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 Standing Conference for the History of Education (ische), which took place in Chicago 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 business 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 economic transformations inside and outside of Luxembourg. Besides Jean Back, the main inspiration for the famoso projects came from Germaine Goetzinger, 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’ paternalistic and philanthrocapitalist initiatives, which were not only a response to
Launched in 2013 and 2014 respectively, the two famoso projects initially focused on the entanglements between industrialization and the cultural, economic, 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 materials—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 educational 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 current and former project members and international colleagues who have supported 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
Karin Priem and Frederik Herman
Belval, 2019