This article explores how contemporary theories of gentrification improve our understanding of past urban change. Discussing municipal housing statistics and local newspaper coverage from late-19th-century Berlin, it first illustrates the tremendous increase in rents that the German capital witnessed in the second half of the century. Rather than focusing on the rise of highly segregated neighbourhoods as urban historians usually do, the article then studies to what extent the growth of industrial cities like Berlin was accompanied by physical displacement in existing proletarian and middle-class quarters. Based on a methodologically innovative use of historical address books, it thus portrays an uneven geography of inner-city transformation. By compiling samples of socio-demographic change on the micro-level of individual streets, this article reveals that historical patterns of displacement followed a peculiar logic that affected socio-economic groups very differently. The article indicates that there exists a contentious pre-history of gentrification that has been utterly neglected in urban studies so far. At the same time, it epitomises the potential of historical research for the advancement of urban theory.
Over the past few years, scholars from a broad range of disciplines have started to explore the role that emotions play in the collective memory of social movements. Against this backdrop, they have proposed that activists do not necessarily commemorate failed struggles by drawing on negative emotions such as suffering and grief. As a case in point, the interdisciplinary literature has drawn attention to the fact that the historical labour movement commemorated even events that ended in bloodshed and defeat, such as the Paris Commune of 1871, through performances and writings that evoked feelings of hope and joy. Analysing commemorative practices by the German labour movement in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this article shows that Commune memory differed considerably in Germany. In a first step, the article shows that during the two decades following the Commune’s bloody demise, German socialists remembered the Paris Commune by drawing on hatred, anger, and grief – not hope or joy. In a second step, the article demonstrates that while the 1890s did see the rise of memory practices that emphasized hope, this was a peculiar kind of hope largely detached from the historical event that was commemorated. By the turn of the century, the German labour movement had established a memory tradition that saw the Commune as a painful but necessary step in the forward march of the movement. In a short conclusion, the article explores some of the reasons why memory traditions by the German labour movement differed from the pattern detected elsewhere. In so doing, it shows that the change in the affective repertoire corresponded to a change in the political needs of the movement. The conclusion thus points to how the historical examples discussed here contributes to a better understanding of role of emotions in social movements more generally.
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