Jean-Michel Johnston has written a very useful and archivally rich monograph on nineteenth-century telegraphy in Germany. The book covers the innovation of telegraphy, its implementation in multiple German states and the Kaiserreich, as well as the reactions and interpretations of users. Johnston rightly asserts that the history of telegraphy in Germany is comparatively under-researched, and this book goes a long way to addressing that deficit.
The book proceeds chronologically and tries in each chapter to incorporate Prussia, Bavaria, Bremen, and other states where feasible. Johnston's consistent attention to states and cities beyond Prussia provides a very different picture of the development of telegraphy in Germany. Through research at state, municipal, and private archives in Berlin, Bremen, Nuremberg, Duisburg, Wuppertal, Frankfurt am Main, and Munich, the book moves beyond Prussia and a Berlin-centric narrative. By 1873, almost 5.5 million of the roughly 9 million telegrams sent by Germans passed through Berlin. But Johnston rightly emphasizes and examines the development of telegraphy and its usage far beyond Berlin. Even after unification, Bavaria and Württemberg retained their own telegraphic administrations, making Johnston's attention to the non-Prussian space highly relevant for the post-1871 period as well. This broad coverage enables him to trace unexpected dynamics and to show how political and economic interests influenced the emergence of telegraphy.
Throughout the book, Johnston carefully expands readers’ understanding of telegraphy, its emergence, and its usage. This starts with chapter 1, which focuses on optical telegraphy, neatly unpacking the “fluid concept” (34) of telegraphy itself. For example, Johnston reminds us that a Prussian department for telegraphy first emerged in 1832 with the completion of an optical telegraph between Berlin and Cologne.
Three chapters comprise the first part of the book and explore how scientists, bureaucrats, intellectuals, and entrepreneurs cooperated and clashed in their visions and development of telegraphy between 1830 and 1849. Particularly fascinating is how Johnston traces the “Hanseatic exception” (106), for example showing that Bremen introduced Germany's “first publicly accessible electric telegraph line” (81) in 1847 due to the convergence of state and economic interests. Elsewhere in Germany, however, it took the frictions of the 1848-1849 revolutions for governments to construct telegraph lines, such as the first line between Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, completed in time for Friedrich Wilhelm IV to turn down the offer of an imperial crown from the National Assembly in Frankfurt on April 28, 1849.
The three chapters in part II examine how telegraph networks were laid and administered between 1850 and 1880 while also including the perspectives of users ranging from businessmen to journalists. Chapter 6 carefully explores how telegraphy became a part of everyday life, even for those who did not use it, through satire and realist fiction. Johnston convincingly demonstrates how the 1850s and 1860s constituted a “period of dynamic change” (116) in government administration of telegraphy. Johnston shows how telegraphy first attracted interest from business communities and the police, especially Berlin police president Carl von Hinckeldey, who also developed a fire-prevention network that he could adopt for police purposes. The Prussian government under Bismarck pursued control of news through informal and formal agreements with the Berlin-based Wolffs Telegraphisches Bureau news agency.
These chapters illuminate growing frictions as telegraphy spread. For example, telegraph offices charged delivery fees by distance. The greater costs for manufacturers located outside of town borders produced tension with commercial and financial elites housed in town centers. Tension also emerged from journalists, who chafed against the growing power of Wolffs, facilitated by its priority access to telegraphy.
Throughout, Johnston uses detailed statistics to great effect to demonstrate how actual use of telegraphy manifested itself. For example, despite rhetoric about global telegraphy, about 90 percent of all telegrams in 1873 were sent within Germany and Austria-Hungary. The most popular destination beyond those borders was France with 2 percent of telegrams. Only around 11,000 of nine million telegrams were sent to “America” (216).
Overall, Johnston frames the book as an attempt to renew “modernization” as a useful term by approaching it “as an analytical concept to explain the emergence of a fundamentally ambiguous and diverse modernity by the late nineteenth century” (7). At the end of the book, however, I would have liked more exploration of how that frame of “modernization” added to the analysis. It would have been fascinating to learn more about the Deutsch-Österreichischer Telegraphen-Verein, founded in 1850 to coordinate telegraphy across states and dissolved in 1871. As Johnston notes, there is space for work on telegraphy in Austria, and perhaps that work could incorporate more on this großdeutsch organization. Finally, gender garners a brief mention in the epilogue, which notes that most telegraph users and the first operators were male, while telephony expanded into “what was then seen as the female sphere of domesticity” (246). I wondered, though, if and how telegraphy contributed to constructions of masculinity in communications.
As Johnston notes, the history of telegraphy is “remarkably overlooked in the historiography of modern Germany” (2). This book goes a very long way to rectifying that lacuna. Hopefully, this book will receive the wide readership from historians of Germany, technology, and media that it deserves.
