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One Clock Fits All? Time and Imagined Communities in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2020

Oliver Zimmer*
Affiliation:
University College, University of Oxford

Abstract

Many Germans defended local time well beyond 1893, when Germany adopted a time standard bearing on the life of the entire nation. Yet the defining feature of Germany's temporal landscape was its multilayered nature, with North and South adopting different temporal regimes and undergoing different experiences. Focusing on the spread of (railway-induced) standard time and the responses it provoked, this article offers an investigation of German time culture in the nineteenth century. Out of curiosity and because their lives depended on it, Germans took an interest in obtaining the right time from the frequently contradictory horological landscapes they inhabited. Yet their shared curiosity did not breed conformity. The inspectors of the station clocks concerned with accuracy and synchronicity; the townsfolk in southern Germany who fast-forwarded their favorite public clock in order to get to the station in time; the Prussian scientists and villagers who opposed railway time becoming public time—they all, in their own way, contributed to putting time back in its place.

Viele Deutsche verteidigten die Lokalzeit noch lange nach 1893, als Deutschland ein für die gesamte Nation einheitliches Zeitsystem einführte. Das zentrale Merkmal der deutschen Zeitlandschaft blieb gleichwohl seine Vielschichtigkeit. Ausgehend von der Ausbreitung der Standardzeit und der dadurch hervorgerufenen Reaktionen bietet dieser Beitrag eine Untersuchung der deutschen Zeitkultur im 19. Jahrhundert. Aus Neugier und weil ihr Leben immer stärker davon abhing, interessierten sich die Deutschen zunehmend dafür, die „richtige“ Zeit aus den oft widersprüchlichen horologischen Umgebungen herauszufiltern, die sie bevölkerten. Doch diese gemeinsame Neugier brachte keine Konformität: Inspektor*innen der Bahnhofsuhren mit ihrer Sorge um Genauigkeit und Synchronizität; süddeutsche Stadtbewohner*innen, die ihre beliebteste öffentliche Uhr vorstellten, um rechtzeitig am Bahnhof zu sein; die preußischen Wissenschaftstreibenden und Dörfler*innen und ihr Widerstand gegen die Einführung der Bahnzeit als Standardzeit – sie alle trugen auf ihre eigene Art dazu bei, die Zeit wieder an ihren angestammten Platz zu rücken.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association, 2020

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Footnotes

I wish to thank the organizers and participants of the Central European History Seminar at Vanderbilt University (especially Celia Applegate, David Blackbourn, and Helmut Walser Smith) for giving me an opportunity to present ideas informing this article in Nashville in September 2018. The insightful suggestions by the two anonymous reviewers for CEH proved invaluable, as did the feedback I received from Jim Brophy, Jean-Michel Johnston, and Tobias Straumann. The research for this article benefitted from the award of a major research fellowship by The Leverhulme Trust (Project Grant: MRF-2014-036).

References

1 Schmoller, Gustav, “Über den Einfluss der heutigen Verkehrsmittel,” Preussische Jahrbücher 31 (1873): 424Google Scholar.

2 The literature on railway time is large. For two illuminating treatments of the nineteenth-century debate, see Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise. Zur Industrialisierung von Raum und Zeit im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 2000 [1977])Google Scholar; Solnit, Rebecca, “The Annihilation of Time and Space,” New England Review 24, no. 1 (2003): 5–9Google Scholar. For contemporary accounts, see Waldo, Leonard, “Railroad and Public Time,” The North American Review 137, no. 325 (Dec. 1883): 605–9Google Scholar; Bähr, Otto, “Ortszeit, Weltzeit, Eisenbahnzeit, Zonenzeit,” Grenzboten 50 (1891): 433–47Google Scholar.

3 “Gesetz nr. 2075, betreffend die Einführung der einheitlichen Zeitbestimmung,” Reichsamt des Innern, March 16, 1893, Reichsgesetzblatt, no. 7, 93.

4 In 1889, an imperial Denkschrift on standard time recommended that Germany emulate Prussia and Alsace-Lorraine, where Berlin time determined the operational side of the railways, with villages and towns operating on local time: one clock fits all, but only for the railways, and with Prussia imposing Berlin time on the rest of Germany. A copy of the memorial can be found in Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart (HStAS), E 40/16, Bü 168.

5 Altonaer Nachrichten, April 15, 1893. After 1872, Prussia's (and Saxony's) railways had run on Berlin time. On time coordination and standard time, see Galison, Peter, “Einstein's Clocks: The Place of Time,” Critical Enquiry 26, no. 2 (2000): 355–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ogle, Vanessa, The Global Transformation of Time 1870–1950 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bartky, Ian R., One Time Fits All: The Campaign for Global Uniformity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar. The symbolic and economic significance of Germany's railways preceded their capacity to generate a large traveling public. See Gall, Lothar and Pohl, Manfred, eds., Die Eisenbahn in Deutschland. Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998), 919Google Scholar; Schivelbusch, Geschichte der Eisenbahnreise, chap. 3. There was no comparable time lag in England. On Britain, see Robbins, Michael, The Railway Age (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1962)Google Scholar; Freeman, Michael, Railways and the Victorian Imagination (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999)Google Scholar. For a global history of transport by a contemporary, see Geistbeck, Michael, Der Weltverkehr. Seeschiffahrt und Eisenbahnen, Post und Telegraphie in ihrer Entwicklung dargestellt, 2nd ed. (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herdersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1895), 327–49Google Scholar.

6 HStAS, M1/4, Bü 330, Ministerium d. Innern an die K. Stadtdirektion Stuttgart und die K. Oberämter, March 1, 1892. See also HStAS, E 40/51, Bü 89, Verfügung des Ministeriums des Kirchen- und Schulwesens betr. Die Ordnung der Unterrichtszeit in den Volksschulen und den kleineren Gelehrten- und Realschulen infolge der Einführung der sogenannten mitteleuropäischen Einheitszeit, February 23, 1892. The reform and its intricacies filled the pages of major and provincial newspapers. See, for example, Altonaer Nachrichten, March 28, 1892.

7 HstAS, M 40/51, Bü 89, Königl. Preuss, Gesandtschaft in Württemberg an Staatsrat Freiherr von König, September 23,1892.

8 Two factors in particular appear to have facilitated Britain's early adoption of a time standard underpinning both the railways and public life. One concerns its lead in communication density (industrialization and urbanization), the other its relatively modest east-west extension. The introduction of GMT-based zone times is discussed in Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time 1870–1950, chap. 3, and Bartky, One Time Fits All, chap. 8. On density of communication in comparative perspective, see Seigel, Jerrold, Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics, and Culture in England, France, and Germany since 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 31CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 That Germans who believed in progress liked to look to Britain above all other countries, and that their obsession was particularly manifest in relation to time and speed, cannot be seriously doubted. On this topic, see Zimmer, Oliver, “Die Ungeduld mit der Zeit. Britische und deutsche Bahnreisende im Eisenbahnzeitalter,” Historische Zeitschrift 308, no. 1 (2019): 46–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Brophy, James M., “The End of the Economic Old Order: The Great Transition, 1750–1860,” in Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, ed. Smith, Helmut W. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 169–94Google Scholar; Herrigel, G., Industrial Constructions: The Sources of German Industrial Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar. On the railroads’ economic impact, see Fremdling, Rainer, “Railroads and German Economic Growth: A Leading Sector Analysis with a Comparison to the Unites State and Great Britain,” Journal of Economic History 37, no. 3 (1977): 583604CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On railways and national communication, see Green, Abigail, Fatherlands: State-Building and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar, chap. 6; Weichlein, Siegfried, Nation und Region. Integrationsprozesse im Bismarckreich (Droste: Düsseldorf, 2004), 70104Google Scholar.

11 For important recent work, see inter alia: Allen, Thomas M., A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, Mark M., Mastered by the Clock: Time, Slavery, and Freedom in the American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997)Google Scholar; McCrossen, Alexis, Marking Modern Times: A History of Clocks, Watches, and Other Timekeepers in American Life (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Nanni, Giordano, The Colonisation of Time: Ritual, Routine and Resistance in the British Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wischnitzer, Avner, Reading Clocks, Alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time 1870–1950; Gay, Hannah, “Clock Synchrony, Time Distribution and Electrical Timekeeping in Britain, 1880–1925,” Past & Present 181 (2003): 107–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Morus, Iwan Rhys, “‘The Nervous System of Britain’: Space, Time and the Electric Telegraph in the Victorian Age,” British Journal for the History of Science 33 (2000): 455–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Helmut von Moltke, “Gesammelte Schriften und Denkwürdigkeiten,” in Reden des Generalfeldmarschalls Helmuth von Moltke, Bd. 7 (Berlin: Mittler, 1892), 38–39.

For a useful recent summary of available knowledge, one that puts Germany in its international context, see Richard Evans, The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815–1914 (London: Penguin, 2016), 389–96. See also Bartky, One Time Fits All, 122–26; Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt. Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2011), 118–26. The best treatment of time reform in Germany is Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time 1870–1950, chap. 1. For an illuminating contemporary account, see Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg, Die Einheitszeit nach Stundenzonen (Dresden, 1892). The two classic syntheses, by Thomas Nipperdey and Hans-Ulrich Wehler, have nothing to say on the subject, nor do more recent syntheses of German history. The most original article, with implications that go far beyond Germany, is Michael J. Sauter, “Clockwatchers and Stargazers: Time Discipline in Early Modern Berlin,” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (2007): 685–709.

13 Although their work on time was not centred on the modern nation-state, both E. P. Thompson and David Landes examined how clock time and time awareness manifested themselves in particular national contexts. While Landes focused on technological innovation, Thompson attributed the rise of time discipline to capitalist modes of production. See E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (1967): 56–97; David Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). Critics of these classic interpretations include Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales 1300–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), chap. 2; Nanni, The Colonisation of Time; On Barak, On Time; Wischnitzer, Reading Clocks, Alla Turca; Ogle, The Global Transformation of Time 1870–1950. See also Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).

14 Wolfgang Schivelbusch, “Railroad Space and Railroad Time,” New German Critique 14 (Spring 1978): 31–40.

15 The tendency to view time in terms of multiple modernities is on full display in Glennie and Thrift, Shaping the Day, 28. For a recent critique of the multiple modernity thesis, see James Vernon, Distant Strangers: How Britain Became Modern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015).

16 For accounts that explore time culture as a dialectic between time as formal referent and as social experience, see Mark M. Smith, “Old South in Comparative Perspective,” American Historical Review 101 (December 1996): 1435; Alain Corbin, “The Daily Arithmetic of the Nineteenth Century,” in Time, Desire and Horror: Towards a History of the Senses (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 1–12.

17 The phrase that time was “nature's way to keep everything from happening all at once” is attributed to the US theoretical physicist Archibald Wheeler. Cited here in James Gleick, Time Travel: A History (London: 4th Estate, 2016), 9.

18 As Michael O'Malley put it,“Standard time, like standard money, was a universal solvent dissolving the glue of local tradition and custom.” See Michael O'Malley, Keeping Watch: History of American Time (New York: Viking, 1990), 79–80.

19 Focusing on processes of standardization and communication in nineteenth-century Britain, James Vermont speaks of a world of “distant strangers” that prompted “a reanimation of the local and the personal.” See Vernon, Distant Strangers, xi, 15. More explicitly focused on the construction of nationhood outside of Prussia, works exploring nineteenth-century modernity through a regional or local prism have long occupied a prominent place in German history. The two classic exemplars are Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), and Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871–1918 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). For a discussion of this historiographical paradigm, see David Blackbourn and James Retallack, Localism, Landscape, and the Ambiguities of Place: German-Speaking Central Europe, 1860–1930 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2007), esp. introduction. The theme of time and social rhythms, which is peripheral to the older historiography on region and nation, is central to Oliver Zimmer, Remaking the Rhythms of Life: German Communities in the Age of the Nation-State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

20 The Times, March 22, 1886, 3.

21 The Times, March 22, 1886, 3. See also the commentary by the Austrian geodesist Robert Schram, “The Actual State of the Standard Time Question,” The Observatory 161 (April 1890): 139–46.

22 The Times, March 22, 1886, 3.

23 The Times, March 22, 1886, 3.

24 Preussische Mitteilungen 93 (December 1, 1891). “English people,” a Hamburg daily wrote in 1898, “are said to be so precise in their usage of time that they turn up at the station at the very last minute.” Neue Hamburger Zeitung, July 7, 1898. On German and British levels of impatience, see Oliver Zimmer, “Die Ungeduld mit der Zeit.” On how the spread of the telegraph heightened a spirit of competition, see Jean-Michel Johnston, “The Telegraphic Revolution: Speed, Space and Time in the Nineteenth Century,” German History 38, no. 1 (2020): 1–30.

25 Altonaer Nachrichten, August 1, 1883.

26 Allgemeine Zeitung, October 29, 1889.

27 Hamburger Nachrichten, November 16, 1889.

28 Allgemeine Zeitung, March 26, 1890.

29 Allgemeine Zeitung, April 16, 1891.

30 Altonaer Nachrichten, February 13, 1892.

31 Allgemeine Zeitung, October 5, 1891. The difference between Aachen and Königsberg was circa fifty-five minutes. For a table indicating the difference between MEZ and various German towns, see Bayerisches Jahrbuch. Kalender für Bureau, Comptoir und Haus, Vierter Jahrgang (1893): 54.

32 Authors of general historical accounts often forget that, in many societies including Germany, Eisenbahnfieber was for some time mainly a spectator sport. According to Siegfried Weichlein, 72,778 Saxons and 53,917 Bavarians traveled by rail every day in 1887; the bulk of passenger traffic was short distance, with only a small minority of travelers crossing the boundary of their state; well into the 1880s, the passenger network remained relatively inaccessible for the majority of the German population. Weichlein speaks of Eisenbahnwüsten and Eisenbahnparadiesen; see Weichlein, Nation und Region, 70–72, 94–95. The railways were not alone in this: On the “two-speed society” created by the telegraph, see Johnston, “The Telegraph Revolution.” As far as the railways’ contribution to mass passenger traffic is concerned, the contrast with England remained marked right up to the turn of the century: in 1889, every inhabitant of Germany undertook on average seven journeys by railway per year, which was about a third of the English average. The ratio of 1:3 would remain roughly unchanged for the remainder of the century: in the mid-1890s, every English person undertook on average 26.5 train journeys per year. It was 9.1. train journeys per year in France, and in Saxony, the state with the densest railway network in Germany at the time, it was 8.1 journeys in 1887. This draws above all on Timothy Leunig, “Time Is Money: A Re-Assessment of the Passenger Social Savings from Victorian British Railways,” Journal of Economic History 66, no. 3 (2006): 665. On the changes around 1900, see Zimmer, “Ungeduld mit der Zeit,” 69–80.

33 The point is made with great force in Pitirim A. Sorokin, Sociocultural Causality, Space, and Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1943), 197.

34 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), 26.

35 The argument is spelled out more fully in Oliver Zimmer, Remaking the Rhythms of Life, esp. introduction. The conceptual background to this position is developed in Edward S. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time,” in Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1996), 13–52. For a classic treatment, see Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977).

36 Helmuth von Moltke, “Gesammelte Schriften und Denkwürdigkeiten,” 38–39.

37 Altonaer Nachrichten, March 4, 1893.

38 Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz (GStAPK), I. HA Rep 93E, nr. 1230, Präsident d. Staatsministeriums, von Caprivi, an den K. Staatsminister der öffentlichen Arbeiten, von Maybach, April 20, 1891.

39 GStAPK. I. HA, Rep 93E, nr. 1230. Dr von Botticher an Thielen, December 7, 1891.

40 Bayrisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (BHStA), MVI, nr. 1301, “Die Zonenzeit. Eine Stimme aus dem Publikum,” 1900.

41 GStAPK, I. HA Rep 93E, nr. 1230, von Caprivi an Thielen, November 23, 1891.

42 GStAPK, I. HA, Rep 93E, nr. 1230, Sitzung des K. Staatsministeriums, February 2, 1892.

43 GStAPK, I. HA, Rep 93E, nr. 1230, Ministerium des Geistlichen, Unterrichts- und Medizinalangelegenheiten an K. Staatsminister und Minister für öffentliche Arbeiten, December 21, 1891.

44 GStAPK, I. HA, Rep 93E, nr. 1230, Ministerium für Handel und Gewerbe an K. Staatsministerium, November 27, 1891.

45 Börsen-Halle, March 25, 1884.

46 Wilhelm Foerster, “Über die von der Conferenz zu Washington proponierte Veränderung des astronomischen Tagesanfanges,” Astronomische Nachrichten 2643 (January 1884): 35. And, by the same author, Wilhelm Foerster, Weltzeit und Ortszeit im Bunde gegen die Vielheit der sogenannten Einheits- oder Zonen-Zeiten (Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmlers Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1891). See also E. J. Boettcher, “‘Nationalzeit, örtliche oder Weltzeit?’ Vortrag, Gemeinnützige Gesellschaft in Leipzig, March 29, 1889,” Die Grenzboten 48 (1889): 324–26.

47 Hamburger Nachrichten, November 5, 1890.

48 Hamburger Nachrichten, November 5, 1890.

49 Dohrn-van Rossum, Gerhard, Die Geschichte der Stunde. Uhren und Moderne Zeitordnunge (Munich: Hanser, 1997), 251Google Scholar. See also Cipolla, Carlo M., Clocks and Culture, 1300–1700 (New York: Norton, 1978)Google Scholar.

50 Dohrn-van Rossum, Die Geschichte der Stunde, 317. Jerrold Seigel considers the “advent of the railroads” the “most powerful force in establishing modern ways of reckoning time.” Seigel, Modernity and Bourgeois Life, 33. For a contemporary perspective, see Schmoller, “Über den Einfluss der heutigen Verkehrsmittel,” 413–30.

51 Dohrn-van Rossum's dichotomy between the time of the town and the time of transportation seems born of an analytical conviction aptly captured by Michel de Certeau: “that a certain kind of production … can set out to produce history by ‘informing’ the whole of a country.” Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 167. On page 111 de Certeau called the railways the “perfect actualization of the rational utopia.” The tendency is also evident in Schivelbusch, “Railroad Space and Railroad Time,” 34–40.

52 Auslaender, Leora, “Beyond Words,” American Historical Review 110, no. 4 (2005): 1017Google Scholar. For an account that focuses on the materiality of clocks and their uses, see Smith, Mastered by the Clock. On the importance of ordinary objects in sustaining German nationhood, see Smith, Helmut Walser, “Monuments, Kitsch, and the Sense of German Nation in Imperial Germany,” Central European History 49, no. 3–4 (2016): 322–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Allen, A Republic in Time, 66.

54 Mark M. Smith has put it best in his social history of clock time in the antebellum South: “For plainly, there are points at which various forms of time accommodate one another.” Smith, Mastered by the Clock, 40.

55 Augsburger Tagblatt, February 3, 1836. On the replacement of the solar moon by mean times in Bavaria, see Staatsarchiv Bamberg (StaBa), F VIII, no. 103, Staats-Ministerium des Innern an die K. Regierung des Obermain-Kreises, Kammer des Innern. Die Regulierung der öffentlichen Uhren nach der mittleren Zeit betreffend, April 2, 1837.

56 Allgemeiner Anzeiger und Nationalzeitung der Deutschen, October 22, 1842. On the significance of church bells in the French countryside, see Corbin, Alain, Village Bells: Sound and Meaning in the Nineteenth-Century French Countryside (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 21Google Scholar.

57 Allgemeiner Anzeiger und Nationalzeitung der Deutschen, October 22, 1842.

58 Münchner Tagblatt, July 21, 1842.

59 Augsburger Tagblatt, February 6, 1849.

60 StaBa, F VIb, no. 4719, Generaldirektion d. K. Bayrischen Verkehrsanstalten an die K. Bayr. Regierung von Oberfranken, Kammer des Innern. Betreff: Die Regulierung der Uhren der K. Verkehrsanstalten nach der Münchner mittleren Zeit betreffend, February 2, 1854.

61 On Augsburg's built environment, see Grünsteudel, Günther, Hägele, Günter, and Frankenberger, Rudolf, eds., Augsburger Stadtlexxikon, 2nd ed. (Augsburg: Perlach Verlag, 1998)Google Scholar.

62 Augsburger Tagblatt, June 15, 1856.

63 Augsburger Anzeigenblatt, January 31, 1858; Augsburger Tagblatt, June 9, 1860.

64 Augsburger Tagblatt, June 6, 1860.

65 Augsburger Tagblatt, June 9, 1860.

66 Augsburger Anzeigeblatt, January 31, 1862.

67 Augsburger Tagblatt, January 6, 1867.

68 Ansbacher Morgenblatt für Stadt und Land, March 13, 1851, 202.

69 Bayerische Landbötin, October 14, 1848. The practice of two-minute hands, one displaying local and one railway time, was widespread in England in the first years after GMT was adopted. See Howse, Derek, Greenwich Time and the Discovery of Longitude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 105–12Google Scholar.

70 Deutsche Blätter, January 1, 1865. Particularly when it comes to large towns and cities, complaints about a lack of electrical clocks was a transnational phenomenon. For a London example, see Punch, November 22, 1851, 228, where an article entitled “Electrical Clocks” began thus: “In Berlin they have Electrical Clocks—and in Stockholm, all the public clocks are put in motion by electricity. Why could not the same plan be adopted in London?” See also Gay, “Clock Synchrony, Time Distribution and Electrical Timekeeping in Britain, 1880–1925,” 113–17; Galison, “Einstein's Clocks,” 360–61. On how members of Berlin's eighteenth-century bourgeoisie obsessed over obtaining the correct time, see Sauter, “Clockwatchers and Stargazers,” 687–92.

71 Amberger Tagblatt, August 6, 1864. In the society that pioneered railway commuter traffic, too, the railways heightened the debate about the accuracy of clocks. See Oliver Zimmer, “Time Tribes: Time and the Other in Britain's Railway Age,” ms.

72 Jenzen, Igor A., ed., Uhrzeiten. Die Geschichte der Uhr und ihres Gebrauchs (Frankfurt/Main: Jonas Verlag, 1989), 100Google Scholar. An acute insight into the maintenance requirements of a good pocket watch can be gained from a talk delivered at the Technische Gesellschaft Zurich in 1874. J. Schilling-Baumann began with the observation that “the more exquisite pocket watches,” provided they were “well maintained and regularly used,” would display the time “almost accurately.” What constituted good maintenance according to Schilling-Baumann was that the watch would be wound-up “slowly and without strong external movements every morning”; that it would be placed in the exact same position every night before going to bed; that during the cold season the watch would not be placed on material such as marble because excessive differences in temperature would decrease its accuracy; that, to prevent dust from entering the encasement, trouser pockets would “be turned inside out and cleaned from time to time” (the more microscopic the dust, the greater risk it posed to the watch's internal organs); and that, finally, no other items should be put in the pocket in which the watch was carried, least of all keys and coins because they could break the watch's cover glass. To this Schilling-Baumann added: every watch, however good its quality, would need to be cleaned and repaired after two to three years. Unless the watch owner knew a skilled watchmaker, it was best to put the watch out of circulation until a trusted professional could be found. When it came to the required setting of one's pocket watch, “tower and electrical clocks” could be “a source of deception.” It was therefore important to find a trustworthy public clock and ensure that its movements remained regular over longer periods of time. J. Schilling-Baumann, Uhren im Allgemeinen, deren Geschichte und Behandlung, Separat-Abdruck aus dem Jahresbericht der Technischen Gesellschaft in Zürich, 1875, 11–15, 16–17.

73 See Daniel Drascek, “‘Früh um 6 Uhr habe ich schon nahezu 24 Stunden Verspätung …’—Zur Verbreitung der Armbanduhr und die zeitliche Rhythmisierung des Alltags um 1900,” Rheinisches Jahrbuch für Volkskunde 33 (1999/2000): 51–66.

74 The best works on this theme have been done on the United States, though even there the station clock has not been subject to a separate study. See in particular O'Malley, Keeping Watch, chap. 1; McCrossen, Marking Modern Times, chap. 5.

75 See Weichlein, Nation und Region, 70–74.

76 Here as elsewhere, the distinction between towns and cities, on one hand, and more rural areas, on the other, makes more sense than differentiations according to region, or between Prussia and the rest.

77 Neue Hamburger Zeitung, June 6, 1903.

78 StABa, F VIb, no. 4619, Bayreuth an sämtliche Distriktpolizeibehörden, February 20, 1854.

79 Fürther Tagblatt, November 18, 1873; Kemptner Zeitung, October 3, 1873.

80 In 1873, the town authorities of Kempten in Swabia published the following announcement in the Kemptner Zeitung: “Announcement. We herewith wish to bring to public attention that the undersigned authority has ensured that as of today the local clocks—which hitherto have been much in advance of the station clock—will be brought in precise agreement with the station clock.” Kemptner Zeitung, October 4, 1873.

81 Bamberger Zeitung, June 12, 1865.

82 Bamberger Zeitung, June 12, 1865.

83 Reglement für die Kgl. Schauspiele zu Berlin (Berlin: Schnellpressendruck von E. Litfass, 1852), 44.

84 Juristische Wochenschrift für die preußischen Staaten, vierzehnter Jahrgang 1848, 355–56.

85 Allgemeine Gerichtszeitung. Zeitschrift für Gesetz und öffentliches Recht, January 2, 1850, 230–33.

86 On the continued importance of bells for communicating time in the nineteenth century, see Corbin, Village Bells, introduction.

87 Zeitschrift für die freiwillige Gerichtsbarkeit und Gemeindeverwaltung, Jahrgang 1890, 136–39.

88 Mecklenburg-Schwerinsches Landesstrafrecht: die in den Grossherzogthümern Mecklenburg, einschliesslich des Fürstenthums Ratzenburg, in Geltung befindlichen landesrechtlichen Verordnungen strafrechtlichen Inhalts. Schwerin i.M., 1887.

89 Gesetzsammlung der freien Hansestadt Hamburg, vols. 1 (1866), 175; 11 (1875), 133; 23 (1887), 164; 32 (1895), 72.

90 Zeitschrift f. Staats- und Gemeindeverwaltung im Grossherzogtum Hessen, vol. VIII, 1884, 111.

91 Sammlung d. Ortsgesetze, Regulative und wichtigeren Polizeiverordnungen für die Grossherzoglich Sächsische Haupt- und Residenzstadt Weimar, 3. Folge, 1910, 168, 181.

92 Berliner Börsenzeitung, January 10, 1889.

93 Berliner Börsenzeitung, January 10, 1889.

94 GStAPK, I. HA Rep 93E, nr. 1230, Eisenbahndirektion Elberfeld to Minister der öffentlichen Arbeiten, December 23, 1891.

95 GStAPK, I. HA Rep 93E, nr. 1230, Eisenbahndirektion Breslau to Minister der öffentlichen Arbeiten, February 2, 1892.

96 GStAPK, I. HA Rep 93E, nr. 1230, K. Eisenbahndirektion Berlin an Minister der öffentlichen Arbeiten, January 14, 1892.

97 Neue Hamburger Zeitung, March 18, 1899.

98 Neue Hamburger Zeitung, June 6, 1903.

99 Die Landgemeinde, Volkstümliche Fachzeitschrift für die ländlichen Selbstverwaltungs-Behörden und -Beamten der preussischen Monarchie. Amtliches Organ d. Verbandes der altpreussischen Landgemeinden, 1898, 166.

100 Neue Hamburger Nachrichten, October 28, 1908.

101 Berliner Börsenzeitung, December 30, 1910.