On the Inner Frontier: Opening German City Borders in the Long Nineteenth Century

In the eighteenth century, most German cities possessed clear physical and conceptual borders. The breach of these borders was a conspicuous sign of the ruptures of modernization that also greatly altered everyday life. This dissertation examines the opening of German city borders beginning in the eighteenth century with the removal of fortifications and moats through nineteenth-century battles over opening city gates, removing walls, lifting border taxes and expanding municipal boundaries, and closes with debates at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth over urban growth and the relationship between the growing city and the German nation. Placing archival research on four different cities selected to represent the diversity of German urban experience (Berlin, Leipzig, Oldenburg and Paderborn) in the context of an emerging national discussion of urban form, I use local debates over the opening of city borders to investigate the relationship between the experience of the city as a local place and the changing notions of what it meant to be each urban, modern and German in the nineteenth century. This project draws on recent developments in German history and urban studies that have pointed to the investigation of spatial practice as a way of integrating the history of material conditions and imagined communities. The investigation of the urban border is a particularly valuable subject of study for this purpose, since its opening was of both symbolic and practical significance. It also contributes to the growing field of literature on the relationship between local experience and the nineteenth-century nation. A return to local environments has enriched our understanding of modernization processes traditionally thought to loosen the ties between understanding of modernization processes traditionally thought to loosen the ties between identity and proximate place. Urban borders were both established and dissolved through a confluence of local, regional and national concerns as local actors strategically appropriated universal and national categories to frame their interests. In this way, abstract notions of both nation and modernity constituted and were constituted by the concrete experience of urban spaces.