10.

1177/0096144203258342
JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY / November 2003
Jazbinsek / GEORG SIMMEL

ARTICLE

THE METROPOLIS AND THE

MENTAL LIFE OF GEORG SIMMEL
On the History of an Antipathy
DIETMAR JAZBINSEK
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin

German sociologist and cultural philosopher Georg Simmels contribution to Europes urban history has
had an enduring influence, due in no part to the validity of his empirical approach. In his texts, however,
Simmel manages to capture quite accurately the feeling of life in modern urban centersso his readers attestdue to his own experiences as a city dweller. This article asks what kind of experiences he had in the big
city, or could have had, particularly in Berlin.
Keywords: urban sociology; cultural pessimism; Berlin; Grostadt-Dokumente

In the landscape of publications on the history of European cities in the

twentieth century, the contribution by the German sociologist and cultural philosopher Georg Simmel towers above the urban silhouette. Scarcely any discourse on the nature of urbanism and the social impacts of urbanization goes
without one of the classical citations of Simmels observations about the
intensification of nervous stimulation in the city or the specifically metropolitan extravagances of mannerism. This enduring influence is certainly not
due to the validity of his empirical approach. Except for the first scholarly
work that Simmel publishedhis 1879 survey on yodelinghe never dealt
with social research. His texts about cities, however, are equally incomparable
with the historical studies as published in that age by other prominent figures
in German sociology, above all Werner Sombart and Max Weber (in whose
works the modern city is not treated).
If Simmel has managed to capture the feeling of life in modern urban centers as accurately as his readers repeatedly attest, it can only be due to his own
experience as a city dweller, which he later brought into his theoretical considerations. The question in this article is, therefore, what kind of experiences he
had in the big city, or could have had, particularly in Berlin. This approach is
not unusually original. Even while Simmel lived, one of his students, Theodor
AUTHORS NOTE: I thank David Antal for this translation of my German manuscript into English.
Marcus Funck, Bernward Joerges, Jrg Potthast, Heinz Reif, Gert Schmidt, Erhard Stlting, and Ralf Thies
have my gratitude for their support on earlier versions of this article. I owe special thanks to Ani Difranco.
JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY, Vol. 30 No. 1, November 2003 102-125
DOI: 10.1177/0096144203258342
2003 Sage Publications

102

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Lessing, made an initial attempt to relate the way of life in his own hometown
to the thinking of his philosophical teacher. Lessings essay began with the day
Simmel was born, March 1, 1858:
No holy star promising peace shown over his birthplace (on the corner of
Leipzigerstrasse and Friedrichstrasse) as it had over Bethlehems manger. No!
Garish illuminated signboards boasted about a smutty world of metropolitan sex
orgies. Trams clanked! Omnibuses chugged by. And the commercial vehicles
piled up in the four criss-crossing densely inhabited streets, whose slick sidewalks reflected the poisonous green gas light from hundreds of street lamps
every evening. And instead of the hallelujah of blessed angels from on high was
heard the insane din from an appalling crowd of people. Loiterers
[Pflastertreter], con men, demimondes, all the scum of Europe streamed along
precisely this building, like hell as defined by St. Theresa: This is the fetid place
without love. Little Georg, however, slept in probably the noisiest cradle that a
philosopher had ever rocked in.1

Clearly, the story was intended to suggest that Simmel was predestined to
become a theoretician of the urban setting because he had been steeped in the
flair of the city from his childhood on. But the lullaby that Lessing intoned
with his expressionist tremolo was flawed, for the street corner on which little
Georgs birthplace stood was still relatively tranquil in 1858. Friedrichstrasse
did not have a bus line until a decade later, at which time it still operated with
horse-drawn vehicles. The road could not reasonably be called a thoroughfare
until March 22, 1873, when the first shopping arcade opened on the corner of
Friedrichstrasse and Behrenstrasse in celebration of the birthday of Emperor
William I.2 The elegant Caf Bauer in 1884 courted customers with the first
illuminated signboards far and wide after the German Edison Company for
Applied Electricity set up a signal box in the cellar of the building next door.
The list of examples illustrating the fundamental change in the streetscape
in the area of Friedrichstrasse and Leipzigerstrasse in the second half of the
nineteenth century could go on,3 but the point is that Lessing plainly was not
describing the urban atmosphere of the year in which Simmel was born.
Instead, he was unabashedly projecting the Berlin of 1912 and 1913, the years
when he wrote the text, more than half a century into the past. This anachronism is salient because it skims over one of Berlins peculiarities in the European context: the boom in the beginning years of the Second German Empire.
Granted, other major European cities, too, experienced heady growth during
that period, but the qualitative basis from which it started was decidedly different. As the centers of the great colonial powers, London and Paris were already
world-class cities when Berlin was still just the residence of the Prussian monarchs. In other words, the place where Simmel was active as a sociologist no
longer had much at all in common with the city of his childhood. Contrary to
Lessing, I therefore assert that Simmel was called to be the theoretician of the
urban setting precisely because he had not become accustomed to the tumult
of the metropolis4 from early life on but rather had been confronted again and

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again with what was new and what needed getting used to. He had been confronted with the strangeness of a city in which nothing today is like it had been
yesterday. Simmel himself conceded that this circumstance had crucially
influenced his intellectual development: Berlins development from a city
into a world metropolis in the years around and after the turn of the century
coincides with my own broadest and most intense development.5
To understand what Simmel could have really meant by that statement, I
examine his writings on urban sociology through a biographical lens in this
article. Each of the following four sections recapitulates Simmels relationship
to his hometown from a different perspective: (1) Berlin as a city of workers,
(2) Berlins amusement culture, (3) Berlin as seen from Rome, and (4) wartime
Berlin. But before attempting to understand Simmels texts about cities
through his biography (and vice versa), I return to what he himself wrote about
the impact that cities have on intellectual life.

THE URBANIST MANIFESTO

Having now indicated the special position that Simmels sociology enjoys
in academic literature on the city, I hasten to add that this exceptional status is
not based on his lifes work or even on a multivolume standard collection. It
rests instead on a revised lecture manuscript, the original of which was no longer than twenty-one pages. In 1903, Simmel was invited by the foundation of
the pharmaceutical wholesaler Franz Ludwig Gehe to come to Dresden and
give a lecture, The Metropolis and Mental Life. In 1925, the published version of the lecture was hailed by the Chicago sociologist Louis Wirth as the
most important single article on the city from the sociological standpoint.6
That claim is still viable, nearly a century after its appearance, especially
because the text has become so central to urban sociologists and urban historians alike. In lieu of long paraphrases, I attempt to summarize Simmels reasoning (see Table 1), in which he tried to give urbanism contour as a way of life by
constantly making comparisons with other forms of sociation, which are tentatively subsumable in the generic expression traditional way of life.
Despite the self-contained appearance of Table 1, it does not completely
convey the many layers and ambiguities of the original text. Simmels essay on
big cities defies a straightforward summary for three reasons.
1. Lack of a systematic approach: the inconsistencies in his juxtaposition of the
urban and traditional ways of life arise from a perpetual shift in the yardstick of comparison. Sometimes, Simmel compares the city with the countryside; at other times, he compares the metropolis with the town; and in between,
he continually compares modern urban centers with the cities of earlier epochs.
2. A break with conventional thinking about causality: the imprecision in Simmels
argumentation does not necessarily have to do with intellectual carelessness. As

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TABLE 1

Synopsis of Simmels Lecture Titled The Metropolis and Mental Life

Unit of Comparison

Urban Way of Life

Traditional Way of Life

Main metaphor

Long chains

Small circles

Dominant economic system

Goods production and

money economy
Detailed division of labor

Subsistence production
and barter economy
Little division of labor

Core economic problem

Fight for man

(instill new needs)

Fight with nature

(satisfy elementary needs)

Consumers relation to the

product

Orientation to exchange
value
a
Blas attitude toward things
Consumption of final
products

Orientation to utility value

Sensitivity to differences
Consumers input

Consumers relation to the

manufacturer

Dependence on many people

the consumer does not know
Positive: predictability
Negative: inexorability

General etiquette

Brevity and rarity of meetings

Dependence on a few people

the consumer knows
Positive: latitude for judgment
Negative: arbitrariness

Slight aversion

Length and frequency of

encounters
Solidarity

Benefit to the individual

Individual freedom

Collective support

Danger to the individual

Social isolation

Social control

Leveling of people

Adaptation to formal
procedures (e.g., the
obligation to be punctual)

Adaptation to group norms

Differentiation of people

Stylization of individuality
in public

Knowledge of individualities
a
in the group

Rhythm of life

Tempo
Contrasts
Incessant change

Leisureliness
Evenness
Constancy

Personality patterns

Intellectuality
Tolerance
Flexibility of roles played

Emotionality
a
Philistinism
Stability of character

Life horizon

The near is far; the far is near

a
Cosmopolitanism

The near is near; the far is far

Provincialism

a. Translations of Simmels own expressions. The present translation departs in places from earlier English versions, which are not free from serious errors. For example, the contrast between the
urban and the traditional way of life is described by Simmel as follows: Das Entscheidende ist, da
das Stadtleben den Kampf fr den Nahrungserwerb mit der Natur in einem Kampf um den
Menschen verwandelt hat, da der umkmpfte Gewinn hier nicht von der Natur, sondern vom
Menschen gewhrt wird. The formulation Kampf um den Menschen is translated by H. H. Gerth
and C. W. Mills in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York, 1964), 420, as
inter-human struggle and by E. Shils in Donald N. Levine, ed., Georg Simmel: On Individuality
and Social Forms (Chicago, 1971), 336, as conflict with human beings.

his colleague Heinrich Rickert stressed, Simmel deliberately avoided system

building.7 This practice is illustrated particularly well by Simmels responses to
the question about the determining factors of social change. In one place, he says

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it results from urbanizationthe individuals expanded freedom, for example.

In another place, he explains that social change develops from the money economy. Simmel only superficially suspends this contradiction by declaring that the
urban centers specific nature resides in its being the seat of the money economy. Simmels whole purpose is to take unilinear causalities such as town-airmakes-you-free and dissolve them in a web of interactions. He wants to express
that the city is both cause and effect.
3. A relish for paradoxes: the essays coincidentia oppositorium, its unity in opposites, is a pattern of thinking characteristic of Simmels texts. Urbanization is not
treated as a zero-sum accounting of gains and losses but rather as a process
whose impacts come across as paradoxical at first glance: the simultaneous rise
in the level of the individuals dependence and independence, the simultaneous
increase in anonymity and intimacy in interpersonal relations as one sharpens
the differentiation between them.8

But for all the ambiguity resonating in Simmels theory of urbanism, he is

definite on one matter. The final sentence of the essay contains the reminder
that it is not our task either to accuse or to pardon, but only to understand9 the
city as an entity. The degree to which Simmel himself adhered to this precept is
examined in the following sections.
THE NO-GO AREAS AT THE
TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

As Berlin developed into a center of trade, banking, and finance, old residential neighborhoods in the downtown area had to give way to new commercial buildings. After the creation of the Second German Empire in 1871, labor
migrated to the city, notably from the eastern parts of the country, finding
employment in the new industrial complexes located on the outskirts of the
capital. To cope with the ever more urgent housing problem, it was necessary
to resort to a kind of accommodation introduced earlier by Fredrick the Great,
one that was to become a trademark of modernism in Berlin: tenements
(mietskasernen). In 1908, Albert Sdekum, a deputy of the Social Democratic
Party in Germanys federal diet, published a report summarizing the results of
his research trips to the proletarian quarters in the northern part of the capital. He began by describing the examination of mass accommodations in the
block demarcated by Mllerstrasse and Reinickendorferstrasse. Sdekum
accompanied a physician friend of his on a call to a couple who had to share a
single kitchen room with their three children. It was a hot, humid afternoon in
August, and the stench in the tenement was wretched:
The smell of diapers is typical of all proletarian dwellings. And just as the small
children contribute most to the bad air, they also suffer most from it. What drives
the father to the bar drives the child to the grave.10

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Hell is a fetid place without love.

Sdekums arrangement of the empirical material draws attention to the
influence of his lifelong friend, the sociologist Ferdinand Tnnies. One way
Sdekum demonstrated the representativeness of his reported individual cases
was to cite a school physicians statistics according to which nearly half of all
Berlin school children had to sleep in one room with more than three people.11
These others were not necessarily family members, either. In many cases, they
were people (schlafleute) with whom workers and their families had to share
their dwellings because they could not pay the rent on their own. It takes little
empathy to imagine that most of the attributes that Simmel regarded as characteristic of city lifethe individuals greater independence, the elaboration of
individuality, the surfeit of goods that made life infinitely easy12applied
at most to the quarters of Berlins well to do, not to the involuntary communities in the tenements.
To Sdekum, increased self-responsibility of the individual in modern
times was one of the trite Manchester phrases.13 As a local politician, he
heard it most from deputies of the city assembly who considered the fight
against poverty to be a question of police strategy. Alluding to Nietzsche,
Sdekum referred to his own report on the conditions in the suburbs as
thoughts out of season, by which he wanted to say that public preoccupation
with the miserable conditions of urban housing had already passed some
years earlier. Sarcasm permeated his commentary about the response of the
intellectuals to the situation in the workers quarters and about their influence
on the entire development of the discussion about the social problem:
For a while they put up with the housing issue, too, though preferably the one
in Londons Eastend or New Yorks Bowery rather than that in Berlins
Scheunenviertel or in Recklinghausen; then enoughs enough! Thats just the
way things are. Not only do such people know the least about what is right under
our noses, they dont even want to familiarize themselves with it.14

What is near is far; what is far is near. Taking what Simmel wrote about the life
horizon of urbanites, Sdekum transferred it to the level of social policy, driving home the chill of the social climate prevailing in Berlin in those years.15
The reproach about the ephemeral interest in the iniquities of ones own city
applied to Simmel the sociologist as well. Around 1890, he sympathized for a
time with the Social Democratic Party and, under a pseudonym, submitted
articles to journals that shared the partys views. In later years, he counted this
involvement as one of his youthful transgressions.16 Unlike other Berlin
intellectuals who went over to the next philosophical fashion after a phase of
solidarity with the proletariat, Simmel retrospectively offered an explanation
for their ignorance:
Personal contact between educated people and workers often so vigorously
advocated for the social development of the present, the rapprochement of the

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two worlds of which the one does not know how the other lives also advocated
by the educated classes as an ethical ideal, fails simply because of the insuperability of impressions of smell.17

In Simmels opinion, asking the well to do to sacrifice personal comfort, to

go without lobster, lawn-tennis, and chaises longues, is easier than asking
them to engage in physical contact with people to whom the sweat of honest
toilclings. The social question is not only an ethical one, but also a question of
smell [eine Nasenfrage].18
Simmel did not write his commentary Sociology of the Senses from the
perspectiveor better, wind directionof the person smelling of sweat but
rather from that of the person disgusted by the odor. What he wrote about the
affectations of educated people who approach reality with retracted fingertips at most can be read as autobiographical information. This suggestion is
by no means meant as a denunciation. After all, Simmels thoughts about the
connection between fear of contact and loss of reality provide an authentic
answer to the fundamental methodological question of what effects the objects
of observation elicit in the observer and what influence this reaction has on the
cognitive process.19 But when one interprets the manifestation of disgust
cognitively, not morally, a contradiction arises. Although Simmel stressed the
inherent selectivity of perception, which results from perceptions emphasis
upon liking and disliking, he blithely makes his own hypersensitivity the
yardstick of modernity: The modern person is shocked by innumerable
things, and innumerable things appear intolerable to their [sic] senses which
less differentiated, more robust modes of feeling would tolerate without any
such reaction.20 The refinement of taste and an attendant, somewhat aseptic
rejection of what is felt to be unaesthetic were what Simmel saw as modern.
The inhabitants of the tenements were thereby furtively excluded from modern humanity. Life in stench, noise, and filth appeared as something premodern or, as Sdekum aptly put it, out of season.
MODERN AMUSEMENT CULTURE

The misery that existed just a few blocks away, yet seemingly on a different
planet, was something that the young Simmel became familiar with through
the literary dramas and novels of German naturalism. After witnessing an
1892 performance of Gerhart Hauptmanns The Weavers attended by Berlins
intellectual circles, he emphasized the utility of the piece for their social education. This appraisal only heightened his indignation at the decision to censure the play shortly thereafter:
The police permitted performance only for a private association [and] banned
public stagings. Year after year, though, they let the Berlin Residenz Theater
perform the most vulgar French buffoonery, allowing it to exert its educational
effects on our people by titillating sexual feelings and centering all lifes

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interests on the attendant pleasures. In the waxworks there is permission to show

the public a series of bloody acts under the title For Viewers with Strong Nerves,
which thereby systematically brutalizes the young, who are keen on it, begets wanton lust for cruelty, and breeds in humans the instincts of the wild animal.21

To show the absurdity of censoring the workers drama, this passage by

Simmel reproduced the cliches of the cultural criticism in his day. This criticism can be read as an answer to the question of what individuals do with the
expanded freedom granted them by the relaxation of social controls in the anonymity of the city. The conservative elites of the empire, such as the big landowners and the clerics, were convinced that urbanites would use their freedom
for criminal or sexual escapades.22 To the delinquents credit, however, it was
recognized that they did not stray from the path of virtue on their own accord. It
was acknowledged that they had been seduced by a newly arisen amusement
culture running the gamut from the subtle decoration in the department stores
to the parade of feminine enticements on vaudeville stages. The Residenz theater and the Castan brothers wax museum were star attractions of Berlins
early culture industry, which underwent a remake in the golden twenties.
The scandal surrounding the censorship of The Weavers in 1892 was not the
only occasion on which Simmel used the stimulus-response pattern to model
the effect that the new kinds of diversion had on their public. Utter vitriol
against the hollow splendour of modern amusements burst forth in the diatribe titled Infelices possidentes, which Simmel published under the pseudonym Paul Liesegang in 1893. The temples of light entertainment such as the
Apollo Theater in Berlin and the Ronach Theater in Vienna were portrayed by
Simmel as incubators of infection from which the rage for pleasure was
spreading like an epidemic throughout the population:
The terrible and tragic aspect of such domination by the shallow and the common is that it not only takes hold of those of a bad or base disposition, who would
give in to it in any case, but also the better and more noble ones. 23

Simmel saw the causes of this susceptibility in the intensification and monotony of work. Compulsive concentration on occupational life, he asserted, was
compensated for by compulsive diversion during leisure. As Simmel saw it,
this behavioral pattern was particularly true of the well to do, who were able to
afford everything but could scarcely really enjoy anything. The worker, for
whom entry to the pleasure palaces of Friedrichstadt was beyond reach, was
nevertheless supposed to be consoled by the knowledge that the jeunesse dore
of the fin de sicle type only sought to camouflage its inner emptiness by
means of external opulence.
Simmel believed he recognized the contagious nature of this craving for
pleasure (genusucht) also in its capacity to erupt in social contexts having
nothing to do with entertainment at first glance. The Berlin Trade Exhibition
of 1896, for example, was by no means exclusively a commercial fair and a

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showcase of German industrys prowess. What arose on the grounds of

Treptow Park on the banks of the Spree River was a Prussian Disneyland with a
nostalgic little set-piece town named Old Berlin; a giant telescope and a panorama of the Alps; a thirty-six-meter-high model of the Great Pyramid of
Cheops, complete with built-in elevator; and an artificial reservoir for staging
sea battles, all of which were won by the German fleet, the pride of Emperor
William II.24 When Simmel contrasted the exhibition style with the monumental style in contemporary architecture and saw the proof of aesthetic
productivity in the way the buildings on the exhibition grounds called attention to their own transience, he momentarily succumbed to the characteristic
logic of this early form of pop culture. 25
However, the tenor of Simmels sociological feuilleton was different.
Arranging every conceivable product into one gigantic ensemble led to a
paralysis of the senses in Simmel when he visited the exhibition. The creators of the exhibition transferred the stimulating dimension of what is
urbanthe richness and variety of fleeting impressionsto a media environment. Simmel the viewer felt like someone who zaps the programs of private television for the first time. And he did not like what he saw. Every fine
and sensitive feeling, however, is violated and seems deranged by the mass
effect of the merchandise offered.26 He also conceded that the effect of
massive quantity can indeed be experienced by less sensitive people as
amusement. He remarked that great care was invested in design and decor
because in the struggle for the consumer, the main thing was increasingly
the shop-window quality of things.27 To Simmel, the economy proved in this
respect to be merely a superstructure of cognitive psychology. Freely translated, Theres no business without show business.
Only people who are already satiated can be coaxed to continue consuming
by means of polished glamour alone. One can therefore assume that Simmel
had the wealthy uppermost in mind when he castigated the slaves of the products, who have lost contact with their inner selves because of endless habits,
endless distractions and endless superficial needs.28 In this critique of decadence, too, Simmel drew on a cliche common around the turn of the century.
One of the most hated social characters to take the stage of German social life
in the era after 1870 was the parvenu. According to a widely quoted statement
by Walther Rathenau, modern Berlin was considered not only the parvenu
among capital cities but also the capital of parvenus.29 Modernizations
winners included corporate founders, engineers, and executives right along
with natural scientists and media intellectuals. There were in fact many newly
rich people in Berlin then, and Simmel, who had inherited a significant sum
after the death of his uncle, Julius Friedlnder, was able to describe quite precisely what it is like to suddenly come into money:
As long as we are not yet in a position to buy things, they affect us with their particular distinctive charms. Yet as soon as we easily acquire them with our money,

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those charms fade away, not only because we now own and enjoy them, but also
because we acquired them by an indifferent method which effaces their specific
value.30

Note, however, that Simmels criticism of this dulling of the capacity to

fully discriminate, this blas attitude, is directed only at those well-off people
whose consumption no longer satisfied any need that could be taken seriously,
such as the development of character. It was aimed at consumption that had
degenerated into an end in itself, into mere consumerism.31 Declaring this distinct form of blas attitude to be the universal trait of urban life clearly shows
how much Simmels image of the city was shaped by Berlins Westend, where
the sociologist spent most of his life. If Berlin was the capital of parvenus at
that time, then the western part of the city was dead center.32 To Simmel, the
nouveau riche of Berlins western quarters were superficiality in person.
Remembering also what Simmel pointed out as the titillation of the senses33
by indecent illuminated signboards and the olfactory impact of masses of people, one begins to suspect that he cannot have felt altogether at ease in his part
of the city. Unsurprisingly, he regarded it as Richard Wagners master stroke
that the composer moved performance of his operas to the Bavarian town of
Bayreuth, for in Simmels opinion the seriousness of serious art could really be
appreciated only in a place remote from modern life.34 Simmel himself, too,
searched for a place of refuge outside the big city.
FROM ETERNAL ICE
INTO THE ETERNAL CITY

Simmel the Berliner had a very special relation to the Alps. Again and
again, he sought out the solitude of the Swiss mountains with his family so that
he could devote himself to writing in peace. Some of his texts are said to suggest their alpine origins because, for instance, they speak of the loftiest
peaks that the author set about climbing in the history of thought. Yet the
mountains were more to Simmel than just a backdrop to and a symbol of his
own thinking. They helped him keenly experience contrast, helped him
achieve a feeling of being delivered from the shallowness of the everyday
world.35 It was primarily the absolutely unhistorical landscape of the glacier regions that enraptured him. In the Philosophy of Money, he conveyed the
intensity of this experience of nature as a symptom of modernism, as a specific
perceptual mode of the urbanite. As Simmel explained, the bond that country
dwellers have to nature was precisely what made it impossible for them to see a
landscape from purely aesthetic perspectives.36
The idyll in the Swiss alpine mountains began to cloud in the 1890s. New
streets and railroad connections brought more and more city dwellers into the
remote areas near Mrren and Adelboden. Simmel protested that alpine tourism became a wholesale opening up. Annoyed, he added,

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The concentration and convergence of the massescolourful but therefore as a

whole colourlesssuggesting to us an average sensibility. Like all social averages this depresses those disposed to the higher and finer values without elevating those at the base to the same degree.37

The philosopher fled the city, but the city pursued him. The daredevil climbing
parties of the Alpine Club were a downright scandal to Simmel because the
risking of life as mere enjoyment is unethical.38 In the final analysis, the
addiction to pleasure seeking for which he had criticized the mindless consumer back home was the same malady for which he now rebuked the mountain climbers. With his words, those at the base (den niedrig Veranlagten),
he did not mean the workers, who around 1900 could not yet afford any alpine
trips, but rather the parvenus on vacation.
Simmels criticism of vacation culture suggests a family quarrel, for his
older brother Eugen had published a book titled Walks in the Alps, which
recounted the expeditions of Berlins Alpine Club as adventure stories.39 The
books final chapter contained photographs of the icy graves in which
the corpses of the excessively daring among these pioneers of todays
Erlebnisgesellschaft (society oriented toward the enrichment of personal
experience). In spite of, or rather precisely because of, such misfortunes,
Eugen Simmel tried to deny the appearance of the sensational and to present
mountain climbing as a unique educational experience. With Kants Critique
of Judgment in his backpack, Eugen climbed the Piz Bernina and held forth on
the fortitude of the fearless in the face of natural forces. This educational solicitude found no mercy from his brother. The family expert on Kant categorically stated that the experience of nature was far too brief to contribute to an
abiding enrichment of intellectual life. The uplift which a view of the high
Alps gives is followed very quickly by the return to the mood of the mundane.40 The superficiality of the alpine journeys would be immediately clear if
they were compared with a true educational experiencewith Italian journeys.41
In 1898, Georg Simmel visited Rome for the first time since his youth. The
themes that were to occupy him in his lecture titled The Metropolis and Mental Life five years later do not appear in his travel report. As emphasized by
the reports subtitle, Simmels observations were an aesthetic analysis, not a
sociological one. To Simmel, the aesthetics of the Italian capital consisted in
the way the disparate details of the urban structure fit together into a harmonic
whole. In a footnote, he stated that he owed this holistic impression to a carefully delimited scope: I may disregard the parts of Rome that are of unremitting modernity and equally unremitting atrociousness. Fortunately, they lie
where, with a bit of caution, they will be of relatively little concern to the
stranger.42 Rome was (and is?) the paragon of the ancient city, whereas Berlin
then (as now?) was perceived as a giant construction site.43 One of the most
influential depictions of Berlin as a test-tube city without tradition is found in

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Julius Langbehns book Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as an Educator).

Reviewing this bestseller in 1890, Simmel did remonstrate that its author
lacked a higher order perspective. As long as the eye is fixated on this or that
discrete phenomenon of modernism, one would like to think that telephones,
mountain railroads, factory smokestacks, and the citys endless monotonous
streets lined with houses are the most antipoetic things in the world.44 But
eight years later, he adopted Langbehns stance and was no longer able to see
telephones, factory smokestacks, or asphalt streets as manifestations of poetry
rooted in reality.
Simmels text on Rome deals with what he misses at home, what oppresses
him there.45 At the sight of the Roman ruins, the present merges with the past in
the eyes of their beholder from Berlin. The panorama of the eternal city evokes
in him a feeling similar to that brought on by the sight of the eternal ice: being
free from all here and now. But at the very moment Simmel declaresin
pathos typical of the periodhow overcome he is with emotion, his field of
vision is violated by that irksome element, a tourist. Although Simmel is a
tourist, too, he is not the typical pleasure traveler. Already feeling himself
unpleasantly affected elsewhere by human beings of this species, Simmel
finds them more stylistically incongruous and intolerable in Rome than otherwise.46 The typical thing about typical pleasure travelers is that they only
pay attention to individual sights: The subhuman and primitive human consciousness is stuck in the isolation of its notions; the sign of higher [human
consciousness] and the proof of its freedom and supremacy is that it draws
connections between the particulars.47
Nor was Simmel spared the irritation about primitive human consciousness while in Florence, where he often spent his semester breaks. From travel
guides in circulation around the turn of the century,48 one gathers that Michelangelos sculptures in the Medicis family tomb in Florence were among the
musts for the Tuscany faction of Germanys educated middle class. Simmel, an
admirer of Michelangelo, was therefore unable to devote himself to enjoying
art in peace there. In a diary entry after a social evening on October 3, 1903,
historian Kurt Breysig noted, Simmel complains about the public in the
museums; 7 minutes long in the Medici chapelmeaning: nonetheless have
a vague yearning for beauty.49 The most profound reason for the resentment
that Simmel the sociologist felt toward the German capital may be that regardless of where he fled, he always came across his unloved neighbors from
Berlin.

SIMMELS STUDENT JULIUS BAB AND

THE GROSTADT-DOKUMENTE SERIES

After never rising above the rank of associate professor (extraordinarius) at

the Royal FriedrichWilhelm University in Berlin, Simmel accepted a chair at

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the University of Strasbourg in April 1914. When the news of his imminent
departure became public, the journal Die Gegenwart printed an editorial,
Berlin without Simmel, lamenting that the city was losing one of its most
spirited forcesa truly extraordinary scholar whom an entire dozen of the full
professors do not make up for. Simmel and his family were highly gratified to
read this article, though it did strengthen the doubts about whether the decision
to leave Berlin for the provinces was the right one.50 The author of the article,
the thirty-four-year-old theater critic Julius Bab, had regularly attended Simmels
lectures as a student and had maintained amicable relations with his teacher in
the years thereafter.51
The publication that had made Bab known overnight was his 1904 portrait,
Berlin bohemia.52 Whereas a year earlier Simmels famous lecture had characterized cities as places in which the most tendentious peculiarities of selfaggrandizement thrived, Bab noted how far the cultivation of eccentric deportment had advanced in Germany. Bab was personal friends with probably the
most conspicuously shabby and unruly [looking]53 of all Berlin bohemians,
the anarchist Erich Mhsam. Bab asserted that the egocentrism of cultural
gypsies such as Mhsam acquires a new dimension in the city because the
loners there can join together as a community:
The bohemian is a child of the city, conceived and born of these centers of modern culture, which endeavor to gather all talents within them. . . . There have
always been individual bohemians, but a bohemia has existed only since the
advent of modern metropolises.54

Only in a city of millions does the number of dissidents reach the level needed
to establish their own meeting places, publications, group rituals, and clothing
styles.
This train of thought may be obvious today, but in the early twentieth
century, it was unusual and confusing. The prevailing image of the city in
Germany around 1900 was one of disorder. Invoking Tnnies, observers associated the process of urbanization primarily with the dissolution of traditional
communities. Simmel, too, posited a loss of community ties in the city but juxtaposed it with gains in individual freedom and came up with mixed results.
Bab, by contrast, associated individualism as a lifestyle with the emergence of
new, modern forms of group formation. His overall judgment of urban culture
was correspondingly positive, especially because he accorded the outsider
communities an important social function. He saw no cause for censure in their
attack on the societys habitual and convenient lies. To him, it was instead
creative destruction, an engine of modernization.
Julius Bab considered his chronicle of the Berlin bohemia only an initial
sketch, a preliminary study for a great, historically critical work55 in which
he also wanted to study criminal and professional communities to determine
what influence the city exerted on the search for identity among marginalized

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groups. Bab thereby anticipated a principle that Claude S. Fischer elaborated

seventy years later in his subcultural theory of urbanism.56 Fischers central
thesis was that deviations from the norm in an agglomeration can reach a critical mass that lends the very quantity of rule violations a new quality, the
quality of an independent subculture. 57
Although Bab himself did not follow up on his research program, at least
parts of it were pursued later in the series in which he had published his book
on the Berlin bohemia. From 1904 through 1908, fifty-one monographs
appeared in this series, which carried the title Grostadt-Dokumente. Its editor, Hans Ostwald, chose the study on the bohemia as the second volume after
he himself had scouted the dark corners of Berlin in the first volume, albeit
without attempting to stake out a theoretical position.58 This decision is interpretable as an indication that Ostwald saw Babs ideas on the sociology of the
social outsider to be a systematic outline for the entire urban research project.
To be sure, the series went on to include studies not only on the subculture of
bohemians but also on gamblers, esoterics, pimps, athletes, professional criminals, anarchists, and homosexuals.59 Among the forty authors who worked on
the project, Ostwald was surrounded by a core group of scholars who had close
contact with each other through their mutual affiliation with artistic circles,
press editorial departments, and associations for social reform. It is this intellectual milieu of the Berlin bohemia that Julius Bab described so vividly,
which is why his contribution to the series can also be read as a self-portrait of
the authors community.
When writing about the city, Simmel confined himself to the segment of
reality he knew from his own everyday world. Ostwald and his coauthors,
however, predicated their work on the systematic inquiry into unfamiliar areas
of the city, using various observational and descriptive methods ranging from
walking tours to biographical interviews and the printing of personal documents.60 Most of the procedures would be classified today as qualitative social
research, but sociological naturalism seems a more appropriate term for communicating both the pathos of authenticity and the predilection for marginal
existence that were reflected in the Grostadt-Dokumente series. Indeed,
Emile Zola and the German naturalists exerted great influence on the Berlin
community of authors.
Given the projects vast range of methods and spectrum of topics, it is
exceedingly difficult to find a similarly encompassing early-twentieth-century
undertaking classifiable as urban researchin the broadest sense. The closest
contending body of work is that of the Chicago school of urban sociology,
which was started approximately a decade later under the direction of Robert
E. Park, though the methodology involved was far more refined and the theories more sophisticated. There were in fact many indications that the Ostwald
series was closely studied by the founding generation of the Chicago school.61
In Louis Wirths famous 1925 bibliography of scientific literature on urban
sociology, for example, Babs article was praised as a unique contribution to

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the mentality of city life.62 Beyond this tribute, almost all other individual volumes of the Grostadt-Dokumente series were listed and commentated, with
Wirth expounding on some of their leitmotifs and translating them into the terminology of Chicago urban sociology. In so doing, Wirth tackled a task that
had been neglected by the Berlin authors: the analytical penetration of the
factual material that was spread over more than five thousand pages of text in
Grostadt-Dokumente. What Park had done in Chicago with the prefaces for
the classical studies of his doctoral students was far beyond what had been
manageable in Berlin by Ostwald, who was a goldsmith by trade and a selftaught journalist. Ostwald had instead trusted that his readers would relieve
him of the work of analyzing and synthesizing. A characteristic passage
expressing this approach is Ostwalds introduction to volume 33, in which the
diary of a convict is printed: I deliberately refrain from further commentbut
expect that psychologists, criminologists, sociologists, politicians, philanthropists, and misanthropes will appreciate the value of this document and
extract the pulp from the rind.63
In purely theoretical terms, Georg Simmel could have been the sociologist
for that job, particularly because personal contact to the Berlin community of
authors existed through Julius Bab.64 Realistically speaking, however, the
Ostwald project came at least ten years too late for Simmel. By the time his students bohemia essay appeared, Simmel had long since made the switch from
social involvement to formal sociological analysis, from naturalism and
social democracy to aestheticism and the circle surrounding George, from
sociology to metaphysics.65 There is hardly a greater contrast than that
between Ostwalds fascination with the diversity of city life66 and Simmels
distaste for Berlins titillation of the senses and intoxication of the nerves.
This difference is apparent, among other things, from the style of the social
gatherings that Simmel cultivated with his friends and acquaintances in
Berlins Westend. Part of the genteel etiquette in Simmels salon meant ensuring that conversation avoided mention of the surrounding city. As reported by
Elly Heuss-Knapp, a firsthand witness of the jours in Simmels private apartment in 1906: There is never talk of what is currently occupying Berlin, but
rather of the special rhetoric used by the French in the Dauphin against the
northern French or of other things no one else knows about. I like listening.67
Such words express once again the notion that what is near is far, and what is
far is near. There were other exclusive salons in Berlin that existed at the turn of
the twentieth century, but Simmel considered them more trivial forms of fellowship, as he stressed in an invitation to Stefan George, his most prominent
guest: The Berlin world reposes in dinner parties, social gatherings, and other
things one can buy, and that makes a good periphery for our ever quieter and
more concentrated life.68 To the rest of the world, the big city became nothing
more than a distant background noise helping the intellectual elite to achieve
an even more intense feeling of turning away from the world. It may be the

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appropriate setting for a poet of the transcendental, but is it for an observer of

modern times?

BABYLON BERLIN IN THE GREAT WAR

1 August, war! The greatest shock of my life. . . . The furor teutonicus is

unleashed and rages in me as well.69 This entry in the memoirs that Hans
Simmel wrote in American exile during World War II describes his fathers
reaction to the outbreak of World War I. As long as Georg Simmels strength
permitted, that is, until he fell ill with cancer at the turn of 1917 and 1918, he
tried to contribute nonmaterially to the self-assertion of the German Empire in
a world of enemies. He worked late in the evenings at the censors bureau of the
Strasbourg telegraph office, took a hand in foreign propaganda, and agitated
against the French policy of retaliation and revenge and against Englands
hunger for gold. On speaking tours within Germany, he made a point of
declaring his love for the fatherland, and he gave university lectures at the
western front.
Simmels activism did not differ markedly from that of the other German
sociologists, who did not hesitate long to volunteer for the combat patrols of
ideological warfare.70 But coming from an author with a fondness for such
niceties as coquetry and sake bowls, the crudeness of the belligerent is more
surprising with Simmel than with the other representatives of the field. It is
even more startling than with Sombart, Tnnies, and Weber, who, for all
their proclamations about freedom from value judgment, seldom shunned
the opportunity to interfere in daily politics. With Simmel, the shift from
theorizing about individualism to rooting for the nation comes across as a
radical break with his own past. The patriotic tones in his writing during
the war are new when compared with the tenor of his earlier texts. He never
used to think about what sets Teutonism apart from the Romanesque and
had never before tried to distinguish between genuine German cosmopolitanism and the globetrotters diffuse gushing about foreignness (verblasene
Auslnderei).71 Such phrases suggest that Simmels enthusiasm for the war be
equated with a temporally localizable sacrificium intellectus and that his work
be regarded as essentially unscathed by the causes and consequences of German militarism.
This conclusion amounts to a serious misinterpretation, as demonstrated by
Simmels first wartime speech, which he gave on November 7, 1914, in
Aubette Hall in Strasbourg. Simmel expressed his deep relief that the epoch
since 1870, the era of Berlin modernism, had irrevocably come to an end,
linking the hope for a renaissance of the German people and culture in the form
of a new man. Just as the war of 1870-1871 helped the German nation
achieve its economic potential, the new Great War couldso he asserted
lead to the mobilization of their spiritual reserves by eliminating one of the

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root evils of Wilhelmine society, mammonism, which he defined as the

worship of money and of the monetary value of things.72 Mammonism was
thus nothing other than a new, more concise formulation of Simmels old conviction that money had ceased being a mere means of payment and had made
itself the ultimate purpose of human existence. Furthermore, the statement
that this development of the golden calf into something transcendent . . .
became endemic in our major cities ought to sound familiar to the readers of
Simmels 1903 essay on the city. In the lecture The Crisis of Culture, which
was delivered in January 1916, Simmel reiterated the same basic idea more
systematically and more abstractly: lifethe protagonist in Simmels metaphysicsfinally defends itself against its rape by the mechanics of modernism. He stated with unmistakable clarity in the endnote to the printed version
of the lecture that the foundations of the historiocultural and historiophilosophical bases of these considerations are thoroughly described in my
book The Philosophy of Money.73
How far the equating of war and catharsis removed Simmel from the conceptual world of his countrymen is shown by the fact that he based his hopes
not on possible victory but rather on the probability that Germany would be
impoverished. Remarkably, Simmel was persuaded of the latter scenario
within just four months after the war broke out. Germany will be a poor laggard by comparison.74 He deleted an additional clauseeven if a happy end
to the war restores billions to herfrom the 1917 reissue of his first wartime
text, for by then a happy outcome was no longer likely. From the outset, making a virtue out of necessity had been more important to Simmel than victory
or defeat. The privations of the war economy were to teach Germany a more
sensitive, less blasI would even go so far as to say a more reverentrelationship to the commodities which we consume daily.75 The state indicates
that Simmels antipathy, as in his prewar texts, once again railed primarily
against the craving for pleasure of people with a blas attitude. People who
could barely afford the simplest articles of daily consumption already existed
in Germany during peacetime, but now those who used to be guilty of mammonism were expected to sacrifice what they cherished mosttheir money.
In February 1915, Simmel called for this sacrifice by launching a headstrong food campaign that was to occupy him for more than two years. His
Lenten sermon to the wealthy, which was circulated in newspapers and journals, laid down the law on the heresy that misconceived thrift constituted:
Today, the catchword savings is leading former consumers of sole, artichokes, and beef filet to eat haddock, white cabbage, and roast knuckles
instead.76 The examples varied: People who had been used to lobster salad,
young carrots, and partridge were suddenly eating green herring, old carrots,
and hash made of calfs lung.77 The message was the same, however: whoever
could afford the most expensive food should continue eating it during the war
as well so that the inexpensive foods remained available for the other groups in
the population.

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Simmel thereby addressed the chief problems of Germanys war economy,

the bottlenecks in the supply of food to the population, especially in the big cities and above all in Berlin. He greatly welcomed the decision to ration staple
food, a measure born of necessity. Beginning on February 22, 1915, flour and
grain in Berlin were allocated by means of bread ration-cards. This distribution system was typical of so-called wartime socialism and was soon expected
to extend to other everyday goods and other regions of the German Empire.
Simmel rejoiced,
The bread ration-card symbolizes the uselessness of even the greatest wealth. . . .
At last people are again being asked to economize with meat and butter, bread
and wool, for the sake of these commodities themselves. This change may sound
simple, but it totally reverses a sense of economic value which has been nurtured
for centuries in the civilized world.78

The sense of economic values characteristic of the barter economy is what was
finally supposed to reassert itself. What Simmel the Lenten preacher had in
mind is tantamount to a revival of the traditional way of life79 on an urban scale
and at a national level.
Simmels vision took no account of the everyday world in the regions
behind the war of position. Each person with a bread ration-card was to receive
about eight ounces of flour a day, which, if stretched with a potato additive,
corresponded to a little more than four pounds of bread.80 Approximately
800,000 people, most of them in the capital, are estimated to have starved to
death in Germany during the years of the Allied economic blockade of the
country. In the midst of the war, Berlins topography began to deurbanize, with
a bizarre form of the barter economy eventually taking over within the city.
Potatoes were cultivated in parks and open areas, balconies were used for
growing tomatoes, and chickens and rabbits were raised in back courtyards.
The universities feverishly conducted experiments with new, synthetic foods,
such as flour made from finely ground tree bark, pudding powder made from
gluten, and pepper made from ash. Supply gaps opened the way for the black
market and the underground economy. Only solvent customers could pay the
exorbitant prices for illegally procured goods. A wartime version of the parvenu arose with the profiteer of black marketeering and the chain trade. Corruption existed everywhere, but only in Berlin did it emerge into a way of life,
highlighting the extreme inequality of access to food in the German capital.81
In far-off Strasbourg, Georg Simmel eventually also began to note the catastrophic conditions in his hometown. A footnote to a collection of articles published in the book titled Der Krieg und die geistigen Entscheidungen (The War
and the Decisions of the Mind), which appeared in mid-1917, he conceded,
The war years that have meanwhile elapsed, with profiteering and overcharging, hoarding, and methods of war-tax evasion, have shown that there can be
no talk of a general endeavor to overcome mammonism.82 But even then he

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could not yet bring himself to give up the idea that the war was accomplishing a
metaphysical feat: The war has brought life a tremendous increase of
intensity that which the wonderful people have become even more wonderful and the knaves even more knavish. At the same time, the revision of his
original expectations was associated with their radicalization into a fantasy
of annihilation: The cozy tranquility of peace can perhaps afford to carry
along what is superfluous, what is innerly dead[.] . . . This is no longer compatible with the toughness and decisiveness to which the war has hammered out
our existence.83 And uppermost on Simmels list of what is innerly dead
superfluous people. It is that which is without right to the future: People and
institutions, world views, and concepts of morality.
He thus seemed to have sensed that the war would not meet his desire for
annihilation. When he works himself up over the old mammonistic Adam, it
sounds more like a curse than like philosophy. His Old Testament wrath is not
directed solely at the materialism of the monied classes but also at the big
city, at Berlin, where culture suffered the fate of the Tower of Babel84 and
where the golden calf became transcendent. In Simmels religion of education, modern Berlin is what ancient Rome was according to Augustinian
allegory85the hotbed of vice, the city of vulgarity and idolization of money
with modern Rome taking the place of biblical Jerusalem.

BERLIN, SIMMELSTRASSE, MARCH 2001

In late 1914, Simmel had been able to extemporize, as it were, a meaning

for the war because he had spent years in mental mobilization. It would be
an injustice to him to regard his radicalization of The Philosophy of Money
into a uniquely Simmelian variant of the German steel-bath philosophies
(stahlbadphilosophien) as a misinterpretation of his own work, as a retrospective prophecy belatedly claiming to have seen from the outset how things
would turn out. Simmel had actually foretold much earlier that the pathology
of culture would inexorably lead to the outbreak of the crisis.86
On the walls of the Berlin entertainment establishments there stands the mene
mene tekel; the marble and the paintings, the gold and the satin that cover them
seek in vain to cover the writing, it penetrates through the present, and todays
seers know how to interpret it.

Two decades before Verdun, these words marked the start of Infelices possidentes. A few lines later, Simmel added an oracle: A terrible seriousness will
not only replace this gleaming intoxication.87 The seer from Friedrichstrasse
did not merely divine the terrible seriousness; he longed for it: Give us, o
onrushing times, give to us reverence again. In 1900, he wrote a poem
inspired by the turn of the century, concluding it with this prayer formula to

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express a feeling unmistakably stressed from the very title through to the punctuation: A yearning.88 That same year, Simmel made a statement in The Philosophy of Money that has puzzled many a scholar studying his works: Modern times, particularly the most recent, are permeated by a feeling of tension,
expectation, and unreleased intense desiresas if in anticipation of what is
essential, of the definitive[,] of the specific meaning and central point of life
and things.89 The passage sounds less puzzling if one reads one sentence further, for Simmel mentions there the most striking example, aside from
money, of mere preparation, a latent energy, a contingency. He meant the
regular army and the negation of its end: to wage war.
The fact that Simmel secretly understood himself as a prophet of impending
doom already in peacetime was not lost on his contemporaries. His student
Theodor Lessing, for example, intended this very message when he had little
Georg grow up amid a hallucinated filthy world of metropolitan sex orgies
and stylized him into a new messiah called to take a whip and drive the money
changers from the Holy Temple.90 To Simmel, this moment of reckoning
seemed to have come with the outbreak of the Great War, the dawn of the
great era. What used to displease him about urban culture he now interpreted as degeneration resulting from the culture of peace.91 And quiet aversions then became vociferous aggressions.
Why has the link between Simmels wartime texts and urban texts been so
rarely discerned since that time? Why have so few observers seen the perfumed Nietzscheanism of a man who combined the refinement of his own,
higher mental life with the contempt of all people he classified as lower
human beingsa man who is considered an urbanist (and a modernist) par
excellence, although he bequeathed a work clearly laced with antiurbanist
(and antimodernist) affects? There are a kind explanation and an unkind explanation of the usual interpretation of Simmels urban sociology, in which his
pitch-black cultural pessimism is perceived at best as a gray veil. According to
the unkind version, what Simmel wrote of Julius Langbehns success applies
to his own:
I mean the success achieved everywhere by pure brilliance as such. That the
people to whom we owe what is true and deep in content were often also capable
of brilliant form, astonishing analogies, the ability to capture colorful appearances in a fitting wordthat has generated the utterly wrong opinion that these
formal characteristics already have the value of truth and depth. What contributes to this is the vast number of literary productions and the cursoriness of the
reading caused thereby.92

The kind explanation for the one-sided reception of Simmels work amounts to
saying that his texts have been read as he wished his readers to read them: One
should gratefully absorb from a book what is edifying and simply pass over the
other.93 Should one? Can one not be grateful for everything there is yet to learn

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from Simmels books and nevertheless refuse simply to pass over the other,
sociologically dubious aspects in his work?
Along with several works that were brilliant only in form, Simmel the
man left a great deal that was true and deep, and the city of Berlin showed its
thanks by naming a street after him.94 Of course, traffic arteries such as
Friedrichstrasse and Leipzigerstrasse were out of the question for this purpose.
But streets with less tradition, such as Nussbaumallee and Lindenallee in the
noble Westend quarter, were not considered, either, although they would have
been fitting for Simmel because he had felt the area to be his home for a while.
The street that was ultimately chosen lies in the far north of the city, in what
used to be a proletarian residential part of Reinickendorf, a vicinity that
Simmel probably never would have voluntarily set foot in. When I asked a resident of Simmelstrasse about the person after whom the road was named, she
shook her shoulders in perplexity. The only metropolitan sound drowning out
the birds chirping in the trees lining the street is the noise of the passenger airlines taking off and landing at nearby Tegel airport at regular intervals. Naming this urban village street after the world-famous professor may still have
been a way of showing deference, but it is also a kind of vengeance for the considerable antipathy lining Simmels ambivalence toward his hometown. It
would be unusual if the authors extensive work were to contain no quotation
in keeping with this sublime form of revenge: It is the subtlest and often most
ineluctable revenge exacted by powers of fate that they grant us the substance
of our desires and completely reverse it into its caricature merely by granting
more of it or less.95

1. Dies ist der Ort, wo es stinkt und man nicht liebt, Theodor Lessing, Philosphie als Tat, Erster Teil
(Gttingen, 1914), 303.
2. The biggest attraction of this Imperial Gallery became the wax museum by the brothers Louis and
Gustav Castan, whose exhibits included not only famous figures such as Napoleon Bonaparte but infamous
ones such as Jack the Ripper (much to Simmels consternation, as shown later in this article).
3. Ralph Hoppe, Die Friedrichstrae: Pflaster der Extreme (Berlin, 1999).
4. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (1900), translated by Tom Bottomore and David Frisby
(London, 1990), 484.
5. Hans Simmel, Auszge aus den Lebenserinnerungen, in Hannes Bhringer and Karlfried Grnder,
eds., sthetik und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende: Georg Simmel (Frankfurt am Main, 1976), 265.
What is true of Simmel is, of course, also true of the other classical thinkers of early German sociology who
tackled the topic of urbanization. Weber (born in 1864), Sombart (born in 1863), and Ferdinand Tnnies
(born in 1855) all belonged to this generation of sociologists, for whom Berlin modernism became a key
experience, though some of them discussed it only from afar. I am unable to judge whether this relationship
to the urban environment justifies the conclusion that the idea of the modern city is an invention typiquement
allemande. See Stphane Jonas, La mtropolisation de la socit dans loeuvre de Georg Simmel, in Jean
Rmy, ed., Georg Simmel: Ville et modernit (Paris, 1995), 53.
6. Louis Wirth, A Bibliography of the Urban Community, in R. E. Park, E. W. Burgess, and R. D.
McKenzie, eds., The City (Chicago, 1925), 219.
7. Heinrich Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens (Tbingen, 1920), 26.

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8. The latter aspect, the appreciation of the value attached to privacy in the city, is one of the few basic
thoughts on urbanism in The Philosophy of Money that Simmel did not mention in his Dresden lecture (see
Ibid., 469). Apart from that difference, The Metropolis and Mental Life can be read as a summary of the
second, synthetic part of his magnum opus. See Otthein Rammstedt, Simmels Philosophie des Geldes,
in Jeff Kintzel and Peter Schneider, eds., Georg Simmels Philosophie des Geldes (Frankfurt am Main,
1995), 34.
9. Georg Simmel, The Metropolis and Mental Life (1903, trans. by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills),
in Kurt H. Wolff, The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York, 1964), 424.
10. Albert Sdekum, Grostdtisches Wohnungselend, Grostadt-Dokumente, vol. 45 (Berlin, 1908),
34.
11. Ibid., 46.
12. Simmel, Metropolis and Mental Life, 422.
13. Sdekum, Grostdtisches Wohnungselend, 7.
14. Ibid., 6.
15. In subject matter and sometimes in tone, Sdekums ridicule of the lovers of pressed raspberry lemonade evokes Tom Wolfes coverage of the radical chic of New York high society in the late 1960s. See Tom
Wolfe, Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (New York, 1970).
16. Klaus Christian Khnke, Der junge Simmel in Theoriebeziehungen und sozialen Bewegungen
(Frankfurt am Main, 1996), 23-24.
17. Georg Simmel, Sociology of the Senses (1907, trans. by Mark Ritter and David Frisby), in David
Frisby and Mike Featherstone, eds., Simmel on Culture (London, 1997), 118.
18. Ibid. See also Georg Simmel, Soziologische sthetik (1896), in Georg Simmel, Gesamtausgabe
(GSG) (Frankfurt am Main, 1992), vol. 5, 205.
19. Georges Devereux, From Anxiety to Method in the Behavioral Sciences (Paris, 1967).
20. Georg Simmel, Sociology of the Senses, 117-19.
21. Georg Simmel, Gerhart Hauptmanns Weber (1892), in Werner Jung, ed., Georg Simmel: Vom
Wesen der Moderne (Hamburg, 1990), 166.
22. Ralf Stremmel, Modell und Moloch. Berlin in der Wahrnehmung deutscher Politiker vom Ende des
19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Bonn, 1992), 100-104.
23. Georg Simmel, Infelices possidentes! (1893, trans. by Mark Ritter and David Frisby), in David
Frisby and Mike Featherstone, eds., Simmel on Culture, 261.
24. Paul Thiel, Berlin prsentiert sich der Welt. Die Treptower Gewerbeausstellung 1896, in Jochen
Boberg, Tilman Fichter, and Eckhart Gillen, eds., Die Metropole. Industriekultur in Berlin im 20. Jahrhundert
(Munich, 1986), 16-27.
25. Georg Simmel, The Berlin Trade Exhibition (1896, trans. by Sam Whimster), Theory, Culture, &
Society 8 (1991): 121.
26. Ibid., 119-20.
27. Ibid., 122.
28. Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 483.
29. Walther Rathenau, Die schnste Stadt der Welt, in Jrgen Schutte and Peter Sprengel, eds., Die
Berliner Moderne 1885-1914 (Stuttgart, 1987), 100.
30. Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 257.
31. The blas people whom Simmel identified as a type thus have nothing to do with colloquial expressions might be associated with this label, say, an arrogant snot, or someone fixated on being cool.
32. Edmund Edel, Neu-Berlin, Grostadt-Dokumente (Berlin, 1908), vol. 50.
33. Simmel, Infelices possidentes! 259.
34. Ibid., 260.
35. Georg Simmel, Die Alpen (1918), in GSG, vol. 14 (1996), 296-97.
36. Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 478.
37. Georg Simmel, The Alpine Journey (1895, trans. by Sam Whimster), Theory, Culture, & Society 8
(1991): 95.
38. Ibid., 97.
39. Eugen Simmel, Spaziergnge in den Alpen (Leipzig, 1880).
40. Georg Simmel, Alpine Journey, 96.
41. This is an allusion to Goethes Italian Journey (published 1816-1817).
42. Georg Simmel, Rom. Eine sthetische Analyse (1898), in GSG, vol. 5 (1992), 303.

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43. Ralf Thies and Dietmar Jazbinsek, Berlin-das europische Chicago. ber ein Leitmotiv der
Amerikanisierungsdebatte zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts, in Clemens Zimmermann and Jrgen Reulecke,
eds., Die Stadt als Moloch? Das Land als Kraftquell? (Berlin, 1999), 53-94.
44. Georg Simmel, Rembrandt als Erzieher (1890), in GSG, vol. 1 (1999), 237.
45. Simmel, Rom, 308.
46. Ibid., 306.
47. Ibid., 309.
48. See, for example, the various editions of Griebens Ober-Italien (northern Italy).
49. Typescript Kurt Breysig, in Staatsbibliothek Berlin, NL 125 (Michael Landmann), box 1.
50. Hans Simmel, Auszge aus den Lebenserinnerungen, 226.
51. See, for instance, Simmels letter of recommendation for Bab, July 9, 1910, in Kurt Gassen and
Michael Landmann, eds., Buch des Dankes an Georg Simmel (Berlin, 1958), 107.
52. Julius Bab, Die Berliner Bohme, Grostadt-Dokumente (Berlin, 1904), vol. 2.
53. Ibid., 79.
54. Ibid., 40.
55. Ibid., 3.
56. Bab went uncited, however. See Claude S. Fischer, Toward a Subcultural Theory of Urbanism,
American Journal of Sociology 80 (May 1975): 1319-41.
57. Even if no statistically significant differences between the rural and urban population are discernible
in terms of sex and crime, a change in the form of sexuality and criminality is likely in the city. I presume it
was this change that elicited the rampant fear of sex and crime that Berlin triggered by virtue of its new existence as a major urban center.
58. Hans Ostwald, Dunkle Winkel in Berlin, Grostadt-Dokumente (Berlin, 1904), vol. 1.
59. The greatest sensation was stirred at that time by the report titled Berlins Third Sex (Berlins
Drittes Geschlecht), in which the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld toured the homosexual scene of the imperial capital, and a volume containing the case histories by a gynecologist writing about female homosexuality. The latter book was banned by the Berlin county court and subsequently confiscated.
60. An instructive example of this early form of urban ethnography is Albert Sdekums study on the living conditions in the tenements (see the third section of this article), which appeared as volume 45 of
Grostadt-Dokumente.
61. Dietmar Jazbinsek, Berward Joerges, and Ralf Thies, The Berlin Grostadt-Dokumente: A Forgotten Precursor of the Chicago School of Sociology, Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fr Sozialforschung,
Discussion Paper FS II 01-502 (Berlin, 2001).
62. Wirth, Bibliography of the Urban Community, 188.
63. In the Working Group on Metropolitan Studies at the Social Science Research Center Berlin
(Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fr Sozialforschung), my colleagues and I are endeavoring to continue where
Louis Wirth stopped seventy-five years agowith the search for the leitmotifs in Ostwalds project of urban
research. Although a few of the volumes are still frequently cited, especially Berlins Drittes Geschlecht by
Magnus Hirschfeld, the series as a whole was forgotten after World War I.
64. A letter written by Simmel in 1913 and preserved in the Julius Bab Collection of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York indicates that Bab kept Simmel informed of his publications.
65. Khnke, Der junge Simmel, 144. Stefan George (1866-1933), one of the most influential and eccentric lyricists of Wilhelminian society, is meant.
66. Ostwald, Dunkle Winkel in Berlin, 3.
67. Typescript Elly Heuss-Knapp, Staatsbibliothek Berlin, NL 125 (Michael Landmann), box 1.
Another ground rule of this ludic form of sociation was that no one was allowed to bring his idiosyncrasies, problems, and needs along (Margarete Susman, in Gassen and Landmann, Buch des Dankes, 281).
68. Georg Simmel to Stefan George, letter of February 9, 1899. Stefan George archive,
Wrrtembergische Landesbibliothek, Stuttgart.
69. Hans Simmel, Auszge aus den Lebenserinnerungen, 266.
70. Hans Joas, Die Klassiker der Soziologie und der Erste Weltkrieg, in Hans Joas and Helmut Steiner,
eds., Machtpolitischer Realismus und pazifistische Utopie: Krieg und Frieden in der Geschichte der
Sozialwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main, 1989), 179-210. Sven Papcke, Dienst am Sieg: Die
Sozialwissenschaften im Ersten Weltkrieg, in Sven Papcke, ed., Vernunft und Chaos. Essays zur sozialen
Ideengeschichte (Frankfurt am Main, 1985), 125-42. Incidentally, most of the authors of GrostadtDokumente allowed themselves to be infected by German jingoism. Hans Ostwald worked in the War Press
and Information Office. Julius Bab concocted chauvinistic verse. Magnus Hirschfeld attacked the Anglo-

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Saxon smoking culture. According to the history written in the former German Democratic Republic,
Albert Sdekum, the ethnographer of the tenements, contributed in no small way to the outbreak of the world
war by steering German social democracy, along with a few other traitors to the workers, toward a truce
with the military and approval of war credits.
71. Georg Simmel, Die Dialektik des deutschen Geistes (1917), in GSG, vol. 16 (1999), 36.
72. Georg Simmel, Deutschlands innere Wandlung (Straburg, 1914), 6.
73. Georg Simmel, Die Krisis der Kultur (1917), in GSG, vol. 16 (1999), 53. The endnote is absent in
the English translation. See Georg Simmel, The Crisis of Culture (trans. by D. E. Jenkinson), in David
Frisby and Mike Featherstone, eds., Simmel on Culture, 101.
74. Simmel, Deutschlands innere Wandlung, 5.
75. Simmel, The Crisis of Culture, 97-98.
76. Georg Simmel, Die Umwertung der Werte. Ein Wort an die Wohlhabenden, Frankfurter Zeitung,
March 5, 1915; Georg Simmel, Eine Fastenpredigt. Von dem Opfer der Wohlhabenden, Frankfurter
Zeitung, March 18, 1917.
77. Georg Simmel, Geld und Nahrung (1915), in GSG, vol. 13 (2000), 120.
78. Simmel, The Crisis of Culture, 97.
79. The attributes associated with the traditional way of life are shown in Table 1.
80. On this point and the following passages, see Dieter and Ruth Glatzer, Berliner Leben 1914-1918
(Berlin, 1983), 83-87, 202-10; Thierry Bonzon and Belinda Davis, Feeding the Cities, in Jay Winter and
Jean Louis Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War: Paris, London, Berlin, 1914-1919 (Cambridge, UK, 1997),
305-41.
81. Bonzon and Davis, Feeding the Cities, 341.
82. Georg Simmel, Deutschlands innere Wandlung (1917, reprint), in GSG, vol. 16 (1999), 18.
83. Ibid., 21.
84. Simmel, The Crisis of Culture, 100.
85. James Dougherty, Exiles in the Earthly City: The Heritage of St. Augustine, in Peter S. Hawkins,
ed., Civitas. Religious Interpretations of the City (Atlanta, 1986), 105-22.
86. Simmel, The Crisis of Culture, 92.
87. Simmel, Infelices possidentes! 259.
88. Georg Simmel, Eine Sehnsucht (1900), in Christian Wehlte, ed., Georg Simmel: Momentbilder sub
specie aeternitatis (Heidelberg, 1998), 101.
89. Simmel, Philosophy of Money, 481.
90. See the introduction of this article. At the end of his biographical essay, Lessing reveals himself to be
Judas when, full of love and hate, he realizes that Georg Simmels Philosophy is the triumph of a dogmatic
mind over a personality of Protean fluidity (Lessing, Philosophie als Tat, 335).
91. Simmel, Die Krisis der Kultur, 50. The expression peace culture (friedenskultur) does not appear
in the English translation cited above.
92. Simmel, Rembrandt als Erzieher, 242.
93. Georg Simmel, Fragmente und Aufstze aus dem Nachla (Munich, 1923), 28.
94. This honor was bestowed on October 20, 1932, under circumstances that cannot be reconstructed, for
the corresponding files of the responsible district office were destroyed in World War II. Oddly, the street was
not renamed after the national socialists seized power.
95. Georg Simmel, Rache (1902), in Christian Wehlte, ed., Georg Simmel: Momentbilder sub specie
aeternitatis (Heidelberg, 1998), 45.

Dietmar Jazbinsek is a research assistant at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. Interested in the history and theoretical foundation of modern metropolis since the late
nineteenth century, he has published various articles on that topic. Among them are
BerlinChicago 1914. Die Berliner Grostadt-Dokumente und ihre rezeption durch
die Grndergeneration der Chicago School of Sociology, in Schriftenreihe der
Forschungsgruppe Metropolenforschung des Forschungsschwerpunktes Technik
ArbeitUmwelt am Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fr Sozialforschung.

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