Set in 1905, Water for Canitoga introduces Oliver Monstuart (Hans Albers) as the principal engineer of a pipeline project that is to bring water to the Canadian frontier community of Canitoga (fig. 18). The project prompts frequent sabotage activities, sponsored by American gold trusts that fear the emergence of new mining areas. After he kills one of the saboteurs, yet fails to produce justifying evidence, Monstuart has to flee the construction site. Later in the year, and transformed into a serious alcoholic, Monstuart returns to Canitoga and, in disguise, seeks reemployment with the construction company. Despite his being rejected by Captain Trefford, an old
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Figure 18. Engineering masculinity: Ad for Water for Canitoga (1939, Herbert Selpin) ( Film-Kurier, March 1939).
soldier friend from British colonial enterprises and now the head of the project, Monstuart appears on the site and assumes a leading role in the project again. Quickly, Monstuart detects faulty structures and unveils some of the saboteurs, led by Lily Westbrook, the flamboyant owner of the local saloon. To rescue the project, Monstuart suggests the assembly of a
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high-pressure caisson in whose protection the workers can fix the dam. Another sabotage act, however, threatens the underwater tank, whereas a number of the workers, after learning Monstuart’s true identity, want to lynch the engineer. Monstuart convinces the mob of his integrity and, despite his physical condition, descends into the tank. Meanwhile, Trefford remembers the power of male friendship and persuades the Canitoga dignitaries of Monstuart’s goodwill. When Monstuart, after his heroic intervention, arrives at the town meeting, the gathering absolves him from his murder charges and celebrates him as a hero. The engineer asks for a glass of water and staggers out of the room—literally dropping out of the frame—to die.
Resolute commitments to technology in Water for Canitoga overcome the emasculating effects of alcohol and unearth the civilizing powers of male camaraderie. In the traditional western the male heroes drink, on the one hand, coffee, the bourgeois goad to intellectual attention and self-control,66
and, on the other hand, hard liquors, normally consumed in the West’s saloons and ingredients of a ritual in which the lone ranger temporarily drowns his self-inflected animosity to communal bonds.67 In Water for Canitoga, in contrast, Monstuart’s alcoholism brings to the fore the social stigmata rebuked by temperance movements in Europe around 1900.68 Liquor, far from enabling a public male ritual, here promotes a weakening of masculinity. It subverts what holds society together: the dynamic will to collectivity and solidarity. Yet if Monstuart rediscovers in the course of the film his willpower, he does not do so in order to exchange whiskey with coffee, narcotic intoxication with a drink that sharpens the senses. Instead, Monstuart’s fusion of engineer- and cowboydom culminates in a final request for a glass of water, the very resource his technical work mediates to Canitoga. Not the rationalism and restraint of the classical western but rather the technological recuperation of the natural is the motto of Monstuart’s last toast.
Monstuart’s change of drinks illuminates what drives the film’s overall representation of technology. Engineers and their technological projects in Water for Canitoga appear endowed with a cultural mission, a calling for spiritual purification that bolsters both the individual and the collective against the egotistical aspirations of mere profiteers. According to the film’s notion of modernization, social crises do not result from the sudden colonization of the Far West with modern machines and technological projects per se but rather from the implementation of modern technology in the symbolic system of capitalist exchange: the will to material wealth ruins technology, which ruins nature, which ruins society. Whereas Monstuart sacrifices himself for the pipeline project to ensure the aura of a technolog-
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ical work, the saboteurs destroy the manifestations of modern engineerdom and in so doing also expunge the very spirit that provides the cement for social harmony.
Monstuart’s technological spiritualism—his fusion of idealist, anticapitalist, and antirationalist sentiments into a jargon of physical immediacy—
clearly reflected the signs of the time. Leading theoreticians of technology during the Third Reich, such as Heinrich Hardenstett, Rudolf Heiss, Eugen Diesel, or Werner Sombart, rendered modern machines and technologies as an emanation of the spiritual realm of Kultur rather than the material one of Zivilisation. 69 The sublime presence of technological works, for these engineers and ideologues, gave form to the chaos of life and thereby elevated the individual to the timeless realm of the national spirit. In influential journals such as Technik und Kultur Nazi engineers, in fact, developed a philosophy of technology that sought to unearth mythical dimensions of modern machines and turn their thrust against the achievements of social and political modernity, against procedural politics and the normative substance of liberal democracy.
Similar to Monstuart, ideologues of engineering during the Third Reich understood technology not as a product of abstract reasoning but as a mystic mediator between the realms of the spirit and the material demands of the day. Whereas scientists, they argued, would create dead knowledge through abstract theories, the Faustian engineer generated beautiful forms that could last for eternity. In Heiss’s writings this hostility against scientific abstraction gave cause to the portrayal of the engineer as an artistic genius. For Heiss “the natural sciences existed in a world of laws, regularities, and impractical abstractions, rather than in the creative and heroic immediacy of the inventor and engineer.”70 To secure this cultural mission of technology, Nazi ideologues argued for a separation of technology from the demands of the market: it was only through the intervention of an authoritarian state, they contended, that technological creativity could be defended against profit seekers and the anarchic domain of exchange values.
To the extent that they insisted on a political, not economic, hegemony over technology on the one hand, while emphasizing the superiority of pragmatic creativity over scientific abstraction on the other, Nazi engineers hoped technology could provide a renewed sense of existential authenticity and cultural homogeneity. Steeped in a cleverly generated aura of precapi-talist craftsmanship, technology was meant to resuscitate a world of natural rhythms and uncontested values. Fascism’s engineers sought to recuperate “modern man’s lost rituals with the help of the very factor that has threatened them in the first place: technology.”71
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Water for Canitoga grafts Heiss’s reactionary modernism onto the figure of Oliver Monstuart. What is at stake in constructing Monstuart’s pipeline is not the project’s actual use value so much as the realization of existential pathos and the reassertion of masculine identity. Similar to the way in which the l’ art pour l’ art movement around 1900, in its protest against the commodification of nineteenth-century art, cut all links between art and social life, Monstuart aims to redefine technology as an autonomous realm of existential self-referentiality. He marshals instrumental reason to sanctify technology as an overwhelming presence. Albers, who according to Nazi film ideologue Oskar Kalbus embodied nothing less than “the German idea of masculinity,”72 proved an ideal choice for this task. In the film’s musical interlude, “Goodbye Jonny,”73 Albers establishes himself as a roughneck whose aim is to evacuate women and uncontrolled passion from the Far West. Modeled on the New Year’s Eve sequence of W. S. Van Dyke’s 1936
San Francisco, Albers’s song articulates a crude attack on difference and female sexuality that aspires to reinvent the West as a sphere free of whatever could distract the cowboy-engineer from his existential mission. Albers’s song intends to make language rough and dangerous again, to transform orality into a conduit for manly action.74 In opposition to a scientist’s putative intellectualism and abstraction, Monstuart’s song recasts language into a direct expression of male resolution and physical immediacy.
Long before the film’s release, press reports applauded the work invested in the making of Water for Canitoga as a sign of authenticity. What became a particular object of fascination was the caisson, which was built according to real models exhibited in the Deutsches Museum, Munich. As Der Film informed its readers in minute detail, the technical staff “manufactured a wood caisson which holds a pressure of 2.5 atm and which is 2.2 meters high, 6 meters wide, and 6 meters long. Its walls are 60 centimeters in depth.”75
In the film itself Monstuart resorts to rather different methods of marketing the caisson. To illustrate its operation, he cuts a whiskey bottle in half and submerges it in a small aquarium (fig. 19). Casually commenting on his procedure, Monstuart captures a fish underneath his model and pres-surizes the bottle with air. As the fish desperately seizes because of the lack of water, it proves that men could work in the suggested underwater container and fix the dam’s faulty constructions. Like his tough talk, Monstuart’s fishbowl presentation typifies modern engineering as an existential quest for Faustian creativity and physical immediacy in which technology figures as an expression of the engineer’s will to power. Relying on the power of visual display rather than on discursive modes of reasoning, the engineer overcomes the alleged captivation of scientific reason in regularities, laws,
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Figure 19. Recuperating resolve: Monstuart’s (Hans Albers) fishbowl experiment in Water for Canitoga. Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin—Deutsche Kinemathek.
routines, and orthodoxies. Implemented by a cowboy-technician, technological breakthroughs become stages of charismatic revelation, sites that recenter identity and help describe modern technology in terms of essential meanings— of the soul, the will to form, and unhampered virility.
