No sooner had the railways started their triumphal march in Great Britain in the middle of the 19th century, when doctors warned of the health dangers of rail transport. Even more than the negative pressure during the journey, they feared the vibrations that would jolt and shatter the passengers and their nerves. In order to dampen the hardship of the mechanical blows, railway designers and interior decorators switched to the production of schooners, covers, cases and upholstery, which soon reached into the apartments.
Even the grueling view from the compartment window of the passing landscapes called for protection against irritation. Freud later described this as the formation of cortex on the surface of consciousness to soften the impact of sensory impressions. Meanwhile, the train travelers reacted to the new unreasonable demands with fainting fits of fatigue. It was no coincidence that occupational physicians and engineers were discussing industrial fatigue of people and machines at the same time, which they saw as the main cause of serious accidents and traumatic neuroses.
The creative annihilation of the familiar old through the ruthlessly modern
When Wolfgang Schivelbusch published his epoch book “History of the Railway Journey” in 1977 on the “Industrialization of Space and Time in the 19th Century”, there was great astonishment in the humanities. It is true that since Norbert Elias there had always been big stories that showed the process of civilization through secondary phenomena such as snuffers or cutlery. But a history of culture and technology that examined the mutual modeling of humans and machines and described the creative annihilation of the familiar by the ruthlessly modern was largely new. In the midst of the enthusiasm at the time about the Berlin philosopher Walter Benjamin, who unfortunately had directed his admired spatial-material thinking entirely on the retrospective Parisian arcade world, Schivelbusch discovered the human essential forces in the machine room of the industrial revolution.
Born in Berlin, who received his doctorate on theater after Brecht, had fled the thin air of the theoretical world of his literature and philosophy studies into the concretions of material culture. With his two following books on luxury foods and artificial lighting, he created a material trilogy about the work of things on people, which managed without the puzzles of the French technical theory of Bruno Latour. Schivelbusch always approached his gigantic material research with intuition and empathy, but without any methodological scruples. The readers had to deliver themselves confidently to this authorial documentarist in order to receive rich presents.
Schivelbusch, who is now 80 years old, never held academic positions, but financed his private scholarship exclusively with scholarships, project grants and company contracts. The powdery mildew of university civil service science does not lie on his brilliantly written books. And his decades of double life between Berlin and New York taught him that Anglo-Saxon science books are never just paper-based printing subsidies, but always have to be sold.
In America, as Schivelbusch reports to his biographer Stephan Speicher in the recently published conversation book “Die other Seiten” (The Other Side), he was inevitably sensitized to the guilt and shame complexes of other countries as a descendant of German guilt. In 2001 he wrote his large-scale “Culture of Defeat” on this, in which he examined the lost war of the American southern states, the French thought of revenge after 1871 and the stab in the back legend in 1918, which narratives, myths and mourning emerged among the vanquished.
Since then, a topos has run through his works that goes back to Reinhard Koselleck and Carl Schmitt: the distinction between winners and conquered. Schivelbusch pays the greatest attention to the losers, because above all a power that falls becomes interesting for the mind. He invokes Hegel’s master-servant dialectic: the slave labor of the inferior servant makes the rule so lazy that the productive underdog ultimately wins. This author was recently able to win an essayistic salvation of honor even from the taboo of military retreat.
He made many enemies in the United States with his book “Remote Relationship” from 2005 about the belief in the state of the 1930s under fascism, National Socialism and the New Deal. In it he demonstrated the ghostly simultaneity of the large public investments in the crisis to create jobs. The synopsis of Roosevelt’s dams of the Tennessee Valley Authority, Mussolini’s cultivation of the Pontine Marshes and Hitler’s Reichsautobahn together with their propagandistic accompanying music revealed the ambivalence of the up to then linear progress narratives.
Schivelbusch said goodbye to the world of things in 2015 with his study “The Consuming Life of Things”, in which he combined Marx’s primacy of the production and use of goods with their transformation through consumption and consumption. Against the short lifespan of industrial mass products, he recalls the circular thinking of the Greek atomists, who took things at their word physically and saw them in constant transformation through human use. But Schivelbusch also recognizes something good in modern consumption of wear and tear: that it binds as much aggression and destructiveness as is necessary today to maintain the still historically unique state of peace.
Wolfgang Schivelbusch: The other side – living and researching between New York and Berlin. Rowohlt, Hamburg 2021. 336 pages, 26 euros.