ABSTRACT
Michael Schäfer The emergence of the nineteenth-century urban bourgeoisie in Britain as well as in Germany has been widely researched by historians. We now know quite a lot about the social composition of urban elites, as well as the strategies, discourses and languages that enabled them to exert local hegemony. As a result we can assess the accomplishments and failures of the Bürgertum in responding to the challenges of industrialisation and urbanisation.1 But these rather clear cut images of the urban bourgeoisie as a class in action seem to get blurred by the late nineteenth century. In historical studies on urban governance after 1900, and even more so after 1914, the dealings of bourgeois civic elites appear to be of little interest. Local politics in early twentieth-century British as well as German cities now seems to be primarily a matter of political parties, social, religious or ethnic movements and economic pressure groups.2 On the other hand, German urban historians have long been fascinated by the rise of professional municipal administration, which by the turn of the century seemed to have taken urban governance out of the hands of middle-class notables.3 Thus the urban bourgeoisie, the Bürgertum, loses historiographic attention at the very moment when its alleged hegemony is seriously challenged.
