Fabricating Modern Societies <UN> Studies in Global Social History Series Editor Marcel van der Linden (International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam, The Netherlands) Editorial Board Sven Beckert (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, usa) Dirk Hoerder (University of Arizona, Phoenix, AZ, usa) Chitra Joshi (Indraprastha College, Delhi University, India) Amarjit Kaur (University of New England, Armidale, Australia) Barbara Weinstein (New York University, New York, NY, usa) volume 37 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sgsh <UN> Fabricating Modern Societies Education, Bodies, and Minds in the Age of Steel Edited by Karin Priem and Frederik Herman leiden | boston <UN> This is an open access title distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC 4.0 License, which permits any non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited. Cover illustration: Apprentices with a telescope at the seaside in Belgium. Undated. Digital positive from glass plate negative. © Institut Emile Metz. cna Collection (HISACS000048V01). The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov lc record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2019023135 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1874-6705 isbn 978-90-04-34423-5 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-41051-0 (e-book) Copyright 2019 by the Authors. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. 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This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. <UN> To Frank Simon ∵ <UN> Contents Acknowledgments ix List of Figures xii Abbreviations xiv Contributors xv Introduction 1 Karin Priem and Frederik Herman part 1 Modeling Subjectivities 1 Machines, Masses, and Metaphors: The Visual Making of Industrial Work(ers) in Interwar Luxembourg 35 Ira Plein 2 Photography as a Space for Constructing Subjectivities: Luxembourg’s Steel Dynasties and the Modern Workforce as Seen through the Glass Plate Negatives from the Institut Emile Metz 58 Françoise Poos 3 Buddhism, Business, and Red-Cross Diplomacy: Aline Mayrisch de Saint-Hubert’s Journeys to East Asia in the Interwar Period 79 Klaus Dittrich part 2 Mapping Bodies and Senses 4 “Sensuous Geographies” in the “Age of Steel”: Educating Future Workers’ Bodies in Time and Space (1900–1940) 111 Karin Priem and Frederik Herman 5 The Eye of the Machine: Labor Sciences and the Mechanical Registration of the Human Body 138 Frederik Herman and Karin Priem <UN> viii Contents Part 3 Engineering Social Change 6 Germs, Bodies, and Selves: Tuberculosis, Social Government, and the Promotion of Health-Conscious Behavior in the Early Twentieth Century 169 Enric Novella 7 Transatlantic Iron Connections: Education, Emotion, and the Making of a Productive Workforce in Minas Gerais, Brazil (ca. 1910–1960) 193 Irma Hadzalic 8 Requiem for Gary: Cultivating Wasteland in and beyond the “Age of Steel” 219 Angelo Van Gorp Illustration Credits 241 Index 243 <UN> Acknowledgments This volume has emerged from two research projects at the University of Luxembourg entitled “Fabricating Modern Societies: Industries of Reform as Educational Responses to Societal Challenges” (famoso and famoso 2) and funded by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (fnr). Its chapters result from a symposium organized by Karin Priem at the 38th International Stand- ing Conference for the History of Education (ische), which took place in Chi- cago in August 2016. The idea for the famoso projects originated in May 2010 during a lively and inspiring conversation with Jean Back, then director of the Luxembourg Centre national de l’audiovisuel (cna), Luxembourg’s national public institution for the conservation and promotion of the country’s audio-visual heritage. Back introduced Karin Priem, the principal investigator of the famoso projects, to a huge holding of some 2,400 glass plate negatives and positives related to the Luxembourg steel company Aciéries réunies de Burbach-Eich-Dudelange (arbed), a significant global player in the twentieth-century steel and iron busi- ness and Luxembourg’s main driver of social, cultural, and economic change. The glass plates offered a vivid glimpse into the industrial cosmos created by arbed during the first half of the twentieth century, displaying the company’s production site in Dommeldange, its impressively varied products, from huge iron and steel constructions to everyday products, its social and educational initiatives, as well as its workers, engineers, founders, and leaders. This archival holding raised further questions and encouraged research on the multifaceted history of arbed, its national, European, and global outreach, and its promotion of modern thought styles, also in view of far-reaching social, cultural, and eco- nomic transformations inside and outside of Luxembourg. Besides Jean Back, the main inspiration for the famoso projects came from Germaine Goetzin- ger, the honorary director of the Centre national de littérature (cnl) in Mersch, Luxembourg, who introduced Karin Priem to some key intellectual networks at the time, such as the Décades de Pontigny, the Colpach circle, and the Union de la vérité of Paul Desjardins. These networks were important avant-garde discussion forums for Luxembourg’s industrialists and their families who were eager to create their own new role models in the era of industrialization and develop modern cultural, societal, and socio-educational reforms. The first steps in the design of the famoso projects date back to 2011 and were much stimulated by a booklet entitled Œuvres sociales. Published by arbed in 1922, the booklet gave insight into the wide range of the industrialists’ pater- nalistic and philanthrocapitalist initiatives, which were not only a response to <UN> x Acknowledgments emerging social unrest but also to the economic interdependencies between workers and industrialists. Industrialists were eager to engineer a stable society in times of rapid industrialization and implement a wide range of technologies of identity formation in the “machine age.” An important initial step in the development of the famoso projects was the discovery that some of the glass plates of the cna holding were reproduced in Œuvres sociales, thus revealing strong links to technologies of image reproduction as well as the industrial- ists’ desire to document and promote their social and educational interven- tions and to establish meaning, purpose, and moral superiority through their actions. Retrospectively, this at first sight rather simple discovery of a connec- tion between an illustrated arbed publication and the images archived at the cna was a key element in the development of the famoso projects. It showed the importance of visual technologies and the role of images as reproducible and mobile objects in promoting the company’s achievements, also beyond the economic sphere. Indeed, project members soon discovered more visual material—films, photograph albums, posters, corporate brochures, popular magazines, and postcards—that subtly attuned the public to emerging in- dustrial landscapes, modes of production, and new lifestyles and thus helped shape both arbed’s corporate and Luxembourg’s national identity. Launched in 2013 and 2014 respectively, the two famoso projects initially focused on the entanglements between industrialization and the cultural, eco- nomic, and social transformations in Luxembourg and beyond. Over time, the initial project design and goals were expanded, as team members introduced new ideas, found their own approaches originating from different academic disciplines, and discovered new rich and previously unexplored source ma- terials—for instance, in private archives inside and outside of Luxembourg. As a result, this multi-dimensional and interdisciplinary collection of essays moves away from and beyond traditional social histories of industrialization, hagiographies of industrial entrepreneurship, labor history, social work, social welfare, social hygiene, and comparative European histories of social and edu- cational reform movements. Instead, it elaborates and expands on the socio- cultural and material histories of a wide range of technologies of modernity with various consequences for Luxembourg and other societies at the turn of the twentieth century. The famoso projects achieved their final shape and structure as a result of many interdisciplinary conversations and discussions with and among cur- rent and former project members and international colleagues who have sup- ported the projects and/or have acted as ‘critical friends’: Regula Bürgi, Cathy Burke, Klaus Dittrich, Irma Hadzalic, Robert Hariman, Martin Loiperdinger, Enric Novella, Ira Plein, Françoise Poos, Siân L. Roberts, Frank Simon, Andreas <UN> Acknowledgments xi Tacke, Geert Thyssen, and