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Peter Thomspon

Dissertation: "Grasping for the Mask: German Visions of a Chemical Modernity, 1915 - 1938"

Certified Spring 2019  

Peter Thompson is a PhD Candidate studying Modern German History at the University of Illinois. His research interests lie at the intersection of German intellectual history and the history of science and technology at the turn of the twentieth century. His dissertation project, “Grasping for the Mask: German Visions of Chemical Modernity, 1915-1938” argues that the gas mask, while often seen as a purely protective technological artifact, proved to exacerbate fears of possible chemical warfare among Germans in the 1920s and 30s. Not only did daily interwar encounters with the mask visibly present the possibility of aero-chemical attack, but the object itself became a symbol of the very nature of German futurity.

From 1915 to 1938, a select group of German scientists and engineers who referred to themselves as gas specialists insisted that chemical weapons were not an existential threat to soldiers or civilians. Based on their firsthand experience in World War I and their later scientific experiments, they argued that poison gas could not achieve sufficient density to blanket entire urban centers, and that a properly applied gas mask was effective protection against most chemical weapons. These men believed that technologically-augmented, self-disciplined Germans could live, if not thrive, in a world permeated by poison gas. Thus, they envisioned a “chemical modernity” in which daily life would be defined by the constant concern for the chemical construction of the environment.

In conversation with theories of technology from Langdon Winner, Bruno Latour, Martin Heidegger, Günther Anders, and Jacques Ellul, the dissertation narrates the contestations over this vision of the future and the ways in which the gas specialists’ calls for gas mask distribution aligned with the Nazis’ appeal to a protected and disciplined Third Reich that extended into each German household. By revealing the extent to which a seemingly benign 20th century technology (the gas mask) maintained its own violent politics and existed within a perversely self-justifying technological order, the project underscores the ways in which technological objects exert agency on human history.