The Engineer as Ideologue: Reactionary Modernists in Weimar and Nazi Germany

Abstract

The dichotomy between Kultur and Zivilisation, so crucial for German nationalism in the decades preceding the nazi seizure of power, posed a serious dilemma: how could the Kulturnation be both powerful and true to its soul? How could its strong romantic anti-Enlightenment traditions be reconciled with technical advance? Nowhere else in Europe did modernity arrive so rapidly and intensely as in Germany. Nowhere else was the anti-modernist rejection so intense. Germany gave birth to the second industrial revolution based on the electrical and chemical industries just as it was experiencing the impact of the first industrial revolution based on steam. Germany was also the home of Volkish ideologues, castigating the Jews and idealizing the small German village and peasant virtues. This confrontation of Biedermeier and modernity became a commonplace in sociological theory, providing us with many of the familiar sociological dichotomies - tradition and modernity, community and society, etc. From Tonnies and Weber to Parsons and Dahrendorf, sociology has interpreted the Kultur-Zivilisation dichotomy as of central importance to the ideological roots of German politics. Yet, with a few important exceptions, less attention has been given to the problem of how the dilemmas of the Kulturnation was resolved in the modern world. Perceptions of technology are central to resolution of this dilemma, because a nation that is technologically backward is a weak nation, yet technical advance appeared to many of Germany's conservative cultural critics to pose a dire threat to the German soul. Could the romantic German soul and modern technology be reconciled and if