-
Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban
SpacesAuthor(s): Andreas HuyssenSource: PMLA, Vol. 122, No. 1,
Special Topic: Cities (Jan., 2007), pp. 27-42Published by: Modern
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12 2.1
Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces
ANDREAS HUYSSEN
The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass. ?Theodor
W. Adorno, Minima Moralia
ANDREAS HUYSSEN is the Villard Pro
fessor of German and Comparative Lit
erature and founding director of the
Center for Comparative Literature and
Society at Columbia University. He is a
senior editor of New German Critique. His books include After
the Great Divide:
Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism
(Indiana UP, 1986), Twilight Memories:
Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia
(Routledge, 1995), and Present Pasts:
Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of
Memory (Stanford UP, 2003). An edited
volume on Third World cities, entitled
Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imagi naries in a Globalizing
Age, is forthcom
ing from Duke University Press.
AT A REVEALING POINT IN RAINER MARIA RILKE'S THE NOTE books
ofMalte Laurids Brigge, written before World War I, in the years
1904-10, the narrator, traumatized by metropolitan
life, laments, "Dass man erzahlte, wirklich erzahlte, das mufi
vor meiner Zeit gewesen sein" 'The days when people knew, really
knew how to tell stories must have been before my time'
(Aufzeichnungen 844; Notebooks 146). A generation later, in the
famous 1936 essay "The Storyteller," Walter Benjamin diagnosed the
end of storytelling as the result of the destruction of experience
in the trenches: "Begin ning with the First World War, a process
became apparent which continues to this day. Wasn't it noticeable
at the end of the war that
men who returned from the battlefield had grown silent?not
richer, but poorer in communicable experience?" What follows this
rhetori cal question is that well-known enumeration of destructive
aspects of modernity, ending with the cosmic vision of the "tiny,
fragile hu man body" beneath the clouds, "in a force field of
destructive tor rents and explosions" (143-44). The imagination of
destruction took a different form in Rilke's prewar text, but the
crisis of traditional
experiences of time and space in the metropolis already pointed
to that of the battlefield: shock, violence, and anonymous death
per vade the early pages of Rilke's novel, and they affect its
narrative form. Already the first sentence of the novel has this to
say about Paris: "So, also hierher kommen die Leute, um zu leben,
ich wiirde eher meinen, es stiirbe sich hier" 'So this is where
people come to live: I would have thought it is a city to die in'
(709; 3).
? 2007 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA 27
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28 Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces
PMLA
With Malte, Rilke turned to prose be cause his ability to write
poetry seemed to have abandoned him. Thus the narrator's re
flections on poetry: "Denn Verse sind nicht,
wie die Leute meinen Gefuhle (die hat man fruh genug),?es sind
Erfahrungen" 'Poems are not, as people think, simply emotions
(one has emotions early enough)?they are
experiences/ But what is experience? Malte continues: "Urn eines
Verses willen muss man
viele Stadte sehen, Menschen und Dinge ...
Man muss zuriickdenken konnen an Wege in unbekannten Gegenden,
an unerwartete Be
gegnungen und an Abschiede, die man lange kommen sah" 'For the
sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people
and
Things-You must be able to think back to streets in unknown
neighborhoods, to unex
pected encounters, and to partings you had
long seen coming....' Writing poems also
requires a wealth of memories. But, as Malte
writes, "Und es geniigt auch noch nicht, dass man Erinnerungen
hat. Man muss sie ver
gessen konnen, wenn es viele sind, und man muss die grosse
Geduld haben, zu warten, dass sie wiederkommen" c[I]t is not yet
enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they
are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they
re
turn' (724; 19-20). It sounds very Proustian avant la lettre, to
be sure, but Proust's heroic achievement of grounding narrative one
more
time in the remembrance of things past eludes Malte. Malte's
attempt to regain a lost form of experience, the one that can be
rendered as Erzahlung cstory,' shipwrecks. The coher
ence^ the novel form disintegrates into frag ments, mere
Aufzeichnungen, sketches that soon even lose their temporal
moorings in the diary form. The novel begins with a series of
miniatures focusing on perception and its disorientation. The
second miniature reads:
Dass ich es nicht lassen kann, bei offenem Fen
ster zu schlafen. Elektrische Bahnen rasen lau
tend durch meine Stube. Automobile gehen
liber mich hin. Eine Tiir fallt zu. Irgendwo klirrt eine Scheibe
herunter, ich hore ihre
grossen Scherben lachen, die kleinen Splitter kichern. Dann
plotzlich dumpfer, eingeschlos sener Larm von der anderen Seite,
innen im
Hause. Jemand steigt die Treppe. Kommt.
Kommt unaufhorlich. 1st da, ist lange da, geht vorbei. Und
wieder die Strasse. Ein Madchen kreischt: Ah tais-toi, je ne veux
plus. Die Elektri
sche rennt ganz erregt heran, dariiber fort, fort
uber alles. Jemand ruft. Leute laufen, uberho
len sich. Ein Hund bellt. Was fur eine Erleichte
rung: ein Hund. Gegen Morgen kraht sogar ein Hahn, und das ist
Wohltun ohne Grenzen.
Dann schlafe ich plotzlich ein. (710)
To think that I can't give up the habit of
sleeping with the window open. Electric trol
leys speed clattering through my room. Cars drive over me. A
door slams. Somewhere a
windowpane shatters on the pavement; I can
hear its large fragments laugh and its small ones giggle. Then
suddenly a dull, muffled noise from the other direction, inside
the
house. Someone is walking up the stairs: is
approaching, ceaselessly approaching: is
there, is there for a long time, then passes on. And again the
street. A girl screams, Ah,
tais-toi, je ne veux plus. The trolley races up
excitedly, passes on over it, over everything. Someone calls
out. People are running, catch
up with each other. A dog barks. What a re
lief: a dog. Toward morning there is even a
rooster crowing, and that is an infinite plea sure. Then
suddenly I fall asleep. (4-5)
For Rilke, an extended sense of orderly spaces and times is no
longer to be had. Experience itself is in an epochal crisis, as
Benjamin claims, and this crisis affected Rilke's writing of both
poetry and narrative.1
Rilke's and Benjamin's suggestion that the
age of storytelling had ended has nothing to do with the
nostalgia of which both authors have often been dismissively
accused. The di
agnostic premonitions underlying this alleged nostalgia were
thoroughly misconstrued. As a
result, their novel kind of writing practice was not understood.
Although Benjamin seems
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i22.i Andreas Huyssen 29
to theorize the loss of storytelling in his essay "The
Storyteller," it is much more interesting to
read his literary endeavors in Einbahnstrasse, Berliner Chronik,
or Berliner Kindheit as the modernist transformation of an older
type of
Erzahlung. Instead his literary prose pieces were read as
autobiography, while Rilke's Malte was absurdly read as a
bildungsroman rather than a city novel in fragments. The diffi
culty was to properly name this new form that exceeded
traditional generic descriptions such as Kurzprosa, aphorism,
fragment, sketch, re
citpoetique, poeme en prose, parable. Rilke's writing practice
in the Notebooks
is important for my argument in yet another sense. It couples
the breakdown of the tempo ral dimension of erzahlen 'to narrate'
and the
spatial aspect of erfahren 'to experience' with a foregrounding
of vision and the legibility of urban space. The narrator in Edgar
Allan Poe's Man of the Crowd introduces that ur ban allegory with
the German words "Es lasst sich nicht lesen" 'It cannot be read'
(506; my trans.). Malte's project in Paris, however, is different.
It is "learning to see" (Notebooks 6) rather than to read or write
("Ich lerne sehen"
[Aufzeichnungen 710]), even though writing about seeing is what
Malte ends up doing.
This first part of the Notebooks, writ ten at the time when
Franz Kafka began to
develop his early experimental prose and when Robert Walser
wrote many of his urban
newspaper feuilleton pieces, remains central to the trajectory
of the modernist miniature as a minor genre attractive to poets,
novelists,
and philosophers in subsequent decades. In German and Austrian
literature, modernist miniatures flourished in the first three de
cades of the twentieth century, in Hugo von
Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Walser, Robert Musil, Gottfried Benn,
Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Jun ger, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch,
Walter
Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, as well as in lesser-known authors
such as Peter Altenberg,
Alfred Polgar, Franz Hessel, Mynona, and Walter Serner. Among
Germanists, many of
these texts are fairly well known. All the more
puzzling is the absence of any broader critical
analysis that attempts to read this whole body of writing as a
central phenomenon of mod ernism. The modernist miniature as a
specific mode of writing may indeed be more central to the new in
literary modernism than the novel or poetry.
Historical Excursus
A brief historical excursus is in order here, before I turn to
the issue of the miniature itself. The place of the restructuring
of tem
poral and spatial perception, for which the modernist miniature
is an important field of
experimentation, is the metropolis at a time when it was an
island of modernization in a
society in which country and small-town life were still dominant
but losing ground?the period of high modernism stretching from
Charles Baudelaire's Paris to Arthur Schnitz
ler's, Hofmannsthal's, and Krauss's Vienna
to the Paris of the cubists and surrealists; the Berlin of
expressionism, left-wing Dada, and
Brecht; and the Moscow of Sergey Tretyakov, Sergey Eisenstein,
and Dziga Vertov.
Attempts to write the metropolitan city, its seething chaos, its
filth, and its miseries as much as its exhilaration and
exuberance,
were not new in 1900. We can think of Bal zac's Paris, Dickens's
London, Engels's Man
chester, or Dostoevsky's Saint Petersburg: their texts present
us with earlier fictional and sociological reflections on
urbanization and modernization. But it is enough to com
pare these novels or Theodor Fontane's Berlin
novels, written as late as the 1880s and 1890s, with Rilke's
Notebooks or the modernist city novels by James Joyce, John Dos
Passos, and Alfred Doblin to realize that something fun damental
changed in the literary representa tion of social space in the
city. The modernist
miniature enters our discussion as a specific feuilleton form
that departs in significant ways from those earlier city
narratives.
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30 Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces
PMLA
Something else must be said about the
genealogy of what I call the modernist min iature. Short prose
forms existed well before 1900. Consider the aphorisms of the
French
moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries or of
Georg Lichtenberg's Sudel
biicher; the fragments of the Jena Romantics; forms such as the
anecdote, the calendar or almanac story, the epigram; and all those
short notices, sketches, and observations pub lished in newspapers
and feuilletons since the
eighteenth century. Yet the modernist min iature differs
significantly from those other short prose forms?though, not
coinciden
tally, the feuilleton turns out to be the me dium of preference
for its writers.
Attempts to define such Kurzprosa in ge neric or poetic terms
have generally not been successful. My emphasis here is therefore
not on a genre poetics but on the brief trajectory of a privileged
form-content-medium triangle at a specific time and a specific
place.2 The ir
ritating and exhilarating novelty of the me
tropolis at the end of the nineteenth century and the
immediately following decades must be recaptured and historicized
if we want to understand how that crisis of perception gen erated
the modernist miniature as part of a
much broader process of the urbanization
of literature. Why did this new form, which seems less bound
than the novel or the mod ern epic to a national culture, flourish
so em
phatically in German writing? The flourishing may have been an
effect of the exceptionally fast-paced late-nineteenth-century
urban
growth in Vienna and Berlin as compared with such older European
cities as London and Paris, and it surely can be related to the
collapse of the German and Austrian Empires in 1918. But the
specific crisis of perception that initiated a new relation to
space and time, as it is articulated in the modernist miniature
from Kafka and Rilke to Kracauer and Ben
jamin, has now become history, nostalgia, cliche. All too often
today the texts resulting from this crisis are simply read as
anticipating
postmodernism (Weimar surfaces, rhizomic
culture, minor literature, the culture of the
spectacle, etc.). We must resist such presentist appropriation
and back shadowing if we are interested in the specificity and
nonidentity of cultural phenomena over time. It is pre cisely
because there is some truth to the argu ment that something
fundamental changed in
post-World War II modernity that we should
guard against such elisions of historical dif ference. For after
World War II, metropolitan urbanity in the West invaded and
saturated all social space through consumerism, the
automobile, air travel, and mass communica
tions. My hunch is that while short prose is still being written
in various forms, we would have to look to other media and their
effects on our lives to determine whether or not the
perceptual regime of modernism has itself been altered or
transformed into something new in our own time.
The Writing of Bilder
Rilke, I have argued, represents only one be
ginning of the metropolitan miniature, which has its own
genealogy with the Baudelairean
poeme en prose. As we know, modernism de
veloped unevenly?it came earlier to Paris
than to London or Berlin. Indeed, Baudelaire,
always the "Herold der Moderne" 'herald of
modernism,' as Adorno once called him (As thetische Theorie 201;
Aesthetic Theory 133),
anticipated much of what later came to be known in German
scholarship as Prosagedicht, in France recit poetique as it evolved
through Rimbaud, Lautreamont, and Mallarme to the surrealists. But
the prose fragments of Rilke's
Malte are not really prose poems in the Baude lairean sense.
They lack Baudelaire's irony and
distance, coming much closer to the emphatic Ausdruckskunst that
emerged with expres sionism, its spatial disorientation, auditory
confusion, and disturbances of vision. They also differ in their
coding of subjectivity (e.g., Rilke's use of the diary form and of
a fictional
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122.1 Andreas Huyssen 31
protagonist) from the postexpressionist min iatures by such
writers as Kracauer, Junger, Benjamin, and Bloch. Some of this
difference results from the authors' differing discourses
(sociology, philosophy, literature) and genres of writing
(poetry or prose). But there is an
other, perhaps more important, dimension.
Something else had to happen to trans form the prose poem into
the modernist min iature of the interwar years, which, together
with the documentary, is one of the few genu inely novel modes
of writing created by mod ernism in its love affair with the
feuilleton of
European newspapers such as the Neue Presse in Vienna; the Neue
Rundschau; the Frank
furter Zeitung; and other dailies, weeklies, or
monthlies. When the Baudelairean tradition of writing and
reading the city merged with
developments internal to philosophy?as philosophy became ever
more literary in the
aphoristic writings of such antisystemic phi losophers as
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche?the
prose poem shifted to a specific kind of highly condensed short
prose that has come to be known as Denkbild 'thought image' (by
Ben
jamin), Raumbild 'space image' (by Kracauer), Wortbild 'word
image' (by Hofmannsthal),
Korperbild 'body image' (by Junger), Bewusst seinsbild
'consciousness image' (by Benn), and simply Bilder 'images' and
Betrachtungen 'observations' (subtitles in Musil's Nachlass zu
Lebzeiten [Posthumous Papers of a Liv
ing Author]). The writing of such Bilder was now a separate
enterprise from the writing of the novel or even, as for Rilke, the
fictional
diary. The recourse to the visual in naming this literary form
is striking, but it also poses certain problems. All these Bilder
come in the medium of written language and thus have to be read as
Schriften 'writings.' They play off the fundamental difference
between
Schrift and Bild, attempting to strike sparks from their
confrontation in the miniature. As
Schrift-Bilder 'scriptural images' they draw on the tradition of
the hieroglyph, as Miriam Hansen has shown in her work on hiero
glyphic writing and mass cultural images in Kracauer and Adorno.
As such they are not
easily legible. The visual dimension disturbs
legibility, and the promise of linguistic trans
parency is denied in the complex texture of
ekphrasis, metaphor, and abstraction. Bild is never meant here
simply as a stand-in for Gemalde 'painting' and its
post-Renaissance regime of perspectival visuality. Even less is it
identical to photography, understood as un
mediated realism. Remember the Benjamin ian distinction between
Bild and Abbild: only
Abbild refers to simple representation. In a more pragmatic
register, the recourse
to Schrift-Bilder could be easily explained. Al
ready since the later nineteenth century, the streets of the
metropolis were full of store
signs, street signs, electric ads, the marquees of theaters and
movie palaces, Litfassaulen (advertisement pillars), sandwich men,
and so on. And then there was the medium of
publication itself. Before being gathered in book form under an
overarching title, most of these miniatures were published
separately in the feuilleton, an urban literary medium
that, as part of a newspaper, often combined text and image.
But such pragmatic observations fall short of addressing the
deeper question. Bilder are typically two-dimensional and suggest
perspectival organization. It was, however,
precisely perspectival viewing that metro
politan experience threw into turmoil. What if all these
modernist miniatures, described as
Bilder, account for a different organization of sensual, not
only visual but also auditory and embodied, perception that the
metropolis gen erated? I propose that the advantage the Bild
offered to these writers lay in that a Bild, in this more than
visual sense, condensed the ex tensions of time and space,
compressed them into an overdetermined synchronous image that was
significantly different from ambling description, sequential
observation, or the
merely empirical urban sketch. My reading of
paradigmatic texts tests this hypothesis.
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32 Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces
PMLA
Let me dramatize a bit for argument's sake. At stake with
modernist miniatures
was a profound transformation of the literary project that
crossed the disciplining border line between language and the
visual, between narrative and space, as it was codified in the
eighteenth century in G. E. Lessing's Laokoon. Rilke is only an
early example here for this
largely undertheorized phenomenon within
modernism, the other side of what Franco Moretti has called the
modern epic as distinct from the novel.3 Much as the modern epic
has been neglected or domesticated by scholars, the miniature has
been seen as a minor genre at best by comparison with the heroic
efforts of the modern novel or the seminal cycle of
poems. And even where it has been recog nized as an important
part of a writer's oeuvre
(Kafka, Junger, and Benjamin come to mind), it is more often
avoided than actually read.
As a specific historical form, the mod ernist miniature emerges
only in retrospect. It has that in common with Moretti s modern
epic. The authors who engaged in writing such miniatures did not
know how to name the
genre. Thus Bloch, with his Spuren (Traces) and sections of
Erbschaft dieserZeit (Heritage of Our Times) another major
contributor to this new mode of writing, lamented in a let
ter to Kracauer (June 1926), "Hatte man nur einen Namen fur die
neue Form, die keine mehr ist" 'If only we had a name for the
new
form, which is no longer a form' (Briefe 278;
my trans.). Robert Musil in turn, in a review of Kafka's first
book, Betrachtung, singles out Kafka's short prose and Walser's
feuil
leton pieces as the prototype of a new mode of writing, which is
however "nicht geeignet, einer literarischen Gattung vorzustehen"
'not
suitable to preside over a literary genre' (Mu sil 1468; my
trans.). The new form as antiform resists the laws of genre as much
as systemic philosophy or urban sociology, crossing the boundaries
between poetry, fiction, and phi
losophy, between commentary and interpre tation, between
language and the visual. But
as form it is firmly grounded in the microlog ical observation
of metropolitan space, time, and life at that earlier stage of
moderniza tion. If the modern epic in Moretti represents something
like a national encyclopedia in the form of a macroscopic fictional
map, then the
modernist miniature in all its incredible vari
ety represents the microscopic condensation of a metropolitan
imaginary that never gels into some encyclopedic totality.
Schrift-Bilder, Photography, and Architecture
My examples for the modernist miniature fo cus on certain
crucial aspects of reading and
seeing the city that reoccur in many texts: the
feeling of terror emanating from space; the loss of boundaries
between private and public space, living space and street space;
the motif oiLeere 'void' and Hohlraum 'hollow space'; the
Schrift-Bilder of urban advertising and their excess of legibility.
I give a double frame to my discussion, one frame taken from pho
tography, the other from architecture. I pro pose to read the
modernist miniature as a
snapshot of urban space and to see it as a field of
experimentation to test the validity of what
Siegfried Kracauer described in the 1920s as "das neue
Raumgefuhl" 'the new feeling of
space' ("Expose") and of what the architec tural historian
Siegfried Giedion at the same time described as spatial
Durchdringung 'in
terpenetration, overlapping' (Bauen 6; Build
ing 6) in modern architecture. The modernist miniature can be
shown to complicate the commonsense understanding of the snapshot
just as it reveals the threatening aspect of the new experience of
space, which is absent in
Giedion's account of the programmatic, even
Utopian dimensions of building in glass, iron, and
concrete.4
Snapshot at first sight suggests superfici ality, reification of
time, arbitrariness of the
image. It may also seem poorly chosen as a
guiding concept to discuss the new modernist
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122.1 Andreas Huyssen 33
regime of space, since photography remains tied to the
perspectival organization of space,
which is challenged and transformed in the modernist miniature
just as it is in modernist
painting, paradigmatically in cubism. But it is the temporal
rather than spatial dimension of the snapshot that justifies its
usage here. After all, snapshots can be fundamentally opaque and
mysterious, resisting interpreta tion. Think of Michelangelo
Antonioni's Blow
Up and the photographer's frustration read
ing his own snapshots, which seem to reveal a
murder he actually did not see. Any snapshot, as Roland Barthes
has taught us, may have its
punctum, the dimension of the photograph that eludes
transparence, "that accident which
pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to
me)" (27). The easy legibility of the snapshot is a myth.
Similarly, the modernist miniature seems easily legible, but more
often than not it resists facile understanding. Snapshots also
must be carefully read because, as Maurice
Merleau-Ponty once noted, any photograph holds open a specific
moment that the rush of
(lived) time would otherwise have immedi
ately closed (39). The snapshot marks the space where the
present turns into memory, but si
multaneously it preserves the appearance of a
presence.5 When transposed into writing, this
unexpected eruption onto the scene of vision that Barthes called
the punctum and Merleau
Ponty described in its temporal dimension as the holding open of
the moment in space toward its present, its past, and its future al
lows for a palimpsestic writing of space, one that transcends the
seen and the scene and
acknowledges the present and past imaginary any snapshot of
space carries with it.
As snapshots of space open up to the
passing of time, modernist miniatures articu late the new
dynamic experience of space in
Durchdringung. The literary texts in question here, however,
articulate the negative side of
Durchdringung, its threatening, even horrify ing dimension as
experienced by the subject lost in urban space. This fundamental
differ
ence in assessing the phenomenon of Durch
dringungas central to the experience of urban
space could be further explored. It is no coin cidence that
Kracauer meshes the two oppos
ing senses of the concept most interestingly. Among the writers
I am considering, the
one with the arguably most astute sense of urban space is
Kracauer, who was trained as
an architect and studied with the author of the Sociology of
Space, Georg Simmel. Kra cauer serves as my main example. Space in
his miniatures is typically triangulated. There is
concretely described architectural and urban
space such as the hotel lobby, the renovated
arcade, a street in a Paris neighborhood, the Kudamm in Berlin,
the roller coaster, the
unemployment office. Urban space is coded
here, long before Henri Lefebvre's seminal
work, as social space, which is then textually transfigured into
a spatial imaginary or even into dream space. In the miniature on
the un
employment office, we read, "Die Raumbilder sind die Traume der
Gesellschaft" 'The im
ages of space are the dreams of society' (Kra cauer, Schriften
5.2 186; my trans.). Deeply influenced by Georg Lukacs's notion of
the transcendental homelessness of the modern
subject, Kracauer deploys this triangulation to allegorize the
fallen state of the world?at first in rather metaphysical ways and
later, from the mid-1920s on, in sociological and
Marxist ways (Mulder).
Urban Space in Kracauer's, Kafka's, and
Benjamin's Miniatures
Let us take "Das Karree" ("The Quadran gle"), one of two pieces
under the umbrella title "Zwei Flachen" ("Two Planes"), first pub
lished on 26 September 1926 in the feuilleton of the Franfkurter
Zeitung and republished in Das Ornament der Masse in 1963 in
the
introductory section entitled "Natiirliche Ge ometric" ("Natural
Geometry") (Das Orna ment 12-13; Mass Ornament 38-39).6 There is
absolutely nothing natural about this piece.
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34 Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces
PMLA
The accompanying miniature "Die Bai" ("The
Bay"), a piece about the harbor of Marseilles that resonates
strongly with "The Quadran
gle," makes it clear enough that the location is the
Mediterranean city. From the Kracauer
Benjamin correspondence we also know that Kracauer named the
quadrangle Place de
l'Observance, that "uncanny square we en
countered at night" (my trans.), as Benjamin, remembering his
Marseilles walks with Kra
cauer, writes after receiving a copy of the min iature from
Kracauer himself ("das Portrat des unheimlichen Platzes, auf den
wir nachts
stiessen"; Benjamin, Briefe 33). But the place name is estranged
to the abstract quadrangle, and the name of the city is never
mentioned.
The first sentence of the text contains a
punctum. "Nicht gesucht hat den Platz, wen er findet" (Das
Ornament 12). The transla tion "Whoever the place finds did not
seek it" does not quite capture the reversal of subject and object
as succinctly as the German does
(Mass Ornament 38). The meaning, how
ever, is clear: "He whom the place finds did not seek it." The
uncanny reversal of human
subject and urban space in the German sen tence immediately
disorients the reader. The human subject becomes grammatical
object; the empirical object becomes grammatical subject. The
following sentences conjure up a
chaotic urban landscape, rife with putrefied smells, red lights
suggesting brothels, signs in Arabic, and dreamlike, contorted
archi tectural space?the condensed imaginary of
Marseilles's infamous harbor quarter as sen
suous and sleazy labyrinth:
Ein Hintertreppenquartier, die Prunkauf
gange fehlen. Turen stehen offen, aus denen
graugriin der Geruch der Meerabfalle schwelt, rote Lampchen
weisen den Weg. An den
Durchblicken sind Versatzstiicke improvisiert: Reihen von
Schwibbogen, arabische Schriftta feln, Stufengewinde. (Das Ornament
12)
A backstairs quarter, it lacks the magnificent
ascending entrances. Grayish-green smells of
sea waste come smoldering out of open doors;
little red lamps lead the way. In the spaces that afford a view,
one finds improvised back
drops: rows of flying buttresses, Arabic signs, stair windings.
(Mass Ornament 38)
Then the quadrangle, "ein Karree, das mit einer Riesenform in
das Geschlinge gestanzt worden ist" 'which has been stamped into
the urban
tangle with a giant template' (13; 39), finds the
flaneur, who instantly becomes its prisoner. The dreamlike
spatial imaginary of the first sen
tences, with its reminiscences of urban scenes in Hofmannsthal's
Marchen der 672. Nacht, is
replaced by a different spatial regime:
Auf dem menschenleeren Platz begibt sich dies: durch die Gewalt
des Quadrats wird der
Eingefangene in seine Mitte gestossen. Er ist al
lein und ist es nicht. Ohne dass Beobachter zu
sehen waren, dringen ihre Blickstrahlen durch die Fensterladen,
durch die Mauern_Split ternackt ist die Angst; ihnen
preisgegeben_
(13)
On the deserted square something happens: the force of the
quadrilateral pushes the per son who is trapped into its center. He
is alone,
and yet he isn't. Although no observers are
visible, the rays of their gazes pierce through the shutters,
through the walls.
. .. Fear is
stark naked, at their mercy. (39)
The further analogy to certain court scenes in Kafka's Trial are
obvious: "Ein Gericht tagt auf unsichtbaren Sitzen um das Karree"
'On invisible seats around the quadrangle a tri bunal is in
session.' The whole setup is a kind of Foucauldian panopticon in
reverse, but no
less oppressive for that. The quadrangle with its military
barracks, its "Horizontalen ... mit
dem Lineal gezogen" 'horizontal lines drawn with a ruler,' and
the "hundischem Gehorsam" 'canine obedience' of the wall, whose
strangely nonvanishing lines lead into the quadrangle, represent
the natural geometry of Cartesian
perspectival space (13; 39, 38). But instead of
liberating the subject's body and permitting
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122.1 Andreas Huyssen 35
visual control over the environment, this ab stract perspectival
space exudes power and
domination, disciplining and surveillance. Kracauer's
agoraphobia, which Anthony
Vidler has so brilliantly analyzed, is not just the fear of
empty open spaces that dwarf the
subject and unmoor its perception; it is also
linked to the recognition of the disciplining power of a
rationalist and abstract regime of
visuality that denies agency to the human body as subject of
sensual perception. It is in this second sense that the quadrangle,
rather didac
tically, is turned into an allegory of the state of the world,
in the concluding paragraph:
Niemand sucht in dem Knauel der Bilder
gange das Karree. Seine Grosse ware bei pein licher Uberlegung
massig zu nennen. Doch
dehnt es sich, wenn die Beobachter auf ihren
Stiihlen sich niedergelassen haben, nach den
vier Weltseiten aus, erdriickt die armseligen Traumweichteile
und ist ein Quadrat ohne Erbarmen. (13)
In this tangle of pictorial alleys, no one seeks the
quadrangle. After painstaking reflection, one
would have to describe its size as moderate. But
once its observers have settled into their chairs,
it expands toward the four sides of the world,
overpowering the pitiful, soft, private parts of
the dream: it is a square without mercy. (39)
The translation of "Knauel der Bildergange" as "tangle of
pictorial alleys" inevitably loses the notion of the walking
subject contained in the neologism Bildergange 'image walks.'
Also note the move in German from the con crete Karree to the
abstract Quadrat. The translation of Quadrat as "square" does not
render this move, since square in English sig nifies both the
geometric figure and the ur
ban square, while Quadrat refers only to the
geometric figure. This ending may strike the reader as
embarrassingly didactic. But the di dacticism is itself thrown off
track, estranged by the comment about the observers settling into
their chairs. What observers? What chairs? Where are we?
The quadrangle, displaced (verschoben), becomes a mise-en-scene
in which the ob
servers take their position in a perspectiv ally organized
theatrical space. But is it the natural geometry of the
Guckkastentheater 'fourth-wall stage,' or do these observers look
inward from all four directions, as if in a
theater in the round?better, a theater in the
square? The text remains enigmatic on this score. But it
suggests that the terror of the invisible gaze of these observers
overpowers the subject in the center of the now worldwide
quadrangle, the "Quadrat ohne Erbarmen"
'square without mercy.' The cold geometry of invisible gazes
overwhelms the "soft, private parts of the dream"
("Traumweichteile"), just as the quadrangle wins out over the
labyrin thine "tangle of pictorial alleys" ("Knauel der
Bildergange"). The fate of the subject becomes identical to that
of the city. The condensation of urban space into the allegorically
read
quadrangle comes with an imaginary ex
pansion of the oppressive power of geomet ric space across the
world: natural geometry without mercy. No need to point out how
this text translates the critique of rationalization
Weber's iron cage, if you will?into concrete urban space and its
imprisoning effect on the human subject. Indeed, Karree can be read
as exemplifying the dystopian dimension of Kracauer's mass ornament
itself.
A different form of spatial terror is de scribed in "Erinnerung
an eine Pariser Strasse" ("Remembering a Parisian Street"
[Kracauer, Schriften 5.2 243-48]). The narra tor in one of his
strolls and in a state of mind he calls Strassenrausch 'street
euphoria, intox
ication' is lost in a side street unknown to him in the
proletarian Quartier Grenelle. Suddenly a nightmarish perception
overcomes him:
Aber nun geschah es: kaum hatte ich mich von der weissen,
ubertrieben hohen Theater
wand abgelost, so fiel mir das Weitergehen schwer, und ich
spurte, dass unsichtbare
Netze mich aufhielten. Die Strasse, in der ich
mich befand, gab mich nicht frei. (244-45)
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36 Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces
PMLA
But now it happened: hardly had I come de tached from the white,
excessively high wall of the theater, I had trouble walking on, and
I felt invisible nets holding me back. The street in which I found
myself kept me captive.
(my trans.)
He then sees several hotel signs without names on derelict
buildings, which suggest prostitu tion. Stepping up to one of these
hotels, the nar rator suddenly becomes conscious of the fact
dass ich beobachtet worden war. Aus den
Obergeschossfenstern mehrerer Hauser sahen
Burschen in Hemdsarmeln und schludrig ge kleidete Weiber auf
mich nider. Sie sprachen kein Wort, sie schauten mich immer nur
an.
Eine schreckliche Gewalt ging von ihrer blos sen Gegenwart aus,
und ich hielt es beinahe fur eine Gewissheit, dass sie es waren,
die mir
die Fesseln angelegt hatten. Wie sie stumm
und reglos dastanden, schienen sie mir von
den Hausern selber ausgebriitet worden zu
sein. Sie hatten jeden Augenblick ihre Fan
garme nach mir ausstrecken und mich in die
Stuben hereinziehen konnen. (245)
that I had been observed. From the upper
story windows of several houses, lads in shirt
sleeves and slovenly clad women were looking down upon me. They
didn't utter a word, they
just kept looking at me. Their mere presence exuded a terrifying
force, and I considered it
almost a certainty that it was they who had put me in fetters.
As they were standing mute and
motionless, they seemed to have been hatched
from the houses themselves. Any moment,
they could have stretched out their tentacles
and pulled me into the rooms. (my trans.)
If illicit sexuality and class anxiety combine in this surreal
scene, a comparable
spatial situation appears in a more purged, ab
stracted, and more violent form in Kafka's di
aries, a rich source of modernist miniatures:
Durch das Parterrefenster eines Hauses an ei
nem um den Hals gelegten Strick hineingezo
gen und ohne Rucksicht wie von einem der
nicht acht gibt, blutend und zerfetzt, durch alle Zimmerdecken,
Mobel, Mauern und Dachbo
den hinaufgerissen werden, bis oben auf dem
Dach die leere Schlinge erscheint, die meine Reste erst beim
Durchbrechen der Dachziegel verloren hat. (Tagebiicher 567-68)
To be pulled in through the ground-floor window of a house by a
rope tied around
one's neck and to be yanked up, bloody and
ragged, through all the ceilings, furniture, walls, and attics,
without consideration, as if
by a person who is paying no attention, until
up on the roof the empty noose appears, hav
ing lost hold of what remained of me only as it broke through
the roof's tiles.
(Diaries 291; trans, modified)
Here the miniature is condensed into one
breathless sentence, at the end of which the narrator's body has
been thoroughly disap peared, leaving only the empty noose?a
sur
real vision of an urban hanging that destroys both human body
and built space. The pas sive voice points to the absence of an
execu
tioner. Rather than provide protection and
shelter, the building has become a tool, if not
the agent, of the execution. The terror emanating from urban
space
and the dreamlike contortion of space are
things Kracauer shares with Kafka, whose novels he was one of
the first to review for the
Frankfurter Zeitung in the mid-1920s. At the same time, Kafka's
Angst-Raume 'spaces of
anxiety' lack the social and philosophical lan
guage that characterizes Kracauer s rendering of urban space,
which, as a result, poses fewer
riddles to the interpreter. Yet reading these texts
together makes it clear that we are confronting not simply a
case of intertextual influence. Kaf ka's and Kracauer's approaches
to urban space
are grounded in the similar effects the modern
city had on its most astute observers. I could go on and compare
the spatial
terror as rendered in Kafka's and Kracauer's
miniatures with texts by Ernst Junger from
the capriccios in Das abenteuerliche Herz
'The Adventurous Heart.' Jiinger's example
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i22.i Andreas Huyssen 37
could serve to take the argument one step further and to
establish the analogy between urban experience and war experience,
a fre
quent topos in Weimar literature and paint
ing.7 In all three writers, the terror is sudden and nameless,
tied to the hidden power of ur
ban space and its Durchdringung, literally the
penetration and overpowering of the subject. In Junger, however,
the spatial threat serves to
strengthen the subject, to create the armored
body though Haltung, desinvolture ('posture, bearing'), and what
he calls the telescopic gaze, whereas in Kracauer's and Kafka's
texts
the borders between inside and outside, be tween the subjective
imaginary and objective
world, are constantly crossed, endangering the coherence of the
narrating or narrated,
observing or observed subject. If the terror experienced by the
sub
ject emanates mainly from outdoor urban
space in Rilke, Kafka, Kracauer, and Junger, it is not absent
from the bourgeois interieur, once celebrated as the space of
privilege and
protection from an unfriendly and danger ous outside. Thus in
Einbahnstrasse, Benja min speaks tongue in cheek of "Schrecken der
Wohnung" 'the horror of apartments' (88; One-Way Street 446). The
arrangement of nineteenth-century furniture is to him "the site
plan of deadly traps, and the suite of rooms prescribes the path of
the fleeing victims" (446). The bourgeois interior "wird
adaquat allein der Leiche zur Behausung" 'fittingly houses only
the corpse.' And: "Auf diesem Sofa kann die Tante nur ermordet
werden" 'On this sofa the aunt cannot but be murdered' (89; 447).
Ten years later Kra cauer took up the theme of indoor murder as
favorite topic of the boulevard press, but here the focus was the
anonymous hotel room as the space of murder sensationalized in
the
press (Schriften 5.3 293). In Benjamin's text, the bourgeois
interior with all its furnishings, potted nature, and collected
knickknacks is as subject to intrusions from the outside as is the
traditional bourgeois self and its inward
ness. Think of the disruptive ringing of door bells or
telephones in Benjamin's miniatures.
Or, for that matter, in Kafka's Trial. The house of the self in
both senses caves in. It caves in because the boundary between the
secure
private space of the bourgeois interior and its
inwardness, on the one hand, and the public space of the street
and the city, on the other, is increasingly blurred?most famously
in
Benjamin's analysis of the arcade as an inte rior street space,
which, like the dream, lacks a proper outside.
The extended scholarly discussion of
Schwellenerfahrungen 'threshold experi ences' in Benjamin
belongs in this context as well (Menninghaus): thresholds not just
between interior and street life (think of the
all-important space of the loggia in Berliner
Kindheit) but also between dream and wak
ing, past and present, life and death, surface world and
myth-laden underworld. The slight elevation of the Schwelle
'threshold' on the floor separating one room from another was one
of the distinctive features of Berlin apart ments in the old and
new West of Benjamin's time, but it is imbued in his writing with
an
allegorical dimension that exceeds any single architectural,
anthropological, philosophical, or mythic referentiality.
Time and again, miniatures by Benjamin and by Kracauer, as those
by Rilke, Kafka, Benn, and Musil, focus on this process of the
breakdown of the inside-outside division in
subject-object relations and in the relation between private and
public space. To different
degrees, all these writers read this breakdown as a symptom of
major historical change, not
just anticipating a new perception but also re
quiring a new organization of social life. More than other
literary genres, these miniatures in their very form record and
construct a new
sensibility in perceiving time and space. There is a certain
logic of form in that Benjamin's Proustian memory project, his
Berliner Kind heit um Neunzehnhundert, comes to us as a
carefully constructed montage of miniatures
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38 Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces
PMLA
rather than as an extended narrative in novel or
autobiographical form. In Berliner Chronik, the Berlin montage
preceding Berliner Kind
heit, Benjamin distinguished his project from
autobiography as a temporal form focusing on "den stetigen Fluss
des Lebens" 'the con tinuous flow of life.' He continued, "Hier
aber ist von einem Raum, von Augenblicken, vom
Unstetigen die Rede" 'Here I am talking of a
space, of moments and discontinuities' (488; Berlin Chronicle
612). Time gives way to space,
continuity to das Unstetige, the sovereign sur
veying gaze to the spatially isolating and frag menting look
through the magnifying glass, as it were. Adorno's aphorism about
the splin ter in the eye as magnifying glass captures the kind of
vision that generates the writing of the modernist miniature
(Minima Moralia 57).
Giedion and Durchdringung
If Durchdringung ofinside and outside, sub
ject and object, private and public space is
presented in the modernist miniature as
Angst-Raum 'space of anxiety' and Angst Traum 'nightmare,' it
took on entirely positive, even Utopian connotations in the
architectural discourse of the 1920s. The idea that space was
central to modernist literature is not exactly new. Yet it is
important to re
member, since all too often in recent decades,
literary modernism has been discussed as
privileging time over space, whereas the
emergence of space as a key structuring factor has been
attributed to postmodernism, most
famously perhaps by Fredric Jameson. This view shipwrecks on the
modernist minia ture (and not only there). We know that both
Kracauer and Benjamin were interested in
the new architecture and its Utopian visions in the work of Paul
Scheerbart, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies
van der Rohe, Lilly Reich, and many others. Thus Kracauer, in an as
yet unpublished piece archived in his Nachlass 'literary estate'
in
Marbach, spoke of "das neue Raumgefuhl"
'the new feeling for space' produced by the
development of technology and so far hardly understood ("bisher
noch kaum erfasst" ["Ex pose"]). In his Frankfurter Zeitung review
of the Stuttgarter Werkbund exhibition of 1927 he emphasized the
dissolution of traditional
perspective in urban housing, in interior de
sign (Loos comes to mind), and even in the
exhibiting of household tools (Schriften 5.2
68-74). In such comments on the new archi
tecture, he seems to approach the Utopian di mension of
architectural modernism, which is largely absent from his literary
miniatures.
Siegfried Giedion, in his 1928 work Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen
in Eisen, Bauen in Eisen
beton, a programmatic statement about the
promises of modern architecture that was
extensively excerpted in Benjamin's notes for his arcades
project, describes this new spatial experience with the multivalent
term Durch
dringung, which opens up a new form of see
ing. According to the felicitous phrasing by architectural
historian Hilde Heynen, Durch
dringung "stands for a weakening of hierar chical models on all
levels?social as well as
architectural" (35). What appears as terroriz
ing spatial experience in the modernist minia ture appears here
as the liberatory dimension of Durchdringung and a new
understanding of architectural space. Giedion writes:
Es scheint uns fraglich, ob der beschrankte
BegrifF'Architektur" uberhaupt bestehen blei
ben wird. Wir konnten kaum Auskunft iiber
die Frage geben: Was gehort zur Architektur?
Wo beginnt sie, wo endet sie? Die Gebiete
durchdringen sich. Die Wande umstehen
nicht mehr starr die Strasse. Die Strasse wird
in einem Bewegungsstrom umgewandelt. Gleise und Zug bilden mit
dem Bahnof eine
einzige Grosse. (Bauen 6)
It seems doubtful whether the limited con
cept of "architecture" will indeed endure.
We can hardly answer the question: What
belongs to architecture? Where does it begin, where does it
end?
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i22.i Andreas Huyssen 39
Fields overlap: walls no longer rigidly de fine streets. The
street has been transformed
into a stream of movement. Rail lines and
trains, together with the railroad station,
form a single whole. (Building 90)
If architecture's realm is no longer just that of built objects
but also one of spatial and social relations, as Giedion suggests,
then one
could argue that the modernist miniature, de
spite its largely negative coding of Durchdrin
gung, is the literary analogue of this new way of seeing and
experiencing space. One would then want to define the literary
techniques corresponding to architectural Durchdrin
gung as the intermingling of spaces through the partial absence
of floors (as for instance in such nineteenth-century iron
constructions as the Eiffel Tower) or the interpenetration of
equivalent volumes that erase the borders between them (Gropius's
Bauhaus in Dessau). This project could further draw on contem
porary suggestions such as Ernst Cassirer's, "dass das
Raumproblem zum Ausgangspunkt einer neuen Selbstbesinnung der
Asthetik werden konne" 'that the problem of space may become the
point of departure for a new
self-reflection of aesthetics' (95; my trans). I cannot perform
here this task of trans
lating architectural Durchdringung into a
variety of writing strategies in the modern ist miniature, but I
hope my reading of Kra
cauer's "Quadrangle" in the context of other
miniatures has been suggestive of how one
might argue this point: the intermingling of spatial mappings,
urban space as social
space, the loss of the subject's firm stand
point, visual and bodily disorientation, fall
ing through missing floors as in Junger's "Das Entsetzen" ("The
Horror") or being pulled up through ceilings as in Kafka, bodies of
philo sophical and descriptive text overlapping or
interpenetrating one another, and so forth. Both architecture
and literature reflect new modes of seeing and experiencing space
and time, and as with the introduction of all new
technologies, the result is a mix of fascination and terror.
Kracauer into Exile
Let me conclude with some broader com ments on Kracauer's urban
imaginary. Critics have pulled his Stadtebilder 'urban images' too
much into the orbit of his philosophy of
history, which interprets the city exclusively as emblem of
alienation, ego loss, reifica
tion, and anomie, as the catastrophic space of a modernity gone
awry and overwhelmed
by abstract forms of empty time and empty space. True, the
notion of Leere 'emptiness, void' appears frequently in his
miniatures, and it can be compared with Benjamin's no tion of an
empty homogeneous time or with Bloch's characterization of Weimar's
Neue Sachlichkeit 'New Sobriety' as "Funktionen im Hohlraum"
'functions in the void' (Erb
schaft 212; my trans.). But as the differentia tion of spatial
models in "The Quadrangle" already suggested, urban space in
Kracauer is not coded exclusively as homogeneous nega tivity. As
Paris and Berlin provide the privi leged spaces for his texts, one
can note how he differentiates between the two cities. The street
in Paris still functions as site of mem
ory and experience, while streets in Berlin either scream with
emptiness ("Schreie auf der Strasse" [Schriften 5.2 207]) or
undergo such rapid architectural change that they no
longer hold any memory of the past ("Strasse ohne Erinnerung"
[Schriften 5.3 170-74]). Berlin is seen as the decisive cauldron of
mo
dernity in political and social crisis, while Paris is described
as a city of the past. The modern world seems to be missing in
Paris in this perspective of the visitor from Berlin. In "Pariser
Beobachtungen" ("Paris Observa tions" [1927]), Kracauer writes
about France:
Die Gesellschaft dauert fort als habe sie den
Krieg wirklich gewonnen, man spricht uber
Kunst und Literatur wie in verschollenen
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40 Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces
PMLA
Jahrzehnten, Besitz und Mitgift stehen im Geruch der Heiligkeit,
und ihre Generale sind echte Generale. (Schriften 5.2 25)
Society continues as if it had really won the war. One speaks
about art and literature as in
lost decades. Property and dowry exude an
odor of holiness, and their generals are au
thentic generals. (my trans.)
The visitor returns to Berlin "mit dem Be wusstsein .. . dass er
hier wieder die Luft der rauhen Wirklichkeit atme, wie es heisst"
'conscious here of breathing the air of harsh
reality, as they say' (26; my trans.). This harsh reality,
however, harbors a po
litically promising contradiction, which Kra cauer has
paradigmatically analyzed in the well-known essay "The Mass
Ornament." The tension he developed there between the dys topia and
the Utopia of reason also emerges if
we compare the several miniatures that focus on advertising. In
"Langeweile" ("Boredom" [1924]), Kracauer analyzes the historical
de cline of boredom as a creative mental state. Here is what he
writes about the flaneur walk
ing the street in the evening:
Da Ziehen leuchtende Worte an den Dachern voruber, und schon ist
man aus der eigenen Leere in die fremde Reklame verbannt. Der
Korper schlagt Wurzeln im Asphalt, und der
Geist, der nicht mehr unser Geist ist, streift mit
den aufklarenden Lichtbekundungen endlos
aus der Nacht in die Nacht. Ware ihm noch ein Verschwinden
gegonnt! (Das Ornament 322)
Illuminated words glide by on the rooftops, and already one is
banished from one's own
emptiness into the alien advertisement. One's
body takes root in the asphalt, and, together with the
enlightening revelations of the il
luminations, one's spirit?which is no longer one's own?roams
ceaselessly out of the night and into the night. If only it were
allowed to
disappear. (Mass Ornament 332)
This is still the subjective discourse of loss,
typical of an antiurban German Kulturkritik,
before Kracauer turned to more sociologically and politically
inflected views. The descrip tion of "Lichtreklame" 'electric
advertising' of 1927 is very different:
Die Lichtreklame geht an einem Himmel auf, in dem es keine Engel
mehr gibt, aber auch nicht nur Geschaft. Sie schiesst uber die
Wirt
schaft hinaus, und was als Reklame gemeint ist, wird zur
Illumination. Das kommt davon,
wenn die Kaufleute sich mit Lichteffekten ein lassen. Licht
bleibt Licht, und strahlt es gar in alien Farben, so bricht es erst
recht aus den
Bahnen, die ihm von seinen Auftraggebern vor
gezeichnet sind.... Der Reklamespriihregen, den das
Wirtschaftsleben ausschiittet, wird zu Sternbildern an einem
fremden Himmel.
(Schriften 5.2 19)
Electric ads rise in the heavens that no longer harbor angels
but are not all commerce either.
They exceed economics, and what is meant as
advertising becomes illumination. Such things
happen when businessmen handle light effects.
Light remains light, and when it shines in all its
colors, it really breaks the bounds set by its con tractors. ...
The drizzle of advertising poured forth by economic life is
transformed into a constellation in an alien sky. (my trans.)
Lichtreklame as uncontrollable excess
points to an alternative future to be read as a
Sternbild 'constellation' in an alien sky. Even if overall the
rhetoric is less apocalyptic than in the earlier text, the form of
the miniature is much the same. It remains so until 1933, by
which time the dystopian vision has returned,
supported now by Kracauer's concrete obser vations of social
realities after the crash of 1929. In "Die Unterfuhrung" ("The
Under
pass"), a miniature about a passage under the
rail lines at Bahnhof Charlottenburg, which is always crowded
with travelers, beggars, and
hawkers, Kracauer makes much of the oppo sition of the
oppressive and unshakable iron and concrete low-ceiling
construction and the human chaos of motion. Both, however,
elude
any kind of human rational Durchdringung:
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122.1 Andreas Huyssen 41
Unmenschlich ist aber nicht nur die Planlosig keit, mit der die
Menschen umhertreiben, son
dern auch die planmassige Konstruktion der
Passage_Ein System, das so undurchdrungen und verlassen ist wie
das anarchische Gemisch
der Passanten und Bettler. (Schriften 5.3 41)
Inhuman is not only the aimlessness, with
which people drift about, but also the planned construction of
the passage.... It is a system
just as opaque and forsaken as the anarchic
mix of passersby and beggars. (my trans.)
The Utopian dimension of Durchdringung, articulated by Giedion
before the crash, has not been fulfilled. One of Kracauer's last
Ber lin miniatures, published just a couple of days after its
author left Berlin for good on 28 Feb
ruary 1933 to enter the extraterritoriality of
exile, describes the silent crowds looking at the burnt
Reichstag the day after the fatal fire:
Die Blicke dringen durch dieses Symbol hin durch, und tauchen in
den Abgrund nieder,
den seine Zerstorung eroffnet. (211)
The gazes penetrate and go through this
symbol, and they dive down into the abyss opened up by its
destruction. (my trans.)
In certain ways, "Rund um den Reichstag" marks the logical,
though not chronological, end point of the modernist miniature as a
spe cific form in the urban feuilleton. If the main function of the
form was to enable readers to see the dangers and pleasures of
urban life in new ways, to open up the surfaces of urban
space to the dangerous and exhilarating depths underlying them,
then that depth has now been transformed into an Abgrund, the abyss
that six years later was to engulf the world.
Notes 1. For a fuller discussion of Rilke's novel, see Huys
sen 105-26 ("Paris/Childhood: The Fragmented Body in Rilke's
Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge").
2. This essay is a first attempt to describe the mod
ernist miniature as a central laboratory of urban litera
ture. In future work, I hope to expand the scope of this
investigation to include close readings of works by Kafka,
Musil, Benn, and Junger as well as by Benjamin, Bloch, and
Adorno. What has always intrigued me about this
specific mode of writing is that, in the wake of Baude
laire, it was practiced by most of the major modernists in
Germany and Austria as well as by the major representa tives of
German critical theory.
3. There is an extensive literature that discusses the
modernist city novel in terms of cinematic narrative and
technique. The relation of literary texts to photography has
been much less discussed. Focus on the modernist
miniature as Bild may help expand our understanding of
the relation between the literary and the visual domains
in modernism.
4. The central concept of Durchdringung has been lu
cidly described by Heynen (30-38). 5. A comparable argument
about the temporality of
photography can be found in Kracauer's "Photography" in Mass
Ornament (47-63).
6. The following reading of Kracauer's miniature owes much to
Briiggemann's path-breaking Das andere
Fenster.
7. On Junger's short prose pieces of Das abenteuerli che Herzy
see Huyssen 127-44 ("Fortifying the Heart
Totally: Ernst Junger's Armored Texts").
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42 Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces
PMLA
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Article Contentsp. 27p. 28p. 29p. 30p. 31p. 32p. 33p. 34p. 35p.
36p. 37p. 38p. 39p. 40p. 41p. 42
Issue Table of ContentsPMLA, Vol. 122, No. 1, Special Topic:
Cities (Jan., 2007), pp. 1-424Front MatterIntroduction: Dreaming of
Infrastructure [pp. 9-26]Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots
of Urban Spaces [pp. 27-42]Stadtwollen: Benjamin's "Arcades
Project" and the Problem of Method [pp. 43-60]Playing the Tourist
in Early Modern London: Selling the Liberties Onstage [pp.
61-71]Sounding the Space between Men: Choric and Choral Cities in
Ben Jonson's "Epicoene; Or, the Silent Woman" [pp.
72-88]Metropolitan Modernism and Its West Indian Interlocutors:
1950s London and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature [pp.
89-104]Utopia Interrupted: Archipelago as Sociolyric Structure in
"A Draft of XXX Cantos" [pp. 105-123]Shadow Photographs, Ruins, and
Shanghai's Projected Past [pp. 124-134]"It's a Sin to Bring down an
Art Deco": Sabina Berman's Theater among the Ruins [pp.
135-150]Citizens of Memory: Refiguring the Past in Postdictatorship
Argentina [pp. 151-169]Rio's Favelas in Recent Fiction and Film:
Commonplaces of Urban Segregation [pp. 170-178]"Outcasts and
Dreamers in the Cities": Urbanity and Pollution in "Dead Voices"
[pp. 179-193]Black Atlanta: An Ecosocial Approach to Narratives of
the Atlanta Child Murders [pp. 194-209]Unburying the Dead in the
"Mother City": Urban Topographies of Erasure [pp. 210-219]"To What
Shall I Compare You?": Jerusalem as Ground Zero of the Hebrew
Imagination [pp. 220-234]Reading the City: The Urban Book from
Mercier to Mitterrand [pp. 235-251]Correspondents at Large"I No Be
like You": Accra in Life and Literature [pp. 252-255]"Postmodern"
Space in the Heart of Beijing: From the National Theater to the
Palace Museum [pp. 256-263]Dispatches from Benghazi [pp.
264-270]The Fate of a Stereotype: Little Paris [pp.
271-274]Bucharest at the Crossroads [pp. 275-280]Afropolis: From
Johannesburg [pp. 281-288]Mammon, Magic, Mimicry, and Meaning in
Public Postapartheid Johannesburg [pp. 289-293]Lima the Horrible:
The Cultural Politics of Theft [pp. 294-300]Disputing Limeo
Historical and Cultural Heritage [pp. 301-305]Readable City [pp.
306-309]Olympiad Dreams of Urban Renaissance [pp.
310-315]Metropolitan Life and Uncivil Death [pp. 316-320]Sex,
Music, and the City in a Globalized East Africa [pp. 321-324]Sold
down the River [pp. 325-330]No Natural Disaster: New Orleans,
Katrina, and War [pp. 331-335]The Tribulations of a Postcolonial
Writer in New York [pp. 336-337]Letter from Ramallah [pp.
338-339]Letter from (The Myth of) Saint Petersburg [pp. 340-343]A
"Glimpse through an Interstice Caught": Fictional Portrayals of
Male Homosexual Life in Twentieth-Century Sydney [pp. 344-347]Waste
in Sydney: Unwelcome Returns [pp. 348-351]
Guest ColumnAfterword: The Buenos Aires Affair [pp. 352-356]
ForumCitizenship and Cosmopolitanism [pp. 357-359]"Eurasia" and
Imperialism [pp. 359-362]
Minutes of the MLA Executive Council [pp. 363-364, 366, 368,
370]In Memoriam [pp. 372, 374]Abstracts [pp. 421-424]Back
Matter