Import and export of ideas: Georg Simmel in Chicago,George M. Beard in Berlin

Transatlantic crossing I: Georg Simmel in Chicago

Robert E. Park’s importance for the constitution and the reputation of the Chicago School of Sociology is undisputed (Bulmer, 1984). If Small was its historical founder, Park was undoubtedly its head and impresario for years. However, Park’s path into academic sociology was anything but straightforward (Matthews, 1977; Raushenbush, 1979). After dropping out of engineering school, he studied philosophy and history with John Dewey, among others, before working for several years as a newspaperman. He began his career at the Minneapolis Journal, before he led an unsteady life as a reporter for the Detroit Tribune, the New York Journal, and the Chicago Journal. Park hence knew the metropolis and the metropolitan life very well, having experienced it first hand. Lindner (1996) has impressively traced how much Park was shaped by this life as a newspaperman and how much his sociology was influenced by these experiences. And yet, after a few years as a reporter, Park decided to return to university with the aim of studying metropolitan life and public opinion under the conditions of modern means of communication.

Therefore, as previously mentioned, he decided to engage in a longer period of study in Germany. He went first to Berlin in 1899 and later to Heidelberg. One academic teacher in particular impressed Park at this time and was to become influential in his work (Christmann, 2007: 22–23): Georg Simmel, who would incidentally remain Park’s only sociological teacher throughout his life, as we know from an autobiographical statement: ‘With the exception of Simmel’s lectures I never had any systematic instruction in sociology. As I said I got most of my knowledge about society and human nature from my own observations’. (quoted in Baker, 1973: 257).

This one lecture in sociology that Park attended, however, must have held a lasting fascination for him, and certainly had an enormous impact on Park’s subsequent career. The fact that Simmel was an engaging and charismatic lecturer and that his lectures were social events in Berlin is well known and has been emphasised repeatedly (Gassen and Landmann, 1958). But that alone cannot explain why Park once called him ‘the greatest of all sociologists’ (Raushenbush, 1979: 30). What is Simmel’s influence and where exactly does it show?

Firstly, Simmel’s approach of a formal sociology was certainly eye-opening for Park (Matthews, 1977: 41–45). This approach made it possible to take an interest in a variety of very different topics and to comparatively examine different forms of social Wechselwirkungen. In this context, it is worth examining Park’s doctoral thesis, which was supervised by Wilhelm Windelband and submitted to the University of Heidelberg under the title Masse und Publikum in 1903. At first glance, Simmel does not seem to play a very important role in this. In the required biographical information in the appendix of the work, Simmel is indeed mentioned, but only in passing along with the professors whose lectures Park attended in Germany. In addition to Simmel, these were the pedagogue Friedrich Paulsen in Berlin, the neo-Kantian Wilhelm Windelband, the liberal philosopher Theobald Ziegler, the geographer Georg Gerland and the monetary theorist Georg Friedrich Knapp in Strasbourg, as well as in Heidelberg the geographer Alfred Hettner ⁵ and the national economist Karl Rathgen, who represented Max Weber’s chair at the time (Park, 1904: 111–112).

However, it is not only in the curriculum vitae, but also in the work itself that Simmel does not appear prominently at first. Park devotes himself to the phenomenon of the crowd and wishes to examine collective psychology as ‘a new arrival among the sciences’ (Park, 1972: 5). For this reason, he discusses all the works that appeared on this subject at the end of the 19th century: La folla delinquente by Sighele (1891), Psychologie des foules by Le Bon (1895), ⁶ L’animo della folla by Rossi (1898) and L’opinion et la foule by Tarde (1901). These authors had all pointed out that it is not enough to define crowds on a quantitative basis alone, and that they needed to be understood as a reality sui generis. Following Le Bon’s work, Park points out that crowds are characterised by a high degree of affective irritability, a certain form of suggestibility, a one-sidedness of certain opinions and an increasing intolerance and impersonality (Park, 1972: 15–16).

If the crowd therefore cannot be understood merely as a collection of bodies in a limited space, how can it be grasped from a sociological perspective? In this context, Park refers to a central concept of Simmel’s sociology and identifies the ‘geistige Wechselwirkung’ (Park, 1904: 27), which is oriented towards a collective goal, as the central characteristic of crowds: ‘the defining characteristic of the crowd is not spatial juxtaposition, but the presence of psychic reciprocity’ ⁷ (Park, 1972: 22). Park, however, is not only concerned with describing the crowd as an isolated phenomenon. As he already makes clear on the first page of his work, he is concerned with directing his attention to ‘different forms of groupings’ (Park, 1972: 5). For this reason, he distinguishes between the crowd and the public. ⁸

Here again, Park uses Simmelian vocabulary, but without making this explicit. It is not an exaggeration, however, to claim that the concept of form is the linchpin of the entire work. For it is not the content, but rather the forms of the collective consciousness that distinguish the crowd and the public from other social groups. Unlike the case of political parties, for example, this collective will and desire of crowds and publics has not yet taken the form of a binding norm – it has not yet been transformed into a fixed statute. And yet the public and the crowd also differ from another in one important aspect: in crowds, it is more the ability to empathise that matters, while in publics, it is more the ability to think. For this reason, Park sees publics as being characterised more by a critical attitude and an inner fragmentation, whereas crowds are characterised more by affective homogeneity and an inward lack of criticism. What Park attempted to achieve with his doctoral thesis was thus not so much a contribution to the psychology of crowds, but rather a contribution to a formal sociology of crowds – an undertaking for which Simmel was unmistakably the inspiration (see Levine, 1972).

In addition to this interest in social forms that Park shared with Simmel, also a certain parallelism in the courses of their lives stands out. Both careers were anything but linear. When Park studied in Berlin, Simmel was 41 years old and kept his head above water as a Privatdozent, an unpaid private lecturer. He was appreciated by his contemporaries for his intellectual agility and his keen powers of observation, but he was also regarded with suspicion by just as many. Simmel was assumed to be a relativising, morally unreliable thinker (Müller and Reitz, 2018: 13), with comments about him rarely appearing without a reference to his Jewish origins. And Simmel was certainly not a systematic thinker, which in Germany, the country of so many systematic thinkers, inevitably leads to mistrust.

As a former newspaper man, Park may also have been intrigued by Simmel, whose essayistic style of writing influenced many feuilletonists of his time (Thériault, 2021). He apparently had no reservations about the supposedly unsystematic approach, indeed he seemed to have been attracted precisely by Simmel as an eclectic (Levine, 1989: 171). Nowhere is this more evident than in the famous Introduction to the Science of Sociology that Park published together with Ernest W. Burgess in 1921. Anyone who picks up this book today will notice that Simmel is simply unmissable in it. And this introduction was immensely important for the institutionalisation of sociology in the USA. With a notable 30,000 copies sold by 1943, it became an early standard work in the discipline (Matthews, 1977: 130). Not only did Park and Burgess use this book to formulate what they consider to be the central questions of the discipline and to elaborate upon a set of basic sociological concepts, it also functions as a kind of reader, containing a collection of significant sociological essays to be inventoried. It can even be considered an attempt to form an early sociological canon.

Both the structure of the table of contents and the selection of essays are interesting. Many of the 13 subchapters, each of which Park and Burgess have devoted to a central sociological concept, follow Simmel’s terminology very conspicuously and focus on his essays. With a staggering 10 essays, Simmel is by far the most reprinted author after Park himself. ⁹ By way of comparison, there is not a single text by Max Weber in this book and only one essay each by Auguste Comte, Émile Durkheim, or Herbert Spencer. Simmel’s essays, though, are presented to an American readership as the central reference texts of a still young and nascent academic discipline. This appreciation of Simmel in the United States is remarkable, and for his reception history, the importance of Chicago as a transit station can therefore hardly be overestimated (Tomasi, 1998). Here, Simmel’s works were translated early on, and his ideas were disseminated, modified and sometimes even productively suppressed – as can be illustrated above all in what is probably one of Simmel’s most famous essays.

Georg Simmel’s urban habit of mind

It was his alert mind and intellectual curiosity for ephemeral phenomena that marked Simmel out – characteristics that can certainly be traced back to his socialisation. Simmel was a child of the city. The city of Berlin was his natural habitat. This remark is anything but trivial. Berlin, a large city around 1900 even by world standards, with a population similar to that of Chicago, was and is the only German metropolis worthy of that name. Simmel grew up there, studied there and worked there for most of his life. This affiliation with the city is evident in Simmel’s work. His thinking is urban thinking, his sociology is one that also has its origins in urban coexistence (Jazbinsek, 2003).

It should be noted in passing that German intellectual history shows an astonishing rootedness in the periphery. Many of the canonical authors are associated with small towns, some of them remote, which have thus also remained in the public memory. This is true of places such as Todtnauberg (Martin Heidegger) or Plettenberg (Carl Schmitt), which became places of isolation after the Second World War; but it is also true of smaller university towns such as Heidelberg (Max Weber) and Kiel (Ferdinand Tönnies) or small residential towns such as Oerlinghausen (Niklas Luhmann), which are explicitly associated with the work done there. Even in the case of the Frankfurt School, which at least bears the name of a town in its title, it is other places that are connected with the authors. One thinks of Theodor W. Adorno’s nostalgic longing for the small town of Amorbach (Pabst, 2003), where he spent parts of his childhood, or even of Jürgen Habermas, who is publicly referred to as the ‘philosopher from Starnberg’.

In Simmel’s case, it is different. Simmel is associated with the city of Berlin. In this urban rootedness of thought, Simmel may have been a role model for Park as well. Nowhere else is the urban element in thought as clear as in his ground-breaking and still much-discussed essay ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’ (‘Metropolis and Mental Life’), ¹⁰ which was undoubtedly important for the emergence of the Chicago School of Sociology. Although, as will be shown below, the reference was anything but obvious.

In 1903, at the invitation of the pharmaceutical wholesaler Franz Ludwig Gehe, Simmel gave a lecture in Dresden on ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’. The content of this lecture is as well known as it is difficult to paraphrase. For in it, Simmel refuses to accept an all too straightforward argumentation. Instead, Simmel attempts to characterise the city as something elusive and hard to grasp. We learn about the pace of the city, which is contrasted with the evenly flowing rhythm of small-town life and which demands a reaction of the mind and not of the spirit and feeling; this activity of the mind is described on the one hand as a protective measure against environmental influences and uprooting, even as a ‘Präservativ des subjektiven Lebens gegen die Vergewaltigungen der Großstadt’ ¹¹ (Simmel, 1995/1903: 118), while at the same time it is emphasised that the objectivity that prevails in the city sometimes turns into ruthless harshness – in other words, it is both a protection and a weapon. It is particularly the money economy and the orientation towards the market that makes the city dweller an all-round calculating subject, aiming for precision and exactness. This impersonality associated with the city has in turn left clear traces in the personality structure of the city dweller. Aloofness and a blasé attitude are the two ways in which distance is created from one’s environment, which in turn leads city dwellers to resort to ever more extravagant means in order to set themselves apart and attract the attention of those around them:

‘This gives an allure to the most tendentious and whimsical forms of behaviour that are specifically metropolitan extravaganzas of setting oneself apart, such as capriciousness and preciousness, whose meaning lies less in their content than in the form of being different and noticeable’. (Simmel, 2021/1903: 199)

It is well known that Simmel wrote these lines in quite blatant dislike of the nouveau riche of Berlin’s Westend, whose goings-on he witnessed at first hand and whom he even had to endure, much to his disgust, in the seclusion of the mountains on his beloved Alpine trips (Jazbinsek, 2003: 109–110; Simmel, 1991/1895). It must certainly be said that Simmel’s text is not sparing with criticism. Quite in line with classical urban criticism, the ‘atrophy of individual culture through the hypertrophy of objective culture’ (Simmel, 2021/1903: 199) is repeatedly contrasted here, without overlooking the fact that cities have historically been those places that have enabled ‘the belief in the individual’s freedom of movement, regardless of social or spiritual condition’ (Simmel, 2021/1903: 199).

In Simmel’s ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’, an anthropological and an historical-economic line of argumentation are thus combined (Hoerning and Weidenhaus, 2018: 800). On the one hand, cities are identified as the central places of the division of labour and the money economy, where there is a principled relativisation of almost everything. Simmel thus takes up the central idea of his Philosophie des Geldes (The Philosophy of Money), according to which money as ‘the equivalent for anything and everything’ (Simmel, 1991/1896: 24) both connects and separates. On the other hand, Simmel conceives of humans as ‘creatures of difference’ (Simmel, 2021/1903: 193), who, in this metropolis accelerated by the money economy, must permanently deal with a multitude of impressions and stimuli and, for protection, develop a specifically metropolitan mentality.

Simmel is thus concerned with working out the interaction (Wechselwirkung) between a specifically spiritual-intellectualist attitude and the money economy. In his view, the city is not the cause of this, but ‘provides fertile ground for this interaction’ (Simmel, 2021/1903: 194). That is precisely what makes this text so instructive and worth reading to this day. In it, Simmel presents an indeterministic approach to sociology that avoids an unambiguous causal explanation, instead reconstructing the mutual intertwining of different developments (Müller, 2015). In the strongest moments of this text, Simmel is able to make all these aspects converge in a single detail; for example, when he talks about the proliferation of pocket watches, in which the interrelationship between objective economic pressure and the expectation of constant punctuality is combined with the subjective feeling of being permanently driven. Long before authors such as Bruno Latour, Simmel thus not only hints at the moral disciplining power of technical objects (Latour, 2000), but is also able to describe how even the spread of rationality and anonymity is concretely materialised and embodied.

‘The fact that people carry around small denominations of money in their pockets, with which they can immediately purchase all sorts of small articles, often on a whim, [. . .] and in general the divisibility of money into the tiniest sums certainly contributes to the frivolous style of the external, and particularly the aesthetic areas of modern life, as well as to the growing number of trivialities with which we furnish our life. The punctuality and exactness–somewhat analogous to that of pocket watches–which the spreading of the monetary system has conferred on the external relationship of people, is by no means accompanied by an equivalent increased inner conscientiousness in the ethical sphere’. (Simmel, 1991/1896: 28–29)

According to Simmel, the ticking of pocket watches as well as the ringing of small change in trouser pockets form something like the background noises against which a certain metropolitan mentality could develop. And this peculiar mentality became the brand essence of the city as such.

From a sociology of the metropolis to a metropolitan sociology

To say that Simmel’s remarks on the city made an impression on Park is probably an understatement. If one looks at Park’s essay ‘The City. Suggestions for the Investigation of Human Behavior in the City Environment’ (1915), it becomes clear how much he follows Simmel programmatically. This essay was later republished and forms the opening chapter of the volume The City, edited by Park together with Ernest W. Burgess, which can be understood as a kind of manifesto of the Chicago School of Sociology. ¹² In it, Park explores all the things that should be investigated about the city from a sociological point of view. An approach in Park’s sense would have to look at population figures as well as the city’s black plan, the technical infrastructure, cultural and ethnic segregation, employment conditions or means of communication. But that alone is not enough, because what really makes the city is to be found elsewhere. Right at the beginning of the essay, Park makes it clear that the specifically urban lies in the interrelationship of the physical and the mental: ‘The fact is, however, that the city is rooted in the habits and customs of the people who inhabit it. The consequence is that the city possesses a moral as well as a physical organization, and these two mutually interact in characteristic ways to mold and modify one another’. (Park, 1915: 578)

The city is accordingly described by Park as ‘a psychophysical mechanism’ (Park, 1915: 578). The culmination of the essay is therefore the final chapter, which is dedicated to the temperament of the city dweller. For Park, the city is unmistakably the motor of increasing individualisation and the natural habitat of the individual person. Against the background of the spread of modern means of transport and communication, the city offers the possibility of increasing mobility and the emergence of a multitude of spatial and thematic-intellectual niches.

‘The attraction of the metropolis is due in part, however, to the fact that in the long run every individual finds somewhere among the varied manifestations of city life the sort of environment in which he expands and feels at ease; finds, in short, the moral climate in which his peculiar nature obtains the stimulations that bring his innate qualities to full and free expression’. (Park, 1915: 608)

According to Park, this proliferation of places and spaces, each with its own moral climate in which the individual can act out, also leads to an increase in metropolitan eccentricity: ‘In a small community it is the normal man, the man without eccentricity or genius, who seems most likely to succeed. The small community often tolerates eccentricity. The city, on the contrast, rewards it’. (Park, 1915: 608–609).

In Simmel’s work, this increase in metropolitan eccentricity corresponded with the development of the mental phenomenon of a blasé attitude. Interestingly, Park does not take this argumentative step in his essay. Instead, he pleads for something like a sociological or methodological blasé attitude. Those who turn their attention to the city should be interested in the different ‘moral regions’ within a city – Park mentions the half-world or the red-light district as examples of this – but should hold back as much as possible with their own moral judgements. ‘A moral man cannot be a sociologist’, Park is supposed to have said (Lindner, 1996: 92). He probably also borrowed this moral abstinence from Simmel, who, as is known, ended his essay ‘Die Großstsädte und das Geistesleben’ with the remark that he did not want to act as a judge towards the city. He saw his task as neither ‘to condemn nor to pardon, but only to understand’ (Simmel, 2021/1903: 200). In this point Park unmistakably follows Simmel’s example, just as he takes seriously his suggestion to focus on the city as a psychophysical mechanism. The slightly revised reprint of the essay ‘The City’ therefore begins programmatically as follows:

‘The city, from the point of view of this paper, is something more than a congeries of individual men and social conveniences–streets, buildings, electric lights, tramways and telephones, etc.; something more, also, than a mere constellation of institutions and administrative devices–courts, hospitals, schools, police, and civil functionaries of various sorts. The city is, rather, a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of the organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in these customs and are transmitted with this tradition. The city is not, in other words, merely a physical mechanism and an artificial construction. It is involved in the vital processes of the people who compose it’ (Park, 1925: 1).

In research, it has been pointed out that Park only took up the anthropological strand of Simmel’s remarks, thus halving the content of the argument (vgl. Hoerning and Weidenhaus, 2018). This reproach is not unjustified, since Park concentrates strongly on the city as a habit of mind. Nevertheless, the link to the historical-economic argument is by no means omitted. Whereas Simmel primarily points to the importance of the money economy, Park emphasises the division of labour, the coexistence of professions and, as a former journalist, the role of the daily newspaper (Christmann, 2007: 53). Whereas for Simmel the city dweller becomes a constantly calculating subject through the circulation of money, for Park he becomes a reader of daily changing news. Both money and newspapers contribute to an enormous ‘intensification of nervous stimulation’ (Simmel, 2021/1903: 193), which in this form is a special feature of cities.

As many of the central motifs from ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’ can be found in Park’s ‘The City’, it is surprising that Simmel never appears in it as a source or an inspiration. Park, who has integrated 10 different essays by Simmel into the Introduction to the Science of Sociology, omits precisely this seminal text on the city. Only in a single spot in the entire book can a clearly laudatory remark be found, albeit somewhat hidden. Simmel’s essay is described there as ‘the one outstanding contribution to a sociology or, perhaps better, a social philosophy of the city’ (Park and Burgess, 1921: 331). Even in the 1925 book publication The City, which in addition to the reprint of Park’s essay from 1915 contains further contributions on the topics of human community, neighbourhood, and city life by Parks himself and by Ernest W. Burgess and Roderick D. McKenzie, Simmel is only mentioned once in total. In an extensive and still impressive bibliography on the subject of the city prepared by Louis Wirth, which forms the conclusion of the volume, Simmel’s essay is presented as laconically as it is appreciatively: ‘The most important single article on the city from the sociological standpoint’. (Wirth, 1925: 219).

You almost have to look for this sentence with a magnifying glass. Not only is it in small print, but it is also hidden between lists of doctoral theses and forgotten essays. The fact that this single most important article on the city plays such an unimportant role throughout this entire book is somewhat strange, as is the fact that this essay by Simmel was translated into English so late. In 1936, a translation by Edward Shils was published for the first time, but initially only for internal use by students (Lindner, 1996: 62). However, there is no denying the eminent role that this essay played as a stimulus and orientation for the constitution of the Chicago School of Sociology. And years later, in 1938, Louis Wirth himself wrote an essay entitled ‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’, which clearly owes a great deal to Simmel, right down to certain formulations, but which also quotes him only very casually. Wirth focuses on the change of mentalities and ways of life under conditions of growing cities and increasing density. It is above all the connection between a multiplication of social contacts and a simultaneous increase in distance that Wirth emphasises in his essay. At this point, he then quotes from ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’ and takes up Simmel’s observations of increasing atomisation and anonymisation in the city. For Wirth, this simultaneity of density and atomisation constitutes the character not only of big cities, but above all of city dwellers:

‘The multiplication in a state of interaction under conditions which make their contact as full personalities impossible produces that segmentalization of human relationships which has sometimes been seized upon by students of the mental life of the cities as an explanation of the ‘schizoid’ of urban personality. This is not to say that the urban inhabitants have fewer acquaintances than rural inhabitants, for the reverse may actually be true; it means rather that in relation to the number of people whom they see and with whom they rub elbows in the course of daily life, they know a smaller proportion, and of these they have less intensive knowledge’. (Wirth, 1938: 12)

In this respect, according to Wirth, urbanism must be understood both in purely physical terms as the growth of urban area and population, and also as an independent form of social organisation and group formation, above all as a specific mentality, a ‘set of attitudes and ideas’ (Wirth, 1938: 19).

Simmel always shines through in all of this, far more than the few quotations and footnotes would suggest. In Chicago, however, the emphasis was less on a philosophical approach to a history of mental life and its deformation, and more on formulating research questions to be as concrete as possible. The investigation of Geistesleben becomes an investigation of human behaviour, and this terminological shift is anything but marginal, as Rolf Lindner has reconstructed in his magnificent study The Reportage of Urban Culture (1996). While for Simmel, metropolitan Geistesleben is still a symptom of a profound historical and dialectical process of release and decomposition, which must be viewed above all in the context of the money economy, Park and his students view urban behaviour more as an empirical phenomenon to be described in as much detail as possible. The city is considered ‘a laboratory or clinic in which human nature and social processes may be conveniently and profitably studied’ (Park, 1915: 46).

This idea of the city as a laboratory has decisively shaped Park’s sociology in these years (Park, 1929), even if he imagined this laboratory to be anything but clean and sterile. He is known to have repeatedly instructed his students time and again to venture into the city and get their hands dirty. ¹³ The result was all those famous studies of the 1920s that we still associate with the Chicago School as the programme of a certain form of empirical social research: The Unadjusted Girl by William I. Thomas (1923), The Hobo by Nels Anderson (1923), The Gang by Frederic M. Thrasher (1927), The Ghetto by Louis Wirth (1927), The Saleslady by Frances R. Donovan (1929) ¹⁴ , or The Jack Roller by Clifford Shaw (1930). A lesser known but equally fascinating study from this period is the doctoral thesis by Norman Hayner, who had also studied with Simmel for a time, produced the first American translation of ‘Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben’ around 1920, but only for his own use. In his doctoral thesis, he devoted himself to an examination of life in hotels (Hayner, 1923). As Lindner has worked out (Lindner 1996: 62), Hayner repeats the Simmelian argument once again in miniature. For Hayner, the hotel is the metropolitan place par excellence, in a sense its own city within the city, where anonymity, aloofness, loneliness, strangeness, freedom and above all the extensive lack of moral restraints can be examined as if under a microscope. Of course, the hotel also produces a certain mentality and thus a kind of typical hotel inhabitant, and it should not be surprising what terms Hayner chose to describe it: ‘The individual who lives continually in hotels tends to become either blasé or urbane’ (Hayner, 1928: 793).

Whether it was Hayner, Wirth or Park himself, the city was not just one sociological object of study among many, but the sociological object of study par excellence. Especially Park has worked out an approach that is perhaps able to grasp the city more precisely than Simmel was able to (Ruwet, 2017). It was therefore not so much about a sociology of the city, but much more radically a sociology out of the city.

Transatlantic crossing II: George M. Beard in Berlin

One could now make the accusation that the story that has been told so far is fairly unsurprising. Simmel was the one who had pointed out a certain mentality peculiar to city dwellers. His remarks were still in the tradition of German cultural criticism and certainly took up several motifs from the Nietzschean hatred of cities (Moebius, 2023). It was in Chicago that they finally found their most enthusiastic readers, who not only freed this text of its sceptical tone, but also transformed it into a tangible and workable research programme. The city has gone from being a subject of cultural criticism to the primary object of study for a sociology that has set out in search of society in concrete urban coexistence and has developed its own methods and instruments in the city (Hannerz, 1980).

The implied juxtaposition of speculative thinking from Europe and empirical research in the United States is as old as it is simple. It has been the subject of criticism in the past because it does not stand up to scrutiny upon closer inspection (Sutherland, 1978). One should hence also look more carefully with Park and Simmel. Is this linear history of a gradual Americanisation (Oromaner, 1970: 330), through which Simmel’s essayistic approach to the city was transformed into an empirically oriented research programme, even true?

Let us therefore go back to Simmel’s lecture from 1903, in which he observes the intensification of nervous stimulation that can be identified in large cities and is increasingly spreading there. Simmel was by no means alone in this observation. Nervousness was, after all, one of the great themes of the time (Radkau, 1998). In the same year that Simmel gave his talk in Dresden, for example, an article by William A. White appeared in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. In it, White sets out to find the environmental conditions of nervous diseases, especially insanity. He first discusses factors such as temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, or wind velocity to conclude that purely physical factors are not sufficient to explain the increase in nervous diseases. Instead, the density of the population should be taken into account. It is precisely the large cities where a high prevalence of mental diseases can be found: ‘Thus we find that the ratio of insane in cities [. . .] has not only increased in the decade from 1880 to 1890, but that the ratio for the whole country has decreased. It is also significant that, while in 1880 there were only 35 cities containing 50.000 or more inhabitants, in 1890 there were 58 such cities’. (White, 1903: 264–265) The rapid growth of large cities at the end of the 19th century led to a change in everyday life for which, according to White, society was not prepared. The correlation of traffic, noise and nervous diseases is the subject of discussion in medical research as well as social policy and even art (Lentz, 1998; Pols, 2003). White’s paper is only one of numerous examples of this.

One of the many, but certainly one of the most important figures in this context is George M. Beard, a neurologist from New York and a unique figure within the history of science. His lifelong defining research theme was nervousness. In 1881 he published a work entitled American Nervousness, which received much attention. Only 2 years later, this book was translated into German and found some of its most avid readers in Germany. One of the leading German neurologists of his time, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, even described Beard’s writing as a revelation (Radkau, 1994: 213). For Beard it was clear that the emergence of nervousness as a challenge to modern medicine had to be connected with the characteristics of modern civilisation. ‘American nervousness is the product of American civilization’. (Beard, 1881: 176) In this context, Beard lists ‘steam power, the periodical press, the telegraph, the sciences, and the mental activity of women’ (Beard, 1881: 96) as decisive factors. Nowhere else can all these factors be observed in such a condensed form as in the American metropolis. Beard also devotes an entire subchapter to the pocket watch in his study. In this single object, city and technology, behaviour and mentality are, quite similar to Simmel’s words, combined in a fascinating way.

‘The perfection of clocks and the invention of watches have something to do with modern nervousness, since they compel us to be on time, and excite the habit of looking to see the exact moment, so as not to be late for trains and appointments. [. . .] A nervous man cannot take out his watch and look at it when the time for an appointment is near, without affecting his pulse, and the effect on that pulse, if we could but measure and weigh it, would be found to be correlated to a loss to the nervous system’. (Beard, 1881: 103)

The reason why this explicitly medical-scientific approach met with so much interest, especially in Germany, was probably that it went well with a certain scepticism about civilisation that existed there. In the preface, Beard himself seems surprised at the endorsement of his theories in Germany. For Joachim Radkau, Beard’s American Nervousness was one of the early cases in which academic knowledge was transferred from West to East and not vice versa (Radkau, 1994: 212).

The key issue is by no means only the intercontinental reception of writings, but also the export of a real phenomenon. Beard himself emphasises that it was thanks to the profundity of German philosophy – he interestingly mentions Karl Hillebrandt – that the psychological constitution of the individual was taken seriously. In this way, a phenomenon such as nervousness can be addressed with precise means. But this phenomenon is an American one. Although it can increasingly be found in Europe as well, Beard speaks explicitly of American Nervousness: ‘The philosophy of Germany has penetrated to all civilized nations; in all directions we are becoming Germanized. Similarly, the nervousness of America is extending over Europe, which, in certain countries, at least, is becoming rapidly Americanized’. (Beard, 1881: 14).

When Simmel, in his 1903 lecture, focuses on the intensification of nervous life that, in his view, is so characteristic of cities, he is certainly drawing on a finding that was much discussed in medicine, psychology and philosophy during his time, but which was originally intended to describe a decidedly American situation. Simmel transfers these descriptions, of which he was undoubtedly aware, to the Berlin of his time and concludes them briefly with his reflections on the spread of the modern money economy. It is therefore no exaggeration to claim that American traces can indeed be discerned in Simmel’s remarks on the city, and that these should be examined more closely.

Transatlantic crossing III: Hans Ostwald in Chicago

We should once again turn to the Chicago School. We have assumed that it was in Chicago that Simmel’s social philosophy of the city was translated into a research programme that could become the foundation of sociological research and empirical studies. First, it should be mentioned that in Chicago, even before Park’s time, empirical studies of urban coexistence had already emerged ¹⁵ (Matthews, 1977: 129). And yet, it was the great achievement of Park, his colleagues, and students to have worked out a set of methods with the help of which the city could be systematically and participatorily observed. While it is worthwhile to examine the American influences in Simmel, it is also valuable to explore the German roots of the Chicago School’s empirical research programme. Can Chicago truly be considered the origin of ethnographically oriented urban research?

While this assertion holds some truth, it should not be taken lightly. As Dietmar Jazbinsek and Ralf Thies demonstrated in their insightful work (Jazbinsek and Thies, 1997), which has unfortunately received insufficient attention in sociology, there were indeed precursors to the Chicago research – and surprisingly, these originated in Berlin. Between 1904 and 1908, an impressive publication project known as the Großstadt-Dokumente was created, comprising 50 individual volumes that dealt with everyday life in the city. Ostwald (1900), a self-taught journalist and writer who published a novel called Vagabonden in 1900, initiated this project. Ostwald’s novel addressed his experiences as an unemployed tramp more than 20 years before Nels Anderson’s The Hobo. Later he went from being a Landstreicher (vagabond in the country) to being more a Stadtstreicher (vagabond in the city) and began to record these experiences as well (Fritzsche, 1994; Thies, 2006).

The Großstadt-Dokumente each focused on a specific aspect of urban life, primarily in Berlin, but also occasionally in Vienna. Some volumes covered topics such as the Berlin bohemian scene (Bab, 1904), the workers’ movement (Weidener, 1905), department stores (Colze, 1908), and sport (Arndt, 1905). Authors included notable figures such as theatre critic Julius Bab, who also attended Simmel’s lectures, (Jazbinsek, 2003: 114), sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, Olympic swimmer Otto Herschmann, educator and women’s rights activist Ella Mensch, and Felix Salten, the inventor of Bambi. The project was founded on the premise that the city could only be understood through a montage of kaleidoscopic scenes and situations. Georg Bernhard’s study on Berlin banks, for instance, encapsulates the perspective on the city that characterises the entire Großstadt-Dokumente:

‘The city is levelling out. In it, all individual life is submerged and stirred up as in a witches’ cauldron. And this wild and crazy jumble, this kaleidoscope-like mixture gives it that hallmark that one is wont to call the city character. Germany has many big cities. But only one metropolis’. ¹⁶ (Bernhard, 1905: 3)

The individual texts range from feuilleton and social reportage to ‘urban ethnography avant la lettre’ (Jazbinsek et al., 2001: 4), all characterised by immense curiosity for their subject and the simultaneous presence of intimacy and distance. When Ostwald, for example, focuses on gambling and describes the various gambling halls and practices of cheating (Ostwald, 1907), he does so with such a clear view that is in no way inferior to later sociological explorations of this topic (Goffman, 1952). Similarly, Dr. Wilhelm Hammer’s collection of prostitutes’ life stories, gathered through his hospital work, offers a respectful and non-moralistic contribution to early biographical research on the lives of infamous women.

It is beyond the scope of this article to present and do justice to all the different studies within the Großstadt-Dokumente. However, it is evident that they offer a rich trove of material yet to be fully explored by sociology. These documents not only captivate with their diverse topics on various facets of city life but also impress with their simultaneous interest in both the significant and the marginal, in politically charged issues like urban housing misery or the women’s movement, as well as the banality of everyday life. Many of the methods of empirical social research that we have long associated with Chicago – such as participant observation, urban mapping, biographical interviews, urban strolling, or the mere collection of documents – are already employed (Jazbinsek and Thies, 1997: 37).

Although the Großstadt-Dokumente are not widely known today, they were certainly well-known in Chicago during the 1910s and 1920s. As Jazbinsek and Thies have shown through extensive archival research, in 1914, all volumes were acquired for the library of the University of Chicago, and the leading figures there were familiar with these works. This is evident not only from borrowing cards but also from the volume The City (1925). In the bibliography compiled by Louis Wirth, where Simmel is mentioned only in passing, the Großstadt-Dokumente receive nearly 40 citations. For instance, Hans Ostwald’s study on Berlin dance halls is lauded for its ‘‘intimate glimpses of the diverse types of dance halls and their habitués’, and Julius Bab’s examination of Berlin bohemia is described as an ‘excellent history of a local community and [. . .] a unique contribution to the mentality of city life’ (Wirth, 1925: 200, 188). The extent of the documents’ influence can only be speculated upon. However, when comparing the major empirical studies of the Chicago School with the Großstadt-Dokumente in terms of both topic selection and methodological approaches, it is not unreasonable to suggest a productive appropriation occurred, whereby a particular approach to the city was not only Americanised but also re-academicized (Jazbinsek et al., 2001: 22).

This paper has not merely focused on a one-sided history of fascination with Georg Simmel’s sociology. Instead, it has sought to illuminate the intriguing interstitial episodes in the narrative of Simmel and the Chicago School. This exploration delves into mutual fascinations and influences, examining both the Americanisation of knowledge and the Europeanisation of experience. The story of Simmel and the Chicago School must be expanded to include the import and re-import of American Nervousness as a phenomenon, and most significantly, the little known Berlin Großstadt-Dokumente. These books represent a veritable treasure trove that has largely been overlooked by sociologists thus far.

Considering the ongoing transformation of cities and the contemporary challenges of urban coexistence, a project as ambitious as the Großstadt-Dokumente may be more essential now than ever before. What modern-day equivalents can we find for the gambling halls, department stores, and poorhouses of the early 1900s? Moreover, is it still adequate to characterise urban coexistence as ‘an eternal flowing and pulsing’ (Simmel, 1909: 311) solely among humans? ¹⁷ Are the tempo of cities, the modes of socialisation, and the mindset of their inhabitants ¹⁸ not more profoundly influenced by media, technology, infrastructures, and architectures in today’s world? It would indeed be fascinating to envision the places, situations, and objects a contemporary Chicago School of Sociology or a project akin to the Großstadt-Dokumente might select to elucidate the distinct aspects of urban life at the dawn of the 21st century.