The arrival of the railway industrialised the layout of cities by creating new intense flows of traffic to and from the station. You travel from a form of warehouse to another warehouse, at a given time - not traditional time determined by the position of the Sun - but one decided by the Rail company (as many as four different times applied in a Pittsburgh station which served multiple companies). Even a new technology – and you may have noticed this if you have switched from a paper system to an electronic one in your working life – does not start out to realise its own potential but instead seeks to replicate what already exists. The violence, disruption, overthrow of traditional approaches, alien discipline and structure, all experienced by workers in industrial workplaces was shared in by the travel experience of rail travellers.Īt the same time as all this newness existed there was also no blank slate, no white page. Schivelbusch tells us that rail travel was for many people their only experience of an industrial process. And that distinction is one of the points of the book. Unless you are in the USA, in which case you are shipped. It builds up steam towards the industrialisation of travel, with the traveller as product, delivered to their destination. Long enough for others to have drawn from it and for its messages to have passed through many stations. It helped to remember that this book has been rattling around since 1977. What this is, is a cultural history, culture very broadly understood, of the railway.Īt first everything seemed so familiar that I could hardly perceive the insight. Since I read this book with twinkling eyes and a smile on my face I tenderly recommend it to other readers, at least those who are interested in trains. Now updated with a new preface, The Railway Journey is an invaluable resource for readers interested in nineteenth-century culture and technology and the prehistory of modern media and digitalization. As a history of the surprising ways in which technology and culture interact, this book covers a wide range of topics, including the changing perception of landscapes, the death of conversation while traveling, the problematic nature of the railway compartment, the space of glass architecture, the pathology of the railway journey, industrial fatigue and the history of shock, and the railroad and the city.īelonging to a distinguished European tradition of critical sociology best exemplified by the work of Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin, The Railway Journey is anchored in rich empirical data and full of striking insights about railway travel, the industrial revolution, and technological change. In a highly original and engaging fashion, Schivelbusch discusses the ways in which our perceptions of distance, time, autonomy, speed, and risk were altered by railway travel. In The Railway Journey, Schivelbusch examines the origins of this industrialized consciousness by exploring the reaction in the nineteenth century to the first dramatic avatar of technological change, the railroad. But this was not always the case as Wolfgang Schivelbusch points out in this fascinating study, our adaptation to technological change-the development of our modern, industrialized consciousness-was very much a learned behavior. As of 2014, he is a visiting scholar at the Emmy Noether Research Group “The Future in the Stars.The impact of constant technological change upon our perception of the world is so pervasive as to have become a commonplace of modern society. Since 1974, Wolfgang Schivelbusch has been dividing his time between New York and Berlin. His numerous and award-winning publications, many translated into several languages, include The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century (1979), Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (1988), Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants (1992), In a Cold Crater: Cultural and Intellectual Life in Berlin, 1945-1948 (1998), The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (2003), and Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939 (2006). Between 20, he was a frequent visiting scholar at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin. From 1995 to 2000, he was a project collaborator at the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen. Cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch studied comparative literature, philosophy and sociology in Frankfurt and Berlin and received his PhD from Freie Universität Berlin in 1972.
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