Poems in Steel
National Socialism and the Politics of Inventing from Weimar to Bonn (review)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 14527266 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Michael Thad Allen (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2003 |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 414-415 |
| Publication date | 2003-04-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Technology and Culture (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0040-165X • E-ISSN: 1097-3729 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/tech.2003.0052 |
| OpenAlex | W2090849731 |
| Language | EN |
By the 1930s, the frustration of many German engineers led them into the ken of right-wing intellectuals who glorified inventing not as a rational, economic pursuit but as the manifestation of spirit and Volk. It was but a short step from there to the Nazi Party, which mixed romanticism and engineering in a heady brew of "reactionary modernism." This epithet, coined by Jeffrey Herf, has become a handy oxymoron, for it associates disreputable aspects of German industrial modernity with Nazism without acknowledging Nazi Germany as part of the shared history of Western modernity; that is, as a state wedded to "reactionary" modernity, the Third Reich remains unique, outside of "real" modernity. In Poems in Steel, Kees Gispen argues that this only obscures how much German engineers as well as National Socialists were up in arms against the policies of a German legal system dating back to the Empire, which was itself both repressive and modern
Art · Art history · Communism · Empire · German · Literature · Modernism (music) · Modernity · Nazi Germany · Nazism · Political science · Politics · Reactionary · Romanticism · Socialism · Weimar Republic · Cybernetics and Technology in Society · Law · Philosophy
| Highly cited | No |
|---|