Peter Thompson's "The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany"

Peter Thompson is an Assistant Professor of the History of Science at Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany: Visions of Chemical Modernity, and reported the following:

Nominally, page 99 of the electronic edition of The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany introduces the reader to the olfactory experience of chemical warfare for the average World War I soldier. The page begins with the title “A Deadly Bouquet: The Smells of Gas Warfare,” but I begin by discussing the ways in which many German soldiers meticulously maintained their gas masks in order to avoid falling victim to sudden chlorine, phosgene, and tear gas attacks. The page maintains a quote from a 1916 German military magazine that reads:

the soldier is inseparable from [the gas mask], and so, too, he leads it into the quiet divide…the rifle was his original bride, but he has elevated the gas mask to his cousin. This, too, expresses a very intimate relationship, for the soldier usually attends to his cousin as his second bride.

In both a thematic and topical sense, this quote and the text that surrounds it pass the Page 99 Test. Undoubtedly, my book is a historical investigation of subjective German relationships to the technologies that either delivered or protected against chemical weapons in World War I, the interwar years, and World War II. As the book’s title would suggest, I am particularly focused on the gas mask and its ability to mediate the human body and a presumably toxic atmosphere. Thus, I find this quote quite interesting, as the writer seeks to anthropomorphize the gas mask and place it both physically and emotionally near the harried soldier in the trenches. As his second wife, the gas mask supposedly provided a sense of comfort and protection against the often unseen and ethereal dangers of newly developed poison gasses.

Thematically, the section title points to the subsequent pages, which are perhaps even more representative of my book. Using a collection of trench journals, diaries, memoirs, and correspondence, I seek to reconstruct the emotive and sensory experiences of chemical warfare. To do this, I have broken the section into studies of the five senses and the language used to describe gas attacks and the gas mask. In attempts to convey moments of heightened tension, soldiers wrote of burning sensations, eerie hissing, and strange smells of almonds, hay, and garlic. But they also wrote extensively on the gas mask, noting how it reeked of rubber, smothered normal breathing, and soaked the face in sweat.

This then leads me to the way in which the above mentioned quote on page 99 is not fully representative of my study. I do not doubt that many soldiers viewed the gas mask as a lifesaving tool and a necessary appendage in all future forms of warfare. Indeed, I historically trace the way in which this utilitarian relationship to the gas mask informed technical knowledge and national policy on poison gas protection in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. However, I try to balance this vision with the ever-present sense among my historical subjects that gas masks were imperfect technologies, that they might always fail, and that modern chemical weapons might place humanity on the permanent brink of existential crisis. In this way, The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany describes the development of a burgeoning subjective relationship to technological and environmental risk that predates and prefigures what we often refer to as the Atomic Age.

Learn more about The Gas Mask in Interwar Germany at the Cambridge University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue