Planetarien: Wunder der Technik—Techniken des Wunderns [Planetariums: Miracles of technology—techniques of wonder] by Helen Ahner (review)

Reviewed by:

• Planetarien: Wunder der Technik—Techniken des Wunderns [Planetariums: Miracles of technology—techniques of wonder] by Helen Ahner
• Hans-Christian Von Herrmann (bio)

Planetarien: Wunder der Technik—Techniken des Wunderns [Planetariums: Miracles of technology—techniques of wonder]
By Helen Ahner. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2023. Pp. 366.

The first optomechanical planetarium was opened in 1925 as part of the Department of Astronomy in the new building of the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The projection method for a dome-shaped screen had been developed in the previous years by the Carl Zeiss company in Jena together with Dyckerhoff & Widmann AG, which specialized in shell constructions made of reinforced concrete. Today, the classic projectors in planetariums around the world have been mostly replaced by digital fulldome systems. Since then, there has been a renewed historical interest in this approximately hundred-year-old technical invention; examples include research by Charlotte Bigg and Katherine Boyce-Jacino. In these works, it is above all the aspects of the spectacular that attract interest. In her dissertation project, now available as a book, Helen Ahner also examines the planetarium as a place of popular science education and entertainment.

In contrast to earlier studies that address the history of astronomical instruments between antiquity and the industrial age, investigate the sophisticated construction solution of the Zeiss engineers, or locate the planetarium in the history of modern knowledge, including the practices of art, architecture, and scientific simulation, Helen Ahner’s approach succeeds in capturing the surprise and amazement of contemporaries at this artificial experience of nature in the center of the modern city. By treating the planetarium as the “leading fossil of an archaeology of the experience of technology in the 1920s” (p. 185), Ahner thus takes up the ethnographic approach in science and technology studies founded by Stefan Beck in the 1990s.

One of the book’s particular strengths lies in the way the author develops her own arguments in constant exchange with a wide-ranging specialist discussion. Important points of reference, alongside social science theories of practice and embodiment, include Ute Frevert’s history of emotions and the concept of “technology emotions” recently outlined by Martina Heßler. At the beginning, however, Ahner makes the simple empirical observation that the planetarium and the perceptual situation created by it was repeatedly associated with the topos of the “miracle” in the public sphere (for example, in the much-used phrase “the miracle of Jena”). At the same time, the attitude of “wonder” was an indispensable driving force behind the communication of knowledge in these places. For Ahner, the entire physical texture of the audience experience thus becomes more meaningful than the content of the planetarium shows.

In order to demonstrate this on the historical terrain, the study is not only limited to the years 1925 to 1930 but also devotes itself with good [End Page 1041] reason to four case studies: Munich, Jena, Vienna, and Hamburg. The main sources are newspaper articles that reflect the reactions to the opening of the buildings in the cities mentioned. However, the author is never solely concerned with the depiction of regional events but instead primarily with the methodology of a historiography of technology that does not focus on the isolated technical object but on its reception in the complex fabric of everyday life. Thus, Ahner can state: “Wondering about planetarium nature and planetarium technology was a transgressive experience that took shape in the play with the boundaries of knowledge and ignorance, the possible and the impossible, nature and culture, human and machine agency, past, present and future, and shaped the planetarium as lieux de l’avenir” (p. 226).

In Nicholas Ray’s famous 1955 movie Rebel Without a Cause, the planetarium at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles is not only an important location for the plot. It also becomes a protagonist in its own right, allowing the entire historical background of the Cold War and the associated threat of nuclear annihilation to emerge. In a very similar way, Helen Ahner’s study of the planetarium in the second half of the 1920s makes it appear as a place where central themes of modernity are condensed at the level of the public...