by Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!-A Paul Scheerbart Reader Josiah McElheny
shining, brave new world of enlightened engineers and alien architectures
is a perfectly Scheerbartian conceit — a luminous and curative utopia of
tomorrow, nailed to the doorpost beyond which lay global war.
Ironic utopias aside, both of these texts, separated by twenty years,
introduced new ways of thinking about glass construction that found
material expression in the architectural experiments of Taut, who was
introduced to the poet in 1913, and whose work stands as a representation
of the often overlooked influence of Scheerbart’s aesthetics on the many
modernisms that took shape in the metropoles of early twentieth-century
Europe. With revolution on his mind, Taut followed Scheerbart through
the looking glass. The magical vernacular of the poet’s colored-glass
visions deeply inspired Taut, who in turn gave form to Scheerbart’s desire
to fuse the synthetic and the biological, to forge a new “biotechnical”
nature.7 The following year, in 1914, they marked their alliance in an
act of cocreation: at the behest of Taut, Scheerbart penned fourteen
aphorisms, deviously playful apothegms on the totemic power of colored
glass. Taut inscribed several across the frieze of his glass pavilion, built
for the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne.
Sponsored by the German glass industries, Taut’s pavilion embodied
Scheerbart’s concept of glass architecture to its core. Indeed, the house,
with Scheerbart’s text blazing across its surface, spoke the language of
the novel, and the novel the language of the house. In a pamphlet on the
pavilion written for the Werkbund Exhibition, Taut remarked: “Current
architecture desperately needs to be freed from depressing, immobile,
clichéd monumentality. This can only be achieved by flowing, artistic
lightness.”8 Like a modernist rite of passage — reform by light! baptism by
glass! — Taut’s house and Scheerbart’s novel would show the way. As a pro-
totype for a new regime of glass construction, Taut’s pavilion was meant
to test the limits of its form (much like Scheerbart’s novel-manifesto) and
to demonstrate a radicalized form of dwelling — a courageous, phantas-
magoric house, an example of industrial possibility, electrifying and light-
ing up the silent, ascetic voids of an already sanitized modernism. Here
is Scheerbart’s voice, in colored, crystallized form: “mehr Farbenlicht!”
As Taut wrote in Die Glocke, “We do not wish to proselytize, nor can
we; we too are building and sitting at our glass crucibles.”9
Although their collaboration was brief, it had a profound bearing on
the development of German architectural modernism and its international
diaspora. Their shared ideas helped shape a movement whose contours
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and arcs demarcate what might be described as an alternative polychro-
matic modernity, a counterpath to the more canonical culture of glass
architecture dominated by the tropes of transparency and whiteness,
such as we find in the built work of Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe, and the later Walter Gropius. For Taut, writing this history of
glass architecture meant writing poetry. “Scheerbart’s writings, and his
‘Glass Architecture’ in particular,” Taut recalled, “are this history, and
my utopias. This history of what is to come is no more a fantasy than
our hindsight into a past on which the lamp of the present casts only a
small beam of light.”10
The architectural critic and historian Adolf Behne, a longtime friend of
Taut’s from his Choriner Kreis (Chorin Circle Group) days, and an early
acolyte of Scheerbart’s glass vision, once remarked that for Taut “the con-
stant desire was to get from earth to heaven.”11 With this disavowal — of
the centralizing forces of homeland and the mass tenement city, of the
bodily traumas of industrial modernity — came a sublime, almost reli-
gious experience of disembodiment described by Behne as “the ultimate
resolution.” If Taut’s gaze truly did seek the cosmos in hope of salvation,
it was to Scheerbart’s Technicolor night skies that he looked. Taut’s cult
of the “Beyond,” as he called it, was an aggregate of many sources, but its
beating heart was the aporia that Scheerbart spent a lifetime articulat-
ing — the impossibility of utopia, which one must nevertheless attempt
to construct, in perpetuum. Or, as Taut described it, “The echo comes
back from the forest according to how you shout.”12
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U NTIMELY MEDITATIONS A N D OTHER MODERNISMS
NOTES
1. It should be noted that Taut launched Frühlicht first as an insert within the bimonthly
circular Stadbaukunst alter und neuer Zeit, whose board he joined in 1920. Frühlicht
appeared in the first fourteen issues of Stadbaukunst, after which it ran for four issues
as an independent journal.
2. Bruno Taut, introduction to “Glashausbriefe von Paul Scheerbart,” Frühlicht 3
(February 1920), in Stadbaukunst alter und neuer Zeit 1, no. 3 (February 1920): 45.
This book, 132.
3. See Paul Scheerbart, Glasarchitektur (Berlin: Verlag Der Sturm, 1914). Reprint, with
an afterword by Wolfgang Pehnt, Munich: Rogner und Bernhard, 1971. Reprint, with
an afterword by Mechtild Rausch, Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2000. Translated into
English by James Palmes, in Dennis Sharp, ed., “Glass Architecture” by Paul Scheerbart
and “Alpine Architecture” by Bruno Taut (New York: Praeger, 1972). This book, 22–90.
See also Paul Scheerbart, Die Baumaterialien der Zukunft (Berlin: Technischer Verlag
für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe, 1893). This book, illustrations, 144, 147.
4. Scheerbart, Baumaterialien, 11.
5. Bruno Taut, “Glass Architecture,” Die Glocke, March 1921, 1374–76. This book, 120.
6. Ibid., 119.
7. Here I am drawing on Detlef Mertins’s reading of the emergence of what he calls a
“bioconstructivist” and “biotechnical” aesthetics in the work of Taut, Lásló Moholy-
Nagy, El Lissitzky, and Hannes Meyer, which, he argues, was heavily indebted both
to Scheerbart’s vision and to Taut’s postwar endeavors to keep the Scheerbartian line
alive. Mertins writes: “For Taut, as for Scheerbart, glass architecture represented a
new stage in the development of technology that promised to reintegrate humanity
with nature. Taut’s aim was not a naïve return to pre-modern craft but a return
forward to a new nature, a second and synthetic nature achieved by humanity but in
accordance with nature’s laws. . . . While Scheerbart did not use the term ‘biotechnics,’
it may be apt for any architecture that aspires to the status of a second nature.” Detlef
Mertins, Modernity Unbound: Other Histories of Architectural Modernity (London:
Architectural Association, 2011), 17, 18.
8. Bruno Taut, “Glashaus Werkbund-Ausstellung Cöln 1914” (Berlin: Buchdruckerei
Albert Nauck, 1914). This book, 104.
9. This book, Taut, “Glass Architecture,” 120.
10. Ibid.
11. Adolf Behne, “Bruno Taut,” Neue Blätter für Kunst und Dichtung 2 (April 1919): 15.
12. Bruno Taut, from “Mein Weltbild,” a
letter to the Crystal Chain group, written
October 19, 1920, reprinted in The Crystal Chain Letters: Architectural Fantasies
by Bruno Taut and His Circle, ed. Iain Boyd Whyte (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1985), 159.
151
Gary Indiana
A Strange Bird: Paul Scheerbart,
or The Eccentricities of a Nightingale
Reading Paul Scheerbart’s fiction instantly summons a period rich in
aesthetic eccentricities and unforgettable eccentrics, roughly spanning
1890 to the start of the Great War: a longueur of late symbolist dec-
adence and Arctic expeditions, imagist poetry and hot air balloons,
angst-ridden Nordic theater and the first Parisian car crashes. For all
but one year of his life, Scheerbart lived in a world often dismissively
described as frozen in the minute before the disaster, the placid eternity
of Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance, spiced by
Le sacre du printemps and the duchesse de Guermantes’s bal musettes.
It was actually the same world that Céline’s embittered, brawling alco-
holic families inhabited in the Passage Choiseul, their adolescent sons
soon to turn into cannon fodder, the same human swarm busy going
crazy in Broch’s Sleepwalkers and Musil’s Man without Qualities, its
festering pathology brilliantly depicted in Michael Haneke’s 2009 film
The White Ribbon.
The First World War is usually thought to have been “unexpected.”
Certainly its savagery and massive scale were beyond anything the human
race had attempted previously. But it would be hard to look at Munch’s
Scream of 1908, or the paintings Kokoschka exhibited in 1910, without
inferring a contemporary sense that something large and terrible was
about to happen.
In Scheerbart’s Berlin, the sudden capital of frantic modernity, his gen-
eration of artists was spooked by the pointless butchery of late nineteenth-
century Europe’s cabinet wars, leery of the new century’s official optimism
and society’s myriad efforts at self-perfection. Scheerbart’s ebullience over
novel technologies of the period — the audiovisual components of mass
media — invariably sounds its own troubled echo. Stories reveling in
scientific marvels often betray apprehension that the same fabulous
Illustration by Paul Scheerbart, nd.
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GARY I N D I A N A
innovations making life more interesting would likely make death more
ubiquitous, bloody, and communal sooner or later.
It’s rare that a Scheerbart story omits any mention of war or fails to
strike a worried note about it. In “Atlas, the Comfortable: A Myth of
Humanity” (this book, 176–79) several philosophers visit the god Atlas
(who has licked the problems involved in holding up the world by placing
it on columns) with the urgent question of how to end war forever. Atlas
advises that “you have to get rid of rich people.” This seems straight-
forward enough. The philosophers benignly choose to ask the rich to
get rid of themselves. The rich, improbably, recognize the public benefit
of this idea but keep “postponing the whole business.” In the meantime
they enrich the philosophers by donating to the cause; the philosophers
finally “become more patient.” War continues.
The greater our despair — the closer we are to the gods. The gods
want to compel us to draw ever closer to the grandiose. And the only
means they have to achieve this is — misery. Only misery can give
rise to great hopes and great plans for the future.
(Paul Scheerbart, Perpetual Motion: The Story of an Invention)
The imaginary contexts of Scheerbart’s fables and novellas distance
reader and author from direct confrontations with interhuman violence,
as Scheerbart’s fictions are designed to go down gently and impart their
improving messages with the mildness of vitamin pills. His work engages
the mind rather than the heart, though the innocent candor of his style
is itself touching. At times it suggests the pathos of a writer clinging to
naiveté and phobic avoidance of adult reality, but this subtracts nothing
from his work’s exemplary artistry. Like Walser, Scheerbart is blessed
with congenital refinement and an impeccable instinct for delighting
his readers.
It was believed among his friends that Scheerbart’s death in 1915
resulted from self-starvation, a despairing protest against the global car-
nage that had commenced the year before. This singular writer whose
strongest suits are whimsy and an adolescent enthusiasm for bright, hal-
lucinatory futures deserves to be taken seriously, as his alter persona is
Cassandra, who didn’t warn the Trojans about nothing.
That said, Scheerbart is proof of Jack Smith’s aperçu that much of
the best art treats existence and its problems with a delicate, nuanced,
unpretentious touch — and is relegated to obscurity because Western
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A S T RANGE B I R D
culture trains us, insensibly, to equate bombast, heaviness, and Wagnerian
overkill with importance and seriousness. Scheerbart merits far more
respectful attention than the quirky footnote literary history has reduced
him to. It’s the luck of the draw and a few PhD theses, I suppose, but his
disappearance down the memory hole seems a howling critical injustice,
in light of the innumerable festschrifts and revivals lavished on less gifted
contemporaries like Raymond Roussel, who enjoys the high esteem of a
writer whose work nobody actually reads but whose ingenious publicity
stunts ensured his inscription in the literary histories written in his time.
On 27 December 1907 I was thinking about little stories in which
something new — astonishing — grotesque — would play a part. I was
thinking about the future of cannons, which struck me as having
great potential as instruments of transport; goods shot into the air
with automatically opening parachute attachments would, it seemed
to me, return quite comfortably to earth.
(Paul Scheerbart, Perpetual Motion: The Story of an Invention)
The expressive freedom of Scheerbart’s writing is uncanny. His imag-
ination ranges over mythic earthly kingdoms, sentient minerals, ancient
gods, future cities, Baron Münchhausen’s visit to China, and talking
planets in distant reaches of the cosmos, with the childlike brio of Jules
Verne; his verbal peregrinations are gracefully informal and indifferent
to convention. Scheerbart’s morally attractive sentiments, sly humor, and
infectious curiosity radiate from impeccably limpid sentences which,
like those of Patricia Highsmith, have the authentic poetry of plainness.
Scheerbart’s voice is utterly natural, unshowy, and, in its unassuming
way, addictive.
Like the antirealist works of Alfred Jarry, Oskar Panizza, and S. I.
Witkiewicz — and, centrally, Franz Kafka — Scheerbart’s stories, novels,
plays, and poems have stronger affinities to folklore, fables, and fantas-
tic tales of every period than to fin-de-siècle and later Mitteleuropean
naturalism. They elude genre categories, hybridizing p
oetry with prose,
fiction with scientific treatise, fantasy with reportage. To extravagantly
pataphysical tales Scheerbart attaches dry ironies of “visual proof” in
the form of diagrams, schematics, and drawings, subtly blurring the line
between oneric reverie and documentary reality. Scheerbart’s stories sus-
pend quotidian space and time, evoking the dream world of origin myths
and epic, episodic tales such as the Arabian Nights, The Manuscript Found
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at Saragossa, the Icelandic Sagas — narratives nested in other narratives
like Russian dolls.
Set in the allegorical, indeterminate “once upon a time” of the Brothers
Grimm, Scheerbart’s texts have the floating effect of Klee watercolors
or Sufi proverbs. Their metaphysical, synchronous universe is unmoored
from historical contingency. The recurring vagaries of the human con-
dition are in one sense “hypostatized as Fate” (as Marcuse, in another
context, characterized Heidegger’s concept of technology); in a different
sense, what Adolf Loos referred to as humanity’s “private mess” is subject
to improvement in Scheerbart’s stories when the private mess is placed
in the right containers.
Later, I imagined the entire atmosphere of the earth crisscrossed by
cable cars. Cable cars descending from high mountain peaks struck
me as particularly appealing. I thought about how hot air balloons
might serve to keep these cable cars aloft when journeying to the
North Pole and then imagined enormous Ferris wheels that, in my
judgment, might roll through all kinds of terrain much faster than
the small wheels that now are customary.
(Paul Scheerbart, Perpetual Motion: The Story of an Invention)
Such works, even when nominally self-contained as stories or essays,
announce themselves as fragments of didactic, visionary projects whose
discrete parts accrue greater significance considered in relation to each
other. A utopian artist, Scheerbart was most fiercely concerned with mak-
ing the case that social reality and its outcomes are primarily determined
by the constructed environment. Uniquely among the arts, this is the
raison d’être of theoretical architecture, and Scheerbart is more readily
associated with architecture than with any other art, including literature.
