We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2013
The quintessential Berlin artist Heinrich Zille, while remaining almost unrecognized outside Germany and certainly neglected in art historical circles on both sides of the Atlantic, nonetheless offers an important way to understand the modern city in late-nineteenth-century Europe. Zille, I argue, represents a proletarian modernism, a way of viewing and embracing a vibrant working-class domesticity—a milieu—that the Großstadt itself had created. In so doing, he offered intimate representations of Berlin for Berliners; he was decidedly grounded in the local and telescoped Berlin from its districts to its neighborhoods to its streets. What reemerged at this insider level, however, were glimpses of the wider world into which Berliners had been cast. Zille thus blurred distinctions between public and private spaces that marked the social boundaries of the city and drew from both the local and the global in ways that have gone unrecognized in his work. His perspective on the new capital, in other words, was accomplished by embracing the liminal, and he ultimately offered a kind of palatable social protest—a vision of reform without socialism—that was itself quite remarkable.
1 The term “proletarian modernism” is a play on Maiken Umbach's “bourgeois modernism,” which Umbach has argued dominated the Wilhelmine era. Umbach, Maiken, German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890–1924 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.
2 I am indebted to Peter Fritzsche for the idea of Heinrich Zille offering social reform without socialism. Expanded definitions of social protest that recognize nonviolent and nonideological activities and that view all challenges as rational and local also help to position Zille's portfolio as a much overlooked answer to the “social question.” See Evans, Richard J., Proletarians and Politics: Socialism, Protest, and the Working Class in Germany before the First World War (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990)Google Scholar, chap. 2.
3 The literature on modern German imperialism and colonialism has been inspired by several trends, not the least of which has been the “global turn” in history. Transnationalism has offered historians of the Kaiserreich a fruitful repose from the Sonderweg debate by placing Germany more firmly within the context of such late-nineteenth-century western European historical developments as imperialism and colonialism. Some recent studies include Grosse, Pascal, Kolonialismus, Eugenik und bürgerliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland, 1850–1918 (New York: Campus Forschung, 2000)Google Scholar; Zimmerman, Andrew, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Conrad, Sebastian and Osterhammel, Jürgen, eds., Das Kaiserreich transnational. Deutschland in der Welt, 1871–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004)Google Scholar; Conrad, Sebastian, Globalisierung und Nation im Deutschen Kaiserreich (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006)Google Scholar; and Conrad, Sebastian, Deutsche Kolonialgeschichte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2008)Google Scholar.
4 For a discussion of acceleration as an aspect of modernity, see Rosa, Hartmut and Scheuerman, William E., eds., High-Speed Society: Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)Google Scholar. For a discussion of Berlin's ugly modernity, see Haxthausen, Charles, “Images of Berlin,” in Art in Berlin, 1815–1989, ed. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989), 61–82Google Scholar.
5 Dorothy Rowe has emphasized this binary, describing “the most prominent [discourses of urban modernity]” as “focused on [Berlin's] rootlessness, ugliness and lack of tradition on the one hand and its status as a Weltstadt (world city) embodying technology, potential and progress, on the other.” Rowe, Dorothy, Representing Berlin: Sexuality and the City in Imperial and Weimar Germany (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 2Google Scholar. Historian Andrew Lees, however, has suggested that there was a much broader negative consensus among contemporary observers of Berlin. Lees, Andrew, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820–1940 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)Google Scholar. The debate is also discussed in Frisby, David's “Social Theory, the Metropolis, and Expressionism,” in Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy, ed. Benson, Timothy O. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 88–111Google Scholar.
6 Haxthausen, Charles W. and Suhr, Heidrun, “Introduction,” in Berlin: Culture and Metropolis, ed. Haxthausen, Charles W. and Suhr, Heidrun (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990)Google Scholar, xxii and 13.
7 Charles W. Haxthausen, “Images of Berlin,” in Berlin, ed. Haxthausen and Suhr, 61-62. The Berlin-born Walter Benjamin called Paris the “capital of the nineteenth century,” and Paris is the European city that has received much more attention in terms of “visual issues.” See Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993)Google Scholar, 114.
8 Lewis, Beth Irwin, Art for All? The Collision of Modern Art and the Public in Late-Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 106–7, 116–17Google Scholar.
9 Flügge, Matthias, H. Zille Berliner Leben. Zeichnungen, Photographien und Druckgraphiken, 1890–1914 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2008)Google Scholar, 5.
10 Zille, Heinrich, Berlin um die Jahrhundertwende. Photographien, intro. Matthias Flügge (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1993)Google Scholar, 9; Christiansen, Broder, Philosophie der Kunst (Hanau: Clauss & Feddersen, 1909)Google Scholar, 311, as quoted in Lothar Müller, “The Beauty of the Metropolis: Toward an Aesthetic Urbanism in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin,” in Berlin, ed. Haxthausen and Suhr, 46 note 32.
11 Kremming, Rolf, Heinrich Zille. Berliner Köpfe (Berlin: Jaron Verlag, 2002), 112–121Google Scholar.
12 Late-nineteenth-century German intelligentsia fashioned a longer progressive narrative for Berlin—from fishing village on the Spree to Imperial city—that expounded the rise of the German empire, the condition of national prosperity, and, for some, the ascent of the Prussian state. See Lees, Cities Perceived, 82–90. In the nineteenth century, a “big city” was defined as one of at least 100,000 inhabitants. See Lees, Andrew and Lees, Lynn Hollen, Cities and the Making of Modern Europe, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)Google Scholar, 1. A “world city” was not as easily measured, but it was seen to be on par with the cosmopolitan capitals of London and Paris. Historian (and Berliner) Gerhard Masur, and subsequently Dorothy Rowe, has precisely dated the elevation of Berlin's status from a Großstadt to a Weltstadt to the 1896 Berlin Trade Exhibition. See Masur, Gerhard, Imperial Berlin (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 125–31; and Rowe, Representing Berlin, 30–54Google Scholar.
13 While one can easily find a biographical sketch of Heinrich Zille, one example of this narrative can be found in Schumann, Werner, Zille sein Milljöh (Hannover: Fackelträger-Verlag, 1952)Google Scholar; and, more recently, Kremming, Heinrich Zille.
14 Zille, Heinrich, 220 Berliner Bilder (Berlin: Eysler, 1923)Google Scholar, n.p.
15 Rowe, Representing Berlin, 4–7; Fritzsche, Peter, “Vagabond in the Fugitive City: Hans Ostwald, Imperial Berlin, and the Grossstadt-Dokumente,” Journal of Contemporary History 29, no. 3 (1994): 385–402Google Scholar.
16 Lechner, Frank, “Simmel on Social Space,” in “A Special Issue on Georg Simmel,” ed. Featherstone, Mike, special issue, Theory, Culture, and Society 8, no. 3 (August 1991)Google Scholar, as quoted in Rowe, Representing Berlin, 73.
17 For example, see Schumann, Zille sein Milljöh, n.p. [10]; Lothar Fischer, Heinrich Zille (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1979), 22; and Schmidt-Küster, Gustav, ed., Heinrich Zille Bibliographie. Veröffentlichungen von ihm und über ihn (Hannover: Heinrich-Zille-Stiftung, 1979Google Scholar), 13.
18 Ostwald, Hans, Das Zillebuch, with Heinrich Zille (Berlin: Paul Franke, 1929)Google Scholar, 21, 363, as quoted in Kaufhold, Enno, Heinrich Zille. Photograph der Moderne, ed. Galerie, Berlinische (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1995)Google Scholar, 35.
19 Fritzsche, Peter, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, 14, 41.
20 Endell, August, “Die Schönheit der großen Stadt,” in Vom Sehen. Texte 1896–1925 über Architektur, Formkunst und “Die Schönheit der großen Stadt,” ed. David, Helge (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1995), 173–77Google Scholar, quote on 171.
21 Müller, “The Beauty of the Metropolis,” 49.
22 For the modern era, intellectual historian Martin Jay has traced this idea of beauty to the “revival of a neo-Platonic desire for an ideal beauty that could not be perceived with the normal eyes of mundane observation,” which, he argued, contributed to the “waning of the Enlightenment trust in sight” in the late eighteenth century; Jay, Downcast Eyes, 106.
23 Endell, “Die Schönheit,” 54 note 51.
24 The conurbation was not formalized until 1920 when Berlin and its suburbs were incorporated into a single municipality. See Köllmann, Wolfgang, “The Process of Urbanization in Germany at the Height of the Industrialization Period,” in The Urbanization of European Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Lees, Andrew and Lees, Lynn (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1976), 28–44Google Scholar. For more information on the Berlin Secession, see Paret, Peter, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
25 Kaplan, Marion A., The Making of the Jewish Middle Class: Women, Family, and Identity in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 7–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
26 Ostwald, Das Zillebuch, 176.
27 Hüppauf, Bernd and Umbach, Maiken, “Introduction: Vernacular Modernism,” in Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization, and the Built Environment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 2–4Google Scholar.
28 Flügge, Matthias, ed., Klassiker der Karikatur, vol. 18, Heinrich Zille, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Eulenspiegel Verlag, 1986)Google Scholar, 99.
29 Zille, 220 Berliner Bilder, n.p.
30 Schumann, Zille sein Milljöh, n.p. [1].
31 Flügge, ed., Heinrich Zille, 107.
32 Ibid., 222. See, also, Schumann, Zille sein Milljöh; Schumann, Werner, Das Grosse Zille-Album, 3d ed. (Hannover: Fackelträger-Verlag, 1957)Google Scholar, n.p. [3]; Fischer, Heinrich Zille, 12.
33 Zille, Berlin um die Jahrhundertwende, 9.
34 Stargardt, Nicholas, “Male Bonding and the Class Struggle in Imperial Germany,” The Historical Journal 38, no. 1 (1995): 175–76Google Scholar.
35 John Czaplicka, “Pictures of a City at Work, Berlin 1890–1930: Visual Reflections on Social Structures and Technology in the Modern Urban Construct,” in Berlin, ed. Haxthausen and Suhr, 4-6. Further discussion of Zille's work in comparison to other contemporary Berlin artists can be found in Ranke, Winfried, Vom Milljöh ins Milieu. Heinrich Zilles Aufstieg in der Berliner Gesellschaft (Hannover: Fackelträger, 1979)Google Scholar.
36 Stargardt, “Male Bonding,” 175.
37 Endell, “Die Schönheit,” 171–72.
38 Lees, Cities Perceived, chap. 5.
39 Silverman, Dan P., “A Pledge Unredeemed: The Housing Crisis in Weimar Germany,” Central European History 3, no. 1/2 (1970): 115–16Google Scholar.
40 Niethammer, Lutz and Brüggemeier, Franz, “Wie wohnten Arbeiter im Kaiserreich?,” Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 16 (1976): 61–134Google Scholar; and Hofmann, Wolfgang and Kuhn, Gerd, “Einleitung. Die wohnungsgeschichtliche Periode 1900–1930 und ihre Erforschung,” in Wohnungspolitik und Städtebau 1900–1930, ed. Hofmann, Wolfgang and Kuhn, Gerd (Berlin: Technische Universität Berlin, 1993)Google Scholar.
41 Masur, Imperial Berlin, 103; and Rühle, Otto, Das proletarische Kind (Munich: Albert Langen, 1911), 21Google Scholar.
42 Geist, Johann Friedrich and Kürvers, Klaus, Das Berliner Mietshaus, vol. 2, 1862–1945 (Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1980)Google Scholar. See also Horant Fassbinder's Berliner Arbeiterviertel for another study of workers’ housing in Berlin: Fassbinder, Horant, Berliner Arbeiterviertel 1800–1910 (West Berlin: Verlag für das Studium der Arbeiterbewegung, 1975)Google Scholar.
43 Kaelbe, Hartmut, “Arbeiter und soziale Ungleichheit in Westeuropa 1850–1930,” in Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung im Vergleich. Berichte zur internationalen historischen Forschung, ed. Tenfelde, Klaus (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1986), 137–78Google Scholar.
44 Liang, Hsi-Huey, “Lower-Class Immigrants in Wilhelmine Berlin,” in The Urbanization of European Society, ed. Lees, A. and Lees, L., 218Google Scholar.
45 Sommer, Maureen Roycroft, “Bodenreform im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik,” in Wohnungspolitik, ed. Hofmann, and Kuhn, , 67Google Scholar.
46 Flügge, H. Zille Berliner Leben, 183.
47 Benjamin, Walter, Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. Eiland, Howard (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006), 41–42Google Scholar.
48 Ranke, Winfried, Heinrich Zille. Photographien Berlin 1890–1910 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1975)Google Scholar, plate 55.
49 Kaufhold, Heinrich Zille, 18.
50 Flügge, ed., Heinrich Zille, 62.
51 Clark, T. J., The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in Art of Manet and His Followers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Schiff, Richard, “Art History and the Nineteenth Century: Realism and Resistance,” The Art Bulletin 70, no. 1 (1988): 25–48Google Scholar.
52 The practice of bed-letting has been described in Brüggemeier, Franz and Niethammer, Lutz, “Schlafgänger, Schnapskasinos und Schwerindustrielle Kolonie. Aspekte der Arbeiterwohnungsfrage im Ruhrgebiet vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Fabrik, Familie, Feierabend. Beiträge zur Sozialgeschichte des Alltags im Industriezeitalter, ed. Reulecke, Jürgen and Weber, Wolfhard (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 1978), 135–76Google Scholar; and Ehmer, Josef, “Wohnen ohne eigene Wohnung. Zur sozialen Stellung von Untermietern und Bettgehern,” in Wohnen im Wandel. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Alltags in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, ed. Niethammer, Lutz (Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 1979), 132–50Google Scholar.
53 Sigrid Bertuleit pointed out that the man's fly is also wide open and concluded with Zille's saying that “one can be killed by an apartment as with an ax.” Bertuleit, Sigrid, ed., Heinrich Zille (1858–1929). Zwischen Rinnstein und Akademie (Schweinfurt: Museum Georg Schäfer, 2010), 46Google Scholar.
54 Rühle, Das proletarische Kind, 41.
55 Ibid., 59-60.
56 For a discussion of the term “workers’ culture,” see Lidtke, Vernon, “Recent Literature on Workers’ Culture in Germany and England,” in Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung, ed. Tenfelde, , 337–62Google Scholar. Additional studies on workers’ culture include Reulecke and Weber, eds., Fabrik, Familie, Feierabend; and Abrams, Lynn, Workers’ Culture in Imperial Germany: Leisure and Recreation in the Rhineland and Westphalia (London: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar.
57 Rühle, Das proletarische Kind, 59.
58 Flügge, ed., Heinrich Zille, 50.
59 Damaschke, A., “Wohnungsnot und Kinderelend,” in Bericht über den Kongress für Kinderforschung und Jugendfürsorge in Berlin, ed. Schaefer, Karl L. (Langensalza: Hermann Beyer & Söhne, 1907), 370–72Google Scholar.
60 For a reading of the murder, see Fritzsche, Peter, “Talk of the Town: The Murder of Lucie Berlin and the Production of Local Knowledge,” in Criminals and Their Scientists: The History of Criminology in International Perspective, ed. Becker, Peter and Wetzell, Richard F. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)Google Scholar.
61 Damaschke, “Wohnungsnot und Kinderelend,” 373.
62 Ibid., 375. For more on Damashke, see Repp, Kevin, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-Politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, esp. chap. 2; and Sutcliffe, Anthony, Towards the Planned City: Germany, Britain, the United States, and France 1780–1914 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981)Google Scholar.
63 Kaufhold, Heinrich Zille, 12, 18.
64 See, for example, the lack of children in David Clay Large's otherwise magnificent study of Berlin. Large, David Clay, Berlin (New York: Basic Books, 2000)Google Scholar.
65 Zille's particular use of lines and shapes that contributed to the recognizability of his rounded figures can be most easily seen in Uelsberg, Gabriele, ed., Heinrich Zille. Skizzen, Zeichnungen und Aquarelle aus der Sammlung Themel (Mülheim an der Ruhr: Kunstmuseum in der Alten Post, 2003)Google Scholar.
66 Flügge, ed., Heinrich Zille, 12, 115.
67 Gal, Susan and Kligman, Gail, The Politics of Gender after Socialism: A Comparative-Historical Essay (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
68 Holloway, Sarah L. and Valentine, Gill, “Children's Geographies and the New Social Studies of Childhood,” in Children's Geographies: Playing, Living, Learning, Holloway, Sarah L. and Valentine, Gill (London: Routledge, 2000), 15Google Scholar.
69 Zille, Heinrich, Kinder der Straße. 100 Berliner Bilder, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Fackelträger, 1923)Google Scholar, 33, 64.
70 Stoler, Ann Laura and Cooper, Frederick, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Stoler, Ann Laura and Cooper, Frederick (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997)Google Scholar, 27.
71 An illuminating discussion of connections between colonialism and German national identity is “Forum: The German Colonial Imagination,” German History 26, no. 2 (2008): 251–71Google Scholar.
72 El-Tayeb, Fatima, “Dangerous Liaisons: Race, Nation, and German Identity,” in Not So Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History, 1890–2000, ed. Mazón, Patricia and Steingröver, Reinhild (New York: University of Rochester, 2005)Google Scholar, 29.
73 Stoler and Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony,” 27.
74 Wildenthal, Lora, “Race, Gender, and Citizenship in the German Colonial Empire,” in Tensions of Empire, ed. Stoler, and Cooper, , 263Google Scholar.
75 The derogation of “boy” in the United States in both southern plantation slave and post-Reconstruction settings has been discussed by Nast, Heidi J., “Mapping the ‘Unconscious’: Racism and the Oedipal Family,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 90, no. 2 (2000): 215–55Google Scholar.
76 This image did not equate black to dirt and civilization to cleanliness, as Anne McClintock has described the messages in soap advertisements in Victorian England. See McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar.
77 Campt, Tina M., “Converging Specters on an Other Within: Race and Gender in pre-1945 Afro-German History,” in Not So Plain, ed. Mazón, and Steingröver, , 82–106Google Scholar; and Campt, Tina M., Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender, and Memory in the Third Reich (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2005)Google Scholar.
78 The dark portrayal of European metropoles has been analyzed by such historians as John Marriott, who discussed London in the British imperial imagination. See Marriott, John, The Other Empire: Metropolis, India, and Progress in the Colonial Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. chap. 6.
79 Many Germans have been and continue to be fascinated by Native Americans. See Sieg, Katrin, Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation, Sexuality in West Germany (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002)Google Scholar. Zille also took a photograph of his sons standing in their apartment and wearing “Indian” feathers, an example of “ethnic drag” and the importance of whiteness in German children's upbringing.
80 Penny, H. Glenn, “Elusive Authenticity: The Quest for the Authentic Indian in German Public Culture,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48, no. 4 (2006): 798–819Google Scholar.
81 Horton, Susan R., “Were They Having Fun Yet? Victorian Optical Gadgetry, Modernist Selves,” in Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, ed. Christ, Carol T. and Jordan, John O. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995)Google Scholar, 8.
82 Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism; Rothfels, Nigel, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; and Penny, H. Glenn, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Google Scholar.
83 Mergen, Bernard, “Review Essay: Children and Nature in History,” Environmental History 8, no. 4 (2003): 7Google Scholar.
84 Hillard, Derek, “Walter Ruttmann's Janus-Faced View of Modernity: The Ambivalence of Description in ‘Berlin. Die Sinfonie der Großstadt,’” Monatshefte 96, no. 1 (2004): 78Google Scholar.
85 An English translation of his Hurengespräche would certainly remedy his anonymity. Published in 1913 under the pseudonym W. Pfeifer, Zille created short, illustrated autobiographies of fictional female prostitutes in Berlin that depicted poor girls and women who, due to unfortunate circumstances such as sexual abuse in childhood or the death of a patriarch, sexually serviced men (and women) to scrape together an income. Zille sheltered his public persona from this explicit publication, often referred to as pornographic, but it revealed that he was familiar with all aspects of working-class lives. The intimate content—intimacy derived from both the use of a (fading) dialect and frank portrayal of human sexuality—has proved a popular formula today; a new edition of the book has been issued in Zille's name by the German art book publisher Schirmer/Mosel. It may be found in many Berlin bookstores today, creating a revival, perhaps, of Zille's early-twentieth-century work.
