The beauty of Molly Loberg's book lies in her attention to everyday life, which she presents to us in a variety of ways: we meet shop owners, flower sellers, police officers, poster designers and many more who used and claimed Berlin's streets. There is no shortage of studies focusing on the German capital in the first half of the twentieth century examining either its exciting nightlife or its political divisions. But rather than trotting this familiar path, Loberg convincingly combines the areas of politics, consumption and space to tackle issues of order/disorder, appropriation and individuality. Divided into six main chapters that chronologically cover the period from 1918 to 1938, the key focus of this study is more on Weimar Berlin than the title suggests. Berlin's urban life demonstrated, according to Molly Loberg, ‘tension between authoritarian and anarchical tendencies’ (p. 16). These tensions existed in Weimar and Nazi Berlin, but they were used to very different effects. The case-studies used in this book demonstrate this point. These could be disruptively violent events like the anti-Semitic Scheunenviertel riots in 1923 as much as using the new freedoms of the Weimar Republic for commercial opportunities. Sentiments that mobilized the ordered city could mean more traffic safety for urban dwellers as well as regulating and restructuring city spaces according to Nazi ideology.

Beginning with the visual impact of urban space, chapter 1 introduces the readers to advertising and poster campaigns in post-1918 Berlin. Political changes and interpretations were now visually present due to short-lived notices on advertising pillars or buildings. Commercial messages were communicated too, and the municipal council realized that money could be made out of urban space. Chapter 2 continues this focus on commerce but turns to the local neighbourhood and its streets. Shopkeepers and street hawkers were in competition not only for consumers’ attention but also for urban space. Hawkers insisted that they served the working and middle classes and that their profession was an important one. In fact, Molly Loberg demonstrates that hawkers linked their demands to urban space to the democratic ideas of the new republic – public space was there for everyone, they claimed (pp. 87–8). The important single incident discussed in this chapter is the Scheunenviertel riot of late 1923. Anti-Semitic looting of shops and attacks on street hawkers dominated the event and continued even after the police had arrived.

Shifting from the early years of the Weimar Republic to the middle of the 1920s, chapter 3 moves away from commerce and focuses on the policing of space and crowds. Here, Loberg shows how traffic policing and street regulations were used to order and, indeed, to modernize urban space. The smooth flow of traffic and the ‘disciplined’ use of the streets belonged to efforts to regain control on public space(s) and to manage crowds. This strategy worked better for traffic control than for policing protests and demonstrations. Concluding the focus on the Weimar years, chapter 4 concentrates on the years from 1929 to 1933 and again combines politics and commerce. Shop owners were not just concerned about property crimes and looting in these economically difficult years, but worried about the intensified political clashes on Berlin streets that caused damage to businesses. This chapter concludes the concentration on the Weimar years.

Chapters 5 and 6 focus on Berlin in Nazi Germany. While several areas of tension and conflict continued, the possibilities to ignore or successfully challenge state claims on urban space became smaller. Initially, National Socialist co-ordination and control of urban space, and particularly of consumer habits, proved difficult. However, chapter 5 makes it clear that the space for negotiation of interests between the individual and the authorities became smaller for some. Street activities became contested and regulated, while Jewish shop owners were in danger of being reported by their gentile German business competitors for economic benefits. Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom of November 1938, serves as the concluding incident of the book, establishing again the close link between politics and commerce – this time, however, on a national scale and carried out by Nazi thugs.

Molly Loberg's book thus covers diverse areas of research that have all been individually studied in detail by academic scholars. It is, therefore, perhaps inevitable that there are some oversights in the secondary literature regarding, for example, policing and police control, individuality in the city and the varied political use of urban space. However, this is not to take away from the originality of this study and the different view it gives of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s – one that provides insight into the impact of political changes on everyday urban life, reminding us of the importance of consumption and its close links to politics and space.