Mobility in the Metropolis: Responses to the Changing City in Gabriele Tergit’s Käsebier erobert den Kurfürstendamm and J.B. Priestley’s Angel Pavement

Fiona Littlejohn’s paper undertakes a comparative reading of two city novels set in London and Berlin in times of economic depression in the late 1920s. In both novels, Gabriele Tergit’s  Kasebier erobert den Kurfurstendamm (Cheesebeer Conquers the Kurfurstendamm) and J.B. Priestley’s  Angel Pavement , female and male characters respond differently to a changing urban environment: the paper shows striking similarities in the perception of the city under the aspect of gender and generation. In both texts women’s experiences of the living city contrast starkly with men’s views of a lifeless city. While the two middle-aged male characters perceive the effects of modernisation as an alienating threat to traditional patriarchal values, the very same phenomena provide the younger female characters with spaces for mobility and liberation. Both men project their fears, as Littlejohn argues, on the urban landscape; they respond to its threats by retreating into ‘non urban spaces’, as the interior of the private home, or by clinging to rural niches within the city. The two professional women, on the other hand, are travelling through the city on their own, which helps them to break free from the constraints of the domestic interior. However, these liberating journeys are not independent of their economic situation. In Priestley’s novel the horizon of the female protagonist’s urban journeys is restricted by her income. This leaves her dependent on the financial resources of a male companion, whose company is also crucial for gaining access to places which are normally no-go areas for women. This paper explores questions of class, as well as gender, and serves to challenge notions of the City and its images in literature, such as those which exclusively identify urban modernism with universalising tendencies, when the dominant discourse in modernist literature identifies experiences of isolation and strangeness as "the reality of all human life" (Raymond Williams). In the texts by Priestley and Tergit the two female characters, both of whom are from middle class backgrounds, differ in their perceptions of the harsh economic realities of city life in the late 1920s. Priestley’s protagonist responds to her negative perceptions of commercialisation by taking imaginary flights of fantasy into sheltered scenes of bourgeois family life or into travel literature, where women visit exotic places as companions to adventurous men. This heroine leans towards romanticised perceptions of her surroundings which also mirror the contemporary imperialist values. Tergit’s text, on the other hand, provides a female protagonist with a more realistic perspective, one which also contrasts with the escapist fantasies of her male counterpart. Here the woman is shown as being more at home in the city. Walking about freely without ‘any particular purpose’, she is not dependent on a male companion. This construction of a female city dweller challenges, according to Littlejohn, the gendered concept of the  flâneur , which is prevalent in literary perceptions of the City. However, the different perspectives on gender relations employed by Priestley and Tergit do not, in the end, prevent either woman from being deserted by their male lovers - who leave the city on their own in order to explore other spaces.

generation older than Kohler and Matfield, exhibit an increasing apprehension whilst travelling the urban space and seek refuge in the static private sphere or almost rural areas. 3 This raises the central question to be explored in this paper of why Tergit and Priestley should divide these characters' responses to travelling the urban space along such similar generational and gender lines in novels written virtually contemporaneously and set in Berlin and London respectively. Furthermore, the portrayal of the female protagonists' comparatively positive urban experience is of especial interest, given what Katharina von Ankum terms the 'characteristic emphasis on the stressful rather than liberating aspects of women's experience of the modern city' at least in German writing from the mid-1920s onwards. 4 Moreover, feminist cultural critics have often observed the very real dangers, harassment and restrictions which have impeded women from taking full advantage of the emancipatory opportunities offered by traversing the urban space. 5 With this in mind, I also consider to what extent the fates of Matfield and Kohler are indeed typical of the way women's experience in European cities was represented at this time.

II. The Lifeless City
Miermann and Smeeth exhibit a powerful sense of dispossession and anxiety whilst traversing the urban public spaces. Both of these older male characters perceive modernising processes to be undermining the traditional patriarchal structures in the home, in employment and in conventional gender roles. As they journey through the city, they project these fears onto the urban landscape, which is also being transformed by these modernising processes. Therefore, the routes these characters choose to travel through the city and their reaction to the changing city correspond to their anxieties about the repercussions of modernity and the threat posed to their position of authority.
Georg Miermann, editor of the feuilleton at the fictitious Berliner Rundschau newspaper in Tergit's novel, is apprehensive about the risks to his position posed by the recent introduction of rationalisation measures. More seriously, he feels so threatened by young divorcée and archetypal New Woman Käte Herzfeld's refusal to accept him as the dominant partner in their relationship that he rapes her. (K, p.232) These fears about the disappearance of patriarchal social structures are also reflected as he traverses Berlin, which has become 'the dead city' in Miermann's eyes. 6 He deliberately avoids the bustling commercial areas in the West of the city, seeking out instead a public space untouched by redevelopment in the Jüdenhof [sic], where a large tree shelters the old houses. The time required for a tree to grow to such a size implies permanence and endurance and, as Inge Stephan has noted, the tree is the one sign of nature encountered by Miermann during his journey through the city. 7 Significantly, the term 'Jüdenhof' and the suggestion of a small self-contained community are also reminiscent of the Eastern European shtetl, a way of life which the assimilated Miermann has firmly rejected: when the feared rationalisation measures finally lead to his redundancy, Miermann dies in the city streets uttering a Jewish prayer for the first time in 35 years. (K, p.250) Both the prayer and the seeking out of this almost rural space indicate a longing to return to the community and values of a religion he had relinquished decades earlier.
Walking back through the old lanes, Miermann observes with regret that houses are soon to be replaced by new office blocks. (K, pp.236-237) He therefore categorises negatively the increasing commercialisation of the city which encroaches upon the urban space previously available for the private domestic sphere. He recalls the city's appearance before its explosive expansion, 'when it still looked like a town, before house after house had been torn down'. 8 His stroll through the city constitutes an attempt to reclaim the urban territory as he maps his memory of the town before its metamorphosis into a metropolis onto the space he is traversing. Yet this enterprise fails in the face of the present use of urban space and cannot prevent Miermann's apocalyptic vision of having returned to the city after a thousand years to find a scene in which laughter and desire have been extinguished, in which the urban space has been dehumanised. Miermann's negative response to the changing city reveals his fears about the detrimental impact of increasing commercialisation and the growing metropolis upon traditional community, values and social structures.
Herbert Smeeth, head clerk at Twigg and Dersingham, wholesalers of veneers and inlays, similarly expresses apprehension whilst travelling the urban space through the image of the lifeless city. Smeeth is proud of having risen to his position through the office hierarchy, but realises with dismayed incomprehension that neither his younger colleagues nor his children share his attitude to employment and loyalty to the firm. He wanders through London following a series of disturbances to his usual routine and a threat to his employment to visit a sick acquaintance in hospital, only to discover disease and death lurking at the heart of the city, which he associates with consumption and mobility in the metropolis. The hospital has 'all the bustle of a market-place' and is filled with 'mysterious silent traffic'. Although she longs to journey to such places herself and envies a friend who is given the opportunity to travel, Matfield never imagines travelling independently, but dreams instead of indulging in such voyages vicariously through the experiences of a future husband.
In James Golspie, Matfield discovers just such an adventurous type and in his company, the city comes alive. Their relationship enables her to frequent the spaces of leisure from which she otherwise feels excluded, as her response to an invitation to dine at a particular restaurant reveals: 'I've never been there. It's more a restaurant for men, isn't it?' (AP, p.417) Both Golspie's financial resources and his status as a masculine companion provide Matfield with access to the urban public spaces of consumption closed to a young single woman, to parties, music halls, the cinema and boxing matches. Visiting him at the docks before he sets sail to trading partners in the Baltic suddenly makes travelling the urban Like Matfield, Tergit's Fräulein Dr. Kohler has a privileged background, although the family's 12 million Mark fortune has been devoured by the inflationary crisis which followed the First World War in Germany. 11 As Miermann's colleague at the prestigious Berliner Rundschau, Kohler enjoys the kind of responsible, challenging job and substantial salary of which Matfield can only dream. However, whereas Matfield receives support from her father, Kohler has to support her mother, whose desire to preserve the remnants of the bourgeois household binds them to a huge and correspondingly expensive apartment. Rather than offering a refuge to Kohler, the bourgeois interior is a deadweight which fetters her movement and she longs to discard it: But we can't get into difficulties for the sake of the linen and the silver and the porcelain. To say we need a big apartment just because of the cupboards is simply absurd! As a child, she thought, I always used to mark out my favourite curtains and table-linen in the catalogues of Herzog and Gerson and Grünfeld. I have absolutely no feeling for possessions any more! Oh, to be as mobile as possible, free of burdensome objects! 12 Kohler's desire for mobility and emancipation from the private, circumscribed bourgeois interior is echoed as she traverses the urban public spaces in a chapter entitled 'A Girl Walks Through The City'. 13 This journey differs from Matfield's walk through London harbour to Golspie's moored ship in three important respects. Firstly, Kohler does not undergo the same progression to enjoyment of her mobility in the metropolis experienced by Matfield, but appears to be utterly at home in the city. Secondly, although Kohler hopes to travel to France with the elusive Oskar Meyer, she does not depend upon his company to walk through Berlin, but simply takes for granted her freedom to move alone through the urban public spaces. Thirdly, whereas Matfield's journey through London harbour has the ultimate aim of taking down business letters, Kohler wanders the streets without any particular purpose. She directs her attention towards the city's architecture, towards street signs, advertising, walls scarred by bullet holes and displays of commodities. The stimuli she encounters provoke her to reconstruct the city's past and to reflect upon its present; in other words, to consider the modernity of the city. Kohler's activity as she journeys through the city bears a remarkable similarity to that of the flâneur, making her something of an anomaly. Much recent criticism has pointed quite rightly to the conspicuous absence of the female flâneur from the visual arts and literature. 15 Such critics have noted that women who indulged in the aimless loitering or strolling required by flânerie were frequently misrecognized as prostitutes or accosted by men when they ventured out into the public arena. Women traversing the urban public spaces were only deemed respectable by the prevailing bourgeois morality if they were perceived to have a specific objective such as shopping or the journey between work and home, which undermines the aimlessness required by flânerie. 16 Yet Kohler meanders aimlessly through the city without displaying any consciousness that she is the object of observation by men and without being accosted or harassed by men. As such, her travels through the urban public spaces bear a remarkable resemblance to flânerie. However, Kohler's realistic perspective differs significantly from that of male flâneurs such as Baudelaire's or Benjamin's, whose vision of impoverished urban figures tends to be symbolic or idealised.
As in Matfield's case, the economic prerequisite for Kohler's mobility in the metropolis is undermined at the end of the novel. Rationalisation measures close down the newspaper, whilst fraud destroys the remainder of the Kohler family's fortune. This catastrophe finally compels Kohler's mother to contemplate selling the furniture and moving to a smaller apartment. Nevertheless, with worries about job security, Kohler does not greet this event with the expected sense of freedom from the interior: instead she begins to worry about whether they should keep the furniture to barter for basic living requirements with the butcher and the baker. (K, p.266)

IV. Conclusion
The journeys of the middle-aged male characters in Angel Pavement and Käsebier illustrate a negative response to transformations in the urban infrastructure which these protagonists perceive as alienating and dehumanising. They project their fears about the effects of modernisation upon patriarchal social structures in employment and traditional gender roles, which undermine their sense of security, onto the urban landscape portrayed as lifeless and increasingly impermanent and seek to escape from it. By contrast, these same modernising processes offer hopes of emancipation from the bourgeois interior to the young female characters who relish the opportunity to move through the urban public spaces, although the economic recession ultimately halts this new-found mobility. The liberating aspects of the metropolis for women are therefore shown to be precarious, even for these middle-class women, who have a better chance of establishing themselves in the city than most. 17 The fates of Matfield and Kohler are in this sense typical of representations of women's experience in the metropolis at the onset of the Depression. Yet Priestley does not allow Matfield to move beyond purposive forays through the city and her sense of exhilaration and adventure is only shown by him to be possible through the company and finances of Mr. Golspie. Tergit, however, offers a very rare glimpse of a woman who wanders aimlessly through the city on her own terms, taking for granted her right to move through the urban public spaces and observe both the urban infrastructure and its inhabitants. Viewed from this perspective, Kohler ceases to be Matfield's identical twin, and becomes the very unique creation of this female novelist.