Paul Scheerbart
Page 1
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
7
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
8
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.
9
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.
11
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
bsp; 12
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