Günter Dinhobl (Hrsg.): Sonderband 7. Eisenbahn/Kultur – Railway/Culture (2004)
IV. Die Eisenbahn-Technik / Railway-technics - Manfred E. A. Schmutzer: Iron Rules Rule Iron Rails. Cultures and Their Technologies
Manfred E. A. Schmutzer doors open and to have no or as little as possible separation of rooms within a house. European practices were and still are opposite. Segregation and seclusion were common standards, doors were to be closed and curtains drawn. These different standards found their duplication in train carriages again on both sides of the ocean.25 After the Civil War American standards changed together with alterations in demographic distribution and the distribution of wealth. As certain factions of the population acquired considerable gains of material capital they strove for symbolic capital too. It is of additional interest to observe how the basic equality was gradually eroded by this trend. In the sixties of the 19th century a wealthy middle class developed, able to pay higher prices and prone to express distinctiveness. This trend culminated in the practice of wealthy industrialists to reserve entire coaches exclusively for themselves, thus coming close to aristocratic practices in Europe. This tendency undermined the original principles aiming at the democratization of aristocratic luxury. The abolition of equality at first found its expression in the establishment of a two class system on trains. Not much later the automobile26 allowed to cultivate a preference for individual transport and uncoupled the new upper class from the lower as well as from the regimentation by a hierarchical technology, i. e. the car granted to the upper class now individual distinction allowing at the same time an escape from the rigidity of schedules. Technologies and Cultures Cultural Theory provides four distinct types of cultures with distinct qualities rooted in overt differences of social relations. One of the four types, called hierarchy, exhibits the same traits which we found to be characteristic of the railway system. 25 My reader points to the fact, that Schivelbusch explains these differences in another way. Here I am not able to agree with my reader’s comments. For social reasons were American coaches neither accepted in Europe nor would it have been impossible to divide larger rooms on steam boats or railway coaches alike into smaller ones, if desired. Schivelbusch himself mentions e.g. separated rooms for nursing mothers (Schivelbusch: Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise, p. 94). 26 Burkart, Günter: Individuelle Mobilität und soziale Integration - Zur Soziologie des Automobilismus. In: Soziale Welt 45, 2 ( 1994), p. 2 16-241. 316
