Wolfgang Schivelbusch

File:Person.jpg

Title

Biography

Wolfgang Schivelbusch (26 November 1941, Berlin – 26 March 2023, Berlin) was a German cultural historian who worked for his entire career as an independent scholar, without a university post. He studied literature, sociology and philosophy in Frankfurt and Berlin, took his doctorate in 1972, and lived in New York from 1973 to 2014 before returning to Berlin. He received the Heinrich Mann Prize in 2003.

His subject was the history of perception: what technologies do to the senses, and how the resulting changes become invisible by becoming normal. His work was shaped by Norbert Elias's history of manners and by the Frankfurt School, and he wrote in short, essayistic books built from contemporary sources — travellers' complaints, medical reports, newspaper accounts, advertisements — rather than from archives of institutions.

The Railway Journey

Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise (1977), translated as The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (1979/1986), is his most influential book and one of the founding texts of the history of the senses.

Its argument is that the railway did not simply make travel faster; it changed what travel was and what a traveller was. Schivelbusch documents:

• The annihilation of space and time. A contemporary phrase, taken seriously. Places were previously connected by the landscape between them, experienced at walking or coaching pace. Rail removed that intervening space from experience, leaving departure and arrival with an interval of nothing much in between — and thereby brought distant places into a new proximity while destroying the continuous geography that had linked them.
• Panoramic perception. Speed made the foreground unviewable, and travellers reported that the landscape had lost its depth and become a series of moving pictures seen through a frame. Schivelbusch links this directly to the emergence of new visual habits, including the department store window and, eventually, cinema.
• Standard time. Railways could not run on local solar time, so time itself was standardised across regions that had previously each kept their own — a change imposed by a timetable rather than agreed by anyone.
• The compartment and the stranger. Rail forced strangers to sit facing one another for hours without a shared task, a social situation with no precedent, and produced the reading of books and newspapers in public as a strategy for managing it.
• Railway spine and the shock of the accident. The medical and psychological literature on train crashes, which Schivelbusch traces as an origin point for the modern concept of trauma.

Other Work

Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century (1983/1988) does the same for artificial lighting — gas, then electricity — arguing that the abolition of night restructured work, sociability, policing and the sense of privacy. Tastes of Paradise (1980/1992) is a social history of spices, coffee, tobacco and other stimulants and intoxicants, read as instruments for regulating attention and time. The Culture of Defeat (2001/2003) examines the American South, France after 1871 and Germany after 1918, arguing that defeated societies follow a recognisable common pattern of mythmaking.

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Schivelbusch is the model for what this field is trying to do. He takes a technology whose effects are now invisible because they are universal, recovers the period in which people still noticed them, and shows the resulting reorganisation of perception, time, sociability and the body. Any account of what mobile or networked technology has changed is measured against his account of what the railway changed — and much of the vocabulary, including the compression of time and space, comes from him.

Related Reading

• The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century
• Time and Space
• Time and Space Compression
• Landline Telephone
• Yi-Fu Tuan