Realities

This chapter highlights the collaboration between individuals in state institutions and the private sector during the 1840s in Bremen, Bavaria, Prussia, and Austria. Earlier expectations for the potential of telegraphy were confronted with the sobering reality of technological development. On the one hand, the efforts of the state, scientists, and railway companies were supported by the increasingly free circulation of technical knowledge between institutions, experts, and private citizens scattered across the German ‘landscape of innovation’. This circulation is illustrated by an examination of various technical periodicals, while the example of Werner Siemens, a Prussian lieutenant posted in Berlin, is used to illustrate the social connections which also often supported these exchanges of information. On the other hand, the period also witnessed an accentuation of the tensions between and within the private sector and the state, as the latter sought to establish its own interest in obtaining the technology. This combination of necessary collaboration and disagreement caused frustrations which, by 1847, threatened to stall the process of development.

A Nation Connected

This chapter opens with an illustration of the Prussian government’s use of telegraph networks to unite the German nation during the war with France in 1870 by ensuring the timely and ubiquitous distribution of news. Otto von Bismarck and Generalpostmeister Heinrich Stephan then sought to build upon this unifying conception of telegraphic communication by improving and homogenizing the new Kaiserreich’s network, but they soon faced obstacles from within and outside the state. On the one hand, the federal structure of the new empire granted Bavaria and Württemberg the right to manage their own networks. On the other hand, the increasingly global network upon which trade and finance depended, and the news cartel established between Havas, Reuters, and Wolffs Telegraphisches Büro limited the imperial administration’s ability to manage the cost and nature of information circulating on its lines. These issues, and particularly the economic crisis of 1873, led to conflicts in the Reichstag, where deputies openly questioned the technology’s capacity to ‘annihilate space’ and formed alliances based upon the sections of society which they believed should or should not possess an advantage in communication. At a local level, meanwhile, government efforts to build new, more imposing, post and telegraph buildings alongside subsidiary offices threatened the business community’s privileged position within the urban landscape. The distance and time involved in the transmission of telegrams came to define one’s local and social status—as shown vividly in the novels of Theodor Fontane in the early 1880s and in the popular press.

The Dawn of the Network Society

This chapter follows the implementation of telegraphic communication during the so-called era of ‘reaction’ in the 1850s. It investigates the influence of parliaments in Prussia and Bavaria in shaping the initial outline of state networks and the conditions of their use by the public, as well as the emergence of a regional telegraph association, the Deutsch-Österreichischer Telegraphen-Verein. It traces the adoption of telegraphic communication by banks, stock markets, and news agencies across Germany, and the creation of a ‘two-speed’ society, as privileged sections of the economic bourgeoisie (Wirtschaftsbürgertum) in commercial centres adopted more rapid and coordinated rhythms of business. It also considers the efforts of governments to keep up with the pace of communication by managing the circulation of information to the press, and by adopting the technology for policing purposes. This chapter also describes the ambiguous culture of progress which surrounded the implementation of telegraphic communication. It does so using a variety of sources, from articles in Die Gartenlaube and Kladderadatsch to the work of the economist Karl Knies. While some praised the technology’s capacity to ‘annihilate’ space, others feared that the time sensitivity it engendered among certain users, businessmen in particular, was practically pathological. Both the advantages of rapid communication and its potentially nefarious consequences were highlighted during the period, from early instances of ‘fake news’ during the Crimean War to the unstoppable diffusion of the ‘Panic of 1857’. The work of Karl Knies, meanwhile, illustrates the ways in which these developments influenced new understandings of society and the economy.

Introduction

The Introduction presents the historiographical context and main themes of the book. It situates the book within discussions surrounding the process of scientific innovation and industrialization during the Sattelzeit, the process of ‘time-space’ compression associated with the communications revolution, the role of networks of transport and communication in the creation of regional and national identities, and the emergence of a new, connected middle class during the nineteenth century. Bringing together these narratives, the Introduction introduces the book’s principal argument—that, once shorn of its normative connotations, modernization remains a useful concept to illuminate the process through which state and society were transformed during the nineteenth century, and that networks played a crucial role in producing the profoundly ambivalent experience of modernity most often associated with the turn of the twentieth century. It ends with a description of the structure of the book as a whole.

Expectations

This chapter focuses upon the 1830s, when intellectuals, scientists, state officials, and entrepreneurs throughout Germany placed their hopes on the possibility of instantaneous, long-distance communication and increasingly became aware of the practicalities of bringing this vision to life. The correspondence of the scientists Carl Friedrich Gauß and Carl Steinheil illuminates their research into telegraphy and the networks connecting academics across Germany, through which it was discussed. Railway companies took an interest in this research, as they began to see in the technology a potential means of improving the efficiency and profitability of their services. The writings of the political theorists Friedrich List and Robert von Mohl, meanwhile, demonstrate the growing recognition that telegraphic communication could unleash the economic energies inherent in society, while also presenting new challenges for the administration of the state. Bremen is introduced as a counterexample to developments taking place across Germany. By the late 1830s these ideas were brought together as scientists and entrepreneurs turned to one another and to the state as a means of gathering the financial, logistical, and technical resources which they required to develop the technology.

Epilogue

The Epilogue opens up the narrative to consider the longer history of communications networks in Germany. It begins with a brief discussion of the reception of the telephone in scientific circles and by state representatives in the 1870s and 1880s, to demonstrate how the expectations associated with the telegraph half a century earlier were raised once again by a new technology. Drawing upon this example, it proposes a reflection on the role of communications technologies in fostering characteristically modern hopes and anxieties, and brings together the main themes evoked throughout the book. In doing so, it highlights some of the ways in which the development and implementation of telegraphic communication shaped the peculiarities of German modernity, while also tying the region into a much longer-term and geographically widespread process of ‘modernization’.

Resolution

This chapter focuses on the period of the 1848/9 revolutions, and in particular the geopolitical reconfiguration of Germany which was initiated as a result. These events, it argues, released many of the tensions which had emerged in the preceding decade between the actors involved in developing the electric telegraph. The revolutions encouraged German governments to take charge of the production process and to establish telegraph networks for administrative purposes. This chapter investigates the process of negotiation which took place between governments seeking to establish their first extensive telegraph lines, suggesting that these created a new form of interdependence between states. This chapter also provides an opportunity to revisit the role of the Frankfurt National Assembly, which was convened in 1848, and the extent to which it came to influence the arrangements made between German governments. The constitution drafted by the Assembly highlights efforts to impose an understanding of communications networks based upon liberal economic principles.

Prologue

The Prologue reaches back into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to reveal the deep roots of modern communications networks in German-speaking Central Europe. It highlights the changing role of the state in the development of roads, waterways and postal networks, from the emergence of the post-Westphalian territorial state to the diffusion of cameralist ideas in the following centuries. It considers how communications networks influenced, and were in turn shaped by, changing understandings of the function of exchange in society and the economy. It describes the related, changing context of academic scientific research in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and how the broader circulation of ideas slowly merged with cameralist notions of ‘useful knowledge’ to stimulate technological development.

Staying Ahead, Falling Behind

This chapter details the efforts of states to provide a ubiquitous telegraph service during the 1860s, and the tensions which emerged between the growing numbers of people and places competing for access to the network. Government intervention increased during this period, as secondary branches were built to cater to the needs of towns dispersed across territories and engaged in different economic sectors, and the implantation of foreign news agencies on German soil, Reuters in particular, was restricted. Increasing traffic on the lines led states to manage their networks as ‘organisms’, distinguishing between larger and smaller arteries of communication, placing certain users ahead of others in the exchange of telegrams. The promise that telegraphy would ‘annihilate space’ often remained unfulfilled as a result, however, and delays in communication caused divisions even within the privileged class of telegraph users. Within towns, moreover, the growing social diversity of these users made the positioning of telegraph offices increasingly contentious, as the members of the middle class engaged in finance, trade, and industry occupied different sites within the urban landscape and faced the prospect of delayed telegram deliveries. This section also considers the role of telegraphy in the changing geopolitical context of the 1860s, and how the technology’s impact upon events was represented in Kladderadatsch, as well as the role of the German entrepreneur Werner Siemens in the emerging field of global submarine telegraphy.