Love at Last Sight: Dating, Intimacy, and Risk in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin

by Tyler Carrington

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.

264 pages, Hardcover

Published January 16, 2019

Reviews

[Genevieve · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is fixated on heterosexual marriage. In the introduction, the author writes that he has not dedicated any chapter or section to those "who navigated the tricky world of same-sex relationships." Instead, he claims he has woven "their story... into the discussion of heterosexual love" and that "insisting on a strict boundary between straight and same-sex histories merely reinforces the long-standing isolation of these experiences as mutually unintelligible." He writes that "the time has come to merge these stories." However, despite admitting that Berlin "was surely Europe's most gay-friendly city," the author does this so sparingly the book works to reinforce heterosexuality as the default, natural condition (and marriage as the ultimate achievement), and homosexuality as a marginal other in need of minimal treatment. In the book's index one finds "Gays and Lesbians" pointing to eleven (11) pages dedicated to not-straight history and existence (the index does not include "Straights" or "Heterosexuals;" one can assume the remaining 164 pages cover this).
A reader is left completely unaware of the discourse around notions of gender and sexuality that was developing in Berlin at the time (it appears the author thinks "the explosion of a broader variety of sexual identities and approaches" in the Weimar era, which he mentions only in the epilogue, appeared spontaneously). He doesn't even mention the burgeoning women's rights movement (which seems like a gross oversight for a book concerned with "the strictures of normative masculinity and femininity"). The epilogue is also funny because he tries to characterize contemporary Berlin in relation to the history he presents in the book by quoting statistics about marriage from Parship (lol) while completely neglecting Berlin's ubiquitous queer sex parties and culture of nontraditional dating and identity-forming.

[Thomas Schulte · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a really fascinating book that takes a real show-stopping court case from turn-of-the-century Berlin that has been buried by history and gives us all the facts of the case (enough that my true-crime junkie heart was very happy). It puts this case in its historical context and uses the case to explore what dating, marriage, and relationships were like in this time and place, and more broadly is a profound and memorable exploration of how humans look for connection with each other, and what we do when we find it.