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Open Your Eyes! Public Ordering and the Policing Gaze
- Modernism/modernity
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 15, Number 2, April 2008
- pp. 277-296
- 10.1353/mod.2008.0043
- Article
- Additional Information
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In November 1919, the Weimar Republic was a year old, yet no domestic consensus seemed in sight. The international military conflict had transformed into a war at home, where assassinations, street fighting, and protests disrupted public order. Through all this, law enforcement agencies in Berlin worked alongside other civic and private institutions to establish a sense of day-to-day normalcy and security. In the case discussed in this essay, a fictional manhunt known as "Augen auf!" or "Open Your Eyes!" sponsored by the Berliner Morgenpost, representatives of the newly reformed local criminal police helped to set the tone of the popular discourse on civility and sociability in the nascent democracy.