| This dissertation is the first full-length study to assess the politics and meaning of the Deutsches Museum, one of the world's leading museums of science and technology, founded by the Bavarian electrical engineer Oskar von Miller in 1903. Supported by politicians, engineers, scientists, and businessmen, Miller established an institution that sought to enshrine German technological achievements as works of art and instill in the visiting public both a respect for those responsible for these "masterpieces" and an intimate familiarity with how such works shaped their daily lives. In examining the evolution of the museum within the changing contexts of the German Empire, Weimar, and the NS regime, I argue that representations of technology linked the achievements of engineers to definitions of the nation and recast German identity in a distinctly modern light. In chapters alternating between institutional history and cultural history, I shift my analysis from a social history of elites engaged in carving out a representational space to a cultural history of museum displays and their significance.;Museum scholars have in the past decade focused on the manner in which museums create meaning through their overarching narratives, their representational space, and the performative acts of museum visitors. My work draws on the theoretical strengths of such studies and applies them to the specific historical context of 20th century Germany. It therefore bridges the gap between those works that consider the political significance of cultural institutions in Germany and those that focus on internal issues of representation and aesthetics. In considering a popular museum type that has been largely ignored, I put forward a vision of the social significance of science and technology that considers the strategies of professionals eager to improve their social status by linking their projects to definitions of the nation. At the same time I explore how meanings were created on the museum floor and how they were interpreted by the public. Thus I see the museum as a space where politics meets culture and aesthetics, where strategies of representation meet patterns of consumption and entertainment. In the German context, I argue that engineers fostered a neocorporatist view of the museum itself as well as the technology that was on display there; both institutionally and thematically this vision meshed easily with NS conceptions of national greatness. My work reconsiders what it meant to be "modern" in twentieth century Germany. The museum represented a broad understanding of science and technology that was neither reactionary nor entirely modern, but paternalistic, suspicious of the political sphere, and wedded to the idea of the primacy of technology as a historical, economic, social, and even moral force. |
