Reviewed by Daniel Schuster
Susan R. Grayzel’s The Age of the Gas Mask offers a compelling material history of one of the twentieth century’s most unsettling objects. Tracing the civilian gas mask from the ‘weaponisation of the air’ in the First World War through to its ubiquitous presence during the Second, Grayzel demonstrates how the advent of chemical warfare fundamentally altered the relationship between civilians and the state. The book is at its strongest in showing how, during the interwar period, the expected horror of renewed use of chemical weapons permeated cultural life, with novels, political debates, and visual culture repeatedly returning to nightmarish scenes of women and children suffocating in poisoned air.
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