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mods: Love at last sight dating, intimacy, and risk in turn-of-the-century Berlin Carrington, Tyler creator author. text bibliography Electronic books. History nyu 2019 monographic eng remote 1 online resource (xi, 248 pages) "Love at Last Sight opens with the seemingly simple question, "How did single people meet and fall in love in new big cities like Berlin at the turn of the century?," but what emerges from this investigation of daily newspapers, diaries, serial novels, advice literature, police records, and court cases is a world of dating and relationships that was anything but simple. The murder of Frieda Kliem, a young, enterprising seamstress who was using newspaper personal ads to find a husband reveals the tremendous risk associated with modern approaches to love and dating in a big city filled with strangers, swindlers, and a pervasive set of middle-class normativities that parents, peers, and authorities used to discredit men and women looking for love and intimacy. The risk of fraud, censure, or worse was ever-present, especially for gay Berliners, single women, and the many petit-bourgeois who strove for the stability of middle-class life but were outsiders to the social power structures of society. Indeed, though the technologies and opportunities of the big city offered the best shot at finding love or intimate connection among the urban sea of strangers, availing oneself of them--making an acquaintance on the street, pursuing a missed connection from the streetcar, or using a matchmaking service or newspaper personal ad--meant putting one's livelihood, respectability, and life on the line. This was the romantic dilemma facing the vast majority of city dwellers at the turn of the century, and a great many chose to risk everything for some measure of connection and intimacy. This book explores the history of dating as a way of illuminating a core tension of modern, metropolitan life that emerged at the turn of the century and persists through the present d…