Flirting on the ice

By the 19th century, ice skating had developed into a fashionable pastime for the upper classes. The skating rink became an important public space, where social hierarchies, moral values and notions of gender manifested themselves. In the Baltic states too, skating was an integral part of the lives of the German population, as numerous memoirs attest. But why did it play such an important role for people during their years of childhood and coming-of-age to the extent that it would later feature so prominently in their memoirs?