Die Herkunft des Automobils aus Himmelstrionfo und Hollenmaschine.

Jorg Jochen Berns. Berlin: Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, 1996. n.p.

The nineteenth-century German traveler Johann Gottfried Seume, who still enjoys a certain fame for walking all the way from his transalpine home to Syracuse, commented disparagingly on faster modes of travel. Where everyone is driving, he says, all goes wrong. Why? As soon as travelers sit in the coach, they become increasingly distant from the intrinsic roots of their humanity. A person who walks perceives his/her environment more comprehensively than one who rides a coach. So, he concludes, a good republican is well advised to travel by foot. Seume's opinion foreshadows the cultural origin of the automobile as it now has been described by Jorg Jochen Berns. In his comprehensive essay, the author explains the modern car as a descendant of early modern types of "disguised vehicles" which he divides into two categories, heaven trionfos and hell machines (see German title), both propelled by supernatural forces. He identifies two derivative vehicle types, the imperial coach and the battle machine. The trionfo figures allegorically for the antique triumphal procession and, by extension, is a display of sovereign mobility. In witnessing the trionfo, the presence of divine power becomes manifest to the people.

According to Berns, these early modern vehicles were not intended for the transport of people to appointed destinations. Instead, they were mechanical devices which aided in the presentation of an allegorical construct. Berns describes how this purpose of super-elevating the sovereign through his presentation in the mobile apparatus was achieved. During a public political/religious state spectacle, designed to intensify the momentum of imperial triumph, the coach primarily transported not persons but meaning, which, however, could also be personified through an individual. The vehicles demonstrated the legitimacy and virtue of the sovereign - the terrestrial executioner of divine will - by providing him with an aura of ubiquitous, unrestrained mobility and automation. In this respect, Seume seems to have been right in his later verdict against coach-traveling.

The trionfo played a central role in Renaissance court representation, supported probably by the wish to display the potentate at the greatest possible distance from his subjects. Berns, however, goes beyond this very plausible explanation in linking the ceremonial vehicles to metaphysical prototypes. Only extraordinary designs could adequately transport or represent the unfathomable God, and in the visual arts attempts were made to reconstruct His "state coach" in the Renaissance. Also the author found cases where real-life reconstructions were attempted up to the eighteenth century, as Frederick of Prussia for example was offered by an entrepreneur a flying "Cherub-Siges oder Triumphwagen" described so magnificently as to terrify Pope and pagans alike.

Berns is certainly correct in saying that the mechanical functions which supported the vehicle's allegorical movement were not meant to be hidden. On the contrary, the display of sophisticated technology would have been regarded as a significant representation of rulership. Even the jolting motion of these coaches only heightened their extraordinary status, and in this respect was later transferred to the earliest modern automobile which also aroused the curiosity of two contemporary monarchs - an elective affinity of science and principality (in a curious advertisement, the manufacturer said that the dragonhead figure crowning the wood drank water, beer, and wine, but best liked mead!). One is tempted to link such examples to contemporary kunstkammer-philosophy: In the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon perpetuated a similar view when he explained that, after all wonders have ceased, the monarch himself would remain the last impenetrable miracle because of his profound insight. The triumphal advance of mechanization is evident in most of Berns's examples, although the technological framework is not always candidly presented: mechanics and wheels are hidden by artificial clouds; and the chariots are moved in a most extraordinary way by dragons, tritons and mechanical elephants - creatures that represent the enslaved nature. It does not require a leap of imagination to visualize, as the counterpart of this advance, the horrific hell machines of Bosch or Callot that terrorize humanity. They appear to form an antithetical component of a dialectic process that governs technological development.

A glance at our century closes the text. According to Berns, the sovereign pathos, hope, and potential that had imbued mobility with such significance has now degenerated. The utopian dream of liberty has been transformed into the straight path of a projectile, which is allegorized in the streamlined design of the modern automobile. The pathos of super-mobility finally vanished under the restrictive policies imposed under Nazi Germany and since then has been relegated to television experiences. Not quite justifiably, Berns sees the factor of hope replaced by design and advertising, although the promotion of the first modern cars was significantly enhanced by mythological references that would help raise the prestige of their occupants. Hence, modern advertising does not displace utopian values, but is a compensation for the former's fading power.

Although one may disagree with Berns' view of the fate of idealism in modernity, his well-illustrated book merits further discussion, especially because of his interdisciplinary perspective. A more detailed analysis of the medieval tradition, however, would have been useful. It is questionable whether the Renaissance chariot can be truly regarded as direct ideological predecessor of the modern automobile, and it does not appear to have been a Renaissance novelty: medieval fiction, for example, did not ignore mechanical chariots (see the thirteenth-century "Moriz von Craun). What is more, one can find them during medieval state ceremonies such as those constructed for Emperor Frederick's wedding feasts in Cologne. At the court of Charles V of Valois in 1378, a vehicle was reported passing the banquet guests "par telle maniere que nule personne s'en peust point appercheuoir." The automobile chariots Direr invented for Maximilian could be reconsidered in their possible connection to this medieval tradition. The interpretation of these strange vehicles still lacks deeper insight beyond Berns's contribution. Finally, a Renaissance writer unmentioned by the author, Montaigne, wrote an essay on coach travel (Essays, III.6), in which he did not hesitate to link the concept of driving with power and coaches with pretension - thereby confirming some of the historian's thesis.

WOLFGANG BRUCKLE University of Hamburg