Myth and the railway in nineteenth-century German realism (Berthold Auerbach, Theodor Fontane, Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann, Theodore W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer)

This dissertation examines the ways in which the railway was received and represented by a variety of nineteenth-century German realist authors including Berthold Auerbach, Theodor Fontane and Gerhart Hauptmann. It is a focused look at the point at which mythology and technology merge, signifying the composition of a larger narrative that seems to be needed by human beings to achieve some sense of control over a world in which they have little power. Using Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's seminal work on the dialectic of the Enlightenment as a framework, it becomes clear that realist authors are a particularly rich source in which to study this intersection of mythology and technology. These authors often introduce scientific ideas and technological developments in order to bolster the claim that what they write is “real” and therefore represents a “truth.” In so doing, however, they cannot seem to divorce these developments from myth. They either couch the train and its associated technologies in mythological terms, or show how it begins to create its own myths. Thus, as Adorno and Horkheimer posit, technology can never truly separate itself from mythology, and oftentimes develops a mythology of its own. This dissertation is therefore a contribution to the field of third culture studies, that is, the point at which the humanities and the sciences merge.