Mobility in the Metropolis: Responses to the Changing City in Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm and J.B. Priestley’s Angel Pavement

Abstract

Fiona Littlejohn’s paper undertakes a comparative reading of two city novels set in London and Berlin in times of economic depression in late 1920s. In both novels, Gabriele Tergit’s  Kasebier erobert den Kurfurstendamm (Cheesebeer Conquers Kurfurstendamm) and J.B. Priestley’s  Angel Pavement , female and male characters respond differently to a changing urban environment: paper shows striking similarities in perception of city under aspect of gender and generation. In both texts women’s experiences of living city contrast starkly with men’s views of a lifeless city. While two middle-aged male characters perceive effects of modernisation as an alienating threat to traditional patriarchal values, very same phenomena provide younger female characters with spaces for mobility and liberation. Both men project their fears, as Littlejohn argues, on urban landscape; they respond to its threats by retreating into ‘non urban spaces’, as interior of private home, or by clinging to rural niches within city. The two professional women, on other hand, are travelling through city on their own, which helps them to break free from constraints of domestic interior. However, these liberating journeys are not independent of their economic situation. In Priestley’s novel horizon of female protagonist’s urban journeys is restricted by her income. This leaves her dependent on financial resources of a male companion, whose company is also crucial for gaining access to places which are normally no-go areas for women. This paper explores questions of class, as well as gender, and serves to challenge notions of City and its images in literature, such as those which exclusively identify urban modernism with universalising tendencies, when dominant discourse in modernist literature identifies experiences of isolation and strangeness as the reality of all human (Raymond Williams). In texts by Priestley and Tergit two female characters, both of whom are from middle class backgrounds, differ in their perceptions of harsh economic realities of city life in late 1920s. Priestley’s protagonist responds to her negative perceptions of commercialisation by taking imaginary flights of fantasy into sheltered scenes of bourgeois family life or into travel literature, where women visit exotic places as companions to adventurous men. This heroine leans towards romanticised perceptions of her surroundings which also mirror contemporary imperialist values. Tergit’s text, on other hand, provides a female protagonist with a more realistic perspective, one which also contrasts with escapist fantasies of her male counterpart. Here woman is shown as being more at home in city. Walking about freely without ‘any particular purpose’, she is not dependent on a male companion. This construction of a female city dweller challenges, according to Littlejohn, gendered concept of the  flâneur , which is prevalent in literary perceptions of City. However, different perspectives on gender relations employed by Priestley and Tergit do not, in end, prevent either woman from being deserted by their male lovers - who leave city on their own in order to explore other spaces.