Huyssen Urban Miniatures

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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







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.








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










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







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.







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







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)








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








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







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?








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








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:







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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Documents

Huyssen Urban Miniatures