Chapter 4
Modernity, World Wars and Dictatorships
Film and Media Culture before and during the First World War
Around 1900, the media market experienced a radical expansion involving in
particular the proliferation of gramophones, telephones and private cameras,
as well as the emergence of film and wireless telegraphy, the latter leading to
the invention of radio in the 1920s. The interplay of these new media, which
concomitantly changed the old media, may be justly considered a ‘media rev-
olution 1900’ (Käuser 2005). Moreover, the new media were an integral part
of the nascent popular ‘mass culture’ which arose simultaneously: department
stores, zoos, music and sporting events, as well as cinemas, made it possible to
share in spectacular amusements and exotic impressions, apparently without
regard to class barriers (Maase 1997). Of course, the synchronous emergence
of the pejorative term ‘mass’ indicates that this leisure culture in fact bred
bourgeois demarcations.
As a number of studies have stressed, the development of these new media
corresponded to the simultaneous modification of visible reality. What con-
current inventions like the bouillon cube or the X-ray had in common with
film was the fact that they broke down traditional perceptions and experi-
ences, re-staging them as products (Engell 1995: 22). Media scientist Friedrich
A. Kittler also saw parallels to contemporary scientific studies such as ‘psy-
chophysics’ in particular, which performed experimental analyses of human
perception (Kittler 1995: 280). Hence he spoke of a new ‘system of notation
1900’, which captured the body in media terms and marked the beginning
of ‘technological data storage’. Kittler alleged that both film and gramophone
had caused the monopoly of writing to collapse, winning over the imagina-
tion and relegating books to a restricted space (ibid.: 313). In view of the