Germany’s Urban Frontiers

Nature and History on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century City

Through a series of insightful case studies, Poling shows how the shifting urban border, especially as embodied in the city wall, became a flashpoint for both conflicting interpretations of Germany’s urban past and competing visions for the ideal German city of the future. Her astute and engaging analysis encourages us to reevaluate much of our conventional wisdom regarding urbanization and modernity in nineteenth-century Germany.
Matt Erlin, Washington University in St. Louis

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In an era of transatlantic migration, Germans were fascinated by the myth of the frontier. Yet, for many, they were most likely to encounter frontier landscapes of new settlement and the taming of nature not in far-flung landscapes abroad, but on the edges of Germany’s many growing cities. Germany’s Urban Frontiers is the first book to examine how nineteenth-century notions of progress, community, and nature shaped the changing spaces of German urban peripheries as the walls and boundaries that had so long defined central European cities disappeared. Through a series of local case studies including Leipzig, Oldenburg, and Berlin, Kristin Poling reveals how Germans on the edge of the city confronted not only questions of planning and control, but also their own histories and futures as a community.

256 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

September, 2020

isbn : 9780822946410

about the author

Kristin Poling

Kristin Poling is assistant professor of European history at the University of Michigan–Dearborn.

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Kristin Poling