Part 2—Sniffer Squads on the Odour Trail: Smog in Frankfurt
The fog phenomenon seen, and smelled, in London in the late 1800s had still not been eradicated by the midpoint of the next century. On the night of 22 January 1957, mysterious events occurred in Frankfurt am Main that were similar to those in Victorian London. As ‘all Frankfurt daily newspapers unanimously’ reported, adults, and especially children, were afflicted by headaches, dizzy spells, and nausea, while passers-by staggered around in the streets and telephoned from pubs, gasping for a doctor.1 What had happened? The Frankfurter Rundschau answered its own question as follows:
The previous day, the residents of the city had gone about their business, like any other day, and had returned home for a well-earned rest in the evening. In the city centre there was the usual night-time bustle, and in the suburbs and residential areas a peaceful silence prevailed. You could even say there was a deathly silence in the air. Not even the slightest breeze. But it was precisely this silence that resulted in numerous calls to the police and doctors during the night, and in citizens angrily discussing ‘Frankfurt’s bad air’ the next morning.
That night, the air was filled with ‘industrial odours’; even during rush hour, clouds of carbon dioxide—or Stinkmühlen [stink mills]—were cumulating ‘literally in the streets.’ According to the official investigation report, the cause was a weather phenomenon known as ‘turbulence among layers of air near the ground’ or ‘inversion’. This occurs when the normal decrease in temperature as the air rises is interrupted and reversed by a sudden warming. The warm air can form a ‘blanket of high fog’ or ‘barrier layer’, preventing any further circulation. This is what happened in January 1957: for days, not a ray of sunlight penetrated the thick blankets of high fog, ‘popularly known as Wurstsuppenhimmel [sausage broth sky]’.
Contemporaries were already drawing parallels with a more recent ‘London catastrophe’ that had occurred only five years earlier: the Great Smog of 1952. This was known as the ‘pea souper’, because in that winter the London fog had returned for days on end with no less severity than the fogs from the late nineteenth century. From 5 to 8 December, Londoners fell ‘victim to the dreaded London Fog’ in unprecedented numbers.2 Similar to the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858, this fog became infamous as the ‘Great London Fog’ or ‘Killer Fog’.3 According to the official investigation report, more than 4,700 people died in Greater London, surpassing the documented mortality rates of the nineteenth-century fogs and reminding contemporaries of the numbers who had died of ‘Spanish flu’ after the First World War4—especially as more generous estimates, which included fatal respiratory illnesses that emerged in the months following, put the death toll in the tens of thousands. Reporters in Frankfurt and London reminded their readers of the air pollution in the Ardennes three decades earlier, in 1930, when sixty people had died as a result of a temperature inversion. In doing so, they were adopting a historical perspective on contemporary weather conditions and at the same time participating in transnational knowledge-building—London fog researchers had already analysed the problem of inversions back in 1900.5
In Frankfurt, people also blamed the immediate environment, or more specifically, the landscape. Although reporters admitted that it was debatable whether Frankfurt was ‘one of the most beautiful cities’, they noted that it ‘undeniably’ had very beautiful countryside. Surrounded by the green uplands of the Taunus, Vogelsberg, Spessart, and Odenwald, it was ‘precisely this location in a basin’ that favoured the formation of a ‘carpet of air’: ‘The dense cold air lies on the ground, above it the warmer air layer of the inversion, and there is not even the slightest draught to dispel the “dirt” that we ourselves produce from chimneys, flues, and exhaust pipes.’ As in London and the Ardennes, it was not only the weather that was to blame, but also human-generated emissions, which formed ‘the very unpleasant flipside of the Wirtschaftswunder: “bad air”’.
The Federal Republic’s ‘economic miracle’ is usually associated with very different aromas: Sunday roast, medium dry wines from the Moselle, high-proof and fragrant waters produced west and east of the Rhine in Cognac and Cologne. Now, however, ‘a “blue cloud” hung in the sky’ over Frankfurt’s West Harbour, and ‘anyone driving out to Nied or Griesheim will undoubtedly get a whiff of odours that smell of anything but eau de Cologne’.6
In the summer of 1957, a comprehensive working report announced that ‘sniffer squads’ were being deployed who had no tools at their disposal and thus had to ‘proceed in the most primitive way’: reliant on their own noses. These government scent detectives were part of a larger package of measures aimed at ‘solving the issue of noise and odour pollution’.7 ‘Odour hygiene’ was regarded as a ‘neglected branch of air hygiene’, as explained by a professor at the Hamburg Institute for Hygiene, who complained that investigations into ‘the origin, composition, and concentration of odorous substances often fail due to a lack of suitable analytical methods’, and that ‘such methods need to be developed from scratch and tailored to the specific purpose in question.’8
Technical measurement, however, was seen as only part of the solution, for, as was also the case with measuring noise in phons, merely establishing the degree of effect ‘[cannot] be considered a panacea’; rather ‘the consistency of noise and odours has significantly more impact and therefore a much more important role’ to play.9) To substantiate this assessment, the Frankfurt working report cited the medical opinion of a Frankfurt public health officer, who counted circulatory disorders, stomach diseases, muscle pain, hearing disorders, and ‘psycho-physical affect reactions’—in short, ‘a significant additional expenditure of nervous energy’—among the direct and indirect consequences of ‘acoustic impact’. However, according to the report, this statement relating to the effects of noise ‘naturally also applies in a wider sense to other urban nuisances, especially to “odours”, and, generally speaking, affects not only those who work in the city . . . but also “city dwellers” per se, who are constantly exposed to noise, stench, and so on’, and whose sensory functions were now being remeasured under the influence of urban stress.10
Even though there were still no reliable medical findings on these negative sensory influences, there was certainty in Frankfurt ‘that the public sector and the municipal authorities in particular could not wait until the scientific community had gathered the findings it felt were an absolute and basic prerequisite for solving the overall problem.’11 Despite this resolve, in the absence of reliable data, there were no benchmarks to determine which sensory stimuli were to be considered normal, and which were excessive. For example, a comparison with the Ruhr region was ruled out, as Frankfurt was an industrial centre, but not a distinctly industrial area, and as such the city’s population could not be expected to accept what was taken for granted around the Ruhr: ‘inherently anomalous conditions, regardless of whether they can really be regarded as “normal” in industrial centres or not, [can] never be taken as common denominators.’12 Comparisons were therefore only possible with other cities—such as London. This was an articulation of a problem fundamental to ‘normalism’; according to Jürgen Link, normality is produced in modern societies through mean values, yet these are certainly not shared or perceived as normal by everyone.13
The next post in this series will explore this comparative aspect further by turning to the anti-smog measures taken by several American cities in the second half of the twentieth century. . .
Translated by Marielle Sutherland
Feature Image: Fog over Frankfurt. Photo by Mary Nawaz. Licence: CC0 Public Domain.
This blog post is part 2 of a series of 3 (see part 1 here) and is based on archival research made possible by a fellowship at the German Historical Institute London in the foggy month of November 2024. My thanks go to Christina von Hodenberg and the GHIL team. This contribution will also be published in German as an article in an issue of the journal Historische Anthropologie on climate perception edited by my fellow GHIL scholarship holder Karolin Wetjen together with Regina Thumser-Wöhs (forthcoming). I am grateful to Marielle Sutherland for the translation into English.
- Willy Rosentreter, ‘Verpestung der Luft wird zur gefährlichen Plage’, Frankfurter Rundschau am Wochenende, 4 May and 11 May 1957. Transcript/typescript, Institute for the History of Frankfurt (ISG) MA_1095. [↩]
- All quotes above are from Rosentreter, ‘Verpestung der Luft’. [↩]
- New York letter to the Greater London City Council, dated 14 July 1966. TLA LCC/PC/GEN/01/048, Smoke and Fog General File 1952–66. [↩]
- ‘The London Fog, December, 1952: A First Survey’. Reprint from Smokeless Air (Spring, 1953), 4–7. [↩]
- See Rosentreter, ‘Verpestung der Luft’; TLA LCC/PC/GEN/01/048: Note for the Chief Officer (undated, c.1952). [↩]
- The above quotes are from Note for the Chief Officer. [↩]
- ISG MA_1095, Der Magistrat, Gewerbe- und Preisamt der Stadt Frankfurt am Main: Arbeitsbericht über die Bekämpfung von Luftverunreinigung und Lärm aus Industrie-, Gewerbe-, Handwerks- und landwirtschaftlichen Betrieben in Frankfurt a.M., Aug. 1957, 10–11. [↩]
- Cited in Arbeitsbericht, 3. [↩]
- Ibid. (Emphasis in original [↩]
- Both quotes from Arbeitsbericht, 4. [↩]
- Arbeitsbericht, 5. [↩]
- Arbeitsbericht [↩]
- See Jürgen Link, Versuch über den Normalismus: Wie Normalität produziert wird (Göttingen, 2013). For an English explanation of this term, see Anne Mihan and Thomas O. Haakenson, ‘Standard Deviation: An Interview with Jürgen Link. Modernity and the Reign of Normalism’, Cabinet: A Quarterly Magazine of Art and Culture, 15 (Fall, 2004), 83–7. [↩]
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Bodo Mrozek (May 16, 2025). From London Fog to Frankfurt Smog: Sensing Anthropogenic Weather Conditions from a Transurban Perspective in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved June 15, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13xy0