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This article examines the ideas, reception and social role of Germany's most prominent cultural critic of lockdown politics, Gunnar Kaiser. In contrast to the majority of European intellectuals, Kaiser took an early public stand against the naive adoption of science as a social authority and the unprecedented overturning of core democratic principles. He argued that without vigorous, open debate, the worldwide state of emergency threatened to usher in a fundamentally new (bio)political era, in which liberal democracy would be replaced by an increasingly totalitarian technocracy. Yet despite his voluminous philosophical output, which included a highly creative and increasingly professionalised YouTube channel as well as two best-selling books, Kaiser found himself largely excluded from mainstream German discourse. Crew analyses the full range of Kaiser's interventions while also situating him within the broader landscape of European dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how German technocrats created revisionist plans to "unscramble" Africa in the 1930s. In particular, it studies how their schemes emerged from the transnational Eurafrican movement in the interwar period. The mixture of technical expertise and imperial ideologies in Eurafrican planning made Eurafricanism remarkably elastic in political terms, connecting liberal democratic and fascist states in the interwar era. Bureaucrats and colonial thinkers in Nazi Germany helped produce such projects, but also oriented them toward the realization of fascist imperial goals, using Eurafricanism as a tool of territorial revisionism. As a result, the technopolitics of African infrastructure development both depended on and informed the knowledge and ideology that defined fascist geopolitics. Although these blueprints never came to fruition, they point to the importance of spatial categories and technopolitical actors in the ideology and practice of National Socialism. Further, Nazi planners' engagement with Eurafricanism indicates how interwar imperialism connected Nazi Germany to other imperial powers in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the German nuclear industry geared up for the full-scale commercial use of nuclear power plants in the 1970s, it faced increasing public resistance and political obstacles. It reacted with public relation campaigns that were designed to convince skeptics of the reliability, safety and economic necessity of the technology. The material generated by these efforts sheds light on the rhetorical strategies and cultural encodings of an engineering culture under attack, revealing a disposition of technocratic assertiveness and presumption. A close analysis of brochures and pamphlets, including visual techniques of persuasion, also demonstrates some specifically German aspects of promoting nuclear energy. Scientists, managers and engineers invoked alleged lessons of the past, alluding to subtexts of resource anxiety and national autarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on a February 2010 conference held at the Center for Comparative European Studies of the University of Cologne, in Cologne, Germany. Titled "A Europe of Experts? Transdisciplinary Perspectives," the meeting addressed such topics as the dominance of technocrats in the European Union and the role of expert knowledge.

Nazi technical thought was not uniform throughout the Third Reich, but rather dependent on the very different visions of Gottfried Feder, Fritz Todt and Albert Speer. Feder and his circle proposed a 'volkisch technocracy' that implied a radical socio-economic transformation of Germany unacceptable to Hitler and German elites. Thereafter, Todt's 'technopolitical' approach embraced the holistic 'spiritual revolution' of the regime - man, machine and nature in aesthetic harmony - and developed administrative tools to propagate it among German engineers and the broader public. Speer, however, jettisoned the regime's commitment to a specific Nazi technical ideology in favor of the war effort. The 'reactionary modernist' element in Nazi ideology, personified by Todt, disappeared as a result of to the war. The role of technology in Nazi thought is best judged by pre-war Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

1 An earlier version of this article was presented at the lecture series on Women’s and Gender Studies at Bucknell University. I would like to thank my stimulating audience at Bucknell. Special thanks go to Professors Katherine Faull at Bucknell and Kym Morrison at Moravian College for their critical and learned reading of an earlier version of the text. I am especially grateful to the Gotha Research Library and the University of Erfurt for the Merian Scholarship that allowed me to do research in Gotha, Jena, Weimar and Schnepfenthal for this study. The Faculty Research and Development Committee of Moravian College has generously supported my research in Germany. I thank Judith Green for her great editorial assistance. All translations are mine. This study probes the ways in which a meritocratic system of student evaluation emerged in German educational institutions in the late eighteenth century. By probing the case of the Schnepfenthal Institute, founded in 1784 by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, the author suggests that the system of assessment was not only an outcome of meritocratic rationalization but also was influenced by traditional forms of domination. Rather than describing the traditional as monarchical we should see its patriarchal, gendered nature. It is this larger patriarchal context, it is argued, that helps us understand the ways Schnepfenthal and its kindred institutions introduced their systems of student assessment: they were amalgamations of meritocratic aspirations and traditional pressures of patriarchal domination. The research is based on extensive work on archival and other primary materials from Schnepfenthal and the Research Library of Gotha. The study starts with a description of the Schnepfenthal Institute by showing the educational context of the Meritentafel. Then attention is shifted to the practices that allowed Salzmann and his associates to assess students. The last section attempts to explain these practices by analyzing the patriarchal setting of Schnepfenthal which was so important to Salzmann. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Albert Presas I Puig Technology and Culture, Volume 62, Number 1, January 2021, pp. 273-274 (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press For additional information about this article [ Access provided at 4 Mar 2021 10:45 GMT from Ebsco Publishing ] https://muse.jhu.edu/article/783924 B O O K R E V I E W S 273 Taking on Technocracy: Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present By Dolores L. Augustine. In Taking on Technocracy, Augustine, a consummate connoisseur of the histories of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), presents an integrative history of nuclear energy development in Germany. [Extracted from the article]