'Modern Wonders:' Technology In British and German Public Culture, 1890-1945.

Iowa State University, Ames IA

Investigators

Abstract

This project investigates the ways in which public culture promoted technological change in Britain and Germany from the late nineteenth century to the end of World War II. While a Visiting Fellow at Churchill College, University of Cambridge, Dr. Rieger is gathering archival material for a comparative monograph detailing similarities and differences between British and German debates about processes of innovation. This project identifies similarities alongside national differences evident in the ways in which public discussions about technology worked to create cultural climates conducive to innovation in Britain and Germany between the 1890s and the end of World War II. In his treatment of how enthusiasm for, and unease about, innovative technologies interacted during this period, the principal investigator studies the intersecting debates about the following five technologies: aviation, passenger shipping, the motor car, photography, and film. Drawing on pictorial and textual evidence, this inquiry approaches public debates about technological change as productions of knowledge which ascribed meaning to artifacts whose workings most contemporaries were unable to understand. Public debates about the new "modern wonders" that continually appeared on the scene were torn between fears of novel risks and cultural decay on the one side, and passionate support generated by nationalism and social fantasies on the other. While investigating the links between public technophobia and euphoria, the impact of liberal and illiberal ideologies in Britain and Germany requires particular attention in order to uncover the cultural and political mechanisms behind the political appropriation of technological innovations. Thus, this comparative study takes the cultural history of British and German technology beyond the currently dominant inquiries into productivism or into contemporary philosophical debates about "the question of technology" (Friedrich Dessauer). Instead, Rieger advances a comprehensive explanation for the varying reasons why British and German public culture promoted technological innovation between 1890 and 1945.