Technology In Modern German History

"People often associate postwar Germany with technology and with its products of mass consumption, such as luxury cars. Even pop music, most notably Kraftwerk (literally 'power station') with songs such as Autobahn, Radioactivity or We are the Robots, disseminates the stereotype of a close link between German culture and technology. Technology in Modern German History explores various forms of technology in 200 years of German history and explains how technology has been fundamental to the shaping of modern Germany. The book investigates the role technology played in transforming Germany's culture, society and politics during the 19th and 20th centuries. Key topics covered include the different stages of industrialization, the growth of networked cities, and the triumph of a teleological narrative of technology as progress. Moreover, it provides a critical revision of the history of high technology which reveals how high-tech euphoria determined certain paths in history regardless of whether the respective technology proved to be successful. In its second part, the volume introduces new avenues in scholarship. Karsten Uhl examines neglected areas, such as rural technologies or the often-overlooked importance of everyday technologies: How did consumers or workers use new technologies? How did they appropriate and modify them? Lastly, the book considers the final decades of the 20th century and asks if they provided a significant new quality of technological change: To what degree and effects did computerization transform professional and private life in Germany? In culture and politics, reinforced by the German variety of environmentalism, the idea of progress was challenged, as the once prevailing vision of progress gave way to new apprehensions of uncertainty evident to this day. Technology in Modern German History brings fascinating insight into a much neglected area of German history for students and scholars alike."--

People often associate postwar Germany with technology and with its products of mass consumption, such as luxury cars. Even pop music, most notably Kraftwerk (literally 'power station') with songs such as Autobahn, Radioactivity or We are the Robots, disseminates the stereotype of a close link between German culture and technology. Technology in Modern German History explores various forms of technology in 200 years of German history and explains how technology has been fundamental to the shaping of modern Germany. The book investigates the role technology played in transforming Germany's culture, society and politics during the 19th and 20th centuries. Key topics covered include the different stages of industrialization, the growth of networked cities, and the triumph of a teleological narrative of technology as progress. Moreover, it provides a critical revision of the history of high technology which reveals how high-tech euphoria determined certain paths in history regardless of whether the respective technology proved to be successful. In its second part, the volume introduces new avenues in scholarship. Karsten Uhl examines neglected areas, such as rural technologies or the often-overlooked importance of everyday technologies: How did consumers or workers use new technologies? How did they appropriate and modify them? Lastly, the book considers the final decades of the 20th century and asks if they provided a significant new quality of technological change: To what degree and effects did computerization transform professional and private life in Germany? In culture and politics, reinforced by the German variety of environmentalism, the idea of progress was challenged, as the once prevailing vision of progress gave way to new apprehensions of uncertainty evident to this day. Technology in Modern German History brings fascinating insight into a much neglected area of German history for students and scholars alike.

This is the first comprehensive, multi-author survey of German history that features cutting-edge syntheses of major topics by an international team of leading scholars. Emphasizing demographic, economic, and political history, this Handbook places German history in a denser transnational context than any other general history of Germany. It underscores the centrality of war to the unfolding of German history, and shows how it dramatically affected the development of German nationalism and the structure of German politics. It also reaches out to scholars and students beyond the field of history with detailed and cutting-edge chapters on religious history and on literary history, as well as to contemporary observers, with reflections on Germany and the European Union, and on 'multi-cultural Germany'. Covering the period from around 1760 to the present, this Handbook represents a remarkable achievement of synthesis based on current scholarship. It constitutes the starting point for anyone trying to understand the complexities of German history as well as the state of scholarly reflection on Germany's dramatic, often destructive, integration into the community of modern nations. As it brings this story to the present, it also places the current post-unification Federal Republic of Germany into a multifaceted historical context. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in modern Germany.

This is the first comprehensive, multi-author survey of German history that features cutting-edge syntheses of major topics by an international team of leading scholars. Emphasizing demographic, economic, and political history, this Handbook places German history in a denser transnational context than any other general history of Germany. It underscores the centrality of war to the unfolding of German history, and shows how it dramatically affected the development of German nationalism and the structure of German politics. It also reaches out to scholars and students beyond the field of history with detailed and cutting-edge chapters on religious history and on literary history, as well as to contemporary observers, with reflections on Germany and the European Union, and on 'multi-cultural Germany.' Covering the period from around 1760 to the present, this Handbook represents a remarkable achievement of synthesis based on current scholarship. It constitutes the starting point for anyone trying to understand the complexities of German history as well as the state of scholarly reflection on Germany's dramatic, often destructive, integration into the community of modern nations. As it brings this story to the present, it also places the current post-unification Federal Republic of Germany into a multifaceted historical context. It will be an indispensable resource for scholars, students, and anyone interested in modern Germany.

Covering the entire period of modern German history - from nineteenth-century imperial Germany right through the present - this well-established text presents a balanced, general survey of the country's political division in 1945 and runs through its reunification in the present. Detailing foreign policy as well as political, economic and social developments, A History of Modern Germany presents a central theme of the problem of asymmetrical modernization in the country's history as it fully explores the complicated path of Germany's troubled past and stable present.

This eBook edition of "Imperial Germany & the Industrial Revolution" has been formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. The book was published in 1915, after the First World War began. Veblen considered warfare a threat to economic productivity and contrasted the authoritarian politics of Germany with the democratic tradition of Britain, noting that industrialization in Germany had not produced a progressive political culture. Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution is in major part a study of the deviations in cultural and social growth between the English and the German. It deals with the consequences those differences created in social, economic and other domains. Veblen here describes, through the study of German culture, historical and social aspect, how it came to forming of the Third Reich, even before it was formed. He suggests that the Germany's autocracy was an advantage compared to democratic countries. After it was censored during the war, it was later released and it represents a substantial contribution in its sphere of influence. Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929) was an American economist and sociologist. He is well known as a witty critic of capitalism. Veblen is famous for the idea of "conspicuous consumption." Conspicuous consumption, along with "conspicuous leisure," is performed to demonstrate wealth or mark social status. Veblen explains the concept in his best-known book, The Theory of the Leisure Class. Within the history of economic thought, Veblen is considered the leader of the institutional economics movement. Veblen's distinction between "institutions" and "technology" is still called the Veblenian dichotomy by contemporary economists.

With the growth of printing in early modern Germany, crime quickly became a subject of wide public discourse. Sensational crime reports, often featuring multiple murders within families, proliferated as authors probed horrific events for religious meaning. Coinciding with heightened witch panics and economic crisis, the spike in crime fears revealed a continuum between fears of the occult and more mundane dangers. In Crime and Culture in Early Modern Germany, Joy Wiltenburg explores the beginnings of crime sensationalism from the early sixteenth century into the seventeenth century and beyond. Comparing the depictions of crime in popular publications with those in archival records, legal discourse, and imaginative literature, Wiltenburg highlights key social anxieties and analyzes how crime texts worked to shape public perceptions and mentalities. Reports regularly featured familial destruction, flawed economic relations, and the apocalyptic thinking of Protestant clergy. Wiltenburg examines how such literature expressed and shaped cultural attitudes while at the same time reinforcing governmental authority. She also shows how the emotional inflections of crime stories influenced the growth of early modern public discourse, so often conceived in terms of rational exchange of ideas.