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Eine Zeitschrift [Germany geognostically geologically represented, with Maps and Landscape Views, which comprise a geognostic Atlas. A Periodical], which was edited by Christian Keferstein and dedicated to Goethe. Accompanied by a series of maps illuminated or colored by Keferstein and based on a color scheme designed by Goethe, the periodical was part of a larger tide of geological maps, periodicals, and atlases that were fast occupying an important position within the market for printed material in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Indeed, Keferstein s publisher, the Landes- Industrie-Comptoir in Weimar, which had been founded by Friedrich Justin Bertuch in and had later given birth to the Geographisches Institut in , had become one of the major European centers of scientific, and above all cartographic, publication at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Along with Justus Perthes shop in Gotha, such publishing houses were the means through which German mapmaking was fast assuming a leading position in. Embodied in such figures as Alexander von Humboldt, Leopold von Buch, Carl Ritter, Adolf Stieler, and Heinrich Berghaus, the principle project of geo-graphy the relationship of writing and space had by the turn of the nineteenth century assumed renewed cultural urgency.

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In this essay, I want to return to this historical moment when a range of individuals were thinking through challenging new ways of envisioning and representing space. But in doing so I want to move beyond the confines of the disciplinary perspectives of cartography or geology and offer instead a broader perspective of how this new spatial awareness and the means to represent it came about. Keferstein s project, and Goethe s involvement in it, have traditionally been understood within two basic foundationalist narratives: But what is equally significant about this encounter is the way it illustrates the intimate intersection of two representational forms in print that both played a key role in shaping nineteenthcentury readers relationship to space: Keferstein s undertaking began when he wrote to his publisher, Ludwig Friedrich von Froriep Bertuch s successor , in January of to ask Goethe for help in constructing a table of colors for the illumination of geological strata in his planned atlas.

Cotta schen Buchhandlung Pp. Theil of his last novel, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre [Wilhelm Meister s Travels], for publication and conceptualizing portions that were to comprise the second part. And it was also during this period when Goethe then gave up on publishing the second part, which was gradually transformed over the course of the s into a second version 2. Fassung , a shift that occurred during the same decade that saw Goethe s active involvement in the growing geological debates of his age and the observation of the maps that would serve as the visual proxies for such arguments.

The brief encounter between Goethe and Keferstein thus brings to light a larger cultural intersection between these two key nineteenth-century print genres, the map and the novel, that would have a decisive impact not only on Goethe s late work but on nineteenth-century readers more generally. There has been a great deal of recent work on the intersections of cartography and the novel, participating in what has been felicitously termed the topographical turn in literary study today.

Kartographie, Topographie, und Raumkonzepte in den Kulturwissenschaften. Pp Topographien der Literatur. Deutsche Literatur im transnationalen Kontext. Atlas of the European Novel London: The Victorian Illustrated Book. The Spatial Imagination New York: Ordnungen der ungesicherten Welt. The Geographic Revolution in Early America. Maps, Literacy and National Identity. Kartographie und Dichtung um In: University of Chicago Press Bernhard Klein: Nor is it motivated by looking at how maps assume an illustrative function within novels, as subordinate to the word and separate from the scientific field that generated maps.

Rather, I am interested in exploring from a book-historical perspective the way maps and novels participated within a larger bibliographic universe of creating imaginary spaces for readers, the way they jostled with one another to shape readers relationship to, and thus perception of, space. My aim, in other words, is to bring together work in the various fields of the history of the book, history of science, and a history of literature in order to approach what Henri Lefebvre first called the study of the production of space.

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And how did the emergence of such perceptual regimes promote and make available new kinds of subjectivity after ? How did sight and self, in other words, overlap? The role of Goethe s late work in transforming theories of both perception and subjectivity has served as one of the more vital sites for the growing field of visuality studies today. Despite such repeated attention to Goethe and the question of perception, however, little work has been done on the role of cartography in Goethe s own oeuvre or in shaping readers perceptual field during this 9 Bernhard Klein: Maps and the Writing of Space.

The Myth of Continents. A Critique of Metageography. University of California Press P. Blackwell See most recently, The Enlightened Eye: Goethe and Visual Culture. Moore and Patricia Anne Simpson. And yet as historians of cartography have told us, the early nineteenth century marked a period of dramatic cartographic change that was akin to the innovations brought about by the mapping of the new world in the early modern period.

Such changes were driven in large part by the work of German cartographers and natural historians during this period and they were integrally related to the emerging field of geology. The principles of mapping had shifted away from the early-modern prioritization of a static, global vision to an increasingly serialized, stratified, and relational one. This new object of knowledge crucially generated new ways of knowing. In what follows, I will explore the nexus of the map and the novel in their capacity to generate a new sense of space and self through the work of Goethe s late novels, his geological writings and illustrations , and the variety of cartographical projects that he either possessed or knew about from the early nineteenth century.

Not only did Goethe own an ample collection of maps during his lifetime over three-hundred maps and three miscellaneous atlases bringing the total close to cartographical leaves , maps also emerge with fascinating frequency in his prose fiction. Maps thus enter into Goethe s fiction in quite literal and diverse ways. But in the sheer variety of navigational concern in Goethe s late fiction, we can also discern an overriding concern with the geological at the base of these fictional mappings. As the cartographic was increasingly being shaped through its relationship to the geological in the nineteenth century, Goethe s own geological writings and their illustrative practices emerge as essential terrain to understand his engagement with the geologization of vision and subjectivity that was taking place during this period.

There is, I will argue, a fundamental geo-logic to his late novelistic writing G. Maps and Their Makers. Archon P The History of Cartography. Harley and David Woodward. University of Chicago Press Ralph Ehrenberg: Aspects of Geologic Mapping. Library of Congress Ute Schneider: Die Macht der Karten. Eine Geschichte der Kartographie von Mittelalter bis heute. As we will see, such emerging notions of subjectivity were not always integratable or compatible with one another, but the important point is that in each case their availability was often deeply indebted to Goethe s own scientific poetics.

It is precisely through this circular energy between the two printed spaces of the map and the novel in Goethe s work where we can begin to chart the innovative ways that space and self were being reconceived around The Spatialization of Time The Stratigraphical Map Goethe s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre is well known for its explicit engagement with the geological debates of the early nineteenth century, and critics have principally attended to the chapters in which Wilhelm and Montan discuss the nature of the earth and the possibility of its interpretation. But already at the outset of the novel we encounter a consideration of the geological through the opening figure of the cliff.

Wilhelm s position in the cliff s shade thus figured a crucial site of interchange between scientific and aesthetic vision, one that turned on the key question of seeing time. The New Science of Geology. Keferstein s own illuminated geological atlas, which shifted between cliff views of various regions and topographical representations of the distribution of rock masses, was thus deeply indebted to this new concern with a temporally layered ground fig. On the one hand, stratigraphy was part of the larger verticalization of culture around famously invoked by Foucault in The Order of Things.

On the other hand, the stratigraphical raised a problem of visualization, of how to envision such inaccessible depths. While the cliff view the shorn vertical earth provided an ideal space where such depths could be mimetically rendered, it was the topographical 33 Fig. The Order of Things. Similar to the problem of visualizing abstractions such as sound, electricity, or heat that increasingly occupied romantic natural philosophers, the geological stratum posed the problem of how to translate that which escaped our immediate senses into visual form.

The problem of visualizing what is not there that was at the heart of the emerging interest in stratigraphy would become a central concern of Goethe s novella, St. Joseph the Second, which follows this opening scene and in which we encounter a series of engagements with a no longer completely visualizable Christian iconic tradition.

The stratigraphical map was in this sense a distant kin to the rising popularity of both the historical atlas, such as C. Lavoisne s Complete Genealogical, Historical, Chronological, and Geographical Atlas Philadelphia with its chronological map of universal history divided into columns fig.

In each of these cartographical genres where the columnar assumed increasing degrees of prominence, one could observe a new urgency surrounding the mapping of time in the spatial format of the map. The stratigraphical map was thus one of the most visually acute examples of an oft-cited temporalization of nature around But it also simultaneously embodied a key spatialization of time as it illustrated the fixed temporal layers of the earth s surface, highlighting both their spatial relationality 17 Bernhard Siegert: While the stratigraphization of space suggested greater spatial continuity, allowing viewers to see the vast swaths of rock masses that covered the earth s surface, the stratigraphization of time introduced greater notions of temporal discontinuity.

Such rock masses, which had formerly seemed contiguous, were now distinctly differentiated from one another as time assumed a spatial dimension. We can see this new spatialized temporal awareness at work in Goethe s Wanderjahre in the way the figure of descent is not pictured as a fall, but an outward moving spiral as the characters gradually wind their way down the mountainous path. The new vertically and bibliographically oriented self is depicted as a stratified self located in discrete altitudinal spaces, a narrative move that will be repeated throughout this novel that is always intent on demarcating the archival location of its own narrative material.

Indeed, the stratigraphic helps to frame or motivate this new sense of the archival self. The spatialization of time in the Wanderjahre assumed its most powerful and literal expression through the transformation of the map used by Wilhelm to locate the characters from the novella, Der Mann von funfzig Jahren [ The Man of Fifty ], that takes place between the first and second versions of the novel.

As I have explored elsewhere, 20 the arrow that is drawn on this map is transformed from a pointer within the novel in the first version to a pointer between editions of the novel in the second. The map no longer figures as a medium that orients oneself solely in space, but also in time. In doing so, it sediments the first edition within a particular historical epoch of Goethe s own life, disaggregating it in time and space from the later edition. And here I want to suggest that Keferstein s serial, stratigraphic maps assume a crucial position within Goethe s life and work.

Goethe takes up Keferstein s project of stratigraphic illumination precisely during the period when the first volume of the first version of the Wanderjahre was being readied for publication and he was at work outlining and writing portions for the second volume. When the Wanderjahre was initially published Goethe received his first bound copy on May 22, it bore the complete title, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, oder die Entsagenden. But by the summer of that year, Goethe had given up on continuing the novel.

Critics have usually attributed this to the negative reaction the novel elicited among the reading public and to Pustkuchen s parody that appeared by the same name in the same year. I want to suggest, however, that Goethe s increasing involvement in the overlapping fields of cartography and geology made available a new way of thinking about the genre and the medium of the novel, thus allowing the second part to become the second version over the course of the s.

In place of the continuation of the original, the original is gradually fixed in both time and place, as this sequel bifurcates into two different forms of sequality. The first and second edition no longer relate to one another on the same temporal and spatial planes as volumes that physically 20 Andrew Piper: Rethinking the Print Object. Goethe and the Book of Everything. He will then subsequently publish his treatise on the archivization of the author, Archiv des Dichters und Schriftstellers [Archive of the Poet and Author, ], in this same bibliographic space as an attempt to record the sediments of his own creativity, indeed to figure creation as sedimentation.

Such theoretical essays in Kunst und Alterthum become an important prelude to his renewed engagement with the second version of the Wanderjahre. As Goethe wrote to Keferstein about his map in the summer of Bursting the Limits of Time. The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. University of Chicago Press This opening suspension of the correlation between saying and seeing is then narratively explored in the remainder of the chapter in two subsequent ways: Cornell University Press Pp One can see the same rhetorical strategy of indirect speech at the opening of Goethe s Werther, which is punctuated as a declaration but is grammatically equivalent to a rhetorical question: The cartographic, or at least a particular type of cartography that depended on mathematical triangulation and that was at the heart of major eighteenth-century cartographic initiatives such as the Cassini family s mapping of France between and , was figured in the Wahlverwandschaften as the condition of possibility of the classic narrative structure of the realist novel.

But in many ways the captain s project does not represent a solution, but a problem. Resolution in the Wahlverwandscaften is never a function of return, but of a new synthesis. As readers have repeatedly identified, it is Ottilie s diary or Tagebuch that constitutes the narratological core of this novel and, indeed, the novel more generally for Goethe. In the explicit secondariness of the contributions to her personal, daily journal, the importance of Ottilie s diary lies in its capacity not to reject, but to synthesize the disembodied paraphrastic overview of the classical narrator with the perspectival view of serial narration and dialogue.

The Tagebuch, or daily book, emerges as the bibliographic foundation of a narrative poetics dependent on an embodied, serial paraphrasis. Goethe s Wahlverwandschaften thus positioned itself as an extended narrative engagement with the shifting intersections of the serialization and the summarization of perception the dioptic and the synoptic that were undergoing profound shifts at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The serialized synopsis enacted in Ottilie s book within the book would arguably find its most visible bibliographic articulation in the rising popularity of the hand atlas in the early nineteenth century. Handatlanten des deutschen Sprachraumes, Bibliographisches Handbuch. The atlas became a key bibliographic solution to this romantic desire for the synthesis of the fragmentary and the systematic in a single book. As Christian Jacob has written, As a device that can reconcile the desire for an overview and for detail, the atlas is ruled by a cumulative and analytic logic that leads from global vision to partial images.

But such contextualization was always a combination of synechdoche of the particular as part of a larger planetary whole and serialization of a successive flow of knowledge with no hierarchical structure. The book as map as the accumulation of various scalar views in serial form thus provided a clear visual rejoinder to Wilhelm s question, Was bin ich denn gegen das All? How can I stand face to face with it, how can I stand at its center?

The atlas was the bibliographic embodiment of Schlegel s epoch-making notion of a system of fragments. What Schlegel had said about the novel der Roman ist ein romantisches Buch [ the novel is a romantic book ] 32 could be applied in equal measure to the atlas. Goethe s own attention to this problem of the serial and therefore discrete nature of perception circulated freely between his novels and his geological 30 Carl Ritter: Theoretical Approaches in Cartography throughout History.

In his attention to the rock formation of granite in particular, we can see how the geological is coded in Goethe s work as a key site to explore new forms of perception. Beginning with his early essays and sketches on granite in the s to later compositions and printed illustrations from the s, granite is the substance to which Goethe repeatedly returned to work through this interrelationship of perception and division, what I am calling synopsis and diopsis. Goethe s initial interest in granite was a product of his second and third Harzreisen in the fall of and respectively, and in the unpublished notes that resulted from these expeditions we can see Goethe attempting to identify a formal logic to the structural ir regularity of the divisions inherent in granite masses.

In this illustration, which was one of the few to be reproduced in the Taschenausgabe of the Ausgabe letzter Hand, we see two forms of scientific illustration at work that correspond to two different portions of the text. At the top we see a realistic landscape view of the Luisenburg, where each rock mass is marked by both a single and a double letter, with the single letter corresponding to a rock s original location and the double letter corresponding to its post-erosion position.

The text thus narratively reconstructs the formation of the granite structure by corresponding to an alphabetized image. Just as the text makes recourse to a visual form of analysis, the visual is, in this portion J. Goethes Zeitbegriff aufgrund seiner sprachlichen Darstellung geologischer Ideen und ihrer Visualisierung. Goethe und die Verzeitlichung der Natur. Courtesy of a Private Collection. It is an articulation of both a spatio-temporal continuity, linking the original and the fallen structures together through the notation system of the letters, as well as a discontinuity, as what one sees are discrete, frozen positions, with a necessary lacuna or Leerstelle in the middle.

According to Goethe s most recent thinking on mineralogical matter, the divisions that characterized granite masses were not simply evidence of a static spatial formal feature, but were now understood to provide evidence of the effect of time. The serialized perspective contained in the upper image and enacted through the image s textuality the single and double letters is then amplified through the columnar structure of the lower images of the illustration. In place of the letters that captured the process of erosion and the law of granite s temporal formation Gestaltung in the first image, here we have a series of two separate, yet adjacent representational spaces to capture the discrete phases of such processual formations.

The extraordinarily complex visual poetics Goethe develops in his illustrative practice here not only relies on the necessity of an absent origin, whether the original shape of the Luisenburg that is narrated but not seen in the top image or the real formation in the bottom image for which the idealized forms of the lower columns stand in.

In both cases the geological illustration also gestures towards a series of medial absences, absences in-between. In place of a timeless spatial form, we are presented with a notion of space that can only be grasped in discrete moments. Serialization implies a necessary incompleteness of knowledge, as diopsis becomes the basis, not the antonym, of synopsis.

In its explicit seriality, one could see the codicological nature of Goethe s understanding of nature being performed in this image. This new serialized perspective of space will then make its way back into Goethe s fiction in Book One, Chapter Four of the Wanderjahre, where the characters discover a Riesenschloss [ giant castle ], which is comprised of a labyrinth of granite slabs and which is modeled on the Luisenburg. In the same way that the natural space of the Luisenburg was mapped in Goethe s J. Die Luisenburg bei Alexanders-Bad.

Goethes Buch der Natur. A secret had been loaded upon him, a possession, rightfully or wrongfully? The self that emerges from this geological space that is also a bookish space is figured as a combination of the stratified and discrete self. It is a self that contains temporal layers of experience, but also vacancies of self- recognition, embodied in the secret at the heart of the subject.

Much like the vacancies that were captured in the columnar illustration of the Luisenburg, the Luisenburg now provides the narrative backdrop for the discrete self s emergence. The serialization of space for which the Luisenburg came to stand as both granite formation and scientific illustration whose tabular columns are echoed in those granite columns produces a notion of the individual who lacks a coherent sense of experiential continuity, who contains his own Leerstellen or omissions.

Through the genre of the fairy-tale, the narrative invokes an explicit disconnect between the continuities of narration and the discontinuities of self-experience. The self is a discrete self in the double sense of being shaped by the discontinuity of experiential moments and containing an incapacity to adequately articulate the nature of this new sense of momentary experience. Upon leaving the Riesenschloss the rock that is also a lock Felix and Wilhelm will suddenly be trapped by an iron cage Eisengitter as they approach the uncle s estate.

In invoking the image of the Gitter or grid, Goethe was not only once again echoing the columnar structure of the Luisenburg that the characters have just left behind. The Gitter also explicitly drew a connection to Goethe s theory of the formation of granite masses, which he described as a Gitterwerk in his essay, Gestaltung grosser anorganischer Massen, published in Zur Naturwissenschaft in From the natural grating of the 38 J. Gestaltung grosser anorganischer Massen. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag P. They move into a representational space which is defined by the use of the grid through the graphic structure of longitude and latitude.

It is once again the cartographic and its fundamental latticed visual field that is framed as the condition of possibility of this new serial and discrete nature of space and self. The aim of his voyage is to make a series of paintings of her childhood origins. Instead of a space of scientific knowledge or picturesque contemplation, the cliff is now the site of media translation, as the image that the traveling companion paints is not primarily a mimetic representation of a particular place, but a series of visual citations of Mignon s song.

The chapter concludes with the breakdown of the artistic community that had come together at its opening, a breakdown that occurs when the painter attempts to recite, rather than paint, Mignon s song. In the social crisis surrounding the practice of citation, the chapter has traditionally been understood as a rejection of classical forms of imitation in favor of a more properly romantic model of verbal and medial metamorphosis.

But I want to suggest that the failure articulated at the close of this chapter is not simply an articulation of new representational codes that assume a revolutionary character in the history of literature and the arts. Rather, the failure here is also intimately tied to changing notions of space and the representation of space as well. The problem that the place of the Lago Maggiore is dramatizing is a more general deindividualization of space that was taking place at the turn of the nineteenth century. In a few years, at the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth, European culture completely changed the fundamental spatialization of the living being: The end of the Lago Maggiore chapter marks the end of what we might call the storied space, of space as an embodiment of a singular narrative.

Goethe explicitly tells us this place acquired its name from the sad travails of a princess, and in replacing her story, which he does not recount, with the illustrated account of granite, we can see Goethe situating this place within a new geographic paradigm of visual and tabular representation. Space is crucially departicularized in such textual and illustrative moments, opening up a conceptual framework for the greater relationality of space that became a key feature of the visual logic inherent in nineteenth-century cartography.

One of the crucial ways that cartography was moving away from this notion of the particularity, or what Simmel would have called the exclusivity of space to a notion of the relationality of space was through the use of color. Color had become a key expression of the naturalization of space, marking the shift from Staatskunde to Landeskunde [from knowledge of the political state to knowledge of country in the double sense] in geographical thought that had transpired at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Where Weiland had applied color to capture the political boundaries of the German states, Keferstein now used illumination on the same exact map to represent the mineralogical boundaries that transcended such arbitrary political distinctions. Such cartographic recycling was one of the clearest articulations of the growing naturalization of German territory taking place around Georg Simmel: Accessed 2 October Hans-Dietrich Schultz: Raumkonstrukte der klassischen deutschsprachigen Geographie des Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28,3 Perhaps one of the most formidable bodies of geographic work that informed this rising sense of the deindividualization and thus interconnectedness of space in the nineteenth century was that of Alexander von Humboldt.

In , after returning from his multi-year journey in the Americas, Humboldt published the opening treatise in what would become a two-decade, thirty-volume process of disseminating his findings, collected under the title, Voyage de Humboldt et Bonpland. With a Table], which appeared simultaneously in German and French, was dedicated in its German version to Goethe.

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Humboldt s project was indicative of the integral relationship in the nineteenth century between the cartographic and the ethnographic the writing of foreign space a fact that became most visibly manifested and institutionalized in Berghaus Physikalischer Atlas with its sections dedicated to Anthropologie Martin Rudwick: The Tableau physique and the subsequent illustrations to Humboldt s project were not simply providing European readers with new knowledge about the new world, however.

They were also demonstrating new ways of representing this knowledge. As we can see in Humboldt s Tableau fig. The columns that surrounded the central representation, which itself always hovered between two modes of mimetic and abstract representation the realist landscape and the textualized distribution of plant species , were crucially a part of that larger representational space, providing a key template for the rise of the statistical map in the nineteenth century.

The location and identity of each plant species located in the central image was relationally defined through the columns surrounding that image by the various factors of barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, and electrical tension. Within the Tableau physique, the notion of the species was now not only implicated Fig. Avec une Planche Paris: But where the columnar thinking of Goethe s illustrative practice in the Luisenburg image had articulated a temporal and thus serial logic in the understanding of space, Humboldt s columns expressed something far more spatially relational, where multiple factors contributed to a single location s identity.

Humboldt s bold attempt of remapping the new world thus marked a significant contribution to the greater reorientation of spatial thought that was transpiring in the early nineteenth century and that one could categorize as the delocalization of location itself. As in Humboldt s later work on isotherms which charted temperature zones across the globe and that would form the basis of a map in Berghaus Atlas location, one s place in the world, was being refigured after as part of a range of greater global forces that were themselves dynamically understood See Anne Marie Claire Godlewska: From Enlightenment Vision to Modern Science?

Humboldt s Visual Thinking. Livingstone and Charles W. University of Chicago Press Pp Godlewska describes Humboldt s project as the mapping of interactions and change in which the map functions as an analytical device which embodies a theoretical and scientific argument about the nature of the world. P It is important to point out how Humboldt s project falls between Barbara Stafford s accounts of eighteenth-century illustration and its emphasis on the substantive and Daston and Galison s recent work on nineteenth-century mechanically informed objectivity.

See Barbara Maria Stafford: Des lignes isothermes et de la distribution de la chaleur sur le globe. And once again it will be another map that appears at the Lago Maggiore through which this new conceptualization of representing space will be figured. Sie finden darin vor Augen gestellt wohin Sie zu jeder Jahrszeit Ihre Briefe zu senden haben [ In conclusion I include a small table from which you will recognize the mobile middlepoint of our communication.

You will find placed before your eyes the direction in which you are to send your letters for all seasons ] The new representational table whose portability is articulated in its diminutive size now provides a map of available communication channels, and it is precisely such mobile, interactive lines of connection that will then function at the opening of the third book as a substitute for the more traditional map that allows Wilhelm to find his way What we see happening in this chapter is the way the space of the Lago Maggiore, and one could argue, space more generally, is framed by a redefinition of the cartographic through the inclusion of maps at both its opening and close.

Goethe und Alexander von Humboldt. Neue Folge des Jahrbuchs der Goethe-Gesellschaft. Cartography, Grid, Graphic Goethe s late novels thus demarcated a key aesthetic space where the perceptual modernization made possible through innovations in cartography and geology at the turn of the nineteenth century were translated into narrative form as new maps of the world became synonymous with new narrative maps of the self.

Indeed, the very challenges to narration that such spatial imaginaries represented served as the grounds for the narrative innovations that so characterized Goethe s late novelistic work. His fictions were integral participants in the elaboration of a new spatial consciousness in early-nineteenthcentury readers, dramatizing the tripartite structure of the spatialization of time, the serialization of space, and the relationality of location that would become the bedrock of nineteenth-century vision and subjectivity.

Goethe s late novels were thus engaging with one of the central concerns to emerge in the intersecting fields of geography and geology, of how to translate threedimensional experience within a two-dimensional plane in order to capture the fourth dimension of time. Where cartography s grid had stood in the early modern period for a scientific paradigm in which the observer s vision was rigorously controlled by the lines on the page and crucially divorced from any corporeal intimacy with the space projected, the grid or lattice for Goethe had become the preeminent sign of potentiality, of an imaginative, embodied, relational and, above all, dynamic vision of space.

The Geography of Prostitution and Female Sexuality in Curt Moreck s Erotic Travel Guide This essay explores the possible effects of increased public contact between men and women in Weimar Berlin, as well as contact between young, single, working women and prostitutes, as represented in written and visual artifacts of that era. In demonstrating that spatial proximity was accompanied by a discursive conflation of prostitutes and other urban women, I argue that in some works of the period the lack of a cultural and social code for distinguishing New Women from paid prostitutes caused all sexually active women to be marked as whores.

In contrast, Moreck s guide suggests that the sexually freewheeling Weimar Republic emphasized the democratization of gender and made female desire and financial independence more socially acceptable. The Weimar Republic saw a proliferation of public roles for women, particularly in the urban capital of Berlin. Looking back at the advent of the Republic from the perspective of its final years, the social commentator and cultural critic Curt Moreck describes the drastic changes in gender roles and the resultant reconfigurations of social space caused by the First World War.

They stood side by side with the man in the factories, in the offices, and at the machines; and through him they became acquainted with various places of pleasure [ P Unless otherwise noted, all translations from the German are my own. Untainted by any sense of threat or resentment on the part of working men toward their new colleagues, this passage underscores men s role in introducing women to spaces that were previously closed off to them, particularly urban entertainment venues.

As Atina Grossmann has shown in her study of the sex reform movement, the young Berliners who visited eugenic counseling centers in the capital city did so more for free birth control and sex advice than for eugenic screening or health certificates, and many doctors who worked at the centers promoted a particular vision of responsible companionate heterosexuality. Does prostitution become obsolete once female sexuality is less restricted by bourgeois morality, or does it merely lose its ability to mark illicit sexuality?

If, as Daphne Spain postulates in her study of Gendered Spaces, the spatial integration of men and women is a route to higher status for women, how is women s status affected by the act of occupying spaces that are historically associated with commodified female 2 For information on sites of prostitution in Berlin at the onset of World War I see Charles W. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner s Images of Berlin. Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr. University of Minnesota Press Pp Here: Pp , Atina Grossmann: Oxford University Press Pp. Curt Moreck was born Konrad Haemmerling in Cologne in During the German revolution he was active in several radical artists groups.

A popular figure in Weimar Berlin s intellectual circles, he worked as a novelist, editor, translator, and cultural critic. In so doing, it offers the reader a broad range of images of prostitutes and emancipated women, often conflating the two. As Moreck s guide demonstrates, the obvious public presence of women in Weimar Berlin met with a variety of responses, many of which intertwined cultural discourses of sexually and financially emancipated womanhood with those about prostitutes, thereby creating the elision of the woman on the street with the woman of the street Daphne Spain: University of North Carolina Press P.

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In her study, Spain reveals how the spatial organization of men and women contributes to gender stratification, a social hierarchy in which men are granted unrestricted access to public life, while women s access is restricted. Berg P Curt Moreck: Pp For other readings of Moreck s guide, see Deborah Smail: The Conspiracy of Women: University of California Press Pp Here: We Weren t Modern Enough: Women Artists and the Limits of German Modernism.

With once-rigid class divisions and gender roles destabilized by the war and ensuing inflation, s Berlin became a hotbed of sexual experimentation and display, and prostitutes both real and imagined were central figures in the metropolis bawdy entertainment culture. Images of prostitutes pervaded visual and popular culture in Berlin; they could be seen on stage at the city s numerous cabarets, revues, and theaters, on movie screens, posters, and postcards.

Alongside the increased cultural currency of the prostitute came the eroticization of the younger generation of bourgeois and petit bourgeois women. With bourgeois respectability compromised, fascination with the so-called sexual underworld grew as the once-prudish middle classes and the nouveau riche went slumming in Berlin s many dive bars and Tingeltangels. In contrast to Moreck s depiction of men who invite and welcome women into the public sphere, some contemporary male observers saw the increased public presence of women in Weimar Berlin as an alarming trend, and the image of the prostitute was evoked as a way of criticizing this change.

When they encountered financially and sexually independent women in spaces traditionally associated with sexual exchange, these men failed to see women as an increasingly autonomous and observing presence. Journalist Thomas Wehrling s article Berlin Is Becoming 10 A Tingeltangel was, to use Alan Lareau s definition, a low-class music hall or any disreputable barroom entertainment, in which the performers were often prostitutes noted for the vulgarity of their repertoires. Literary Cabarets of the Weimar Republic. See also Peter Jelavich: Princeton University Press Walter Benjamin: Pp The brief translation is mine.

Women, the City, and Modernity. Oxford University Press P. Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany could easily interpret Wehrling s vicious verbal assault on the women of Berlin as a strategy for managing certain kinds of sexual, social, and political anxieties. It is not the aim of this article to simply add to Tatar s discourse on the prostitute and emancipated women as objects of male fear and anxiety, although it is certainly worth noting that she often conflates the two without any critical consideration.

I will examine instead the complexities of this conflation of prostitute and New Woman, for it causes readers to pose the following questions: Did the sexually freewheeling atmosphere of Weimar Berlin actually make the overt expression of female desire and financial independence more socially acceptable, or did the lack of a social code for distinguishing sexually aggressive, working women from paid prostitutes cause all publicly visible women simply to be marked as prostitutes? The latter is clearly the case in Wehrling s indictment of Berlin s whores.

By invoking the image of the prostitute as a method of insult, however, Wehrling s text demonstrates the prostitute s potential power to act as a social irritant and indicator of change. Offering an alternative to Tatar s morbid conclusions in her work on prostitution in the Weimar Republic, the historian Julia Roos asks: Should we simply dismiss contemporary anxieties about women s new independence and sexual assertiveness as expressions of misogynistic ideology which they undoubtedly were to a considerable extent or should we perhaps see these fears also as a symptom of and as a reaction to certain real changes in gender roles?

Berlin Is Becoming a Whore. Translated and reprinted in: The Weimar Republic Sourcebook. University of California Press Pp Ibid. Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany. Weimar s Crisis Through the Lens of Gender: The Case of Prostitution. McCormick, who claims that what ought to be celebrated includes precisely that which has been derided as decadence and effeminate weakness by many writers. Close analysis of Weimar-era texts that explore spaces of public contact between male cultural critics and young working women reveals what Spain describes as the reciprocity between the social construction of space and the spatial construction of social relations.

This is most striking in the case of the cinema, one of the most highly theorized spaces in cultural criticism by Weimar intellectuals such as Siegfried Kracauer and in current scholarship on the Weimar Republic. My approach to these texts employs recent feminist theories of mapping that call for a more nuanced approach to gender in textual analysis. Friedman s work on mapping the multiple positionalities of 17 Richard W.

Gender and Sexuality in Weimar Modernity: Film, Literature, and New Objectivity. Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany. Princeton University Press P. We Weren t Modern Enough. Thus, texts by modern male writers and leftist intellectuals such as Siegfried Kracauer, Bertolt Brecht, and Curt Moreck that represent urban spaces and the women who inhabit them can be read to express both men s anxiety in regard to women s emancipation and their acknowledgement or even celebration of it.

The latter is especially true in the case of Moreck, whose erotic travel guide maps out various possibilities for sexual experimentation and gender masquerade. Feminism and the Geographies of Encounter. Princeton University Press P Friedman argues that [the] new geography of identity insists that we think about [ Das Theater der kleinen Leute. Das Theater 1 Pp Translation quoted in Miriam Hansen: New German Critique 29 With the lifting of film censorship in , prostitutes became a pervasive cultural presence on the movie screens of Weimar Berlin.

In his essay Aus dem Theaterleben [ From the Theater Scene ] from , Brecht portrays the young women in the audience as transfixed by visions of luxury and carefree pleasures displayed in the onscreen portraits of prostitution. If the intended effect of the hygiene films is to warn women away from prostitution, Brecht claims that they have the exact opposite effect. The films, he argues, actually convince young women to be sexually permissive: Culture, Politics, and Ideas.

All the bosses are infused with male desire and pour their secretaries wine; no objections are allowed. It is best to accept the movie ticket from one s boyfriend or the glass of wine from one s boss and give him what he expects in return. In other words, Brecht blurs the line between the fictional prostitute in the film and those he imagines as her viewers, for both allow themselves not simply to be seduced but to be bought.

Brecht s concern for the young women s welfare projects and even promotes an image of female sexual passivity, an image less threatening than that of young women who might actively manipulate male desire to get what they want such as a free movie ticket, a glass of wine, or their boss attention. Portraying audience members as dupes seems far more palatable to Brecht than portraying them as socially savvy cognizant of their own desirability and the advantages that desirability might offer them. In Kracauer s work the moviegoers are nearly identical to the young girls and secretaries in Brecht s text; their designation as little shopgirls is meant to signify their limited education and gullibility.

Emphasis in the original. The translation of this lesser-known essay is mine. Das Ornament der Masse: The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies. Harvard University Press Pp. Kracauer observes the shop girls as they dab tears from their cheeks and remarks: Weinen [ist] manchmal leichter als Nachdenken [ crying is sometimes easier than contemplation ].

Instead of inspiring social or political activity among the girls, the escape to the cinema simply perpetuates other forms of escape by encouraging the female audience members to visit dancehalls and search for wealthy men. Kein Film ohne Tanzbar, kein Smoking ohne Geld. Otherwise women would not put on and take off their pants. The business is called eroticism, and the preoccupation with it is called life ]. Help in the form of a rich cavalier is on the way. All three of the essays discussed above can easily be read as precursors to a broader critical discourse on popular culture, exemplified by Theodor W.

Adorno and Max Horkheimer s treatise on the Culture Industry which maligns the mass culture audience for its uncritical absorption of popular entertainment and its inability to recognize that modern mass culture does not come from the people but is administered and imposed from above. As Andreas Huyssen persuasively argues, behind modernist critiques portraying popular culture as a threat to high culture lay a fear of the working masses and also of women knocking at the gate of a male-dominated culture. The possible threat of the working woman is diffused by 29 Ibid. P This particular quote comes from Andreas Huyssen: Mass Culture as Woman: After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism.

Indiana University Press Pp Here: The original essay by Adorno and Horkheimer is: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. Mass Culture as Woman. The first move presents women as dimwitted dupes easily manipulated from above by their male bosses, lovers, or cultural institutions like film studios. These women are portrayed as having no agency; they place their bodies in service of industry, and they allow their minds to be shaped by the culture industry. The second move is to depict these women in explicitly sexual terms as passive sexual objects. All three authors use both the trope of prostitution and the darkened, eroticized space of the cinema to aid them in these moves.

Here, prostitution takes on a variety of meanings. It can be read as the potential sexual objectification of white-collar women by the men who accompany them to the cinema; it can also represent a rationalized eroticism that keeps women enslaved within an exploitative socio-economic system. Certainly what all of these women have in common is that they do not possess a critical gaze; they are bad spectators.

The authors, in contrast, are authoritative observers who have the power both to see the audience with a critical eye and see through the manipulative messages of the filmic narratives. By foregrounding the deficiencies of the female spectators, these essays privilege male spectatorship, for they imply that the masculine subject can decipher the truth behind the image. Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces. P This discussion of the male gaze takes as its theoretical premise Laura Mulvey s ground-breaking work Visual and Other Pleasures. Indiana University Press While the emotional response of the little shop girls may reveal an acknowledgement of a loss of social mastery, their concentrated gaze involves a perceptual activity that is neither passive nor entirely distracted.

Having just watched a tragic film in which the female protagonist commits suicide in order to save her lover s career, the shop girls shed a few tears, but they wipe their tears and pudern sich rasch, ehe es hell wird [ quickly powder their noses before the lights come up ]. Although Kracauer implies that their powdering constitutes an over-identification with the on-screen actress and their desire to participate in the film s plot, it is possible that their powdering is actually a moment of critical disjuncture. Drying their tears and dotting their faces with powder before the cinematic space is illuminated, the shop girls anticipate the transition from the darkened space of the theater to the space of the street and thereby display an awareness that they will be looked at.

The city street, in contrast to the cinema, can be seen as a form of spontaneous theater that offers urban women and men opportunities to be spectacle and 35 Patrice Petro: Woman as Spectator and Spectacle. Women in the Metropolis. Pp The quote given appears on P.

For a more comprehensive discussion of female spectatorship in the Weimar Republic, see Petro s book-length study, Joyless Streets. Perhaps, then, these shopgirls are not dupes but critical consumers, perfectly aware of the disjuncture between cinematic representations and reality and able to negotiate various urban spaces. Perhaps the cinema is not the site of their social and moral corruption but rather a place where they can exercise their buying power and satisfy their desire for entertainment at the end of a long workday.

Perhaps they are desiring subjects as well as desired objects. And perhaps, before they exit the cinema, they pause to look in their compact mirrors for a second, casting quizzical glances at the intellectual in the back row and returning, even if just for a second, his studied gaze. New Men, New Women, and Masks: Jeder einmal in Berlin! During the period of economic stabilization , as many as two million tourists per year flocked to the city. Those visitors who were looking for sexual thrills that could not be found on a guided tour or in the bourgeois standard-bearer of travel guides, the Baedecker, those who wanted to explore the verwirrende 38 Henri Lefebvre: In invoking the image of the Gitter or grid, Goethe was not only once again echoing the columnar structure of the Luisenburg that the characters have just left behind.

The Gitter also explicitly drew a connection to Goethe s theory of the formation of granite masses, which he described as a Gitterwerk in his essay, Gestaltung grosser anorganischer Massen, published in Zur Naturwissenschaft in From the natural grating of the 38 J. Gestaltung grosser anorganischer Massen. Deutscher Klassiker Verlag P.

They move into a representational space which is defined by the use of the grid through the graphic structure of longitude and latitude. It is once again the cartographic and its fundamental latticed visual field that is framed as the condition of possibility of this new serial and discrete nature of space and self. The aim of his voyage is to make a series of paintings of her childhood origins. Instead of a space of scientific knowledge or picturesque contemplation, the cliff is now the site of media translation, as the image that the traveling companion paints is not primarily a mimetic representation of a particular place, but a series of visual citations of Mignon s song.

The problem that the place of the Lago Maggiore is dramatizing is a more general deindividualization of space that was taking place at the turn of the nineteenth century. In a few years, at the end of the eighteenth century and at the beginning of the nineteenth, European culture completely changed the fundamental spatialization of the living being: The end of the Lago Maggiore chapter marks the end of what we might call the storied space, of space as an embodiment of a singular narrative.

It captures a decoupling of the relationship between space and person and between space and memory that will be a crucial outcome of the growing cartographization of space in the nineteenth century. The Luisenburg essay is once more significant here because it dramatizes precisely this process of unwriting such storied spaces. Goethe explicitly tells us this place acquired its name from the sad travails of a princess, and in replacing her story, which he does not recount, with the illustrated account of granite, we can see Goethe situating this place within a new geographic paradigm of visual and tabular representation.

Space is crucially departicularized in such textual and illustrative moments, opening up a conceptual framework for the greater relationality of space that became a key feature of the visual logic inherent in nineteenth-century cartography. One of the crucial ways that cartography was moving away from this notion of the particularity, or what Simmel would have called the exclusivity of space to a notion of the relationality of space was through the use of color. Color had become a key expression of the naturalization of space, marking the shift from Staatskunde to Landeskunde [from knowledge of the political state to knowledge of country in the double sense] in geographical thought that had transpired at the turn of the nineteenth century.

As we can see in Humboldt s Tableau fig. The columns that surrounded the central representation, which itself always hovered between two modes of mimetic and abstract representation the realist landscape and the textualized distribution of plant species , were crucially a part of that larger representational space, providing a key template for the rise of the statistical map in the nineteenth century.

P It is important to point out how Humboldt s project falls between Barbara Stafford s accounts of eighteenth-century illustration and its emphasis on the substantive and Daston and Galison s recent work on nineteenth-century mechanically informed objectivity. See Barbara Maria Stafford: Des lignes isothermes et de la distribution de la chaleur sur le globe.

And once again it will be another map that appears at the Lago Maggiore through which this new conceptualization of representing space will be figured. Sie finden darin vor Augen gestellt wohin Sie zu jeder Jahrszeit Ihre Briefe zu senden haben [ In conclusion I include a small table from which you will recognize the mobile middlepoint of our communication. You will find placed before your eyes the direction in which you are to send your letters for all seasons ] The new representational table whose portability is articulated in its diminutive size now provides a map of available communication channels, and it is precisely such mobile, interactive lines of connection that will then function at the opening of the third book as a substitute for the more traditional map that allows Wilhelm to find his way What we see happening in this chapter is the way the space of the Lago Maggiore, and one could argue, space more generally, is framed by a redefinition of the cartographic through the inclusion of maps at both its opening and close.

Where the chapter opened with a map that made possible a new departicularized notion of space, it now closes with a map that captures the interactive relationality of space and self, the mobile middle-point of one s own positionality. Der Versuch als Vermittler von Objekt und Subjekt. Goethe und Alexander von Humboldt. Neue Folge des Jahrbuchs der Goethe-Gesellschaft. Cartography, Grid, Graphic Goethe s late novels thus demarcated a key aesthetic space where the perceptual modernization made possible through innovations in cartography and geology at the turn of the nineteenth century were translated into narrative form as new maps of the world became synonymous with new narrative maps of the self.

Where cartography s grid had stood in the early modern period for a scientific paradigm in which the observer s vision was rigorously controlled by the lines on the page and crucially divorced from any corporeal intimacy with the space projected, the grid or lattice for Goethe had become the preeminent sign of potentiality, of an imaginative, embodied, relational and, above all, dynamic vision of space. The Geography of Prostitution and Female Sexuality in Curt Moreck s Erotic Travel Guide This essay explores the possible effects of increased public contact between men and women in Weimar Berlin, as well as contact between young, single, working women and prostitutes, as represented in written and visual artifacts of that era.

In demonstrating that spatial proximity was accompanied by a discursive conflation of prostitutes and other urban women, I argue that in some works of the period the lack of a cultural and social code for distinguishing New Women from paid prostitutes caused all sexually active women to be marked as whores.

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Does prostitution become obsolete once female sexuality is less restricted by bourgeois morality, or does it merely lose its ability to mark illicit sexuality? If, as Daphne Spain postulates in her study of Gendered Spaces, the spatial integration of men and women is a route to higher status for women, how is women s status affected by the act of occupying spaces that are historically associated with commodified female 2 For information on sites of prostitution in Berlin at the onset of World War I see Charles W.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner s Images of Berlin. Haxthausen and Heidrun Suhr. University of Minnesota Press Pp Here: Pp , Atina Grossmann: Oxford University Press Pp. Curt Moreck was born Konrad Haemmerling in Cologne in During the German revolution he was active in several radical artists groups. A popular figure in Weimar Berlin s intellectual circles, he worked as a novelist, editor, translator, and cultural critic.

In so doing, it offers the reader a broad range of images of prostitutes and emancipated women, often conflating the two. As Moreck s guide demonstrates, the obvious public presence of women in Weimar Berlin met with a variety of responses, many of which intertwined cultural discourses of sexually and financially emancipated womanhood with those about prostitutes, thereby creating the elision of the woman on the street with the woman of the street Daphne Spain: University of North Carolina Press P.

In contrast to Moreck s depiction of men who invite and welcome women into the public sphere, some contemporary male observers saw the increased public presence of women in Weimar Berlin as an alarming trend, and the image of the prostitute was evoked as a way of criticizing this change. When they encountered financially and sexually independent women in spaces traditionally associated with sexual exchange, these men failed to see women as an increasingly autonomous and observing presence.

Journalist Thomas Wehrling s article Berlin Is Becoming 10 A Tingeltangel was, to use Alan Lareau s definition, a low-class music hall or any disreputable barroom entertainment, in which the performers were often prostitutes noted for the vulgarity of their repertoires. Literary Cabarets of the Weimar Republic.

See also Peter Jelavich: Princeton University Press Walter Benjamin: Pp The brief translation is mine. Women, the City, and Modernity. Oxford University Press P. Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany could easily interpret Wehrling s vicious verbal assault on the women of Berlin as a strategy for managing certain kinds of sexual, social, and political anxieties. It is not the aim of this article to simply add to Tatar s discourse on the prostitute and emancipated women as objects of male fear and anxiety, although it is certainly worth noting that she often conflates the two without any critical consideration.

Offering an alternative to Tatar s morbid conclusions in her work on prostitution in the Weimar Republic, the historian Julia Roos asks: Should we simply dismiss contemporary anxieties about women s new independence and sexual assertiveness as expressions of misogynistic ideology which they undoubtedly were to a considerable extent or should we perhaps see these fears also as a symptom of and as a reaction to certain real changes in gender roles? Berlin Is Becoming a Whore. Translated and reprinted in: The Weimar Republic Sourcebook.

University of California Press Pp Ibid. Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany. Weimar s Crisis Through the Lens of Gender: The Case of Prostitution. McCormick, who claims that what ought to be celebrated includes precisely that which has been derided as decadence and effeminate weakness by many writers. Close analysis of Weimar-era texts that explore spaces of public contact between male cultural critics and young working women reveals what Spain describes as the reciprocity between the social construction of space and the spatial construction of social relations.

Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany. Princeton University Press P. We Weren t Modern Enough. Thus, texts by modern male writers and leftist intellectuals such as Siegfried Kracauer, Bertolt Brecht, and Curt Moreck that represent urban spaces and the women who inhabit them can be read to express both men s anxiety in regard to women s emancipation and their acknowledgement or even celebration of it. The latter is especially true in the case of Moreck, whose erotic travel guide maps out various possibilities for sexual experimentation and gender masquerade.

Feminism and the Geographies of Encounter. Princeton University Press P Friedman argues that [the] new geography of identity insists that we think about [ Das Theater der kleinen Leute. Das Theater 1 Pp Translation quoted in Miriam Hansen: New German Critique 29 With the lifting of film censorship in , prostitutes became a pervasive cultural presence on the movie screens of Weimar Berlin. In his essay Aus dem Theaterleben [ From the Theater Scene ] from , Brecht portrays the young women in the audience as transfixed by visions of luxury and carefree pleasures displayed in the onscreen portraits of prostitution.

If the intended effect of the hygiene films is to warn women away from prostitution, Brecht claims that they have the exact opposite effect. The films, he argues, actually convince young women to be sexually permissive: Culture, Politics, and Ideas. All the bosses are infused with male desire and pour their secretaries wine; no objections are allowed.

It is best to accept the movie ticket from one s boyfriend or the glass of wine from one s boss and give him what he expects in return. In other words, Brecht blurs the line between the fictional prostitute in the film and those he imagines as her viewers, for both allow themselves not simply to be seduced but to be bought. Brecht s concern for the young women s welfare projects and even promotes an image of female sexual passivity, an image less threatening than that of young women who might actively manipulate male desire to get what they want such as a free movie ticket, a glass of wine, or their boss attention.

Portraying audience members as dupes seems far more palatable to Brecht than portraying them as socially savvy cognizant of their own desirability and the advantages that desirability might offer them. In Kracauer s work the moviegoers are nearly identical to the young girls and secretaries in Brecht s text; their designation as little shopgirls is meant to signify their limited education and gullibility. Emphasis in the original. The translation of this lesser-known essay is mine. Das Ornament der Masse: The Little Shopgirls Go to the Movies. Harvard University Press Pp. Kracauer observes the shop girls as they dab tears from their cheeks and remarks: Weinen [ist] manchmal leichter als Nachdenken [ crying is sometimes easier than contemplation ].

All three of the essays discussed above can easily be read as precursors to a broader critical discourse on popular culture, exemplified by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer s treatise on the Culture Industry which maligns the mass culture audience for its uncritical absorption of popular entertainment and its inability to recognize that modern mass culture does not come from the people but is administered and imposed from above.

As Andreas Huyssen persuasively argues, behind modernist critiques portraying popular culture as a threat to high culture lay a fear of the working masses and also of women knocking at the gate of a male-dominated culture. The possible threat of the working woman is diffused by 29 Ibid.

P This particular quote comes from Andreas Huyssen: Mass Culture as Woman: After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Indiana University Press Pp Here: The original essay by Adorno and Horkheimer is: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. Mass Culture as Woman. The first move presents women as dimwitted dupes easily manipulated from above by their male bosses, lovers, or cultural institutions like film studios. These women are portrayed as having no agency; they place their bodies in service of industry, and they allow their minds to be shaped by the culture industry.

The second move is to depict these women in explicitly sexual terms as passive sexual objects. All three authors use both the trope of prostitution and the darkened, eroticized space of the cinema to aid them in these moves. Here, prostitution takes on a variety of meanings. It can be read as the potential sexual objectification of white-collar women by the men who accompany them to the cinema; it can also represent a rationalized eroticism that keeps women enslaved within an exploitative socio-economic system.

Certainly what all of these women have in common is that they do not possess a critical gaze; they are bad spectators. The authors, in contrast, are authoritative observers who have the power both to see the audience with a critical eye and see through the manipulative messages of the filmic narratives. By foregrounding the deficiencies of the female spectators, these essays privilege male spectatorship, for they imply that the masculine subject can decipher the truth behind the image. Literary Snapshots of Urban Spaces. P This discussion of the male gaze takes as its theoretical premise Laura Mulvey s ground-breaking work Visual and Other Pleasures.

Indiana University Press While the emotional response of the little shop girls may reveal an acknowledgement of a loss of social mastery, their concentrated gaze involves a perceptual activity that is neither passive nor entirely distracted. Having just watched a tragic film in which the female protagonist commits suicide in order to save her lover s career, the shop girls shed a few tears, but they wipe their tears and pudern sich rasch, ehe es hell wird [ quickly powder their noses before the lights come up ].

Although Kracauer implies that their powdering constitutes an over-identification with the on-screen actress and their desire to participate in the film s plot, it is possible that their powdering is actually a moment of critical disjuncture. Drying their tears and dotting their faces with powder before the cinematic space is illuminated, the shop girls anticipate the transition from the darkened space of the theater to the space of the street and thereby display an awareness that they will be looked at. The city street, in contrast to the cinema, can be seen as a form of spontaneous theater that offers urban women and men opportunities to be spectacle and 35 Patrice Petro: Woman as Spectator and Spectacle.

Women in the Metropolis. Pp The quote given appears on P. For a more comprehensive discussion of female spectatorship in the Weimar Republic, see Petro s book-length study, Joyless Streets. Perhaps, then, these shopgirls are not dupes but critical consumers, perfectly aware of the disjuncture between cinematic representations and reality and able to negotiate various urban spaces.

Perhaps the cinema is not the site of their social and moral corruption but rather a place where they can exercise their buying power and satisfy their desire for entertainment at the end of a long workday. Perhaps they are desiring subjects as well as desired objects. And perhaps, before they exit the cinema, they pause to look in their compact mirrors for a second, casting quizzical glances at the intellectual in the back row and returning, even if just for a second, his studied gaze.

New Men, New Women, and Masks: Jeder einmal in Berlin! During the period of economic stabilization , as many as two million tourists per year flocked to the city. Those visitors who were looking for sexual thrills that could not be found on a guided tour or in the bourgeois standard-bearer of travel guides, the Baedecker, those who wanted to explore the verwirrende 38 Henri Lefebvre: University of Minnesota Press P Moreck: Mammen s fourteen contributions, second only to Kamm s twenty, exemplify the presence of an active female gaze that makes Moreck s guide so unique.

Moreck spends his first chapter, Wir zeigen Ihnen Berlin [ We ll Show you Berlin ], convincing the reader that the guide is, in many ways, indispensable to any traveler who wants to get beyond Berlin s offizielle Seite [ official side ]. Every city has an official and an unofficial side, and it is superfluous to add that the latter is more interesting and more informative of the essence of a city. That which appears so clearly in the light of the arc lamps has a face more like a mask than a physiognomy. The smile it offers is more an appeal to the visitor s purse.

It wears the makeup of the coquette, applied too thickly to permit the true features underneath to be recognized. Those who are looking for experiences, who long for adventure, who hope for sensations they must go into the shadows. To use a contemporary phrase, she s a tourist trap. Eager to please the eye, tourism cakes on its makeup, creating a mask that obscures the city s essence. Interestingly, as much as Moreck promises to show his readers Berlin s true features, most often he winds up showing them its many masks.

Perhaps the mask-like makeup so garishly applied is impossible to remove completely. One can only hope to examine its various layers. Moreck s use of prostitute imagery in his description of official Berlin can be read as further testament to the prostitute s mainstream status in s Berlin, for in this passage the prostitute is associated with the money-making industries of entertainment and tourism. Yet prostitutes in Moreck s guide also inhabit the unofficial world of shadows, embodying the adventure and sensations of sexual subcultures, as well as the half world in which they are virtually indistinguishable from the 41 Moreck: Translation of this particular passage is taken from The Weimar Republic Sourcebook.

The sheer variety and ambiguity of Moreck s representations of prostitutes place him in closer proximity to female artists of the Weimar period like Jeanne Mammen, whose works, the art historian Marsha Meskimmon has shown, are effective in dismantling [ Setting himself apart from Karl Baedecker s guide to Berlin and its Environs, which provides readers with recommendations for hotels and restaurants, detailed maps of the capital city s streets and transportation system, and helpful blueprints of churches, monuments, and museums, Moreck gives his readers neither maps nor diagrams.

Unlike traditional travel guides that feature state-sponsored cultural institutions i. Instead of using streets as mere avenues to particular destinations or monumental sites, the streets themselves become destinations. In an essay written the same year as Moreck s guide, Kracauer himself identified the street as a space that can escape the authority of urban planners and architects and reveal the heterogeneity that their designs deny. Kracauer writes from Berlin. The Hidden Stages of Weimar Cinema. For further discussion on Kracauer s writings on the city street see David Frisby: Deciphering the Hieroglyphics of Weimar Berlin: University of Minnesota Press Pp Neither essay engages the topic of gender, for Kracauer did not theorize gender in his discussion of the street.

Admitting that these women may intimidate outsiders, Moreck engages in a project of demystification, telling his readers that these boot whores, once considered a kinky peculiarity, have become a ready-to-wear item catering to a variety of customers. Once seen as dens of iniquity, Moreck claims, some of these clubs now attract fashionable crowds interested in following a trend.

Trend-setters looking for voyeuristic titillation find, however, that the clubs atmospheres are actually quite bourgeois, just as those who go searching Alexanderplatz for the danger of the Berlin underworld find themselves admonished by Moreck not to confuse 48 Baedecker: The very fact that the title of the guide places the word naughty in quotation marks underscores the tension between the reification of sexuality and danger and the demystification of the assumed link between sex and danger, a tension that Moreck s work fails to resolve. It does, however, depart from a common understanding of sex tourism that presumes chauvinistic male agency and female passivity, for it resists mapping a clear path to the sexual satisfaction of male desire at the expense of female desire.

Who, then, is Moreck s intended reader? Although it has been convincingly argued that the guide caters primarily to a male heterosexual audience, the male gaze does not necessarily dominate the narrative, nor does it render the female gaze passive. If anything, in contrast to the texts by Brecht and Kracauer, Moreck s text casts doubt upon the authority given to men s cinematic vision by implying that the reader is prone to confuse film or sexual spectacle with reality. Plainly stated, this modern guide is pitched to an alternative reader.

As previously mentioned, from the beginning Moreck makes it clear that the guide the narrative we is addressing a new generation of reader similar to the new men of Berlin-West, a republican reader who is open to a more democratic view of gender and sexuality. Rudy Koshar thoughtfully speculates upon what this Ibid. P Moreck explicitly uses the term mimicry.

Moreck mentions the cinema in passing, identifying it as one of the many possible spaces in which Berliners might spend a few hours in the late afternoon or early evening. He was of course a male heterosexual who was drawn to the more salacious side of Berlin culture [ In Moreck s Berlin, the Other looked back, and the possibilities of new representations and new sexual identities were contained in this returned gaze.

Young, single, sexually active women in the metropolis who adopt the open flirtatiousness and the once-distinctive style of the prostitute, particularly the prostitute s use of cosmetics and more revealing fashions, make such behavior and style into the new norm.

Returning to the space of the street, consider the passage on the Tauentziengirls, fashionable prostitutes from Berlin-West, who before the First World War were notorious for their refined femininity and demonically sparkling perversity but are now virtually indistinguishable from their athletic and emancipated daughters fig. Ihre Extravaganz von damals ist heute ein Gewohnheitsrecht der weiblichen Jugend.

The Tauentziengirls of yesteryear have become mothers, even if, thanks to their bobbed haircuts and cosmetics, they look more like their daughters older sisters. The Tauentziengirls of yesteryear now laugh over the fact that what one used to refer to as their vice and wickedness is considered perfectly natural today.

Their extravagance of yesteryear is now taken for granted as the female youth s given right. Image courtesy of Mel Gordon. In this particular instance, prostitutes and New Women are quite literally related. The contention that their matching makeup and hairstyles make them. But it is the motif of the mother that is most fitting to the tone of the travel guide, not only because prostitutes have traditionally been depicted, even in more progressive discourses, as anti-mothers, but even more because it implies that emancipated women are the progeny of prostitutes. While the older generation of Tauentziengirls takes on the more traditionally feminine role of the mother and prostitute , the younger generation crosses gender boundaries, embodying both masculine brawn and athleticism and feminine extravagance.

The prostitutes who caused a moral stir in Wilhelmine Berlin have given birth to a new generation of young women for whom sexual expression is a natural right and whose interaction with the men of their generation looks less like a threat and more like healthy competition and camaraderie. The Weimar Republic brought with it what Moreck boldly labels Assimilierung der Geschlechter [ gender assimilation ] in which women actively sought their own leisure activities and created a space for themselves on the athletic fields, the streets, and in Berlin s multitude of entertainment venues.

Descriptions of women s desire to see and be seen permeate the narrative, and the female gaze is visually represented by Jeanne Mammen s illustrations. The translation of Geschlechter in Moreck s comment about the Assimilierung der Geschlechter from German into English always poses a dilemma, considering that the German language makes no distinction between sex and gender.

Nur ein paar Augen sein: Erich Reimer and The Conspiracy of Women. German Portraits from the s. Yale University Press Pp. While the woman in profile takes a casual drag from her cigarette, the woman in the foreground pauses to look straight at the viewer. Her cool expression is softened only slightly by the coy shrug of her shoulder. The blank narrow eyes quite typical of Mammen s style coupled with pale cheeks and red lips give her face a mask-like quality.

The squinted eyes, made-up face, and coy pose could be read today through Helmut Lethen s explication of the cool persona, the adoption of strategic self-enactment central to the age of New Objectivity. Jews and the New Culture Ed. University of Michigan Press Miller: P Canetti is quoted in Rewald: The Culture of Distance in Weimar Germany. University of California Press P Ibid. Mammen, however, draws her female subjects in masks that bear an uncanny resemblance to Lethen s description of the cool gaze a squinting of the eyes into narrow slits: The impulse to squint is transmitted simultaneously to the muscles that lower the upper lids and raise the lower ones, and again to the muscles that open the eyes.

A more or less narrow slit remains open, resulting in the familiar image of eyes peering between nearly closed lids. If, as Lethen argues, character in the age of New Objectivity is a matter of what mask is put on, then Mammen s images of women who exude cool conduct imply that they were just as adept at trying on masks as male intellectuals and artists were.

Sabine Hake reminds us: Until the war, only prostitutes and demimondaines wore makeup during the day. The more widespread use of cosmetics robbed them of their power to mark illicit sexuality. Describing women on the streets of Berlin-West, Moreck raises this very point about makeup, remarking: P The references to makeup and the mask are too numerous to cite in the main body of this text. In the Mirror of Fashion. Again, the inability to distinguish between sex and gender complicates the translation of Moreck s phrase, particularly when one considers that as evidenced by Moreck s description of the transvestite haven Eldorado, makeup in Weimar Berlin was not only used by women to create a playful mask of femininity.

A uniform conjures, on the one hand, the women s uniformity of appearance, their possible indistinguishability. On the other hand, a uniform is also an article of clothing that one puts on and takes off. The widespread use of makeup, combined with the loosening of moral codes, Moreck contends, made it virtually impossible to stigmatize women s promiscuity. Women could use makeup as a mask as a medium through which to try out different looks and attitudes to experiment with androgyny, to be hyperfeminine, to be flirtatious, or to appear cool and detached. As Hake notes, there were different cosmetic uniforms for different spaces: The mechanisms of the production of gender can be exposed as such in order to make a space for woman.

The decorative layer [ In Moreck s guide, the original mask-wearers are prostitutes, and prostitutes remain some of the ultimate performers described in the text. The possibilities afforded 74 Hake: P Mary Ann Doane: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. Routledge See also Doane s earlier article Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator.

The Housing of Gender. Princeton Architectural Press Pp Here: Just how naughty was Berlin, and where did this naughtiness reside? By calling Berlin s naughtiness into question in his own title, Moreck s work is satirizing what it defines as outdated moral codes, such as those represented by Thomas Wehrling s essay and, to a certain extent, by Brecht s and Kracauer s as well, that would define Berlin as a metropolis of vice and its public women as whores.

Johnson stresses through an abundance of spatially oriented language in the novel how geopolitical determinations such as the division of Germany profoundly affect the life of the modern Everyman, protagonist Jakob Abs. This essay outlines how Johnson relates the changed geography of Cold-War Europe to the altered mental states and outlooks of his characters. The next two sections detail the extended spatial metaphors employed by Johnson to illustrate how politics and ideologies shape both private and public spaces, which in turn influence the worldviews of their inhabitants.

The conclusion then makes a plea for further spatial analyses of Cold War literature that documents the human geographies of that era. Wright Mills in his foundational work The Sociological Imagination from the same year. Soja illustrates in this work how space can be made to hide consequences from us, how relations of power and discipline are inscribed into the apparently innocent spatiality of social life, how human geographies become filled with politics and ideology.

Mills s description of the modern individual s immobilization contains a remarkable amount of spatial-metaphorical language: Along with the increasing focus on space by social scientists as well as humanities scholars over the past several decades should come a reevaluation of the crucial role of spatiality by which I mean both spatially oriented language and the conceptualizations that such language represents in literary texts of the twentieth century. In this way, literary studies become vital to a more complete understanding of human geographies within Cold War societies, and of the profound effects of political division on individual lives.

With this novel, Johnson combines the project of making history with that of making geography, a practice that Soja argues provides the most revealing tactical and theoretical world. Social theorists in the twentieth century, from Emile Durkheim and Max Weber to Pierre Bourdieu and beyond, contend that cultural and social entities are also to be understood as constructs or collective representations. Contemporary views generally identify Heimat as one such construction, determined for each person not only by socio-cultural but also highly individual factors.

Heimat may be roughly defined as the imaginary space where a reconciliation with an alienated, moving world takes place. Fredric Jameson has asserted that the inverse occurred with the onset of postmodernism and late capitalism, as time was subsumed by space. See for example Fredric Jameson: Duke University Press Pp. P See Peter Blickle: Through his multiple narrators, Johnson does not take a conspicuous ideological stance that promotes one side of the border as superior to the other. But due to its implicit criticism of GDR socialism, the book was destined to be published at first only in the West.

Norbert Mecklenburg accurately labels the novel in vieler Hinsicht ein DDR- Roman [ in many respects a GDR novel ], 7 due to its critique of socialism from a socialist perspective. Yet Johnson also moves beyond this agenda by suggesting the importance of challenging all Cold War ideologies. As Gary Baker notes about the author, Johnson refused to champion either Germany s ideological position, recognizing instead the deeply disturbing aspects of both German regimes. Uwe Johnson and the Cold War.

The Culture of Criticism: Adolf Behne

German Writers and the Cold War Ed. Manchester University Press Pp Here: University of South Carolina Press P. Jahrestage und andere Prosa. At the same time, Mecklenburg prudently warns us not to neglect Johnson s socialist leaning and the important role it plays in his work. The Modern Language Review Versuch, eine Grenze zu beschreiben. The real consequence of these large-scale geographical determinations by those in power, as Johnson illustrates, is found in their psychological effects on the modern Everyman, represented by Jakob Abs. Johnson thus moves beyond the understanding of space that was still prevalent at the time he wrote the novel that is, primarily as a neutral physical phenomenon by acknowledging a human geography and the deeper social origins of spatiality, its problematic production and reproduction, its contextualization of politics, power, and ideology.

The speculations of the novel s title refer in part to whether Jakob s death was an accident or a suicide, or perhaps even a murder by representatives of the state. The various voices in the novel also reveal different facets of Jakob s personality and convictions; the reader must piece together their fragmented reports and conversations, and still does not come out with a complete picture of the title figure in the end. It seems unlikely that Jakob, who possessed a thorough knowledge of the geography and train schedule of his region, would have hastily crossed the tracks in the fog.

A suspicion of suicide is substantiated as we learn gradually and in a non-linear fashion of Jakob s growing dissatisfaction with his life in the GDR, culminating in the fall of when he was required to give clearance for Warsaw Pact troops to move through his station on their way to invade Hungary. Before his death, Jakob s workday was structured around the network of the train system. After the country s division, the German train network had become more complex and prone to delays. The one system diverged into two, the Bundesbahn in the West and the Reichsbahn in the East, but remained convergent in some respects.

Bundesbahn trains continued to pass through the East, and were often given priority over GDR trains so that the Reichsbahn would appear to the outside world to be running smoothly and punctually. The train system thus becomes an important symbol of the human geography of the GDR; it is not merely the new boundaries that cause route and schedule changes for the citizens, but the insistence of the ideologues to maintain appearances. In turn, the delays do not only keep people from getting to work or back home on time, they lead for some to a profound despair about the future.

Gesine presently works as a translator for NATO and lives in West Germany, although the secret police officer Rohlfs hopes to convince her to become a spy for East Germany. Gesine returns to the GDR illegally at one point, when she confesses her love to Jakob, who later visits her on Rohlfs prompting when she is back in the West Rohlfs is also responsible for scaring Jakob s mother into fleeing to the West.

Jakob returns to the East on his own volition, despite Gesine s attempts to convince him to stay, and he dies soon thereafter on the tracks of his own workplace. Allusions to the postwar demarcations of East and West abound throughout the novel, such as the description of Gesine s residence in dem anderen Deutschland [ in the other Germany ]. At the same time, terminology such as jenseits or diesseits [ beyond or this side of ] that is laden with spiritual and metaphysical connotations implies an insurmountable distance between one part of divided Germany and the other a spatial mystification, to borrow Soja s term.

At times the figures also employ the terms in the Uwe Johnson: Translation from Uwe Johnson: Translations from the novel henceforth are from this edition unless otherwise noted, and will be marked as SJ. It should be noted that something is lost in the translation here, as jenseits especially but not only in its substantive form das Jenseits also has metaphorical connotations of the afterlife, the hereafter, or kingdom come.

This is not to say that Johnson s word choice signals religious or spiritual symbolism, but the term jenseits as opposed to diesseits hints at a much more profound divide than the English across. The translator also sometimes uses the common phrase across the border to translate hinter der Grenze e. Jakob characterizes the Stasi officer Rohlfs with some irony as being so powerful in this world that he lives jenseits [ When we learn that Gesine Cresspahl writes a telegram to her father in the East at the first post office hinter der Grenze [ behind the border ], 16 it is only situational context that reveals on which side she stands and even then it is not absolutely clear where she is.

One can be located simultaneously vor [ in front of ] and hinter [ behind ], depending on which perspective is validated. In describing a character s position in relation to an imaginary line, these locational prepositions emphasize three important points: