The previous chapters have presented evidence of a cultural shift among right-wing intellectuals, each of whom individually exerted an influence on other literary or academic intellectuals. Now I want to shift the focus from the literati to German engineers. The engineers read and were influenced by one or more of the previously discussed figures. But what is more striking is that, beginning in the last third of the nineteenth century and continuing up through the last years of the Nazi regime, a reactionary modernist tradition with themes similar to those we have discussed in the preceding chapters was developed inside the German engineering profession. If the literati sought to win nationalism over to the cause of technological advance, the engineers sought to convince themselves and their skeptical cohorts in law, medicine, the civil service, and the traditional humanistic disciplines that they – the engineers – and the results of their labors – the artifacts of the second industrial revolution – belonged to the Kulturnation. Where Jünger et al. were cultural politicians above all, the cultural politics of the engineers also served pragmatic interests: desires for greater political recognition, for prestige and status equal to that of the older professions, especially law, and for more assistance from the state, and, in the last years of the Weimar Republic, for jobs and an end to restrictions on technical advances and rearmament.

There were Germans, such as Walter Rathenau, the director of the largest electrical corporation, the architect Peter Behrens, who organized the German Werkbund, and the architects and artists in the Bauhaus, who believed a special synthesis of national traditions and international developments was both possible and necessary.