Out of Place

German Realism, Displacement and Modernity

John B. Lyon

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441105967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In late nineteenth-century Germany, the onset of modernity transformed how people experienced place. In response to increased industrialization and urbanization, the expansion of international capitalism, and the extension of railway and other travel networks, the sense of being connected to a specific place gave way to an unsettling sense of displacement. Out of Place analyzes the works of three major representatives of German Realism-Wilhelm Raabe, Theodor Fontane, and Gottfried Keller-within this historical context. It situates the perceived loss of place evident in their texts within the contemporary discourse of housing and urban reform, but also views such discourse through the lens of twentienth-century theories of place. Informed by both phenomenological (Heidegger and Casey) as well as Marxist (Deleuze, Guattari, and Benjamin) approaches to place, John B. Lyon highlights the struggle to address issues of place and space that reappear today in debates about environmentalism, transnationalism, globalization, and regionalism.

1. Place and Displacement in Berlin, 1848–1900

The historical changes associated with industrialization and the onset of modernity forced a reconceptualization of one’s relationship to place. Place, in an ideal sense, may never have actually existed, but the forces of modernity reinforced the perception that place had been lost. Specifically, place became 1. functionally differentiated, 2. a commodity of exchange, 3. a hindrance, a restriction, and source of limitation and confinement, 4. dissociated from identity and transportable, and 5. a means of social control and power. Place lost its quality of familiarity during this era and took on the functional and instrumental quality of space. These historical transformations in place, described in detail in this chapter, provide the context for the literary representations of place to be analyzed in subsequent chapters. The city of Berlin, where Raabe, Fontane and Keller spent formative periods of their literary careers, serves as a unique test site that embodies many of the changes taking place across Germany.

Historical Background: The Shift from Feudalism to Industrial Capitalism and the Growth of Berlin

Berlin became the capital of a united Germany in 1871 and thus had symbolic value for the nation. It was Germany’s largest city by the end of the nineteenth century and the growing pains of industrialization were most pronounced and easily identifiable here. Berlin is representative insofar as it reflects the problems associated with the shift from feudalism to industrial capitalism,¹ but it is unique in the specific manifestations of and reactions to these problems. Thus what happened in Berlin was not a necessary result of industrialization, nor did it happen everywhere else in Germany.² Instead, Berlin, in its simultaneously representative and unique situation, manifests fundamental tendencies inherent in this shift between systems. These tendencies were not inevitable, but were the result of choices that hastened the perceived disappearance of place in favor of space.

Berlin was founded much later than most other German and European cities—the first recorded references to it appear early in the thirteenth century,³ when London, Rome and Paris were already at least a thousand years old—and for a number of centuries its size was relatively insignificant in comparison to its German peers and European counterparts. In 1805 it was listed as the sixth largest city in Europe, after London, Paris, Vienna, Amsterdam and St. Petersburg⁴ and it still had a decidedly provincial character. Farmers still kept livestock in the city and would frequently herd the animals through the city streets. There were even farms and fields within the city walls. As the residence of the Prussian monarchy, Berlin brought together the two extremes of royal pomp and lower-class agrarian workers.⁵ The size and character of the city changed dramatically in the course of the nineteenth century, more noticeably than its European counterparts, as population statistics manifest. From 1800 to 1900, London, Paris, and Vienna grew by 753 per cent, 609 per cent, and 735 per cent, respectively, while Berlin grew by 1,574 per cent, more than doubling the growth rate of these other major metropolises. Most of this growth happened after 1850, for Berlin’s growth rates during the first half of the century were comparable to those of other cities during this period. During the latter half of the century, though, Berlin outstripped them. From 1850 to 1900, London, Paris, and Vienna grew by 279 per cent, 253 per cent, and 398 per cent, respectively, whereas Berlin grew by 607 per cent.⁶ Like other cities in Europe and Germany, Berlin attracted both the growing unskilled proletariat and large industry. But Berlin did so at a faster rate than most of its counterparts, and this growth was concentrated in the latter half of the century.

The primary cause for this immigration to Berlin was legal reforms, conducted in the Prussian State early in the nineteenth century, which dismantled feudal institutions. These included the edict of 11 October 1807, expanded in 1811, which allowed Prussians the freedom to pursue almost any profession, with the exception of a few professions that affected public welfare. This reform not only reduced the control of guilds over professions, but also largely eliminated the distinction between rural and urban labor.⁷ An edict of 14 September 1811 began a reform process that culminated in the Prussian Agrarian Reform of 1850. These various reforms freed farmers from hereditary obligations to landowners, allowed farmers with hereditary leases to acquire this land themselves, and permitted others without hereditary leases to receive monetary remuneration for the land to which they had been bound. All other obligations to feudal lords and landowners—whether of service, corvée or taxes—were removed. All duties to land and to feudal lords were framed now in terms of money rather than in terms of hereditary or other obligations.⁸

The importance of these laws to the rise of industrial capitalism in general, and to capitalism within Germany in particular, cannot be overstated. The changed laws increased the landholdings of noble lords and also created a small group of property-owning farmers. Similarly, many people who had been serfs became day laborers, dependent solely on wages.⁹ The new laws also led to the privatization of all state-owned domains (with the exception of royal estates), thereby opening up all the land around Berlin to real estate entrepreneurs.¹⁰ By the middle of the nineteenth century, urban and rural populations had been given a degree of freedom—civil and economic—previously unknown to them.¹¹ This freedom allowed, and in some cases necessitated, migration from rural areas to the cities, which promised work and the possibility, however remote, of social mobility. Thus these laws encouraged the shift away from a forcibly imposed connection to place and toward a lost connection to place, a loss grounded in the conception of space as an obstacle to overcome, a commodity to trade or transport, and a means to obtain power. This shift would find its most visible manifestation in the cities of industrial Germany.

Although many cities in Prussia grew during this time, Berlin grew most quickly,¹² and population immigration from rural areas was the most significant cause for this. Table 1 shows the population of Berlin in ten-year intervals from 1800 to 1900:

Table 1

Population Growth: City of Berlin (1800–1900)¹³

Year	Population	Growth Rate (population expressed in terms of percentage of population in 1800)
1800	172,132	100.00
1810	162,971	94.68
1820	199,510	115.91
1830	247,500	143.79
1840	322,626	187.43
1850	418,733	243.26
1860*	528,876	307.25
1870	774,498	449.94
1880	1,123,749	652.84
1890	1,578,516	917.04
1900	1,888,313	1,097.01

*New (expanded) city limits

From this table, one sees not only that Berlin increased more than ten times in size in the course of the nineteenth century, but also that most of this growth occurred in the latter half of the century, during the period of industrialization: between 1850 and 1900, the population more than quadrupled in size. What the table does not show, however, is the growth in the smaller cities and suburbs surrounding Berlin, cities that belonged to the larger police district of Berlin but not to its official city limits. These cities became, to all intents and purposes, part of Berlin by the late nineteenth century, some officially in 1861 and some not until 1920. Table 2 shows that growth in these areas was even greater than that in Berlin during the nineteenth century:

Table 2

Population Growth: Berlin’s Outlying Police District (1801–1900)¹⁴

Year	Population	Growth Rate (as a percentage of 1801 population)
1801	9,483	100.00
1822	16,105	169.83
1831	22,116	233.22
1840	27,420	289.15
1852	42,629	449.53
1861*	35,096	370.09
1871	57,838	609.91
1880	125,814	1,326.73
1890	268,520	2,831.59
1900	639,882	6,747.68

*After new (expanded) city limits

It is interesting to note here that the police district, even after losing some of its population to the city in 1861, increased its population by over sixty-seven times in the course of the century, with most of this increase occurring in the latter half of the century (more than an eighteen-fold increase between 1861 and 1900). In other words, during the latter half of the nineteenth century, the city of Berlin increased not only in population, but also in dimensions, with the outlying areas growing at more than four times the rate of that within the official city limits.

The most significant cause for this growth was geographical displacement, not natural population growth. Although birth rates exceeded death rates in Berlin during most of the nineteenth century, births account for only a small portion of overall population increase. Estimates of the ratio of rate of immigration into Berlin to birthrate in Berlin range from as low as five-to-one to as high as thirteen-to-one.¹⁵ Between 1838 and 1885 nearly 3.3 million immigrants settled in Berlin. Even though over 2.4 million people left Berlin during the same period, that still left a surplus of over 800,000 inhabitants.¹⁶ There was a steady increase in the presence of immigrants in Berlin. In 1864, 50.4 per cent of the Berlin population had not been born in Berlin. This non-native population increased to 58 per cent of the Berlin population by 1895, with a peak of 59.3 per cent in 1890.¹⁷ This means that for the latter half of the nineteenth century, immigrants dominated Berlin’s population. It was a city of people displaced from their place of origin.

An ever-increasing population caused the city to expand geographically. Many of the outlying towns and cities, even though not within the official city limits of Berlin, belonged to its police district, and soon became indistinguishable from the city of Berlin itself. In 1861, the city limits of Berlin expanded to include a small number of outlying cities to the west and to the south, leading to an increase in space of more than 68 per cent, and an increase in population of just over 7 per cent.¹⁸ City limits were expanded again in 1878 to th...

Table of contents

• FC
• New Directions in German Studies
• Volumes in the series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Permissions
• Introduction: Displacement and German Realism
• 1 Place and Displacement in Berlin, 1848–1900
• 2 Wilhelm Raabe and Modernity: Realism’s Trajectory of Place
• 3 Dynamic Places in Theodor Fontane’s Irrungen Wirrungen
• 4 Allegorical Place in Gottfried Keller’s Martin Salander
• Conclusion: Place Today—Politics and Humanity
• Bibliography
• Index