Wilhelmine Berlin and Imperial Vienna in the Journalistic Writings of Theodor Fontane and Daniel Spitzer - Writing the City from Within (Hardcover)

Famous for his late novels, Theodor Fontane was also a prolific journalist whose articles fill several volumes of his collected works. As a journalist, Fontane wrote extensively about Berlin: in articles that deal specifically with the city and its inhabitants, in book and theater reviews, and in his well-known essay collections Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg (1862-82) which are being rediscovered in today's united Germany. Daniel Spitzer (1835-93) was a famous columnist whose widely read essays on Vienna, Wiener Spaziergange (1865-92), were published as a weekly column in Viennese newspapers for almost 30 years. Though less well known than Fontane today, Spitzer deserves greater scholarly attention both as a keen observer of urban life in late-nineteenth-century Vienna. As residents of Berlin and Vienna, both Fontane and Spitzer wrote "city texts" from the perspective of insiders whose comments on their cities' day-to-day changes differ from outsiders' accounts of the exceptional in travelogues. The city writings of both these men offer highly interesting insights on parallels and disparities between these twomost important cities in the German-speaking world. Christa Gaug received her Ph.D. in German from the University of Texas at Austin and is a lecturer in the German Department at Rice University in Houston.