6 - Technologies of Fate: Cultural and Intellectual Prophesies of the Future Gas War

Summary

The sixth chapter examines German intellectual understandings of chemical warfare technologies. Several of the most influential interwar intellectuals were veterans of World War I, having experienced gas attacks and used gas masks during their wartime service. Revealing the salience of poison gas in the interwar imagination, this chapter explores the numerous literary, artistic, and cinematic works that attempted to grapple with the individual soldier’s relationship to chemical weapons. Indeed, the continued contact with relentlessly changing and often dangerous technology such as poison gas and the gas mask exemplified the mental uncertainty and political instability of early twentieth-century Germany. As part of a larger debate surrounding militarized technology, arguments over the controllability of poison gas and the viability of gas discipline most clearly played out in the writings of Ernst Jünger and joint projects of Walter Benjamin and Dora Sophie Kellner. These three thinkers constructed highly theoretical visions of aerial warfare technologies that neatly represented two of the major political commitments in the continuing debate over Germany’s potential rearmament and the use of poison gas.