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Technology and Culture 43.4 (2002) 814-815



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Von Ford lernen? Automobilbau und Motorisierung in Deutschland bis 1933. By Reiner Flik. Vienna: Böhlau, 2001. Pp. viii+319. e34.30.

Since the 1980s, American dominance in the scholarly history of the automobile has been seriously challenged. Following James Laux's courageous, though perhaps premature, effort to write a history of the European automobile industry from scratch, several monographs about national and even regional and local automobilism have appeared. Apart from their intrinsic value, their indirect function has been to enable several corrections to the American story, culminating in the hypothesis that this might not have been the only historical narrative.

At least since John Rae and James Flink published their overviews—and since the American Big Three stumbled over Japanese and European challenges to their monopolistic self-indulgence—it has been evident that there are other stories to tell: stories about alternative technologies that were more important than Rae and Flink realized, stories about former colonies and other Third World countries that seemed to function as passive recipients of a fully defined technology, stories also about alternative national trajectories of motorization, characterized by a modal split between the car, the bicycle, the pedestrian, and the railroad. Reiner Flik's Von Ford lernen? (Learning from Ford?) is a very welcome addition to this literature.

Though leaning heavily on Heidrun Edelmann's Vom luxusgut zum Gebrauchsgegenstand (From luxury item to commodity) and, like this standard German work, focusing on the pre-mass-motorization age, Flik reaches beyond Edelmann's American bias. Making uncritical use of secondary [End Page 814] literature from the 1920s and 1930s, an era when most German commentators looked at the United States as the promised land of automobility, Edelmann depicted German motorization as lagging behind the United States and treated German automotive technology as backward. Flik convincingly shows, however, that the German Sonderweg was adequate, given the national circumstances. Although other German automobile historians, such as Hans-Joachim Braun, have already analyzed the German automobile industry's production methods as a clever mix of handicraft and Taylorism, Flik explains why this should have been by pointing at the economic and demographic limitations of the German interwar car market.

For historians of technology, Flik's thoroughly researched and clearly formulated narrative may seem a trifle disappointing. Placing himself within the heritage of traditional economic history, he dismisses as erratic any explanations other than economic ones. And, while he comes a long way, further than anyone before him, there is a lot that is missing: there are no automobile clubs as intermediary forces in shaping and reshaping the car, there is no analysis of automobility at the micro and meso level, and, generally, the creation of an "automobile culture" and the perspective of the user are not to be found. Flik is no Clay McShane (United States), no Sean O'Connell (United Kingdom), no Cathérine Bertho Lavenir (France).

But it is easy to criticize an author for what he does not do. What Flik does do—perhaps for the first time—is go back to the all-too-often neglected treasure of auto and motorcycle registrations, performing a thorough and convincing analysis at the level of the individual bundesländer. This analysis—covering the years to 1939, six years more than the scope of his narrative—enables him to make an explicit comparison with the United States. This reveals, among other things, the quite modest role of the German farmer-owner in the initial diffusion of the automobile, which to a large extent also explains the slow (by comparison to other European countries) motorization of the German middle classes.

Having said this, I should add a critical note regarding the use of sources. Many of Flik's paragraphs are not backed up by any documentation, thereby preventing other scholars from building on his seminal work. If an English-speaking editor were to invite Flik to provide documentation, his analysis would certainly deserve to be translated.

 



Gijs Mom

Dr. Mom is program director of mobility history at the...

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