‘Perhaps I could have achieved something that was also valuable in another city,’ he reflected later, ‘but this specific achievement, that I have in fact brought to fruition in these decades, is undoubtedly bound up with the Berlin milieu.’ This is why Berlin found its self-consciousness in his essays. But more than this, we don’t just hear the individual in general, but also this individual, who struggled to find a place in a hostile world. Simmel effortlessly establishes a rich framework of enquiry. Take the opening lines of Simmel’s essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ (1903): The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.

The impression is of a temporarily illuminated whole that fades rapidly, leaving one with the sense that there is more to be discovered, provided another flash of brilliance. As his fellow German scholar Theodor Adorno wrote of the essay form, thinking of Simmel, it ‘does not let its domain be prescribed for it … The essay does not play by the rules of organised science and theory …’ Instead of fashioning a comprehensive system, essays lightly gesture towards hidden depths and the connectedness of phenomena, often to greater effect. Not at home in the treatise, taxonomy or monograph, Simmel was foremost an essayist. As Gustav von Schmoller, one of Simmel’s contemporaries, wrote of his style: ‘he prefers to provide more caviar than black bread, to illuminate with a firework than a study lamp.’ Although he earned his doctorate in 1881 and his habilitation in 1885, his examiners perhaps had a point: his published articles often omitted references and refused scholarly narrowness. His first dissertation, on ethnomusicology, was failed as too ‘speculative, aphoristic and stylistically careless’. Yet Simmel found it hard to conform to Germany’s staid academic culture. The University of Berlin, which gave Simmel his education, was saturated with neo-Kantianism’s critical, historicist spirit. The Hohenzollern dynasty – one of the oldest in Europe – reigned over a volatile empire, intoxicated by the most modern ideas. A proliferation of modern technologies generated power and wealth while eroding the landed Prussian Junker nobility, the foundation of Bismarck’s united German Reich. An avant-garde cultural elite flourished uneasily alongside central Europe’s aristocracy while a young proletariat fought the state and the bourgeoisie for rights, political and economic. Rapid urbanisation and financial speculation propelled Berlin to the world stage.

That city epitomised the tensions of Germany’s special path to modernity.

Georg Simmel was born in the heart of Berlin in 1858.

Georg simmel contribution to sociology