What is Love?

After the middle of the nineteenth century, city clerks, social reformers, and journalists began to reflect about the effects of Berlin’s dynamic transformation. This chapter focuses on an influential strand of this literature in which authors claimed that the spread of new activities, such as visits to dance halls or seeking marriage through personal ads, resulted in the decline of people’s “feeling of morality” (sittliches Gefühl). The chapter demonstrates that it was important for contemporary authors to draw on the concept of feeling rather than other concepts of morality, as this enabled them to respond to the rising authority of the natural sciences. Since a number of observers described a feeling of morality as an important element that tied Berliners together as a community, its loss raised concern about the effects of urban change on the bodies and minds of the city’s inhabitants.