Technology and Culture

This edited volume poses a question familiar to readers of Technology and Culture: is “technology the engine of modernization?” Despite no question mark in the main title, Thomas Zoglauer in his introductory essay makes it clear that the volume should be read as an attempt to further the discussion about “the interaction between technology and society” (p. 23). Twenty-five years after Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx asked: Does Technology Drive History? (1994), we still do not seem to have overcome “The Dilemma of Technological Determinism,” to quote Smith and Marx’s subtitle. Considering the widespread use of concepts like “co-evolution” and “co-construction” in the history and sociology of technology for almost two decades, Zoglauer’s observation that initial attempts to find a “middle ground between technological determinism and social constructivism” have “recently” appeared is quite surprising (p. 11). Even more astonishing is that neither Zoglauer nor his co-editors delivers a substantial discussion about the concept Modernisierung. Reducing modernization to “the transition from agricultural to industrial society” (p. 13) is certainly inadequate.

Technik als Motor der Modernisierung’s strength lies in the individual contributions. Although the chapters are of very different length and character, each contains empirical information and reflexive comments of relevance to our understanding of technology’s place in nineteenth- and twentieth-century European societies. Whereas some chapters are descriptive and accessible for a lay audience, others are highly theoretical and seem to be directed to specialists.

At one end of the spectrum is Andreas Benz’s technologically deterministic account of cross-border railroad traffic’s revolutionary impact on the postal system in the second half of the nineteenth century, along with Norman Pohl’s discussion about how the chemical industry has triggered [End Page 948] and reacted to various, at times utopian, expectations and needs. At the other extreme we find Nina Köberer and Matthias Rath’s philosophical and sociological analysis of the role of digital media technologies for human communication in modern societies.

Nele-Hendrikje Lehmann’s chapter about the conception and design of technology museums in the German Democratic Republic of the 1950s and ’60s ought to interest many readers of this journal. Despite the centrality of the productive forces in Marxist ideology and the intense competition between the “First and Second Worlds,” East Germany did not create an equivalent to the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Instead, in 1958, the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party decided to design so-called polytechnical museums on local or regional levels. Most of these initiatives never fulfilled the high ambitions. The collaboration with existing folk museums turned out to be difficult, and acquiring suitable objects was a challenge. The implementation of new pedagogic ideas to exemplify what one commentator formulated as “lawful historical processes,” often led to “boring exhibitions and unsatisfied visitors” (pp. 218–19). The attempts “to make machines speak” often degenerated into endless texts on innumerable posters (p. 219).

Lehmann’s chapter, based on fresh source material, is exciting. Other chapters are more conventional. Hans Friesen’s essay on the relationship between technological options and architectural form discusses largely well-known developments and famous architects: Loos, Gropius, Le Cor-busier. The same can be said of Zoglauer’s contribution, where the writings of Verne, Wells, Spengler, and others are consulted to support the thesis that “technology criticism always represents a critique of modernity” (p. 54). To my mind, such a conclusion not only goes too far; it also fails to acknowledge that modernity and modernization are neither uniform nor monolithic processes. The question mark in the title of Thomas Rohkrämer’s book Eine andere Moderne? (1999) is meant to make us aware that other forms of modernity might be possible.