In this seven-chapter monograph, Sabine Hake analyzes Weimar-era architecture to understand contemporary debates about space, identity, class, and modernism/modernity. She explicitly states that she is not interested in writing an architectural history of Berlin's buildings, and it is within the context of her theoretical parameters that the book should be judged. Indeed, as she states quite directly, she “treat[s] architecture as an integral part of modern mass culture and the ideologies of the urban [sic] that organized this complicated relationship” (p. 15). In some ways, this sentence exemplifies both the book's strengths and its weaknesses. Not surprising for a book with such far-reaching goals, the book has some great strengths and virtues. Its core strength is its theoretical acuity. Its central weakness is the quality of writing, which often makes long passages unfathomable.

Hake begins the work with a discussion of Berlin in 1920, reminding her readers that at this point in its history, it was still very much a Wilhelmine city—albeit one that modernists were eager to modify. Her second chapter moves on to a discussion of the masses that inhabited Berlin's urban space. Questioning what and who these masses were, Hake rehearses the question of whether “Angestellten” were workers or a new middle class, and then elides to a discussion of other classic binaries of Weimar-era sociology: Land-Stadt, Kleinstadt-Großstadt, etc. (p. 81). Unfortunately, though, her book does little to transcend them.

Her third chapter uses the masses as a way to understand the modern architectural movement. Powering this discussion is her assertion that the architects were ambivalent about the possibilities of urban culture. She quickly, though, retreats to an assertion that “their need for order [was] measurable by the sterility of their architectural utopias and designs” (p. 99). This seems to be a rather facile, subjective claim in a work that wants to transcend binary oppositions. Nevertheless, it is here that some of her most productive ideas begin to emerge. She claims that the modern materials associated with Weimar architecture (glass, steel, concrete) were meant to level social differences, even as new office buildings announced the emergence of a different kind of society. Within the context of this chapter, she provides pencil portraits of some of the leading architects and architectural theorists of the era, showing the real diversity among the modernists in their vision of the ideal society and architecture's role in moving toward it.

The book then launches into a series of case studies. The first of these looks at the urban essays of Franz Hessel and Siegfried Kracauer. Some of her claims in this chapter seem to be rather over the top. For example, she argues that, “[t]hrough walking, they demarcate a textual space within which to confront their increasing marginalization as a social class and to develop new strategies for surviving in modern mass culture” (p. 135). Nevertheless, there are a number of fascinating ideas apparent here, ideas that provide food for thought to students of the period. For example, she muses on the cultural meaning of electric lights to Weimar theorists. Indeed, she thinks of them as a building material, the importance of which is only apparent after nightfall. She discusses modern facades, which she explains were often seen as an extension of the buildings' interiors. To illuminate this, she reminds us of how much Joseph Roth detested such examples of New Objectivity as the Ku'damm, which for him was modernity at its worst. She is especially good on Franz Hessel, a flaneur whose appreciation of the streets she sees as anachronistic.

Chapter five reminds readers that the ever-present books of photography that celebrate Berlin in the Weimar Republic not only document the city, but in effect construct it. Her close focus on the famous Mossehaus exemplifies this. As she claims, “[a]ll photobooks situate Mossehaus within a narrative trajectory that claims the totality of Weimar Berlin for individual perspectives and affirmative readings” (p. 193). Indeed, she reminds us that the kind of radical cropping and presentation to which photographs of Mossehaus and other examples of Weimar modernism were subject, fundamentally affects how the buildings were understood.

Her excellent sixth chapter investigates Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz. She convincingly shows the novel's architectural qualities. The constant renovation work to which the square was subject was a recurring motif in the novel, and consequently illuminated its portrayal of Franz Biberkopf's utter transformation. The square is built and destroyed in much the same way that Biberkopf was.

In short, the book contains ideas, insights, and approaches that would be of value to all students of Weimar culture. Unfortunately, many readers will probably give up before they have had the chance to come to grips with these because of the book's desperate need of editing. Sentences, indeed, entire paragraphs are often completely opaque. The following exemplifies much of the hard sledding that will face the unwary reader: “Sustained by the primacy of vision in modernity, the dynamics of body and space establish the new parameters through which the metropolis can be theorized in terms of projections, hallucinations, incorporations, and lines of convergence and disintegration, rather than through the conceptual binary of society versus community that aims for stable relationships and clear distinctions within the sociospatial dialectic” (p. 225).

Such passages occur far too frequently. This is especially true of a book that studies the limpid prose of a Hessel, Kracauer, or Döblin. Hake has written a book that shows her command of the spatial culture of Weimar Berlin. I only wish she had written one that could convey that command.