Home Home Contact Us Sitemap Search Deutsch
Completed research programmsMetropolitan City Studies

Completed research programms

Working Group: Metropolitan City Studies





Großstadt-Dokumente. Research on metropoles and the intellectual milieu in Berlin around the turn of the 20th century


 
 

Project Description

In a study on the social history of the social sciences the Metropolitan Research Group reconstructs one of the most ambitious projects in urban research that had ever been undertaken in Germany: the 50 volumes of the series "Großstadt-Dokumente", published between 1904 and 1908. The series had been conceived as a kind of sociological tourist guide, intended to address not only the achievements of "modern Berlin" but also the problems of urban modernization. Aside from the series' editor, Hans Ostwald (1873-1940), writer and journalist, 40 authors had joined in this huge project. Thanks to the fact that their were all affiliated to the Berlin art scene, newspaper offices and associations striving for social reform, the authors were in contact with each other in various forms. Hence it is justified to speak of a community of authors, at least concerning the core group around Hans Ostwald.


 


The research group's study on the milieu of the early Berlin milieu researchers is guided by two questions:

  • What kind of picture of the metropolis do the "Großstadt-Dokumente", including their contexts, present and which urban research approaches were used?·
     

  • What is the relationship of the Berlin authors' community to the intellectual circles at the beginning of the 20th century?

  
 

Content Analysis
 

The systemactic assessment of the "Großstadt-Dokumente"-a text corpus of about 5000 pages-will determine to what extent the single volumes are connected through leitmotifs and which methods of observation and description of urban life had been tested.
 

  
 

Analysis of Context
  The authors of the series have varied the issues and methods in numerous other texts on the city. They published reports, articles in academic journals, novels and even film scripts. This context of publishing activities is also subject of our content analysis, at least on an exemplary basis.  
 

Sociogram of the Authors
  Although Hans Ostwald and some of his collaborators were among the most widely known authors in fin-de-siècle Germany, most of them had fallen to oblivion by the end of World War II. Biographical research shall help to identify parallels of the work and lives of this generation of writers.


 		  
 

Study of Reception
  While the "Großstadt-Dokumente" had found intensive resonance with members of the Chicago School of Sociology, representatives of early German sociology did not take notice of the series. How can this remarkable difference in academic resonance of Hans Ostwald's urban research project be explained?The connection between elements of urban sociology and elements of the sociology of sciences in our research project is given by the fact that the attitude towards modern metropolis was one of the decisively distinguishing features that had triggered conflicts between various factions of the intellectual scene at the beginning of the 20th century, especially the debate between "agro-romanticists" and "asphalt writers". The theoretical basis for the reconstruction of this debate is Bourdieu's concept of the cultural field. The study is meant to contribute to the historic analysis of metropolitan discourses in urban studies and hooks up to earlier research of the Working Group. The project is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and runs from March 1999 to the end of 2002.  

Go to top 

Last change: 2002-10-07 19:40