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Paul Scheerbart

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by Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!-A Paul Scheerbart Reader Josiah McElheny




  Edited by

  Josiah McElheny and Christine Burgin

  Christine Burgin

  University of Chicago Press

  Frontispiece: Josiah McElheny, Scheerbart Hand-Colors Taut’s Glass House, 2014.

  Drawing with retouching pencil on silver gelatin photograph, 20 × 16 inches.

  Contents

  Scheerbart, The Unknowable . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

  Josiah McElheny and Christine Burgin

  The Crystal Vision of Paul Scheerbart: A Brief Biography. . . . . . . 11

  Christopher Turner

  I

  GLASS ARCHITECTURE

  Glass Architecture, 1914 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20

  Paul Scheerbart | Translated by James Palmes

  Illustrated by Josiah McElheny

  Glass Houses: Bruno Taut’s Glass Palace

  at the Cologne Werkbund Exhibition, 1914. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92

  Paul Scheerbart | Translated by Anne Posten

  Glass House: Cologne Werkbund Exhibition, 1914 . . . . . . . . . . . . 98

  Bruno Taut | Translated by Anne Posten

  “Kaleidoscope-Architecture”:

  Scheerbart, Taut, and the Glass House. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111

  Noam M. Elcott

  Glass Architecture, 1921. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

  Bruno Taut | Translated by Anne Posten

  Fragments of Utopia: Paul Scheerbart and Bruno Taut . . . . . . . . . 123

  Rosemarie Haag Bletter

  Glass House Letters, 1920 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130

  Paul Scheerbart | Translated by Anne Posten and Laura Lindgren

  Selected and introduced by Bruno Taut

  Untimely Meditations and Other Modernisms: On the

  Glass-Dream Visions of Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart . . . . . . 145

  Hollyamber Kennedy

  II

  LOVE (AND OTHER FICTIONS)

  A Strange Bird: Paul Scheerbart, or

  The Eccentricities of a Nightingale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155

  Gary Indiana

  Selected Short Stories, 1897–1912

  Paul Scheerbart | Translated by Susan Bernofsky and Anne Posten

  Illustrated by Paul Scheerbart

  A Trial in the Year 1901: A Novelette of the Future . . . . . . . . . 163

  The Colored Moons: A Cosmosophical Scherzo . . . . . . . . . . . 166

  The Love of Souls: A Spiritualistic Scene from a Novel . . . . . . 173

  Atlas, the Comfortable: A Myth of Humanity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 176

  The Magnetic Mirror . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 180

  Transportable Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185

  The Glass Theater . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187

  An Ornament Museum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189

  The Silent Dance of Courtly Society. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191

  The Safe: A Marriage Novelette. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196

  At the Glass Exhibition in Peking:

  The Old Baron’s Diary Entries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200

  III

  A DREAM OF PERPETUAL MOTION

  Perpetual Motion: The Story of an Invention, 1910. . . . . . . . . . . . . 206

  Paul Scheerbart | Translated by Susan Bernofsky

  Illustrated by Paul Scheerbart and Josiah McElheny

  Perpetual Motion: A Summary, 1910. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254

  Paul Scheerbart

  6

  The Invention: A Cinematic Tale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257

  Guy Maddin

  IV

  DEATH AND BEYOND

  Scheerbart’s Fiftieth Birthday Party:

  An Interview with Egidio Marzona . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263

  Hubertus von Amelunxen | Translated by Anne Posten

  On the Birth, Death and Rebirth of Dionysus:

  A Memorial Wreath for Paul Scheerbart’s Grave, 1919 . . . . . . . . . 267

  Anselm Ruest | Translated by Anne Posten

  A Letter from Bruno Taut to His Brother Max, 1915 . . . . . . . . . . 272

  Translated by Anne Posten

  “. . . variants of the seemingly imperfect . . .”:

  Thoughts on Paul Scheerbart and Walter Benjamin. . . . . . . . . . . . 275

  Hubertus von Amelunxen | Translated by Anne Posten

  The Gallery of the Beyond, 1907 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280

  Text and images by Paul Scheerbart | Translated by Anne Posten

  V

  A LIFE IN TITLES

  Novels and Novelettes, Rhetorical Essays, and Prophetic Howls:

  A Bibliographic Poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299

  Josiah McElheny

  Credits. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318

  Acknowledgments. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319

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  Josiah McElheny and Christine Burgin

  Scheerbart, the Unknowable

  “When Scheerbart experts gather together and begin to talk,

  something arises among them — a large collective silence.”

  Georg Hecht, 1912

  Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! A Paul Scheerbart Reader brings together

  for the first time a wide range of work by Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) in

  an attempt to present him as the visionary, passionate, funny, inventive,

  deadly serious yet ultimately unknowable writer, theorist, and literary

  figure he was.

  Closely followed by architects, philosophers, scientists, politicians,

  and artists during the first half of the twentieth century — especially in the

  years around World War I — Scheerbart and his unique world view have

  had a far-reaching but often unrecognized influence. He is a writer diffi-

  cult to define in any coherent way; he can be many things at once. Simple

  in his language, he spoke of the absurd and the stubbornly technological

  in the same breath. It is sometimes hard to know when he is joking, but

  one always feels the desire inside his dreams, however flabbergasting,

  to make sense of the world. Largely forgotten after his death because

  his ideas do not cohere neatly with the values of economic and political

  efficiency that dominated the twentieth century, he is now being rediscov-

  ered. But what does he actually say, and what did he propose that gained

  the trust, faith, and hope of his contemporaries? To some Scheerbart was

  a visionary, a technocrat avant la lettre, who outlined radical new possi-

  bilities for architecture in his book Glass Architecture. To others he is a

  fanciful figure in the history of science fiction, the strange mind behind

  a series of hallucinatory astral fantasies featuring intergalactic romances
>
  between stars and surrealistic biological “advances” in evolution. Others

  appreciate him as part of an essential cadre of early modernist writers,

  such as Robert Walser and Peter Altenberg, who published innovative

  short fiction in the feuilleton section of the daily papers, making way for

  future Brechts and other purveyors of the impossible. Some wished that he

  really was the inventor of a perpetual motion machine, while others, such

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  as Walter Benjamin, understood him to be a revolutionary theorist of the

  politics of culture itself. Finally, in retrospect, we appreciate Scheerbart

  for his exhilarating ability to predict the coming century of political and

  technological violence. Rational theorist or fantastic dreamer? Serious

  writer or spinner of nonsense? Crackpot inventor or revolutionary?

  Literary innovator for a new world or amateur poet? It was Scheerbart’s

  burden to be all of these at once, an outsider begrudgingly recognized

  for both the clarity of his world view and the contradictions of the truths

  he wished for. He was the writer of a story whose answer is a question.

  Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! A Paul Scheerbart Reader includes

  Scheerbart’s most famous work, Glass Architecture (1914), long out of

  print in English but arriving in time to celebrate the one-hundredth anni-

  versary of its publication, in 2014; a collection of his short fictions, many

  of which appear here in translation for the first time; and Perpetual

  Motion, Scheerbart’s obsessive diary of the pursuit of the dream of end-

  less and costless energy. Extensive documentary material of the period,

  including Scheerbart’s own little-known artwork, as well as a collection

  of contemporary essays and responses by historians, critics, artists, and

  filmmakers, accompanies Scheerbart’s texts. As will be clear from the

  list of (selected) Scheerbart titles with which this book closes, there is

  much, much more to choose from. This volume is but a beginning, and

  we hope that Scheerbart will continue to be translated, read, and fenced

  with. There are few radicals who were radical in their own time and who

  remain so today. An audacious statement, to be sure, but if it is true of

  anyone, it is true of Scheerbart.

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  Christopher Turner

  The Crystal Vision of

  Paul Scheerbart: A Brief Biography

  Paul Scheerbart was born in Danzig in 1863, the eleventh child of a well-

  to-do merchant. His early life was marred by tragedy: his mother died

  when he was four, he lost his father at age ten, and all his siblings had

  died by the time he was sixteen.1 Little else is known about his early

  days. Having failed to complete his education, he moved to Berlin in

  1887, hoping to make a career as a writer. He lived there for the rest of

  his life in bohemian chaos and near starvation, publishing books and

  writing journalism on crime, politics, and culture. The Polish symbolist

  Stanislaw Przybyszewski once said that Scheerbart would have walked

  the streets of Berlin naked had it not been for the generosity of a friend

  who gave him clothes inherited from an uncle.2 Scheerbart’s emaciated

  frame was often swamped in an antique frock coat several sizes too big,

  with sleeves so long they hid his knuckles.

  In the metropolis, Scheerbart was a mainstay of café society, a flam-

  boyant character on the literary scene. Prone to self-mythology, he was

  a regular at the Café des Westerns and Das Schwarze Ferkel (The Black

  Pig), where he drank with the likes of August Strindberg, Julius Hart,

  and Edvard Munch.3 Scheerbart was a notoriously heavy drinker. The

  poet Alfred Mombert described him as a “celestial reveler”; the anarchist

  Elrich Mühsam portrayed him, soaked in alcohol and gallows humor

  and puffing on an ill-afforded Virginia cigar, as a “cosmic scoffer.”4

  Przybyszewski said no one ever heard him utter a serious word. At read-

  ings he would stand at the podium and wiggle and snort at his own cre-

  ations, then roar with laughter, doubled over and unable to continue, until

  the whole audience was infected with hysterics. But, Mühsam wrote in

  an obituary, behind the exuberant wit was a serious thinker: “he looked

  like an Asiatic temple servant” and told strange mystical stories “that

  seemed like visions.”5

  Phillip Kester, portrait of Paul Scheerbart, 1910.

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  CHRISTOPHER T U R N E R

  At the age of thirty-seven, Scheerbart wed his landlady, Anna, eight

  years his senior, the widow of a postal worker. It may have been a

  marriage of convenience for someone rarely able to pay the rent. He

  nicknamed Anna “the bear” (Mühsam characterized her as a “female

  Sancho Panza” to Scheerbart’s Don Quixote) and dedicated several of

  his books to her.6 They lived in a southwest suburb of Berlin, close to

  the Berlin Botanical Gardens with its glass Palm House, a winter garden

  where Scheerbart found much inspiration for his writings about glass

  architecture (though he regretted the lack of colored crystal). Though

  mainstream success eluded him in his lifetime, Scheerbart was prolific

  and convinced that he would achieve posthumous fame. “My dear sir,”

  he told a bemused life-insurance salesman who made a house call, only to

  be exposed to one of Scheerbart’s confabulations (about the aluminum

  ring around Saturn), “once I am dead, I will be so famous that I already

  envy my widow.”7

  Scheerbart’s first books came out under the imprint of Verlag deutscher

  Phantasten (Publishing House of German Fantasists), which Scheerbart

  founded in 1892 using a swiftly spent inheritance. He considered fan-

  tasy writing, as he put it, “a specific German art.”8 Over the following

  decades he produced visionary poetry, novels, and plays — over thirty

  major works and hundreds of minor works of staggering diversity, some

  of which feature glass architecture, and a number of which are published

  here in English for the first time. Scheerbart’s astral fantasies are vivid

  dreams of hallucinogenic sensuousness, aligning him with several suc-

  cessive avant-gardes. Starting in 1910, Scheerbart’s last writings were

  published in Herwarth Walden’s radical magazine Der Sturm. Walden

  referred to Scheerbart admiringly as “the first Expressionist,” though he

  might equally have been called the first Dadaist or the first surrealist.9

  Hans Richter, in his recollections of Dada, cited Scheerbart as an influ-

  ence on that movement, specifically his abstract poem Kikakoku (1897), a

  play of nonsense words.10 Walter Benjamin praised Scheerbart as a stylist,

  deeming his direct, pithy prose “as fresh as a nursling’s cheek” — a natural

  precursor to Berthold Brecht.11

  In 1919 Walter Gropius, who founded the Bauhaus that year, urged

  a fellow architect, “You absolutely must read Paul Scheerbarth [sic] . . . in

  his works you will find much wisdom and beauty.”12 Gropius was partic-

  ularly fascinated by Glass Architecture (1914), a book in which Scheerbart

  imagined a new, better, crystal world. “If we want our culture to rise to

&n
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  THE CRYSTAL VISION OF PAUL S C H E E R B A R T

  a higher level, we are obliged, for better or worse, to change our archi-

  tecture,” Scheerbart wrote. “The new environment, which we thus cre-

  ate, must bring us a new culture.”13 Comprising 111 short chapters, this

  impassioned manifesto elaborates on the revolutionary potential of glass.

  Man’s ingenuity would triumph over nature, and the entire planet would

  be transformed by glass architecture, frosting into a dazzling, festive

  frenzy of illuminated colored crystal. Splendid glass cities would float on

  the oceans, and crystalline palaces, linked by bridges of glass and rock,

  would cover Alpine peaks. “On Venus and Mars,” Scheerbart wrote of

  this kaleidoscopic utopia, which he imagined illuminated at night, “they

  will stare in wonder and no longer recognize the surface of the earth.”14

  Though Glass Architecture seems to lack Scheerbart’s characteristic

  humor, the hyperbolic rhetoric is clearly intended to shape it as a literary

  work rather than as the technical manual for which it is often mistaken,

  and it is not without a self-reflexive comic edge that belies its apparent sin-

  cerity. Scheerbart, who professed his admiration for the work of Jonathan

  Swift, had an irreverent, insurgent taste for the absurd.15 A beautiful world

  is conjured up, a teetering tower of monomaniacal reverie that, however

  inspiring and convincing in its detail, is always threatening to crumble.

  Scheerbart’s 1910 novel Perpetual Motion: The Story of an Invention has

  a similar structure to that of Glass Architecture. Some scholars, confus-

  ing mirth with earnestness, have suggested that Scheerbart was himself

  engaged in a hopeless quest to invent such a magical wheel. The narrator

  claims to have created a free energy machine that will change the world,

  and from small beginnings (as in Glass Architecture) he imagines that soon

  nothing will remain untouched by his marvelous invention. It will enable

  the artificial illumination of the planet; it will power elevators that will

  allow entire landscapes to be covered in dramatic tower architecture; it

  will allow the flattening of mountains, the damming of oceans. There

  are many comic moments of self-awareness that frame the narrator’s

  fantasy (if only that troublesome wheel on the device would turn in the

  right direction). Nevertheless, no sooner does the protagonist raise such

 

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