Matt Erlin, Berlin's Forgotten Future: City, History, and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004, 216 pp

Summary

Matt Erlin's Berlin's Forgotten Future represents an ambitious and (mostly) successful attempt to isolate eighteenth-century discourses on urbanity and modernity that strikingly prefigure those we associate with names like Simmel, Kracauer, and Benjamin. Indeed, as Erlin suggests, “the innumerable interpretations that [the modern urban] upheaval elicited … have tended to overshadow earlier confrontations with urban modernity” (64). The book aims to show that many of the central topoi of modernity's engagement with the city, from the city's representation of a peculiarly modern rupture with the past, the modern city's impact on the subject's sensorium, and the city as a site of social disaggregation and thus of enhanced individual autonomy originate in eighteenth-century debates over the role of the city and the meaning of the transformations taking place there. As Erlin's exciting opening chapter makes clear, the city of Berlin, which became the royal Prussian capital at the very beginning of the eighteenth century and tripled in size as the century wore on, became a flashpoint in debates over the mechanisms of historical change, the meaning and merits of the Enlightenment, and the ascendant Prussian monarchy.

In considering the apparently unprecedented newness of the city and its life forms, Erlin argues, the eighteenth century oscillated between two conflicting models of historic time—one based on the notion of a fundamentally ahistoric truth, the other based on a developmental model that emphasized the incom mensurability of the present. Erlin is able to trace this central contradiction quite effectively—however, the reader gets little sense of whether the contradiction (which seems to inhere to some extent in the idea of Enlightenment itself) is unique to eighteenth-century Germany, and whether its connection to the question of urbanity is unique to Berlin. Certainly the fact that Berlin emerged as a metropolis in the eighteenth century from what had hitherto been a glorified village brings to the fore the question of change and its relationship to historical time. However, planned cities, rebuilt cities and reimagined cities were common throughout the eighteenth century (this reviewer happens to hail from one of them). Did similar discourses attach to and similar questions hover over Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Kassel? A little more comparison would have gone a long way towards establishing the Berlin part of Erlin's “forgotten future.”