“The railways, some have claimed, act as large national clocks.”Footnote 1 This was how, in 1873, Gustav Schmoller, the Heilbronn-born political economist, judged the impact of the Eisenbahn on everyday life and culture. It was of course not unusual to associate the railways with the forward march of national time, least of all in the nineteenth century. Most educated contemporaries, ranging from state mandarins and railway experts to municipal officials and businesspeople, described the railways as a time-machine.Footnote 2 What was unusual about Schmoller's observation was that, in presenting his judgment as a view held by others, he sounded an implicit note of caution. As far as he was concerned, only time could tell.
One can think of various reasons why Schmoller appears to have remained somewhat circumspect on the prospect of a German standard time. His methodological preference for inductive reconstruction over deductive speculation may have provided one reason; his hailing from the federalist Württemberg a second; his skepticism about technological determinism a possible third. Whatever the reasons behind Schmoller's reluctance to burden the railways with unbridled expectation, the next three decades would prove him right. What this period of German history sets into relief is that official (standard) time and lived (social) time pertain to different rhythms of life, even if their relationship became closely intertwined as the nineteenth century progressed. In this regard, Germany undoubtedly formed part of a broader tendency, one that manifested itself in other parts of Europe and beyond.
In spite of this broad commonality, Germany represents an extremely fertile case for an investigation of modern time culture. Much of this fertility derives from German-style intricacies concerning the adoption of a national standard time. After a protracted debate on this issue, in 1893 mitteleuropäische Zeit (MEZ in brief) was introduced by imperial legislation. By virtue of this legislative act, Germany acquired a time referent bearing on the whole of national life.Footnote 3 Just over a year before the reform entered into force on April 1, 1893, the imperial railway authorities, wary of public resistance (particularly in Prussia), had decided to restrict MEZ to the railways’ internal operations (innerer Betrieb).Footnote 4 Having completed its one-year test run, the new Einheitszeit was subsequently extended to the railways’ external operations (äusserer Betrieb). Now MEZ (set to the mean time of Greenwich: GMT in short) was displayed on the clocks that passengers caught sight of as they approached a railway station, while villages, towns, and cities were encouraged to adopt it as the time of public life (Zeit für das bürgerliche Leben). At that point railway staff operating between Prussia's eastern borderlands and the Rhineland province must have breathed a sigh of relief, as henceforth all railway clocks (including the chronometers carried by train guards and station staff) could be set to a single time.Footnote 5
Crucially, German time reform took place in a context of competitive comparisons and narrowing gaps. One such gap was domestic—for, in a sense, the evolution of a national time standard is a story of the North catching up with the South: in the southern states, standard time, set to the local mean time of a major city (Munich, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, and Ludwigshafen am Rhein), had been customary since the 1850s. Having operated regional standard times for several decades, political authorities in the South (as well as Alsace-Lorraine) introduced MEZ on April 1, 1892. They also encouraged villages and towns to adopt it for public life as well—just as they had done when they introduced standard mean times in the 1850s and 1860s. Their decision left Prussia (where the reluctance of making railway time the Zeit für das bürgerliche Leben remained marked) little choice but to follow suit.Footnote 6 The Prussian envoy desired to know from a Württemberg minister in September 1892 how his population had been faring with the new time regime. Everything had gone smoothly, came back the reply from Stuttgart.Footnote 7
The other gap concerning time reform—more perceived than real, but exerting a powerful impact on both the debate and reality of German time reform—was international: Imperial Germany adopted GMT-based zone time after Britain (1848), the United States (1883), and Austria-Hungary (1890–1893), but before Switzerland (1894), Denmark (1894), Norway (1895), and Sweden (1900), with Italy also converting to zone times in 1893. That is to say, there simply was no dominant pattern; Germany formed part of a larger pack. If one had to identify a laggard in continental Europe, it would have to be France: after a long-standing battle with Britain over global temporal hegemony, the Third Republic moved to GMT in 1911, preferring to call it “l'heure de Paris moins 9 minutes et 21 secondes.” And if one had to name a pace-maker, it would have to be Britain.Footnote 8
Yet although these disparities were of little concern to most Germans, they mattered greatly to those who saw their country engaged in a series of international struggles.Footnote 9 How could a politically and economically powerful country such as Germany be so reluctant to come together in time—the Germany that had become a nation-state in 1871, and whose railways had gained such a central role since the 1860s; the society that had benefited from a Customs Union founded in 1834?Footnote 10 Why did the rigid separation of local time from railway time prevail for longer there than in several other countries? These are some of the questions that advocates of reform both within and outside of Germany posed in the last third of the nineteenth century.
When it comes to investigating time as a social experience and practice, however, these questions prove less than productive. Informed by nationalist narratives of progress, they frame the development of time cultures in terms of a series of modernist teleologies and dichotomies—as if, that is, the parallel existence of different temporal regimes (local versus national or North versus South, say) signified backwardness and as though that plurality formed an obstacle to the nation reaching its true potential. This article adopts a different approach. Instead of reconstructing time reform as a process of cultural imposition and institutional integration, it explores how a modern time culture evolved at the intersection of lived time and linear clock time.
Such an exploration is not made easier by the lack of in-depth research on time culture in nineteenth-century Germany, of the kind now available for many European and extra-European societies.Footnote 11 All we have are a series of summaries of the familiar story of time reform culminating in the imperial law of 1893. Tucked away for the most part in historical syntheses of one kind or another, most treat Helmuth von Moltke's 1891 address to the Reichstag as a decisive turning point. In this masterly speech, the legendary general urged the German public to endorse a national Einheitszeit on grounds of military strategy and civilizational progress. Thanks to this intervention, Moltke emerged as the foremost champion of German standard time, with many contemporaries as well as latter-born historians depicting him as a voice of progress in a temporal landscape marked by particularism.Footnote 12
Within the rich international historiography on time, an influential interpretation (one that echoes the voices of nineteenth-century reformers) describes the worldwide shift toward national standard times as a function of modernity. One of the central requirements of an integrated nation-state under conditions of industrial capitalism, so this argument runs, is the rise of a national master clock.Footnote 13 In a particularly strong version of this argument, Wolfgang Schivelbusch has called the railways the “destroyer of experiential space and time.”Footnote 14 In stark contrast to these functionalist interpretations of railway time, some cultural historians have stressed the diversity of temporal landscapes; here standard time merely adds another layer to a multiplicity of temporal rhythms. Scholars arguing in this vein have sometimes rejected the concept of modernity altogether, insisting that in the nineteenth century everyone fashioned their own modernity, so to speak.Footnote 15
There are problems with these interpretations. Both downplay the tensions accompanying time harmonization. Both marginalize the fact that contemporaries (depending on their Sitz im Leben and point of view) experienced time reform as a project of either civilization or subjugation. No romantic mindset is needed to recognize that the cognitive and emotive pressures that time reform exerted on individuals and communities could be profound. Yet different temporal regimes rarely proved mutually exclusive. More often than not, lived time and standard time stood in a relation of tension to each other: if the notion of the all-transformative master clock amounts to a modernist myth, the view of the nation as a room filled with multiple timepieces ticking away happily represents somewhat of a cop-out.Footnote 16
This article advances an interpretation that can hopefully serve as a point of departure and debate for future research on the evolution of time cultures in Germany and elsewhere. It starts from the recognition that railway communication relied on linear time, a universal epistemology that could (pending a sufficiently powerful technology) make everything happen all at once.Footnote 17 Marx was right: if everything were to be synchronized the world over, locations and communities would melt into air.Footnote 18 Railway time meant decontextualized time; its implementation threatened to flatten meaningful temporal landscapes. In practice, however, humans made time. Place-makers that they are, individuals and communities did not merely resist clock time, they assimilated it and put abstract time back in its place. In this way, they made time tangible and emotionally accessible. Communities take shape when time is attached to a specific location—be it in a nation, region, locality, or professional society.Footnote 19
The article's focus is on the accommodations that German contemporaries made between different (“old” and “new”) ways of talking and utilizing time, and on how they relocated a linear time, one that had no particular location, to suit their own individual and collective needs as they judged them. It examines two central ways in which Germans relocated abstract time, which are discussed in separate sections. The first (Talking Clocks) investigates how Germans debated the merits and drawbacks of making railway time the time of public life. Here nationalism came to play a central role in the relocation of linear time. The second, slightly longer, section (Adjusting Clocks) investigates how time reform altered Germans’ relationship to clocks as material objects telling the time. This shows that where standard time was confined to the railways’ internal operations (as was the case in Prussia right up to 1893), pragmatism in relation to temporal accuracy and punctuality often prevailed. It also shows how individuals concerned with obtaining the “right time” used familiar clocks to assimilate the linear time displayed (for example) by their station clock, thereby turning it into something more tangible. In other words, and most importantly, the article shows that clock time goes much deeper than standard time. The brief conclusion offers some reflections on the role of the station clock in calibrating modern times.
Talking Clocks
Of the foreign voices on global time reform attracting international attention, few counted more than Britain's Astronomer Royal W. H. M. Christie. As he explained to a London audience in 1884, everywhere increased mobility had necessitated greater accuracy of time to regulate “the hours of labor, sleep, and the times for meals.” Commercial interaction now often involved “different communities separated by distances which may range from a few miles to half the circumference of our globe.” The first response to increased speed and widened space had been the introduction of solar mean time in the early nineteenth century. Yet, at least in England, solar mean time had marked but a brief interlude. By the 1840s it had been replaced by GMT, which in 1884 (when it was adopted as Britain's legal time) had become the global time standard. As Christie summarized the British experience: “The railways carried London … time all over the country, and thus local time was gradually displaced. The public soon found that it was important to have correct railway time and that the discordance between the sun and the railway clock was of no practical consequence. For some years both the local and the railway times were shown on village clocks by means of two separate minute hands, but the complication of the dual system produced inconvenience, and local time was gradually dropped.”Footnote 20 In this way, Christie reminded his audience, Britain had put itself in the lead. Although the railways of France, Austria, Italy and Sweden ran on standard time centered on a capital city, the public life of those countries still followed local time, with travelers having to switch from one time to another as they approached a railway station. Whereas the railway companies in much of continental Europe lived in one temporal universe, the public, or at least its traveling portion, had to live in two.Footnote 21 Whoever ignored the difference between local and railway time risked either missing their train or arriving at the station too early. Only in Britain had railway time absorbed local time.Footnote 22
Yet only in Germany, Christie reassured his audience, were people shielded from railway time altogether. Only there, “under the influence of certain astronomers,” did railway staff communicate with passengers exclusively in local time. Only there did external station clocks tell the time of the village or town where the Bahnhof was located. To make this arrangement work for railway staff, posts had been “placed along the railway to mark out each minute of difference of time from Berlin,” so that “engine-drivers and guards” could alter “their watches one minute for every ten miles as they travel east or west.” This was necessary because train conductors were obliged to ascertain the local time of every intermediate station, so they could keep in touch with the time of their customers. As far as Christie was concerned, the German practice constituted an oddity; he called it “the reductio ad absurdum of local time.”Footnote 23
Even though he failed to distinguish between Germany's North and South, Christie's broader assessment is hard to fault. Most German railway experts and political commentators shared the English scientist's verdict. A report on Einheitszeit that appeared in the Preussische Mitteilungen in 1891 likewise portrayed Germany's public time culture as anachronistic. The use of two different times—Berlin time for the railways’ internal operations, local time for the station clocks—had been a frequent cause of confusion. Not only did it pose a risk for the safety of railway staff and passengers alike, it also tempted the traveling public into arriving at the station either early or late, and the price, in each case, was a loss of time.Footnote 24
The prevailing sentiment among German advocates of national time harmonization was optimism, however. Their mantra was that the railways would bring Germany together in time. At least three assumptions tended to inform their thinking on this issue: that standard clock time, while just as real as local solar mean time, was better suited to the requirements of modern communication; that the forward march of history proceeded in the direction of increasing homogenization in most areas, including time; and, thirdly, that time reform would advance Germany's claim to being in the vanguard of universal progress. Among the contextual factors shaping the debate surrounding German time reform, two exerted particular weight: that much of the German South had known only one public time (namely, railway time) from the 1850s and that, from about the 1870s, standard time had become the subject of a global aspiration. Perceived through the prism of a linear philosophy of history, this twofold contrast (one with the southern German states, the other with the “civilized world”) made for a worrying Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen. Many reformers frankly acknowledged that only a minority of Germans used the railways regularly before 1900. But then, as far as they were concerned, this was precisely what had to change: by problematizing the lack of Einheitszeit, they sought to create the modernity to which they aspired to belong.
When in 1872 Berlin time became Prussian railway time, the reform-minded public saw this as a sign that things were moving in the right direction. Many hoped that the extension of Berlin time to the rest of Germany would swiftly follow, marking another victory in the battle against localism and German particularism.Footnote 25 For the German Verein für Eisenbahnkunde, standard time needed to move from the timetabling officials to the exterior of the railway station. In view of the advantages this would offer to passenger safety and convenience, this was a change they considered all but inevitable. It was in this spirit that in 1889 the association's delegates advocated the introduction of a standard time set to the Greenwich meridian, citing England, Sweden, the United States, and Japan as countries where the reform had been carried out “with ease.”Footnote 26
Just a few years previously, a German railway expert had made a claim that would become a stock-in-trade among supporters of time reform: if “one night all of Germany's clocks, including pocket watches, were to be set to Berlin time” by an invisible hand, nobody would notice it the next day.Footnote 27 In letters and articles to local and regional newspapers, contemporaries associated local time with “an anachronistic habit.” Some insisted that the era when time was controlled by a few local notables had passed. Whoever called Einheitszeit “unnatural,” one correspondent to a national newspaper grumbled, should also “desist from taking the night train or using electric light.” To be truly consistent, he chaffed, they ought “to go to bed with the chickens” and get up with the cows.Footnote 28 Meanwhile, in an 1891 letter to Reichskanzler von Caprivi, the German Architekten- und Ingenieur-Verein endorsed the introduction of a national time standard for the whole of public life. Its delegates dismissed the argument, made by defenders of local time, that a sizeable section of the German population was still sedentary. Instead, they claimed that railway time would help engender levels of mobility on a par with England.Footnote 29
Calls that justified time reform with a felt need to modernize were not confined to influential personalities and pressure groups. As the case of Oberlehrer Hoff shows, much of the agitation derived from within civil society. In a talk he delivered to the Industrieverein Altona in 1891, Hoff began with the concession that, on grounds of habit, most people preferred local to standard time. He then enlightened his audience that the world was currently being divided into different time zones. Given that the much larger United States had recently adopted such a system, there was every reason to assume that Germany would follow suit. The structuring of the entire globe into time zones centered on what G. M. T. Hoff described as “one more bond uniting civilized humanity in its efforts for cultural improvement.”Footnote 30 And when, in 1891 Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria declared their intention to adopt MEZ für das bürgerliche Leben, the Munich-based Allgemeine Zeitung demanded that Prussia follow suit. The difference between the time of Karlsruhe and the 15th meridian (passing through Görlitz) was twenty-six minutes and nineteen seconds. For the editors, this nullified the argument that standard time was unfeasible in Prussia: no town in northern Germany, whether in the extreme west or east, would have to move its clocks by a substantially larger margin than would Karlsruhe after April 1, 1892.Footnote 31
Yet if reformist discourse of time contained a weakness, it was its one-dimensionality. Justified for the most part in functional terms, time harmonization was difficult to sell in a society whose majority rarely traveled by rail (although a small minority traveled almost daily).Footnote 32 More importantly: while reformers largely ignored the question of time's relation to place, in practice time acquired much of its social and emotive force through a process of relocation.Footnote 33 A particularly potent way to accomplish this relocation of abstract time was nationalism. While industrial capitalism relied on “homogenous, empty time,”Footnote 34 nationalism served to situate time within the national community.Footnote 35 As mentioned at the start of this article, the most salient effort to nationalize time along such lines was undertaken by Helmuth von Moltke. Hailed retrospectively as the father of German standard time, Moltke relocated time in a nationalist key. On March 16, 1891, in his last speech to the Reichstag, the ninety-one-year-old described the German status quo as a military liability and an obstacle to national progress:
Meine Herren, … I will not long detain you, as I am very hoarse, on which account I have to ask your indulgence. That Einheitszeit is indispensable for the satisfactory operating of railways is universally recognized, and is not disputed. But, meine Herren, we have in Germany five different units of time. In north Germany, including Saxony, we reckon by Berlin time; in Bavaria, by that of Munich; in Württemberg, by that of Stuttgart; in Baden, by that of Karlsruhe; and in the Rhine Palatinate, by that of Ludwigshafen. We have thus in Germany five time zones, with all the drawbacks and disadvantages which result. These we have in our own fatherland, on top of those we encounter at the French and Russian borders. This is, I may say, a ruin which has remained standing out of the once splintered condition of Germany; but since we have become an empire, it is only right and proper that it should be done away with.Footnote 36
The revered nonagenarian called Germany “our own fatherland,” attributing the absence of a national time standard to Germany's former divisions: what he called the “once splintered condition of Germany.” Like other prominent figures inclined to approach both past and present philosophically, the German war hero diagnosed a nagging Gleichzeitigkeit des Ungleichzeitigen. And as happens to be the case with practicing Hegelians, this was not meant to signal sympathy for those deemed ungleichzeitig. Moltke's state-reinforcing nationalism built on the contrast between an anachronistic present and a desirable future: in order to be strong and powerful, nations had to become tightly integrated states, and a single time standard seemed indispensable to attaining that ambition.
This argument became even more common once the adoption of MEZ began to look like a foregone conclusion. When in 1892 and 1893 regional and municipal authorities all over Germany began to dispatch their instructions on how to adjust public clocks to the new standard, the discordant voices receded, such as when the Altonaer Nachrichten informed its readers that at midnight on March 31, 1893, the minute hands of the town's main clocks would be moved forward by twenty minutes. At that point, local time would “be erased in a single stroke” to make way for the brave new world of coordinated time across the nation. There was no doubt, the paper noted, that this would mean “a profound interference in established habits and customs.” Yet the world of standardized time, so the editors continued, would come with a series of novel and largely unexpected charms, some of which were likely to warm a citizen's heart and soul. On New Year's Eve, for example, when all clocks would be in complete agreement, the whole of Germany (Alldeutschland) would shout their festive greetings at the stroke of midnight: “For the glowing patriot, this commonality in festive spirit is very pleasant to say the least.”Footnote 37
The nationalist relocation of decontextualized time notwithstanding, the champions of national standard time faced strong opposition, particularly in Prussia. The outstanding opponent of the time reform proposed by Moltke was Chancellor Leo von Caprivi. Another decorated war hero, Caprivi questioned Moltke's claim that Einheitszeit was decisive for Germany's war efforts, or that without it, people's lives would be at risk. As he wrote to minister von Maybach, head of the imperial railways and an outspoken supporter of national standard time: “We do not wage a war every day, which is why we must … refrain from citing the eventuality of a war to justify altering the living conditions of our population's lives in times of peace.”Footnote 38 On several occasions, Caprivi professed that “the large majority” of Prussia's population regarded the prospect of a national time (bürgerliche Einheitszeit) as “a troublesome burden,” as something that “contradicted natural dispositions” (ein den natürlichen Verhältnissen widerstrebender, lästiger Druck). Caprivi's deputy agreed, noting that “large sections of the population” were “opposed to the introduction of a single time standard for the Empire as a whole.”Footnote 39 The experience with the introduction of the metric system in weights and measures had shown that “the public” was “highly conservative” in matters affecting deeply engrained habits.Footnote 40 Intent on depoliticizing the reform, Caprivi asked that the railway authorities (rather than the imperial government) take the lead. If the government forged ahead, the public would likely perceive the change as a “violent interference in established ways of life” (gewaltsamer Eingriff in eingebürgerte Lebensgewohnheiten).Footnote 41
Of the Prussian state ministries, those concerned with finance and with internal affairs, as well as the ministries of war and of justice, supported far-reaching time reform. Most doggedly opposed was the Ministry of Agriculture, whose speaker let it be known that many Prussians regarded the planned reform as a “severe interference with the law of solar time.” Also against the introduction of standard time (except for the railways’ internal operations) was the ministry responsible for religion, education, and health.Footnote 42 Unless people had been enlightened about the “deviation of railway time from the time regulating civil life …, total chaos in matters of public timekeeping” would likely ensue.Footnote 43 Of Prussia's various chambers of commerce and trade (Handels- und Gewerbekammern), those of Kiel, Mühlheim am Rhein, Breslau, Liegnitz, Magdeburg, and Schleswig were in favor of introducing MEZ for both the railways and public life; Königsberg, Erfurt, Brandenburg, and Mehresburg were against. The three chambers of commerce (Handelskammern) and the “large majority of the local branches of the Landwirtschaftlichen Verein” were opposed.Footnote 44
As well as being widespread, skepticism toward time reform was multifaceted. In 1884, a Berlin commercial newspaper concluded that time harmonization would mostly benefit the railways and their staff. The situation in southern Germany, where standard time had been adopted down to the level of the localities, was less congenial than some people had claimed: “The railway officials relieve themselves of the duty of converting times, but the travelling public has to cope with a different time every time it crosses a border.”Footnote 45 Two of Germany's most eminent astronomers, Wilhelm Foerster and Johann Gottfried Galle, warned against applying standard time except for the railway's internal operations. Foerster argued that plans to introduce what he described as “a homogenous time, one that is entirely unrelated to differences and changes of location,” constituted “an imposition.”Footnote 46
Foerster's colleague, Johann Gottfried Galle, averred that not everything hailing from the United States or England was worthy of emulation. Like Foerster, Galle stressed that his own discipline, astronomy, relied on local time, as did botany and agriculture. His advice to railway companies and state officials was unambiguous: “Which standard time the railways and telegraph agencies regard as useful to perform their operations is their own private business, which is of no concern to the public.”Footnote 47 As far as the two eminent astronomers were concerned, the stationary part of the population should not have to change its habits so that the minority of frequent travelers could be relieved of the inconvenience of living with different times. Endorsing Galle's views, the Hamburger Nachrichten maintained that, for many contemporaries, local time spoke to their “desire for peace and quiet” in a time characterized by “novelties and change.”Footnote 48 They also agreed with Galle that it was the railways, rather than the public, that had to cope with the temporal dislocation they had produced.
Adjusting Clocks
Talking clocks was important, but real clocks needed regular adjustment. Not that efforts to regulate mechanical clocks were an invention of the railway age. The German medievalist Gerhard Dohrn-van Rossum associates clock coordination with the “modernization and compression of temporal regulations.” Driven by a quest for temporal consistency, such efforts have been made since the late medieval period, particularly in towns.Footnote 49 At the very end of his Geschichte der Zeit, which focuses on the medieval and early modern periods, Dohrn-van Rossum devotes three pages to railway time. By the 1830s, he concludes, the “time of transportation” (Zeit des Verkehrs) had “made obsolete” the “time of the town” (Zeit der Städte). What he holds responsible for this transformation are three institutions of long-distance communication: the postal service, the timetabled coach service, and, finally, the railways.Footnote 50
Yet such relegation of town clocks to time's secondary infrastructure proves unduly restrictive. It ignores the fact that time cultures were the product of both institutional pressures and context-specific agency and that clocks, not despite but because they functioned as time tellers, had to respond to emotive and identificatory needs.Footnote 51 The view of the hegemony of time of transportation (of any time, really) ignores that many felt (and still feel) compelled to make their own time.
The material quality of clocks, their role as objects of status, tradition, and sentiment, is crucial to this story. “Human beings,” Leora Auslaender has noted, “need things to individuate, differentiate and identify; they need things to situate themselves in space and time.”Footnote 52 In a fascinating chapter on the assimilation of clocks in the United States, Thomas M. Allen has offered the following perspective: “A clock might embody a variety of ideas about time held by the clock maker, cabinet maker, and painter who worked on the object. When brought into someone's home, the clock puts these ideas into circulation with the preexisting versions of temporality already present in the household. Thus, the clock is both a representation of existing beliefs and a source of new ideas about time.”Footnote 53 The ideas that railway time put into circulation as it entered a German village or town may have been less variegated than those embodied by the clocks placed in US households. But the essential dynamic—different ideas and objects of time seeking some kind of accommodation—is eminently comparable.Footnote 54
Sometimes public timepieces differing from one another by a few minutes was all it took for people to call a state of temporal anarchy. This was the case in Augsburg, where in 1836 some clocks displayed local solar time while others had switched to local solar mean time. The resulting divergence prompted the Augsburger Tagblatt to enlighten its readers about the difference between the two notations.Footnote 55 Half a decade later, the editors of the Allgemeiner Anzeiger und Nationalzeitung der Deutschen pointed to the pitfalls of the common practice of setting village clocks to the time tellers of a larger town.Footnote 56 The main problem with this approach was that “many town clocks were just as wrong as those in the village.”Footnote 57 In the same year, a Munich daily likewise attributed the faulty time told by the clocks of Starnberg, Andecks, and Seefeld to the three municipalities putting their trust in Munich's church clocks, which were notorious for their erratic movements.Footnote 58 Meanwhile, the Augsburger Tagblatt devoted a front-page editorial to what it described as the town's temporal confusion. It had long been apparent, so its author lamented, that the inhabitants of Augsburg were not exactly spoiled with reliable timepieces. Yet a short walk along some of its landmarks had revealed that the situation was even worse than he had assumed, with four of the city's church clocks ringing the hour a full fifteen minutes apart. Although variations in temperature frequently affected the accuracy of church clocks, their consistency could be improved through a regular regime of adjustment and maintenance. What is revealing is the author's prioritization. Although he criticized the inaccuracy of individual clocks, what he deemed most unacceptable was their lack of agreement: there were now “many people from different walks of life” who had a vested interest in not getting their temporal signals crossed.Footnote 59
When Munich time became the state's railway time in 1854, Augsburg's station clock moved to the center of public attention.Footnote 60 To alleviate the potential for temporal discordance between station and town, a discussion began about installing a new master clock near the cathedral, with one of its dials facing the public. But Augsburg in the second half of the nineteenth century was no small town. Although a new master clock near the town center made life easier for some, it was of little consequence to the majority who lived in neighborhoods farther afield. Out of habit and because of its elevated position near the town center, most inhabitants took their cue from the Perlach clock. With roots stretching back to the ninth century, the Perlach clock tower underwent a massive extension when the new town hall was built between 1612 and 1618. Because it adjoined the town hall and market square, and also due to its height of sixty-four meters, the Perlach clock had long served as Augsburg's unofficial master clock.Footnote 61
Being a mechanical clock requiring regular adjustment, however, Perlach was prone to defects and irregularities. Between the 1850s and 1870s, it found itself engaged in a struggle for hegemony with the station clock. In June 1856, some observed that Perlach was lagging about fifteen minutes behind the station clock.Footnote 62 Subsiding for short periods at a time, the problem would invariably recur, and so the debates over temporal consistency continued.Footnote 63 In 1860, an inhabitant asked that a new master clock, synchronized with the station clock, be installed near the cathedral. Augsburg, he asserted, deserved at least one accurate timepiece near the center of town, all the more so given the Perlach tower clock had become unreliable.Footnote 64 Because most inner-town clocks emulated Perlach's movements, the erstwhile master clock had become a source of contagion.Footnote 65 In 1862, a citizen demanded that the former rule, that Perlach had to be set daily to the station clock, be reinstated or else the city was in urgent need of a new master clock to be fitted near the town hall. Another citizen maintained that the problem lay not with Perlach but with the station clock having been inaccurate of late, a claim that was subsequently confirmed by Ober-Inspektor Lauboeck.Footnote 66 When a Reutlingen-based company visited Augsburg in 1867 to assess its horological needs, it recommended the fitting of an electrical master clock capable of driving the movements of twenty clocks that were to be distributed across the city.Footnote 67
As the Augsburg example shows: the search for a visible clock, one that could command authority, began well before the German railways emerged as a means of mass conveyance in the late nineteenth century. Normaluhr is the term most German contemporaries used to describe a clock that served as an authoritative referent for other timepieces (the British and Americans called it master clock). Some were newly fitted, yet most were well-established; many had a long history and needed an upgrade. In places of work or entertainment, in courts of law or city neighborhoods, such reference clocks began to draw the attention not only of officials and experts.
Which clock is to serve as the Normaluhr? Quite often the question elicited conflicting answers, reflecting disagreements over reference times or the quality of existing clocks. In Ansbach, for instance, the local astronomer accused the town's clock regulator, Mr. Schlemmer, of setting popular clocks to solar time instead of local mean time as the new convention demanded. Schlemmer was said to obtain his time from the postal conductors, who had a reputation for their faith in solar time.Footnote 68 Even though in all parts of Germany municipalities were asked to substitute local mean for solar time, both times continued to coexist in some places, at least for a while. As late as 1848, the clockmaker Joseph Schechtl advertised his “clock towers that display both mean and true time.”Footnote 69 What Schechtl called true time was the prevalent way of referring to solar time.
As telegraph-supported railway communication heightened from the 1860s, questions surrounding the accuracy and coordination of time moved center stage. Even at that point, however, bringing clocks into agreement posed numerous challenges. Much “valuable time” was still “being wasted,” a contemporary lamented in 1865, “because divergent clocks caused people to be either early or late.” This made him wonder why, in Germany of all countries, so few electrical master clocks could be found. Although such clocks graced the temporal landscapes of London, Liverpool, and Glasgow, as well as of Paris, Lyon, Mulhouse, Brussels, and even Ghent, in Germany there had been much talk and little action.Footnote 70 The contemporary in question was not alone in his distrust of mechanical clocks and of the watchmakers who continued to advertise them. “What time is it?” an inhabitant of Amberg in the Upper Palatinate asked in a letter printed in a local newspaper. His answer: “I do not know, because I'm not supposed to prefer my own watch over the public clocks that regulate our business affairs. But these public clocks have long been a source of misery.” While the parish church clock was “either fast or slow” or inaudible, the school clock suffered from those very same deficiencies—if it didn't “stop moving altogether,” that is. The station clock, besides proving inconsistent of late, was rather a long way from the town center: “Are we supposed to walk to the railway station each time we desire to obtain the correct time, and then measure the time it takes us to get back home?”Footnote 71
This disgruntled owner of a pocket watch raises two points that warrant a little further probing. The first pertains to the difference in authority between pocket watch and public clock. Something appears to have changed in this regard, at the time when he was making his observations. As historians of a recent investigation into time and public clocks in Frankfurt have argued, it would have made little sense to mass-produce pocket watches of great precision before 1800. The clocks that mattered, socially and economically speaking, were a select number of town clocks. Few people could afford a precise watch of the sort carried by railway staff or affluent citizens.Footnote 72 With the arrival of the railways, the established hierarchy between public and private timekeeping appears to have been challenged somewhat. Not that a pocket watch suddenly counted for more than a public clock. Who could really tell if someone's watch was trustworthy, anyway! But with the spread of railway time, people could cite a private watch as a witness if they wanted to challenge the authority of a public clock. If more than a handful of individuals did so, those entrusted with public timekeeping needed, at the very least, to acknowledge the problem; and if the complaints persisted, they had to fix it, either themselves or by entrusting the required repair to a recognized expert.Footnote 73
The question concerning the hierarchy of private and public timekeepers is closely allied to the second issue raised by the contemporary, one that would deserve much greater scrutiny from historians with an interest in the cultural and social history of time.Footnote 74 The issue concerns railway time's nearest embodiment: the station clock, its status and significance. One reason why people carrying pocket watches could now challenge the authority of a public clock was that the number of clocks displaying railway time had increased substantially. Set daily by telegraphic time signal or a chronometer-carrying train conductor, station clocks in particular emerged as objects of authority. Although we are lacking exact (indeed any) figures on the distribution of railway station clocks in Germany, it is clear that the number of such clocks must have increased in line with the extension of the network. Yet as Siegfried Weichlein has shown for the German railways, the extension of this important means of communication was patchy in a way that heightened (rather than reduced) social disparities, at least initially. In Weichlein's evocative phrase: railway paradises existed alongside railway deserts.Footnote 75 To risk a broad yet plausible generalization: before the 1880s the railway-clock paradises were more likely to be found in cities and towns than in the countryside.Footnote 76
Returning to our clock watchers: even those who regarded station clocks as pathetic symbols of officialdom found it hard to ignore them. Many quickly accepted the station clock as the new reference clock. Returning to the example of the individual wearing a pocket watch: what had changed was less the precision of the average pocket watch (the movements of most pocket watches were predictably erratic and required daily adjusting); what had changed was that now someone carrying a watch could gain credibility by synchronizing it with a railway clock. It was for this very reason that railway clocks could undermine the status of more established clocks. But this did not result, as Dohrn-van Rossum has suggested in his monumental history of time, in town clocks’ relegation to urban folklore, picturesque yet functionally redundant.
One reason why neither town nor village clocks declined in importance has been mentioned already: the train station was often located at least ten minutes from the town or village it was supposed to serve; and even where the station clock was located nearer the town center, it may well have been invisible to a large portion of the inhabitants. Many small and rural stations featured a single clock fitted along the platform but none to the exterior. There were even some larger stations that left people in doubt about the correct time of day as they approached the station. The Sternschanzenbahnhof in Hamburg, for example, did not feature a single external clock visible to the public before receiving a major overhaul in 1903.Footnote 77 But all this became less acceptable once railways had begun to run on standard time.
What drew many people to the station clock was thus not that it was flawless but that it became the bearer of Einheitszeit. It is worth repeating that from the mid-1850s, towns and villages in the German South were encouraged to adopt the time of either Munich, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, or Ludwigshafen, but there was no obligation to do so (the legal basis for such a demand was lacking). A district such as Bayreuth, which decided to introduce Munich time just a fortnight after it had become the standard time in Bavaria, was the exception. Numerous districts and municipalities took at least a decade until they synchronized their local clocks with railway time, and many took considerably longer.Footnote 78 It was not until 1873, for example, that the busy commercial towns of Kempten and Fürth set their local clocks to Munich time.Footnote 79 Yet, once a regional standard time was introduced (even where local times remained initially in place), this invariably boosted the authority of the station clock.
Of the examples supporting this claim, none may be more compelling than inhabitants and municipalities putting local clocks forward by ten or more minutes to ensure that people would get to the railway station on time. Clock manipulations of this kind could become near habitual, at least for a while, under certain conditions.Footnote 80 If the railway-traveling portion of the population was sizable, and if the station was a good walk away from the center of a town or village, the temptation to turn minute hands forward was considerable. These conditions appear to have been present in Bamberg. Ten years after the Bavarian authorities had installed Munich time as the time for the railways’ internal and external operations, Bamberg decided to substitute railway time for local time. Bamberg was lucky insofar as the city's clocks had to be advanced by a mere three minutes. When it came, the time switch prompted mixed reactions, but no active resistance. Here's an example of how a local newspaper judged the move: with the railways now dominating “business transactions” also in Bamberg, the adaptation had become all but inevitable. What it did not condone was something else: that the minute hands on some of Bamberg's public clocks had been advanced by “another 6–8 minutes.” What had prompted this was a “concern for the travelling public.” Although this concern was understandable, the report's author noted, the action taken suggested that the manipulators suffered from a delusion: trains were being missed by people running late, not by clocks displaying a particular time; whether those clocks were set to local or railway time was irrelevant. Besides, putting the clocks forward by six to eight minutes was a “completely futile” exercise. Because it took about fifteen minutes to get to the railway station from the town center, clocks would need to be adjusted by at least a quarter of an hour for the manipulation to fulfill its intended purpose.Footnote 81
Above all, however, the selective fast-forwarding of a limited number of clocks left Bamberg in a state of temporal confusion. Those carrying out a trade, or children walking to their school, were left uncertain as to the correct time of day. This unpleasant state of affairs could only be overcome, the report suggested, by turning the town hall clock into the city's official master clock. To this end, the town clock maker would need to obtain Munich or railway time every morning at 7:00 a.m. from the telegraph station. And at 8:00 a.m., all church clocks would have to be synchronized with the town hall clock. Once the public could be certain that all public clocks showed railway time, they were free to set their house clocks back by three minutes so that they would display the local mean time of Bamberg. Aside from the advantages of synchronicity and predictability, the proposed strategy would offer another benefit. Here the author referred to that most extraordinary event, the birth of a child: “Someone who wants to register the age of his new-born child, born when the town hall stroke 12 noon, would, in case he wished to register his child's birth by Bamberg local time, have to state the time as 11 hours and 57 minutes.”Footnote 82
How does the North of Germany, whose population was shielded from adjusting local clocks to railway time until 1893, fit into this picture? As far as temporal accuracy and precision was concerned, there is no reason to assume that the problems were fundamentally different from the South: village and (particularly) town people in Prussia defended familiar clocks, complained about temporal disharmony where they found it, blamed local regulators when clocks got out of sync, or, more generally, advanced conflicting accounts of why they thought a local time culture was less than satisfactory. Which clock was to be regarded as authoritative? Many institutions had to find an answer to this simple question. This was relatively straightforward in the case of the starting time of rehearsals and plays for Berlin's actors; they had to follow the chief timepiece of the theater where they worked (which was obliged to follow the clock of the Berlin Academy).Footnote 83 It was more difficult in less regulated local settings, where different vested interests and sensibilities could undermine any hope of a swift compromise.
Yet the main initial difference to the South—the absence of a standard time that could have regulated everyday life—could still prove consequential. In this respect, courts of law provide a particularly instructive example. In response to the diversity of legitimate times and temporal referents, courts in Prussia often took a strikingly pragmatic approach. Many showed considerable leniency, for example, toward witnesses or plaintiffs arriving late from nearby towns and villages. When a group of rural folks turned up “just a few minutes late” to the court in Mühlhausen in Thuringia, they were given the benefit of the doubt. For not only did their village clocks differ from Mühlhausen's town hall clock by a few minutes, but the latter also had a reputation for being fast.Footnote 84 The correct timing of witness statements could decide whether someone had to go to prison, or worse. This became evident in 1849 when a group of nine witnesses saw themselves subjected to the charge of perjury in the Wrietzen district court in Brandenburg. What saved them from a lengthy prison sentence was the revelation that they had obtained their time from a peculiar Normaluhr, one that had made them believe in a truth (namely, that a notorious thief had an alibi for the time a burglary was committed in Strausberg) that turned out to be fake. The legal periodical reporting the case resorted to sarcastic wit to justify why leniency had prevailed: each witness had portrayed the external world not as it really was, but rather in the way in which he or she had “absorbed it”— a little like “Dr. Luther when he proclaimed to have seen the devil on the Wartburg without the latter having been present in the flesh.”Footnote 85
As late as 1890, Prussian experts on civil court proceedings defended the priority of local over railway (then Berlin) time in legal proceedings. In the absence of a legally binding time referent, what counted to them was the time that “found common recognition by virtue of established habit and long practice in the common life of a particular location.” What was decisive was the “chime of the clock,” which the inhabitants of a municipality regarded as “the important one.”Footnote 86 Not everyone who attended a court hearing would “travel by railway,” the report added. Besides, those living in the town where the court was located, particularly judges, often had “no secure knowledge of the time displayed on the station clock.”Footnote 87 A similar practice appears to have prevailed in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin in the 1880s. Its state law decreed that what defined legal time was neither “astronomical time” nor “the tower clock” but rather “that particular clock towards which public life is generally orientated.”Footnote 88 What we see here, in other words—fifteen years after Berlin time was adopted as Prussia's railway time and six years before MEZ was adopted as Germany's time standard—is a Gewohnheitsrecht, a practice defined by prevalent popular custom. In a public culture that restricted Eisenbahnzeit to the railways innerer Betrieb up until 1893, notables and civil servants appear to have had no qualms standing up for local time.
Yet the picture is far from clear-cut. What determined the temporal pragmatism that informed legal proceedings was the complexity of a law court's operations. What mattered most was the fact that staff, defendants, plaintiffs, and witnesses traveled to the court from different locations, and hence observed different times. In other areas of activity, however, and particularly in towns and cities, the approach to time appears to have been more formalized and rigid. Several factors may have contributed to this tendency, including public transport, where the champions of local time came under increasing pressure. Tramway traffic in Hamburg offers a case in point. As early as 1866, the regulations of the horse-drawn tramway between Hamburg and Wansbeck linked departure times to the station clock, which was set to the postal clock that doubled as the city's master clock. In 1875, the clock that regulated the departure times of tramways was still the station clock; in 1887, it was the clock by the stock exchange; and in 1895, by which time the tramway had gone electric, the station clock had resumed the role of local master clock.Footnote 89 Meanwhile, in Mainz in the 1880s, tramway conductors had to carry a “pocket watch set to the station clock.”Footnote 90 In Weimar in 1910, those working on the city's tramway had to carry “an accurate pocket watch synchronised with the station clock,” whereas the hackney cab drivers had to set theirs to the “town hall clock.” At that point both the station and town hall clocks followed MEZ, but what now determined the choice of master clock was visibility, which of course depended on the route.Footnote 91
In some of the larger Prussian cities, too, the synchronization of clocks had long presented a major concern. When in 1889 the Berliner Börsenzeitung offered a report of Berlin's newest hotels, it attributed their popularity with the traveling public to their location in striking distance of railway clocks. There at last, busy individuals would not see their time wasted as a result of temporal contradiction. As the report described the charms of the recently opened Hotel Monopol opposite Stadtbahnhof Friedrichstrasse: “Sitting comfortably at the window and his eyes gazing at the station clock, the traveller is able to expect the arrivals and departures of the trains, almost to the minute, in a state of thorough relaxation.”Footnote 92 Evidently excited, the editors judged that “Very soon the passenger who, distrustful of all watches including his own, would enter the waiting room a good hour before the departure of his train, where, haunted by suffocating boredom, he would sit anxiously until he heard the ‘third ringing’ of the bell, followed by the station guard's shouts of ‘all aboard!’—very soon this passenger will appear like the mythical figure from a distant past.”Footnote 93 Progress, for the Börsenzeitung, meant conquering boredom and time-wasting by stamping out temporal ambiguity.
The impending introduction of railway time for both the internal and external operations reinforced tendencies and dynamics already at play. In particular, it heightened the visibility and boosted the authority of the station clock also in the German North. In 1891, minister von Thielen asked Prussia's railway directorates for reports on the situation concerning visible clocks on their part of the network. The directorate in Elberfeld replied that it had ordered “more than 100 station clocks, to be fitted above all at the exterior of stations and in waiting rooms” at the cost of 10,000 Mark.Footnote 94 Its counterpart in Breslau informed the Ministry of its purchase of “29 platform clocks,” “25 clocks ticket-office clocks,” and “three regulators” at a total cost of approximately 12,000 Mark.Footnote 95 Meanwhile, the railway directorate in Berlin replied that “with the exception of Berlin-Stralsund,” the “large majority of the district's stations on secondary lines” had been fitted with station clocks that were “visible from outside.” “Eight stopping points on main lines” and “eleven stations on secondary lines” still needed to be “fitted with a station clock.”Footnote 96
More clocks meant greater attention to their accuracy and coordination. In 1898, for instance, an investigation of the accuracy of the clocks of dozens of train stations in Prussia drew a thoroughly positive conclusion. Although the inspected clocks had not in each instance proved entirely accurate or in perfect agreement, the deviations had been rather small: “barely half a second.”Footnote 97 The accuracy and coordination of clocks improved in many a railway station, as did their visibility. In 1903, the three clocks at Hamburg's Schanzenbahnhof—one of which was situated along the platform, another near the ticket counter, and the third inside the main building—were complemented by a fourth. The latter was fitted to the station's busy side entrance on Schanzenstrasse. All four clocks were synchronized by electric impulse.Footnote 98
Much suggests that during the 1890s controversies over clocks that were either irregular, out-of-sync, or invisible had become sharper, with tolerance levels in case of temporal divergence having further decreased. In 1898, when the church clock of a Prussian Gemeinde differed by “between ten and twenty minutes” from the station clock, the local police authorities were asked to have a word with the cleric in charge.Footnote 99 A decade later, several inhabitants of Elmshorn in Schleswig-Holstein demanded that the existing station clock be fitted to a more congenial location, one that enabled them to see it when approaching the station.Footnote 100 When in 1910 the Roman numerals adorning Berlin's town hall clock were replaced by Arabic ones, the city's commercial community welcomed the alteration. Along with this endorsement came the suggestion that henceforth Arabic numerals be adopted as standards on all public clocks in Berlin, including church clocks.Footnote 101
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The previous examination suggests that Gustav Schmoller was right to err on the side of caution. The German railways did push time coordination to new levels—beyond locality and toward and beyond the nation. They had the potential to create a single national clock, and, in some ways, they did. Yet they attained this on only a purely formal and institutional level. Socially and culturally speaking, time cannot be formalized in this way, however vigorous its technological underpinnings. Standard time, when and where it was adopted, did not produce a single culture of time. The vision of the one-clock-fits-all, that dream of both nationalist and cosmopolitan champions of standard time, never penetrated very deep into the fabric of social life. Yet what may be more surprising is something else: that it was the railways—that alleged incarnation of linearity, that machine that Wolfgang Schivelbusch described as the “destroyer of experiential space and time”—which (however indirectly) enabled contemporaries to re-embed mechanical clock time. The railways helped them to relocate a time that was supposed to dethrone local parochialism in all its various incarnations.
In the absence of railways, clock time would not have become so ubiquitous so fast in the nineteenth century—neither in Germany nor elsewhere. Yet as this article has demonstrated drawing on a variety of examples, clock time goes much deeper than standard time. Out of curiosity and because their lives depended on it, Germans took an interest in obtaining the right time from the frequently contradictory horological landscapes they inhabited. The inspectors of the station clocks who showed a professional obsession with accuracy and synchronicity; the townsfolk in southern Germany who fast-forwarded their favorite public clocks with the best of intentions; the Prussian notables, scientists, and villagers who opposed railway time becoming public time—they all, in their own way, contributed to putting time back in its place. What this suggests is that decontextualized clock time may have been most disconcerting for the many who barely ever boarded a train. To those who embarked on railway journeys frequently, or who had access to a railway station, it may have lost its abstract quality after a relatively brief period of acclimatization.
Another reason why the nineteenth-century railways may have strengthened local identity concerns the materiality of clock time. In this respect, the station clock appears to have assumed a kaleidoscopic function. The station clock gave abstract time a place. Even though the standard time it displayed bore no relation to a specific location, the clock's materiality (its emotive tangibility?) affixed time to a local context. The station clock was neither abstract nor specific: it could be both. Nor was it a passive device. As station clocks gained in significance, they contributed to initiating new patterns of learning, imparting new habits, new ways of seeing and moving that with time became part of people's everyday routine. Of course, the extent to which a station clock could sustain a sense of community depended on a number of factors, including its visibility, position, aesthetic qualities, a person's relationship to the railways, the frequency with which they traveled, and perhaps even someone's history with and attachment to a place, what we might call their local patriotism. Depending on all these factors and their interplay, station clocks may have proved more or less effective as kaleidoscopes of modern times. At its best, the station clock may have succeeded in reconciling, on a cognitive and emotional level, empty homogenous time with established temporal landscapes. The result, in each case, was something new, but also, something that, in spite of its novelty, looked eerily familiar.
