Men, motorcycles and modernity: Motorization during the Weimar Republic.

摘要

Motorization tangibly altered German society - changing city and landscapes, patterns of circulation of people, goods and capital. My dissertation, "Men, Motorcycles and Modernity; Motorization during the Weimar Republic," argues that the socially dynamic and historically specific process of motorization in Weimar Germany, during which there was a numerical superiority of motorcycles in relation to cars, offers a multi-layered basis for exploring the everyday construction of social categories such as urban, rural, class, gender, generation, production, consumption and leisure. This dissertation, drawing upon methodologies of the everyday, historical anthropology and social histories of technology, challenges standard historiographical interpretations of gender and consumption during the Weimar Republic. Based on an analysis of economic, institutional, juridical and discursive sources, modern man is revealed as an active participant in an emergent consumer society, his masculinity defined not only by what he produced, but also by what and how he consumed.