Global sociology from the “metropole”: Alt-Treptow, Berlin

But this is not the only way to arrive at Global Sociology from Alt-Treptow. Walking the eight hundred meters from Marian’s home to mine in Karl-Kunger-Straße, you can choose among several streets named after nineteenth- and twentieth-century German political economists (Nationalökonomen) such as Wilhelm Lexis, Carl Menger, August Oncken, and Gustav von Schmoller. You will most likely pass Schmollerstraße and Schmollerplatz before entering Karl-Kunger-Straße. Gustav von Schmoller (1838–1917) is arguably the most influential of these economists, and thus he lends his name to both a street and a square. Schmollerplatz is a leafy square, featuring Gründerzeit buildings from the early 20th century, Plattenbau blocks from the GDR and new developments for the affluent.

As an economist, Schmoller was interested not only in the market but also in the “social question,” and although he was not considered “left-wing” at all, he – like several other economists – was given the ironic nickname of Kathedersozialist (variously translated as socialist of the chair, academic socialist or armchair sociologist). By working towards social justice between different classes he wanted to prevent an upcoming socialist revolution. Schmoller became known in sociological circles as a counterpart to Max Weber. In the Verein für Socialpolitik (Association for Social Policy), founded in 1872 in Eisenach – which by coincidence is Marian’s hometown – Schmoller played a central role. He embodied the opposing position to Weber, who in his essay on “The “Objectivity” of Knowledge in Social Science and Social Policy” (published in German in 1904) had demanded that – while not assuming their complete neutrality – scholars should withhold their “value judgments” (Werturteile), their own political orientations, and their convictions over the course of the empirical research process. Schmoller, on the other hand, identified the “common good” as an “objective value judgment.”

Schmoller’s broadly positive attitude toward the German colonial project was fully in line with these positions. He argued that colonialism was essential for Germany’s emergence as a political and economic great power. At the same time, he adopted a comparatively liberal or moderate stance toward colonized populations, whom he believed could be “civilized.” For instance, he advocated “native farming” and “native small businesses” instead of plantation-based economies, seeing these as tools for educating the “natives,” integrating them – at least potentially – into a capitalist world economy, and improving their conditions. In Berlin, he was also among the later founders of the Kolonialpolitisches Aktionskomité (Colonial-Political Action Committee) in 1906 (Grimmer-Solem, 2007). As a respected and widely known public intellectual, he thus helped mobilize broad German public support for the colonial project.
How this thinking affected one of his earlier students is unclear: W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) had enthusiastically attended Schmoller’s lectures at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin (today’s Humboldt University, which later awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1958). Du Bois lived in Germany from 1892–1894, first in Eisenach and then in Berlin Kreuzberg, at that time a working-class district adjacent to Treptow, in the apartment of a German family roughly three and a half kilometers away.

From today’s vantage point, it is difficult to comprehend that Du Bois found life as a Black man in Berlin considerably more pleasant than in the United States, where, especially in the South, social contact was prohibited. In Berlin, and Germany, as he enthusiastically comments in his autobiography, he experienced greater integration into social contexts, and, above all, perceived that class differences were emphasized more strongly than “racial differences,” and that he was seen as an aspiring student:

So too in brave old Eisenach […] I spent a happy holiday in a home where university training and German home-making left no room for American color prejudice. From this unhampered social intermingling with Europeans of education and manners, I emerged from the extremes of my racial provincialism. I became more human; learned the place in life of “Wine, Women, and Song”; I ceased to hate or suspect people simply because they belonged to one race or color; and above all I began to understand the real meaning of scientific research and the dim outline of methods employing its technique and its results in the new social sciences for the settlement of the Negro problems in America (Du Bois, 1968, p. 160).

At the university in Berlin, Du Bois mainly attended lectures by economists – besides Schmoller also those of Heinrich von Treitschke, a well-known antisemite and nationalist. Du Bois was fascinated by their scholarly work and, in general, also by “militaristic patriotism” in Germany and – as Cahn (2025) argues – seems to have ignored Treitschke’s antisemitism just as he overlooked broader misanthropic tendencies in Germany. Academically, Du Bois was impressed by the then-hegemonic historical approach in German political economy, because it enabled him to understand the situation of Black Americans using historical methods and in a globally comparative manner.

He was likewise impressed by the engagement of Schmoller and the Kathedersozialisten with the social question: although conservative in many respects, they expressed clear positions on the challenges of social inequality in Germany, including taking part in the debates in the public sphere. Du Bois became a member of the aforementioned Verein für Socialpolitik, which, according to Cahn (2025), would later inspire his activist commitments.

While Schmollerstraße and Schmollerplatz were named after the economist in 1930 and are well known in Alt-Treptow where many streets bear the names of “great” political economists, Du Bois was only honored in 2019 with a commemorative plaque on the wall of the Kreuzberg house he lived in.