Provincial modernity: Culture, politics and local identity in Hamburg, 1885-1914.

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to illuminate the relationship of culture and politics in Imperial Germany through an investigation of the cultural reform movement in Hamburg between 1885 and 1914. Based in Hamburg's two main museums, the movement included a wide variety of organizations devoted to Volksbildung, or popular education. The education of the public (Erziehung des Publikums) was the foundation of their programs and the creation of a moral community of citizens was their desired goal. The city itself--its institutions, traditions and culture--was mobilized by the reformers as a grand instrument of public enlightenment to create a modern, educated citizenry. By opening museums to the public, founding a public library and sponsoring lectures in the arts and sciences, musical evenings, exhibitions of tasteful and hygienic home decor and projects to disseminate good literature, the reformers aimed to create the modern citizens they desired--the educated, reasonable and cultured public--which would form the cornerstone of a stable modern society and guard against the threat of social revolution. The dissertation contributes to the growing literature on bourgeois society in Germany. Specifically it contests a view of the German middle classes in which an excessive interest in cultural topics on the part of the Wilhelminian bourgeoisie has been seen as aestheticism, a turning away from political questions and civic involvement and into the private spaces of the interior. The social question, it is argued here, had a cultural and an aesthetic dimension. The wish to reform life through an immersion in art, long thought of as characteristic of Wilhelminian cultural pessimism, can also be seen as an effort to negotiate the shape of an emerging modern society rather than as a flight from it. The interest in the spaces of the interior, whether of the home or of the person, was part of a larger, reformist social vision.