Molly Loberg. The Struggle for the Streets of Berlin: Politics, Consumption, and Urban Space, 1914–1945. (Cambridge University Press)
Who owns the street? Interwar Berliners faced this question with great hope yet devastating consequences. In Germany, the First World War and 1918 Revolution transformed the city streets into the most important media for politics and commerce. There, partisans and entrepreneurs fought for the attention of crowds with posters, illuminated advertisements, parades, traffic jams, and violence.
What's the one key idea or message you want readers to take from your book?
Berlin’s interwar streets reveal that in a highly connected and centrally organized society almost every social structure and medium of communication can be turned toward an authoritarian purpose. Something as mundane as traffic regulation was used during the Weimar period to contain street protests and later during the Nazi regime to harass Jews and compel them to emigrate. Display windows, originally invented to stoke consumer desire, became instruments of anti-Semitic boycott. The temptations and tactics of authoritarianism manifest when a society’s commitment to democracy and equality weakens, because these values are so hard to attain and preserve.
What got you interested in the topic of your book?
An archival discovery: I stumbled across a photograph of a Berlin street scene from the 1920s that forced me to re-imagine and re-interpret every historical political poster and commercial advertisement that I had seen before. We usually encounter these as glossy images in a published book or in the pristine condition of an archival collection, in other words, isolated and out of context. But this Berlin photograph showed posters as they actually appeared in city streets: pasted side-by-side and on top of each other in thick layers, tattered by weather, defaced by vandals, and surrounded by a whole urban world. Suddenly, I sensed the contestation for urban space and the competition for the public’s attention. This became the premise for the book.
Books answer questions, but they also raise new questions. What questions does your book raise?
The Weimar Republic is an essential case study in the collapse of liberal democracy. Despite its many challenges, post-WWI Germany was a powerful industrial economy and highly-educated society with a long-tradition of democratic activism. The Republic demonstrated resilience for fourteen years before it ultimately failed. As a comparative question for future research, are there examples of deeply fractured societies that pulled themselves back from the brink and successfully averted catastrophe? And how did they do so?
More broadly, why are the phenomena described in the book so familiar to us today one hundred years later: troubled democracies, street protests, hostilities toward refugees, ethnic nationalism, tumultuous economies, and a pervasive sense of crisis? Is this a mere aberration or part of the longer story of modernity and one that we might be grappling with for a long time?
What are you currently reading, in your field or just generally, and what do you like about it?
Deborah Cohen’s Family Secrets: Shame and Privacy in Modern Britain (Oxford University Press, 2013). In addition to its innovative research and
