Book Review: Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator

Most of us ride an elevator on a weekly if not daily basis without much thought. The contemporary ordinariness of the elevator, however, obscures its epochal importance. In "Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator", Andreas Bernard, editor of Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany's largest daily newspaper, explores how the elevator shaped the twentieth century's built environment and how, as a piece of transportation technology, it reflected the anxieties of modernity. From its growth in popularity at the end of the nineteenth century to the Second World War, the elevator was an almost perfect manifestation of Charles Baudelaire's definition of modernity: "the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent"