The Germans Look at the Atomic Age

THE GERMANS LOOK AT THE ATOMIC AGE I11. Boeschenstein Friedrich Nietzsche seems to have been the first German philosopher to acquire and use a typewriter . Antediluvian though his Danish model must have been in comparison with modem perfection, be was enthusiastic. As he was plagued with Ii steadily deteriorating eyesight the machine was just what he needed, and on occasion it also stood him in good stead when he wanted to wind up a letter. "Good-bye for now," he wrote to Paul Ree in 1881, "the typewriter refuses to work. I have just come to the spot where the ribbon is patched together." Remembering his panegyric on the electric streetcars of Turin one is tempted to state that Nietzsche was, for a long time to come, the last German philosopher to have a good word to say on technical innovations. Suspicion of and outright hostility to technology came naturally to German intellectuals of the last century. The Romantic tradition acted as a brake on realistic thinking, whicb not even Marx, with all his awareness of an industrialized society, was strong enough to release. This lack of understanding for the material exigencies of life and this failure to discuss and interpret technical and soci1:l.l ~h~!!o:es h~":e (;fterr been pointed out as the causes or rather the symptoms of a growing estrangement, in Germany, between thought and life. The industrial revolution went on; German writers, artists, and philosophers, the majority of them, confessed bewilderment or disgust. Adolf von Menzel (1815-1905), who in the subjects he painted encompassed the old as well as the new-a musical soiree at the Court of Sanssouci, an iron foundry, or a railway yard-has no counterpart among the writers of his generation. These were unable or unwilling to expand their imagination, or their vocabulary, to include the conquests made by science and industry. While people everywhere flocked to the railway stations and were eager to board the flimsy coaches, their contemporaries in German fiction were still made to travel to the sound of the postboy's horn. True GBRMANS AND THB ATOMIC AGB 251 enough, when in 1845 the Suebian poet Justinus Kerner, in a poem called "Beneath the Sky," bewailed the coming of the mechanical age and the going of a romantic period, and anticipated the horrible prospect of a blue sky darkened by a train of flying box cars, Gottfried Keller parried with a better poem and a better attitude, boisterously greeting the arrival of the Elias chariot-this being the metaphor for railway trains--and wishing he could be a passenger in an airship carrying wine from Greece to his native Switzerland. "Who would not want to be its pilot?" He for one would, if only to sample the cargo, bend over the gondola, and pour his cup into the lonely sea beneath. But the Romantic overtones are obvious in this ceremonial sacrifice: Keller would have thought twice before wasting good wine and thrice before entrusting himself to an airship. In his own practice as a novelist he hardly ever reduced the fiery dragon-another metaphor for trains used in his reply to Kerner-to its proper technical term so that his imaginative characters might be induced to take a train. They travel on foot or by coach. Older writers continued almost to the end of the century to speak of locomotives as smoking dragons and to refer to telephone wires as Aeolian harps. The shock imparted by the naturalistic writers after 1880 was in no small degree due to the fact that they forced their readers into the company of bedraggled section-men and sweating, cursing, threshingmachine attendants. This is not the place to recapitulate the slow familiarization of German poets with ship-building yards, factories, bicycles, and other products of industry, the less so since such familiarity soon began to breed or renew contempt. Once again, around the turn of the century, the poets found it fashionable to look askance at the realities of a technically determined development and-a matter of far greater concern-to disengage themselves from its social and political implications. Stefan George's call to aloofness and Rilke's one...