Dickie, J. F. In the Kaiser's Capital 1910 [American Church in Berlin]

Dickie, J. F.  In the Kaiser's Capital. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1910. First edition. [2964]

Very good blind & gilt stamped cloth hardcover, binding near-fine with bright gilt. 315 clean and unmarked pages, tight. Illustrated with frontispiece and 18 additional plates, predominately from photographs.  

James Francis Dickie, D.D., Congregational minister, pastor of the American Church in Berlin from 1894 to 1908. This church was established to serve American students studying in that city.

"Among the steadily increasing number of books on Germany written by Americans, the impressions and reminiscences of Dr. J. F. Dickie, pastor of the American church in Berlin, are the most unrestrictedly sympathetic. Owing to the kindness he has experienced there, says the author in the second chapter of his book, he claims almost a citizen's share and interest, as though he were a child of Imperial Berlin...To the visitor not contented with the tourist's field of vision...he has done an inestimable service by his chapter on Berlin legends, his descriptions of the region of the Muhlendamm and the Fischerbrucke, and his translation of Frau Minna Hemnel's reminiscences of old Berlin, especially in the days of Henriette Herz and Rahel Varnhagen...On the whole one carries away the impression that it is the people Dr. Dickie met, rather than the city itself, that appealed to him. A man who was not only received by the Emperor, but thrown into association with some of the leading personalities in the world of intellect, such as Hermann Grimm, Otto Pflelderer, Otto Harnack, Adolf Stoecker, Emil Frommel, Ernst Curtius, Theodor Mommsen, Rudolf Virchow, Joseph Joachim and Adolf Menzel may well forget, in the light of the halo they throw about any place, the shadows hovering in the background." - New York Times, April 9, 1911.