Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces, Andreas Huyssen

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 .Accessed: 31/03/2014 20:07

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12 2.1

Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces

ANDREAS HUYSSEN

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass. ?Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

ANDREAS HUYSSEN is the Villard Pro

fessor of German and Comparative Lit

erature and founding director of the

Center for Comparative Literature and

Society at Columbia University. He is a

senior editor of New German Critique. His books include After the Great Divide:

Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism

(Indiana UP, 1986), Twilight Memories:

Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia

(Routledge, 1995), and Present Pasts:

Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of

Memory (Stanford UP, 2003). An edited

volume on Third World cities, entitled

Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imagi naries in a Globalizing Age, is forthcom

ing from Duke University Press.

AT A REVEALING POINT IN RAINER MARIA RILKE'S THE NOTE books ofMalte Laurids Brigge, written before World War I, in the years 1904-10, the narrator, traumatized by metropolitan

life, laments, "Dass man erzahlte, wirklich erzahlte, das mufi vor meiner Zeit gewesen sein" 'The days when people knew, really knew how to tell stories must have been before my time' (Aufzeichnungen 844; Notebooks 146). A generation later, in the famous 1936 essay "The Storyteller," Walter Benjamin diagnosed the end of storytelling as the result of the destruction of experience in the trenches: "Begin ning with the First World War, a process became apparent which continues to this day. Wasn't it noticeable at the end of the war that

men who returned from the battlefield had grown silent?not richer, but poorer in communicable experience?" What follows this rhetori cal question is that well-known enumeration of destructive aspects of modernity, ending with the cosmic vision of the "tiny, fragile hu man body" beneath the clouds, "in a force field of destructive tor rents and explosions" (143-44). The imagination of destruction took a different form in Rilke's prewar text, but the crisis of traditional

experiences of time and space in the metropolis already pointed to that of the battlefield: shock, violence, and anonymous death per vade the early pages of Rilke's novel, and they affect its narrative form. Already the first sentence of the novel has this to say about Paris: "So, also hierher kommen die Leute, um zu leben, ich wiirde eher meinen, es stiirbe sich hier" 'So this is where people come to live: I would have thought it is a city to die in' (709; 3).

? 2007 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA 27


28 Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces PMLA

With Malte, Rilke turned to prose be cause his ability to write poetry seemed to have abandoned him. Thus the narrator's re flections on poetry: "Denn Verse sind nicht,

wie die Leute meinen Gefuhle (die hat man fruh genug),?es sind Erfahrungen" 'Poems are not, as people think, simply emotions

(one has emotions early enough)?they are

experiences/ But what is experience? Malte continues: "Urn eines Verses willen muss man

viele Stadte sehen, Menschen und Dinge ...

Man muss zuriickdenken konnen an Wege in unbekannten Gegenden, an unerwartete Be

gegnungen und an Abschiede, die man lange kommen sah" 'For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and

Things-You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unex

pected encounters, and to partings you had

long seen coming....' Writing poems also

requires a wealth of memories. But, as Malte

writes, "Und es geniigt auch noch nicht, dass man Erinnerungen hat. Man muss sie ver

gessen konnen, wenn es viele sind, und man muss die grosse Geduld haben, zu warten, dass sie wiederkommen" c[I]t is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they re

turn' (724; 19-20). It sounds very Proustian avant la lettre, to be sure, but Proust's heroic achievement of grounding narrative one more

time in the remembrance of things past eludes Malte. Malte's attempt to regain a lost form of experience, the one that can be rendered as Erzahlung cstory,' shipwrecks. The coher

ence^ the novel form disintegrates into frag ments, mere Aufzeichnungen, sketches that soon even lose their temporal moorings in the diary form. The novel begins with a series of miniatures focusing on perception and its disorientation. The second miniature reads:

Dass ich es nicht lassen kann, bei offenem Fen

ster zu schlafen. Elektrische Bahnen rasen lau

tend durch meine Stube. Automobile gehen

liber mich hin. Eine Tiir fallt zu. Irgendwo klirrt eine Scheibe herunter, ich hore ihre

grossen Scherben lachen, die kleinen Splitter kichern. Dann plotzlich dumpfer, eingeschlos sener Larm von der anderen Seite, innen im

Hause. Jemand steigt die Treppe. Kommt.

Kommt unaufhorlich. 1st da, ist lange da, geht vorbei. Und wieder die Strasse. Ein Madchen kreischt: Ah tais-toi, je ne veux plus. Die Elektri

sche rennt ganz erregt heran, dariiber fort, fort

uber alles. Jemand ruft. Leute laufen, uberho

len sich. Ein Hund bellt. Was fur eine Erleichte

rung: ein Hund. Gegen Morgen kraht sogar ein Hahn, und das ist Wohltun ohne Grenzen.

Dann schlafe ich plotzlich ein. (710)

To think that I can't give up the habit of

sleeping with the window open. Electric trol

leys speed clattering through my room. Cars drive over me. A door slams. Somewhere a

windowpane shatters on the pavement; I can

hear its large fragments laugh and its small ones giggle. Then suddenly a dull, muffled noise from the other direction, inside the

house. Someone is walking up the stairs: is

approaching, ceaselessly approaching: is

there, is there for a long time, then passes on. And again the street. A girl screams, Ah,

tais-toi, je ne veux plus. The trolley races up

excitedly, passes on over it, over everything. Someone calls out. People are running, catch

up with each other. A dog barks. What a re

lief: a dog. Toward morning there is even a

rooster crowing, and that is an infinite plea sure. Then suddenly I fall asleep. (4-5)

For Rilke, an extended sense of orderly spaces and times is no longer to be had. Experience itself is in an epochal crisis, as Benjamin claims, and this crisis affected Rilke's writing of both poetry and narrative.1

Rilke's and Benjamin's suggestion that the

age of storytelling had ended has nothing to do with the nostalgia of which both authors have often been dismissively accused. The di

agnostic premonitions underlying this alleged nostalgia were thoroughly misconstrued. As a

result, their novel kind of writing practice was not understood. Although Benjamin seems


i22.i Andreas Huyssen 29

to theorize the loss of storytelling in his essay "The Storyteller," it is much more interesting to

read his literary endeavors in Einbahnstrasse, Berliner Chronik, or Berliner Kindheit as the modernist transformation of an older type of

Erzahlung. Instead his literary prose pieces were read as autobiography, while Rilke's Malte was absurdly read as a bildungsroman rather than a city novel in fragments. The diffi

culty was to properly name this new form that exceeded traditional generic descriptions such as Kurzprosa, aphorism, fragment, sketch, re

citpoetique, poeme en prose, parable. Rilke's writing practice in the Notebooks

is important for my argument in yet another sense. It couples the breakdown of the tempo ral dimension of erzahlen 'to narrate' and the

spatial aspect of erfahren 'to experience' with a foregrounding of vision and the legibility of urban space. The narrator in Edgar Allan Poe's Man of the Crowd introduces that ur ban allegory with the German words "Es lasst sich nicht lesen" 'It cannot be read' (506; my trans.). Malte's project in Paris, however, is different. It is "learning to see" (Notebooks 6) rather than to read or write ("Ich lerne sehen"

[Aufzeichnungen 710]), even though writing about seeing is what Malte ends up doing.

This first part of the Notebooks, writ ten at the time when Franz Kafka began to

develop his early experimental prose and when Robert Walser wrote many of his urban

newspaper feuilleton pieces, remains central to the trajectory of the modernist miniature as a minor genre attractive to poets, novelists,

and philosophers in subsequent decades. In German and Austrian literature, modernist miniatures flourished in the first three de cades of the twentieth century, in Hugo von

Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Walser, Robert Musil, Gottfried Benn, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Jun ger, Siegfried Kracauer, Ernst Bloch, Walter

Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno, as well as in lesser-known authors such as Peter Altenberg,

Alfred Polgar, Franz Hessel, Mynona, and Walter Serner. Among Germanists, many of

these texts are fairly well known. All the more

puzzling is the absence of any broader critical

analysis that attempts to read this whole body of writing as a central phenomenon of mod ernism. The modernist miniature as a specific mode of writing may indeed be more central to the new in literary modernism than the novel or poetry.

Historical Excursus

A brief historical excursus is in order here, before I turn to the issue of the miniature itself. The place of the restructuring of tem

poral and spatial perception, for which the modernist miniature is an important field of

experimentation, is the metropolis at a time when it was an island of modernization in a

society in which country and small-town life were still dominant but losing ground?the period of high modernism stretching from Charles Baudelaire's Paris to Arthur Schnitz

ler's, Hofmannsthal's, and Krauss's Vienna

to the Paris of the cubists and surrealists; the Berlin of expressionism, left-wing Dada, and

Brecht; and the Moscow of Sergey Tretyakov, Sergey Eisenstein, and Dziga Vertov.

Attempts to write the metropolitan city, its seething chaos, its filth, and its miseries as much as its exhilaration and exuberance,

were not new in 1900. We can think of Bal zac's Paris, Dickens's London, Engels's Man

chester, or Dostoevsky's Saint Petersburg: their texts present us with earlier fictional and sociological reflections on urbanization and modernization. But it is enough to com

pare these novels or Theodor Fontane's Berlin

novels, written as late as the 1880s and 1890s, with Rilke's Notebooks or the modernist city novels by James Joyce, John Dos Passos, and Alfred Doblin to realize that something fun damental changed in the literary representa tion of social space in the city. The modernist

miniature enters our discussion as a specific feuilleton form that departs in significant ways from those earlier city narratives.



Something else must be said about the

genealogy of what I call the modernist min iature. Short prose forms existed well before 1900. Consider the aphorisms of the French

moralists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries or of Georg Lichtenberg's Sudel

biicher; the fragments of the Jena Romantics; forms such as the anecdote, the calendar or almanac story, the epigram; and all those short notices, sketches, and observations pub lished in newspapers and feuilletons since the

eighteenth century. Yet the modernist min iature differs significantly from those other short prose forms?though, not coinciden

tally, the feuilleton turns out to be the me dium of preference for its writers.

Attempts to define such Kurzprosa in ge neric or poetic terms have generally not been successful. My emphasis here is therefore not on a genre poetics but on the brief trajectory of a privileged form-content-medium triangle at a specific time and a specific place.2 The ir

ritating and exhilarating novelty of the me

tropolis at the end of the nineteenth century and the immediately following decades must be recaptured and historicized if we want to understand how that crisis of perception gen erated the modernist miniature as part of a

much broader process of the urbanization

of literature. Why did this new form, which seems less bound than the novel or the mod ern epic to a national culture, flourish so em

phatically in German writing? The flourishing may have been an effect of the exceptionally fast-paced late-nineteenth-century urban

growth in Vienna and Berlin as compared with such older European cities as London and Paris, and it surely can be related to the

collapse of the German and Austrian Empires in 1918. But the specific crisis of perception that initiated a new relation to space and time, as it is articulated in the modernist miniature

from Kafka and Rilke to Kracauer and Ben

jamin, has now become history, nostalgia, cliche. All too often today the texts resulting from this crisis are simply read as anticipating

postmodernism (Weimar surfaces, rhizomic

culture, minor literature, the culture of the

spectacle, etc.). We must resist such presentist appropriation and back shadowing if we are interested in the specificity and nonidentity of cultural phenomena over time. It is pre cisely because there is some truth to the argu ment that something fundamental changed in

post-World War II modernity that we should

guard against such elisions of historical dif ference. For after World War II, metropolitan urbanity in the West invaded and saturated all social space through consumerism, the

automobile, air travel, and mass communica

tions. My hunch is that while short prose is still being written in various forms, we would have to look to other media and their effects on our lives to determine whether or not the

perceptual regime of modernism has itself been altered or transformed into something new in our own time.

The Writing of Bilder

Rilke, I have argued, represents only one be

ginning of the metropolitan miniature, which has its own genealogy with the Baudelairean

poeme en prose. As we know, modernism de

veloped unevenly?it came earlier to Paris

than to London or Berlin. Indeed, Baudelaire,

always the "Herold der Moderne" 'herald of

modernism,' as Adorno once called him (As thetische Theorie 201; Aesthetic Theory 133),

anticipated much of what later came to be known in German scholarship as Prosagedicht, in France recit poetique as it evolved through Rimbaud, Lautreamont, and Mallarme to the surrealists. But the prose fragments of Rilke's

Malte are not really prose poems in the Baude lairean sense. They lack Baudelaire's irony and

distance, coming much closer to the emphatic Ausdruckskunst that emerged with expres sionism, its spatial disorientation, auditory confusion, and disturbances of vision. They also differ in their coding of subjectivity (e.g., Rilke's use of the diary form and of a fictional


122.1 Andreas Huyssen 31

protagonist) from the postexpressionist min iatures by such writers as Kracauer, Junger, Benjamin, and Bloch. Some of this difference results from the authors' differing discourses

(sociology, philosophy, literature) and genres of writing (poetry or prose). But there is an

other, perhaps more important, dimension.

Something else had to happen to trans form the prose poem into the modernist min iature of the interwar years, which, together

with the documentary, is one of the few genu inely novel modes of writing created by mod ernism in its love affair with the feuilleton of

European newspapers such as the Neue Presse in Vienna; the Neue Rundschau; the Frank

furter Zeitung; and other dailies, weeklies, or

monthlies. When the Baudelairean tradition of writing and reading the city merged with

developments internal to philosophy?as philosophy became ever more literary in the

aphoristic writings of such antisystemic phi losophers as Kierkegaard and Nietzsche?the

prose poem shifted to a specific kind of highly condensed short prose that has come to be known as Denkbild 'thought image' (by Ben

jamin), Raumbild 'space image' (by Kracauer), Wortbild 'word image' (by Hofmannsthal),

Korperbild 'body image' (by Junger), Bewusst seinsbild 'consciousness image' (by Benn), and simply Bilder 'images' and Betrachtungen 'observations' (subtitles in Musil's Nachlass zu Lebzeiten [Posthumous Papers of a Liv

ing Author]). The writing of such Bilder was now a separate enterprise from the writing of the novel or even, as for Rilke, the fictional

diary. The recourse to the visual in naming this literary form is striking, but it also poses certain problems. All these Bilder come in the medium of written language and thus have to be read as Schriften 'writings.' They play off the fundamental difference between

Schrift and Bild, attempting to strike sparks from their confrontation in the miniature. As

Schrift-Bilder 'scriptural images' they draw on the tradition of the hieroglyph, as Miriam Hansen has shown in her work on hiero

glyphic writing and mass cultural images in Kracauer and Adorno. As such they are not

easily legible. The visual dimension disturbs

legibility, and the promise of linguistic trans

parency is denied in the complex texture of

ekphrasis, metaphor, and abstraction. Bild is never meant here simply as a stand-in for Gemalde 'painting' and its post-Renaissance regime of perspectival visuality. Even less is it identical to photography, understood as un

mediated realism. Remember the Benjamin ian distinction between Bild and Abbild: only

Abbild refers to simple representation. In a more pragmatic register, the recourse

to Schrift-Bilder could be easily explained. Al

ready since the later nineteenth century, the streets of the metropolis were full of store

signs, street signs, electric ads, the marquees of theaters and movie palaces, Litfassaulen (advertisement pillars), sandwich men, and so on. And then there was the medium of

publication itself. Before being gathered in book form under an overarching title, most of these miniatures were published separately in the feuilleton, an urban literary medium

that, as part of a newspaper, often combined text and image.

But such pragmatic observations fall short of addressing the deeper question. Bilder are typically two-dimensional and suggest perspectival organization. It was, however,

precisely perspectival viewing that metro

politan experience threw into turmoil. What if all these modernist miniatures, described as

Bilder, account for a different organization of sensual, not only visual but also auditory and embodied, perception that the metropolis gen erated? I propose that the advantage the Bild offered to these writers lay in that a Bild, in this more than visual sense, condensed the ex tensions of time and space, compressed them into an overdetermined synchronous image that was significantly different from ambling description, sequential observation, or the

merely empirical urban sketch. My reading of

paradigmatic texts tests this hypothesis.



Let me dramatize a bit for argument's sake. At stake with modernist miniatures

was a profound transformation of the literary project that crossed the disciplining border line between language and the visual, between narrative and space, as it was codified in the

eighteenth century in G. E. Lessing's Laokoon. Rilke is only an early example here for this

largely undertheorized phenomenon within

modernism, the other side of what Franco Moretti has called the modern epic as distinct from the novel.3 Much as the modern epic has been neglected or domesticated by scholars, the miniature has been seen as a minor genre at best by comparison with the heroic efforts of the modern novel or the seminal cycle of

poems. And even where it has been recog nized as an important part of a writer's oeuvre

(Kafka, Junger, and Benjamin come to mind), it is more often avoided than actually read.

As a specific historical form, the mod ernist miniature emerges only in retrospect. It has that in common with Moretti s modern

epic. The authors who engaged in writing such miniatures did not know how to name the

genre. Thus Bloch, with his Spuren (Traces) and sections of Erbschaft dieserZeit (Heritage of Our Times) another major contributor to this new mode of writing, lamented in a let

ter to Kracauer (June 1926), "Hatte man nur einen Namen fur die neue Form, die keine mehr ist" 'If only we had a name for the new

form, which is no longer a form' (Briefe 278;

my trans.). Robert Musil in turn, in a review of Kafka's first book, Betrachtung, singles out Kafka's short prose and Walser's feuil

leton pieces as the prototype of a new mode of writing, which is however "nicht geeignet, einer literarischen Gattung vorzustehen" 'not

suitable to preside over a literary genre' (Mu sil 1468; my trans.). The new form as antiform resists the laws of genre as much as systemic philosophy or urban sociology, crossing the boundaries between poetry, fiction, and phi

losophy, between commentary and interpre tation, between language and the visual. But

as form it is firmly grounded in the microlog ical observation of metropolitan space, time, and life at that earlier stage of moderniza tion. If the modern epic in Moretti represents something like a national encyclopedia in the form of a macroscopic fictional map, then the

modernist miniature in all its incredible vari

ety represents the microscopic condensation of a metropolitan imaginary that never gels into some encyclopedic totality.

Schrift-Bilder, Photography, and Architecture

My examples for the modernist miniature fo cus on certain crucial aspects of reading and

seeing the city that reoccur in many texts: the

feeling of terror emanating from space; the loss of boundaries between private and public space, living space and street space; the motif oiLeere 'void' and Hohlraum 'hollow space'; the Schrift-Bilder of urban advertising and their excess of legibility. I give a double frame to my discussion, one frame taken from pho tography, the other from architecture. I pro pose to read the modernist miniature as a

snapshot of urban space and to see it as a field of experimentation to test the validity of what

Siegfried Kracauer described in the 1920s as "das neue Raumgefuhl" 'the new feeling of

space' ("Expose") and of what the architec tural historian Siegfried Giedion at the same time described as spatial Durchdringung 'in

terpenetration, overlapping' (Bauen 6; Build

ing 6) in modern architecture. The modernist miniature can be shown to complicate the commonsense understanding of the snapshot just as it reveals the threatening aspect of the new experience of space, which is absent in

Giedion's account of the programmatic, even

Utopian dimensions of building in glass, iron, and concrete.4

Snapshot at first sight suggests superfici ality, reification of time, arbitrariness of the

image. It may also seem poorly chosen as a

guiding concept to discuss the new modernist



regime of space, since photography remains tied to the perspectival organization of space,

which is challenged and transformed in the modernist miniature just as it is in modernist

painting, paradigmatically in cubism. But it is the temporal rather than spatial dimension of the snapshot that justifies its usage here. After all, snapshots can be fundamentally opaque and mysterious, resisting interpreta tion. Think of Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow

Up and the photographer's frustration read

ing his own snapshots, which seem to reveal a

murder he actually did not see. Any snapshot, as Roland Barthes has taught us, may have its

punctum, the dimension of the photograph that eludes transparence, "that accident which

pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to

me)" (27). The easy legibility of the snapshot is a myth. Similarly, the modernist miniature seems easily legible, but more often than not it resists facile understanding. Snapshots also

must be carefully read because, as Maurice

Merleau-Ponty once noted, any photograph holds open a specific moment that the rush of

(lived) time would otherwise have immedi

ately closed (39). The snapshot marks the space where the present turns into memory, but si

multaneously it preserves the appearance of a

presence.5 When transposed into writing, this

unexpected eruption onto the scene of vision that Barthes called the punctum and Merleau

Ponty described in its temporal dimension as the holding open of the moment in space toward its present, its past, and its future al lows for a palimpsestic writing of space, one that transcends the seen and the scene and

acknowledges the present and past imaginary any snapshot of space carries with it.

As snapshots of space open up to the

passing of time, modernist miniatures articu late the new dynamic experience of space in

Durchdringung. The literary texts in question here, however, articulate the negative side of

Durchdringung, its threatening, even horrify ing dimension as experienced by the subject lost in urban space. This fundamental differ

ence in assessing the phenomenon of Durch

dringungas central to the experience of urban

space could be further explored. It is no coin cidence that Kracauer meshes the two oppos

ing senses of the concept most interestingly. Among the writers I am considering, the

one with the arguably most astute sense of urban space is Kracauer, who was trained as

an architect and studied with the author of the Sociology of Space, Georg Simmel. Kra cauer serves as my main example. Space in his miniatures is typically triangulated. There is

concretely described architectural and urban

space such as the hotel lobby, the renovated

arcade, a street in a Paris neighborhood, the Kudamm in Berlin, the roller coaster, the

unemployment office. Urban space is coded

here, long before Henri Lefebvre's seminal

work, as social space, which is then textually transfigured into a spatial imaginary or even into dream space. In the miniature on the un

employment office, we read, "Die Raumbilder sind die Traume der Gesellschaft" 'The im

ages of space are the dreams of society' (Kra cauer, Schriften 5.2 186; my trans.). Deeply influenced by Georg Lukacs's notion of the transcendental homelessness of the modern

subject, Kracauer deploys this triangulation to allegorize the fallen state of the world?at first in rather metaphysical ways and later, from the mid-1920s on, in sociological and

Marxist ways (Mulder).

Urban Space in Kracauer's, Kafka's, and

Benjamin's Miniatures

Let us take "Das Karree" ("The Quadran gle"), one of two pieces under the umbrella title "Zwei Flachen" ("Two Planes"), first pub lished on 26 September 1926 in the feuilleton of the Franfkurter Zeitung and republished in Das Ornament der Masse in 1963 in the

introductory section entitled "Natiirliche Ge ometric" ("Natural Geometry") (Das Orna ment 12-13; Mass Ornament 38-39).6 There is absolutely nothing natural about this piece.



The accompanying miniature "Die Bai" ("The

Bay"), a piece about the harbor of Marseilles that resonates strongly with "The Quadran

gle," makes it clear enough that the location is the Mediterranean city. From the Kracauer

Benjamin correspondence we also know that Kracauer named the quadrangle Place de

l'Observance, that "uncanny square we en

countered at night" (my trans.), as Benjamin, remembering his Marseilles walks with Kra

cauer, writes after receiving a copy of the min iature from Kracauer himself ("das Portrat des unheimlichen Platzes, auf den wir nachts

stiessen"; Benjamin, Briefe 33). But the place name is estranged to the abstract quadrangle, and the name of the city is never mentioned.

The first sentence of the text contains a

punctum. "Nicht gesucht hat den Platz, wen er findet" (Das Ornament 12). The transla tion "Whoever the place finds did not seek it" does not quite capture the reversal of subject and object as succinctly as the German does

(Mass Ornament 38). The meaning, how

ever, is clear: "He whom the place finds did not seek it." The uncanny reversal of human

subject and urban space in the German sen tence immediately disorients the reader. The human subject becomes grammatical object; the empirical object becomes grammatical subject. The following sentences conjure up a

chaotic urban landscape, rife with putrefied smells, red lights suggesting brothels, signs in Arabic, and dreamlike, contorted archi tectural space?the condensed imaginary of

Marseilles's infamous harbor quarter as sen

suous and sleazy labyrinth:

Ein Hintertreppenquartier, die Prunkauf

gange fehlen. Turen stehen offen, aus denen

graugriin der Geruch der Meerabfalle schwelt, rote Lampchen weisen den Weg. An den

Durchblicken sind Versatzstiicke improvisiert: Reihen von Schwibbogen, arabische Schriftta feln, Stufengewinde. (Das Ornament 12)

A backstairs quarter, it lacks the magnificent

ascending entrances. Grayish-green smells of

sea waste come smoldering out of open doors;

little red lamps lead the way. In the spaces that afford a view, one finds improvised back

drops: rows of flying buttresses, Arabic signs, stair windings. (Mass Ornament 38)

Then the quadrangle, "ein Karree, das mit einer Riesenform in das Geschlinge gestanzt worden ist" 'which has been stamped into the urban

tangle with a giant template' (13; 39), finds the

flaneur, who instantly becomes its prisoner. The dreamlike spatial imaginary of the first sen

tences, with its reminiscences of urban scenes in Hofmannsthal's Marchen der 672. Nacht, is

replaced by a different spatial regime:

Auf dem menschenleeren Platz begibt sich dies: durch die Gewalt des Quadrats wird der

Eingefangene in seine Mitte gestossen. Er ist al

lein und ist es nicht. Ohne dass Beobachter zu

sehen waren, dringen ihre Blickstrahlen durch die Fensterladen, durch die Mauern_Split ternackt ist die Angst; ihnen preisgegeben_

(13)

On the deserted square something happens: the force of the quadrilateral pushes the per son who is trapped into its center. He is alone,

and yet he isn't. Although no observers are

visible, the rays of their gazes pierce through the shutters, through the walls.

. .. Fear is

stark naked, at their mercy. (39)

The further analogy to certain court scenes in Kafka's Trial are obvious: "Ein Gericht tagt auf unsichtbaren Sitzen um das Karree" 'On invisible seats around the quadrangle a tri bunal is in session.' The whole setup is a kind of Foucauldian panopticon in reverse, but no

less oppressive for that. The quadrangle with its military barracks, its "Horizontalen ... mit

dem Lineal gezogen" 'horizontal lines drawn with a ruler,' and the "hundischem Gehorsam" 'canine obedience' of the wall, whose strangely nonvanishing lines lead into the quadrangle, represent the natural geometry of Cartesian

perspectival space (13; 39, 38). But instead of

liberating the subject's body and permitting



visual control over the environment, this ab stract perspectival space exudes power and

domination, disciplining and surveillance. Kracauer's agoraphobia, which Anthony

Vidler has so brilliantly analyzed, is not just the fear of empty open spaces that dwarf the

subject and unmoor its perception; it is also

linked to the recognition of the disciplining power of a rationalist and abstract regime of

visuality that denies agency to the human body as subject of sensual perception. It is in this second sense that the quadrangle, rather didac

tically, is turned into an allegory of the state of the world, in the concluding paragraph:

Niemand sucht in dem Knauel der Bilder

gange das Karree. Seine Grosse ware bei pein licher Uberlegung massig zu nennen. Doch

dehnt es sich, wenn die Beobachter auf ihren

Stiihlen sich niedergelassen haben, nach den

vier Weltseiten aus, erdriickt die armseligen Traumweichteile und ist ein Quadrat ohne Erbarmen. (13)

In this tangle of pictorial alleys, no one seeks the

quadrangle. After painstaking reflection, one

would have to describe its size as moderate. But

once its observers have settled into their chairs,

it expands toward the four sides of the world,

overpowering the pitiful, soft, private parts of

the dream: it is a square without mercy. (39)

The translation of "Knauel der Bildergange" as "tangle of pictorial alleys" inevitably loses the notion of the walking subject contained in the neologism Bildergange 'image walks.'

Also note the move in German from the con crete Karree to the abstract Quadrat. The translation of Quadrat as "square" does not render this move, since square in English sig nifies both the geometric figure and the ur

ban square, while Quadrat refers only to the

geometric figure. This ending may strike the reader as embarrassingly didactic. But the di dacticism is itself thrown off track, estranged by the comment about the observers settling into their chairs. What observers? What chairs? Where are we?

The quadrangle, displaced (verschoben), becomes a mise-en-scene in which the ob

servers take their position in a perspectiv ally organized theatrical space. But is it the natural geometry of the Guckkastentheater 'fourth-wall stage,' or do these observers look inward from all four directions, as if in a

theater in the round?better, a theater in the

square? The text remains enigmatic on this score. But it suggests that the terror of the invisible gaze of these observers overpowers the subject in the center of the now worldwide

quadrangle, the "Quadrat ohne Erbarmen"

'square without mercy.' The cold geometry of invisible gazes overwhelms the "soft, private parts of the dream" ("Traumweichteile"), just as the quadrangle wins out over the labyrin thine "tangle of pictorial alleys" ("Knauel der

Bildergange"). The fate of the subject becomes identical to that of the city. The condensation of urban space into the allegorically read

quadrangle comes with an imaginary ex

pansion of the oppressive power of geomet ric space across the world: natural geometry without mercy. No need to point out how this text translates the critique of rationalization

Weber's iron cage, if you will?into concrete urban space and its imprisoning effect on the human subject. Indeed, Karree can be read as exemplifying the dystopian dimension of Kracauer's mass ornament itself.

A different form of spatial terror is de scribed in "Erinnerung an eine Pariser Strasse" ("Remembering a Parisian Street"

[Kracauer, Schriften 5.2 243-48]). The narra tor in one of his strolls and in a state of mind he calls Strassenrausch 'street euphoria, intox

ication' is lost in a side street unknown to him in the proletarian Quartier Grenelle. Suddenly a nightmarish perception overcomes him:

Aber nun geschah es: kaum hatte ich mich von der weissen, ubertrieben hohen Theater

wand abgelost, so fiel mir das Weitergehen schwer, und ich spurte, dass unsichtbare

Netze mich aufhielten. Die Strasse, in der ich

mich befand, gab mich nicht frei. (244-45)



But now it happened: hardly had I come de tached from the white, excessively high wall of the theater, I had trouble walking on, and I felt invisible nets holding me back. The street in which I found myself kept me captive.

(my trans.)

He then sees several hotel signs without names on derelict buildings, which suggest prostitu tion. Stepping up to one of these hotels, the nar rator suddenly becomes conscious of the fact

dass ich beobachtet worden war. Aus den

Obergeschossfenstern mehrerer Hauser sahen

Burschen in Hemdsarmeln und schludrig ge kleidete Weiber auf mich nider. Sie sprachen kein Wort, sie schauten mich immer nur an.

Eine schreckliche Gewalt ging von ihrer blos sen Gegenwart aus, und ich hielt es beinahe fur eine Gewissheit, dass sie es waren, die mir

die Fesseln angelegt hatten. Wie sie stumm

und reglos dastanden, schienen sie mir von

den Hausern selber ausgebriitet worden zu

sein. Sie hatten jeden Augenblick ihre Fan

garme nach mir ausstrecken und mich in die

Stuben hereinziehen konnen. (245)

that I had been observed. From the upper

story windows of several houses, lads in shirt

sleeves and slovenly clad women were looking down upon me. They didn't utter a word, they

just kept looking at me. Their mere presence exuded a terrifying force, and I considered it

almost a certainty that it was they who had put me in fetters. As they were standing mute and

motionless, they seemed to have been hatched

from the houses themselves. Any moment,

they could have stretched out their tentacles

and pulled me into the rooms. (my trans.)

If illicit sexuality and class anxiety combine in this surreal scene, a comparable

spatial situation appears in a more purged, ab

stracted, and more violent form in Kafka's di

aries, a rich source of modernist miniatures:

Durch das Parterrefenster eines Hauses an ei

nem um den Hals gelegten Strick hineingezo

gen und ohne Rucksicht wie von einem der

nicht acht gibt, blutend und zerfetzt, durch alle Zimmerdecken, Mobel, Mauern und Dachbo

den hinaufgerissen werden, bis oben auf dem

Dach die leere Schlinge erscheint, die meine Reste erst beim Durchbrechen der Dachziegel verloren hat. (Tagebiicher 567-68)

To be pulled in through the ground-floor window of a house by a rope tied around

one's neck and to be yanked up, bloody and

ragged, through all the ceilings, furniture, walls, and attics, without consideration, as if

by a person who is paying no attention, until

up on the roof the empty noose appears, hav

ing lost hold of what remained of me only as it broke through the roof's tiles.

(Diaries 291; trans, modified)

Here the miniature is condensed into one

breathless sentence, at the end of which the narrator's body has been thoroughly disap peared, leaving only the empty noose?a sur

real vision of an urban hanging that destroys both human body and built space. The pas sive voice points to the absence of an execu

tioner. Rather than provide protection and

shelter, the building has become a tool, if not

the agent, of the execution. The terror emanating from urban space

and the dreamlike contortion of space are

things Kracauer shares with Kafka, whose novels he was one of the first to review for the

Frankfurter Zeitung in the mid-1920s. At the same time, Kafka's Angst-Raume 'spaces of

anxiety' lack the social and philosophical lan

guage that characterizes Kracauer s rendering of urban space, which, as a result, poses fewer

riddles to the interpreter. Yet reading these texts

together makes it clear that we are confronting not simply a case of intertextual influence. Kaf ka's and Kracauer's approaches to urban space

are grounded in the similar effects the modern

city had on its most astute observers. I could go on and compare the spatial

terror as rendered in Kafka's and Kracauer's

miniatures with texts by Ernst Junger from

the capriccios in Das abenteuerliche Herz

'The Adventurous Heart.' Jiinger's example



could serve to take the argument one step further and to establish the analogy between urban experience and war experience, a fre

quent topos in Weimar literature and paint

ing.7 In all three writers, the terror is sudden and nameless, tied to the hidden power of ur

ban space and its Durchdringung, literally the

penetration and overpowering of the subject. In Junger, however, the spatial threat serves to

strengthen the subject, to create the armored

body though Haltung, desinvolture ('posture, bearing'), and what he calls the telescopic gaze, whereas in Kracauer's and Kafka's texts

the borders between inside and outside, be tween the subjective imaginary and objective

world, are constantly crossed, endangering the coherence of the narrating or narrated,

observing or observed subject. If the terror experienced by the sub

ject emanates mainly from outdoor urban

space in Rilke, Kafka, Kracauer, and Junger, it is not absent from the bourgeois interieur, once celebrated as the space of privilege and

protection from an unfriendly and danger ous outside. Thus in Einbahnstrasse, Benja min speaks tongue in cheek of "Schrecken der Wohnung" 'the horror of apartments' (88; One-Way Street 446). The arrangement of nineteenth-century furniture is to him "the site plan of deadly traps, and the suite of rooms prescribes the path of the fleeing victims" (446). The bourgeois interior "wird

adaquat allein der Leiche zur Behausung" 'fittingly houses only the corpse.' And: "Auf diesem Sofa kann die Tante nur ermordet werden" 'On this sofa the aunt cannot but be murdered' (89; 447). Ten years later Kra cauer took up the theme of indoor murder as favorite topic of the boulevard press, but here the focus was the anonymous hotel room as the space of murder sensationalized in the

press (Schriften 5.3 293). In Benjamin's text, the bourgeois interior with all its furnishings, potted nature, and collected knickknacks is as subject to intrusions from the outside as is the traditional bourgeois self and its inward

ness. Think of the disruptive ringing of door bells or telephones in Benjamin's miniatures.

Or, for that matter, in Kafka's Trial. The house of the self in both senses caves in. It caves in because the boundary between the secure

private space of the bourgeois interior and its

inwardness, on the one hand, and the public space of the street and the city, on the other, is increasingly blurred?most famously in

Benjamin's analysis of the arcade as an inte rior street space, which, like the dream, lacks a proper outside.

The extended scholarly discussion of

Schwellenerfahrungen 'threshold experi ences' in Benjamin belongs in this context as well (Menninghaus): thresholds not just between interior and street life (think of the

all-important space of the loggia in Berliner

Kindheit) but also between dream and wak

ing, past and present, life and death, surface world and myth-laden underworld. The slight elevation of the Schwelle 'threshold' on the floor separating one room from another was one of the distinctive features of Berlin apart ments in the old and new West of Benjamin's time, but it is imbued in his writing with an

allegorical dimension that exceeds any single architectural, anthropological, philosophical, or mythic referentiality.

Time and again, miniatures by Benjamin and by Kracauer, as those by Rilke, Kafka, Benn, and Musil, focus on this process of the breakdown of the inside-outside division in

subject-object relations and in the relation between private and public space. To different

degrees, all these writers read this breakdown as a symptom of major historical change, not

just anticipating a new perception but also re

quiring a new organization of social life. More than other literary genres, these miniatures in their very form record and construct a new

sensibility in perceiving time and space. There is a certain logic of form in that Benjamin's Proustian memory project, his Berliner Kind heit um Neunzehnhundert, comes to us as a

carefully constructed montage of miniatures



rather than as an extended narrative in novel or autobiographical form. In Berliner Chronik, the Berlin montage preceding Berliner Kind

heit, Benjamin distinguished his project from

autobiography as a temporal form focusing on "den stetigen Fluss des Lebens" 'the con tinuous flow of life.' He continued, "Hier aber ist von einem Raum, von Augenblicken, vom

Unstetigen die Rede" 'Here I am talking of a

space, of moments and discontinuities' (488; Berlin Chronicle 612). Time gives way to space,

continuity to das Unstetige, the sovereign sur

veying gaze to the spatially isolating and frag menting look through the magnifying glass, as it were. Adorno's aphorism about the splin ter in the eye as magnifying glass captures the kind of vision that generates the writing of the modernist miniature (Minima Moralia 57).

Giedion and Durchdringung

If Durchdringung ofinside and outside, sub

ject and object, private and public space is

presented in the modernist miniature as

Angst-Raum 'space of anxiety' and Angst Traum 'nightmare,' it took on entirely positive, even Utopian connotations in the architectural discourse of the 1920s. The idea that space was central to modernist literature is not exactly new. Yet it is important to re

member, since all too often in recent decades,

literary modernism has been discussed as

privileging time over space, whereas the

emergence of space as a key structuring factor has been attributed to postmodernism, most

famously perhaps by Fredric Jameson. This view shipwrecks on the modernist minia ture (and not only there). We know that both Kracauer and Benjamin were interested in

the new architecture and its Utopian visions in the work of Paul Scheerbart, Adolf Loos, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Lilly Reich, and many others. Thus Kracauer, in an as yet unpublished piece archived in his Nachlass 'literary estate' in

Marbach, spoke of "das neue Raumgefuhl"

'the new feeling for space' produced by the

development of technology and so far hardly understood ("bisher noch kaum erfasst" ["Ex pose"]). In his Frankfurter Zeitung review of the Stuttgarter Werkbund exhibition of 1927 he emphasized the dissolution of traditional

perspective in urban housing, in interior de

sign (Loos comes to mind), and even in the

exhibiting of household tools (Schriften 5.2

68-74). In such comments on the new archi

tecture, he seems to approach the Utopian di mension of architectural modernism, which is largely absent from his literary miniatures.

Siegfried Giedion, in his 1928 work Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisen

beton, a programmatic statement about the

promises of modern architecture that was

extensively excerpted in Benjamin's notes for his arcades project, describes this new spatial experience with the multivalent term Durch

dringung, which opens up a new form of see

ing. According to the felicitous phrasing by architectural historian Hilde Heynen, Durch

dringung "stands for a weakening of hierar chical models on all levels?social as well as

architectural" (35). What appears as terroriz

ing spatial experience in the modernist minia ture appears here as the liberatory dimension of Durchdringung and a new understanding of architectural space. Giedion writes:

Es scheint uns fraglich, ob der beschrankte

BegrifF'Architektur" uberhaupt bestehen blei

ben wird. Wir konnten kaum Auskunft iiber

die Frage geben: Was gehort zur Architektur?

Wo beginnt sie, wo endet sie? Die Gebiete

durchdringen sich. Die Wande umstehen

nicht mehr starr die Strasse. Die Strasse wird

in einem Bewegungsstrom umgewandelt. Gleise und Zug bilden mit dem Bahnof eine

einzige Grosse. (Bauen 6)

It seems doubtful whether the limited con

cept of "architecture" will indeed endure.

We can hardly answer the question: What

belongs to architecture? Where does it begin, where does it end?



Fields overlap: walls no longer rigidly de fine streets. The street has been transformed

into a stream of movement. Rail lines and

trains, together with the railroad station,

form a single whole. (Building 90)

If architecture's realm is no longer just that of built objects but also one of spatial and social relations, as Giedion suggests, then one

could argue that the modernist miniature, de

spite its largely negative coding of Durchdrin

gung, is the literary analogue of this new way of seeing and experiencing space. One would then want to define the literary techniques corresponding to architectural Durchdrin

gung as the intermingling of spaces through the partial absence of floors (as for instance in such nineteenth-century iron constructions as the Eiffel Tower) or the interpenetration of equivalent volumes that erase the borders between them (Gropius's Bauhaus in Dessau). This project could further draw on contem

porary suggestions such as Ernst Cassirer's, "dass das Raumproblem zum Ausgangspunkt einer neuen Selbstbesinnung der Asthetik werden konne" 'that the problem of space may become the point of departure for a new

self-reflection of aesthetics' (95; my trans). I cannot perform here this task of trans

lating architectural Durchdringung into a

variety of writing strategies in the modern ist miniature, but I hope my reading of Kra

cauer's "Quadrangle" in the context of other

miniatures has been suggestive of how one

might argue this point: the intermingling of spatial mappings, urban space as social

space, the loss of the subject's firm stand

point, visual and bodily disorientation, fall

ing through missing floors as in Junger's "Das Entsetzen" ("The Horror") or being pulled up through ceilings as in Kafka, bodies of philo sophical and descriptive text overlapping or

interpenetrating one another, and so forth. Both architecture and literature reflect new modes of seeing and experiencing space and time, and as with the introduction of all new

technologies, the result is a mix of fascination and terror.

Kracauer into Exile

Let me conclude with some broader com ments on Kracauer's urban imaginary. Critics have pulled his Stadtebilder 'urban images' too much into the orbit of his philosophy of

history, which interprets the city exclusively as emblem of alienation, ego loss, reifica

tion, and anomie, as the catastrophic space of a modernity gone awry and overwhelmed

by abstract forms of empty time and empty space. True, the notion of Leere 'emptiness, void' appears frequently in his miniatures, and it can be compared with Benjamin's no tion of an empty homogeneous time or with Bloch's characterization of Weimar's Neue Sachlichkeit 'New Sobriety' as "Funktionen im Hohlraum" 'functions in the void' (Erb

schaft 212; my trans.). But as the differentia tion of spatial models in "The Quadrangle" already suggested, urban space in Kracauer is not coded exclusively as homogeneous nega tivity. As Paris and Berlin provide the privi leged spaces for his texts, one can note how he differentiates between the two cities. The street in Paris still functions as site of mem

ory and experience, while streets in Berlin either scream with emptiness ("Schreie auf der Strasse" [Schriften 5.2 207]) or undergo such rapid architectural change that they no

longer hold any memory of the past ("Strasse ohne Erinnerung" [Schriften 5.3 170-74]). Berlin is seen as the decisive cauldron of mo

dernity in political and social crisis, while Paris is described as a city of the past. The modern world seems to be missing in Paris in this perspective of the visitor from Berlin. In "Pariser Beobachtungen" ("Paris Observa tions" [1927]), Kracauer writes about France:

Die Gesellschaft dauert fort als habe sie den

Krieg wirklich gewonnen, man spricht uber

Kunst und Literatur wie in verschollenen



Jahrzehnten, Besitz und Mitgift stehen im Geruch der Heiligkeit, und ihre Generale sind echte Generale. (Schriften 5.2 25)

Society continues as if it had really won the war. One speaks about art and literature as in

lost decades. Property and dowry exude an

odor of holiness, and their generals are au

thentic generals. (my trans.)

The visitor returns to Berlin "mit dem Be wusstsein .. . dass er hier wieder die Luft der rauhen Wirklichkeit atme, wie es heisst" 'conscious here of breathing the air of harsh

reality, as they say' (26; my trans.). This harsh reality, however, harbors a po

litically promising contradiction, which Kra cauer has paradigmatically analyzed in the well-known essay "The Mass Ornament." The tension he developed there between the dys topia and the Utopia of reason also emerges if

we compare the several miniatures that focus on advertising. In "Langeweile" ("Boredom" [1924]), Kracauer analyzes the historical de cline of boredom as a creative mental state. Here is what he writes about the flaneur walk

ing the street in the evening:

Da Ziehen leuchtende Worte an den Dachern voruber, und schon ist man aus der eigenen Leere in die fremde Reklame verbannt. Der

Korper schlagt Wurzeln im Asphalt, und der

Geist, der nicht mehr unser Geist ist, streift mit

den aufklarenden Lichtbekundungen endlos

aus der Nacht in die Nacht. Ware ihm noch ein Verschwinden gegonnt! (Das Ornament 322)

Illuminated words glide by on the rooftops, and already one is banished from one's own

emptiness into the alien advertisement. One's

body takes root in the asphalt, and, together with the enlightening revelations of the il

luminations, one's spirit?which is no longer one's own?roams ceaselessly out of the night and into the night. If only it were allowed to

disappear. (Mass Ornament 332)

This is still the subjective discourse of loss,

typical of an antiurban German Kulturkritik,

before Kracauer turned to more sociologically and politically inflected views. The descrip tion of "Lichtreklame" 'electric advertising' of 1927 is very different:

Die Lichtreklame geht an einem Himmel auf, in dem es keine Engel mehr gibt, aber auch nicht nur Geschaft. Sie schiesst uber die Wirt

schaft hinaus, und was als Reklame gemeint ist, wird zur Illumination. Das kommt davon,

wenn die Kaufleute sich mit Lichteffekten ein lassen. Licht bleibt Licht, und strahlt es gar in alien Farben, so bricht es erst recht aus den

Bahnen, die ihm von seinen Auftraggebern vor

gezeichnet sind.... Der Reklamespriihregen, den das Wirtschaftsleben ausschiittet, wird zu Sternbildern an einem fremden Himmel.

(Schriften 5.2 19)

Electric ads rise in the heavens that no longer harbor angels but are not all commerce either.

They exceed economics, and what is meant as

advertising becomes illumination. Such things

happen when businessmen handle light effects.

Light remains light, and when it shines in all its

colors, it really breaks the bounds set by its con tractors. ... The drizzle of advertising poured forth by economic life is transformed into a constellation in an alien sky. (my trans.)

Lichtreklame as uncontrollable excess

points to an alternative future to be read as a

Sternbild 'constellation' in an alien sky. Even if overall the rhetoric is less apocalyptic than in the earlier text, the form of the miniature is much the same. It remains so until 1933, by

which time the dystopian vision has returned,

supported now by Kracauer's concrete obser vations of social realities after the crash of 1929. In "Die Unterfuhrung" ("The Under

pass"), a miniature about a passage under the

rail lines at Bahnhof Charlottenburg, which is always crowded with travelers, beggars, and

hawkers, Kracauer makes much of the oppo sition of the oppressive and unshakable iron and concrete low-ceiling construction and the human chaos of motion. Both, however, elude

any kind of human rational Durchdringung:



Unmenschlich ist aber nicht nur die Planlosig keit, mit der die Menschen umhertreiben, son

dern auch die planmassige Konstruktion der

Passage_Ein System, das so undurchdrungen und verlassen ist wie das anarchische Gemisch

der Passanten und Bettler. (Schriften 5.3 41)

Inhuman is not only the aimlessness, with

which people drift about, but also the planned construction of the passage.... It is a system

just as opaque and forsaken as the anarchic

mix of passersby and beggars. (my trans.)

The Utopian dimension of Durchdringung, articulated by Giedion before the crash, has not been fulfilled. One of Kracauer's last Ber lin miniatures, published just a couple of days after its author left Berlin for good on 28 Feb

ruary 1933 to enter the extraterritoriality of

exile, describes the silent crowds looking at the burnt Reichstag the day after the fatal fire:

Die Blicke dringen durch dieses Symbol hin durch, und tauchen in den Abgrund nieder,

den seine Zerstorung eroffnet. (211)

The gazes penetrate and go through this

symbol, and they dive down into the abyss opened up by its destruction. (my trans.)

In certain ways, "Rund um den Reichstag" marks the logical, though not chronological, end point of the modernist miniature as a spe cific form in the urban feuilleton. If the main function of the form was to enable readers to see the dangers and pleasures of urban life in new ways, to open up the surfaces of urban

space to the dangerous and exhilarating depths underlying them, then that depth has now been transformed into an Abgrund, the abyss that six years later was to engulf the world.

Notes 1. For a fuller discussion of Rilke's novel, see Huys

sen 105-26 ("Paris/Childhood: The Fragmented Body in Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge").

2. This essay is a first attempt to describe the mod

ernist miniature as a central laboratory of urban litera

ture. In future work, I hope to expand the scope of this

investigation to include close readings of works by Kafka,

Musil, Benn, and Junger as well as by Benjamin, Bloch, and Adorno. What has always intrigued me about this

specific mode of writing is that, in the wake of Baude

laire, it was practiced by most of the major modernists in

Germany and Austria as well as by the major representa tives of German critical theory.

3. There is an extensive literature that discusses the

modernist city novel in terms of cinematic narrative and

technique. The relation of literary texts to photography has been much less discussed. Focus on the modernist

miniature as Bild may help expand our understanding of

the relation between the literary and the visual domains

in modernism.

4. The central concept of Durchdringung has been lu

cidly described by Heynen (30-38). 5. A comparable argument about the temporality of

photography can be found in Kracauer's "Photography" in Mass Ornament (47-63).

6. The following reading of Kracauer's miniature owes much to Briiggemann's path-breaking Das andere

Fenster.

7. On Junger's short prose pieces of Das abenteuerli che Herzy see Huyssen 127-44 ("Fortifying the Heart

Totally: Ernst Junger's Armored Texts").

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Issue Table of ContentsPMLA, Vol. 122, No. 1, Special Topic: Cities (Jan., 2007), pp. 1-424Front MatterIntroduction: Dreaming of Infrastructure [pp. 9-26]Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces [pp. 27-42]Stadtwollen: Benjamin's "Arcades Project" and the Problem of Method [pp. 43-60]Playing the Tourist in Early Modern London: Selling the Liberties Onstage [pp. 61-71]Sounding the Space between Men: Choric and Choral Cities in Ben Jonson's "Epicoene; Or, the Silent Woman" [pp. 72-88]Metropolitan Modernism and Its West Indian Interlocutors: 1950s London and the Emergence of Postcolonial Literature [pp. 89-104]Utopia Interrupted: Archipelago as Sociolyric Structure in "A Draft of XXX Cantos" [pp. 105-123]Shadow Photographs, Ruins, and Shanghai's Projected Past [pp. 124-134]"It's a Sin to Bring down an Art Deco": Sabina Berman's Theater among the Ruins [pp. 135-150]Citizens of Memory: Refiguring the Past in Postdictatorship Argentina [pp. 151-169]Rio's Favelas in Recent Fiction and Film: Commonplaces of Urban Segregation [pp. 170-178]"Outcasts and Dreamers in the Cities": Urbanity and Pollution in "Dead Voices" [pp. 179-193]Black Atlanta: An Ecosocial Approach to Narratives of the Atlanta Child Murders [pp. 194-209]Unburying the Dead in the "Mother City": Urban Topographies of Erasure [pp. 210-219]"To What Shall I Compare You?": Jerusalem as Ground Zero of the Hebrew Imagination [pp. 220-234]Reading the City: The Urban Book from Mercier to Mitterrand [pp. 235-251]Correspondents at Large"I No Be like You": Accra in Life and Literature [pp. 252-255]"Postmodern" Space in the Heart of Beijing: From the National Theater to the Palace Museum [pp. 256-263]Dispatches from Benghazi [pp. 264-270]The Fate of a Stereotype: Little Paris [pp. 271-274]Bucharest at the Crossroads [pp. 275-280]Afropolis: From Johannesburg [pp. 281-288]Mammon, Magic, Mimicry, and Meaning in Public Postapartheid Johannesburg [pp. 289-293]Lima the Horrible: The Cultural Politics of Theft [pp. 294-300]Disputing Limeo Historical and Cultural Heritage [pp. 301-305]Readable City [pp. 306-309]Olympiad Dreams of Urban Renaissance [pp. 310-315]Metropolitan Life and Uncivil Death [pp. 316-320]Sex, Music, and the City in a Globalized East Africa [pp. 321-324]Sold down the River [pp. 325-330]No Natural Disaster: New Orleans, Katrina, and War [pp. 331-335]The Tribulations of a Postcolonial Writer in New York [pp. 336-337]Letter from Ramallah [pp. 338-339]Letter from (The Myth of) Saint Petersburg [pp. 340-343]A "Glimpse through an Interstice Caught": Fictional Portrayals of Male Homosexual Life in Twentieth-Century Sydney [pp. 344-347]Waste in Sydney: Unwelcome Returns [pp. 348-351]

Guest ColumnAfterword: The Buenos Aires Affair [pp. 352-356]

ForumCitizenship and Cosmopolitanism [pp. 357-359]"Eurasia" and Imperialism [pp. 359-362]

Minutes of the MLA Executive Council [pp. 363-364, 366, 368, 370]In Memoriam [pp. 372, 374]Abstracts [pp. 421-424]Back Matter

Documents

Modernist Miniatures: Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces, Andreas Huyssen