The Challenge of Modernity: German Social and Cultural Studies, 1890-1960.

The Challenge of Modernity: German Social and Cultural Studies, 1890-1960. By Adelheid von Saldern (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2002. xxii plus 383 pp. $64.50).

Adelheid von Saldern belongs to a small group of German female senior historians who, in the past thirty years, have initiated pioneering developments in German historiography, particularly in the realm of gender and local history. This book serves to introduce her research to a broader audience in the United States. It includes eleven essays (one of which von Saldern co-authored with Karen Heinze and Sibylle Kuster) based on recent and contemporary historiographical developments in social and cultural studies, grouped under three different headings: "The Dynamics of the Working-Class Movement in Society;" "Social Rationalization and Gender;" and "Popular Culture and Politics." Modernization features as a component in all of these essays, though the individual articles cover an impressive range of topics. Von Saldern avoids a dogmatic approach but instead opts for a broad definition including party organization, bureaucratization, the differentiation of society and participation in political life, social rationalization and popular culture. All chapters were previously published in German-language journals and collections. Now the University of Michigan Press has collected, translated and published them as part of Geoff Eley's series, "Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany."

Dedicated to labor history, the first section focuses on internal conflicts within the Wilhelminian SPD as well as perceptions of labor parties during the Weimar period. Based on her research on the Gottingen SPD, von Saldern shows that hinterlanders were more reluctant to join the party than city dwellers. Some regions therefore remained permanently weak, a development fostered by a growing trend toward centralization, bureaucracy, and hierarchalism. As a result, even before World War One, tensions between party headquarters and its branches outside of the big cities chipped away at the strength of the SPD, alienating locals from the central administration and weakening the party's overall response to competing political formations. The "myths" of a united working class eventually crumbled after World War One due to the permanent split between the SPD and KPD but also because many voters did not perceive their plight as related to class.

In part two of this volume, von Saldern integrates questions of labor history with Alltagsgeschichte (history of every day life) and gender studies. Here, she shows how the development of modern lower class housing was cast in the context of the "reconstruction" and clean-up of society at large. Reformers and architects like Martin Gropius saw themselves as "remodelers of humankind," hoping to encourage the development of a "new man" who would exhibit a "modern way of life." Informed by Taylorism, they studied efficient ways of housekeeping and devised hygienic standards designed to clean up both the slums and the race. From how to keep bedrooms clean and airy to pressing questions such as "How Should Linoleum Floors Be Cleaned?" manuals, house wards, caretakers, and municipal works provided housewives (i.e. above all women) with plenty of advice on how to adjust their life to the newest, healthiest and scientifically most efficient manner of domestic life. For all the modernity involved, this did not entail a renunciation of traditional gender roles; instead, the modern household along with all its new appliances declaring out-and-out war on dust and darkness effectively "regendered" the existing norm along the lines of modern rationalization. Poverty and homelessness featured the downside of this perception, as the life of Gertrud Polley reveals, a lower-class woman from Hannover who became somewhat of a scandal in the late 1920s. Here, von Saldern shows best how political history, gender analysis as well as cultural studies can be intertwined. A single mother, divorcee, temporary prostitute, vagabond, and, for the most part of her life, a recipient of welfare, Polley did not represent the "new woman" of the 1920s but, instead, a "crank" who embodied everything that seemed threatening to modern reformers: independence, protest, promiscuity, and indecency. As a result, city authorities in Berlin took her son away while Polley herself eventually ended in a mental institution.

Von Saldern is careful to not let her readers jump to conclusions, though. The discourse of slum clearance, she argues, "was adopted outside Germany as well in the 1930s, for instance in England and the United States, where it was lauded as progressive, reasonable, and essential for modernization" (p. 111). For example, both in Germany and the United States the "new woman" was supposed to personify the idea of "social rationalization" in the 1920s. Von Saldern finds it at least "striking that there was so much effort to control homes in the United States" and she suggests that the nation's "reputation as a culturally liberal, purely market-driven society is not very accurate" (p. 155). Still, she concludes the Nazis did add a racist component by "incorporating into the apparently modern, rational attempt to clean up the cities an effort to clean up the Volk as well." (p. 112). Curing society, that is, was not premodern. "It was modernity itself but the other side of the coin, the side of inhumanity and barbarism." (p. 113).

The last part of this book is concerned with modernization and the interplay between popular culture and politics. Most importantly, von Saldern retraces the meaning (and threat) of popular culture in the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich and the GDR. Under all three regimes, popular culture operated both as a threat as well as a manipulating force. Representatives from all strata of society lamented the degenerating effects of lowbrow forms of amusement among the population at large, often calling for a form of governmentally directed "cultural interventionism." Based on the conviction that Germany had to be preserved as a Kulturnation, from Weimar to the GDR powerful moral reform movements sought to clean up the cultural scene by censoring films, pulp fiction and trashy movies while trying to popularize "classics" and the "old masters." Such outcries were not at all restricted to conservatives or moral reformers. Social democrats and communists as well, "had great difficulty accepting the fact that thrilling or erotic entertainments ... had become an integral part of working-class life, about which little could be done." (p. 280). At the same time, these very media became powerful and much-liked forms of entertainment after a long day among men and, even more so, women. For example, between 1930 and 1960, that is, before the advent of television, radio experienced its heyday both as a source of diversion and as a powerful propaganda tool.

This is a highly interesting and informative book that works well on several levels. The chapters can be read collectively or individually; the author even provides brief conclusions at the end of some though not all essays. In toto, they provide insight both into the focus of von Saldern's work--labor history, gender studies, popular culture--as well as into the some of the major historiographical trends in Germany since the 1970s.

Jessica Gienow-Hecht

University of Frankfurt