CONSIDERING THAT Germans invented the concept of fear of the future ( zukunftsangst), it's remarkable to see how confident and optimistic they once were about the world of tomorrow.
In 1910, leading German thinkers, scientists and artists collaborated on a remarkable vision of the future in the book The World in 100 Years.
Radium would cure the blind, German-controlled Zeppelin airships would command the skies and we would all be carrying “telephones in our waistcoat pockets”. Wrong, wrong and . . . right actually, but minus the waistcoats.
A runaway success in 1910, the book has been reprinted 100 years later – again to huge acclaim.
By commissioning experts in their respective fields, editor Arthur Brehmer ensured his book’s incorrect predictions were just as interesting as the many correct ones.
In his essay “The Wireless Century”, author Robert Stoss predicted: “Everything we now can send and receive through wires we can also send by wireless means.
“Everyone will have his own pocket telephone with which he can connect with whomever he wishes, wherever he is: on the sea, in the mountains, in his room, on a racing train, ship or a plane gliding through the air.” This pocket telephone would have a myriad of settings including ring tone and vibration options.
He forecasted a kind of public Wi-Fi in “every train, public house and apartment” and even the humble fax – useful, he suggested, to transmit last-minute stays of execution signed by the Kaiser.
Austrian novelist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Bertha von Suttner foresaw a united, peaceful Europe based on reciprocity – and the fear of overkill.
Love would be deconstructed by 2010 to its constituent parts: “radioactive sympathy rays of the soul and the heart”. Religion would be alive and well, “but as one house, no one will demand: ‘Feel, think, believe as I do’.”
Not everyone was so optimistic: author Ellen Keij was convinced that, having destroyed the Earth’s landscape through war and industrial pollution, we would live in undersea cities.
Children would be taken from their parents one hour after birth and returned – potty-trained and educated – at age 30, no less.
“Everyone will be a member of parliament,” she assured readers, “even the idiots.”
Not that everyone would be here to enjoy 2010: criminals would be deported to Mars, she predicted. Journalists too.