The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany: Visions of Chemical Modernity

Exploring the history of the gas mask in Germany from 1915 to the eve of the Second World War, Peter Thompson traces how chemical weapons and protective technologies like the gas mask produced new relationships to danger, risk, management and mastery in the modern age of mass destruction. Recounting the apocalyptic visions of chemical death that circulated in interwar Germany, he argues that while everyday encounters with the gas mask tended to exacerbate fears, the gas mask also came to symbolize debates about the development of military and chemical technologies in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. He underscores how the gas mask was tied into the creation of an exclusionary national community under the Nazis and the altered perception of environmental danger in the second half of the twentieth century. As this innovative new history shows, chemical warfare and protection technologies came to represent poignant visions of the German future.

Ever since Germany's use of chlorine gas on the battlefields of Flanders during the First World War, modern warfare has become synonymous with gas warfare, its images an iconographic shorthand for a detached, humiliating, and dishonourable death, and the gas mask a modern symbol of memento mori, a reminder of our own mortality. The paper argues that a critical history of chemical weapons and protective technologies, which is firmly grounded in the historiography and pays particular attention to the wider political and scientific context and related complexities, can help to facilitate greater public understanding and a willingness among key stakeholders to prioritise a shared interest: the creation of a world free from chemical weapons once and for all. Through an extended book review of Peter Thompson's recent book The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany, the paper seeks to demonstrate that writing such a history of modern warfare poses distinct challenges. Across eight chapters, the book covers, among others, the history of the first attack with chlorine gas in 1915, the development of gas masks, the perceived fear of gas among soldiers, the role of doctors in treating gas casualties, the role and writings of “gas specialists”, and, last but not least, the alleged realisation of a specific “Nazi chemical modernity”, through which the author attempts to connect the subject matter with the Holocaust. Such a wide‐ranging, longue durée perspective can be fruitful if it is done with an attention to critical source analyses and balanced argumentation. Whether the book will inspire scholars to “rewrite the history of the twentieth century”, as the author implies, remains to be seen, but its broad discussion about the perceived and real implications of chemical agents and other “invisible toxins” undoubtedly offers food for thought in an increasingly volatile and seemingly threatening world.

The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany: Visions of Chemical Modernity By Peter Thompson

The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany: Visions of Chemical Modernity

Review for "Grounding the history of modern warfare: An extended book review of Peter Thompson's <i>The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany</i>"

Decision letter for "Grounding the history of modern warfare: An extended book review of Peter Thompson's <i>The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany</i>"

ABORTION MUST BE THE KEY TO new world for women, wrote the British feminist Stella Browne in 1935. Browne believed that the public emancipation of women in such areas as politics and the economy demanded and was dependent on their emancipation in the private sphere of sexual and reproductive practice: freedom of choice and deliberate intention are necessary for [women] in their sexual relations and their maternity, if they are to make anything of their status and opportunities. Toward this end, she advocated abortion as an absolute right spanning public and private realms.1 Browne evoked modern visions of femininity through abortion and emphasized the issue's liminality between public and private. These are themes also reflected in recent historical studies of abortion in North America and Europe. In work on post-1960 abortion in the United States, for example, Celeste Michelle Condit notes the intersection between changing discursive understandings of abortion and those of femininity, a negotiated transformation of women's own private discourses in public and private spheres, view also adopted by Jane Jenson in her examination of abortion in France.2 Other studies of abortion have emphasized its role in problematizing the private female body in the context of the public sphere after World War 1.3 This is particularly true of work on the controversies surrounding Article 218 in interwar Germany and the 1920 loi sce'Mrate in France, as Cornelie Usborne, Atina Grossmann, and Mary Louise Roberts have shown.4