ABSTRACT
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Carl Theodor Welcker—Germany's greatest writer and one of its leading liberals—both expressed unmistakable support for urban values during the second quarter of the nineteenth century. This chapter discusses a number of writers who were anything but disaffected with the development of an urban Germany. German city boosters bestowed their most enthusiastic accolades for cultural achievement on two urban centers, Berlin and Munich. The journalist Theodor Goering pointed out that whereas energy and intelligence predominated in the north, Germany's "spiritual side" emerged more clearly in the south. Far from weakening Germany, as anti-urbanists habitually charged, the modern city mightily enhanced national strength. Many antimodernist members of the literary intelligentsia and clergymen, among others, described the big city harshly and denounced it bitterly. Middle-class spokesmen for the working classes, especially Social Democrats, also expressed a good many misgivings with regard to particular aspects of the urban scene.
