Even beyond the deep research and rich narrative material that Joseph Ben Prestel, a professor at the Free University in Berlin, provides in his study of public debates about changing urban life in Berlin and Cairo, he also engages difficult methodological questions about comparative and world history. Wryly acknowledging that he could have told this story in an alternative way, as a story of global difference and divergence, Prestel emphasizes connections and analogous dynamics. At the same time, he avoids effacing the particularities of context or ignoring the influence of contemporary discourses about differences, especially those which allegedly separate Europe and the Middle East, North and South, modern and backward – distinctions that were themselves globalized products. Prestel defines this complex field of commonalities and particularities as synchronous historical “parallels.”
We see these processes at work in how people handled the category of emotions – a versatile “universal” category that allowed for many “particular” claims. As in other recent studies in emotions history, Prestel approaches emotions not so much as an elusive realm of inward subjective experience, but more as social practices of public knowledge and representation. Also echoing recent studies, Prestel sees emotions as located at social “intersections” of minds and bodies, as material as well as cultural locations. As a theoretical orientation and as a record of contemporary interpretation – and he rightly focuses on how the people he studies understood emotions – Prestel approaches emotions as practices entwined with mixtures of social experience, material life (including bodies), culture, and language. No less, he recognizes, emotions were not only reflections of experience but practices that shaped experience and the world, as “doing” things. Using a term that is one of the minor leitmotifs in the book (but not emphasized theoretically), subjects are seen to “negotiate” the seemingly opposed perceptual spaces of inner and outer. And such “negotiation,” he shows, was a practice that extended to other social predicaments, including class, nation, gender, and morality.
The book is structured in chronological and spatial “parallels.” Each chapter explores debates about urban change and emotions in Cairo or Berlin during successive periods from the mid-nineteenth century to the eve of the First World War. I admit that I had initially hoped for a thematic organization, precisely because this would have been the greater narrative and analytical challenge. But by not combining locations or time periods in individual chapters (as in, for example, possible chapters on entertainment, sex, or physical culture), Prestel avoids losing sight of the contextually particular negotiations of comparable experiences. These comparable themes are clearly in evidence throughout the book, including locations such as street life, commercialized sex, new forms of urban entertainment, and common discursive categories such as nervousness, excitement, passion, fear, rationality, happiness, and love. But he interprets these as parallel practices in local contexts rather than as universal inward subjectivities. Emotions have history, he shows, in concrete social settings of place and time.
Emotional disorder and control is a major theme throughout the book, often involving anxieties about “disruptive” and confused emotions, but also the ambiguous experiences of individual freedom and the “thrills” of a disrupted urban life. The desire to control the self, but also to discipline the selves of others, was a common solution to emotional disorder and possibility. Control of the “passions,” especially among middle-class men, whose social and political positions and aspirations are another leitmotif in this book, was a preoccupying concern in both cities, though played out in different ways. Related was the problem of “nerves,” judged to be a distinctly urban and modern emotional condition. Deepening the modernity and transnationality of these complex stories, claims about “scientific” and “rational” forms of knowledge, notably the claims of modern medicine and psychology, were grounding for diagnoses of emotional troubles and for solutions.
Intersections of bodies and emotions is another major theme. Repeatedly, in Cairo and Berlin as in other globalizing cities in the late 1800s and after, we encounter arguments about healthy bodies as essential for healthy feelings and minds, and thus for a flourishing society and nation. This meant growing concern about bodily and spiritual “nervousness,” weakness, and decay – for which physical exercise and sport, and the “healthy” emotions these stimulated, were an obsessive answer – but also about excessively “stimulating” bodily practices such as social dance, sex outside the bounds of conjugal reproduction, and many forms of modern entertainment and leisure culture. These troubling practices and hopeful solutions were linked to concepts of morality, especially a notion of “morality as feeling” (though Prestel does not fully develop this argument).
For comparative urban studies, a particularly important theme is space and place – a topic that is well documented but not highlighted as a conceptual category. The book is rich in stories of public emotional practice where space matters, both in shaping emotional perception and as an object of interpretation. This includes the city itself, streets, entertainment and sin districts, spatial practices such as walking (including authoritative male strolling and “licentious” “wandering females” [89]), suburbs (as a material and spatial cure for urban pathologies and unhealthy emotions), and the very important temporal space of the night.
Discourses about emotions were a compelling way for individuals and social groups, especially men and middle classes, to make claims about public life that reflected their needs and interests but also their desires. As Prestel repeatedly documents and argues, we learn more about particular historical practices by recognizing connections to other times and places and eschewing imposed conceptual separations, as between Europe and the Middle East, modernity and tradition, public and private, emotional and material life. I read this book as a specialist neither on Berlin nor Cairo. But a good part of the book’s power and value is Prestel’s determination to make connections, to see parallels, to recognize the intersections of the particular and the global in history.
