In 1895, journalist Edward Platt Ingersoll founded a magazine in New York whose name heralded a remarkable future: "The Horseless Age. A Monthly Journal Devoted to the Interests of the Motor Vehicle Industry". The epoch that is just dawning is not defined here by the introduction of something unknown, but by the absence of something familiar: the horses disappear. At the same time, cars were neither built in a standardized way nor sold on a large scale. Although the internal combustion engine had existed for a long time, vehicle manufacturers continued to prefer steam and electricity.
Kai Spanke
Editor in the feuilleton.
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Today, the future of transport is once again a subject of debate, with the difference, of course, that it can hardly be separated from the future in general. And so, it is not without astonishment to read in Moritz Neuffer's essay on the "Epochal Turn in Automotive Magazines around 1900" that Ingersoll repeatedly referred to the latest state of electric car construction, albeit with disapproval. He could only imagine rich women in urban areas as buyers of an electric car. At the beginning of the last century, battery-powered vehicles were so popular that they accounted for more than a third of all vehicles registered in the USA. This was done with the electric starter, which replaced the crank, which was difficult to operate.
Wasn't it enough for the Audi, Mercedes or Porsche?
Neuffer's text can be found in an anthology on "cultural imaginations of the car". Its table of contents gives the impression that we are dealing with a systematic treatise; in fact, as is quite common with this book format, the contributions are so inconsistent that they result in a colorful, sometimes exhibited academic, but altogether stimulating hodgepodge. So it is also advisable to examine, sniff, here and there comparative reading. This is because some contributions vibrate with each other, which by no means only means that they would necessarily complement each other and come to similar conclusions. Rather, the reader encounters consensus as well as different assessments.
Steffen Martus, for example, points out in his essay on the "Class Boundaries of the Golf Generation" that since the sixties, "sociological zeitgeist literature" has observed how "a number of criteria have lost their certainty of meaning". These included occupation, income and possessions. Compared to other countries, "in principle, too many people could afford too many lifestyles". This also applies to car brands, which in the post-war period were still quite reliable indications of social position. Today, on the other hand, people at the wheel of a Porsche can be discovered who, at least at first glance, are out of place there.