dark side of 'automobilism', 1900-30: Violence, war and the motor car, The

Journal of Transport History, The, Sep 2003 by Moser, Kurt

For most historians it is a commonplace that motor cars should not be studied just in the context of machines, companies or inventors. Indeed, over the last thirty years, scholars have studied the wider political, institutional, organisational, economic and cultural dimensions of the car. Nevertheless there are still some aspects which merit closer attention if we are properly to understand the early diffusion of the 'mobility machine' throughout Europe.1 Contextualising the diffusion of the motor car, as with any technological artefact, involves historiographical choices. However, scholars are far from agreed on what made mobility machines so attractive to contemporaries; there is no consensus over the focus of this aspect of automobile history or about the questions that should be investigated. Is it best developed as a subfield of the history of technology, of social, institutional or economic history, or of transport history? If the last is the case, then how should this new kind of transport history be written?

There are certainly problems with some of the other possibilities. The most recent attempts to develop a historiography of mobility within the history of technology try to integrate social, economic and political aspects and are open to the use of cultural forms of evidence. But even these historians still seem to have difficulty in looking beyond artefacts and coming to terms with the complexities of what has become the largest techno-social system on earth.2 On the other hand, when automobile history is treated as part of economic, institutional or social history and, as such, focuses on the 'large system' of infrastructure, it tends to disregard the 'small system' of the automobile and its components.3 Yet understanding cars within the framework of traditional transport history leaves much to be desired, because many features of this 'means of transport' have little to do with transport as a utilitarian function but much to do with non-rational, or symbolic, social and psychological choices. It is this last aspect of mobility history that this article addresses, by exploring a subject which was crucial for the social acceptance and early diffusion of the motor car in Europe - the 'culture of aggression' before the First World War. The aim is not a comprehensive treatment of this vast field but a review that indicates some directions for future research.

This article argues that in the formative decades of automobilism the use of automobiles and aeroplanes in the context of races and other technologically oriented mass spectator sports played a significant role in generating a collective mood that anticipated and prepared individuals and societies for a European war.4 Automobilism and aeronautics provided a system of cultural references that could later be used to understand, shape and express wartime experience. Several important works of historiography suggest that motorisation played a role in preparing society, mentally and culturally as well as practically, for the 'Big Bang' (gro[beta]e Kladderadatsch) anticipated by most European elites.5 Together with other components of an evolving 'speed culture' - cycle races, aviation gatherings, motorboat regattas - automobiles played an important part in the creation of a collective mentality appropriate to the coming war. This future contest between nations was perceived in terms of a Darwinistic struggle for which every major European power felt it had to be prepared. Car culture was thus highly significant for what has been termed the 'European civil war' and its cultural, political and social history.6

The relationship between aggression and early automobilism has been noticed before.7 The German historian Klenke draws parallels between the aggressive habit of the front-line fighter and the 'antisocial' behaviour of the driver, referring to the aggressive car culture of the early decades of the German Federal Republic and, thus, offering an explanation of the 'Darwinistic' behaviour of German motorists in the period after the second World War.8 Violent 'road battles' and conflicts between automobilists and other road users in the early diffusion period have also received attention.9

There is one period in the history of motorisation where the link between the history of automobilism and the political and social history of aggression has been researched thoroughly, namely the Nazis' 'motorisation policy' (Motorisierungspolitik). Research has been done on the role played by private cars, the promotion of car ownership and the building of Autobahnen (motorways) in the economic and military preparation for mechanised war. Eess attention has been paid, however, to how automobilism prepared people for war in mental terms. The Nazi programme to make Germany a 'nation of drivers', and to make Germans 'car-minded' in order to ensure victory in any future mechanised war, has been widely discussed, while the military role of the Autobahn programme has also been debated extensively.10 But more recently scholars have tended to downplay the significance of the Nazis' 'politics of motorisation' in preparation for war.11 Generally speaking, automobile historians writing about Germany find themselves in a similar situation to those dealing with the First World War. While they have learned from British or American scholars, they have not acquired the wide perspectives, and particularly the sensitivity towards cultural matters, found in works by Clay McShane or Sean O'Connell.12 And there are no volumes of essays in German on popular car culture comparable to that edited by Thorns et al.13