Germany's Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century City by Kristin Poling

Abstract

Reviewed by: Germany's Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century City by Kristin Poling Sandra Chaney Germany's Urban Frontiers: Nature and History on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century City. By Kristin Poling. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. Cloth $50.00. ISBN 978082294610. Kristin Poling's thoroughly researched study of modernizing nineteenth-century German cities explores how urban borders became sites for debating local histories, contemporary challenges, and plans for future growth. Adopting the notion of "frontier," a term the author acknowledges is often associated with claims of American exceptionalism through westward conquest and settlement, Poling argues that Germans, too, came to see the shifting edges of their cities to be frontiers for expansion and opportunity. The book's five chapters analyze the transformation of Leipzig, Oldenburg, Paderborn, Berlin, and Nuremberg, illustrating broad trends in nineteenth-century urbanization as well as local conditions making each city's growth and modernization unique. Poling has mined local and state archives and an impressive array of contemporary periodicals to reconstruct discussions among urban dwellers, planners, and authorities as they dismantled fortifications on their peripheries and then used the space to chart their city's future development. Poling emphasizes that urban inhabitants generally agreed that removing old fortifications was desired to make their communities modern. While walls, gates, and moats had defended German cities since medieval times and protected their right to self-govern, by the late 1700s these fortifications were militarily obsolete, expensive to maintain, and restrictive of growth. Between 1790 and 1815, when the Holy Roman Empire was replaced by a political system in which laws defined and defended borders rather than walls, some 350 German cities dismantled large sections of their fortifications. Poling's illuminating case studies begin in the early 1800s when German cities removed remnant fortifications on their "urban frontiers," debating whether to use the newly available space to increase commerce and transportation, address housing shortages, or provide access to nature. Paradoxically, Poling explains, removing fortifications also sparked interest in preserving at least parts of old walls, especially iconic gates, as reminders of distinct communal histories. By the 1890s, when William II sought to develop an official national culture, remnant walls became prized symbols of regional traditions that could be seen as forming a united heritage of the new German Empire. Poling helps readers appreciate the local conditions influencing how cities shaped their peripheries. Leipzig's leaders and planners were most concerned with making their defortified urban edge seem open to commerce. As a result, they blurred the visible boundary between city and countryside, first by creating a promenade in English [End Page 375] Garden style and then, in the 1860s, by applying a uniform tax code and services like street lighting to the city and its suburbs. By contrast, Oldenburg's expansion and modernization were influenced by its status as a ducal seat and its environmental surroundings of marshes and moors. In 1845, on Oldenburg's 500th anniversary, city leaders asserted their authority over the duke by deemphasizing the fortifications and stressing their community's freedoms. Most importantly, Poling argues, they began annexing their hinterland—previously deemed a "desolate wasteland"—and encouraged settlement in newly canalized fen colonies. Although settlers struggled in the moorland frontier and many emigrated to the United States, by the late 1800s Worpswede artists and homeland preservationists celebrated Oldenburg's remaining walls and rationalized surroundings as a landscape of refuge from the urban wilderness. Poling uses two Prussian cities, Paderborn and Berlin, to explore why some urban walls endured for so long. Berlin's modest tax wall remained until the 1860s while Paderborn's dilapidated fortifications stood until the 1880s. The latter's walls remained, partly because Protestant Prussia used them to collect taxes, thereby exerting centralizing influence over Catholic Paderborn, a city considered uncooperative and independent, shaped as it was by its status as a prince-bishopric seat and former Hanseatic member. More decisive in the fortification's delayed removal, though, was that neither Prussia nor Paderborn could afford to tear down the fortifications until the city finally did so beginning in 1880. Details of Berlin's expansion will be familiar to some readers...