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SoSe 21: Fire, Security and Modernities

Cornel Zwierlein

Kommentar

The world is very much threatened by large conflagrations even today — more, perhaps, forests in free nature than larger cities, although fires often also endanger large megacities nearby, like Buenos Aires, or those on the American West Coast. This is a more and more frequent phenomenon nowadays, commonly explained as one of the effects of climate change. Journalists are already using the term “fire season” for what seems to have become a phenomenon that occurs now every year at the West Coast. The helplessness of the modern firefighters showed the astonished global public that we are, still, not living in a fire-safe world. However, nearly in all larger cities all around the world - if we except the slum quarters -, and most so in the so-called ´Western World´ from Berlin to New York, we expect to live in cities which, in times of general peace, are not subject to extreme conflagrations that would burn within two days or a week of fire the whole center of a city leaving a ground zero of thousands of burnt houses around the Alexanderplatz: Such events seem to belong to the ´past´, to ´premodernity´, and by that, the long-term history of fire catastrophes is not just an interesting object as such, but poses methodological problems of how to conceive of modernit(ies) in a global context and in terms of global historical developments. The history of the concepts of risk and security/safety, of security regimes (insuring), the mapping of risk and the social history implied (fire prevention institutions, fire fighter sociability, history of charity networks) is entangled with many general questions as the history of the transfer of technical innovations, of the globalization of trade and financial business, of the networks established between global trading ports. The seminar will cover the period form largely 1700 to 1914. Schließen