Germany's Other Modernity

This book offers a new approach to urban history by focusing the real, everyday spaces that make up the modern city, rather than just symbolic spaces or representations of space. It questions conventional interpretations of German history, focusing on the generation that grew up in the Reich, fought the Great War, and created - then destroyed - the Weimar Republic. It engages with key themes in human geography and cultural studies, by focusing on physical spaces, how they are produced, and how they influence the modern city and the lives of the people who live in it. It challenges the habits of architectural history, and the way historians have used it. Rather than emphasising the same old 'famous' architects and designers, it opens up new ones to investigation. It investigates the ideas, fears and hopes that shaped a growing city and the experience of 'modernity' which every course on German history, urban history and modern cultural studies needs to address.