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The Paradox of Visual and Material Cultures in Mack Walker's German Home Towns

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2014

Yair Mintzker
Yair Mintzker*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

As far as visuality and materiality are concerned, Mack Walker's German Home Towns is a paradoxical work. In more than 400 pages of dense text about society, politics, and law in and around German towns from 1648 to 1871, the author devoted almost no space to the home towns' visual and material aspects. One would look in vain in this book for detailed descriptions of burghers' private and communal buildings; the layout of fortifications, streets, and public spaces; the location of civic and religious institutions; or the outward appearance of the townspeople, their fairs, rituals, and processions. Early in the book, Walker set the tone for his approach by dismissing as intellectually lazy the most common definition for a town in early modern central Europe—a settlement surrounded by physical walls—and in the entire book he included only one image of a German home town (and even that only on page 222).

Type
Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 47 , Issue 3 , September 2014 , pp. 505 - 512
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2014 

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References

1 Walker, Mack, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648–1871, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 30Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., 31, 118, 332.

3 James J. Sheehan, foreword to Walker, German Home Towns, xv-xvi.

4 Ibid., xiii.

5 Walker, German Home Towns, 4.

6 See Wolfgang Zorn's review of German Home Towns in Historische Zeitschrift 216, no. 1 (Feb. 1973): 175Google Scholar.

7 On the history of community studies in the U.S., see Bender, Thomas, Community and Social Change in America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

8 Telling examples for the former can be found in the explosion of studies on New England villages that tried to pin down the exact moment when the bonds of Gemeinschaft dissolved into Gesellschaft (suggestions included the 1650s and 1690s; the 1740s and 1780s; the 1820s, 1850s, 1880s; and the 1920s), while one prominent example of the latter trend—concerning neighborhoods and big cities—was Jacobs's, Jane famous The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Modern Library, 1961)Google Scholar. See Bender, Community and Social Change, 51.

9 For the now classic distinction between the three fundamental types of social systems, including face-to-face interaction, see Luhmann, Niklas, “Interaction, Organization, and Society,” in The Differentiation of Society, trans. Holmes, Stephen and Larmore, Charles (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 69–89Google Scholar. On Parsons's early engagement with notions of community and interaction, see, for instance, Parsons, Talcott and Bales, Robert F., Family, Socialization, and Interaction Process (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1955)Google Scholar.

10 For examples, see the edited essays in Warren, Roland, ed., Perspectives on the American Community (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966)Google Scholar; and Nisbet, Robert, The Quest for Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969)Google Scholar. Talcott Parsons himself held this view: “A community is that collectivity the members of which share a common territorial area as their base of operations for daily activities.” See Parsons, Talcott, The Social System (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1951), 60Google Scholar.

11 Durkheim, Émile, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Fields, Karen E. (New York: Free Press, 1995), 425Google Scholar.

12 Bender, Community and Social Change, 7.

13 The four classic accounts of “new social history” of New England towns appeared in 1970, shortly before the publication of German Home Towns: Greven, Philip, Four Generations: Population, Land, and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Lockridge, Kenneth, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years. Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736 (New York: Norton, 1970)Google Scholar; Demos, John, A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; and Zuckerman, Michael, Peaceable Kingdoms: New England Towns in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Knopf, 1970)Google Scholar.

14 Sheehan, “Foreword,” xvi; Walker, German Home Towns, 73–75.

15 Walker, German Home Towns, 235–36.

16 Simmel, Georg, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Wolff, Kurt H. (New York: Free Press, 1950)Google Scholar; Wirth, Louis, “Urbanism as a Way of Life,” American Journal of Sociology XLVI (July 1938): 1–24Google Scholar.

17 Schlögl, Rudolf, “Interaktion und Herrschaft. Probleme der politischen Kommunikation in der frühneuzeitlichen Stadt,” in Was heißt Kulturgeschichte des Politischen, ed. Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara (Berlin: Duncker & Humboldt, 2005)Google Scholar, esp. 124–25.

18 The classic essay here is Stollberg-Rilinger, Barbara, “Zeremoniell als politisches Verfahren. Rangordnung und Rangstreit als Strukturmerkmale des frühneuzeitlichen Reichstags,” in Neue Studien zur frühneuzeitlichen Reichsgeschichte, ed. Kunisch, Johannes, Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, Beiheft 19 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1997), 91–132Google Scholar.

19 Schlögl, “Interaktion und Herrschaft,” 119.

20 Mintzker, Yair, The Defortification of the German City, 1689–1866 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)Google Scholar.