Translator’s Introduction

On July 13, 1895, the Viennese weekly Die Zeit published an article with the title “Alpenreisen” (Alpine Journeys). An article on jaunts to the mountains in an Austrian paper was in and of itself nothing out of the ordinary—it was the height of the summer, more than 65 percent of the empire’s terrain was mountainous, and Austria had actively been promoting Alpine tourism for decades—were it not for its author: Georg Simmel. Simmel was neither a hiker nor a climber, but a sociologist, philosopher, and expert on life in the modern city. Born in 1858 to a wealthy merchant family in Berlin (his father cofounded Felix und Sarotti, which later became the successful chocolate company Sarotti), Simmel studied history and philosophy at Berlin’s Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, earning his doctorate with a prize-winning paper on Das Wesen der Materie nach Kants Physikalischer Monadologie (The Nature of Matter according to Kant’s Physical Monadology) in 1881, after his initial dissertation on musical psychology had been rejected. Simmel first taught as Privatdozent, then as Professor Extraordinarius in Berlin, and his lectures and publications quickly garnered him fame far beyond the capital’s academic circles, reaching across Europe and to the Americas. Notorious for his eclectic objects of study—among them topics as diverse as concubines, death, fashion, picture frames, money, Goethe, Nietzsche, or Rembrandt—Simmel was a prolific writer of more than twenty-five monographs and two hundred essays whose collected works in German today span twenty-four volumes. And yet Simmel’s style, while elegant, is not always immediately accessible, even to educated readers. Jürgen Habermas characterized Simmel as “a creative although not a systematic thinker,” whose “pieces vacillate between essay and scientific treatise; they roam around the crystallizing thought.” Elizabeth Goodstein similarly described Simmel’s method of inquiry as a “highly aesthetic mode of theorizing in essayistic tours de force that leap dizzyingly from idea to idea.”

Around 1900, Simmel lived and wrote on the cusp of a new modern world. His life not only spanned two centuries but he experienced firsthand the waning of the age of empires and the waxing of the age of extremes.