Week 2: The Metropolis and Mental Life

Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was born to a prosperous Jewish family, at the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Leipzigerstrasse, the very heart of Berlin’s commercial and theatrical bright light district, the equivalent of New York’s Times Square or London’s Piccadilly Circus. Simmel obtained his doctorate in philosophy in 1881 at the University of Berlin. Marginalized by the German academic system because of Jewish ancestry and intellectual radicalism, Simmel did not obtain a regular academic appointment until the last four years of his life. For most of his career, he maintained a recurring lecturing position at the University of Berlin, where his lectures influenced an extraordinary legacy of students, including Georg Lukacs, Ernst Bloch, Karl Mannheim, and Robert Park. Despite being somewhat an academic outsider, he was nevertheless an engaged public intellectual who frequented fashionable salons and enjoyed the friendship of eminent sociologists like Max Weber and the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. As a nonobservant Jew in Weimar Berlin, he was a rootless cosmopolitan while being a public figure.

Simmel’s seminal essay (“Die Grossstätde und das Geistesleben”) was originally delivered as a lecture within a series during the winter of 1902–03 connected to an exhibition held in Dresden by the Gehe Foundation on the emergence of the modern metropolis. This First German City Exhibit (Erste Deutsche Städte- Ausstellung) was following upon the 1896 Berlin Trade Exhibition, part of a historical vogue in world city expositions, such as those held in Paris in 1886 and Chicago in 1893. The lectures and exhibits examined the intellectual, economic, and political dimensions of German urbanism, and addressed planning problems and social issues related to public transportation, housing, employment, health, welfare, and cultural institutions. Simmel’s essay focused more upon the philosophical and psychological implications of these transitions. Simmel was interested in the social construction of the modern urban self.