by Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!-A Paul Scheerbart Reader Josiah McElheny
progress, subsequent failures, and fresh tries. There is a foldout sheet with
myriad interlocking cogwheels and mathematical formulas to match. He
expected nothing less than a miracle machine: it would tap the secrets of
unlimited cosmic energy that could be harnessed to clear up the world’s
problems. He wrote: “And so finally the social question can be put to
rest. I wonder what the Social Democrats will have to say about this great
Revolution of Work!”10
The free energy of the perpetual motion machine was also to be used
to reconstruct the landscape in a manner that anticipates post–World
War II land art and for “house building plants,” detailed in an essay of
1910.11 He adds in an ironic manner: “I think the best thing would be
just to use the Harz mountain range in its entirety. You can dig up the
whole place as much as you like and exhibit large-scale plans in smaller
formats. . . . The Bode Valley in the Harz can be left just as it is — for the
sake of contrast.”12 The total mobility of all inhabitants would become
economically feasible. As a result, there would be a complete dissolution
of national borders. The perpetual motion machine thus becomes the
anarchist’s sine qua non. At the same time, Scheerbart is afraid that the
military would appropriate his powerful invention. And he continues
more pessimistically: “Of course these are all fantasies. Actual reality is
always quite different.”13
Through his friendship with Taut, Scheerbart’s ideas about the tran-
scendent effect of glass architecture took on visible form in architectural
drawings and designs in Taut’s prewar Glass House at the Werkbund
Exhibition in Cologne (1914), which was dedicated to Scheerbart, just
as Scheerbart’s Glass Architecture of the same year was dedicated to
Taut. While the Glass House still suggests elements of the romantic and
symbolist crystal brain, Taut’s postwar utopian books such as Alpine
Architecture (1919), The Dissolution of the Cities (1920), and The World
Building Master (1920) apply Scheerbart’s social, anarchist, pacifist, and
synesthetic concepts about the transformative power of a mobile and
flexible glass architecture.14
Through the Art Soviet, begun in 1918, and the Crystal Chain,
started in 1919 — both groups of architects and artists initially led by
Taut — Scheerbart’s writings were further disseminated among social-
ist postwar artists and architects. Proposals for polychrome glass proj-
ects that dwell on sensory perception and emotive power rather than
126
FR AGMENTS OF UTOPIA
on technology distinguish Scheerbart’s and the expressionists’ notions
from mainstream modernism of the later twenties. That is, technology is
not overtly displayed, nor is it abandoned, but is subsumed in service to
a changed culture. During the tense years following the war, hopes for a
new society had been raised, but almost no construction was economically
possible. Taut, like Scheerbart before him, described his visionary books
as mere fantasies. On the title page for The Dissolution of the Cities Taut
wrote wistfully, “It is naturally only a utopia and a little amusement even
if it is supplied with proofs in the literary appendix.”
After 1923, when the German economy stabilized, Taut produced a
large number of housing estates in Berlin (more than Gropius or Mies)
that reflect his earlier utopian ideas. These are decentralized garden sub-
urbs built for a housing cooperative association that had been established
for white-collar workers. The larger of these settlements contain a mix
of apartment buildings and row houses. In place of colored glass, too
impractical and expensive in this context, bright polychrome stucco is
used to organize the buildings urbanistically and psychologically.15 Thus
Scheerbart’s and Taut’s colored glass architecture is a utopian tradition
that is possible only in literary and architectural proposals. It functions
as a metaphor for social transformation but could not be applied literally.
Because Taut’s designs — along with those of many of his compatriots
such as the great Hans Scharoun — did not fit comfortably with the later
rationalist and technocentric notion of modern architecture, these explor-
ative efforts were omitted from the standard histories of modernism.
Herwarth Walden referred to Scheerbart as the first “expressionist,” but
with his technological musings he might also have been called a “poet of
the future,” and Dada writers considered him influential.16
These are not mutually exclusive interpretations. They simply reflect
differing attitudes to cultural meaning. After 1920 even the most com-
mitted followers of Scheerbart had ceased to produce utopian fantasies.
Walter Benjamin appreciated Scheerbart’s work in the later 1920s, but
he radically reinterpreted his glass architecture; Benjamin was affected
by Giedion’s materialist approach as well as by his own conviction that
glass has no “aura” and his belief in a deliberate “impoverishment” of
experience in order to resist the culture industry.
Scheerbart’s and Taut’s fantasies are by no means the complete,
self-sufficient systems one finds, for instance, in Thomas More’s Utopia
(1516) or William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890). Rather, they are
fragmentary proposals that can be understood in light of the Marxist
127
ROSEM A R I E H A AG BLETTER
philosopher Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia (1918).17 Bloch suggested
that utopias were still possible as fragments that could spring from quite
diverse sources — even fairy tales and the everyday — and be collaged
into a partial rather than a fixed reality. It might even be said that Bloch
believed in the participatory potential of utopia.
NOTES
1. My dissertation, “Bruno Taut and Paul Scheerbart” (1973), was done with George
Collins at Columbia University. Collins, together with his wife, Christiane Crasemann
Colllins, had published a translation and expanded edition of Ulrich Conrads’s
Architecture of Fantasy (New York: Praeger, 1962; the German version had appeared
in 1960). This renewed concern for antirationalist trends had been reinforced by the
Museum of Modern Art’s Visionary Architecture exhibit of 1960. A similar attitude was
also evident in The Anti-rationalists, ed. Nikolaus Pevsner and J. M. Richards (New
York: Harper and Row, 1973).
2. Reyner Banham, “The Glass Paradise,” Architectural Review, February 1959, reprinted
in Reyner Banham, Design by Choice, ed. Penny Sparke (New York: Rizzoli, 1981),
29–33.
3. Rose-Carol Washton Long, “Occultism, Anarchism, and Abstraction: Kandinsky’s Art
of the Future,” Art Journal 46 (Spring 1987): 38–45.
4. Rosemarie Haag Bletter, “The Interpretation of the Glass Dream: Expressionist
Architecture and the History of the Crystal Metaphor,” Journal of the Society of
Architectural Historians 40 (March 1981): 20–43; Bletter, “Scheerbart’s Architectural
Fantasies,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 34
(May 1975): 83–97;
an updated, abbreviated application of Scheerbartian crystal symbolism is in Bletter,
“Mies and Dark Transparency,” in Mies in Berlin, ed. Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll
(New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2001), 350–57.
Recent studies of the queen of Sheba have clarified her position as a female ruler
of a commercially powerful country and the condemnation of her as a witch in later
histories. See, for instance, Jacob Lassner, Demonizing the Queen of Sheba: Boundaries
of Gender and Culture in Postbiblical Judaism and Medieval Islam (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1993), and St. John Simpson, ed., Queen of Sheba: Treasures from
Ancient Yemen (London: British Museum Press, 2002).
5. Selected Works of Alfred Jarry, ed. R. Shattuck and S. W. Taylor (New York: Grove,
1965), 236. Jarry’s Dr. Faustroll was published in part in 1895; the complete work
was published posthumously in 1911 — Jarry had died in 1907. During Faustroll’s
travels in search of knowledge, the hero encounters nearly all the symbols of spiritual
transformation current at one time or another. His eclecticism takes us all the way
back to the probable origins of this mythology, Solomon’s glass palace, as is clear from
this passage: “His female retainers, whose dresses spread out like the ocelli of peacock’
tails, gave us a display of dancing on the glassy lawns of the island; but when they
lifted their trains and walk upon this sward less glaucous than water, they evoked the
image of Balkis [the Arabic name of Sheba], summoned from Sheba by Solomon, whose
donkey’s feet were betrayed by the hall’s crystal floor.” Ibid., 209–12.
6. John A. Stuart translated The Gray Cloth with an introduction that correctly stresses
Scheerbart’s feminist themes, among other topics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
7. “Transportable Cities” (this book, 185); “Dynamitkrieg und Dezentralisation,”
Gegenwart 75 (November 27, 1909): 905–6; The Development of Aerial Militarism and
the Demobilization of European Ground Forces, Fortresses, and Naval Fleets: A Flier,
trans. M. Kasper, Lost Literature Series 4 (Brooklyn, NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007).
Among other essays that employ mobility to achieve an altered social structure are
128
FR AGMENTS OF UTOPIA
the following: “Das Automobil-Theater,” Der Morgen 1 (December 13, 1907): 871;
“Die Stadt auf Reisen” [The traveling city], Das Blaubuch 5 (September 29, 1910):
929–32; “Das Luft-Sanatorium” [The aerial sanatorium], Gegenwart 76 (October
16, 1909): 781–82; and “Aviatik und Baupolizei” [Aviation and building inspectors],
Gegenwart 71 (August 7, 1909): 582.
8. This book, Scheerbart, Perpetual Motion: The Story of an Invention, 206–53.
9. Ibid., 213.
10. Ibid., 236.
11. Paul Scheerbart, “Hausbaupflanzen” [House building plants], Gegenwart 77
(January 22, 1910): 77–79.
12. This book, Scheerbart, Perpetual Motion, 214, 219.
13. Ibid., 251.
14. Bruno Taut, Alpine Architektur (Hagen, Germany: Folkwang Verlag, 1919); Die
Auflösung der Städte (Hagen, Germany: Folkwang Verlag, 1920); Weltbaumeister
(Hagen, Germany: Folkang Verlag, 1920). All three books are reproduced and appear
with an English translation in F. Borsi and G. K. König, Architttura dell’Espressionismo
(Genoa: Vitali & Ghianda, 1967). A better translation of Alpine Architecture can
be found in Dennis Sharp, ed., “Glass Architecture” by Paul Scheerbart and “Alpine
Architecture” by Bruno Taut (New York: Praeger, 1972). This book, Scheerbart, Glass
Architecture, 22–90.
15. For a more detailed discussion of this transition from utopias to designing housing
estates, see Rosemarie Bletter, “Expressionism and the New Objectivity,” Art Journal
43 (Summer 1983): 108–20.
16. Herwarth Walden, “Paul Scheerbart,” Der Sturm 6 (December 1915): 96.
17. Ernst Bloch, Der Geist der Utopie (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1918). See also
Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony A. Nassar (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2000). Bloch engaged in a spirited debate about the correct Marxist
response to expressionism with the communist literary critic Georg Lukács (by the
1930s a Stalinist). Today Lukács’s harsh criticism is better known than Bloch’s more
measured response. Bloch’s and Lukács’s essays on this topic appear in translation,
together with critiques by Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin, and others, in Aesthetics and
Politics, Afterword by Fredric Jameson, trans. and ed. Ronald Taylor (London: NLB,
1977). For a further discussion of this debate — its political context and influence on
contemporary art critics — see also Bletter, “Mies and Dark Transparency,” 355–56.
129
“Glashausbriefe” (Glass house letters) appeared in the February 1920 issue of
Frühlicht (Early light), a supplement to the Berlin journal Stadtbaukunst Alter
und Neuer Zeit (Urban architecture ancient and modern) edited by Bruno Taut.
These letters were selected by Taut, and the comments in parentheses within
the letters are Taut’s comments as published. The illustrations are unattributed
yet appear very similar in style to drawings by Bruno Taut, who is known to
have illustrated other issues of Frühlicht. Frühlicht was subsequently published
as stand-alone issues, the final issue appearing in the summer of 1922, including
essays by Scheerbart.
130
Finish the European!
finish him! finish him!
finish him off!
(Paul Scheerbart)
Glass House Letters
by Paul Scheerbart
Let anyone who doesn’t already know be told that in 50 years he will be
a German classic. The only poet of architecture, born in Danzig, who
died “of the war” on October 15, 1915, age 52.1
Berlin-Lichterfelde 4, Marschnerstraße 15
24 December 1913
Dear . . . !
Many thanks for the little China book and for your lovely let er. Mül er
sent Glass Architecture back. And now I have to rest a bit, so I can’t come
to the Glass House on Saturday. Maybe Saturday a week from now! I have
some glass hair here (so-cal ed fairy hair).2 And they’re warm! Another
problem. So — merry Christmas and a happy New Year. And cheerful
glass greetings from my house to yours.
And I am
Your old
Paul Scheerbart.
By the way, ten years ago Bruckner was pitted against Wagner — or maybe
it was longer ago. I’m very glad that you want to dissociate yourself from
such truly antiquated partisan squabbling. And so — no enmity whatso-
ever! Long live Siegfried and Tristan!
• • •
132
Berlin-Lichterfelde 4, Marschnerstraße 15
8 February 1914
Dear . . . !
I just read B.’s article in the Hartungsche [Zeitung] and now I under-
stand the dedication. (The Glass House in Cologne bore a dedication to
P.S.) It is absolutely wonderful, and I’m touched. Thank you. I wil try to
repay you for it. At first I thought the dedication should be incorporated
into the model. That too would be very nice. But on the big house, it’
s won-
derful. I can’t find the words for it. Congratulations on the accomplishment.
I hope now too that my Glass Architecture wil find a publisher. When
that final y happens, we’l have to get together.
Let us hope!
Mil ions of Sunday greetings from my house to yours, and I am
Your old grateful
Paul Scheerbart.
With great pleasure I read your story about necessity (proposition for an
art house in Sturm in 1913); in my opinion land on Lake Schwielow must
be purchased. I’l go there as soon as I can.
Glafey’s “The Raw Materials of the Textile Industry” (Quel e &
Meyer, Leipzig, 1.25 M) discusses glass as wel ; collodion and rubber can
give glass hair flexibility. Do you know about this?3
• • •
Berlin-Lichterfelde 4, Marschnerstraße 15
10 February 1914
Dear . . . !
On Sunday I wrote down: 28 words per motto. But that was my mis-
take. You surely meant “let ers.” But 28 is a little too few. Anyway — I
tried. But it wasn’t completely successful. I’m including a few that are too
long. But — maybe they would work using smaller letters. Or on the other
hand, 2 m 50 cm with bigger spaces — or use different sizes of letters.
These must be hand drawn, correct?4
The order here is random.
Composing mottoes is no easy mat er. Some of them sound a little banal.
I wanted to give them al the feeling of improvisation — effortlessness. It
would make me very happy if these bring you pleasure. It is a pleasure that
133
G L A S S HOUSE L E T T E R S
must be long lasting. That’s why I didn’t write immediately. Please take
some time with each verse. And then in the end say what you have to say.
I have a numbered copy too, so you can refer to them that way.
Spring greetings from my house to yours.
And I am your old
Paul Scheerbart.
I don’t think I can fit more thought or purpose in such a short space.
Mot oes for the Glass House5
1. Good luck without glass —
Balderdash!
Glück ohne Glas — / Wie dumm ist das!
2. Brick shal pass
Colorful glass wil last.
Backstein vergeht, / Glasfarbe besteht.
