Paul Scheerbart, The Gray Cloth. Introduced, translated, and with drawings by John A. Stewart. MIT Press, 2001.
"The German expressionist, architectural visionary, author, inventor, and artist Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) wrote several fictional utopian narratives related to glass architecture. In The Gray Cloth, the first of his novels to be translated into English, Scheerbart uses subtle irony and the structural simplicity of a fairy tale to present the theories of colored glass outlined in his well-known treatise Glass Architecture. The novel is set forward in time to the mid-twentieth century. The protagonist, a Swiss architect named Edgar Krug, circumnavigates the globe by airship with his wife, constructing wildly varied, colored-glass buildings. His projects include a high-rise and exhibition/concert hall in Chicago, a retirement complex for air pilots on the Fiji Islands, the structure for an elevated train across a zoological park in northern India, and a suspended residential villa on the Kuria Muria Islands off the coast of Oman in the Arabian Sea. Fearing that his architecture is challenged by the colorfulness of women’s clothing, Krug insists that his wife wear all gray clothing with the addition of ten percent white. This odd demand brings him notoriety and sensationalizes his international building campaign. For the reader, it underlines the confluence of architecture with fashion, gender, and global media. In his introduction John Stuart surveys Scheerbart’s career and role in German avant-garde circles, as well as his architectural and social ideas. He shows how Scheerbart strove to integrate his spiritual and romantic leanings with the modern world, often relying on glass architecture to do so. In addition to discussing the novel’s reception and its rediscovery by contemporary architects and critics, Stuart shows fiction to be a resource for the study of architecture and places The Gray Cloth in the context of German Expressionism." "In The Gray Cloth, Scheerbart shows that even in the most edifying buildings, the human comedy finds a home." —Alan G. Brake
"Bruno Taut’s Glass Pavilion, which the architect designed for the 1914 German Werkbund Exhibition, is one of the idealistic icons of Expressionist architecture. Commissioned by Germany’s glass industry, the smallish circular building with its faceted cupola, glass brick wall, and open interior conveyed on a modest scale the mystical properties of glass that author Paul Scheerbart espoused in his seminal tract, Glasarchitektur (Glass Architecture) published by Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm press the same year. The pavilion façade was actually inscribed with Scheerbart’s polemical aphorisms on the virtues of glass: among them “Light wants crystal”: “Without a glass palace, life becomes a burden,” and “Building in brick only does harm.”
Scheerbart met Taut in 1913 when he sought to organize a “Society of Glass Architecture.” Taut had already received the commission to design the Glass Pavilion, which he ended up dedicating to Scheerbart just as Scheerbart dedicated Glasarchitektur to him. Though Scheerbart died in 1915, the year after the Werkbund Exhibition, his book was eagerly consumed by utopian German architects who sought to renew their nation’s culture after the destruction of World War I. As Walter Gropius wrote to the artist Herman Finsterlin, “You absolutely must read Paul Scheerbarth [sic]…in [his] works you will find much wisdom and beauty.” Taut was actually the architect most responsible for keeping Scheerbart’s vision alive after the war. He published several books, including Alpine Architecture (1919) and The Dissolution of Cities (1920), which translated Scheerbart’s fervent espousal of glass architecture into projects for utopian towns, including the construction of glass temples in the mountains. In 1919 Taut also started a correspondence among a group of his colleagues called the Glass Chain which obliged each member to share ideas about the future of architecture. Around the same time, he inaugurated a journal, Frülicht (Early Light), which published some of the Glass Chain correspondence among other idealistic articles about architecture.
In 1921 Taut was appointed city architect of Magdeburg, a position which committed him to a much more pragmatic approach to building than Scheerbart’s glass fantasies allowed. Others in the Glass Chain also moved on to practical work. By the time Germany adopted the Dawes Plan in 1924, architects were more inclined to address the nation’s need for low-cost housing than to concern themselves with the magical properties of glass. It is unclear whether or not Scheerbart influenced Mies van der Rohe, whose models for steel and glass towers in the early 1920s were allied with the rationalist tendencies of the G group. Certainly Mies’s early Weimar experiments paved the way for the subsequent explosion of glass curtain wall office and apartment buildings. Though his spartan aesthetic left no room for the extravagant use of colored glass that Scheerbart promoted, his structures and those of others responsible for modernism’s corporate style after World War II came closer to realizing Scheerbart’s vision than the utopian projects of Taut and other Expressionist architects. Scheerbart’s novel The same year that Scheerbart published Glasarchitektur, he also brought out a novel, Das graue Tuch und zehn prozent Weiss; Ein Damen Roman, which has now been admirably translated into English as The Gray Cloth and Ten Percent White: A Ladies Novel by John A. Stuart, professor of architecture at Florida International University. Stuart also wrote an extensive contextual introduction and produced several lovely pastel drawings as visual complements to Scheerbart’s text. From Stuart, we learn that The Gray Cloth was the last of Scheerbart’s novels. It is also the first to be translated into English. Scheerbart was a prolific writer who produced a good number of novels and theater pieces as well as myriad essays, stories, and reviews, many of them on architectural topics, for Berlin’s daily press. He also participated in the city’s lively café life. As a writer, Scheerbart was known for his ironic style, which one might compare with that of Karl Krauss or Adolf Loos, who were writing around the same time in Vienna.
From the time of his first novel, Das Paradies: Die Heimat der Kunst (Paradise; Homeland of Art), published in 1893, Scheerbart was preoccupied with glass architecture, which is a major theme of The Gray Cloth. The novel is set in the middle of the twentieth century, a time when new technologies as envisioned by the author enable people to travel around the world, build large structures of glass, and communicate with each other by telegraph. His protagonist is Edgar Krug, an immensely successful Swiss architect and a proponent of buildings made of colored glass. Krug circumnavigates the globe in his own dirigible-like airship, attending to his many projects. The novel opens in one of Krug’s buildings, a large exhibition hall of steel and colored glass in Chicago where an organ concert is taking place. The organ “roared with such a stormy rhythm that all the seated visitors involuntarily sprang up and stared at the dazzling color magic.”(4) When Krug is introduced to the organist Clara Weber she is wearing a simple gray dress with ten percent white trim. Krug is enraptured with this outfit because he believes that only gray clothing with no more than ten percent white added, is compatible with his colored glass architecture. Clara’s outfit so endears Krug to her that the two move quickly to a marriage contract, which obligates Clara to dress only in gray with no more than ten percent white trim or accessories. Clara’s seeming submissiveness to Krug’s will, however, is countered by her powerful organ playing. She is, in fact, introduced to the reader through the potent rhythms of her music, which induce the audience to stand up and respond to the colored glass walls around them. Throughout the book Clara is encouraged by her American friend Amanda Schmidt to reject the decision to dress as Krug wishes. Amanda is an artist who sells one of her sculptures to Krug at the beginning of the book. In the piece that Krug buys, a head which might be a lion’s or a human’s, is attached to a fish’s body while the side fin covers the entire fish’s body like a cloak. The replacement of a fish’s head with that of a lion or human, thus combining either brute force or refined intelligence with the flowing movement of the fish’s body, suggests an empowerment of Amanda as an artist and a woman.
Though the examples of Clara’s organ playing and Amanda’s art introduce both women as strong figures, male power is quickly reasserted when Krug’s airship takes off, whisking him and Clara to the Fiji Islands, where he must attend to one of his projects, a convalescent home for retired air chauffeurs which is being built by an Englishman, Mr. Webster. Beginning with this project, Krug travels in his airship from one place to another as he is called to make important decisions and attend to crises. Though the male force that Krug embodies is now front and center, Scheerbart keeps the female voice alive through telegraph messages back and forth between Clara and Amanda. Clara is confined to the airship and laments that her agreement to dress only in gray is now making her long for colors. Meanwhile Edgar Krug is embroiled in a dispute with the builder, Mr. Webster, about how much color can be included in the convalescent home. Webster argues that the chauffeurs are against the colors Krug proposes and want only single-colored glass plates. Here Scheerbart pits Krug’s vision against the realities of his clients’ desires. In his discussion of the convalescent home, Scheerbart conveys an impressive knowledge of building techniques. Krug and Webster have a technical discussion of how to position the building’s windscreens to enhance a view of the sea. Krug enlists Clara to introduce the prospect of adding color to the project. Initially he calls Webster’s attention to her gray outfit as evidence of his taste for simplicity but he then invites Clara to suggest several bright colors for the glass windscreens. Webster finally agrees to use them. Once again, we find a contrast between Clara’s gray garb and her discursive power to influence a response to colored glass architecture. Meanwhile, Clara receives a telegram from Amanda which exhorts her to question her marriage to Krug whom she thinks will turn Clara into a "sandwich lady.” (21) The telegram becomes part of a secret dialogue among women that speculates about Krug’s desire for power and the female response to it. Female forces Scheerbart then shifts his ground and reintroduces female power through a group of women artists in the painter-colony of Makartland, a territory at the South Pole. The colony recalls the German turn-of-the-century artist’s colony, Worpswede, near Bremen where at least one important woman artist, Paula Modersohn-Becker, worked. Scheerbart’s colony consists of twenty female painters, ten of whom are married to male artists and ten of whom are unmarried daughters. One of the women is a seamstress who tries to subvert the dress clause in Clara’s marriage contract by making her clothing that continually interprets the ten percent white in new ways. Edgar and Clara remain for nine months in Makartland while Edgar builds a glass expansion of the colony. One of the artists, Käte Bandel, befriends Clara and decides to go with her when the couple leaves the South Pole. After they arrive in Australia on their way to Borneo, Käte engages in a dialogue with Krug about the comparative virtues of wood and glass as building materials. Not only does she defend wood but she also claims that the still sea (i.e. nature), when it seems like a sheet of ice, is more beautiful than glass architecture. Her lively explanation gets Edgar so excited that he jumps up and demands two bottles of champagne from the airship steward. When they arrive in Borneo, Käte persuades Clara to appear at a mountain restaurant wearing ten percent plaid (a checked scarf) instead of white. Clara acquiesces and enrages Krug who demands that Käte return to Makartland immediately. Despite her provocation of Krug, which results in her banishment from the couple’s party, Käte’s vigorous defense of nature’s beauty is nonetheless another example of how Scheerbart uses the woman’s voice to establish an empowering relation to Krug’s architecture. For someone who became known for his persistent promotion of such architecture in real life, Scheerbart shows a surprising dialogic tendency in the novel, where he constantly questions assumptions about the architect’s power and the virtues of his creations. On the one hand, woman is subordinate to the male will, represented by Clara making herself a gray compliment to Krug’s colorful designs; but it also a woman, Käte Bandel, who argues for the superiority of nature over Krug’s architecture. Scheerbart recognizes female power in another way through his description of the Japanese women whom Edgar and Clara meet when they arrive in Japan from Borneo. These women, who live in glass buildings within a small mine, “went around in airy costumes that were, naturally, ablaze with very, very bright colors.” (41) Krug does not like these colors because he thinks they overwhelm those of the glass walls. When he tries to praise his wife’s gray clothing, he is met with opposition by the Japanese women. Their spokeswoman, the Marquise of Fi-Boh tells Edgar that his thoughts about contrast might sit well in Europe but they don’t hold up in Japan. She praises his architecture but denigrates his wife’s drab clothing and offers to change it. Krug refuses and leaves the room with his wife. Subsequently they head to north India where Krug is involved with a project in a large zoological park. Architectural ambitions With the exception of the exhibition hall in Chicago, Krug’s architectural projects are primarily in underdeveloped countries and territories, some real and some fanciful. Most are in Asia or the Pacific region, while several are in the Middle East and one is at the South Pole. Scheerbart goes out of his way to contrast the grand scope and advanced technology of Krug’s glass architecture with the backward or primitive conditions of the places where it is being considered or built. In the Fiji Islands, the natives “probably sleep in holes and never think about glass architecture.”(16-17) Webster, in a discussion with Krug, advises against laying a rail line there. Considering transportation plans for the islands, Krug sees the advantages of using litters to carry people. This, he says, would give the natives something to do. In India at the foot of the Himalayas Krug observes a zoological park where the walls that separate the animals are made of brick. Electric carriages run along the walls, moving the visitors from one animal area to another. Despite the sophisticated technology, Krug is unimpressed because the park does not have enough glass. He tells the park directors that foreigners will only visit the zoo if they find great glass architecture there. Then he proposes that they build colored glass roofs in a variety of shapes over the brick walls. The directors agree to enclose only one quarter of the buildings. THE architects of the INDIAN animal park decide to build a ten-tower organ for Clara, thus amplifying her musical voice which causes the wild animals to stop their roaring. Shortly thereafter the Marquise Fi-Boh arrives from Japan with an entourage of eighty five women bringing bolts of silk cloth. They persuade Clara to dress in the colorful silk. She does so and then plays “wild waltz music” throughout the night. At the moment of Clara’s liberation in India, Krug is in Ceylon with Mr. Webster where he is discussing plans for a Center for Air Research, that would require more than one hundred iron and glass ports in the mountains. Krug’s ideas for using glass to build the center are challenged by the engineers who think glass would be too heavy for the structure. As a replacement they suggest “a wire mesh with a colorful transparent glue spread over it.”(56) They also question Krug’s proposal to use parabolic and elliptical shapes for the hangars. Krug fails to persuade the engineers in Ceylon of his views and moves on to other projects. In the so-called Kuria Muria Islands he has a rendez-vous with a wealthy Chinese client Li-Tung who makes him dress in red silk for their meeting and presents in his honor a performance of exotic female dancers of all races in colorful veils (Scheerbart mentions Negresses, Indians, and Persians). Li-Tung tells Krug that he wants to build houses that hang from gallows. Krug proposes glass houses that could be raised or lowered using a lever arm and rotated so that the living room is always in the shade. The projects that engage Krug range from the futuristic as in the Center for Air Research in Ceylon to the archeological as in Babylon, where a group of businessmen want to recreate the ancient city as it was under Nebuchadnezzar. They propose to staff the Babylonian theme park with Bedouins who would dress up as “warriors, court officials, eunuchs, and temple servants.” (72) All visitors would have to dress in Babylonian costume and women would be carried about in litters. Majolica, Scheerbart tells us, was the triumphant material of the new Babylon and Krug can do little with the project except to glass in the ancient king’s barge. Although he has no architectural success in Babylon, Krug agrees there to strike the clause in the marriage contract with Clara that requires her to dress in gray. Nonetheless, Clara says that she will continue to wear gray with ten percent white by her own consent. Now Clara can costume herself as she likes and her desire to remain a quiet compliment to her husband’s architecture becomes an important contrast to Käte Bandel’s more contentious earlier debate with Krug about the aesthetic power of nature versus his buildings. The succession of events that leads to striking the dress clause from the marriage contract is paralleled by Krug’s continued lack of success with his projects. In Cairo, where he is invited to meet with members of a newly formed pyramid society his suggestion to build small glass hotels on the banks of the Nile is rebuffed and the society members propose instead the construction of large glass obelisks on the tops of the pyramids. Outraged, Krug refuses to mix glass architecture with ancient buildings and he will have nothing to do with the Egyptian project. When they leave Egypt, Krug reveals to Clara that he is also an archeologist. He explains that antiquity and glass architecture are still compatible and he proposes to demonstrate this compatibility with the design of a new museum for Oriental weapons on Malta. When he and Clara arrive there, Clara is now more outspoken about her views on architecture. She has become Krug’s supporter, telling him that she wears her gray clothes strategically in order to help seduce his clients into using at least a couple of colors. Meanwhile she continues her dialogues by telegraph with her women friends, Käte and Amanda. At this point, Clara reaffirms Edgar’s views on the gray cloth and replies to Käte that “[it] is better to have a colorful house than colorful clothing.’ (86) On Malta, the Oriental weapons are stolen and instead of a museum to house them, a museum of glass architecture is built instead. Despite his recent lack of success, Krug has achieved his due recognition and he and Clara repair to his sumptuous home in Isola Grande, Switzerland. In the end, Krug has not altered the world’s reception to glass architecture. His sense of sanguinity about its virtues is countered by the many setbacks he experiences during the course of the novel as he faces difficult clients, contentious engineers, and hesitant builders. The public as described by Mr. Webster and Clara is highly resistant to this form of building and must be persuaded of its merits. Clara become a devotee. When Krug ceases to insist that she wear gray, she continues the practice of her own accord despite the contradictory counsel of her women friends. Although Scheerbart ends the novel with this decision, he allows a multitude of other voices to express different positions and does not impose on the reader a simple polemic about either glass architecture or fashion. In fact, the play of voices is central to the novel and makes the meaning of the title more complex. Subtitling the book, “[a] Ladies Novel,” the author offers innumerable images of independent and strong women, particularly artists. Written at the end of the Wilhelmine era, the novel expresses in many ways prevailing German attitudes of the time: the acceptance of colonialism and the subservience of the darker races, the imperial ambitions of Western capitalists, and the male as a powerful creative force. But Scheerbart also gives unusually strong voices to a diverse group of female characters including several, notably Clara and Amanda, who are extremely successful artists. Although Clara voluntarily dons gray at the end, she has not done so because of patriarchal coercion, nor has she compromised her power as an artist. Scheerbart’s title, The Gray Cloth, can thus direct the reader to an unanticipated theme, the strength of the female voice, which competes vigorously with the architectural discourse that one might have otherwise expected to dominate the novel." - Victor Margolin
"Glass is commonly associated with the presumed rationalism of modern architecture. Architectural historians directly link the glass exhibitions and botanical structures of the mid 1800’s to modern architecture. But this simple modernist storyline bypasses a large amount of other major influences that played an even more significant part in the development of meaning behind glass architecture. My research is about one such forgotten character, left behind by the modern movement in its written history: Paul Scheerbart. That he, the author and advocate of Glasarchitektur, should also be named as a pioneer of glass architecture has sunk into oblivion. My dissertation, through Scheerbart’s various writings with an emphasis on his book Glasarchitektur and his novel Das Graue Tuch, brings to light his influence on architecture, particularly through his close collaboration with Architect Bruno Taut on the design of the GlasHaus. Architectural historians view Taut and Scheerbart Expressionist work’s as being unrealistic and competing against a more rational interpretation of European destiny (whose monument was to be the factory). Consequently, the portrayal of Taut’s and Scheerbart’s architecture as only being fit for fantasises does no justice to the actual impact they had on built architecture and future generations of architects. This disparity is due to some simple facts: Taut (1880-1938) and Scheerbart (1863-1915) died before they had the opportunity to write their own history like other architects of the period. This contributed significantly to their being forgotten about, whilst architectural historians deemed the International Style the source of rebirth for architecture and shunned all other movements. Furthermore World War II created an overwhelming prejudice against anything that was German so this hindered the discovery of Paul Scheerbart’s interpretation on glass architecture. All these factors resulted in Scheerbart receiving some attention as a literary figure in Germany for his eccentric tales and fantasies but the short historiography of English works examining his architectural fictions are considerably lacking, hence my dissertation tries to return to Paul Scheerbart his rightful place in history as the GlasPapa of glass architecture." - Amélie Conway
Paul Scheerbart, Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention, Translated, with an introduction, by Andrew Joron. Wakefield Press, 2011."In the last days of 1907, the German novelist and exponent of glass architecture Paul Scheerbart embarked upon an attempt to invent a perpetual motion machine. For the next two and a half years he would document his ongoing efforts (and failures) from his laundry-room-cum-laboratory, hiring plumbers and mechanics to construct his models while spinning out a series of imagined futures that his invention-in-the-making was going to enable. The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention, originally published in German in 1910, is an indefinable blend of diary, diagrams and digression that falls somewhere between memoir and reverie: a document of what poet and translator Andrew Joron calls a “two-and-a-half-year-long tantrum of the imagination.” Shifting ambiguously from irony to enthusiasm and back, Scheerbart’s unique amalgamation of visionary humor and optimistic failure ultimately proves to be a more literary invention than scientific: a perpetual motion of a fevered imagination that reads as if Robert Walser had tried his hand at science fiction. With “toiling wheels” inextricably embedded in his head, Scheerbart’s visions of rising globalization, ecological devastation, militaristic weapons of mass destruction and the possible end of literature soon lead him to dread success more than failure. The Perpetual Motion Machine is an ode to the fertility of misery and a battle cry of the imagination against praxis. "Originally published in 1910, Scheerbart’s The Perpetual Motion Machine: The Story of an Invention recounts his failed attempt at perfecting an illusory device. Bringing together dozens of diagrams of the increasingly complicated perpet (his name for the machine in question) along with notes on scientific methodology, cosmology (the so-called Earthstar) and architecture, the memoir presents a brief survey of Scheerbart’s crystalline paradise. ‘How the airships will rejoice over the masses of light! All church steeples can truly be covered with light from top to bottom. Very tall mountains can be illuminated in the same fashion. And then the shining vehicles, the housetops, and the colossal boulevards of light – and the banks of canals.’ As his reveries digress, however, Scheerbart begins to substitute the construction of the machine for the composition of his prose, so that by the conclusion the hapless scientist reveals that the story of his invention is much greater than the contraption itself: ‘Ten thousand Utopian novels were waiting to be written about all these nascent revolutions; 1,000 novels couldn’t begin to exhaust the subject matter.’ The reader is left with a sense of Scheerbart’s stark Utopian vision of space and technology in the service of literary fantasy – a belief that led to his collapse and premature death at the onset of the Great War. Scheerbart was summarily excised from the canon of German literature and architecture, despite his direct influence on Die glaserne Kette (The Crystal Chain), a Utopian correspondence network led by Bruno Taut between 1919–20, in which a small group of architects and artists exchanged ideas on what form the architecture of the future should take; Walter Gropius’s ‘Ausstellung für unbekannte Architekten’ (Exhibition for Unknown Architects, Berlin, 1919) and Walter Benjamin’s unfinished Das Passagen-Werk (The Arcades Project, 1927–40) all of which endeavoured to achieve similar interdisciplinary innovations in both theory and design from beneath Scheerbart’s shadow." - Erik Morse
Paul Scheerbart, The Development of Aerial Militarism and the Demobilization of European Ground Force, Fortresses, and Naval Fleets. Trans. by M. Kasper, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2007."Scheerbart's 1909 pamphlet could be characterized as a montage of shifting registers, from banal to bombastic, now chatty, now dry, full of non-sequiturs and with a deadpan tone that leaves readers uncertain as to what's funny and what's not." "Ugly Duckling Presse has recently re-published, as part of its Lost Literature series, this quizzical and provocative "flyer" (itself an intentional pun) by German writer Paul Scheerbart, The Development of Aerial Militarism and the Demobilization of European Ground Forces, Fortresses, and Naval Fleets (1909, and ably translated by Michael Kasper, published in 2007). One is tempted to read this quasi-Swiftian pamphlet alongside the sundry modernist manifestoes of the time, which proclaim (a la Marinetti) the triumph of technology for modern man, yet Scheerbart appears to have been parodying such triumphalist gestures. The flyer's tones range from the bombastic to the tragicomic; note the opening: "We're on the brink of a tragedy. The magnificent military culture of the nineteenth century will soon be 'demobbed'...one would as soon assume the world was ending" (1). Scheerbart's "argument" is clear from the title: air power will end war culture as we know it. Though clearly, prior to World War I, glorification of the military and European power was very much in evidence, countervailing views also existed, and it is probable that Scheerbart enlists himself in that latter category. But such is the Swiftian cleverness of the flyer that he never completely reveals himself and his own opinions. Does he believe air power will make armies obsolete, or is he just miming the gestures of the triumphalists? That ambiguity is precisely what makes this flyer such a discomfiting, and critical, read, for those of us interested in war resistance texts. Does the text merely perform a Swiftian "Modest Proposal" for the armed forces? Absolutely not. After all, every new military technology that was created has been heralded as the end of warfare (Nobel's dynamite, the nuclear bomb, etc.), and yet immediately has become yet another weapon in the arsenal of potential or actuated threats. In fact, perusing a list of contemporary "non-lethal" weaponry researched by the Pentagon is to enter into a horror movie without end. Every human sense is threatened with ray guns, acoustic sonic blasts, malodorants, rubber and plastic projectiles, etc. (a list shortly forthcoming). The military admits that such "non-lethal" weaponry is, of course, not an attempt to make war less lethal, but to supplement its lethality regimes and to lessen protest. In Department of Defense Directive 3000.3 (July 19, 1996), the (heavily-Latinate) language goes: "Nonlethal weapons should not be required to have a zero probability of producing fatalities or permanent injuries." The Development of Aerial Militarism and the Demobilization of European Ground Forces, Fortresses, and Naval Fleets is an essential read for helping us think about how literature might intervene in questioning our ongoing celebration of technology. At the same time, it offers a sobering picture of how imagination itself is harnessed to violent ends, in the weapons industries of our time. "Use your imagination," as Military Intelligence exhorted the soldiers at Abu Ghraib. Finally, it is suggestive of the contradictions of the avant-garde project: how satiric and parodic gestures can become so easily co-opted, commodified and domesticated, and how all attempts at resistance come to resemble the object of critique; from Dada to Beat, from Pop Art to Punk, from Language Poetry to Flarf, avant-garde texts and practices often dwell on the liminal space between resistance and complicity, between oppositionality and top of the pops." - Philip Metres
"Paul Scheerbart is unlikely to be remembered in America for his poetry, if at all for any of his writing. However, in his satirical flyer The Development of Aerial Militarism and the Demobilization of European Ground Forces, Fortresses, and Naval Fleets, Scheerbart writes with ambiguously sardonic and wry humor that speaks to anyone who’s watched for the last 100 years, addressing the omnipresence of and social malaise relative to technological development, specifically military development, that presses forward from generation to generation. He criticizes the arms race which took place before the start of World War I and predicts—unknowingly—what later was to be coined Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD. The flyer is organized into 16 smaller essays concerning the point “Aerial Militarism is far stronger than ground forces, fortresses, and navel fleets.”
Beginning with the first essay, “The Impossibility of a Land Battle when Air-Fleets are Involved,” Scheerbart presumes that two European powers possessing Air-fleets want war with one another. If such a war occurs, according to Scheerbart, Air-fleets would cause great and irreconcilable damage in attacks to military installations, parliaments, and palaces; it would happen so quickly that the troops would be “greeted with a hail of torpedoes,” rendering land troops “totally superfluous.” In the second smaller essay, “The Impossibility of a Fortress War when air-fleets are Involved,” the author goes on to explain that “a fortress war is inconceivable no matter what, if air-fleets exist on both sides.” Scheerbart states that air-fleets simply aren’t bothered by forts, forts being the standard first line of defense against invading armies. Furthermore, air-fleets can fly with complete freedom and need not pay further attention to forts. He then concludes that forts are superfluous and should be converted for peaceful purposes, a notion rendered with marvelous humor. Scheerbart’s logical, direct and deadpan humor laughs the reader into identifying with Scheerbart’s position—even if he has no clear “stance” other than the hint that it is careless to brainlessly praise technology for its own sake. You’ll laugh inaudibly at his absurd, yet almost conceivable logic: “many soldiers can hide in the forts. But if they come out, they’re exposed to air torpedoes. They might as well not come out. Now it’s obvious that soldiers who can’t put in an appearance in wartime are totally superfluous.” The irony speaks for itself; the future, and future technology, are incoherent, a little bit frightening and always based on something of a false premise. A bit antique, Aerial Militarism might raise the “relevance” question at first. But good political satire is timeless; Scheerbart keeps a steady eye on the illogical and contradictory moves by Militarists, as well as their denial of the proliferation of god-knows-what new military technology as it “pursues its own steady progress without regard for humanity or civic sentiment” and “compels a dynamite war.” It also serves to remind us of the speed at which once-fascinating and unnerving technology can become commonplace as newer and more destructive ends are researched. Figuratively, the flyer (pun intended, if you haven’t determined that yet) claims a war of terror and atrocity, which literally depends on dynamite. There have always been Rules of War, and there have always been people ordered to break them; nevertheless, the question of morality is raised: “in the future, even the dropping of explosive munitions on enemy ships will be possible so that, as in a land war, the battle will have to take another course, and at the very least leave a powerful moral impression.” In the end, Scheerbart strikes a profoundly relevant chord, asking Aerial militarists should “feel a moral lift when, with a couple of dynamite bombs, they succeed in sending a couple of thousand enemies to kingdom come? Indeed—I wouldn’t be surprised if they soon started talking about “holy” dynamite…” What’s more holy than victory?" - Komo Andanda
"Like Rilke’s mirrored stag, Scheerbart offers sixteen points in this “flyer”, newly translated a hundred years after it was written.
I. “A land battle however is completely impossible—the dynamite dropping from above works so fast that ground forces don’t arrive until long after events develop.”
II. “Naturally—many soldiers can hide in forts. But if they come out, they’re exposed to air torpedoes. They might as well not come out.”
III. “Naval fleets count for nothing in future dynamite wars... in particular, the English are to be pitied.”
IV. “Infantry is of no use whatsoever.”
V. “Artillery, all the same, would have a limited ‘right to existence.’”
VI. “Horse soldiers nowadays haven’t the slightest value.”
VII. “One could stop building submarines.”
VIII. “I’m against demolishing fortifications—they’re excellent examples of architectural landscapes... even torpedo boats would be well received as passenger steamers.”
IX. “Superfluous cannons... horses... most sabers and most uniforms will probably wind up in the war museums of the future.”
X. “A European or international congress of militarists should be organized in the very near future. Whether it meets in Berlin, Paris, or Switzerland is neither here nor there... redeployment of armaments is what needs discussing, not disarmament.”
XI. “Anti-militarism hasn’t the slightest right to exist anymore; it’s over, and the friends of peace should realize that very soon.”
XII. “Naturally, the smallest state can be very dangerous to the biggest.”
XIII. “’This image also suggests notions of just what an air apparatus might mean to anarchists, nihilists, and others of that ilk. The eagle eye of the police may constantly monitor the doings of these groups, but who’ll watch over them if they hurl their murderous weapons from on high, which, with flying machines, will soon be within reach?’”
XIV. “Festivals! After what’s just been said, I need hardly add that we have little reason to celebrate dirigibles with festive enthusiasm.”
XV. “Over the centuries, the United States of Europe have constituted a much-ridiculed utopia. Faced with a dynamite war, this utopia becomes a much more realizable thing—soon losing its comical side.”
XVI. “Private aircraft, therefore, are easily utilized in air warfare.” - Christopher Mulrooney
Scheebert's texts (German)
Josiah McElheny, The Light Club: On Paul Scheerbart's "The Light Club of Batavia", University of Chicago Press, 2010."Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) was a visionary German novelist, theorist, poet, and artist who made a lasting impression on such icons of modernism as Walter Benjamin, Bruno Taut, and Walter Gropius. Fascinated with the potential of glass architecture, Scheerbart’s satirical fantasies envisioned an electrified future, a world composed entirely of crystalline, colored glass. In 1912, Scheerbart published The Light Club of Batavia, a Novelle about the formation of a club dedicated to building a spa for bathing—not in water, but in light—at the bottom of an abandoned mineshaft. Translated here into English for the first time, this rare story serves as a point of departure for Josiah McElheny, who, with an esteemed group of collaborators, offers a fascinating array of responses to this enigmatic work. The Light Club makes clear that the themes of utopian hope, desire, and madness in Scheerbart’s tale represent a part of modernism’s lost project: a world based on political and spiritual ideals rather than efficiency and logic. In his compelling introduction, McElheny describes Scheerbart’s life as well as his own enchantment with the writer, and he explains the ways in which The Light Club of Batavia inspired him to produce art of uncommon breadth. The Light Club also features inspired writings from Gregg Bordowitz and Ulrike Müller, Andrea Geyer, and Branden W. Joseph, as well as translations of original texts by and about Scheerbart. A unique response by one visionary artist to another, The Light Club is an unforgettable examination of what it might mean to see radical potential in absolute illumination."
“An exciting hybrid—beautifully clear, yet complex; a meditation on meta-narratives by a leading artist and writer of his generation; a work of art.”—Michelle Kuo
"McElheny surrounds this vision of "ironic utopia" with metanarratives, which he commissioned from other artists and writers, or authored himself. In a play, a reminiscence, a male/female dialogue, and a critique, Scheerbart’s century-old original gets re-narrated -- its bold creative idealism is hightlighted while its discriminating and, in hindsight, alarming aspirations are exposed." - Sabine Russ
"The Light Club is built up around Der Lichtklub von Batavia: Eine Damen-Novellette, a very short text (despite what one might expect from its designation as a 'novellette') by Paul Scheerbart, first published in 1912, which Josiah McElheny and his collaborators use as a springboard for their own pieces, which range from simply translating the text (it is printed in both the original German and the English translation by Wilhelm Werthern) to reimagining it (as in the poem 'From the Shadows' by Gregg Bordowitz and Ulrike Müller) to providing context and analysis (the Introduction, and the pieces on Scheerbart himself). Scheerbart's work has not been widely translated into English but he is a fascinating writer who defies easy categorization. Among his works are a 'hippopotamus novel', a 'railway novel with sixty-six intermezzos', and his 'asteroid-novel' Lesabéndio (the original edition of which came with illustrations by Alfred Kubin). He also had a thing about glass and architecture, and it's this that has attracted the most English-language attention, with The Gray Cloth: Paul Scheerbart's Novel on Glass Architecture (MIT Press, 2001) the most prominent of his works in translation; it is also this that is of particular interest to McElheny here, as Scheerbart's 'The Light Club of Batavia: A Ladies Novelette' involves a subterranean project where: "The villas of the mine and the hotels are also to be constructed top to bottom with Tiffany-glass and iron", etc. As McElheny notes about Scheerbart in his Introduction:
It is often hard to tell in his texts what he intends as humor, satire, or a call to arms, but he continually returns to the idea that cultural stagnation can be overcome, that renewal is possible.
'The Light Club of Batavia' -- a mere six pages long -- seems like a simple little piece, but there's quite a bit to it; between McElheny's Introduction and his story, as well as the elaboration of the text in the poem by Gregg Bordowitz and Ulrike Müller this volume nicely shows how a text can be explained, read, and understood through a variety of approaches. McElheny's story, 'The Light Spa in the Mine', is both reading of and elaboration on the original, repeating parts of the story -- in paraphrase, rather than direct quote (allowing him to continue the translation, as it were), and the variations on the original are all quite good, usefully enhancing the text. The Light Club also serves as a good if limited introduction to Scheerbart himself, an author whose works certainly deserve a larger readership: 'The Light Club of Batavia' is barely even the tip of the iceberg of his work." - M.A.Orthofer
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