For Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of Our Desires

By Wolfgang Sachs

In his cultural analysis of the motor car in Germany, Wolfgang Sachs starts from the assumption that the automobile is more than a means of transportation and that its history cannot be understood merely as a triumphant march of technological innovation. Instead, Sachs examines the history of the automobile from the late 1880s until today for evidence on the nature of dreams and desires embedded in modern culture. Written in a lively style and illustrated by a wealth of cartoons, advertisements, newspaper stories, and propaganda, this book explores the nature of Germany's love affair with the automobile. A "history of our desires" for speed, wealth, violence, glamour, progress, and power—as refracted through images of the automobile—it is at once fascinating and provocative.

Sachs recounts the development of the automobile industry and the impact on German society of the marketing and promotion of the motor car. As cars became more affordable and more common after World War II, advertisers fanned the competition for status, refining their techniques as ownership became ever more widespread.

Sachs concludes by demonstrating that the triumphal procession of private motorization has in fact become an intrusion. The grand dreams once attached to the automobile have aged. Sachs appeals for the cultivation of new dreams born of the futility of the old ones, dreams of "a society liberated from progress," in which location, distance, and speed are reconceived in more appropriately humane dimensions.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.
In his cultural analysis of the motor car in Germany, Wolfgang Sachs starts from the assumption that the automobile is more than a means of transportation and that its history cannot be understood merely as a triumphant march of technological innovation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Dec 22, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520354739

Wolfgang Sachs

Wolfgang Sachs is a Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Studies in Essen, Germany. Don Reneau is a writer and translator who lives in Berkeley, California.

Book preview

For Love of the Automobile

For Love of the Automobile

Looking Back into the History of Our Desires

Wolfgang Sachs

Translated from the German by Don Reneau

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley • Los Angeles • Oxford

Originally published as Die Liebe zum Automobil: ein Rückblick in die Geschichte unserer Wünsche

© 1984 Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek bei Hamburg

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

Oxford, England

© 1992 by

The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sachs, Wolfgang.

[Liebe zum Automobil. English]

For love of the automobile: looking back into the history of our desires / Wolfgang Sachs; translated from the German by Don Reneau

p. em.

Translation of: Die Liebe zum Automobil.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-520-06878-5

1. Automobiles—Social aspects—History. 2. Automobiles—

History. 3. Technology and civilization. I. Title.

HE5613.S2313 1992

303.48'32—-dc20 91-8902

CIP

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Contents 1

Contents 1

Preface

Stations

Pleasures for the Wealthy (1890-1914)

Cars for the Few— Cars for the Many? (1920-1933)

The Motorized Volksgemeinschaft (1933-1945)

We Did It! (1950-1960)

Republic on Wheels (1962-1973)

Desires

Independent as a Lord

Victorious Speed

Secure in Comfort

A Flood of Novelties and the Hunger for Improvement

Travel and the Tourist’s Gaze

Space and Time as Resources

Disenchantment

The Aging of Desire

The Dominion of Long Distances and Speedy Execution

The Decline of Autonomous Mobility

Tranquillity Rediscovered; or, For Love of the Bicycle

Prospects

No One Wants the Blame

Streamlining Through High Tech

Less Is More

Selected Bibliography

Preface

There is no shortage of writings critical of the automobile. For that reason such topics as carbon monoxide and decibel ranges, dying forests, lung cancer, and accident casualties will be of marginal concern in this book. Nevertheless, the charges do not seem to be causing great disquiet among automobile enthusiasts. The problem with the automobile today consists precisely in the fact that the automobile is not a problem. Why, I asked myself, does the loyalty to automobiles remain so unassailable, even though everyone knows that cars already have their future behind them?

Love only rarely listens to reason. So it seems here as well. At stake are our needs and preferences—and they have proved astoundingly resistant to the clever arguments and cunning mathematics of the critics of the automobile. That is why I have undertaken to study technological development as a chapter in the history of mentalities, to measure how much latitude we are left by our need for an ecological future.

The automobile is much more than a mere means of transportation; rather, it is wholly imbued with feelings and desires that raise it to the level of a cultural symbol. Behind the gradual infiltration of the automobile into the world of our dreams lie many stories: ones of disdain for the unmendable horse, of female coquetry, of the driver’s mega lomania, of the sense of having a miracle parked in the drive, and of the generalized desire for social betterment. A technological history, setting one type of automobile next to others and singing a devotional hymn to increasing perfection, is blind to human needs and cultural significations; it fails to consider that every technology is the product of a historical period, in which it rises to prominence and then disappears. This book, therefore, is an invitation on a journey back to the beginnings of our automotive needs, to where the breast first swelled with the pride of independence, where the love of speed was born, where the feeling of comfort took root, and where the automobile became allied with the clock as a time-saving machine.

From today’s perspective, the story is not a triumphal one, replete with flags and fanfare. The history of the automobile can ultimately be read as a morality play about the withering of a historical project. The dreams are aging in our day: boredom with motorization is widespread, and contrary images are becoming evident; the preference for bicycles is growing, and the idea of an unhurried society finds fertile soil on which to fall. Today it is the personal computer, more than the internal combustion engine, that causes excitement. Is the microchip not for our children what the engine was for our grandfathers? Thus it appears today, nearly one hundred years after Carl Benz first rattled through the streets of Mannheim, that a eulogy is in order, a eulogy to the history of the excitement caused by the automobile.

For suggestions and encouragement, for criticism and support, I want to thank Ingke Brodersen, Bernhard Fliß, Christian Holz, Helmut Holzapfel, Ivan Illich, Ursula Juch-Neubauer, Jobst Kraus, Jean Robert, Klaus Traube, Otto Ullrich, and Thomas Weymar. I have profited especially from years of discussions with my friends and colleagues from the Energie und Gesellschaft (Energy and society) project at the Technische Universität in Berlin. Their study, Szenario Auto 2000. Wege zu einem ökologisch und sozial veträglichen Autoverkehr (Auto scenario 2000: Toward an ecologically and socially tolerable traffic system), can be read as the traffic planners’ counterpart to this cultural history.

Wolfgang Sachs

Berlin, May 1984

Stations

When at some later time cultural historians try to label the epoch extending from the beginning of the nineteenth to after the turn of the twentieth century, they will best designate it the epoch of great advances in transportation, of great progress in vehicular technology. At the dawn of this epoch comes the invention of the railroad, the locomotive, which for the first time since the beginning of cultural history replaced the horse in its dominant role as the most important means of travel and transport on land …; and at the close of the same epoch the automobile begins its triumphal march. … Thus does the automobile appear to complete what the railroad began and the age of the horse to come to an end, finished by the power of mechanized natural forces, which are destined to become the driving element in travel and transport forever after.

Theo Wolff, Vom Ochsenwagen zum Automobil. Geschichte der Wagenfahrzeuge und des Fahrwesens von ältester bis neuester Zeit (From ox-cart to automobile: History of vehicular traffic from earliest to most recent times) (Leipzig, 1909), 159f.

Pleasures for the Wealthy (1890-1914)

The sober journalistic tone of the Vorarlberger Landeszeitung barely concealed wonder as it noted on March 11, 1893, the first appearance of a Patent-Autocar Benz on the streets of Bregenz, Austria:

A carriage with a gasoline engine has been here for a few days, in the private possession of Mr. Eugen v. Zardetti. In its construction the vehicle resembles an elegant chaise; in front, however, the car rests on a single wheel, which can be turned left or right as on a velocipede for purposes of directing the craft. Ignition of the gasoline engine is accomplished by electricity. The forward progress of the car is even, gentle, and can be raised to a very high speed. This novelty exercises a peculiar attraction: no horses are needed, no skittishness, no harness, etc.—advantages which will be of great importance only once such vehicles become cheaper?

In the skeptical astonishment of this early observer flashes an idea that will continue to define much of the essence of the automobile for succeeding generations: the liberation of speed from the fetters of corporeal nature. The coach rolls to its destination entirely without horses; therein lies the novelty’s peculiar attraction. Until now the horse and carriage offered the most refined means of transport through

1. Quoted in H. Seper, Damals als die Pferde scheuten. Die Geschichte der österreichischen Kraftfahrt (Back when the horses shied: The history of Austrian motor travel) (Vienna, 1968), 17f.

New! Practical! Gas-potvered motorcar, patented in all industrial countries. Entirely supersedes the horse and wagon … Always starts right up … very low operating costs … comfortable and totally safe! Patented motorcar with removable title and splash-leather. From the first automobile prospectus, 1888.

the streets, and although bicycles were seen in isolated instances, most people had to be content with the cobbler’s conveyance—that is, going on foot. The horse and carriage had insured that more genteel travelers were protected from the muddy streets, raised above the many, and, drawn by an impersonal force, able to go about their business. Did it make sense to release the horse from the harness and move to motorcars? That was the burning question in refined circles.

The wait for an answer from an expert source was not long in coming. L. Baundry de Saunier, a French authority in automobilism who was also recognized in Germany, made short work of the old ways in the first popular book on the automobile: It can … be said with certainty that the horse—a weak, dangerous, costly, and dirty motor, easily broken and hard to repair—… is destined to disappear. 1 With evident pleasure, Saunier enumerated the organic frailties of the horse. Not only was it sluggish and prone to exhaustion; beyond that it could not be repaired, for its bones cannot be soldered, and once the front piston rods, its knees, are cracked, one cannot return them even superficially to order by applying some sort of enamel. Then, too, the oat motor is vulnerable: If the oats with which it is fed contain dust, the air intake sustains immediate damage, and it coughs; should the water it takes in be too cold, then its drainage ports contract, often entangling themselves in the most terrible fashion. The fact that the horse lives becomes its doom; a motor neither sleeps nor falls ill, nor does it leave piles of steaming waste in its trail or unexpectedly bolt. And, last but not least, the motor run on oats possesses one flaw that reason, from the perspective of economy, must characterize as nearly monstrous: to continue to consume even when it is performing no work. Not without melancholy, but in the spirit of the time, the verdict falls: the horse is frail, whereas the engine is tireless.

Masters of Time and Space

It was certainly easier to imagine the superiority of the motor than to count on it. To be a motorist, as the racy sport and pleasure drivers of the cities soon came to be called, one needed more than money; muscle and courage were required as well. Automobiles resembled untamed animals in the early years, with sudden swings of mood and a tendency to dangerous reactions. It took a strong arm to work the crank (which would likely kick back) and so coax a sound from the monster’s insides, until it began to roar and shudder and belch its stinking vapors.

Driving was still an adventure, producing above all the gratification of having successfully overcome the fear. But then there was the fear’s reward: breath-taking speed. To charge across the land, manning the helm with skill and stamina and utter presence of mind, leaving onlookers behind in the dust from the road—who could still believe that happiness rode on the back of a horse?

The driver was first of all a sportsman taking up the reins of technology, and races made the automobile the topic of the day. Beginning in 1895 with a Paris-Bordeaux-Paris race, new long-distance runs,

A Daimler is a worthy beast, Pulls like an ox, seen west and east. It doesn’t feed while in the stall, And only drinks when work’s the call. It threshes, saws, and stands your loan, When you fall short, a common moan. Ne’er ill in foot and mouth and bite, And never up and goes on strike. It doesn’t scorn, attack with horn, Does not consume your hard-grown corn. So buy yourself just one such beast, Forevermore you’ll lack the least.

Advertisement verse, Cannstätt Fair, 1897.

races, and rallies were added to the calendar every year. As early as 1898, when the winner of the first German motor contest, from Berlin to Potsdam and back, achieved an average speed of 25.6 kilometers per hour, the races proved to a society eager to embrace speed the superiority and reliability of the horseless carriage. It was the dawn of a time of ever-increasing speed (in just less than a decade the maximum jumped from 25 km/h to 100 km/h)—exciting for those who could make it their own, threatening to those forced to watch from the sidelines.

Mechanized speed and power created a sharp perceptual contrast between the age of the automobile and the era of the horse, and between the experience of individual mobility and reliance on the railroad. The horse and carriage, the traditional insignia of privilege, had declined in rank over the course of the nineteenth century, to the point that whenever a train overtook a coach, the rail passengers would laugh sneeringly out the windows. So ladies and gentlemen of a better sort had to condescend to train travel as well; forced by necessity, they became inmates of mass transportation. Technically and organizationally, the railroad was a thoroughly postfeudal means of conveyance. What the carriage had bestowed in the way of freedom and prestige now fell beneath the wheels of a steam engine racing to its scheduled destination on unmovable tracks.

Freedom has been sacrificed to speed. The train ticket—so ran the lament of Otto Julius Bierbaum, the Carl Benz of automobile interpretation, in 1902—

is purchased not only with money, but also with the forfeiture of one’s right of self-determination for a certain while. Whoever goes traveling in a railway coach forgoes, for a time, his freedom. Every trip made by railway is also a transport of prisoners; the wardens are called conduc-

From the horseless carriage …

tors, which does not, however, always obligate them to courtesy; the prison rules are called railway regulations …; [and] as the solitary cell system is too dear, the prisoners are transported … together in groups, more or less large, whereby, admittedly, some consideration is shown for the capacity of one’s purse.2

Bierbaum feels justified in indulging some strong words, a proof of how greatly the refined world felt its self-respect to be threatened by the railroad. What the common people welcomed as a democratic advance, individuals of more privileged position greeted with a snort. The railroad (like, incidentally, its contemporary, the department store) ignored differences of social status and deprived the cultivated lifestyle of its very basis. Where everyone, whether rich or poor, is reduced to a piece of freight, pride of place no longer finds nourishment. The epoch of the equipage had apparently come to an end.

Against this background, the automobile accrued what one could call a restorative significance. The ideal of the era of the carriage could arise anew with none of the frailties of organic horsepower—a mix of restoration and progress that opened the purses of the well-heeled. The writer Julius Otto Bierbaum lent words to this sense of a curiously forward-looking nostalgia in the first German-language book devoted to an automobile trip: The meaning of the automobile is freedom, self-possession, self-discipline, and ease. In it the traveling coach is revived in all its poetic plenitude, but in a form endlessly enriched by the former’s exquisite potential for intensified and simultaneously expanded gratification.3

8 / Stations

… to the luxury sedan. (Courtesy Daimler-Benz Museum, Stuttgart- Untertürkheim)

No more missed trains, no more overflowing compartments, no more predetermined routes; in its commentary on the change, the Allgemeine Automobil-Zeitung of 1906 waxed philosophical:

The automobile: it will grant to human beings their conquest over time and space by virtue of its speed of forward motion. The entire over- grown apparatus of the railroad—the network of tracks, the train stations, signal stands, supervisory personnel, and administration—falls away, and in relative freedom humanity has conquered time and space.4

A combination of the advantages of the carriage with those of the railway; freedom, through the power of the motor, from the exhaustible nature of the horse; and the individual mobility of the carriage—in these improvements were found the meaning of that motorized carriage, the automobile.

It is therefore no wonder that the first generation of motorcars resembled horse-drawn carriages with a motor attached. It was as if the horses had simply been unharnessed from the shafts, in the place of which a pivoted axle was installed; the motor was then loaded into the luggage compartment to drive the rear axle by means of either a belt or a chain. Likewise, the coachman was retrained as a chauffeur, working now with a steering column instead of reins. As far as first appearances were concerned, the motorcar directly inherited the symbolic features of the coach, even if those who dared to drive the still uncanny vehicles came from the ranks of well-to-do inventors and technology enthusiasts.

Automobile design began to free itself from the model of the coach only after the turn of the century. The motor made its way to the front,

where it was encased in a tin housing. Seating was no longer arranged so that passengers faced one another. The wheelbase became longer, and a redesigned body provided both the engine compartment and the driver and passenger area with a belt-high enclosure. But these changes did not yet satisfy the aesthetic requirements of Bierbaum, who, in his Automobilreise (A sentimental journey by automobile, from Berlin to Sorrento and back to the Rhine), pressed on the designers the following advice:

The aesthetic of the automobile lingers in its infancy. One might say that its beauty suffers at present because the designers have not yet completely forgotten the horse—namely, the horse before the wagon. … [Automobiles] look like draught wagons without a drive team. An automated wagon ought to have sufficient self-confidence to look like a machine. And it can be pretty. I choose not to say, pretty as a horse. Of such a thing of beauty only our dear God is capable. … The form of the automobile must grow organically out of its mechanics and chassis, but must appeal down to the tiniest of its curves to the aesthetic sense and, in addition, be practical and comfortable.5

With near precision, Bierbaum’s proposals anticipated the automobile design of the 1920s, when, influenced by the Deutscher Werkbund, a search was mounted for the beauty of technologically determined form.

For the time being, however, design reflected the adoption of the automobile by the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie, who used its speed and power to display their social superiority. It had always been a sign of power to master an extensive spatial range and leave others staring in one’s wake. In addition, a transportation vehicle served better than any other object as a status symbol, because by its very nature it commanded public attention: one drove on the streets in clear view of everyone. An elongated hood expressed social power in addition to mechanical force; and cars with closed bodies, which appeared more and more frequently after 1910, were reminiscent of equipages, where the driver sat in the rain while the more refined passengers rode in agreeable comfort within. Beyond all technical requirements, design underlined this social significance of the automobile. In accord with its presentation as a mobile money temple, the design of the front and rear of the vehicle took over aesthetically: there the automobile’s formal technical requirements could be exceeded ostentatiously by means of artistic and architectural motifs.6 Temple themes inspired radiator

Automobile Club: If I may, Board Director Fränkel, forty horsepower. A pleasure, Count Dohna, sixty HP. Caricature by Bruno Paul in Simplicissimus, 1903.

grills, giving the visible side of the radiator the significance of a facade. As in classical architecture, geometric precision and the tension between horizontal and vertical lines determined the contours of the body, while the Jugendstil preference for sweeping lines and the ornamental was seen in some exteriors. This formal syntax, applied to the vehicle rather than derived organically from it, expressed in traditional motifs the message that did not emerge from formal design alone: the car is a luxury item.

The upper elites thereby enlisted the car into the ranks of their objects of self-representation, just as, conversely, the automobile’s own artistic pretensions graced its owner with higher social status. The automobile caused no immediate revolution in mobility, but it did in the dominant symbols of prestige. In this essential aspect it was welcomed by the doctors and lawyers, the entrepreneurs and the upper middle class, who used the car to demonstrate their elevated social position, though they were not of noble lineage. Right around the turn of the century these bourgeois groups, especially in the cities, were gaining in importance, while the power of the landed aristocracy was increasingly in decline. For these nouveaux riches the automobile arrived just in time, allowing them to enter the scene as masters of the dawning epoch. The automobile took up and incorporated the interests and ideals of the rising, moneyed, urban bourgeoisie. With the aim of demonstrating that the bearers of these ideals and interests had the say in society, the bourgeoisie arrogated