Untitled

Rudy Koshar
as the impact of radio (in the 1930s) or television (in the 1950s) in the home. But
it is not only an issue of the passivity with which moderns reacted to the penetration
of technology or mass media in their private lives. In Europe and North
America, the 1950s and 1960s saw an increase in the “do-it-yourself” movement,
which included gardening, woodworking, and the like, but also included much
popular technology, especially among people who built their own radios, or
worked on cars. In many parts of the United States after World War II, but also in
Europe, entire subcultures grew up around the appropriation and modification of
automotive technologies. 50 This history continues, of course, and now includes a
transnational dimension even more pronounced than in earlier decades of the
twentieth century. For example, “tuning culture” began in Japan in the 1960s but
soon made its way into the United States, first on the West Coast but then in other
parts of the country. It includes automotive shops, magazines, websites, and
countless social interactions among young men (and not a few women) who
customize, display, and race Hondas, Acuras, Toyotas, Nissans, and other Asian
automobiles. This is a rich – and massively overlooked – chapter in the history of
social assertion over technologies in daily life.
Questions of passivity or agency go directly to the problem of the history of
experience and emotion. How people experience leisure time has much to do with
the meanings they derive, the memories they preserve, and the anticipation with
which they approach the future. Recently, scholars of modern German history have
called for closer attention to how the history of pleasure weaves itself through the
violence of the twentieth century. This issue derives much of its moral energy not
only from the history of genocide but also from the extraordinary bifurcation of
German history in the twentieth century between an age of war and an age of
unprecedented prosperity. One of the most surprising aspects of an otherwise
deeply troubling memoir of life in Nazi Germany is the record of the Jewish
professor Viktor Klemperer’s experiences with learning how to drive a car, a
subject taken up in my chapter on German driving practices. 51 Klemperer’s
enjoyment of the automobile symbolized a degree of freedom at a moment when
German Jews’ ability to act as normal citizens was being cut away on a daily basis
by the Nazi regime. For the German “Aryan” population, however, the interpenetration
of persecution and pleasure was of a different nature. Regime policies
of persecution and genocide rested in part on the Nazis’ capacity to maintain a
relatively normal standard of living for most of the population, and postwar
economic well-being derived much of its initial energy from the buildup of
industrial capacity under the Nazis. From the demand side, meanwhile, Germans,
supported in part by a tradition of bourgeois self-cultivation, could easily regard
consumption as an important function of identity formation without troubling
themselves about the larger exploitations on which it rested.
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