A Pattern Language (1977), the landmark architectural study by the Berkeley Center for Environmental Structure, highlights the affinities between architectural and poetic modes of structuring reality. At their most potent, its authors argue, both poetry and architecture can illuminate the densely packed layers of the language and space around us. In this view, we ought to take the bunker-like brickwork of a local bank branch as seriously as the historical echoes of the word cotton, the network of meanings around the Russian Federation’s recent deployment of the letter z, or the form of the novel. Like all cultural products, structured space reveals its content through its form.
Traces of this logic can be found, half a century earlier, in Siegfried Kracauer’s novel Ginster (1928), appearing for the first time in English translation by Carl Skoggard with NYRB Classics. If A Pattern Language presents us with a poetics of architecture, Kracauer’s novel reverses the perspective, presenting something like an architectural poetics. Here, literature processes its content through the lens of manufactured space. The flaneurial, semi-autobiographical novel—which follows its eponymous young architect as he skitters through the German metropole and in and around the periphery of the First World War—puts into literary form the exponential complexities of the modern city, resulting from the large-scale industrialization and urbanization of Europe in the lead-up to 1914.[1] Kracauer, in other words, attempts to read the catastrophe of the First World War architecturally. Rather than opting for the straight-to-celluloid big-band sensationalism of the trenches of its contemporary, All Quiet on the Western Front (also published in 1928), Ginster registers the war from the distant drafting desk of the everyday. Kracauer assembles a war novel that desperately wants to be otherwise. In so doing, he sketches an as-built drawing of not only the war’s unthinkable actualities but, in turn, of the structure of the novel form. Focalized through the novel, Kracauer registers the empirical world by way of diagrammatic schema.
Ginster was Kracauer’s first major work in any genre, garnering the admiration of writers such as Thomas Mann and Herman Hesse and even resulting in a sequel of sorts (Georg [1973]), albeit published posthumously. In spite of this, Kracauer (1889–1966) is far better known as a cultural critic than as a novelist. His close relationships with fellow German-Jewish intellectuals Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Leo Löwenthal often lead him to be justly associated with the idiosyncratic Marxism of the first generation of Frankfurt School critical theory. Meanwhile, his pioneering writings on cinema—especially From Caligari to Hitler (1948) and Theory of Film (1960)—have offered a commonly deployed critical lens through which to view Ginster.
When the novel was anonymously serialized—apparently written by Ginster himself—in the Frankfurter Zeitung beginning in 1928, its eponymous protagonist already conjured up references from the world of filmic slapstick. “Ginster at war,” Joseph Roth writes in his review, “That’s Chaplin in the department store.”[2] And, indeed, the novel often unfurls in the prose equivalent of pratfall, take-after-take, keeping jaunty, cane-twirling step with both the picaresque tradition and the modernist montage, “always wrestling with the boots and the gaiters” (200)—evoking Don Quixote’s battle with the wine skins as much as the Tramp’s passage through the cog-toothed guts of the assembly line. Johnannes von Moltke, in his afterword to Skoggard’s crisp translation, suggests an apt anachronistic comparison to Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hullot.[3] It is not difficult to imagine Ginster stumbling around the over-landscaped yard of Villa Arpel in Mon Oncle (1958), three calamitous decades later, as quixotically bemused by the fishly water feature as Hullot.
If films, as Kracauer puts it, “cling to the surface of things,” architectural thinking instead reduces these surfaces to diagrammatic abstractions; in this regard, Ginster’s underexamined architectural register might be read as a foil to the novel’s more obvious filmic panache.[4] Architectural thinking, in other words, makes visible the process of diagrammatic abstraction that filmic surfaces make appear whole and organic. The architectural, here, bridges the theoretical and the practical, either as construction or reduction. Architectural thinking is a space of planned abstraction, a quality it shares with Kracauer’s modernist novel.
Ginster, like his author between 1914 and 1920, works as an architect tasked with “the leisurely production of landscapes” (6)—what Adorno, in a letter to Kracauer, calls “the empty pleasure in putting things together.”[5] Ginster is disenchanted with the profession:
The more he tried to conform himself to it, the more he understood that the magic of architectural drawings dissipated as soon as they were realized with the help of bricks and bricklayers. Instead of letting weirdly intricate line drawings turn into buildings, he would have liked to reduce all workaday objects to drawings. (16)
Ginster’s fascination with the complex geometric patterns of architectural drawings, rather than the buildings they amount to, approaches what would become Kracauer’s master metaphor for culture in the capitalist metropolis of early twentieth century: the mass ornament. Kracauer illustrates this term by way of the Tiller Girls—the English high-kicking proto-Rockettes—whose meticulously drilled routines more closely resemble aerial photographs of cities or diagrams in a textbook on Euclidian geometry than human beings. In this way, the mass ornament is the logical aesthetic counterpart to the motions of a factory line. It is through these “surface-level expressions,” Kracauer believes, that one has access to “the fundamental substance of the state of things.”[6] Listening to an after-dinner piano performance, Ginster glimpses “events that [are] not events at all, but geometric oddments whose features [are] immediately obliterated, as with features in dreams” (38). Ginster’s focus on the ornamental quality of the music, his desire to reduce the world to the distance of pattern, forms an attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible through structures of abstraction.
Such abstraction is key to Ginster’s architectural poetics. Setting, characters, mood, and atmosphere are repeatedly figured as space, a kind of space which is, in turn, subsumed under its diagrammatic and abstract concept. On the one hand, such abstraction is part and parcel of literature’s—or, for that matter, language’s—representative axis, its ability to reflect the world at all, upon which its formal existence depends. On the other, however, Kracauer’s abstraction is unique to its historical moment. For him:
The current site of capitalist thinking is marked by abstractness. The predominance of this abstractness today establishes a spiritual space that encompasses all expression. The objection raised against this abstract mode of thought—that it is incapable of grasping the actual substance of life and therefore must give way to concrete observation of phenomena—does indeed identify the limits of abstraction. As an objection it is premature, however, when it is raised in favor of that false mythological concreteness whose aim is organism and form. A return to this sort of concreteness would sacrifice the already acquired capacity for abstraction, but without overcoming abstractness.[7]
Such totalizing abstraction shares its double character—both dominating and potentially emancipatory—with the structure of the mass ornament. “Like abstractness,” Kracauer writes, “the mass ornament is ambivalent. On the one hand its rationality reduces the natural in a manner that does not allow man to wither away, but that, on the contrary, were it only carried through to the end, would reveal man’s most essential element in all its purity.”[8]
The novel, then, enacts Ginster’s reduction on the world writ large, as both a numbing agent and a scalpel. Ginster spends most of it absorbed in his consistent omission from the world, and in this way reveals obliquely the mechanics of modernity, both civil and martial. This is perhaps most apparent in Ginster’s own professional attitude toward the design of space. Tasked with redesigning a shop mezzanine, he finds himself enamored with the inclusion of “ingenious storage spaces, […] though not for their economy but because of the element of surprise they provided” (65). His architectural vision is a practiced impracticality, his actions: figural motion just before it falls prey to common sense.
Kracauer lays his ornamental matrix over everything from the Kafkaesque knots of office interiors to the labyrinthian sentences spun by Otto, Ginster’s intimate companion who is quickly swallowed up and spat out by the machinery of war. Indeed, the novel’s prose often reflects the abstracting tendencies of the mass ornament, which is fitting because Kracauer understands the history of the novel form itself in terms of an architectural draft. In a Frankfurter Zeitung essay from 1930, he writes:
The unified structure of the traditional novel form reflects the supposed unity of character, and its problematic is always an individual one. […] But when this fixed coordinate grid disappears, all the curves plotted on it lose their pictorial form as well. […] In the midst of this world which has become blurred and ungraspable, the passage of history becomes a primary element.[9]
Adrift on a formerly graphed Cartesian plane of ideas, the subject of the novel seems no longer uniformly subjective. Things are subsumed under ornamental abstractions. History rushes in from all sides to ambivalently fill the vacuum. Ginster plays out in this theater between history and character, between the historical novel, the Bildungsroman, and the autobiography. As a narratology of planned abstraction, Ginster reads remarkably like the plan for a novel fitted into the costume of the novel form. Ginster (the character), in turn, is as much the plan for a collective mood as he is a novelistic character. Thus, a dialectical microcosm of the novel as a whole, among the modern, metropolitan crowd, its opening words read: “When the war broke, Ginster, a young man of twenty-five, found himself…” (9).
In the war, in its apparent irrepresentability and its refusal to ever come into view as anything other than a pencil sketch, Kracauer finds his most striking model for novelistic architecture. He pictures the conflict as “a palace with enormous entrance halls that brought on agoraphobia”[10]—as a horrifying void, made visible only by the surrounding ornamental surfaces that make it legible as lack. Kracauer replicates this design in his novel’s form. In so doing, the differences between the architectural and the novelistic become blurred and ambivalent. If architecture is—as Walter Benjamin suggests, adopting Kracuaer’s theory—received in a state of distraction, Ginster posits architecture as a façade over the unseen.[11] The war is invisible save for the effects of its gravity, which drags the ornamental detritus of capitalism into view. Meanwhile, tasked with designing “for an era of universal war,” Ginster uses his T-square to “prepare a cemetery more like a military organization chart.” The countless dead are made “scannable, like a railway timetable” (118, 117). Ginster sweeps ambiguity into the pit. In making death legible, the surfaces of public space—and, on another level, the novel’s larger diffusion of the war into architecture—become an index of the catastrophe.
The book’s epilogue attempts to read that index from its aftermath, but, having been told the utter solemnity of the disaster, it cannot help but begin to laugh. What is left? Having wept “for himself, for countries and human beings,” (256) the novel turns to clowning. In Kracauer’s lopsided denouement, Frau van C.—the longstanding object of Ginster’s attention—mimes revolution through some improvised space work. With a physical gesture, she invokes a ravaged Europe. Ginster and Frau van C. proceed to plan the geopolitical future with their hands. Taking what is left of the catastrophe, she “roll[s Europe] together with one hand, knead[s] it until it bec[omes] a tiny sphere, and cast[s] the sphere away.” Ginster joins in, “grabb[ing] hold of Europe, albeit rather timidly.” The plans for a collective, concrete future are made a pantomime. Ginster’s diagnosis? “‘I don’t want to be an architect any longer, not for all the world’” (266). Ginster’s reasoning here is crucially ambivalent. It may be that such an architectural poetics of abstraction leads only to a recognition of the catastrophic insufficiencies of our current designs—aesthetic, theoretical, and practical. They may demand a serious reconsidering of the historical forms of poetics, poiesis, and public space. They may also amount to a call for demolition, either of our buildings or of their best laid plans. If this is the case, Kracauer reminds us, “Art”—for better and for worse—“is what we do with what is left.”[12]
Notes:
[1] See Eric Jarosinski, “Urban Mediations: The Theoretical Space of Siegfried Kracauer’s Ginster,” in Spatial Turns: Space, Place, and Mobility in German Literary and Visual Culture, ed. Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel (Leiden: Brill, 2010): 171–188.
[2] Joseph Roth, “Wer ist Ginster?,” in Frankfurter Zeitung, Nov 25, 1928. trans. Johannes von Moltke. Quoted in Ingrid Belke and Irina Renz, Siegfried Kracauer: 1889–1966, Marbacher Magazin no. 47 (1988): 52.
[3] Additionally, in Theory of Film, Kracauer called Tati’s “admirable comedy, one of the most original since the days of silent slapstick,” 109.
[4] Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality, (Oxford University Press, 1960), x.
[5] Theodor W. Adorno and Siegfried Kracauer, Correspondence: 1923-1966, trans. Susan Reynolds and Michael Winkler, ed. Wolfgang Schopf (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), 99.
[6] Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. Thomas Y. Levin (Harvard University Press, 1995), 75.
[7] Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 81.
[8] Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 83.
[9] Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 102.
[10] See Anthony Vidler, “Agoraphobia: Spatial Estrangement in Georg Simmel and Siegfried Kracauer,” New German Critique, no. 54 (1991): 31–45.
[11] Walter Benjamin, “Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility (Third Version)” trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. in Selected Writings Volume 4: 1938–1940, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 269.
[12] Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, 79.