Brucken am Weg: Fruhe Brucken aus Eisen und Beton in Deutschland und Frankreich (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Brücken am Weg: Frühe Brücken aus Eisen und Beton in Deutschland und Frankreich * Tom F. Peters (bio) Brücken am Weg: Frühe Brücken aus Eisen und Beton in Deutschland und Frankreich. By Klaus Stiglat. Berlin: Ernst & Sohn, 1997. Pp. 179; illustrations. DM 68. Germany is ahead of the United States in structural engineering history, which does not mean that more, or more thoughtful, books have been written on German engineering. Far from it; the Anglo-American world still has the edge there. The first analytical books on German engineering history are only being written now. But Germany has embraced engineering history as a cultural matter and as a reflective teaching tool for engineers, which is more than what the English-speaking world can claim. Engineering history really started in Germany at the beginning of this century, fostered by Oskar von Miller, the director of the world’s first museum of technology, the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The biographies, industrial biographies, and encyclopedias of Conrad Matschoss (1871–1942) and Franz-Maria Feldhaus (1874- 1959) laid the groundwork for an understanding of technology as culture in Germany, and this understanding is beginning to blossom today, in the work of the Berlin-Brandenburg school. Its members—K.-E. Kurrer, historian of engineering theory and editor of the engineering journal Stahlbau, A. Kahlow, professor of the history of structural engineering at the FH Potsdam, and W. Lorenz, professor of the same at the Technische Universität Cottbus—are working together to create a body of thought and knowledge about the role of Prussia in the development of modern construction. They are supported in the international seminars organized by E. Schunk at the Technische Universität Munich and in the work of a whole institute devoted to structural engineering history at the University of Karlsruhe, headed by W. Schirmer. The Verein Deutscher Ingenieure (VDI) has published its historical journal Technikgeschichte since 1901 as an annual and since 1933 as a quarterly publication, and the VDI’s history committee has existed since 1949. The Anglo-American world has no comparable pedigree to offer. Klaus Stiglat’s unusual book is best seen against the background of this culture. At first Brücken am Weg appears to be a simple and somewhat random Baedecker’s tour of surviving iron and concrete beam and arch bridges in France and Germany, complete with maps, beautiful photographs, and historical engravings attractively laid out. But it is more. Written by an amateur historian, it is not professional history but the autobiography of a thoughtful engineer’s discovery of historical thinking along the many roads he traveled, the writing of a man curious about the objects he knows professionally and loves. The book documents the author’s questioning of the meaning of history in his field and the development of engineering process and thought. As explained in the introduction (p. 12), the question that led to the book was Stiglat’s confusion about the Eiffel remodeling of the Cubzac bridge north of Bordeaux. An engineer looking at the bridge is naturally [End Page 768] confused by the early nineteenth-century cast-iron piers surmounted by a late nineteenth-century box truss in wrought iron. Not understanding what he was looking at and why it looked that way, Stiglat embarked on a voyage of discovery, symptomatic of engineering thought in Germany today. Far from being a typical engineer’s deterministic view of historical chronology and a hagiography, or a professional historian’s didactic analysis of a development or problem, the book is a perceptive dialectic between one person’s discovery of the historical meaning of his field and the current development of engineering thought. It is “dilettante” in the positive, eighteenth-century sense that the term once possessed. The book starts with a brief history of bridge construction and touches on the highlights as they apply to Germany and France, but it makes no pretense of being complete or even comprehensive. It concentrates on the development of a few types and discusses transnational influences. Without being dogmatic, the narrative dissolves constraining concepts such as “national technological style” simply by demonstrating how and when engineering ideas and logic...