Georg Simmel and the Berlin Trade Exhibition of 1896

Abstract

In tracing a theoretical history of modernity peculiar to Imperial Berlin after 1871, the urban themes developed in the writings of the German social theorist, Georg Simmel, have proved to be particularly pertinent. The exhibition of 1896 provides Simmel with a major site of investigation into the visible effects of the commodified urban sphere upon the individual city dweller which finds one of its most spectacular forms in the rise of the mid-nineteenth-century ‘World Exhibition’. The paper outlines aspects of Simmel's theories of the differentiation of the individual in the capitalist metropolis as a background to an investigation into the various functions assigned to the 1896 Berlin Trade Exhibition both by its organizers and by Simmel.