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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 Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25501669 .
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12 2.1
Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshotsof Urban Spaces
ANDREAS HUYSSEN
The splinterinyour eye is thebestmagnifyingglass.?Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia
ANDREAS HUYSSEN is the Villard Pro
fessor of German and Comparative Lit
erature and founding director of the
Center forComparative Literature and
Society at Columbia University. He isa
senior editor of New German Critique.
His books include After theGreat 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 ina Globalizing Age, isforthcom
ingfromDuke University Press.
AT A REVEALINGOINT INRAINER ARIA ILKE'S HENOTEbooks ofMalte Laurids Brigge, written beforeWorld War I, in
theyears 1904-10, thenarrator, traumatized by metropolitan
life, laments, "Dass man erzahlte, wirklich erzahlte, das mufi vor
meiner Zeit gewesen sein" 'The days when people knew, really knew
howto
tell storiesmust
have been beforemy time' (Aufzeichnungen844; Notebooks 146). A generation later, in the famous 1936 essay"The Storyteller,"Walter Benjamin diagnosed the end of storytellingas the result of the destruction of experience in the trenches: "Begin
ning with the FirstWorld War, a process became apparent which
continues to this day.Wasn't itnoticeable at the end of thewar that
men who returned from thebattlefield had grown silent?not richer,
but poorer in communicable experience?" What follows this rhetori
cal question is thatwell-known enumeration of destructive aspectsofmodernity, ending with the cosmic vision of the "tiny, fragile hu
manbody"
beneath theclouds,
"in a force field of destructive tor
rents and explosions" (143-44). The imagination of destruction took
a different form inRilke's prewar text,but the crisis of traditional
experiences of time and space in themetropolis already pointed to
that of the battlefield: shock, violence, and anonymous death pervade the early pages of Rilke's novel, and they affect itsnarrative
form.Already the first sentence of the novel has this to say about
Paris: "So, also hierher kommen die Leute, um zu leben, ichwiirde
ehermeinen, es stiirbe sich hier" 'So this iswhere people come to
live: Iwould 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 towrite 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 manfruh 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 anWege in
unbekannten Gegenden, an unerwartete Be
gegnungen und an Abschiede, die man lange
kommen sah" 'For the sake of a single poem,you must seemany 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
longseen
coming....' Writing poems also
requires awealth of memories. But, asMalte
writes, "Und es geniigt auch noch nicht, dass
manErinnerungen hat. Man muss sie ver
gessen konnen, wenn es viele sind, und man
mussdie grosse Geduld haben,
zuwarten,
dass siewiederkommen" c[I]t s not yet enoughtohave memories. You must be able to forgetthem when theyaremany, and youmust have
the immense patience to wait until theyre
turn' (724; 19-20). It sounds very Proustian
avant la lettre, tobe 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
ofexperience,
the one that can be rendered
as Erzahlung cstory,'shipwrecks. The coher
ence^ the novel formdisintegrates into frag
ments, mere Aufzeichnungen, sketches that
soon even lose their temporal moorings in
the diary form.The novel begins with a series
ofminiatures 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
libermich hin. Eine Tiir fallt zu. Irgendwoklirrt eine Scheibe herunter, ich hore ihre
grossen Scherben lachen,die kleinen Splitterkichern. Dann plotzlich dumpfer, eingeschlossener Larm von der anderen Seite, innen im
Hause. Jemand steigt die Treppe. Kommt.
Kommt unaufhorlich. 1st a, ist langeda, gehtvorbei. Und wieder die Strasse. EinMadchen
kreischt: Ah tais-toi, je ne veuxplus. 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 istWohltun ohne Grenzen.
Dann schlafe ichplotzlich ein. (710)
To think that I can't give up the habit of
sleeping with the window open. Electric trol
leys speed clattering throughmy 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 iswalking up the stairs: is
approaching, ceaselessly approaching: is
there, is there for along time, then passes
on. And again the street. A girl screams, Ah,
tais-toi, jene veux
plus. The trolleyraces up
excitedly, passes on over it, overeverything.
Someone calls out.People
arerunning, catch
up with each other. A dog barks. What a re
lief: adog. 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 spacesand times isno longer to be had. Experienceitself is in an epochal crisis, as Benjamin
claims, and this crisis affectedRilke's writingof 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 ofwhich both authors
have often been dismissively accused. The di
agnostic premonitions underlying this alleged
nostalgia were thoroughlymisconstrued. As a
result, their novel kind ofwriting practice was
not understood. Although Benjamin seems
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i22.i Andreas Huyssen 29
to theorize the loss of storytelling inhis essay
"The Storyteller," it ismuch more interesting to
read his literary endeavors inEinbahnstrasse,
Berliner Chronik, or Berliner Kindheit as the
modernist transformation of an older type of
Erzahlung. Instead his literary prose pieceswere read as autobiography, while Rilke's
Malte was absurdly read as a bildungsromanrather than a citynovel infragments.The diffi
cultywas toproperly name thisnew form that
exceeded traditional generic descriptions such
asKurzprosa, aphorism, fragment, sketch, re
citpoetique, poeme enprose, parable.Rilke's writing practice in theNotebooks
is important formy argument inyet anothersense. It couples the breakdown of the temporal dimension of erzahlen 'to narrate' and the
spatial aspect of erfahren 'to experience' with
a foregrounding of vision and the legibilityof urban space. The narrator inEdgar Allan
Poe's Man of theCrowd introduces that ur
ban allegory with theGerman 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 orwrite ("Ich lerne sehen"
[Aufzeichnungen 710]), even though writingabout seeing iswhat Malte ends up doing.
This first part of theNotebooks, writ
ten at the timewhen Franz Kafka began to
develop his early experimental prose and
when RobertWalser wrote many of his urban
newspaper feuilleton pieces, remains central
to the trajectory of themodernist miniature
as aminorgenre
attractive topoets, novelists,
and philosophers in subsequent decades. In
German and Austrian literature, modernist
miniatures flourished in the first three de
cades of the twentieth century, inHugo von
Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Walser, Robert Musil,
Gottfried Benn, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Jun
ger, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, Walter
Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, aswell as in
lesser-known authors such as PeterAltenberg,Alfred
Polgar,
Franz Hessel,Mynona,
and
Walter Serner. Among Germanists, many of
these texts are fairlywell known. All themore
puzzling is the absence of any broader critical
analysis that attempts to read thiswhole bodyofwriting as a central phenomenon ofmod
ernism. The modernist miniature as a specificmode ofwriting may indeed be more central
to the new in literarymodernism 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 themodernist miniature is an important field of
experimentation, is themetropolis at a time
when itwas an island of modernization in a
society inwhich country and small-town life
were still dominant but losing ground?the
period of high modernism stretching from
Charles Baudelaire's Paris toArthur Schnitz
ler's, Hofmannsthal's, and Krauss's Vienna
to the Paris of the cubists and surrealists; the
Berlin of expressionism, left-wingDada, andBrecht; and theMoscow of Sergey Tretyakov,
Sergey Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov.
Attempts towrite themetropolitan city,its seething chaos, itsfilth, and itsmiseries
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
andsociological reflections
onurbanizationand 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 themodernist citynovels by James Joyce, JohnDos Passos, and
Alfred Doblin to realize that something fun
damental changed in the literary representation of social space in the city.Themodernist
miniature enters our discussion as a specificfeuilleton form that
departsin
significantways 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 ofwhat I call themodernist min
iature. Short prose forms existed well before
1900. Consider the aphorisms of the French
moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenthcenturies or of Georg Lichtenberg's Sudel
biicher; the fragments of the JenaRomantics;
forms such as the anecdote, the calendar or
almanac story, the epigram; and all those
short notices, sketches, and observations published innewspapers and feuilletons since the
eighteenth century. Yet themodernist min
iature differs significantly from those other
short prose forms?though, not coinciden
tally, the feuilleton turns out to be themedium of preference for itswriters.
Attempts todefine suchKurzprosa in generic or poetic terms have generally not been
successful. My emphasis here is therefore not
on a genre poetics but on the brief trajectoryof a privileged form-content-medium triangleat a specific time and a specific place.2 The ir
ritating and exhilarating novelty of theme
tropolis at the end of the nineteenth centuryand the
immediately following decadesmust
be recaptured and historicized ifwe want to
understand how that crisis ofperception generated 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 themod
ern epic to a national culture, flourish so em
phatically inGerman writing? The flourishing
may have been an effect of the exceptionally
fast-paced late-nineteenth-century urban
growth inVienna and Berlin as comparedwith such older European cities as London
and Paris, and it surely can be related to the
collapse of theGerman and Austrian Empiresin 1918. But the specific crisis of perceptionthat initiated a new relation to space and time,
as it is articulated in themodernist miniature
from Kafka and Rilke toKracauer and Ben
jamin, has now become history, nostalgia,cliche. All too often today the texts resultingfrom 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 ifwe are
interested in the specificity and nonidentityof cultural phenomena over time. It is pre
cisely because there is some truth to the argument that something fundamental changed in
post-World War IImodernity thatwe should
guard against such elisions of historical dif
ference. For afterWorld War II,metropolitan
urbanity in theWest invaded and saturated
all social space through consumerism, the
automobile, air travel, and mass communica
tions.My hunch is thatwhile short prose isstillbeing written invarious forms,we would
have to look to other media and their effects
on our lives to determine whether or not the
perceptual regime ofmodernism has itself
been altered or transformed into somethingnew in our own time.
TheWritingfBilder
Rilke,Ihave argued, represents only
onebe
ginning of themetropolitan miniature, which
has itsown genealogy with the Baudelairean
poeme en prose. As we know, modernism de
veloped unevenly?itcame earlier to Paris
than toLondon 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 ofwhat later came to be
known inGerman
scholarship
as
Prosagedicht,in France recitpoetique as itevolved 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 ironyand
distance, coming much closer to the emphaticAusdruckskunst that emerged with expres
sionism, its spatial disorientation, auditory
confusion, and disturbances of vision. Theyalso differ in their coding of subjectivity (e.g.,Rilke's use of thediary form and of a fictional
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32 Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces PMLA
Let me dramatize a bit for argument'ssake. At stake with modernist miniatures
was a profound transformation of the literary
project that crossed the disciplining border
line between language and thevisual, betweennarrative and space, as itwas codified in the
eighteenth century inG. 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 themodern epic as distinct
from thenovel.3Much as themodern epic has
been neglected or domesticated by scholars,
theminiature has been seen as aminor genre
at best by comparison with the heroic effortsof themodern novel or the seminal cycle of
poems. And even where ithas been recognized as an important part of awriter's oeuvre
(Kafka, Junger, nd Benjamin come tomind),it ismore often avoided than actually read.
As a specific historical form, the mod
ernist miniature emerges only in retrospect.Ithas that in common with Moretti smodern
epic. The authors who engaged inwriting such
miniatures did not know how to name thegenre. Thus Bloch, with his Spuren (Traces)
and sections ofErbschaft dieserZeit (Heritage
ofOur Times) another major contributor to
this new mode of writing, lamented in a let
ter toKracauer (June 1926), "Hatte man nur
einen Namen fur die neue Form, die keine
mehr ist" 'Ifonly we had a name for the new
form,which isno longer a form' (Briefe 278;
my trans.). Robert Musil in turn, in a review
of Kafka's firstbook, Betrachtung, singlesout Kafka's short prose and Walser's feuil
leton pieces as the prototype of a new mode
ofwriting, which ishowever "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 asmuch as systemic
philosophy or urban sociology, crossing the
boundaries between poetry, fiction, and phi
losophy,between
commentaryand
interpretation, between language and the visual. But
as form it isfirmly grounded in themicrological observation ofmetropolitan space, time,
and life at that earlier stage ofmoderniza
tion. If themodern epic inMoretti represents
something like a national encyclopedia in theform of amacroscopic fictional map, then the
modernist miniature in all its incredible vari
ety represents themicroscopic condensation
of ametropolitan imaginary that never gelsinto some encyclopedic totality.
Schrift-Bilder,Photography, and
Architecture
My examples for themodernist miniature focus on certain crucial aspects of reading and
seeing the city that reoccur inmany texts: the
feeling of terror emanating from space; the
loss of boundaries between private and public
space, living space and street space; themotif
oiLeere 'void' and Hohlraum 'hollow space';the Schrift-Bilder of urban advertising and
their excess of legibility. I give a double frame
tomy discussion, one frame taken from pho
tography, the other from architecture. I propose to read the modernist miniature as a
snapshot of urban space and to see itas a field
of experimentation to test thevalidity ofwhat
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
ing6)inmodern architecture. The modernist
miniature can be shown to complicate the
commonsense understanding of the snapshot
just as itreveals the threatening aspect of the
new experience of space, which is absent in
Giedion's account of the programmatic, even
Utopian dimensions of building inglass, iron,
and concrete.4
Snapshot at first sight suggests superfici
ality, reification of time, arbitrariness of the
image.Itmay
also seem
poorly
chosen as a
guiding concept todiscuss thenew modernist
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122.1 Andreas Huyssen 33
regime of space, since photography remains
tied to theperspectival organization of space,which is challenged and transformed in the
modernist miniature just as it is inmodernist
painting, paradigmatically in cubism. But itis the temporal rather than spatial dimension
of the snapshot that justifies itsusage here.
After all, snapshots can be fundamentally
opaque and mysterious, resisting interpretation. Think ofMichelangelo Antonioni's Blow
Up and the photographer's frustration read
inghis 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 photographthat eludes transparence, "that accident which
pricks me (but also bruises me, ispoignant to
me)" (27). The easy legibility of the snapshotis amyth. Similarly, themodernist miniature
seems easily legible, butmore often than not
it resists facile understanding. Snapshots also
must be carefully read because, asMaurice
Merleau-Ponty once noted, any photographholds open a specificmoment that the rush of
(lived) timewould otherwise have immediately closed (39).The snapshotmarks the spacewhere the present turns intomemory, but si
multaneously itpreserves the appearance of a
presence.5When transposed intowriting, this
unexpected eruption onto the scene of vision
thatBarthes called thepunctum andMerleau
Ponty described in its temporal dimension
as the holding open of the moment in spacetoward itspresent, itspast, and its future al
lows for a
palimpsestic writingof
space,one
that transcends the seen and the scene and
acknowledges thepresent 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 inquestionhere, however, articulate the negative side of
Durchdringung, its threatening, even horrify
ing dimension as experiencedby
the
subjectlost in urban space. This fundamental differ
ence in assessing the phenomenon of Durch
dringungas central to the experience ofurban
space could be further explored. It isno coin
cidence thatKracauer meshes the two oppos
ing senses of the concept most interestingly.Among thewriters 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 asmy main example. Space inhis
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, theKudamm 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
intodream space. In theminiature on theun
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.). Deeplyinfluenced by Georg Lukacs's notion of the
transcendental homelessness of the modern
subject, Kracauer deploys this triangulationto allegorize the fallen state of theworld?at
first in rather metaphysical ways and later,
from themid-1920s on, in sociological and
Marxist ways (Mulder).
Urban Space inKracauer'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"), firstpublished on 26 September 1926 in the feuilleton
of the Franfkurter Zeitung and republishedinDas Ornament der Masse in 1963 in the
introductory section entitled "Natiirliche Ge
ometric" ("Natural Geometry") (Das Orna
ment 12-13; Mass Ornament38-39).6
There
is absolutely nothing natural about thispiece.
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34 ModernistMiniatures: iterarynapshots fUrbanSpaces PMLA
The accompanying miniature "Die Bai" ("The
Bay"), a piece about the harbor ofMarseilles
that resonates stronglywith "The Quadran
gle,"makes itclear enough that the location is
theMediterranean city. From theKracauerBenjamin 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 hisMarseilles walks with Kra
cauer,writes after receiving a copy of themin
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 isnevermentioned.
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 subjectand object as succinctly as theGerman does
(Mass Ornament 38). The meaning, how
ever, is clear: "He whom the place finds did
not seek it."The uncanny reversal of humansubject 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, rifewith putrefied
smells, red lights suggesting brothels, signsinArabic, and dreamlike, contorted archi
tectural space?the condensed imaginary of
Marseilles's infamous harborquarter
as sen
suous and sleazy labyrinth:
Ein Hintertreppenquartier, die Prunkauf
gange fehlen. Turen stehen offen, aus denen
graugriinder Geruch derMeerabfalle schwelt,rote Lampchen weisen den Weg. An den
Durchblicken sindVersatzstiicke improvisiert:Reihen von Schwibbogen, arabische Schriftta
feln, Stufengewinde. (Das Ornament 12)
A backstairs
quarter,
it lacks the
magnificentascending entrances. Grayish-green smells of
sea waste comesmoldering out of open doors;
little red lamps lead theway. In the spacesthat afford a view, one finds improvised back
drops: rows of flying buttresses, Arabic signs,
stair
windings.(Mass Ornament 38)
Then thequadrangle, "einKarree, dasmit einer
Riesenform indas Geschlinge gestanzt worden
ist" 'which has been stamped into the urban
tanglewith a giant template' (13; 39), finds the
flaneur,who instantlybecomes itsprisoner. The
dreamlike spatial imaginary of the first sen
tences,with its reminiscences of urban scenes
inHofmannsthal'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
Eingefangenein seine Mitte gestossen. Er ist al
lein und ist es nicht. Ohne dass Beobachter zu
sehenwaren, dringen ihreBlickstrahlendurch
die Fensterladen, durch die Mauern_Split
ternackt stdieAngst; ihnenpreisgegeben_(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. Althoughno observers are
visible, the raysof theirgazes pierce throughthe shutters, through the walls. . .. Fear is
stark naked, at their mercy. (39)
The further analogy to certain court scenes
inKafka's Trial are obvious: "Ein Gericht tagtauf unsichtbaren Sitzen um das Karree" 'On
invisible seats around thequadrangle
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
itsmilitary barracks, its"Horizontalen ... mit
dem Lineal gezogen" 'horizontal lines drawn
with a ruler,' and the "hundischem Gehorsam"
'canine obedience' of thewall, whose strangely
nonvanishing lines lead into the quadrangle,
represent the natural geometry of Cartesian
perspectivalspace (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 justthe fear of empty open spaces that dwarf the
subject and unmoor itsperception; it is also
linked to the recognition of the disciplining
power of a rationalist and abstract regime of
visuality that denies agency to thehuman bodyas subject of sensual perception. It is in this
second sense that thequadrangle, ratherdidac
tically, is turned into an allegory of the state of
theworld, in the concluding paragraph:
Niemand sucht indem Knauel der Bilder
gange das Karree. Seine Grosse ware bei pein
licher Uberlegung massigzu 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
thedream: it sa squarewithoutmercy. (39)
The translation of "Knauel der Bildergange"as "tangle of pictorial alleys" inevitably loses
the notion of thewalking subject contained
in the neologism Bildergange 'image walks.'
Also note themove inGerman from the concrete Karree to the abstract Quadrat. The
translation of Quadrat as "square" does not
render thismove, since square inEnglish signifies 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 settlinginto their chairs. What observers? What
chairs?Where arewe?
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 overpowersthe subject in the center of thenow worldwide
quadrangle, the "Quadrat ohne Erbarmen"
'square without mercy.' The cold geometry of
invisible gazes overwhelms the "soft,privateparts of the dream" ("Traumweichteile"), justas the quadrangle wins out over the labyrinthine "tangle of pictorial alleys" ("Knauel der
Bildergange"). The fateof 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 geometric space across theworld: natural geometrywithout
mercy.No need to
pointout how this
text translates the critique of rationalization
Weber's iron cage, ifyou will?into concrete
urban space and its imprisoning effecton 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 ofmind
he calls Strassenrausch 'street euphoria, intox
ication' is lost in a side streetunknown tohim
in theproletarian Quartier Grenelle. Suddenlya nightmarish perception overcomes him:
Aber nun geschah es: kaum hatte ichmichvon der weissen, ubertrieben hohen Theater
wand abgelost,so fiel mir das Weitergehen
schwer, und ich spurte, dass unsichtbare
Netze mich aufhielten. DieStrasse,
inder ich
mich befand, gabmich nicht frei. (244-45)
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36 Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces PMLA
But now ithappened: hardly had I come de
tached from thewhite, excessively highwall
of the theater, had troublewalking on, and I
felt nvisiblenetsholdingme back. The street
inwhich I foundmyself keptme captive.
(mytrans.)
He then sees several hotel signswithout names
on derelict buildings, which suggest prostitution. Stepping up toone of thesehotels, thenar
rator suddenly becomes conscious of the fact
dass ich beobachtet worden war. Aus den
Obergeschossfenstern mehrerer Hauser sahen
Burschen inHemdsarmeln und schludrigge
kleideteWeiber aufmich nider. Sie sprachenkein Wort, sie schauten mich immer nur an.
Eine schrecklicheGewalt gingvon ihrer los
senGegenwart aus, und ichhielt 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
sleevesand slovenlycladwomen were lookingdown 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 itwasthey who had put
me in fetters. As theywere standing mute and
motionless, they seemed to have been hatched
from the houses themselves. Any moment,
they could have stretched out their tentaclesand pulledme into therooms. (mytrans.)
If illicit sexuality and class anxietycombine in this surreal scene, a comparable
spatial situation appears in a more purged, ab
stracted, and more violent form inKafka's di
aries, a rich source ofmodernist miniatures:
Durch das Parterrefenster eines Hauses an ei
nem um den Hals gelegten Strick hineingezo
gen und ohne Rucksicht wie von einem der
nichtachtgibt,blutendund zerfetzt, urch alle
Zimmerdecken, Mobel, Mauern und Dachbo
den hinaufgerissen werden, bis oben auf dem
Dach die leere Schlinge erscheint,diemeine
Reste erstbeimDurchbrechen derDachziegelverlorenhat. (Tagebiicher567-68)
To be pulled in through the ground-floorwindow of a house by a rope tied around
one's neck and tobe yanked up, bloody and
ragged, through all the ceilings, furniture,
walls, and attics, without consideration, as if
bya person who is paying
no attention, until
up on the roof the empty noose appears, hav
ing lost hold ofwhat remained ofme only as
itbroke through the roof's tiles.
(Diaries 291; trans,modified)
Here theminiature is condensed into one
breathless sentence, at the end ofwhich the
narrator's body has been thoroughly disap
peared, leaving onlythe empty
noose?a sur
real vision of an urban hanging thatdestroysboth human body and built space. The passive voice points to the absence of an execu
tioner. Rather than provide protection and
shelter, the building has become a tool, ifnotthe 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 themid-1920s. At the
same time, Kafka's Angst-Raume 'spaces of
anxiety' lack the social and philosophical lan
guage that characterizes Kracauer s renderingof urban space, which, as a result, poses fewer
riddles to the interpreter. et reading these texts
togethermakes itclear thatwe are confrontingnot simply a case of intertextual influence.Kaf
ka's and Kracauer's approachesto urban space
are grounded in the similar effects themodern
cityhad on itsmost astute observers.
I could go on and compare the spatialterror 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 stepfurther and to establish the analogy between
urban experience and war experience,a fre
quent topos inWeimar literature and paint
ing.7 In all threewriters, the terror is suddenand nameless, tied to the hidden power of ur
ban space and itsDurchdringung, 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 objectiveworld, are constantly crossed, endangeringthe coherence of the narrating
or narrated,
observing or observed subject.If the terror experienced by the sub
ject emanates mainly from outdoor urban
space inRilke, Kafka, Kracauer, and Junger,it isnot absent from the bourgeois interieur,
once celebrated as the space of privilege and
protection from an unfriendly and danger
ous outside. Thus inEinbahnstrasse, Benjamin speaks tongue in cheek of "Schrecken
derWohnung" 'the horror of apartments'
(88; One-Way Street 446). The arrangementof nineteenth-century furniture is to him
"the site plan of deadly traps, and the suite
of rooms prescribes the path of the fleeingvictims" (446). The bourgeois interior "wird
adaquat allein der Leiche zur Behausung"
'fittinglyhouses only the corpse.' And: "Auf
diesem Sofakann die
Tante nurermordetwerden" 'On this sofa the aunt cannot but
be murdered' (89; 447). Ten years later Kra
cauer took up the theme of indoormurder as
favorite topic of theboulevard press, but here
the focus was the anonymous hotel room as
the space ofmurder sensationalized in the
press (Schriften 5.3 293). In Benjamin's text,
thebourgeois interiorwith all itsfurnishings,
potted nature, and collected knickknacks is
as
subjectto intrusions from the outside as is
the traditional bourgeois self and its inward
ness. Think of the disruptive ringing of door
bells or telephones inBenjamin's miniatures.
Or, for thatmatter, inKafka's Trial. The house
of the self inboth senses caves in. It caves in
because the boundary between the secure
private space of thebourgeois 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 contextas well (Menninghaus): thresholds not justbetween interior and street life (think of the
all-important space of the loggia inBerliner
Kindheit) but also between dream and wak
ing, past and present, lifeand death, surface
world and myth-laden underworld. The slightelevation of the Schwelle 'threshold' on the
floor separating one room from another was
one of the distinctive features ofBerlin apart
ments in the old and newWest ofBenjamin'stime, but it is imbued inhis writing with an
allegorical dimension that exceeds any singlearchitectural, anthropological, philosophical,ormythic referentiality.
Time and again, miniatures by Benjaminand 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 differentdegrees, all thesewriters read thisbreakdown
as a symptom ofmajor 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 theirvery form record and construct a new
sensibility inperceiving time and space. There
is a certain logic of form in that Benjamin'sProustian memory project, his Berliner Kind
heit umNeunzehnhundert,
comes to us as a
carefully constructed montage ofminiatures
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38 ModernistMiniatures: iterarynapshots f UrbanSpaces PMLA
rather than as an extended narrative innovel
or autobiographical form. InBerliner Chronik,
the Berlin montage preceding Berliner Kind
heit, Benjamin distinguished his project from
autobiography as a temporal form focusingon "den stetigen Fluss des Lebens" 'the con
tinuous flowof life.'He continued, "Hier aber
istvon einem Raum, von Augenblicken, vom
Unstetigen die Rede" 'Here I am talking of a
space, ofmoments and discontinuities' (488;Berlin Chronicle 612). Time givesway to space,
continuity todas Unstetige, the sovereign sur
veying gaze to the spatially isolating and frag
menting look through themagnifying glass,
as itwere. Adorno's aphorism about the splinter in the eye asmagnifying glass captures the
kind ofvision thatgenerates thewriting of the
modernist miniature (Minima Moralia 57).
Giedion and Durchdringung
IfDurchdringung ofinside and outside, sub
ject and object, private and public space is
presented in the modernist miniature as
Angst-Raum 'space of anxiety' and AngstTraum 'nightmare,' it took on entirely
positive, even Utopian connotations in the
architectural discourse of the 1920s. The idea
that space was central tomodernist 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 itsUtopian visions
in thework 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 piecearchived 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 farhardlyunderstood ("bisher noch kaum erfasst" ["Ex
pose"]). In his Frankfurter Zeitung review of
the StuttgarterWerkbund exhibition of 1927he emphasized the dissolution of traditional
perspective in urban housing, in interior de
sign (Loos comes tomind), 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 literaryminiatures.
SiegfriedGiedion, inhis 1928work Bauen
inFrankreich, Bauen inEisen, Bauen inEisenbeton, a programmatic statement about the
promises ofmodern architecture thatwas
extensively excerpted inBenjamin's notes for
his arcades project, describes this new spatial
experience with themultivalent termDurch
dringung, which opens up a new form of see
ing.According to the felicitous phrasing byarchitectural historian Hilde Heynen, Durch
dringung "stands for aweakening of hierar
chical models on all levels?social as well asarchitectural" (35).What appears as terroriz
ing spatial experience in themodernist minia
ture appears here as the liberatory dimension
ofDurchdringung and a new understandingof architectural space. Giedion writes:
Es scheint unsfraglich, ob der beschrankte
BegrifF'Architektur" uberhaupt bestehen blei
ben wird. Wir konnten kaum Auskunft iiber
die Frage geben: Was gehortzur 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 bildenmit dem Bahnof eine
einzigeGrosse. (Bauen 6)
It seems doubtfulwhether the limitedcon
cept of "architecture" will indeed endure.
We canhardly
answer the question: What
belongs toarchitecture?Where does itbegin,where does itend?
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i22.i Andreas Huyssen 39
Fields overlap:walls no longer rigidlyde
fine streets. The street has been transformed
into a stream of movement. Rail lines and
trains, together with the railroad station,
formasingle
whole.(Building90)
If architecture's realm is no longer justthatof built objects but also one of spatial and
social relations, as Giedion suggests, then one
could argue that themodernist miniature, de
spite its largelynegative coding of Durchdrin
gung, is the literary analogue of this new wayof seeing and experiencing space. One would
thenwant to define the literary techniques
correspondingto architectural Durchdrin
gung as the intermingling of spaces throughthepartial absence of floors (as for instance in
such nineteenth-century iron constructions
as the Eiffel Tower) or the interpenetrationof equivalent volumes that erase the borders
between them (Gropius's Bauhaus inDessau).This project could further draw on contem
porary suggestions such as Ernst Cassirer's,
"dass das Raumproblem zum Ausgangspunkteiner neuen
Selbstbesinnung der Asthetikwerden 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 ofwriting strategies in themodern
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 arguethis
point: the interminglingof spatial mappings, urban space as social
space, the loss of the subject's firm stand
point, visual and bodily disorientation, fall
ing throughmissing floors as in Junger's "Das
Entsetzen" ("The Horror") or being pulled up
through ceilings as inKafka, bodies of philo
sophical and descriptive text overlapping or
interpenetrating one another, and so forth.
Both architecture and literature reflect new
modes ofseeing
andexperiencing space and
time, and as with the introduction of all new
technologies, the result is amix 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'toomuch into the orbit of his philosophy of
history,which interprets the city exclusivelyas emblem of alienation, ego loss, reifica
tion, and anomie, as the catastrophic spaceof amodernity 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 itcan be compared with Benjamin's no
tion of an empty homogeneous time orwith
Bloch's characterization ofWeimar's Neue
Sachlichkeit 'New Sobriety' as "Funktionen
imHohlraum" 'functions in the void' (Erb
schaft 212; my trans.). But as the differentia
tion of spatial models in "The Quadrangle"
already suggested, urban space inKracauer is
not coded exclusively as homogeneous nega
tivity.As Paris and Berlin provide the privi
leged spaces forhis texts, one can note how
he differentiates between the two cities. The
street in Paris still functions as site ofmem
ory and experience, while streets in Berlin
either scream with emptiness ("Schreie auf
der Strasse" [Schriften 5.2 207]) or undergosuch rapid architectural change that theyno
longer hold anymemory of the past ("Strasse
ohne Erinnerung" [Schriften 5.3 170-74]).Berlin is seen as the decisive cauldron ofmo
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 thevisitor fromBerlin.
In "Pariser Beobachtungen" ("Paris Observa
tions" [1927]), Kracauer writes about France:
Die Gesellschaft dauert fortals habe sieden
Krieg wirklich gewonnen, man spricht uberKunst 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 ihreGenerale
sind echte Generale. (Schriften .2 25)
Society continues as if ithad reallywon the
war. One speaks about art and literature as in
lost decades. Property and dowry exude an
odor of holiness, and their generalsare 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 theUtopia of reason also emerges if
we compare the severalminiatures that focus
on advertising. In "Langeweile" ("Boredom"
[1924]), Kracauer analyzes the historical de
cline of boredom as a creative mental state.
Here iswhat hewrites about the flaneurwalk
ing the street in the evening:
Da Ziehen leuchtendeWorte an den Dachern
voruber, und schon istman aus der eigenen
Leere in die fremde Reklame verbannt. Der
Korper schlagt Wurzeln im Asphalt, und der
Geist, der nicht mehr unser Geist ist, streiftmit
den aufklarenden Lichtbekundungen endlos
aus derNacht indie Nacht.Ware ihmnoch 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 thenight. Ifonly itwere allowed to
disappear. (Mass Ornament 332)
This is still the subjective discourse of loss,typical of an antiurban German Kulturkritik,
before Kracauer turned tomore sociologicallyand politically inflected views. The description of "Lichtreklame" 'electric advertising' of
1927 isvery different:
Die Lichtreklamegeht an einemHimmel auf,indem 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 sichmit Lichteffektenin
lassen. Licht bleibtLicht,und strahltes gar in
alien Farben, so bricht es erst recht aus den
Bahnen, die ihm von seinen Auftraggebernvor
gezeichnet sind.... Der Reklamespriihregen,
den dasWirtschaftsleben ausschiittet, ird zuSternbildern an einem fremden Himmel.
(Schriften.2 19)
Electric ads rise in the heavens that nolonger
harbor angels but are not all commerce either.
They exceed economics, and what ismeant as
advertising becomes illumination. Such things
happenwhen businessmen handle light ffects.
Lightremains light, ndwhen it hines inall its
colors, itreally reaks thebounds setby its on
tractors. ... The drizzle of advertising poured
forthby economic life is transformed into a
constellation in an alien sky. (my trans.)
Lichtreklame as uncontrollable excess
points to an alternative future tobe read as a
Sternbild 'constellation' in an alien sky.Even
ifoverall the rhetoric is less apocalyptic than
in the earlier text, the form of theminiature
ismuch the same. It remains so until 1933, by
which time thedystopian vision has returned,supported now byKracauer's concrete obser
vations of social realities after the crash of
1929. In "Die Unterfuhrung" ("The Under
pass"), aminiature about a passage under the
rail lines at Bahnhof Charlottenburg, which
is always crowded with travelers,beggars, and
hawkers, Kracauer makes much of the opposition of the oppressive and unshakable iron
and concrete low-ceiling construction and the
human chaos ofmotion. Both, however, eludeany kind of human rational Durchdringung:
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122.1Andreas Huyssen 41
Unmenschlich ist bernichtnurdie Planlosigkeit, mit der die Menschen umhertreiben, son
dern auch die planmassige Konstruktion der
Passage_Ein System, das soundurchdrungen
und verlassen istwie das anarchische Gemisch
derPassanten und Bettler. (Schriften.3 41)
Inhuman is not only the aimlessness, with
which people drift bout,but also theplannedconstruction of the passage.... It is a system
just as opaque and forsaken as the anarchic
mix ofpassersby and beggars. (mytrans.)
The Utopian dimension ofDurchdringung,articulated by Giedion before the crash, has
not been fulfilled. One ofKracauer's lastBer
linminiatures, published just a couple of daysafter itsauthor leftBerlin forgood on 28 Feb
ruary 1933 to enter the extraterritoriality of
exile, describes the silent crowds looking at
the burnt Reichstag theday after the fatal fire:
Die Blicke dringen durch dieses Symbol hin
durch, und tauchen in den Abgrund nieder,
den seine Zerstorung eroffnet. (211)
Thegazes penetrate
andgo through
this
symbol, and theydive down into the abyss
opened up by itsdestruction. (mytrans.)
In certain ways, "Rund um den Reichstag"marks the logical, though not chronological,end point of themodernist miniature as a specific form in the urban feuilleton. If themain
function of the formwas to enable readers to
see the dangers and pleasures of urban life in
new ways, to open up the surfaces of urban
space to thedangerous and exhilarating depths
underlying them, then that depth has now
been transformed into an Abgrund, the abyssthat sixyears laterwas to engulf theworld.
Notes1. For a fuller discussion of Rilke's novel, see Huys
sen 105-26 ("Paris/Childhood: The
Fragmented Bodyin
Rilke's Notebooks ofMalte 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 ofworks by Kafka,
Musil, Benn, and Junger as well as by Benjamin, Bloch,
and Adorno. What has always intriguedme
about thisspecific mode ofwriting is that, in the wake of Baude
laire, itwas practiced bymost of themajor modernists in
Germany and Austria as well as by themajor representatives 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 photographyhas 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
inmodernism.
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 inKracauer's "Photography"inMass 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 ofDas abenteuerli
cheHerzy see Huyssen 127-44 ("Fortifying theHeart
Totally: Ernst Junger's Armored Texts").
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