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.

In the face of growing alarm about climate change, contemporary scholars of apocalyptic fiction have begun to raise pragmatic questions about this genre’s effects: What responses does apocalyptic narrative condition readers to have before, during, and after a catastrophic event? Many critics have objected to the clichéd content of dystopian apocalyptic narratives, claiming that their bleak visions induce resignation in readers rather than a will to assert their political and personal agency. Meanwhile, a number of scholars associated with “disaster studies” have noted that the history of twentieth-century disasters suggests that people actually tend to be at their most compassionate after a catastrophe. In response to this tension, this essay takes a dialectical approach to understanding both the critical and reparative aspects of twenty-first-century American apocalyptic fiction. In the first half, it demonstrates that the violent mythmaking in this work is both symptomatic of the “elite panic” characterized by disaster studies and reflective of other decidedly American ideologies. The second half identifies how some of these same apocalyptic texts complicate or even counteract expectations of panic, theft, and violence, providing insights for how readers might cultivate cooperation and community in the wake of an apocalyptic event.