Love at Last Sight is a history of dating in the modern metropolis. It 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—the story of which serves as the book’s central narrative—reveals the tremendous risk associated with modern approaches to love and dating. The risk of fraud, censure, or worse was ever present, especially for the many Berliners who strove for the stability of middle-class life but were outsiders to the social power structures of German 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—pursuing a missed connection from the streetcar or using a 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 their stories as a way of illuminating this core tension of modern, metropolitan life.