In memoriam: Wolfgang Schivelbusch, polymathic cultural historian

Sam Roberts

Ever wonder why railroad tracks in America meander but English tracks ordinarily run straight? What was the traditional breakfast drink in Europe before coffee came along? How did the introduction of gas mains transform family life? Why did the Confederate battle flag become so enduring a symbol? Who was missing when the United States military ceremonially declared victory in Iraq? For four decades, Wolfgang Schivelbusch, a polymathic cultural historian, feasted on those and other brainteasers as he explored mass transportation, spices and stimulants, commercial lighting and the legacy of defeat on society in about a dozen groundbreaking books.

He wrote them in his native German (most were translated into English) from his Manhattan apartment, where he spent winters, and his home in Berlin, where he died in a hospital on March 26 at 81. His death was not widely reported outside Europe.

“He was an extraordinary public intellectual, an independent largely unaffiliated wildly poly-curious and extravagantly gifted seeker after the patterns and idiosyncrasies of history,” the author Lawrence Wechsler wrote after Schivelbusch’s death to members of the New York Institute for the Humanities, where Wechsler was a director and Schivelbusch a fellow. Die Zeit, the German national weekly, called Schivelbusch a “master of cultural-historical research.”

His conversational memoir of commuting between two continents, “The Other Side: Living and Researching Between New York and Berlin,” was published in 2021. Schivelbusch’s pithy and provocative books won praise from academics for microscopically connecting history with quotidian life. But, unusual for a public (if unpretentious) intellectual, he also attracted a wider audience that, captivated by his quirky curiosity, joined him on his exploits — even if, unlike Indiana Jones’s, those exploits were largely confined to libraries.

The New York Times food writer Molly O’Neill called “Tastes of Paradise” “a small dose of mind-sharpening brain candy.”

His book about railways won the German Non-Fiction Prize in 1978. In 2003, the Academy of Arts in Berlin awarded him the Heinrich Mann Prize. In 2013, he won the Lessing Prize of the City of Hamburg for achievements in German culture.

Schivelbusch operated for most of his career as a private scholar, free from academic constraints but dependent on grants and book advances. He conducted research for his memoir at the Max Planck Institute for History in Gottingen from 1995 to 2000. He was a senior fellow at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research after he returned permanently to Germany in 2014.

For several decades Schivelbusch plumbed mysteries that most people would never have even noticed. Among his findings: Railroad tracks run straighter in England because labor in America was more expensive, so it was cheaper just to lay tracks around natural obstacles like hills and rivers. In Europe, beer soup (heat eggs, butter and salt, then add them to beer and pour over pieces of a roll or white bread) was the breakfast drink of choice before it was replaced by coffee in the 18th century.

Gas mains changed family life because they eliminated the hearth as the focus of family life by giving individuals personal light. They also helped replace private enterprise through the granting of municipal or regional gas monopolies.

Roberts is an obit writer with NYT©2023

The New York Times