The Symphony of the Metropolis in Text Form

The Berlin of the 1920s and its urban myth have their roots in the Empire. Anyone who wants to know how the tranquil Spree-Athens became the bustling Spree-Chicago should read Hans Ostwald.

When Hans Ostwald commissioned the first urban documents at the beginning of the 20th century, he had no idea that the series, initially planned to consist of twenty milieu studies, would quickly grow to fifty volumes. The resulting texts penetrate the complexity of Berlin and depict a broad panorama of both rough and poetic moments of urban life. Ostwald himself spends a night in a homeless shelter and finds authors who are familiar with the milieu of spirit mediums or who write about the not always legal dealings at the Hoppegarten racetrack. And there are even more provocative topics: Magnus Hirschfeld's depiction of the homosexual scene caused a scandal upon its release, while Wilhelm Hammer's volume on lesbian relationships was immediately banned.

Never before has there been a similarly ambitious attempt to capture the essence of a metropolis in all its facets as with this series. Thomas Böhm has curated a selection that brings the Berlin of the turn of the century to life, reveals astonishing parallels between then and now, and ignites a desire to explore the "poison flowers," "peculiar personalities," "virtues and vices" of Berlin, as Ostwald put it.