I have been working for several projects on a cultural history of modernity that focuses on the connection between perception and intervention. Fundamental changes in the wake of industrialisation were perceived in different ways by different groups of actors and incorporated into specific interpretative frameworks. These interpretative frameworks in turn suggested certain modes of intervention.

The analytical model is therefore not: problems arise, are recognised and then solved more or less adequately, but rather:

Reality is perceived and framed in the process of perception; this framing is always a tailoring, a shaping of reality, which is therefore only ever available for access in modelled form. Solutions to problems are therefore not primarily to be judged according to whether they were "objectively" appropriate from today's perspective, but rather to what interpretation they owe their form.

So far, I have investigated this in the context of the following projects:

• West German social history (defence of the nation as a structure of order in the "age of extremes"; ca. 1930-1970)
  
• Population discourse (defence of the social position of the bourgeois middle classes against lower classes and migrants; ca. 1798 to the present)
  
• Racial anthropology (naturalisation of the prevailing social order; ca. 1850-1970)
  
• Social engineering (design of "technologies of the self" to ward off the destructive consequences of industrialisation; ca. 1918-1970).
  
• Imaginary Landscapes (design of landscapes to realise "reasonable" ideas of order; ca. 1800 to the present)

These projects work out a structural similarity of contingency managementin modernity via heterogeneous professions. They focus primarily on experts who, moreover, did not belong to the artistic avant-garde, but above all to scientists and technocrats. They were characterised by a mixture of deep concern about the developments of the present and an optimism that they would be able to overcome these upheavals in the future. In all cases - transnationally and across political camps - the fundamental model of order was based on the powerful contrast between "organic" community and "atomising" society, i.e. on the goal of containing (not shutting down) the contingency of modern societies.

I concentrate on less spectacular attempts to find solutions for dealing with contingency, uncertainty and change, on the everyday machinery of social control, so to speak. Rather than reconstructing social and intellectual debates or writing an event history of specific technologies, I focus on the practice of control: How was framing done? How were ideas of order provided with evidence? In other words, how was thinking in practices attempted to be realised? This can perhaps be described as a praxeological history of ideas, in which the content of texts, images, etc. is less important than their form and implicit effects, which they gain through their embedding in overarching structures (discourses, scripts, genre rules, etc.).

Publications (selection):

• Etzemüller, Thomas: Hjorthagen 1937: Reading a photograph as a metaphor for modernity, in: Budde, Gunilla/ Freist, Dagmar/Reeken, Dietmar von (eds.): Geschichts-Quellen. Bridging the gap between historical studies and historical didactics. Festschrift for Hilke Günther-Arndt, Berlin 2008, pp. 45-55
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: La storia del "moderno". I problemi della sua concettualizzazione, in: Dipper, Christof/Pombeni, Paolo (eds.): Le ragioni del moderno, Bologna 2014, pp. 221-238 (German Ms. as PDF)
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: Did modernity have a "Janus face"? A critical examination from a (Northern) European perspective, in: Hachtmann, Rüdiger/Reichardt, Sven (eds.): Detlev Peukert und die NS-Forschung, Göttingen 2015, pp. 112-125
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: Ambivalent metaphorics. A critical review of Zygmunt Bauman's "Dialectic of Order" (1989), in: Zeithistorische Forschungen 14, 2017, pp. 177-183 (also online)
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: Social engineering, version: 2.0, in: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: Diagnosing the present means making something visible as something. Perception, visualisation and intervention in figures of modernity, in: Alkemeyer, Thomas/Buschmann, Nikolaus/Etzemüller, Thomas (eds.): Gegenwartsdiagnosen. Cultural Forms of Social Self-Problematisation in the Modern Age, Bielefeld 2019, pp. 105-126
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: Instrument for coping with the world. The group between heavy and cybernetic modernity, in: Mittelweg 36 28/29, 2019/20, issue 6/1, pp. 22-43
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: The course book of the German Federal Railway. Life clocking in the ponderous modern age, in: Merkur 77, 2023, H. 888, p. 30-43
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: Unloved, cold, heroic modernity. Decisionists and social engineers, in: Merkur 79, 2025, H. 911, pp. 5-15
  
• Etzemüller, Thomas: "Heroic modernity". Ambivalence of an epoch, Bielefeld 2025
  
• Hand grenade or drawing pen. On the ambivalence of modernism, Hamburg 2025