The Democratization of Leisure and the Modernities of Space and Place in Theodor Fontane's Berlin Novels

As Berlin developed into a modern metropolis in the nineteenth century, writers took note of the connections between the city's expanding geography and its burgeoning leisure and consumer culture. Varying accounts in novels, feuilleton essays, and city guides documented the incessant changes to the city's leisure landscapes and helped residents and tourists alike discover all the various outlets for amusement, diversion, and refuge.1 One such writer, the novelist and journalist Julius Rodenberg, connected the growing popular enthusiasm for leisure to the geographical expanse of the city. In 1 882, he asked: "Wohin nun, mein Freund? Ganz Berlin gehort dir; entscheide, triff deine Wahl" (50-51). While Rodenberg celebrated the empowering potential of Berlin's seemingly limitless options for amusements, others identified particular areas of the city as centers of leisure. Berlin W, for instance, became the moniker not only for the affluent residential areas west of the Tiergarten, but also a synonym for an urban space of consumption and entertainment. In the area of central Berlin known as Berlin C, Leipzigerstrase, Unter den Linden, and FriedrichstrafSe became alternatively known as "Kaufstrase," "Laufstrase," and "Saufstrase."2 Such labels not only underscored the variety of amusements and diversions available, but also their increasing accessibility. Indeed, the city's demographic and geographic growth, coupled with its improvements in transportation infrastructure and an emerging leisure industry, helped foster a so-called democratization of leisure.3 Whereas leisure had once been the domain of the aristocracy, all Berliners, regardless of class, could now find an array of locations for recreation, relaxation, and refuge. Theodor Fontane's Berlin novels, in particular L'Adultera (1880), Irrungen, Wirrungen (1887), Frau Jenny Treibel (1892), and Die Poggenpuhls (1896), provide ambivalent explorations of the varied manifestations and ramifications of this democratization of leisure. In each of these texts, particular sites for leisure, from well-known locations such as the Tiergarten, Stralau, and Treptow to new attractions such as Hankels Ablage and Halensee, become contested terrains in this process. As such, the geographic concepts of place and space help to elucidate the courses and outcomes of these contestations. As Yi-Fu Tuan notes, space is abstract and undifferentiated; it only becomes place when we get to know it better and endow it with value (6) . In terms of Berlin' s leisure sites, writers like Rodenberg, with their celebratory profiles of the city, sought to create defined, knowable, and masterable places of leisure that were comfortably set apart from the city's chaotic spaces of masses, traffic, and other urban ills. Fontane's Berlin novels, in contrast, demonstrate how the distinction between place and space is blurry and subject to the vagaries of modern urban life.4 In so doing, these texts perform, to use the words of Michel de Certeau, "a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces and spaces into places" (118). The leisure sites in Fontane's works are sometimes idyllic places of comfort, but also spatial manifestations of the worst of urban life: crowds, noise, chaos, and even existential danger. Moreover, the commercialization of such sites sometimes becomes so apparent that leisure emerges much more as a marketing concept than an actual experience. Yet, the new opportunities available at these leisure sites also sometimes challenge the idea that urban space is inherently bad and place intrinsically good. While the comforts of place can be illusory, the chaotic dimensions of urban leisure spaces can break down stifling traditional social structures, open up new opportunities for those less privileged, and constitute new sources of amusement and pleasure. These varied and inconsistent outcomes underscore how Fontane's novels do not provide harmonious narratives of life in the modern metropolis, but instead reveal the vicissitudes and paradoxes of this experience. …