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Love at Last Sight: Dating, Intimacy, and Risk in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin
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About Love At Last Sight: Dating, Intimacy, And Risk In
Product Description In June 1914, a seamstress named Frieda Kliem left Berlin on a commuter train to meet the man she had fallen in love with through a newspaper personal ad. Instead of proposing marriage, the man lured her into the forest, murdered her, and stole the few valuables she had in her apartment. Through Kliem's story, Love at Last Sight examines the risk associated with modern approaches to dating and finding love in the turn-of-the-century metropolis. Using newspapers, diaries, police records, and court cases, it reveals the strangers, swindlers, and traditional middle-class values that threatened single people looking for intimacy in new ways. For most men and women, using modern technologies to seek romance-making an acquaintance on the street, pursuing a missed connection from a streetcar, or paying for a matchmaking service or personal ad-meant putting one's livelihood, respectability, and life on the line. Those attracted to the opposite and same sex alike experimented with these and other novel approaches, including looking for mates at their workplaces, apartment buildings, dance halls, and bars. In doing so, they navigated traditional and modern class and gender norms in search of financial stability and personal fulfillment.Love at Last Sight exposes the tensions of romance in the modern city as turn-of-the-century Berliners found the metropolis a place of new opportunities to find meaningful connections, as well as a site of isolation, alienation, and danger. Review "An ingenious microhistory." -- Robert Beachy, Journal of Modern History"Carrington's micro-history Love at Last Sight opens like a work of true crime....Carrington uses the case notes from the murder investigation to bring to light experiences that don't usually make it into history books. Frieda's life, especially her love life, he argues, reveals the tensions inherent in the urban middle-class experience during this period: between older and younger generations, between respectability and opportunity, between the public perception of events and reality." -- Chloë Daniel , London Review of Books"The book is most engaging when it links historical context with the documented reality of its primary subject's life-in Frieda Kliem, Carrington has found a case thateffectively showcases Berlin women's "struggle for existence" and the dangers they might encounter in pursuing a stable, middle-class marriage." -- Dinah Lensing-Sharp, University of California, German Studies Review"The study is deeply researched, engagingly written and full of fascinating insight. Particularly significant, both for his analysis and for future work, is his decision not to marginalize queer relationships by examining them separately, but rather to explore all forms of dating and intimacy as part of the broad field of urban experience ... The book can be productively read alongside other recent books on intimacy and urban space in Berlin and will fit very well in graduate or undergraduate courses on Berlin, urban history or the history of emotions." -- Sace Elder, German History"Workplace romance, personal ads, new dating technologies, matchmaking services, broken engagements, same-sex intimacy, marriage and upward mobility, sexual dangers in the big city, the decline of marriage, sexual assault, a rising urban murder rate-all of this sounds familiar. Love at Last Sight empathetically deploys the telling life and tragic death of Frieda Kliem to illuminate how these personal fears and sexual disruptions are nothing new. Tyler Carrington's vivid prose and meticulous research successfully transforms turn-of-the-twentieth-century Berlin into a prism of our own time."--Timothy J. Gilfoyle, author of City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920"Tyler Carrington's Love at Last Sight focuses on the tension between modernity and traditional respectability that is at the core of his central case study on the tragic story of
