Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890-1945 (review)

This is a book about transatlantic passenger liners, aviation, and film. And first of all it is about public judgment and public opinions and the impact they had on a cultural climate for technological innovation. Bernhard Rieger concentrates on liners, aviation, and film because they all emerged as new technologies during the 1890s and 1900s and represented "modern wonders" in the eye of the public. At first there were increasingly far-reaching critical debates about modernity, which makes it especially interesting to see how contemporaries evaluated technology. Rieger impressively shows how the respective publics in Britain and Germany shared the enthusiasm for new technologies, how they defined them as symbols of modernity across the political spectrum, and how the publics' perception created an "era of unprecedented, dynamic and exciting manmade changes" (p. 47). After the Second World War, debates about technology changed substantially: public belief in technological modernity eroded, and new levels of public resistance to technological innovations can be observed.

The book is thematically organized, moving from an examination of insecurity and risk-awareness to the cultural and political sources of public enthusiasm in order to explain how debate created cultural environments conducive to technological innovation. In the first chapter, Rieger examines the cultural foundation of technological enthusiasm and how the formula of "modern wonders" intensified after 1890, highlighting the contemporary belief that the present was exceptional. He shows how the trope of the "modern wonder" provided a persistent device to describe mind-boggling changes. This was achieved by maintaining a complex of interpretations that not only mirrored admiration and excitement, but also popular insecurity and anxiety about technological change. On the whole, welcoming sentiments outweighed skepticism. But ambivalence remains crucial for the following chapters, in which Rieger examines the debates about airship explosions, plane crashes, and shipwrecks and the ways by which the public coped with the physical risks of technology, and how contemporaries managed to integrate the perils of technology into a cultural climate supportive of technological innovation and change.

The comparison between Britain and Germany reveals astonishing cultural similarities. Widely shared social fantasies and desires played a crucial role in generating enthusiasm for new devices in both countries. These can be found in the iconography of the heroic male and female solo pilot triumphing over perdition and in the notion of floating palaces, casting ships as orderly worlds of luxury, consumption, and leisure. Public debate about film did not give rise to any antitechnological tirades "because film was hardly ever viewed as a technology in the first place" (p. 277). Rather, amateur film-making was viewed as a spare-time activity that fortified the individual and strengthened the family ideal.

British and German assessments of the significance of technology contrasted sharply only where they focused on the nation. The British public perceived new technologies as helping their country keep its leading international status, while Germans considered technology as a tool to improve their position in the world's power competition. In Germany after the First World War, technology symbolized the spirit of national resistance and resilience, and after 1933 the National Socialists' rhetoric offered a comprehensive alternative vision of Germany as a modern society. Hence this book provides an important contribution to the debate about modernity in Nazi Germany. Drawing on an extremely wide range of popular contemporary writings and pictorial material, it not only offers interesting insights into the debates on three technologies, but also uses a sophisticated and stimulating comparative approach to the cultural appropriation of technology.