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.

Chapter 1 unfolds the historical context of two central overarching notions in this book’s narrative: the German Kulturstaat and the country’s Bildungsbürgertum. Combining historical analysis with ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin during the fiftieth-anniversary edition of Germany’s largest theatre festival and observations at the city’s iconic Volksbühne, this chapter explores the moral significance attributed to institutionalised public theatres, as well as activist contestations of its state patronage and institutional structures. It also traces the role of cultural politics in facilitating the emergence of public theatres as sites for aesthetic self-cultivation (Bildung) and nation-building in the face of an increasingly diverse contemporary Germany. Expanding on the notion of institutions as traditions in Western contexts, it expands on the necessity for anthropology to take into account cultural history and art history as part of fieldwork.

Chapter 2 focuses on Hans Pfitzner’s Symphony in C♯ minor, a reworking of his 1925 String Quartet Op. 25, at its Berlin premiere in March 1933. This case study illuminates how National Socialist values, particularly to do with monumentality, gained traction within symphonic aesthetics. Liberal sociological theorisations of the symphony such as Paul Bekker’s (1918) seemed increasingly absurd as politics shifted and Enlightenment narratives about sovereignty reached breaking point. For instance, due to Nazi threats of violence, just days before the Berlin performance of Pfitzner’s new symphony the Philharmonie had seen the cancellation of Walter’s regular concert, precipitating his political exile. I read the Pfitzner concert’s critical reception in parallel with both Bekker’s symphonic utopianism and emerging Nazi symphonic aesthetics, exploring Pfitzner’s symphony as caught between these two symphonic poles. I pay attention to how discourses of public and private space associated with the symphony and chamber music allow a clear view of fascist reformulations of subjectivity and space in this context marked by Walter’s persecution.

Premiered in Berlin, but composed in Paris, Arthur Honegger’s Mouvement symphonique n° 3 was a commission for the Berlin Philharmonic, and Chapter 5 deals with its reception, bringing the book back to its two major European centres. For reviewers, Swiss-German Honegger’s work, the third in a trio of symphonic movements that began with Pacific 231 and Rugby, was unambiguously neither French nor German, and it reveals mechanisms by which commentators sought either to assimilate the work with, or expel it from, Germanic idealist aesthetic traditions. Despite the work’s ‘sober and unprepossessing’ title, this chapter suggests that Mouvement symphonique n° 3 had a critical political programme – even if programmatic aspects were barely acknowledged in the critical reception. Manipulating the symphonic form, and referencing Beethovenian subjective narratives in particular, the work considers the changing relationship between the individual and the collective within a tumultuous era of political and industrial/technological upheaval, ultimately lamenting over the ruins of both the symphony and the utopian political project it represented.

Part introduction to the frame around 1933, part initial case study, the first chapter introduces Kurt Weill’s Symphony No. 2, the symphony-in-progress he carried in his suitcase as he escaped Nazi Berlin for exile in Paris in March 1933. The chapter explores its 1934 premiere in Amsterdam, where critics took issue with both the popular-sounding music and with Weill himself – neither seeming suitable for the symphonic genre – to introduce the book’s central concerns: how, at this uncertain and turbulent political moment, the specific cultural anxieties that emerge around symphonies can generate insights into how people thought about both subjectivity and about political and aesthetic notions of space. If previous scholarship on the genre has largely been wedded to nation-states and grand political narratives, this chapter instead argues for a transnational approach and lays out the symphonic genre’s long history of entanglement with Germanic philosophies of subjectivity and space, from E. T. A. Hoffmann to Paul Bekker.

Chapter 11 examines the steps needed to rescue Brandt’s Ostpolitik from its near-demise at the hands of a polarized Bundestag. Following a rash of back-channel diplomacy with Egon Bahr at the center, France, Britain, the United States, and the USSR finally reached a Quadripartite Agreement on Berlin; it guaranteed access to the city but failed to clarify West Berlin’s relationship to the Federal Republic, leaving room for future disputes. Brandt’s surprise visit to Brezhnev in Crimea deepened the relationship between these two leaders, but created suspicion in the Western camp that did not ease even with Brandt’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize. Rainer Barzel, leader of the CDU/CSU, insisted that the Warsaw and Moscow treaties must be renegotiated; he maneuvered in the Bundestag to overthrow the Brandt government. Outside observers feared that the entire course of détente was in jeopardy. Barzel’s bid for power failed, but he continued to seek concessions from the Soviets; the GDR did briefly take a softer line. The treaties passed without CDU/CSU support, and Brandt went on to win a decisive victory in the 1972 elections, affirming public backing for Ostpolitik.

In Chapter 8, focus turns to the handiwork of Brandt’s Ostpolitik – the negotiation of the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties in 1970. Egon Bahr’s bargaining strategy in Moscow was hasty and dilettantish; he did not worry overly about the contents of the treaty with the USSR, since he saw the agreement as only one component of an interlocking series of treaties. When the substance of the “Bahr Paper” was leaked, his secretive approach and his failure to address the Berlin problem further polarized German politics. The CDU/CSU vehemently rejected Brandt’s policies and members of the coalition parties began to defect. The external resonance of German Ostpolitik was nonetheless enormous. Brandt’s meeting with Brezhnev in Moscow alerted the world to the ebbing of Soviet hostility, resulting in greater maneuvering room for Bonn. When the chancellor kneeled in Warsaw, it appeared to signal German acceptance of the moral weight of Nazi crimes. A closer view shows, however, that the Federal Republic was extremely hard-nosed toward Poland; it demanded emigration rights for ethnic Germans while refusing to offer restitution payments. Brandt’s Germany looked forward, not backward.