Like Virilio, the late Friedrich A. Kittler (1943–2011) came from a generation that was too young to fi ght in the Second World War but which was old enough to experience the bombardment of the civilian centres of Europe fi rst- hand. Kittler, who was born in Rochlitz, Saxony, remembered seeing Dresden ablaze and talked extensively about growing up in the former East Germany (Kittler and Armitage 2006). His mother used to take him on trips to Peenemunde, a Baltic seaport which was the centre for Nazi research into V2 rocket technology. Virilio, born in 1932, was a small child during the Second World War and fl ed Paris for Nantes with his family. The port was heavily bombed by the Allies in 1943. For both thinkers, a fascination with war, and the changes wrought by the Second World War in particular, guide their enquiries into the question of technology, leading both to productively examine the relationship between military technology and culture in a number of seminal texts.

Kittler's work on military technology is mainly associated with his so- called media- theoretical mid- period, which spanned the 1980s up to 2000. (His earlier writings had been focused on applying the insights of French poststructuralism to the hidebound discipline of German literary studies; his later work on ‘cultural technologies’ took him back to ancient Greece with an avowed rejection of war in favour of an exploration of ‘love in Europe’.) During this time, Kittler emerged as the leading proponent of a new German ‘media science’ (Medienwissenschaft) that aimed to inject a new rigour into the humanities with a tech- savvy engagement with culture on the broadest terms.