UC Berkeley

This dissertation explores the relationship between domestic interiors and urban exteriors in Weimar literature and film. Interiors have been neglected in scholarship about Weimar Großstadtliteratur (big-city literature); scholars have focused on the street scene and the psychological effects of industrial capitalism, urbanization, and commodification. While many architecture and design theorists of the time engaged with interiors as part of a plan to modernize and thus create a new city—and society—the interiors they imagined for the Neues Wohnen (New Dwelling) are conspicuously absent from contemporary novels and films. One finds instead interiors like those of the previous century.

I argue that the persistence of nineteenth-century interiors in novels and films about Weimar Berlin uncovers the tensions inherent in modern city living. The expectation of what it was like to “live” in the fictional home differs from the New Dwelling of “real-world” homes. Despite their differences, both ways of dealing with modernity seek understanding and control of the urban environment. Whereas the architects of the New Dwelling strive to control modern city life through construction, the fictional imaginary explores the many ways in which the city controls and is controlled by its dwellers.

In order to explore these approaches to modern living, I will present close readings of a corpus of Berlin novels and films from the Weimar Republic, focusing on Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz; Erich Kästner’s Fabian; Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen; Phil Jutzi’s Mutter Krausens Fahrt ins Glück; and Slatan Dudow’s Kuhle Wampe oder Wem gehört die Welt? My readings of these films and novels will be tested and informed by a study of manifestos and articles written by avant-garde architecture theorists including Le Corbusier, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Erich Mendelssohn, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius.

My dissertation will nuance the topography of space that has been allotted to the modern German big-city novel and film by expanding the understanding of what it means to “dwell” in the city. More broadly, this dissertation will contribute to discourses on urban space during the first quarter of the twentieth century, leading the focus (momentarily) away from skyscrapers, department stores, traffic-jammed streets, and crowded sidewalks. This study will reflect on past German writers’ and filmmakers’ understanding of interior space and their critique of thoroughly modern urban dwelling habits with an eye to the present global obsession with minimalism, micro-housing, and smaller urban footprints.