In the spirit of a growing interest among historians in ‘transnational’ approaches, which entail an emphasis not so much on international comparisons as on international interactions and ‘transfers’,Footnote ¹ this article explores German views of life in British cities. It explores social and cultural contacts between nations and the theme of cross-cultural influences with particular reference to ideas about urban areas and the sorts of developments that were occurring in them. Big cities have long functioned as central places not only for buying and selling but also for the incubation and transmission of ideas and examples. They have attracted and fascinated not only visitors from nearby regions but also observers from abroad, who have toured and written about them with a view to gaining fresh perspectives on the societies from which they themselves have come. To put it another way, they have served as windows through which foreign conditions and practices could be observed and evaluated, both in horror and in admiration. They have functioned as nodal points in international networks, in which the main actors were various writers, who often found it easier to frame their thoughts in terms of localities than with reference to entire countries. Urban history, although it has often been practised as a narrowly circumscribed kind of microhistory, can thus go hand in with the broader form of historical inquiry – transnational history – to which I refer here. What follows will illustrate this point via an account of both criticisms and more affirmative views of town life by large numbers of travellers and other Germans who took a keen interest in British towns and what was going on there between the mid-1830s and World War I.

Before proceeding to take up this theme in detail, some additional comments about two historiographical traditions that antedate current discussions of the differences between local, national, comparative and transnational approaches are in order. One has to do with German views of the Großstadt (big city) in general. Much writing by historians has emphasized a strong tradition of bitter animosity toward it, which manifested itself (it is argued) in a particularly virulent form of romantic rejection of modernity. In this view, modern urbanization, stimulated as it was by the industrial revolution, evoked a set of emotional and cultural responses that were deeply marked by nostalgic longings for a return to the more settled and attractive conditions of earlier times. The rapid rise not only of Berlin and Hamburg, which by 1910 had 2,071,000 and 932,000 inhabitants respectively, but also of many other places which, since 1800, had climbed from far below to far above the magic mark of 100,000 or more souls (e.g., Munich, Dresden, Düssseldorf and Essen), stimulated a nostalgic longing for earlier modes of settlement. Quaint Kleinstädte (small cities, usually with walls) and unspoiled countrysides functioned in this view as alternatives to the contemporary scene that were highly charged with positive connotations. Such romanticism, clearly evident already in the nineteenth century, reached a crescendo in the ‘blood and soil’ ideology of national socialism.Footnote ² In much of my earlier work, I have sought to modify this view.Footnote ³ I am not going to rehearse my earlier writing in this regard. Suffice it say for now that there were strong tensions between alarm and optimism and that such tensions constitute an important theme in this article.

Historians' views of Germans' views of big cities have been paralleled by another discourse that has to do with Germany and the West. Like the discourse about views of big cities, it too has pointed accusingly to the themes on which it focuses as forerunners and causes of worse to come. It has emphasized Germany's enduring differences from and (until after 1945) its growing hostility toward supposedly more ‘modern’ and ‘progressive’ countries. Hostility toward America has figured heavily in the works of such historians.Footnote ⁴ Writing about German views of Britain has been less abundant and more nuanced. A recent book on this subject shows how complex Nazi views really were.Footnote ⁵ Overall, however, the prevailing ‘master narrative’ of German views of their British cousins has been one in which anglophilia gave way to anglophobia, thus helping to set the stage for both World War I and World War II.Footnote ⁶ As in the case of ideas about cities, ideas about Britain – both sets of ideas having been formed in the nineteenth century – helped to set the stage for the Third Reich, at least in the view of a goodly number of historians.

Without denying either a strong tradition of German anti-urbanism in general or the growth after German unification of an ‘Anglo-German antagonism’, one can nonetheless construct a narrative that differs quite markedly from either of these. Focusing neither on cultural philosophy nor on politics but instead on views of society and of social reform, with particular reference to industrial/urban society, one can detect a trajectory of a quite different sort. This path led from criticism toward commendation. It moved from negativity toward a generally quite positive assessment of what Britain had to offer for Germany to consider. Looking at Germans as they looked through urban windows abroad, one can see developments in thinking about Britain that paralleled German feelings about cities more generally. German reflections on British cities reflected a growing emphasis by many Germans – despite all of the misgivings of the anti-urbanists – on the real benefits of living in places where progress seemed to occurring almost everywhere one looked. In the case of German thinking about Britain, there was a particular emphasis on virtues of social voluntarism, which Britons appeared to display to great advantage, although there was also growing recognition of achievements in the area of local government. In both instances, initiatives by members of the urban middle classes seemed to betoken an abundance of what Germans refer to as Bürgerlichkeit, or civic-mindedness. Whether Germans pointed – as many of them did – to ways in which British urban do-gooders deserved emulation or pointed to ways in which British municipalities seemed to be catching up with their German counterparts, their views revealed a widespread sense of commonality. Their thoughts thus pointed away from rather than toward the international conflict that inevitably tends to colour our view of the period that preceded it.

It must be pointed out that observations and influences did not occur only on one side. As was shown some years ago in a work by E.P. Hennock (albeit one that focused more on developments at the national than at the local level), examples were noted and ideas were exchanged in a two-way process of transnational communication in which affinities between Britons and Germans were affirmed by the former as well as by the latter.Footnote ⁷ More recently, Hennock has reminded us again of the complex interrelationships between the social histories of these two countries (albeit in a work that focuses more on comparisons than on influences).Footnote ⁸ Historians based in Germany have also explored these themes, one of them – Jürgen Reulecke – having pointed to ways in which British observers expressed praise for ‘honorary’ participation by members of the German Bürgertum in the administration of support for the poor at the local level through the so-called ‘Elberfeld system’ of poor relief.Footnote ⁹ That said, the rest of this article concentrates on how conditions and developments in Britain looked in the eyes of Germans.

Despite a good deal of enthusiasm for the diversity and dynamism of London, particularly among liberals of a moderate bent who echoed the anglophilia that had been so pronounced in the eighteenth century, discourse about urban Britain during the 1830s and 1840s was primarily characterized by deep misgivings.Footnote ¹⁰ These sentiments reflected both conservative and radical distaste for a milieu in which, it was asserted, the untrammelled freedom associated with laissez-faire had caused misery among all too many workers and their families, particularly in urban areas.Footnote ¹¹ As in the thinking of the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, there was a widespread feeling among German visitors in the 1830s and 1840s that the broad consequences of industrial urbanization were deeply damaging to the great majority of city dwellers. Sombre and ugly cityscapes served as stultifying settings for the lives of city dwellers, which were all too often unhappy and short. Cognizant of the fact that Britain had proceeded much farther than their own country on the path of industrial and urban expansion, observers from Germany saw in Britain harbingers of what likely lay in store for them and their fellow Germans, and most of them were quite appalled by what they perceived.

The writer August Jäger pointed accusingly to ‘moral decay, the commercial spirit, deceit, egoism, and evil of every sort’. In the big city, an overriding concern with practical utility degraded men both morally and spiritually. At some points in his indictment, Jäger suggested that the evils he had mind were distinctively English, but he indicated elsewhere that the ills that concerned him were in fact present in big cities everywhere.Footnote ¹² They posed such a great threat in London precisely because of its enormous size. ‘Just as London’, he wrote, ‘is the biggest and most populated city, all the vices indicated here and many others manifest themselves to the highest and most shocking degree.’ London was unusual, but it was not sui generis. Here we encounter – as was the case in much of literature that concerns us here – a pronounced sense that in going to Britain the traveller could get valuable insight not just about a foreign country in the here and now but also about what the future held in store for his own land.

Disapproval of London was rather restrained in comparison with the criticisms that arose with regard to newer cities in the industrial north – much smaller cities, which had, however, grown much more rapidly in recent decades – Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield. Friedrich Raumer, after writing positively about his visit to the capital, wrote about his approach to Birmingham in ways that conjured up images of hell: ‘As far as the eye can reach, all is black, with coal mines and iron works; and from this gloomy desert rise countless slender pyramidal chimneys, whose flames illumine the earth, while their smoke darkens the heavens.’ More generally, he voiced the view with regard to most of what he visited outside London that it was quite monotonous. Pointing to ‘a certain similarity and repetition’ in what he had seen, ‘from exchanges to prisons, and from soft cotton to hard iron’, he concluded that although English towns surpassed German ones in terms both of size and of wealth they fell short when it came to ‘peculiarity of character and decided contrast’. Only the university towns, Oxford and Cambridge, stood out as exceptions to the general rule.Footnote ¹³

The writers who produced the most detailed and explicit critiques of conditions in cities located themselves either to Raumer's right or to his left. In doing so, they placed much more emphasis than he did on the perceived plight of urban workers. Catholic conservatives such as the social philosopher Franz von Baader and the various contributors to the Historisch-Politische Blätter für das katholische Deutschland were especially harsh in denouncing laissez-faire as a concomitant of liberalism, and they inevitably focused their attention on the situation of the lower classes in cities.Footnote ¹⁴ The Protestant conservative Victor Aimé Huber, who held positions as a professor of literature at several universities starting in 1833 (and at the University of Berlin 1843–51), voiced similar displeasure in a series of articles that dealt with relationships between politics and social policy. Appearing in a new journal by the title of Janus that he began to edit in 1845, after a trip to England the previous year, his essays emphasized the deleterious impact of laissez-faire liberalism on the daily lives of ordinary people.Footnote ¹⁵

Explicit criticism of the situation in cities was most readily apparent among writers to Raumer's left. Take for example the moderate Johann Georg Kohl, a professor of geography who authored numerous books about many parts of the wider world. Echoing Raumer, he wrote in 1844 of Leeds that ‘like its brethren, Sheffield, Manchester, and the other great manufacturing cities of England’, it could not boast of any ‘interesting antiquities or historical associations’, and that like them it was ‘a dirty, smoky, disagreeable town’. But what he saw in such towns alarmed him – as his reference to dirt and smoke already began to suggest – for reasons that went well beyond the bruised sensibilities of the offended aesthete. Industrial cities were not only ugly but also unhealthy, physiologically, socially and morally. In his description of Manchester, Kohl took note of large numbers of people who wandered about nomadically, ‘making a precarious income, sometimes by begging and selling trifling articles, and sometimes by various frauds and depredations’. He saw factory workers whom the advance of machinery had, in his eyes, ground down ‘into the abyss of wretchedness and degradation’. When he called attention also to huge increases in crime, as well as in numbers of houses of prostitution and numbers of taverns, he did so in order to underline defects in social relationships and opportunities as well as in built environments. The quarters inhabited by Manchester labourers were ‘the most melancholy and disagreeable parts of the town, squalid, filthy, and miserable to a deplorable degree’, and they inevitably took a heavy toll in all sorts of ways on those who lived there.Footnote ¹⁶

Gustaf Höfken and Georg Weerth were radical journalists, both of whom examined urban ills in Britain. Having been imprisoned twice in the 1830s for his political activities, Höfken wrote about his foreign travels not only in newspaper articles but also in a much lengthier study of the English scene. He bemoaned the rapidity with which the agrarian population, under the impact of industrialization, had deserted the land in favour of the towns. Like Kohl, he echoed conservative complaints about lower-class ‘immorality’. Emphasizing environmental factors, he complained bitterly that in British cities overcrowding, excessive levels of disease and other ‘harmful physical influences’ helped to produce a ‘race’ (Geschlecht) whose members not only suffered from high death rates but also displayed thoughtlessness, frivolity, immoderation and inability to resist sensual pleasures.Footnote ¹⁷ Weerth worked between 1843 and 1846 as a clerk in Bradford, where he wrote a series of sharply critical reports, many of them intended for publication in the widely read Kölnische Zeitung. Assembled slightly later for publication as a book but not actually published as such until much later, his observations reeked with misgivings of a sort that clearly prefigured the sentiments expressed in the following decade by Charles Dickens. Arrival in Bradford resembled descent into hell. Although Manchester, where the air lay on one's head like lead, was bad enough, it felt like paradise in comparison with the city where Weerth lived. Bradford was, he wrote, a place in which ‘one feels as if one has been locked up with the devil alive’.Footnote ¹⁸

It is within the context of views such as Raumer's, Kohl's, Höfken's and Weerth's that one needs to place the still more critical views expressed by the young Friedrich Engels, who like Weerth resided and worked in an industrial town. His book on English workers must be seen not only as part of a socialist tradition but also as part of a much wider effort to make sense of the industrial city – and in particular of the penalties it imposed on many if not most of its inhabitants.Footnote ¹⁹ Long famous in Britain (where it was translated into English in the 1880s) as well as in Germany by virtue of its role as part of the background for the Communist Manifesto, it stands out as the best known and the most trenchant of all the critiques of industrial cities, whether in Britain or elsewhere. Like reports by others, but much more memorably and influentially, it combines depressing descriptions of crowding and filth with angry accounts of suffering experienced by people who – unlike Engels – experienced it on a daily basis. Paying particular attention, in a chapter on ‘The great towns’, to Manchester (where he was employed in a branch of a family firm), he repeatedly denounced living conditions there. Greed by bourgeois builders had resulted in workers' dwellings that were ‘miserable and wholly lacking in comforts’, which in turn gave rise to all sorts of pathological behaviour by the people who inhabited them. At the same time, however – and here he offered a fresh perspective – Engels depicted the urban milieu as a force for positive change. Instead of simply denouncing it as a site of evil and oppression, Engels also pointed to ways in which the urban environment could and would give rise to forces that would lead to social amelioration. Great cities, he observed, were ‘the birthplace of the working-class movement’, which would ultimately bring about a revolutionary transformation both of the cities and of the rest of society as well.Footnote ²⁰

In the more conservative decade of the 1850s, after both the collapse of Chartism in Britain and the failure of the revolutions of 1848–49 on the continent, views such as those voiced by Engels in 1845 gave way to quite different perspectives on the urban scene, which on the whole were decidedly more positive. To be sure, there were still those who dwelled on urban misery among the masses. Sympathetic to political radicalism, the travel writer and social critic Gustav Rasch insisted in an account of his journeys in London – particularly in recounting his ‘night-time wanderings through disreputable quarters and streets’ – on depicting poverty and suffering rather than the life of ‘the upper ten thousand’. At the other end of the political spectrum, a leading compendium of conservative views contained an article on Manchester whose author emphasized both what he regarded as the quite limited influence of cultural institutions on the urban population as a whole and the prevalence of political radicalism.Footnote ²¹ Indictments such as these, however, counted for much less than did an unmistakably laudatory literature. The latter described locations that were far more attractive. A particularly upbeat view of the metropolis asserted itself in travel accounts that appeared around the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace, visitors at which almost inevitably tended to evince overall affection for the city in which it took place.Footnote ²² Enthusiasm for London appeared subsequently in the writing of the political exile Max Schlesinger and Theodor Fontane, who spent several years there in the 1850s as a journalist and took the opportunity while doing so to repeat sentiments of awed fascination and respect he had expressed earlier.Footnote ²³

What bears particular emphasis here, however, is the emergence of a strand of thinking that combined both criticism and affirmation. Particularly significant as a harbinger of later developments that will receive more attention below, it revealed attentiveness both to urban sore spots and to ways in which urban energies could work to overcome them. In contrast to Engels, the writers under consideration at this point evinced no sympathy for radical upheaval. Their writing pointed away from the supposed follies of revolution toward quite different efforts and activities. It expressed approval of efforts and developments in cities that were quite acceptable to moderates and conservatives. It focused on social reform, which was regarded by its advocates as having already begun much more effectively than any revolution could ever do to produce tangible gains for city dwellers. Admirers of relatively modest efforts to bring about urban improvement gradually were not unwilling to recognize the persistence and in some cases the exacerbation of urban ills. They nonetheless saw in English cities examples of beneficial action as well as of regrettable misfortune. They warmly welcomed city-based readiness to confront and seek to improve some of the conditions that had contributed to recent outbreaks of popular protest.

One of the earliest exponents of this sort of outlook was Victor Aimé Huber. Referred to above as a conservative critic of English liberalism as it manifested itself in places such as Manchester during the 1840s, he included in a later account of his travels in Britain repeated expressions of concern about the quality of urban life. He described an area near Leeds, for example, as consisting of ‘filthy worker's housing’, where numerous children resembled ‘noxious vermin’.Footnote ²⁴ His political conservatism having been strengthened by the revolutions of 1848–49, Huber sought nonetheless to combat discontent through reform rather than through repression. In this connection, he campaigned in the 1850s and 1860s as an advocate of what Germans called Genossenschaftswesen (i.e. co-operative associations, or organized self-help). He expected members of the upper classes to help foster it, with a view to promoting social harmony under conditions of accelerating industrialization. Much of what he wrote reflected his awareness of developments abroad, particularly in England, which he held up as a model for would-be reformers in Germany.

In 1852, in a lecture he gave at a meeting of the Prussian Central Association for the Welfare of the Working Classes, Huber reported enthusiastically on co-operatives in English cities. Dealing with both consumer co-operatives, such as the Rochedale Equitable Pioneers Society, and a variety of producer co-operatives, he pointed to two sorts of advantages that accrued from the activities of such organizations. They not only made it possible for their members to save money, by cutting out the middle man, but also helped to strengthen a sense of moral responsibility toward fellow members of whatever group or groups to which one belonged. Reflecting desires by otherwise isolated individuals to help themselves collectively, these institutions also reflected guidance and leadership that had been provided by members of ‘an intellectual or social aristocracy’ – men such as the reformist clergymen Frederick D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley and others who, in organizations such as the Society for the Promotion of Working Men's Associations, agitated and acted in favour of the groups Huber admired. These men stood out as social philanthropists, who were helping workers to help themselves.Footnote ²⁵

Huber returned to the theme of co-operation repeatedly. In a series of letters he wrote while travelling abroad in the summer of 1854, he reported further on the views of Maurice, whom he praised for his efforts both to make Christianity relevant to social problems and to help improve working men's education, most notably in his working men's college. He also described the activities of many other men, such as the seventy members of a newly reconstituted, London-based Association for Promoting Industrial and Provident Societies, who similarly sought to spread co-operative principles among workers. In addition, he wrote about visits to Rochdale, a key site in the co-operative movement's history, and to Leeds, where he had attended a general conference on co-operation at which Maurice had played a prominent part.Footnote ²⁶ In one of his last writings, which appeared in the year of his death in 1869, he summed matters up by once again proclaiming that co-operatives had benefited their members not only materially but also morally and intellectually. ‘The good spirit of cooperation’ exercised a beneficial influence that no other social arrangements could replace.Footnote ²⁷

Meanwhile, similar views had found expression in a general treatment of English society by a visiting economist, Hermann J.F. Schultze, who similarly embedded recognition of urban shortcomings within what was fundamentally a celebratory narrative of social improvement. Beginning his book with an enthusiastic celebration of England in general as a country that exhibited inexhaustible energy, especially in commercial and industrial cities, he went on in his remarks about Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham to give due regard to their ‘dark sides’. Depressingly uniform houses and sickly workers who indulged in unacceptably raucous behaviour on Saturday evenings characterized an urban milieu that lacked both aesthetic attractiveness and internal discipline. Urban conditions reminded Schulze of the enormous contrasts that characterized English life and of the yawning gap between poverty and wealth. ‘The great fluctuations to which the industrial population is exposed’, he wrote, ‘lead to wildness among these undisciplined masses, which are tightly pressed together in the great cities.’Footnote ²⁸ And yet, despite all this, Schulze's confidence in ‘the full energy and the great future of the English nation’ remained intact. In addition to narrow selfishness, the English also evinced a spirit of Christian charity, which was complemented by a ‘spirit of association’. This spirit manifested itself in a multitude of voluntary contributions to the welfare of the poor and the disabled. Schulze referred approvingly not only to societies that established hospitals and institutions for the deaf and dumb but also to citizens' support for savings banks, public baths, temperance and education, and he pointed also to urban missions. The totality of such impulses led to the conclusion that English society was basically heading in the right direction.Footnote ²⁹

Interest in ways in which Britons were experiencing problems that had arisen in connection with the rise of the factory and the city intensified as Germany itself made the shift – a relatively abrupt one – during the decades that followed national unification from being a still largely rural country to being one that was predominantly urban. Particularly in the years between the early 1880s and 1914, as the percentage of the German population that qualified officially as urban rose from a little over 41 to over 60 per cent, Germans focused in more detail than ever before on urban life across the North Sea. Although the discrepancies in regard to levels of urban growth that had earlier made looking at Britain useful as a means of glimpsing what might be in store for their own country were being rapidly reduced, interest in British cities as well as in their own was in the ascendant. Certainly exceeding what had been apparent during the preceding three decades, it was now stimulated by a combination of anxieties and hopes. The growth of slums in the German capital made it imperative to take a close look at the much larger slums in London. Growing anxieties among members of the Bürgertum (middle class) with regard to the rise of an organized proletariat, which consisted disproportionately of city dwellers, similarly stimulated desires in Germany to study developments in Britain. The British had experienced not only far-reaching urbanization but also the emergence of a large labour movement, and its presence also contributed to German curiosity. In a situation in which urban workers in Germany increasingly tended to support Social Democracy, Germans wanted to know why it was that in Britain workers, albeit supportive of trade unions, were on the whole so much less militant. In this connection, it bears emphasis that for many Germans careful attention to developments abroad served as a means of acquiring insights into ways of beginning to master difficulties at home. Widespread desires to compare differing strategies for the pursuit of urban reform (conceived of in part – but only in part – as a means of combating threats from below) stood out clearly. For a wide variety of reasons and with a broad range of perspectives, German visitors to Britain and other writers about Britain thus participated in an increasingly intensive discussion of urban conditions and developments across the North Sea.

Even though, as we shall see shortly, they were off-set by competing discourses that pointed in a very different direction, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century worries about the downside of the urban upswing in Britain found renewed expression in numerous writings. Like criticisms discussed earlier, expressions of such unease served as essential background to the discourse of social reform. It was in large part, after all, urban problems that gave rise to efforts to bring about urban improvements.

A young student of theology, Walther Classen, expressed widespread disquiet when he wrote at the turn of the century about his observations during a recent tour that had taken him to several cities, among them not only London but also Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield and Glasgow. He lamented the fate of the many families who had to live in a ‘sea of stone’, where they inevitably suffered both physically and morally. Subject both to industrial pollution and to ‘spiritually deadening uniformity’, city dwellers in the places he had visited illustrated unmistakably the dire consequences of having lost their ancestors' familiarity with life on the land and with labour in small workshops. The big city did not serve as a true home (Heimat), and as a result all too many of its inhabitants experienced psychological and spiritual degeneration of a sort that led to ‘bitterness, frustrated hope, and despair’. Such individuals were not merely pitiable. They were also dangerous. ‘The condition of large parts of the British population’, Classen complained, ‘is barbaric, and they live in worse filth, drunkenness, and dissipation than the ancient Germans.’ Returning to this theme later in his account, Classen fumed again as follows: ‘How unbelievably ugly, deplorable, [and] barbaric all of that [the current situation in the cities] is! What . . . vice, what fearful alcoholism . . . what a lack of household capabilities . . . [and] of the foundations of culture: order, diligence, cleanliness, discipline, self-respect!’Footnote ³⁰

Classen's observations built on and were echoed by remarks by others, who commented in more place-specific fashion about particular towns. Some picked up the earlier theme of conditions in northern and industrial cities, which had drawn so much attention in the 1830s and 1840s. The writer Ludwig Freiherr von Ompteda began his report on Manchester, ‘the capital of cotton’, by describing it as a ‘bee-hive’, in which everything was organized for purposes of production. People worked there with a view to acquiring enough money so that they could live elsewhere, although in fact only a tiny minority of those who were engaged in the textile industry succeeded in this regard. Despite some stately squares and splendid buildings here and there, its appearance was not at all appealing. ‘The uniform rows of blackened masses of houses extend’, he wrote, ‘under the dim light of a rainy sky in unending straight lines, criss-crossed by the filthy waters of the Irrwell River.’ Ompteda strengthened his indictment by recounting ‘an evening in the slums’, which enabled him to observe an appalling assortment of common lodging houses as well as taverns. He concluded by describing lodging houses for women as hellish places, where most of the residents were idle, unkempt and drunk. Gustaf Steffen, several of whose works on Britain were translated from Swedish into German, added to the stockpile of such remarks. He too used the metaphor of the bee-hive to describe the industrial scene, going on to lament a process of urban growth that pointed toward ever greater destruction of unspoiled nature as a result of the spread of ‘brick and mortar deserts’. He found Sheffield, one of the ‘metropolises of metallurgy’, particularly unattractive, characterized as it was by ‘filthy and monotonous streets and by a smoke-filled atmosphere’.Footnote ³¹

Commentators on the urban scene focused most of all on the British capital. It increasingly riveted the attention of foreigners as well as natives, to the point where more was written about it than about all other cities in Britain put together. Although visitors in the 1880s already complained about what one of them referred to as the ‘social misery’ that, despite the fabulous wealth of ‘the upper ten thousand’, consigned all too many Londoners to a condition of ‘bestiality’, indictments became much more frequent in the 1890s. The writer Wilhelm Brand, in a chapter devoted to the East End, described that part of the capital as a place beset by suffering and vice to an extent unequalled anyway else in the world! The London ‘slums’, with their overcrowding and their homelessness, had given rise to drunkenness, brutality and depravity to such an extent that, in ‘these sewers of humanity’, there was little to be hoped for from the resident population of adults. Any prospect of improvement rested on the possibility that younger people might be raised under conditions substantially better than those to which their parents had been subjected. Although Paul Fischer, writing for series of writings aimed at workers that was published under the auspices of the Social Democratic Party, focused initially on worsening conditions of work and on the growth in the East End of an ‘industrial reserve army’, his forebodings also rested on the economic state of the entire area and on residential conditions. Citing the Booth survey as well as Andrew Mearns' Bitter Cry of Outcast London, he explained to his readers the ways in which not only the extreme poverty of the ‘lumpenproletariat’ but also extensive neediness among others who were only slightly better off led to pervasive disease and hopelessness. He summed up his indictment by quoting the poet Shelley: ‘Hell is a city much like London.’ After the turn of the century, criticism continued. One author bemoaned both the utter homelessness that pointed people in the direction of night refuges and the extreme overcrowding experienced by hundreds of thousands of families who had residences that consisted of only a single room. Another quoted the phrase ‘the richest city in the world’ mockingly. He turned quickly from the subject of the capital's undeniable wealth to the sorry tale of the majority of the population whose members who lived uncomfortably at best and miserably at worst. Inebriation, crime, neglect of children and suicide ran rampant among the capital's numerous poor. Gustaf Steffen summed up such diatribes by referring, in a description of his return to London after an absence from it of more than a decade, to ‘mile after mile of desolate, noxious, and morally injurious slum streets’.Footnote ³²

It bears emphasis that such apprehensions were counterbalanced by (indeed, frequently accompanied by) statements to the effect that Britons had demonstrated and continued to demonstrate praiseworthy willingness and ability to meet the challenges their cities posed. Picking up on ideas voiced earlier by Victor Aimé Huber, many of them evinced a line of thought according to which a vibrant civil society across the North Sea pointed the way toward addressing social problems effectively at the urban level. The bulk of their attention centred on voluntary activities by members of private associations. Their political thinking, such as it was, tended to be left-liberal, or ‘progressive’. But in many cases they chose to focus on social questions instead of politics, working to effect change in a realm where change seemed possible rather than in one where change seemed unlikely. By pointing out the benefits that could accrue from acts of neighbourly kindness, they not only celebrated the efforts of urban activists to overcome both material and psychic deprivation; they also held up examples of city-based voluntarism as examples of responses to urban challenges that contrasted rather sharply with the more top-down approaches that prevailed in Germany itself. Already in the early 1880s, the clergyman Otto Funcke counterbalanced his expressions of anxiety by pointing out that London was a place where the forces of darkness were strongly opposed by the forces of light. Although it and big cities more generally could certainly be regarded in part as ‘monstrosities’, they deserved recognition nonetheless as places that attracted and nourished the best the world had to offer. Their greatness and their virtue were readily apparent in the manifold efforts both of missionaries and of purveyors of charity to build a new Jerusalem in place of the existing Babel. In a similar vein, the clergyman Julius Werner proclaimed in the mid-1890s that it was in ‘darkest England’ that the stars shone most brightly. London, ‘the city of opposites’, was witnessing a multitude of voluntary efforts by Christians to combat sin and deprivation precisely where their foes were strongest. Later, another author wrote approvingly of the substantial advances that had occurred there in recent decades, as members of various organizations had striven to improve both standards of living and moral and cultural conditions.Footnote ³³

In addition to clergymen and others who approached social problems from a primarily religious standpoint, professional economists lent their voices to the celebration of social and moral improvement. Two such academics – Lujo Brentano and Gerhart Schulze-Gävernitz, both of whom discussed social reform in Britain at length – stood out. Members of the influential Association for Social Policy (Verein für Sozialpolitik) as well as professors, they belonged to a wing of the Association that emphasized free trade and individual empowerment, in contrast to bureaucratic measures initiated from above. In Germany, the role of the national state was becoming increasingly pronounced as a result of adoption of new social insurance legislation – starting in the 1880s with regard to sickness, industrial accidents and old-age – but these men wanted to move in different directions, and they expressed their views in part by pointing to England. They did not, however, rely primarily on market-oriented laissez-faire and self-seeking individualism, the effects of which they sought to temper.Footnote ³⁴ They pointed instead to the beneficial effects of undertakings by groups of individuals who worked to promote projects, among others, of the sort extolled earlier by Viktor Aimé Huber. The persons they praised combined religious motivations with practical efforts to enhance the quality of working-class life via broadly philanthropic programmes that comprised both material assistance and, to a greater extent, efforts to bring about educational and cultural uplift. Brentano, in 1883, published a brief volume on ‘the Christian-social movement’.Footnote ³⁵ After touching on the ideas of various thinkers, such as Charles Kingsley, he went on to discuss the growth of co-operatives, before concluding with workers' education. These themes and many more were developed at much greater length less than a decade later in a work by Schulze-Gävernitz, one of Brentano's students, on efforts in Britain to achieve ‘social peace’ throughout the nineteenth century.Footnote ³⁶ Schulze-Gävernitz looked favourably both on British factory legislation (an area in which Germany lagged badly) and on British trade unionism. In line, however with his book's sub-title, which referred to ‘the social and political education of the English people’, he also praised Englishmen such as Thomas Carlyle and others who had sought to awaken the consciences of people with property, motivating them to do their duty toward their less fortunate compatriots. In this connection, he too wrote admiringly about co-operation, both in the area of consumption and in the area of production, which he portrayed as an outstanding example of the practical application of reformist thinking. He also depicted another sort of ameliorative activity – one that was more closely linked to education itself, not just as a matter of influencing public opinion via books but also as an outcome of more organized activity that took place face-to-face. In a lengthy chapter on ‘the university movement’, he discussed the thought of John Ruskin, the pedagogical activities of Arnold Toynbee (an economic historian who lived in East London for several years in the early 1880s before dying in his early thirties), and larger efforts that were inspired both by Ruskin and by Toynbee. Among the institutions that came in for attention, the one that stood out was Toynbee Hall.

Several of the initiatives Brentano and Schulze-Gävernitz discussed received further attention from other observers and commentators. Generally situated, unlike these two economists, outside universities (which in Germany were institutions of the mostly monarchical states of the German Empire) these men and women seldom wrote big books. Their remarks were less sweeping and more in the nature of narrow reportage, often conveyed in articles in magazines, and whatever books they wrote were seldom if ever aimed at elite audiences. The breadth of their testimony testifies nonetheless to the omnipresence of English examples in the thinking of bürgerlichreformers during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Many of them focused heavily on Toynbee Hall, a major motor force behind what came to be known as ‘the settlement house movement’, and other places that resembled it. Named in young Arnold's memory, it opened in 1884 under the leadership of the Anglican clergyman Samuel Augustus Barnett and his wife Henrietta. It served both as a place of residence in Whitechapel in East London for about a dozen recent graduates of Oxford and Cambridge and as a centre for adult education and community service by the residents. As an example of philanthropic reform that was community-oriented, it and its counterparts elsewhere in Britain influenced Americans such as Jane Addams more strongly than visitors and observers from any other country outside Britain, but its influence among Germans was by no means negligible.Footnote ³⁷

A typically laudatory discussion of Barnett's settlement appeared in an article in a journal titled Der Arbeiterfreund (The Worker's Friend), which reported regularly on all sorts of projects being undertaken by would-be benefactors of the working classes.Footnote ³⁸ Published in 1889 under the name of Wilhelm Bode – a leading temperance reformer, a publicist and later a biographer of Goethe – it began by celebrating the man after whom Toynbee Hall had been named, whom Bode praised highly as a scholar who could make his ideas readily intelligible to ordinary people, both in lectures and in casual conversations. Barnett also came in for commendation. He would doubtless have preferred to spend his time in more comfortable settings than the place in which he ended up. He had nonetheless decided to settle in Whitechapel in order to help impart the ‘the best and most beautiful that . . . the age had to offer in the cultural realm’ to people for whom these goods would otherwise have remained inaccessible. Discussion not only of a variety of reading groups and other educational activities led by a dozen of so residents in the neighbourhood but also of more purely recreational activities led Bode to conclude that Barnett was pointing the way toward ‘dispassionate reform and fraternal elevation of the masses’ – the only way in which ‘the social question’ that had given rise to such efforts could be solved.Footnote ³⁹

A quarter of a century later, the prolific publicist Leopold Katscher – a pacifist as well as a progressive – wrote an article for the same journal in which he examined the work done in south London at the Robert Browning Settlement, founded there in 1894. A wide range of activities contributed rightly to its growing reputation as ‘a broadly conceived welfare institution’. Although its founders ostensibly sought to help the poorest of the poor, material assistance was not what counted. What mattered most was a combination of neighbourliness, friendship and opportunities for self-improvement through attendance at free theatrical productions, membership in travel clubs and improved access to savings banks, among other possibilities sponsored by the settlement. In conclusion, Katscher emphasized outreach to children, the lack of overtly political objectives and the importance of the fact that the organization obtained all its funding from charitable donations.Footnote ⁴⁰

We turn now, in more detail, to two individuals who functioned as what one might call ‘observer/practitioners’. Seeking to shine a light on English examples not just in the hope that others would follow suit, they actively emulated the aspirations and the activities of the English men and women whose praises they sang. Doers as well as writers, they sought to link perception with practice.

One such individual was Walther Classen. Born in 1874 in Hamburg into a family of academics on his father's side and civil servants on his mother's, he had by 1900 been trained in theology and had been employed for several years in a working-class part of the city as an assistant to a pastor there who had set up a club for local young people. Selected by a local industrialist and philanthropist to undertake a study tour of cities in Britain referred to above, he wrote a brief volume in which he not only reported gloomily on urban defects but also reported rhapsodically on evidence of what he regarded as ‘social chivalry’. Everywhere in otherwise forsaken areas, he asserted, there were ‘clergymen, missionaries, and philanthropists [who] lived among the people’, evincing a ‘spirit of aristocratic duty’ that represented the admirable values of the social philosopher Thomas Carlyle, as well as Charles Kingsley and others like them.Footnote ⁴¹ Of all the places he visited, the one that interested him the most was Barnett's settlement in Whitechapel. Here, the spirit he esteemed manifested itself to the highest degree, and he went on for page after page describing the manifold activities that took place there. Believing strongly that what was good for England could also be good for Germany, Classen concluded his report with a plea for implementation of ‘the Toynbee Hall idea in Hamburg’. He called for – and later helped to develop and maintain on an ongoing basis – university extensions, continuing education for graduates from elementary schools, popular entertainments (concerts and art exhibitions for adults, sporting events for youths), provision of free information about legal matters, and volunteer work in day-care centres and other institutions that served the urban poor. All of these, he contended, could be effectively fostered via an institution such as the one in East London he had just visited.Footnote ⁴²

Classen's aspirations and efforts were paralleled by those of Alice Salomon. Born in Berlin in 1872 into a Jewish family of the upper middle class, she was essentially idle for half a dozen years after being forced, by virtue of being a woman, to exit from formal schooling when she was still only 15. She found, however, a new purpose in life when she joined a fledgling association known as The Girls' and Women's Groups for Social Assistance. Activity in the ‘The Groups’, in which she soon played a leading role, predisposed her to look favourably on what she regarded as predecessors and models abroad. Like Classen, she looked on Toynbee Hall and other settlement houses with great admiration. Canon Barnett, his wife and their team of young men from Oxford and Cambridge in London and Salomon and her female friends in Berlin seemed to be up to the same thing, and she was quite happy to point to it as a source and as an ongoing inspiration for efforts of the sort in which she herself was engaged. Having first travelled to London to visit a brother who lived there in 1896, when she almost certainly visited Toynbee Hall, and having returned to London in 1899 to take part in a conference of the International Council of Women, Salomon recorded her thoughts about educational philanthropy in the British capital – and its relationship to her own work in the German capital – in several articles that appeared thereafter. She described Toynbee Hall in depth and with warmth, referring in awestruck terms to the sorts of activities carried out by the men who lived there: ‘welfare associations for the poor, establishment of schools for vocational education, holiday camps, support for workers' associations, participation in the university extension movement, in adult education strivings, and so on’. She also emphasized their readiness to serve in unpaid positions in the area of municipal government, their help in overseeing public schools and their contributions to administering the Poor Law.Footnote ⁴³ In addition – in contrast to Bode, Katscher and Classen – Salomon went on to discuss settlements for women: one that opened in Southwark in 1887 as well as the better known Hull House in Chicago (whose founder, Jane Addams, later became a close friend). ‘This expansion of the settlement movement as a result of participation by women’, she wrote,

In places such as the Southwark settlement, one could find particularly valuable guidance as a young female activist in Berlin, determined to help guide other young women who also wanted to become more socially engaged.Footnote ⁴⁴

Many additional projects also elicited admiration, which rounded out a multifaceted picture of ‘good works’ among British volunteers for Germans to consider. Much of what they had in mind pertained to efforts to help the very poor. German visitors to East London had already begun before the establishment of Toynbee Hall to point approvingly to the Salvation Army, founded there in 1865 by the Methodist minister William Booth as the East London Revival Society, and they kept up the refrain in later years. Otto Funcke, while expressing some reservations about the Army's methods and its style, credited ‘General’ Booth with having induced thousands of men who had been mired in vice to begin to lead upright lives. Leopold Katscher, although he found Booth's earnest theatricality and his Puritanism rather distasteful, expressed genuine appreciation in the mid-1880s for the founder's considerable successes in reaching out to marginal members of urban society and changing their conduct much for the better, particularly by combating drunkenness. Nearly two decades later, Katscher was much less restrained, heaping praise on what had begun in East London as it had later developed, not only in Britain but also in America and elsewhere in the world. ‘The Salvation Army’, he proclaimed, ‘stands unquestionably at this time at the forefront of social-religious organizations.’ Carl Peters wrote in a similar vein, adding as well the observation that by encouraging members of the organization to speak in meetings it helped to prepare them for public life more generally. All of these men saw in the Army a force for urban good that deserved their respect. However odd they might find it and however unlikely they were to wish for its growth in Germany, they willingly admitted that it performed a praiseworthy function in the slums of East London.Footnote ⁴⁵

Other writers drew their readers' attention to efforts to rescue abandoned or orphaned children from the destitution and delinquency into which they were all too likely to fall if forced to fend for themselves on city streets. Again, an East London-based organization stood out. The National Incorporated Association for the Reclamation of Destitute Waif Children – otherwise known simply as Dr Barnardo's Homes, so named after their founder, the self-proclaimed physician Thomas Barnardo – was frequently listed and lauded along with Toynbee Hall and the Salvation Army. Immanuel Völter, the general secretary of the progressive Protestant Social Congress, applauded Barnardo for having taken in ‘thousands of forsaken and demoralized ragamuffins’ and having turned them into valuable members of society. A literary critic and historian, Leon Kellner, wrote similarly about Barnardo's success in dealing with ‘street Arabs’ who resisted efforts by others to get them to live in children's refuges, handling them effectively without having recourse to the courts or the police. Heinrich Albrecht, a staff member of an umbrella group that was known as the Centre for Workers' Welfare Associations, wrote in a comparable vein in a report on an ‘information trip’ he had helped to lead to both England and Scotland. He drew attention not only to Dr Barnardo's Homes but also to the less extensive but still remarkable network of institutions that operated under the auspices of the Orphan Homes of Scotland, based in Glasgow. Both organizations merited admiration for receiving all of their support from charitable donations as well as for operating according to strongly religious principles. For all of these men, such institutions contributed impressively to the project of moralizing urban society.Footnote ⁴⁶

A great multitude of other programmes and efforts, like those that were embodied in the settlement houses, had less to do with providing assistance for the very poor than with affording educational and cultural opportunities to city dwellers who occupied higher rungs on the social ladder. Mentioned from time to time in writings already cited in this article, they came to the fore with particular emphasis in works by the Hamburg-based librarian and publicist Ernst Schultze.Footnote ⁴⁷ Later to become, after World War I, a professor of economics, and, by the late 1930s, a sharp critic of Britain,Footnote ⁴⁸ he stood out earlier as a prolific student of cultural developments, both in Germany and abroad. He also stood out as a man who, while quite anxious about the spread of what he referred to as ‘filth and trash’ in the area of popular literature,Footnote ⁴⁹ saw many hopeful signs of efforts to combat such ‘rottenness’, particularly abroad. Having written his first book on the university extension movement as exemplified by institutions such as Ruskin College in Oxford,Footnote ⁵⁰ Schultze reported a quarter of a century later on a much broader range of developments, with which he had become familiar both during a stay of several weeks at Toynbee Hall and during two subsequent study trips. A book on ‘the intellectual elevation of the masses’ and a second one on ‘popular education [Volksbildung] and popular well-being’ surveyed a vast array of pedagogical efforts. Toynbee Hall and other settlements of course figured prominently, and Dr Barnardo's Homes came in for consideration too, as did the university extension movement, which had become much more far-reaching since Schultze first described it. Educational efforts that were church-related and strivings toward improvement that arose among the workers themselves, in connection with co-operatives and trade unions, also merited Schultze's approval, as did the spread of public libraries.Footnote ⁵¹ The totality of these developments clearly seemed to embody pervasive desires to improve the overall condition of the British population in ways that would entail making widespread use of the possibilities for cultural uplift within mainly urban settings. Most of what Schultze discussed was taking place in the voluntary sector, either as a result of efforts by middle- and upper-class volunteers to ‘elevate’ people whom they regarded as being in need of their guidance or as a result of efforts that arose from within the ranks of certain sectors of the ‘masses’ themselves. But his discussion of libraries pointed beyond that realm, toward activities by local governments.

Shifting from voluntary and philanthropic activities to ones in which the lead was taken by public officials – in the case of cities, men who bore responsibility at the municipal level – we enter into an area where Germans were by no means inferior. Indeed, by no later than the end of the nineteenth century, Germany's cities as well as its national government had taken enormous strides forward in managing the effects of urban-industrial development. These developments were to elicit considerable admiration by English admirers of the German example, among them Thomas Horsfall and William Harbutt Dawson.Footnote ⁵²

Although German progress in this area – together with the fact that there was so much interest in British voluntarism – meant that references to the increasing functions of British municipalities constituted a secondary rather than a major theme, they too contributed to a positive view of British cities. To be sure, the voluntary sector inevitably attracted far more attention than the public sector. Several authors did, however, point to ways in which the English were working to overcome earlier deficits, thus refusing to concede victory to the better organized Germans.

Hugo Lindemann, who wrote under the pseudonym Carl Hugo, was one such observer. Having resided in London, where he came into contact with members of the Fabian Society, between 1892 and 1896, he wrote a substantial volume that dealt with city government and ‘municipal socialism’ in the country where he had just lived. Appearing in print shortly after his return to Germany, where he was to become increasingly active as a participant in both local and national affairs as well as a scholar of municipal administration, the work offered a broad and generally favourable survey of what Britons were doing. It expressed a viewpoint that clearly coincided with his overall support for social democracy. Only the second socialist to figure so far in this article, he articulated a spirit of gradualism that contrasted markedly with Engels' radicalism half a century earlier. Lindemann's book told the story of an evolutionary process in which city governments had not only extended their powers in areas where private entrepreneurs had no interest – particularly the area of public health – but had also ‘mastered . . . the task of meeting communal needs for basic services’ (water, gas, electricity, transportation, public libraries and so on).Footnote ⁵³ Much of it focused on developments that had been supported by ‘progressives’ in the newly formed London County Council, who had sought to combat private monopolies with the goal of furthering common interests. In conclusion, however, Lindemann also paid tribute to the exemplary qualities displayed in Scotland by the town council of Glasgow, which had undertaken wide-ranging municipalization in such a way that citizens there enjoyed excellent services at low costs. His views were heartily endorsed by a fellow Social Democrat, the ‘revisionist’ Eduard Bernstein (who had also got to know Fabians during a long English stay of his own). He saw in Lindemann's book convincing evidence that the British had clearly moved beyond their earlier reliance on the services of private entrepreneurs to meet the needs of urban populations.Footnote ⁵⁴

Ernst Schultze, although primarily interested in the voluntary sector, also paid tribute to urban administrators and legislators, whose work in London he celebrated a decade later in an essay for a journal that represented the views of reform-minded Protestants.Footnote ⁵⁵ He pointed toward a wide range of ways in which progressive Londoners could be seen as having developed new ways of tackling urban problems. Public ownership of tram lines, construction and maintenance of public parks and playgrounds, and various initiatives in the areas of housing and public health all testified to a high degree of civic responsibility among those who ran the British capital – many of whom, Schultze emphasized, served in unpaid positions rather than as governmental employees. Altogether, despite the fact that a London municipality had first been formed in 1888, the metropolis could take pride in a record of accomplishment that was worthy of emulation by Germans as well as other Britons.

This article analyses a variety of largely sympathetic stories about British cities and developments in them that were told in Germany during the three-quarters of a century that preceded World War I. While pointing both to highly critical comments early in the period and to reiterations and elaborations of such disquiet later on, it has placed greater emphasis on other views of a quite different sort. It has stressed a movement in favour of competing pronouncements that revealed a great deal of admiration for ways in which the British were coping with at least some of what the critics denounced. The men and women whose efforts they lauded operated for the most part in a public sphere that was voluntary rather than official, and much of what appealed to them had to do with often religiously based efforts to improve mass morals and culture. The most prominent example of such efforts consisted of the activities that took place in and around Toynbee Hall in East London and other settlement houses. It must be recognized that most of the observers considered in this article had rather little to say about much of what most interests today's historians of urban improvement. There was little attention to the public health movement, the regulation of housing or reform of the Poor Law, none of which was as easy to observe as a slum, a settlement house or a meeting of the Salvation Army. It must, however, be pointed out that by the late 1890s commentary on cities also included recognition and admiration of local government, which was increasingly seen as a valuable counterpart to and extension of efforts by philanthropic volunteers.

What are the broader implications for our understanding of modern Germany of the sort of thinking that was exemplified by the men and women on whose views this article concentrates? It epitomized not only a good deal of openness toward developments abroad (i.e., a certain ‘transnationalism’) but also, in tandem with this orientation, strong commitments to the notion of a civil society. The Germans treated here upheld the idea of the city as a space in which middle-class activists could operate independently from state bureaucracies. Plenty of men and women looked to groups of citizens in Anglo-Saxon countries (not just Britain, but also America) for inspiration of a sort that, they hoped, would serve as bases of social improvement in their own country as well as abroad. Such progress would, it was hoped, add a civic dimension to the great schemes of social insurance at the state level developed in the 1880s. In this regard, activist citizens in British cities appeared to be both their mentors and their allies. They seemed to embody tendencies toward reconciliation between social classes and mastery of urban problems that stemmed from voluntary and local efforts – projects that should be pursued for the purpose of improving urban life in Britain and Germany alike. Looking at Britain through the eyes of men and women who wrote about British cities results in a view of a civil society with which Germany had no reason to quarrel and many reasons to co-operate.