Have you ever wondered why railway lines in America meander, but English tracks normally run straight? What was the traditional breakfast drink in Europe before coffee hit the market? How did the introduction of the gas network change family life? Why did the Confederate battle flag become such an enduring symbol? Who was missing when the US military solemnly declared victory in Iraq?
For four decades, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, a polymathic cultural historian, enjoyed these and other brainteasers as he explored mass transportation, spices and stimulants, commercial enlightenment, and the legacy of defeat on society in about a dozen groundbreaking books.
He wrote them in his native German (most were eventually translated into English) from his Manhattan apartment, where he spent the winters, and his home in Berlin, where he died in a hospital on March 26 at 81 a.m. Europe.
His wife, Helma von Kieseritzky, said the cause was bacterial meningitis complicated by sepsis, Covid-19 and pneumonia.
“He was an extraordinary public intellectual, an independent, largely unaffiliated, wildly polycurious, and extravagantly gifted seeker of the patterns and idiosyncrasies of history,” author Lawrence Wechsler wrote after Mr. Schivelbusch’s death to members of the New York Institute for the Humanities, where Mr. Wechsler was a director and Mr. Schivelbusch was a fellow.
Die Zeit, the German national weekly, called Mr. Schivelbusch a ‘master of cultural-historical research’.
Among his books are “The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century” (1977), “Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants, and Intoxicants” (1980), “Disenchanted Night: The Industrialization of Light in the Nineteenth Century” (1983), “The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery” (2001) and “Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany, 1933-1939 ” (2005).
His conversational memoir about commuting between two continents, ‘The Other Side: Living and Researching Between New York and Berlin’, will be published in 2021.
The pithy and provocative books of Mr. Schivelbusch have been praised by academics for microscopically linking history to everyday life. But, unusually for a public (if unpretentious) intellectual, he also attracted a wider audience who, captivated by his peculiar curiosity, joined him in his exploits—even though, unlike Indiana Jones’s, those exploits were largely limited to libraries.
DailyExpertNews food writer Molly O’Neill called “Tastes of Paradise” “a small dose of mind-sharpening brain candy.”
His book on railways won the German prize for non-fiction in 1978. In 2003, the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin awarded him the Heinrich Mann Prize. In 2013 he won the Lessing Prize of the City of Hamburg for achievements in German culture.
Wolfgang Walter Schivelbusch was born on November 26, 1941 in the Berlin district of Wilmersdorf. His mother, Waldtraut Erika Schivelbusch, was a housewife. His father, Helmut Ludolf Schivelbush, was a businessman.
In the late 1960s he studied literature, philosophy and sociology in Frankfurt and Berlin with Theodor Adorno and Peter Szondi. He received his higher education during a period of turbulent student protests against the restrictions of post-World War II society and American involvement in the Vietnam War.
He obtained his PhD with Hans Mayer at the Free University of Berlin in the early 1970s; his dissertation was on the socialist drama of Berthold Brecht. His intellectual fathers also included Walter Benjamin, Norbert Elias and Siegfried Kracauer.
He operated most of his career as a private scientist, free from academic constraints but dependent on grants and book advances. From 1995 to 2000 he did research for his memoirs at the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen. He was a senior fellow at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research after returning permanently to Germany in 2014.
Shortly after Richard M. Nixon was elected president in 1968, he visited the United States to determine whether the country was about to make a dangerous right turn. He returned in 1973 to research his book on railroads and began his annual winter residency in New York.
Attracted, among other things, by the freedom to browse the bookcases of New York University and New York’s public libraries, he worked in New York from November to May and spent the remaining five months in an apartment in Berlin’s Westend or in a country retreat in a converted blacksmith shop in Blankenberg, a village of about 60 inhabitants 55 miles northwest of Berlin, with his wife, Mrs. von Kieseritzky, a well-known bookseller.
Besides her, he is survived by a brother, Klaus.
For decades, Mr. Schivelbusch explored mysteries that most people would not even have noticed. Among his findings:
Railroads run straighter in England because labor was more expensive in America, so it was cheaper to just build tracks around natural obstacles like hills and rivers.
In Europe, beer soup (heating eggs, butter and salt, then adding to beer and pouring over pieces of bread roll or white bread) was the favorite breakfast drink before it was replaced by coffee in the 18th century.
Gas pipes changed family life as they removed the hearth from the center of family life by giving individuals personal light. They also replaced private enterprise by granting municipal or regional monopolies.
Immigrant workers and farmers introduced the St. Andrew’s Cross to the Confederate flag, and the highlanders’ burning cross was adopted as its symbol by the Ku Klux Klan. Speaking of the post-Civil War American South, Mr. Schivelbusch told Cabinet Magazine in 2006 that “romanticizing defeat can become much more powerful than romanticizing victory,” in part because “after every victory, the victorious side doesn’t know what to do.” do, except divide the spoil.”
“The South,” he wrote, “transformed the distinction between battlefield failure and moral superiority into the central dogma of its new identity.”
As for the Iraq War, Mr. Schivelbusch marveled that the ceremonial surrender took place without a key participant: the losers. “Clearly, consciously or not, that scene was one of ersatz surrender, for the simple reason that the defeated regime had vanished without a trace,” he wrote in a 2003 DailyExpertNews op-ed. The victors, deprived of their surrender trophy, were left empty-handed.
“You can’t eat your enemy,” he concluded, “and have him.”
Mr. Schivelbusch’s great curiosity sometimes raised questions he had to answer, and at other times he suggested answers to questions he had not yet asked.
His goal, German scientist Eva Geulen recently wrote on the Leibniz Center’s blog, was “not to repeat what was already known, but to make the little known or unknown better known”.
‘His sense of neglected detail’, wrote Professor Geulen, ‘was due to an individual sensitivity to the concrete, from which no rules could be followed.
“His subjects found him,” she added, “not the other way around.”
Christopher Schuetze contributed reporting.