How the Police Produced Emotions: Traffic Ordinances, Urban Tempos, and Consumer Visions in Berlin, 1900

The Berlin police, circa 1900, were no fans of modern street advertising, which they found aesthetically and morally dubious. Relying on traffic ordinances and the concept of the ‘Fluchtlinie,’ defined as the urban building line as well as the means of public egress in case of emergency, they used the principle of smoothly moving bodies as a tool to restrict large-scale billboards, mesmerizing window displays, and ads peering down from rooftops or up from sidewalks. Such consumer spectacles distracted pedestrian concentration and caused accidents, they claimed. Beneath the overt public safety concerns, the police also used traffic regulations to enforce ‘correct’ emotions, for instance banning electrified cigarette ads featuring Emperor Wilhelm II for their lack of respect, or removing sexually suggestive statuettes from shop windows to avoid causing offense and provoking a tumult on the sidewalk. Emotions, sight, and urban movement were aligned in the police perspective.

While the police kept people moving, lest fixated gazes led to unwanted desires, they did so in a consumer culture whose advertising theory and marketing laws promoted both eye-catching spectacles and subliminal emotional techniques to arrest the vision of potential buyers. The resultant clash of interests intersected with fears of neurasthenia, a nervous disorder related to the overwhelming sensory input and fragmentation of attention in the urban space. Consumer spectacles were everywhere in the modern city, moving, blinking, calling out, and surprising pedestrians to gain their attention. According to police policy, though, pedestrians were to look at them fleetingly and askew, without stopping and thus not allowing their cognitive faculties to process the desires raised by consumer visions. The authorities sought a solution to the paradox by working to calibrate the rhythm and tempo of urban walking, and thus create a ‘proper’ bodily approach to consumer objects and their power as emotional accessories.