Liberation Movement ◽  
White Middle Class ◽  
Human Liberation

Explores the creative roles men might play in a human liberation movement in which their privileged position will need to be modified. Sees pastoral counselors as “hope agents” who may faciliate the transition of men to new and different roles in which patriarchy will play less and less of a role in society. Details specific ways in which the loss of patriarchy can lead to a fresh and creative equality in which both men and women will experience new freedoms.

What Kind of Job Is That for a Nice Jewish Boy?

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Kranson
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
The Self ◽  
American Jews ◽  
New Models ◽  
Economic Position ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
American Jewish

In the 1950s and early 1960s, American Jews wrestled with new models of masculinity that their new economic position enabled. For many American Jewish novelists, intellectuals, and clergy of the 1950s and early 1960s, the communal pressure on Jewish men to become middle-class breadwinners betrayed older, more Jewishly-authentic, notions of appropriate masculinity. Their writing promoted alternative, Jewish masculine ideals such as the impoverished scholar and the self-sacrificing soldier, crafting a profoundly gendered critique of Jewish upward mobility.

Antediluvian pictorial fun: E.T. Reed and the prehistoric peeps

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Horrall
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Local History ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Racial Threat ◽  
British Identity ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Conservative View ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World

This chapter is centred on the ‘prehistoric peeps’ cartoons that E.T. Reed began publishing in Punch magazine in 1893. These immensely influential images, which appeared for years and were reproduced throughout the English-speaking world, marked the point at which the cave man character entered popular culture. Reed’s scruffy human cave men were not related to gorillas or missing links and so they posed no existential racial threat. They inhabited a completely fanciful world that is also easily recognisable as an archaic version of late-Victorian Britain. Reed poked gentle fun at contemporary institutions, ideas and events. It was a conservative view of the ancient past that endorsed late-Victorian ideas about gender, class and national identity. Reed’s images were especially popular in the colonies, where they were used to promote a British identity and erase indigenous peoples from local history. Reed’s impact on contemporaries is explored, especially American cartoonists whose imitative images finally popularised cave men in that country. Reed’s cartoons were also recreated on stage by professional and amateur performers in Britain and throughout the empire. Writers explored prehistory in literature. By the turn of the century, Reed’s unthreatening, middle class vision of prehistory predominated.

Nationals and Liberals, 1904/1906

2020 ◽  
pp. 201-226
Author(s):  
Chelsea Stieber
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
New Approaches

This chapter traces the continued civil war in Haiti that manifested itself along these newly formed post-1869 divides: between Liberals and Nationals in politics, divergent approaches to education and cultural policy, and new approaches to commemorating Haiti’s foundational 1804/1806 division at the turn of the new century. Yet these new divides are not invented out of whole cloth: they draw heavily upon Haitian history while responding to ever-changing Atlantic currents of thought. That is, the post-1869 divides are marked by both the divides that shaped Haiti’s first fifty years of civil war and the ideological debates that marked the nineteenth-century Atlantic world—specifically, France’s Third Republican debates on nationhood and imperial republicanism and the rise of a new US hemispheric imperialism at the turn of the century. Thus, the divides between government forms that had driven the first fifty years of Haitian civil war gave way to a new set of factions that reactivated and adapted these earlier divisions.

Epilogue

2019 ◽  
pp. 171-176
Author(s):  
Tyler Carrington
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Online Dating ◽  
The United States ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Contemporary World

The epilogue, which opens by tracing the legacy of Frieda Kliem’s Berlin throughout the rest of the twentieth century, insists that we cannot understand this famous twilight of “old” Germany and its transition into “new” Germany unless we take seriously the tensions surrounding love, intimacy, and dating that play out in Love at Last Sight. It further contends that the modern world—epitomized by the modern metropolis—not only exacerbated some of the long-standing and inherent risks of love, but also created a whole new set of dilemmas with which men and women throughout Germany, Europe, and the United States continue to grapple as they pursue love using similarly radical methods and technologies (most notably, online dating). The story of the Berliners who negotiated these same tensions at the turn of the century, the epilogue concludes, is thus eminently relevant to and instructive for our own contemporary world.

Romantic Fantasies in the Big City

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-45
Author(s):  
Tyler Carrington
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Single Women ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Big City ◽  
Social Scientific

Chapter 1 begins by following the seamstress Frieda Kliem as she moves in 1902 from a rural province to the metropolis of Berlin. As Frieda looks for work, lodging, and acquaintances and then ultimately starts her own business and turns down the matchmaking efforts of a new friend, she personifies the “struggle for existence” that confronted working- and lower-middle-class Berliners, especially single women. After exploring popular cultural and social-scientific perspectives on the plights of men and women in the emerging city alongside the real-life stories that lent them such resonance, this chapter examines Berliners’ fixation on fate and the fortuitous encounter as a path to love. It argues that these imagined rendezvouses, which remained off-limits for respectable Berliners, are best understood as an attempt by Berliners to balance their attraction to the freedoms and possibilities of the modern world with the ever-present awareness of the risks associated with it.

Never Happier in Her Life

2020 ◽  
pp. 176-192
Author(s):  
Allison Dorothy Fredette
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
White Women ◽  
Social Ethic ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Class Society ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
Border Culture ◽  
Poor White

This chapter explores the lives of working-class and poor white women of the border South. Their story reveals the potential of border culture—how it gave a voice and agency to women whose stories could be more easily suppressed in a less fluid community. The border created fertile ground for ideas of mutuality and individualism. While this led many to pursue friendship, love, and partnership in their relationships, elite and middle-class husbands and wives of the border South still often adhered to a social ethic which dictated certain gendered behaviors to men and women. In working-class society, however, these philosophies gave women a greater sense of independence and authority, allowing them to push the boundaries of the household and assert themselves in new ways.

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