Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 January 2010
This historiographical review discusses recent literature on cities in modern Central Europe – mainly on Berlin and Vienna – which reflects the great variety of approaches to urban history and underlines the importance of urban history for the study of modernity. The history of urbanization was a central event in the history of modernity. Especially in the Central European capitals of Berlin and Vienna, where modernization and urban growth started later and then advanced more quickly than in West European cities, all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural modernity and its consequences can be observed in detail.
1 Andreas W. Daum and Christof Mauch, eds., Berlin – Washington, 1800–2000: capital cities, cultural representations, and national identities (Cambridge, 2005).
2 Andreas W. Daum, Kennedy in Berlin: Politik, Kultur und Emotionen im Kalten Krieg (Paderborn and Munich, 2003).
3 The most important studies are Carl E. Schorske, Politics and culture: fin-de-siècle Vienna (London, 1980); Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein's Vienna (London, 1973); Jacques Le Rider, Modernity and crisis of identity: culture and society in fin-de-siècle Vienna (Cambridge, 1993); Steven Beller, Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: a cultural history (Cambridge, 1989); Steven Beller, ed., Rethinking Vienna 1900 (Oxford, 2001); Edward Timms, Karl Kraus, apocalyptic satirist: culture and catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven, CT, 1986); Michael Pollak, Vienne 1900: une identité blessé (Paris, 1992); Hermann Broch, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his time: the European imagination, 1860–1920 (Chicago, IL, 1984); Ilsa Barea, Vienna: legend and reality (London, 1966).
4 Beller, Steven, ‘Modern owls fly by night: recent literature on fin-de-siècle Vienna’, Historical Journal, 31 (1988), pp. 665–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Robert Weldon Whalen, Sacred spring: God and the birth of modernism in fin-de-siècle Vienna (Grand Rapids, MI, 2007).
6 Ibid., pp. 4, 7.
7 Ivan Oxaal, Michael Pollack, and Gerhard Botz, eds., Jews, anti-Semitism, and culture in Vienna (London, 1987); Marsha Rozenblit, The Jews of Vienna, 1867–1914: assimilation and identity (Albany, NY, 1984); Robert Wistrich, The Jews of Vienna in the age of Franz Joseph (Oxford, 1989).
8 Deborah Coen, Vienna in the age of uncertainty: science, liberalism and private life (Chicago, IL, and London, 2007).
9 Ibid., p. 2.
10 Ibid., p. 3.
11 Ibid., pp. 20–1.
12 Ibid., p. 58.
13 Ibid., p. xx.
14 Ibid., pp. 10, 11.
15 Ibid., p. xx.
16 Ibid., pp. 246, 135–6, 111, 212.
17 Ibid., p. 225.
18 Maureen Healy, Vienna and the fall of the Habsburg empire: total war and everyday life in World War I (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 21, 3–4.
19 Ibid., pp. 25, 31.
20 Ibid., p. 84.
21 Ibid., pp. 88–9.
22 Ibid., p. 124.
23 Ibid., pp. 209–10.
24 David M. Vyleta, Crime, Jews, and news: Vienna, 1895–1914 (New York, NY, and Oxford, 2007).
25 Ibid., p. 2.
26 Philipp Müller, Auf der Suche nach dem Täter: Die öffentliche Dramatisierung von Verbrechen im Berlin des Kaiserreichs (Frankfurt, 2005).
27 Vyleta, Crime, Jews, and news, pp. 46, 53. See Sander L. Gilman, The case of Sigmund Freud: medicine and identity at the fin-de-siècle (Baltimore, MD, 1993).
28 Vyleta, Crime, Jews, and news, pp. 115, 155, 160.
29 Ibid., pp. 180–1. See Helmut Walser Smith, The butcher's tale: murder and antisemitism in a German town (New York, NY, 2002). Walser Smith has studied the ‘Konitz Affair’ in East Prussia.
30 Vyleta, Crime, Jews, and news, p. 203.
31 Ibid., p. 221.
32 Ibid., p. 224.
33 Thomas Weyr, The setting of the pearl: Vienna under Hitler (Oxford, 2005).
34 Chad Bryant, Prague in black: Nazi rule and Czech nationalism (Boston, MA, 2007).
35 Cathleen M. Giustino, Tearing down Prague's Jewish town: ghetto clearance and the legacy of middle-class ethnic politics around 1900 (Boulder, CO, 2003).
36 Dorothy Rowe, Representing Berlin: sexuality and the city in Imperial and Weimar Germany (Aldershot, 2003), p. 2.
37 Joachim Schlör, Das Ich der Stadt: Debatten über Judentum und Identität, 1822–1938 (Göttingen, 2005).
38 Ibid., pp. 213, 216.
39 Dorothy Rowe, Representing Berlin, pp. 1–2.
40 Ibid., p. 2.
41 Ibid., p. 161.