Risking Gas Warfare

This essay examines how the anticipation of future warfare shaped the interwar period and led to the emergence of a literature of risk in Weimar culture. Having witnessed the introduction of air power and chemical warfare during the First World War, a broad European consensus held that unannounced aerial gassings of cities would decide the next war. After examining how the war scenarios of military strategists placed societies into an unprecedented risk situation, the essay rereads works by Benjamin, Döblin, Canetti, and Jahnn, and argues that their writings present the most thorough attempts to understand and represent the new temporality and spatiality that accompanied the omnipresent threat of a war of perception-defying weapons of mass destruction. Offering a new prospective reading of Weimar literature, the essay proposes that these writings gain a renewed relevance for contemporary efforts to rethink risk and society today

Aesthetics · Interwar period · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Relevance (law · Sociology · Weimar Republic · World War II · History · Law · Literature and Cultural Memory · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction

• The chemical subject

  Peter Thompson•History and Technology•2017

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