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

Abstract

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