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  • Germany’s Other Modernity: Munich and the Making of Metropolis, 1895–1930
  • Gavriel D. Rosenfeld
Germany’s Other Modernity: Munich and the Making of Metropolis, 1895–1930. Leif Jerram. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007. Pp. vii + 229. $84.95 (cloth).

One must credit Leif Jerram for writing a book with an ambitious theoretical and historiographical agenda. Germany’s Other Modernity seeks to contribute both to the “historicisation of modernity” (13) and the long-debated question of whether Germany’s path into the modern world was a deviant one (a Sonderweg). Jerram takes as his case study Munich’s urban development in the waning years of the Kaiserreich (or, perhaps more accurately in the Bavarian context, the Prinzregentenzeit) as well as the Weimar Republic. Yet no matter how many telling insights he coaxes out of his primary source material, the evidence that he marshals—perhaps inevitably—is insufficient to accomplish his ambitious goals.

Throughout the book, Jerram displays an impressive familiarity with both the theoretical literature on modernity as well as the German historiographical literature on the Sonderweg. He also clearly reveals which lines of argumentation he opposes and which he supports. Jerram particularly critiques those scholars (such as Zygmunt Bauman and Detlev Peukert) who have identified pathological sides to the modern world, and those (such as George Mosse and Fritz Stern) who have focused their attention upon the notorious antimodern German thinkers who helped to pave the way for the Third Reich. All of these scholars, he charges, have ignored the positive features of modernity and have overlooked those German elites who, while finding fault with the metropolis (Großstadt), tried to humanize it instead of rejecting it.

Jerram’s desire to offer a corrective to this historiographical trend is praiseworthy. The same can be said of his call to restore a sense of open-endedness to Germany’s historical development prior to 1933. At the same time, however, his anti-teleological position leads him to marginalize the very political turmoil that made Munich the birthplace of Nazism and helped to propel Germany down the path of disaster. As a result, Germany’s Other Modernity ultimately emerges as a curiously detached book, one that, to paraphrase Trevelyan, might be described as a history with the era’s political tumult left out.

Jerram’s book is organized into four chapters, all of which outline what he takes to be moderate, philo-modern trends within Munich’s overall urban development. Chapter One focuses on those urban planners in the city who agreed with Georg Simmel’s assessment that urbanization had produced adverse psychological consequences (nervousness, stress, angst) and who, in response, tried to provide solutions to counteract them. City building official Hans Grässl was one who advanced this cause by trying to infuse an air of “Heimat” (a complex word connoting vernacular rootedness) to architectural projects. Jerram cites Grässl’s Implerstrasse school in the Munich neighborhood of Sendling, which was functionalist in orientation but also contextualist in the way it fit into its environment. Some city officials sponsored exhibitions on urban design (most notably in the years 1908 and 1928) that promoted the values of “simplicity and good taste” and stressed the need for technology to serve the Heimat (42). Finally, other officials embraced Viennese city planner Camillo Sitte’s belief in the need to enclose citizens in comfortable artistic [End Page 625] spaces, doing so most clearly in their “12,000-Programme” (a city program to construct 12,000 housing units) in the years 1928–1931.

This sympathy for moderate solutions to the problems caused by modernization is further explored in the book’s other chapters. In Chapter Two, Jerram shows how city officials endorsed the idea of the metropolis by formally incorporating outlying towns and villages into the city’s boundaries. Moreover, the new functional structures that were built in these newly incorporated areas, whether schools or gasworks, were designed according to artistic principles. Finally, the modern-traditional design of new buildings in the city center, such as the Technisches Rathaus (a city hall annex housing offices for city services, such as electricity and gas), revealed local support, Jerram argues, for technical modernity...

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