inner city

[Peter A. McGraw]

I guess I don't quite get the point here.  Manheim is simply translating
the German "Innenstadt," which is the oldest part of Vienna--the district
lying within the Ringstrasse, which replaced the former city wall after the
latter was torn down.  It is roughly at the center of the city--i.e., its
innermost district--and thus its designation.  Obviously Samarkand had (or
has) something similar to pre-Ringstrasse Vienna.  Anyway, the Inner City
of Vienna does indeed contain most of the buildings that formerly housed
the institutions of "Imperial and Royal" power: St. Stephen's Cathedral,
the Hofburg (the imperial palace), other palaces and the imperial
government buildings.  Even today, the district's former status as a seat
of imperial power is unmistakable.  The Opera and the Burgtheater happen to
be on the Inner City side of the Ringstrasse, but the two big museums, the
Parliament, the Vienna city hall and the University of Vienna are on the
other side--but all these were built after the wall was gone.

Besides the imperial government buildings and such, though, the Inner City
also contains lots of narrow, winding streets lined with old houses, shops,
restaurants, churches, etc.  The population of this area is unremarkable
now (or was last time I was there), and I don't know anything about its
pre-WW2 population, but I gather from the Mein Kampf passage that it must
have been heavily Jewish before the war.

In any case, I don't see what any of this has to do with the connotations
of the expression "inner city" as applied to late-20th century America.

Peter

--On Tuesday, March 15, 2005 11:42 AM -0800 Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM> wrote:

> OED has "inner city" from 1968 as "the central area of a city, esp.
> regarded as having particular problems of overcrowding, poverty, etc."
> Perhaps this entry needs some historical clarification.
>
> Ralph Manheim's 1943 translation of _Mein Kampf_ features this striking
> usage near the end of ch. 2:
>
> "Particularly the Inner City and the districts north of the Danube Canal
> swarmed with a people which even outwardly had lost all resemblance to
> Germans."
>
> The 1911 _Britannica_ tells us, however, that
>
> "The inner city [of Vienna]...is still, unlike the older parts of most
> European towns, the most aristocratic quarter, containing the palaces of
> the emperor and of many of the nobility, the government offices, many of
> the embassies and legations, the opera house and the principal hotels."
>
> The earliest "inner city" I can find through EEBO and ECCO is the
> following:
>
> 1722 Francois Petis de la Croix _The History of Genghizcan the Great_
> (London: J. Darby, 1722):  In this great City [of Samarcand] there was an
> Inclosure called the inner City, which had four Gates, but the Walls were
> defenceless. The principal Mosque of Samarcand was within this Enclosure
> [sic], as also the Palace where the Prince used to reside.
>
> Other 18th C. exx. refer to ancient Athens and Memphis.
>
> JL
>
>
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*****************************************************************
Peter A. McGraw       Linfield College        McMinnville, Oregon
******************* pmcgraw at linfield.edu ************************