Grenzen der Sicherheit. Unfälle, Medien und Politik im deutschen Kaiserreich ed. by Amerigo Caruso and Birgit Metzger

Abstract

Reviewed by: Grenzen der Sicherheit. Unfälle, Medien und Politik im deutschen Kaiserreich ed. by Amerigo Caruso and Birgit Metzger Jens-Uwe Guettel Grenzen der Sicherheit. Unfälle, Medien und Politik im deutschen Kaiserreich. Edited by Amerigo Caruso and Birgit Metzger. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2022. Pp. 293. Hardcover €36.90. ISBN 978-3835339064. This edited volume is a much-needed intervention in newly invigorated debates about the German Empire. The volume's concrete focus on accidents, their reception, politicization, and utilization in the Kaiserreich before 1914 provides depth and details to discussions that, after the critique of Hedwig Richter's Demokratie. Eine deutsche Affäre, have tended to unfold within, at times, rather lofty historiographical meta-levels. Grenzen der Sicherheit brings us back down to earth (even below the earth's surface level with respect to mining accidents) as the book covers everything from non-military shooting accidents (Dagmar Ellerbrock) to collisions of naval ships (Sebastian Rojek) and zeppelin accidents (Jürgen Bleibler, Rüdiger Haude), to accidents within the army (Birgit Metzger), to mining and industrial disasters (Michael Farrenkopf, Fabian Trinkaus), to the accidental deaths of prominent individuals such as Friedrich August II of Saxony (Amerigo Caruso) and the pioneer of aviation Otto Lilienthal (Peter Busse/Bernd Lukasch). Grenzen der Sicherheit provides us with the history of accidents in the German Empire and thus combines two separate debates: inquiries into the handling of physical risks and the changing attitudes towards and demands for individual and collective security on the one hand, and on the other, longstanding questions about the character of the first German nation state and the ambiguities of modernity (7–8). The book covers these issues with great verve and clarity, and the individual [End Page 157] chapters show repeatedly how significantly perceptions about risk, risk management, and related social controlling and policing mechanisms changed between the middle years of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Dagmar Ellerbrock's chapter on gun-related accidents highlights this development, as it traces both the changing public attitudes toward private shooting accidents and deaths and the correspondingly shifting policy responses, thereby clearly demonstrating that in the early years of the twentieth century these events were seen as a security problem in need of policy solutions, while the same issues had been perceived as natural risks half a century earlier. Other chapters of the book sketch out similar developments, among them Michael Farrenkopf's contribution on mining disasters and Fabian Trinkaus's piece on accidents in the iron and steel industry. Yet Grenzen der Sicherheit also shows that social and political responses did not always sync up with the growing knowledge and awareness of certain risks. A partial exception to this "norm" is presented in the book's chapters on aircraft accidents. Especially with respect to the frequent and disastrous accidents of Count Zeppelin's airships, Farrenkopf and Trinkaus both show that public reaction nevertheless remained favorable to these machines, as they were seen as symbols of German technological prowess and imperial aspirations. With respect to the book's intervention in debates about "the character of the first German nation state," Grenzen der Sicherheit answers as many queries as it raises new questions. Given this edited volume's breadth and depth, this is entirely as it should be. The book's contributions demonstrate convincingly how significantly attitudes towards what constituted (acceptable) social and individual risk(s) changed during the covered period. However, this process is at least at times described as an essentially naturally occurring one, rather than as a development driven by human actors. For example, the increasing public awareness (and fear) of gun-related accidents during the years before the beginning of war in 1914 was not just fueled by independently changing attitudes toward privately owned firearms and accidents caused by them, but also by the increased use of such weapons in unruly and densely populated working-class neighborhoods. Beginning with the massive suffrage demonstrations in the spring of 1910 and the Moabit unrests later during the same year, the increased use of privately owned weapons resulted in something of an arms race between the Prussian police and working-class demonstrators. Changing perceptions of what risks were...