Epilogue

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.

Modern Dating and Respectability on Trial

Chapter 5 follows the sensational trial of Frieda Kliem’s murderer and the strategy of the defense, which was not so much a legal strategy as a way of turning the trial into a question of Frieda’s respectability as a middle-class woman. It interprets this trial—and the life of Frieda Kliem, more generally—as a microcosm of the large-scale confrontation between nineteenth-century society and the emerging twentieth-century world. It contends that identity, presented either authentically or as an illusion, became supremely relevant in the metropolis, where the ubiquity of strangers, new faces, and mysterious crimes shaped the way city people narrated the search for love and intimacy. And because enterprising outsiders like Frieda Kliem so flouted the established patterns of middle-class respectability, they remained on the outside looking in as German society clung to the nineteenth-century world that was crumbling in the face of a bewilderingly new twentieth-century one.

Romantic Fantasies in the Big City

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.

Emerging Technologies of Love

Chapter Four begins in the heat of the police investigation into Frieda Kliem’s murder, following the police as they pursue Frieda’s killer. It then explores the ways in which the age-old practice of matchmaking was transformed into a fundamentally new technology of love: newspaper personal ads. Examining both the rise and wager of using personal ads to find love and exploring their significance for gay Berliners, this chapter argues that newspaper personal ads’ appeal lay both in their radical attempt to harness the distinct qualities of urban life as a way of making love more attainable and in their very practical rejection of middle-class society’s fascination with fate and fortuity. These advantages notwithstanding, personal ads remained too great of an affront to stability, that prized quality of middle-class life, and, as the chapter concludes, this relegated both ads and, importantly, their users, to the shadows.

Reimagining Marriage

Chapter 3 probes the significance of an increasingly widespread belief that traditional marriage seemed fundamentally incompatible with modern, twentieth-century life. The chapter opens as Frieda Kliem, in establishing a “free love” relationship with her casual boyfriend and yet continuing to wear a fake wedding ring and tell her neighbors that he was her “uncle,” negotiated the tricky matter of balancing respectability with a desire for intimacy in the modern metropolis. It then examines changing perceptions about “old maids,” about turn-of-the-century women and men who decided to avoid marriage altogether, and about proposals for a complete modernization of marriage laws and customs, contending that marriage served as the primary battlefield in this back-and-forth between traditional bourgeois respectability and modern, twentieth-century individualism.

Introduction

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.

Urban Avenues to Love

The modern city presented an alluring array of new avenues to love and intimacy that had not existed in the small towns that dominated the nineteenth century, and a great many maverick Berliners, including those looking for same-sex love, embraced these in the hopes of finding love and avoiding the loneliness and isolation that could be so oppressive. This chapter examines a variety of modern methods for finding love in the workplace, in apartment corridors, on the dance floor, and at evening balls that were gradually evolving to accommodate the modern world. The chapter concludes by studying the rise of casual dating, which was characterized by less-than-reputable romantic relationships that rarely led to marriage. It suggests that individualistic approaches such as these marked the beginning, however fraught with controversy and risk, of a potential modernization of the nineteenth-century middle-class sensibilities that formed the bedrock of German social life.