by Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!!-A Paul Scheerbart Reader Josiah McElheny
feeling of boisterous freedom, “as if man were rising up on tiptoe and
simply had to dance out of inner pleasure” — Paul Scheerbart was truly a
man after Nietzsche’s own heart! Nietzsche, who saw such reincarnations
of Dionysus returning again and again — “We set our gaudy puppets amid
the clouds and then cal them Gods and supermen . . . ”
This last Dionysus died and left us, left Europe, four years ago now:
crucified, torn apart once again — this time by the war of the earth. (Here
it must not be cal ed a World War.) He was hit by no bullet, by no grenade
nor bomb from the airships he so feared — and yet the titanic destructive
power of this war had already sapped and undermined him far earlier than
was visible to others. Indeed, Scheerbart had a last dream for humanity, a
dream of the future like Victor Hugo’s: the expanses of the heavens added
to those of the earth — the abolition of al borders — one people of the
world — the earthly paradise, whose seed would be rescued by the first
“dirigible!” But the new “heavier-than-air” principle bril iantly triumphed
before Scheerbart’s very eyes, though he saw the terrible interregnum of
chaos, the horrifying age of destruction and the unbearable deserts that lay
beyond and between with more prescience and foreboding than any of his
contemporaries. Like the mythical rain of sulfur and fire on Sodom and
Gomorrah, now dynamite rained unsparingly down from the heavens: the
triumphal arches of centuries turned to dust at lightning speed, pyramids
and temples pulverized, the Raphaels and Michelangelos unshielded amid
the rubble. Already ten years before the great war, this made the “good”
Paul Scheerbart, who actual y did not love culture but who rather — like
only Friedrich Nietzsche before him in Europe — was himself a part of it,
extraordinarily “nervous.” It did not make him shake in his boots or tremble
with sympathy like some sentimental apostle of peace — the “frightful y
vulgar” affects do not touch one whose nature is true: rather it would res-
onate in every fiber and breath, he would feel it in his blood when al of
existence threatened to turn radical y into its opposite. He always felt his
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ON THE BIRTH, DEATH, A N D REBIRTH OF DION YSIS
culture-nature as a star among stars — illuminating, whirling, cosmic — not
as terrestrial and separate; but suns fear nothing more than darkening and
destruction, holocaust, the twilight of the gods. Zarathustra too knew only
light and darkness. Already in Scheerbart’s writing, “Rakkóx, der Bil-
lionär,” who wants to use his bil ions to gradual y turn the earth into a
shimmering architectural palace, perishes miserably in a war that he un-
successful y tries to prevent through the “commingling of al races.” And in
fact back then — in 1900 — a huge increase in personal steam travel was
supposed to see to the “flushing out of national elements.” Ten years later
there was “The Aviator’s Dream,” a strange air-spectacle with the same
goal: countless aviators, whirring around and among each other, gradual y
give up, change, and switch “fatherlands” — they no longer see each other
as Scandinavian or Chinese but as “passengers” — — — “air-uncles.” Five
years before the war, this was only the external, seemingly innocuous, and
carefree reflection of events that could no longer ful y hide their sinister,
“nervous-making” character under a seemingly spotless surface. Certainly
there were hints — “who would want to lead revolutions or make wars,”
when a few hundredweights of dynamite dropped from above could now
easily destroy any major city — “it’s now far too easy . . .” But Scheerbart
had already grown uneasy over one thing: that the darkening of the lumi-
nous might occur not according to laws or rules written in the stars, but
arbitrarily, at any time, by accident; that the devastation of beauty could
happen suddenly — irrevocably — with a childish senselessness. Was he
now trying to appeal to humanity? Culture and humanity: like Nietzsche,
he saw these things as far from the reality of the world. Culture is the reli-
gion of the strong, rock-solid and benevolent; humanity, the instinct of the
weak, the sniveling, and therefore often anarchic. And so by 1909 he had
written the utopian pamphlet The Development of Aerial Militarism and the
Demobilization of European Ground Forces, Fortresses, and Naval Fleets,
a text already pregnant with al the volcanoes of the future. Here, on the
wide fields on which the terrible new catastrophes are played out, every-
thing dies: animals, humans, and al civilization. Only the air fleets remain
and continue to flourish magnificently — and yet somehow there were stil
il ogical people somewhere on the earth who lacked complete sympathy
for this charming technological toy! But by 1910 Hal ey’s comet had come
streaming across the sky — undeflectable, unavertable, in accordance with
natural law — this was what final y brought the gathering tensions to the
point of explosion. “Orchids, snowdrops,” — cried Scheerbart — “trig-
ger quite particular emotions, have effects on the soul — and a gleaming
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A N S E L M R E U S T
comet . . .” Hal ey’s comet had previously appeared just before 1789; and
now once again we were visited with revolutions, convulsions, and com-
motions of the most terrible kind. The steerable airship — that is the new
revolution, the new — terrible epoch. So said Paul Scheerbart.
Since then he lived in a state of terrible “nervousness.” He withdrew
from society. Got drunk. “Now do you understand why I’ve become so
gloomy?” he asked his last friends. But his tremendous, truly inspired mind
was nonetheless able to invent two more engines of fantasy powerful enough
to fly away from the dreaded “dirigibles,” inventions which in fact forced
them temporarily into service: Perpetual Motion and Glass Architecture.
Here it was again: the ideal star, a dancing star, al turmoil and light . . .
Perpetuum mobile: the ultimate machine, the one that final y makes al oth-
ers superfluous, a likeness of the infinite, a planet: how can one understand
this bold bacchanalian dream, conceived as a bulwark, continually making
the little wooden crutches and paltry wheels it constantly needed, weighing
itself down only in order to launch itself higher and farther — leaving only
the self-important philistines to their awkward smiles and refutations . . . ?
And Glass Architecture — it was ultimately the most profound bulwark
against the storm that came smashing everything to shards from above that
was ever conceived . . . ! Or — was it ironic? What breaks more easily than
glass? Wait and see. A few rattling panes won’t do it. But — the effects
of light! Sparkling palaces, the interplay of colors, millions of glimmering,
sparkling, spinning sparks — an intoxication of color! The whole earth — a
glittering, flickering crown of pearls! And here it is again: only light and
darkness. But the darkness wil not come. The earli
est light of dawn and
the latest sunset shimmer in glass palaces. And then the illuminated wal s,
the colorful domes, the gay colored lights. Even flowers are dif erent under
colored glass, their souls change — greenhouses. Behind colored glass,
people wil not be so evil. They wil be more religious — like in the colored
half-light of Gothic cathedrals — —
Culture! Culture! — So that it won’t be shattered again and again: we
wil build it out of glass, awe-inspiring glass . . . Truly, this Scheerbart — if
only Europe had heard his voice, if only it had been able to — because,
like al true originals, he spoke an untranslatable language — it would have
laughed more and become — more awestruck, more reverent. And if only
Scheerbart had been awarded the Nobel Prize, as the only real and true
apostle of peace in Europe, as I continually pleaded between 1911 and
1914 . . . ! Then perhaps his voice would have been echoed — since most
people need external signs and signals in order to take notice and listen . . .
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ON THE BIRTH, DEATH, A N D REBIRTH OF DION YSIS
Certainly, he knew better than anyone that he could not hold back the
approaching destiny: and so in 1913 he wrote Lesabéndio — a last wil and
testament bequeathing comfort to the peoples of the world: “Do not fear
pain — but do not fear death, either!” Who knows — perhaps the most
terrible pain was needed for the final culture, for our highest development.
And stil he experienced the reality — the war. The first reality, how-
ever — that was lethal to this great mind! The total darkening of this star.
Eclipse of the sun. Death.
His little “Perpet” models (as he cal ed the machine) were never even
dimly realized, as mentioned above; neither was his Glass Palace, despite
the “real” one built for him by Bruno Taut — : rather, the Glass Palace
worked like protective goggles to shield such bright inner vision — and
therefore Paul Scheerbart was so grateful to Taut — for keeping the un-
fathomable depths of his inner vision from blinding him.
But the war — that was the first reality that real y horrified him . . . not
from fear or cowardice. Oh no — — . Only culture — culture!
Dionysus was once more torn apart by titans. Dionysus is dead.
But he must rise again.
In whom? When?
Translated by Anne Posten
271
A Letter from Bruno Taut to
His Brother Max, October 30, 1915
Zehlendorf. Oct. 30, 1915
My dear Max. You haven’t written for quite some time. I hope you have
been wel . You’l have some rest now that the of ensive is over. Please write.
There’s not much new here — except for something very sad: since 14
Oct. our dear Star Papa Paul Scheerbart is no longer with us. He had a
stroke, struggled in a coma for 24 hours, and then passed away. We went
to the funeral, which was dreadful: it was organized by the self-proclaimed
association of “poets” and the speeches were awful. Everyone was terribly
upset.
([Planc?] Nov. 5)
That was now quite some time ago, which is what it makes it so difficult
to tel you and Mutz about it. One cries one’s eyes out not to have him
here anymore. I stil feel like I have been orphaned. But Paul Scheerbart
lives — not just in his work — but in al his humanity. I don’t know of any-
thing else new. I’ve long been waiting for news from Hoffman, who’s in
the trenches in east Galicia. You write too and — at least say that you are
there. We won’t lose hope.
Brotherly greetings!
Your Bruno
Transcribed by Hubertus von Amelunxen and translated by Anne Posten
A letter from Bruno Taut to Max Taut, his brother and fellow architect in the firm Taut &
Hoffman, on the death of Paul Scheerbart. Taut wrote the first half of the letter from the
Berlin neighborhood of Zehlendorf two weeks after Scheerbart’s death. Max appears to have
been on the Western front at the Battle of Loos in France, which concluded on the same day
as Scheerbart’s death, October 14. Taut was probably writing from the offices of Taut and
Hoffman, on what was then the Berlin-Potsdamer Chaussee. In the second half of the letter,
Taut notes that he is writing about a week later, no longer from Zehlendorf but from “Planc.,”
an abbreviation possibly for Planckstraße in the nearby Mitte neighborhood. Taut explains
his difficulty and delay in sending Max the sad news and is anxious about their architectural
partner Franz Hoffmann, who was a cavalryman at the German eastern front at the time.
272
Hubertus von Amelunxen
“. . . versions of the seemingly
imperfect . . .”
Thoughts on Paul Scheerbart
and Walter Benjamin
“I became a humorist out of rage, not out of kindness,” wrote
Paul Scheerbart.1 His friend Stanislas Przybyszewski, echoing
this, said that Scheerbart possessed “the desperate grief and
nobility of a great man,” one who “smothered life’s hellish
pain with laughter.”2
The act of reading a text by Scheerbart inevitably induces a laughing
dream-state or perhaps a dreamy laughter. It is not hearty laughter, as our
writer delicately upsets the ordering of things of this earth, rearranging
them within cosmic space and expanding the earth’s finitude outward
with fantastical interstellar possibility. “The earth,” says Knéppara in
Scheerbart’s “moon novel” The Great Revolution, “is really a very boring
and disagreeable star.”3 Thus the character Mafikásu is able to convince
the moon-men to turn their gaze from the earth, end their millennia-long
observation of humankind’s drive toward self-destruction, and instead
look at the other side of the moon using a telescope equal in length to the
diameter of the moon itself. Hundreds of years in construction, allowing
the discovery and excavation of all the moon’s crystalline treasures, this
Walter Benjamin manuscript 836. This manuscript is one of the few surviving examples of
Benjamin’s exploration of Scheerbart, a set of notes on Scheerbart’s novel Münchhausen und
Clarissa (Münchhausen and Clarissa), which Benjamin bought in winter 1922 and probably
read in 1922 or 1923. Other examples of Benjamin’s interest in Scheerbart appear in two essays
associated with his Arcades Project, a collection of essays and fragments initially inspired by
the glassed-in shopping arcades of Paris: “Experience and Poverty,” which discusses Scheer-
bart and glass architecture and “On Scheerbart,” an essay on Scheerbart’s novel Lesabéndio.
Benjamin’s planned book “The True Politician,” which was to contain an extensive exploration
of Scheerbart’s work, is lost or was never completed.
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HUBERTUS VON A M E L U N X E N
telescope opens up a vista so big and wide that the moon-men—in fact
the moon itself — become “all eye.” Stanley Kubrick might have been
reading Scheerbart. As in Scheerbart’s novels, the timeless flight through
opalescent nebulae at the end of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey presents
the end
of a history of humanity, and of a humanism that understands
all persons in proportion to their similarity to the world of humans. As
Kubrick presented us his realization of the computer HAL or envisioned
a reverse cosmic time leading to the birth of a “new” man, Scheerbart
turned away from humankind and from humanity’s civilizing activities,
emphatically welcoming “the great revolution” in the moon-men’s renun-
ciation of Earth.
In 1914, the year before his death, Scheerbart protested vehemently
against the very idea of a “world war” and was an oracle for an interstellar
peace, in contrast to war on earth. In a brief, late essay on Scheerbart (writ-
ten in French), Walter Benjamin wrote that Scheerbart’s great achievement
was to call on the stars for aid in the preservation of humankind’s creation
here below (“La grande trouvaille de Scheerbart aura été de faire plaider
par les astres auprès des humains la cause de la création.”)4 Benjamin’s first
essay on Scheerbart was written between 1917 and 1919, a commentary
about Scheerbart’s asteroid-novel Lesabéndio, which Benjamin received
as a wedding present from Gershom Scholem in 1917. Benjamin had a
long-standing fascination with Scheerbart’s work and was familiar with
many of the misfit writer’s novels, stories, and miscellanea. Gershom
Scholem describes another great essay, probably finished in 1920 but
regrettably now lost, titled “The True Policitian,” in which Benjamin
draws on Scheerbart for his political theories, which he later linked to
Brecht’s ideas of epic theater at the end of the 1920s.
Notably, the essay “Experience and Poverty,” published in December
1933, also makes substantial reference to Scheerbart. In that essay
Benjamin compares Scheerbart to the artist Paul Klee and the architect
Adolf Loos, saying no one had greeted the arrival of the “naked man of the
contemporary world who lies screaming like a newborn babe in the dirty
diapers of the present . . . with more joy and hilarity” than Scheerbart.5
At the heart of Benjamin’s sympathy toward Scheerbart is the latter’s
turning away from earthly naturalism, to turn instead toward the “arbi-
trary, constructed”6 — toward Glass Architecture— as well as Scheerbart’s
