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From London Fog to Frankfurt Smog: Sensing Anthropogenic Weather Conditions from a Transurban Perspective in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

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.

Continue reading From London Fog to Frankfurt Smog: Sensing Anthropogenic Weather Conditions from a Transurban Perspective in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
  1. 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. []

Germany–India Entanglements in the Scientific Racialization of Caste

This blog post marks the launch of the latest monograph in our series, Publications of the German Historical Institute London:

Racializing Caste: Anthropology between Germany and India and the Legacy of Irawati Karve (1905–1970)

by Thiago P. Barbosa, winner of the 2023 Prize of the German Historical Institute London and the Frobenius Research Promotion Award 2023

The idea of ‘race’ has shaped our understanding of human diversity. As an idea that became a key concept in different sciences dealing with the variation of human form and life, race has been part of the discourse since the nineteenth century. Following the movements of scientists, books, and technologies, the idea of race travelled around the globe. As Germany intensified its racial frameworks in science and politics, several students from different nations, including India, trained within the German school of racial anthropology, a tradition of anthropology that reached its political apex at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics (KWI-A) in Berlin. One of these international students was Irawati Karve (1905–70), a prominent Indian anthropologist who trained in the late 1920s and early 1930s at the infamous KWI-A.

Continue reading Germany–India Entanglements in the Scientific Racialization of Caste