Week 8- The Nation and The City

Lecture 1- The Nation

Linguistic Nationalism 

Habsburg empire:

• German was administrative language, spoken in cities  

• Other languages such as Lithuanian and Czech were peasant dialects 

Hungary:

• German becomes administrative language, taking over Latin

• Latin was language of Hungarian Nobles- used in parliament until 1843

Bohemia

• Educational reforms- Primary school in Czech 

• High school in German

• Czechs protest (Czech identifying people in the city)- Czech nationalism begins here; traditional dress starts coming in the city 

Taking traditions and amplifying them, pretending there is a unity to them and long-standing history to them. 

Nationalism: often said that modern Nationalism did not exist until French Revolution

Revolutions of 1848 aka the Barricades, The Springtime of the Peoples

• Catalyst for turning growing uprising into full revolutions

• Berlin 1848- period leading up to 1848 is called the “Pre-march”, members of public being increasingly frustrated with the backwards system about the nobility and church

• Vienna 1848 

• Bohemia (modern day Czech Republic): intensification of Nationalism in both Czech and German speakers in 1848 – Czechs see themselves as Czech, German speakers see themselves as German 

Austro-Hungarian Empire 

• Declared in 1867

• Kingdom of Hungary does not only speak Hungarian- there is Ukrainian and more

• New Hungarian policy did not recognize the other linguistic groups and nationalities the way Nationalist wanted to- made Hungarian the official language

• Transylvania: Romanian (Peasant) speakers demanding Romanian national language rights– shocked everybody

• 40,000 people died in ethnic civil war 

Outcome of merging empires:

• Turns Austro empire to Austro-Hungarian 

• Francis Joseph becomes king of Hungary

• Questions of other nationalities within the empire exists: Czechs, Pols, Slavic speakers 

• Nationalism becomes the political language of the empire

Before

After

Unification of Germany

Creation of Frankfurt Parliament in 1848 

• Parliamentary deputies from the German states, meet and demand to unite Germany

• Not the nation making the state- but the state making the nation

Lecture 2- Mass Culture and Cities

Transition from Mass medieval centres considered sites of both social unrest and poor health → urbanized cities

• At least 12,000 building knocked down 

• Working poor people relocated from the centre to the edges 

• Demolition broke up old neighbourhoods where labour took place, and sources of unrest 

• New wide streets were too wide for barricades to go up, replacing narrow streets

Good for:

• Commerce and capital, these boulevards could build shops on, accumulating huge amounts of money

• Speculators would get tipped off where the next demolition would come from and place their shops there making huge profit  

New buildings:

• Apartments buildings essentially the same on every floor

• Increasing separation between private and public sphere. Domesticity.  

• New middle class lifestyle develops that relies on distinction between public and private 

• Relied on strict gender roles: middle classness became inseparable from the gender roles of domesticity.  

Vienna: 

• Had a ring road built to bring Vienna into modernity, built around the medieval center

• There is no central square, the city is organized in a circular flow so there is not a common point where revolutionaries can gather 

Mass Consumption

• Au Bon Marche, first department store built in 1869

• Endless products meant that any bourgeoise fantasy of consumption can be fulfilled

• Created an international prototype seen throughout Europe and North America 

• Small shopkeepers couldn’t keep up, disappeared  

Mass Leisure:

• Music hall becomes immensely popular as more people can afford it  

• Professional Sports (1863 in England- Professional Football began)  

• First Modern Olympics in 1896 

• First Tour de France, 1903– cycling becomes a major hobby, everyone was on bikes  

• Riding bicycles became a feminist cause: liberating for women to not rely on men for transportation. “Bicycles had done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world”

• Changed the way women dressed; out were corsets and long billowing skirts, instead they had bloomers (baggy pants) which were more convenient to ride bicycles 

• Travel business boomed in middle class- travel to sea, abroad via train 

• Photography- Kodak 1, first personal camera. Amateur photography emerged as a major hobby

A Society of Strangers

• Emergence of modernity meant that we lived in a society of strangers 

• Old forms of exchange, relations, and socialization were replaced 

• Zooming through cities to cities with no sense of place 

• Encounter strangers on mass at train stations or at department stores 

• Not long before, many lived in enclosed rural communities but now lived as anonymous individuals amongst strangers, lead to a feeling of dislocation or loss of sense of place

• Sitting in cramped space (bus) but avoiding eye contact because it is an awkward situation

• Metropolitan Underground Railway (precursor to Subway) – huge amounts of people

• Sociologists emerging to study “society” instead of “community” 

• Era of statistical analysis: 

Fin-de-siècle (end of 1800 century) Vienna and Modernism

• Time of extraordinary intellectual creativity; emergence of Freud, etc 

• Rejection of the bourgeois order emerged in 19th century, break free from the passionless, highly gendered society   

• Sigmund Freud, founder of Psychoanalysis 

• Grew up in highly dissimilated Jewish household, pursued a career in science 

• Began to pursue a materialist theory of the mind, moved to Paris to work with a scientist who studied mental causes of physiological phenomenons 

• Society with all its rules and norms made people repress their desires, and by analysing them, we could better understand people's behaviours more broadly  

• The “Interpretation of Dreams” as signs of the unconscious. 

Gustav Klimt’s Art

Leads to modernism, finding alternate ways of representing art and reality