Streit um die Technikgeschichte in Deutschland, 1945-1975 (review)

Streit um die Technikgeschichte in Deutschland, 1945-1975. By Wolfhard Weber and Lutz Engelskirchen. Münster: Waxmann, 2000. Pp. 448. DM 49.90.

This is a book about the institutionalization of the history of technology in both German states at the height of the cold war. The narrative stops just before the senior of the two authors, Wolfhard Weber, became active in the field himself. Weber contributed the material on the German Democratic Republic and wrote the final draft, while Lutz Engelskirchen, his graduate student, researched the archives in the Federal Republic. Streit is not a German version of John Staudenmaier's Technology's Storytellers. As noted in the preface, the authors "have dispensed with an analysis of the results of research in the history of technology," and academic debate surfaces only when it serves political purposes. The reader is never left in doubt about the identity of the good guys.

Often polemical, Streit cannot be to everyone's liking. In West Germany, the history of technology was quickly exploited in the interest of fostering amnesia about Nazism. A highly conservative cultural history and history of ideas were revitalized to provide background for a denazified version of the positive contributions of engineers and a "neutral" technology. Under these circumstances, it is no surprise that conservative historians of mathematics and physics came to dominate the field in the 1950s and 1960s, with strongholds in Munich, Berlin, and Hamburg.

A second group, led by Wilhelm Treue of Hannover, connected to the social and economic history of the pre-1914 Empire. Less "pure" but equally apologetic, the "Treue" history of technology built the first bridges to debates in general history. Both schools wooed engineers for support by offering them a sanitized identity in the new republic. It was Treue and the "historians" faction that eventually dominated the activities of the Association of German Engineers and reactivated the journal Technikgeschichte.

The Munich-Berlin-Hamburg notion of the history of technology as a subset of the history of ideas—bypassing the social and economic—failed to win much support among young scholars or those planning educational reform. During the 1960s the history of technology began to drift toward history proper. The new University of Bochum (where Weber has worked since the late 1960s and has been professor since 1976) was the first to create a combined chair for history of technology and economic history within the faculty of history. Treue himself came under pressure from younger historians, especially Reinhard Rürup, pulling history of technology ever closer to the social sciences and measuring it against recent French, British, and, most of all, American research.

In the GDR, history of technology as history of ideas had no ideological home and was quickly swept away with other bourgeois remnants. Historical materialism placed history of technology within the matrix of social and economic history—the "history of productive forces"—with research conducted in the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin under the mentorship of Jürgen Kuczynski and his student Wolfgang Jonas. Weber and Engelskirchen express contempt for the focus on social and economic dimensions of technology in the East, while keeping silent about the influence of Western Marxists on the history of technology in both West and East Germany.

The great attraction of Marxist studies was the head start into the social and economic context of technology. Indeed, it was sufficiently tempting for Weber's mentor and predecessor in Bochum, Albrecht Timm, to illicitly copy whole passages from Jonas's 1969 book on the History of the Productive Forces in his own Introduction to the History of Technology. Even though this politically delicate plagiarism was the only "dispute over the history of technology in Germany" that made national headlines in the 1970s, Weber and Engelskirchen note the affair in just one sentence and without comment (p. 311). Instead, we get a succession of polemics about the shortcomings of East German history of technology and its practitioners...