Chapter 11 Organising the Chaos: Firefighting in Upper Lusatia in the Early Modern Period
In: Early Modern FireSearch for other papers by Cornelia Müller in
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Abstract
In this chapter I examine how firefighting was organised in three early modern towns, Bautzen, Görlitz and Löbau, which were all located in the same legal area, Upper Lusatia (in eastern Germany). These towns had the right to make their own municipal ordinances, as they were relatively independent of the sovereign. Drawing on Henri Lefebvre’s idea of space as a complex social construction, and on Susanne Rau’s interpretation of Lefebvre’s theory, I suggest that fire regulations should be read as “mental spaces” in which different aspects, both ideal and real, of the social, political and economic life of a city are represented. An analysis of the regulations shows that the urban space was not conceived as a unit, but was divided into zones with different functions and times of intervention in the event of fire, revealing specific social hierarchies. The distribution and visibility of firefighting equipment (buckets, ladders, syringes, etc.) also reflected social organisation. Interestingly, the regulations not only represented the mental plan of action elaborated by the city’s magistrate, but also distilled past experience and used it to build future plans aimed at maintaining “good policing.”