In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

AUTOMOBILES 29
Alluding to the present crisis of the French franc [see Americans in Paris],
the 8 Uhr-Abendblatt of May 19 presents a cartoon with racketeers
traveling westward in a large chauffeur-driven automobile. In Thomas
Mann's novella "Unordnung und friihes Leid," the only car owner is,
predictably, a young stockbroker.
But such tensions between pride and resentment, between physical
pleasure and the fear of death [see Action = Impotence (Tragedy)],
occupy only part of the complex web of emotions that automobiles
trigger. Before Bigua, a rich Argentinian landowner in exile, can lure the
seven-year-old Antoine into his "magnificent limousine, so new that it
still seems to be in the display window of a store on the Champs-Elysees"
(Supervielle, 13), the child has lost all sense of direction amid the "cars
and tires and horses passing by" on the busy streets of Paris (12).
Contrasting with horse-drawn vehicles, cars have become the basic elements
of a new everyday world and are now indispensable in numerous
contexts. The Berliner Morgenpost impresses its readers by publishing,
in the July 25 issue, a large map that explains in detail the way in which
its papers are distributed daily by "air service" and "automobile express
service." But if this map documents a proud claim to modern logistics,
it is also true that the Morgenpost could not be competitive on a nationwide
basis without using airplanes and cars to reach its subscribers. In
the United States, which accounts for 19 million of the world's 25 million
automobiles (Germany, in contrast, has only 93,000), their integration
into everyday life is far more advanced (Chronik, 100). As a consequence,
the aristocratic aura of the automobile is vanishing, and the halo
of an almost mythical fear surrounding the car is gradually transformed
into a host of practical problems. With such pragmatic connotations, the
automobile belongs to the normal technical environment of the young
generation. Peugeot tries to accelerate this development by awarding
twenty-one cars as prizes to the most brilliant French high school and
university students (Annees-memoire, 31). Featuring numerous ads for
gas-and-service stations in the neighboring city of Palo Alto, the student
yearbook of Stanford University shows that the automobile has become
a normal part of daily life, at least among students from well-to-do
families (1926 Quad, 397, 405). Likewise, the Handbook of Information
for Mount Holyoke College, which contains a long list of rules
governing the lives of its female students, devotes much of the list to the
particular problems of "motoring." These rules are a function of the