Chapter 6 Traffic as the Art of Citizenship It was as if the earth suddenly lost its gravity and liberated me. I held tightly onto the steering wheel, but my feet were far away and found no purchase, and I myself was light and empty, and could fly safely through space, and my breath was also very light and almost superfluous. This era of freedom, brazenness, and petrol. Gabriela Taggot. Never too near or too far, the city and the sense of touch. Whether or people there is also traffic, traffic is the fluid of their coexistence, their motion in space, the transportation of their goods. The purpose of traffic is both to produce and to avoid contact. People want not only to reach one another but to pass by one another unharmed. People need each other, and they are afraid of each other. Both of these facts are proved daily in traffic. It is a mirror of desire, of unrest and vitality.
In the Vima Republic, it assumed such density and such magnitude that it became frightening. Shortly after the war, private cars were still an absolute luxury. Those who owned them also had chauffeurs to ferry them around. But within a few years, cars became everyday objects. Between 1924 and 1932, ownership of privately owned vehicles in the German Reich multiplied fourfold, from around 132,000 to 497,000. In the same period, the number of lorries multiplied by five, from 30,000 to over 150,000. And within ten years, the number of motorcycles increased by a factor of 30 to 800,000. While horse-drawn carts still rattled along the country lanes, the rural calms seldom interrupted by automobiles. In the cities, the roar of combustion engines drove anyone with sensitive hearing to distraction.
400-pound power units belched their way coarsely along with a deep complacent roar. Shrill whistles ring out intermittently. Huge automobiles, record-breaking 800-pounders, groan, grunt, squeak, beep, and honk. Motorbikes hiss and snort through the silent night. These are the words of the philosopher Teodor Lessing, who had brought out a pamphlet urging caution, noise, a broadside against the loud sounds of our life, published as early as 1908. No end to growth was in sight, since motorbikes and cars were made increasingly cheap by assembly line manufacture and the cities were attracting more and more people, fantasies of the future made way for a dystopian density of traffic.
It seemed only logical that cities would soon look as Fritz Lang had prophesied in the 1927 silent science fiction film Metropolis. They would grow steeply upwards and downwards, and airplanes would float along the gorges between the buildings and under bridges that connected the residential towers at dizzying heights. The most vital German city novel so far, Alfred Dublin's Berlin Alexander Platz, was published in 1929, and begins with gridlock on an existential scale. The novel's main character, Franz Bieberkopf, is already unaccustomed to traffic after a long stay in prison. On the day of his release into life, as if from a protective womb, he is catapulted from the tram into the condensed tumult of Berlin, and he experiences a kind of birth trauma.
The raging traffic comes charging at him, nothing seems to want to stay in its place, even the roofs look as if they are slipping and about to plunge down upon him. Bieberkopf flees terrified into a house doorway. From now on, the trauma of the traffic won't leave him. But 60 passages in the novel are devoted to Bieberkopf's insecurity. Again and again he fears being thrown off by the city. He anxiously checks the roofs as he walks through Berlin to make sure that they aren't starting to slide. He is never allowed a relaxed stroll. He marches, he fights his way through, he runs against the city that its creator Dublin has organised as a hyperactive surface, a space that can rebel, that develops its own hub of voices and constantly addresses the protagonist.
Here, the surroundings do not group themselves obediently around the main character as they might in a classic novel; they move according to their own laws, they can rise up and literally shake off a person. This is the modern city as man's antagonist. Much more than a mere dwelling place, it is a social space that can achieve autonomy and turn the movement of a human being into its opposite. And at the same time, it is a place of longing, full of promises and gripping density of experience. In the 30 years between 1875 and 1905, the number of inhabitants in Berlin had more than doubled from 1 million to 2. In the 10 years from 1920 until 1930, an additional 500,000 people had arrived, bringing the total to over 4.3 million; no one could have guessed that the peak had been reached.
Instead, they were sure that the city would become more and more cramped and that it would happen increasingly quickly. For many Berliners, the imagined future of their city existed alongside the present, as if in time-lapse; they lived with one foot in what was yet to come. Berlin presented itself as the fastest metropolis in the world, the symphony of the big city played constantly in the background, and the experience of the capital, which was in fact very quiet in some places, was overlaid by anticipated turbulence. Every traffic jam, every hint of a crowd prompted the anxious certainty that worse was on the way, Babylon and Gomorrah, the sci-fi version. Multiplyed with the threatened dangers from criminality and vice, the city was also perceived as a flourishing thicket and a devouring jungle, technology as hostile nature, a mollock, a devouring monster that threatened to consume its inhabitants.
The architect and city planner Martin Wagner, Berlin's municipal building surveyor since 1926, had been brought in to keep gridlock at bay. In a series of lectures and essays that coincided with the publication of Durblin's novel, The Passionate Social Democrat, inspired by the possibility of planning the future and by the immensity of the tasks that it involved, set out how he imagined the reconstruction of the city in accordance with the needs of the future. Wagner saw himself as the director of the global city, and the city itself as the constructive housing of a machine for work and comfortable living. During the example of Alexander Platz, he wanted to show what modern city planning was capable of doing. The square of a global city is a sluice for traffic, almost constantly full, the clearing point of a network of veins of the first order he explained. Traffic must be guided across the square with as much speed and clarity and as little interruption as possible.
But Wagner, one of the first profits of the car-friendly city, had more in mind than merely cutting his way through the confusion of the streets and airing cramped neighborhoods with wide avenues. He suggested a differentiation of thoroughfares. Pedestrians, trams, cars, horse-drawn hackney carriages, hand carts and cyclists would no longer have to fight against one another, but would instead be guided in a circle at different levels. The car's multi-story roundabout might have come to nothing, but in Alexander Platz, Wagner did introduce a roundabout, although here it assumed an elliptical form. Once it had been completed, the result was sobering. The cars now curved spatiously around on the large ellipse, while the tram lines crossed in the empty middle of the square. Two office blocks unadorned in the Neuer-Zachlichkeit style, but very elegant, with impressive cubic light towers on their frontages lined the square to the west.
The eastern edge was worse. It didn't actually exist. A generous space had been created here with the wrecking ball, but there was no money left to build on the vacant lots. In 1929, because of the looming global economic crisis, the investors pulled out, so the huge empty spaces simply continued to yawn there. Later, the anti-urban void would conform to National Socialist Taste, and the urban planners of the GDR were also happy with it. It's rough lack of welcome remains unique to the square, even today. Until Martin Wagner's rebuilding measures, Alexander Platz had been an intoxicatingly beautiful but also chaotic place. The many department stores and shops, including the Hamantit store, with supposedly the longest shop facade in Europe, the huge central market hall where the horse carts of the farmers from the surrounding countryside regularly caused traffic jams in the morning, the short and long-distance railway lines, the grand hotel, huge numbers of office blocks, and restaurants such as the famous Ashinga, all meant large crowds.
At the middle of the whole thing stood Berolina, a colossal 14-meter figure in a chainmail vest who was supposed to embody the proud city of Berlin. And she embodied it fairly well, with her surprisingly charming features. But after the reconstruction, stout Berolina no longer matched her roadworthy clearing point. She was two 18th century for the Berlin magistrate, and urban surveyor Wagner had always imagined the spirit of the new age as being fat-free. The modern mass, he wrote, wishes to appear fat-free like an aeroplane, a diesel locomotive, an engine, etc. So Buxem Berolina ended up in storage. She would only be reinstalled to the applause of an emotional Berlin populace by the Nazi magistrate. But that was a deceptive triumph typical of the Nazis. In 1942, Berolina was finally melted down for munitions production.
When they saw the new plan for the square, the horrified managers of Teats Department Store declared themselves willing to give its wonderful, vilhemine facade with its opulent curves and the proud atlas figure on the gable, a functionalist redesign. So great was the fear of being swept away by Berlin's dynamic planning project. Martin Wagner dreamed of a city that could rebuild itself generation after generation, a constant spirit of renewal, but the costs of demolition and reconstruction had to be covered at top speed. For that reason, he defined the ideal plan for a global city not only as having the smoothest possible crossing traffic, but as producing a profit. He said, the flowing traffic in the square must be set against the standing traffic that holds tightly onto the purchasing power of the crowds of people crossing the square. Shops, bars, department stores, offices, etc. In that way, one arrives at a concentration of buildings whose alignments must be adjacent to the lines of motion of the pedestrians, which is to say the purchasing power.
In Wagner's plans, consumption had almost exactly as great a part to play as traffic, since in the end someone had to pay for this permanent progress. Every 25 years urban construction investments were to bring in a profit so that the next generation was able to engage in a redesign. In our time, there is no longer any place for petrified eternal values, he said. If every generation could rebuild the city as they saw fit, the aesthetic problem of urban development would solve itself. Wagner believed that happiness could be built, rationalized and fairly distributed by planning measures. For conservatives, this was a hideous idea, a gratuitous destruction of natural order and inequality. For most of them, the cities with Berlin at their head were irrevocably lost, breeding grounds of cosmopolitanism and cultural Bolshevism, women's emancipation and liberalism.
In 1918 and 1922, the philosopher Osvald Schbingler, the supplier of culturally pessimistic slogans directed at the city, had claimed in his two-volume door-stopper, The Decline of the West, that the emergence of global cities had throughout history been a sure indication of a culture's decline. The development of the global city had regularly meant the beginning of the end of a mature civilization. It replaced homeland with cosmopolitanism. It robbed people of their respect for tradition and organic growth. It transformed the people into a crowd. It despised the provinces and farmers and hence the foundations of its own existence, and not least, it was damned by its innate intellectual arrogance to steer itself towards its own end. If the right declared its devotion to the countryside and its folk traditions, the left praised the city and its free spaces.
Josef Raught professed himself in favour of traffic, the author and journalist who was born in 1894 in the Galician Stettel of Brody, and who had come in 1920 from Vienna to Berlin, wrote a hymnic declaration of love to the Glaistraek. The word means track triangle, an unadorned Berlin junction of two underground train tracks close to Anhalter station and to the strange place where an elevated railway ran through the middle of the second floor of a rental block. I declare my admiration for the Glaistraek. It is a symbol and the initial focus of a circle of life fantastical product of a force that promises the future. After this beginning Raught got into his flow. This is what the heart of a world looks like, whose life is wheel-belt swing and clock strike, the cruel beat of the lever and the wail of sirens.
This is what the heart of the earth looks like, which rotates a thousand times faster on its axis than it wants to teach us by day and night shift, whose incessant rotation looks like madness and is the product of mathematical prescience, whose furious speed presents itself to sentimental backward lookers as the brutal annihilation of internal forces and healing balance but in reality produces life giving warmth and the blessing of movement. Amazing what hope of the future traffic could inspire in such a profoundly melancholy man. Raught who worked for the Berzenkorye and the Frankfurt-Artsitung among others was filled with savnece at the decline of the Austrian monarchy but celebrated the beauty of soot and iron all the more defiantly.
The landscape is given an iron mask, it cheered and so along the tracks iron guards sprouting upwards and signals blossoming in bright green. Asphalt literati was the term the national socialists used for convinced urban authors such as Josef Raught, Alfred Dublin, Iresh Kestner, Leon Foystvanger, Gabriela Taggitt and Vicki Baum. In 1929 when the Fosse-Schutzitung asked him to take part in the survey does Berlin inhibit or encourage artistic creativity, Alfred Dublin replied as enthusiastically as one might have expected of one of the Asphalt literati. Overall it has a powerfully inspiringly enlivening force. That excitement of streets, shops and cars is the heat into which I must allow myself to be beaten if I am working which is to say always. That is the petrol on which my car runs.
The Cologne-based scholar Hehrmoud Plessner wrote a philosophical celebration of traffic in a higher communicative sense. In his 1924 book, Grensen de Geiminschaft, Limits of Community, a critique of social radicalism, he developed a theory of coexistence in which he advocated the virtues of good traffic using traffic to refer to all levels of social interaction, not only in the street. Plessner's relationship theories of coldness were a plea for an anonymous society striving to strip the phenomenon of alienation of its horrors and stress its positive sides. He advised making social traffic as pleasant as possible, with people coming never too close nor too far from one another so that to some degree they could get along with one another without accident.
Tacked in particular was necessary, Plessner said, a thoughtful response to the truth, a willingness to maintain a balance between honesty and consideration, sparing the other for my own sake, sparing myself for the sake of the other. In order to get on in society, one had to know how to disguise oneself, keep one's opinions to one's chest and wear masks, tenderness was important, obligingness that does not oblige, a culture of restraint. Plessner, the modern age required a cheery face, tacked, respect for the other soul, was the magic formula that preserves an anonymous society from collisions, makes it lovable, smooth and ultimately exhilarating. The second last chapter about the hygiene of tacked practically swings, it has rhythm and energy and here too the symphony of the big city rings out in philosophical application.
In fact, the ability to negotiate around about, to synchronize oneself, to communicate quickly with swift gestures and glances, to switch lanes gently, was in many respects, like being at a party where one is constantly switching conversational partners and amidst convivial small talk, keeping people pleasantly close and at a distance at the same time. Where does cordiality begin? Where does it stop? Plessner asks. Where does it cross over into sociability? Where does the familiarity of community circles begin? Where are we allowed to relax and build on kindness, love, understanding and insight? If tacked doesn't tell us, we are betrayed and sold. Feeling, checking, saving face, but never with too heavy a gun, without superiority, a sure sign of weakness, without insistence, open but never without reserve, determined but also flexible, lovable but never creeping, everyone knows these oscillations whose amplitude decides man's dignity, standing and value in society.
The analogies between social traffic and street traffic are obvious. For that reason, traffic also became a central topic of the Weimar Republic, because the most contrary individuals had to learn to rub shoulders fluently, the extent to which they seemed to have achieved this and at such pace could be seen as the secret code for a future society based on intuitive conflict resolution, while in reality the debates were becoming increasingly hurt for political positions increasingly irreconcilable. Zekewid Karkawa was fascinated to watch police officers and experienced taxi drivers greeting one another and communicating fleetingly with inconspicuous gestures, how the officers ceased to be holders of high office and instead became functionaries of traffic.
Traffic sent very new instructions to the brain, new hybrid forms of concentration and intuition were used, new capacities for spatial and dynamic vision, a sixth sense for the coexistence of an unfamiliar quantity of variables. It was impossible not to be spellbound at the effect that the new systems of rules had on people, for example traffic lights, the fact that amber appeared between red and green gave rise to extensive observations that attempted to trace what traffic was doing to people. Karkawa reflected on the meaning of the three-phase traffic light. This amber marks the transition from one resolute state into another. It cautions pedestrians and automobile drivers to pay attention and liberates them from all reflections that the compulsion to consideration commanded when signals changed suddenly. By introducing an intermediate light, caution is to a certain extent objectivized and initiative displaced from people. In other words, amber allows people to dose peacefully during the red phase.
Something that has passed wordlessly into our DNA today has been analyzed at length. Plessner's reflections became explosive against the background of the debate around society versus community. These slogans concealed different visions of the essence of social cohesion. In community, cohesion is defined by a descent and by common values that are passed down. In society, by rules governing the coexistence of people who are potentially alien to one another. Their forms of traffic require an ability to compromise and tact. Focish theorists, stressed community, democratic ones, society. The term focus essential to the National Socialist Vision refers to members of a national community relates to the promotion of German purity and greatness and carries strong racist connotations. For the far right, the case was quite clear. Community is German. Society is alien to us.
The cultural critic, Helmut Leiten, came up with a fine phrase. When traffic becomes the central topic, creatures that wish to put down roots will suffer. Democrats, on the other hand, had pace on their side. The worship of speed, the aesthetic presentation of traffic in a global city, the profound connection between fashion and cars. This was the bearing of a democracy connected by fate, to growing affluence and the certainty that things would keep going forward in the long term. Of course, there were also some among them who did not join in with the application of political significance to the phenomena of city and traffic. Under his pseudonym, Ignatz-Frober, Küt Tórholzky, described Berlin's traffic as pure invention, a media phantom that matched the deep urge of the new German to feel the way he imagined Americans felt.
Living in a city that has a city and a broad way lifts their spirits. That was why the Berlin press was busy, he said, drumming a new fixed idea into the Berliner. Traffic. The police support them splendidly in this. The attempts currently put in place to organize traffic, to grasp it statistically, to describe, to regulate, to drain and feed it are practically ridiculous. Is there really so much of it? No. If you come to Berlin, a lot of people will ask you with an almost pleading expression, Berlin traffic is colossal, isn't it? It wasn't, Tórholzky replied. Berliners just imagined a bleak spectacle like the one in Paris. Berlin does not have this traffic, but it imagines it does, and the police regulate this imaginary traffic as no one in Paris has ever regulated it, nor ever would.
This notional traffic plague spread to the rest of the country, what Berlin has, bookabock deserves. No car far and wide, but two traffic policemen, a car on the horizon and wild waving, honking, and whistling begins. It was true, the familiar mixture of inferiority complex and boastfulness was lived out in Berlin's description of itself as the fastest city in the world. But even Tórholzky's dismissiveness wasn't free of pose. The marketplace of opinions was not dissimilar to what we have today. It's always tempting for well-known op-ed journalists such as Tórholzky, Tórholzky, as he was known, to sign off calmly on a debate that has become too heated. Then the only option is the discipline of skillful deflation, of which Tórholzky was a master.
But there will have been a reason why, in 1924, the traffic police that he so disdained set up Germany's first traffic light housed in an 8-meter high tower. 26 tramlines and five buslines crossed Potsdamaplats. Contemporary films show considerable swarm of cars, horse-drawn carriages, hand carts, motorbikes, and pedestrians. At peak times, that would have made even a car driver of today break out in pearls of sweat. Potsdamaplats assumed mythical status at a speed entirely in line with the velocity-driven times. Even today, no tour guide will neglect to mention that it was once the most traffic-filled square in Europe. For many visitors from the provinces who travel to their capital, following the motto, once to Berlin, the experience of turmoil at Potsdamaplats was a must. Bidecker recommended comfortable vantage points. The lively bustle may be comfortably observed from the Belvüp patisserie, the cafe of the first Norfotel and the Yosti patisserie and the Pórholz restaurant, in the evening Bright Neon signs.
A city without people. The city was particularly challenging to painters. On the one hand, there were the lovers of traffic. Lesa Oori painted magical representations of night-time urban traffic using impressionistic lighting effects. Ernst Ludwig Jächner turned Potsdamaplats into a circular rotating stage on which two elegant passers-by with feathers in their hats turned into shrill sensations. Their proportions dramatically distorted. The square is small, the two graces enormous. But what might be more surprising is the countercurrent. Some painters, whom we now see as strong proponents of Neuyserlichkeit, created a very quiet picture of the city. Their melancholy urban still lives look like a protest against the cult of speed that dominated their time. So Gustav Wunderwelds Berlin's street landscapes are usually deserted. At most a lonely couple deliberately drawn far too small wanders around the mountainous buildings.
一座没有人烟的城市。这座城市对画家来说特别具有挑战性。一方面,有喜爱交通的艺术家。Lesa Oori 用印象派的光影效果描绘了魔幻般的夜间城市交通。Ernst Ludwig Jächner 则将 Potsdamer Platz 变成一个旋转的舞台,上面两位戴着羽饰帽子的优雅行人变成了引人注目的焦点。他们的比例被极度扭曲。广场很小,而这两个优雅的人物却显得巨大。但更令人惊讶的是与之相反的趋势。一些画家(我们现在认为他们是“新客观性”的重要倡导者)却描绘了一幅非常安静的城市图景。他们忧郁的城市静物画似乎是对当时那种速度崇拜的抗议。因此,Gustav Wunderwelds 的柏林街景通常是空无一人的。最多只有一对孤独的情侣被故意画得极小,在高耸的建筑间徘徊。
These are images of almost ghost-like peace that draw much of their power from the absence of traffic. Wunderwelds paintings look like sets. Until 1918 he earned most of his money working as a set painter in the theatre, for a life that has yet to be performed or accessories for a play that has been cancelled. What a contrast with the stage sets for the plays of Avin Piscatoa, which kaleidoscopically depict the bustle of the city via the use of the photo montage. Wunderwelds streets, on the other hand, are stripped of all excitement, but this is done in such a radical way as to intensify the sense that in reality these streets are different. Standing before their painted silence, the noise returns for a moment in the mind of the viewer. The charm of this magical realism lies in the aesthetic opposition to the turbulent reality. What remains uncertain is whether this emptiness is oppressive or beautiful.
Similarly mixed feelings are created by the Dresden street paintings of Wilhelm Lachnett, influenced by Georgiodekirico's metaphysical realism or the deserted streets and industrial paintings of Karl Gorsbach, who even managed to paint Berlin's avos racetrack without showing a single car. Other Neusachlicide artists, such as Reinhard Nageler or Wilhelm Heiser, painted dense scenes of traffic, but they looked strangely paused as if frozen solid. That is partly to do with the diktats of the concise outline, a central stylistic feature of Neusachlicide. The almost hyper-real precision, even of distant objects, makes every passerby, every dog, every automobile, stand out clearly. In this way, they produced extremely precise images, swarming with detail, through which you can walk in your imagination like a child through a picture book.
In contrast to Impressionism or Expressionism, where details blur in the flow of colour and the dominance of emotions and everything is united in the stream of the crowd, in the urban themes of Neusachlicide, each person remains self-contained, even when there are hundreds of them. Every individual is as identifiable as a pinned insect. There are no blurs of motion. The city squares, seen under a microscope, thus look at one's idyllic and alienating. In them, the individual is frozen and alone, captured with the finest of brushes and separated from the others, each on his own alone in the crowd. The Cologne painter Anton Riederschide simply left out the other participants in the traffic. His chosen subject was himself, always portrayed as a dark figure in a tight-fitting black coat and wearing a bowler hat.
Almost redundantly, he stands in front of the modern grid façades of large office buildings in empty, abandoned city streets. Riederschide painted fantasy and horror paintings at the same time, pursuing the idea that our loneliness increases along with the number of people surrounding us. In the spiritual poverty, they are so far away that the painter simply erases them from the cityscape. In 1914, in his poem Cities, the poet and dramatist Alfred Wofenstein describes loneliness in the crowd like this: Our walls are thinner skin, so that everyone joins in when I weep. Whispering forces its way across like bawling, and how mute in a remote cave, untouched and unlooked at, everyone stands far away and feels alone.
Flanners and car drivers. It is an unavoidable fact that melancholy is also part of urban happiness. City traffic is a tireless sequence of meetings and farewells. In the human funnel, a million faces, Kottorkalski wrote of passing encounters in the big city. Two strange eyes, a brief glance, the brows, pupils, eyelids. What was that? Perhaps your life's happiness? Gone. Vanished. Forever. In the 1920s, the city's stroll was a literary genre of its own, nurtured above all in the art section of the more serious newspapers. The 1920s saw an intense engagement with a theme of movement in cities.
Back then, authors such as Franz Hessel insisted on slowness. They saw themselves not as participants in traffic, but as its observer, as dissidents of the general hubbub and also as education lists. They effectively coached their readers in traffic, always maintaining the balance between the lonely observer and the pedestrian's immersion in the flow. Franz Hessel delivered the finest example of ambitious strolling in his 1929 book, Walking in Berlin, A Flannur in the Capital. The intelligent loafer had plenty of time. The son of a banker had inherited so much money that he was able to study Orientalism without any great urgency and Munich around the turn of the century, without finishing the course, preferring to write here and there and enjoying the extensive entourage of the wonderfully unconventional Fanny Greifensureventlau in the elegant Munich district of Schvabing.
Incidentally, the beautiful Countess died. We are still on the topic of traffic in 1918 from the results of a bicycle accident. In 1906, Hessel moved to Paris, where he stayed until shortly before the First World War. Post-war inflation wiped out Hessel's inheritance, so the polyglot Bon Vivre, whose first novel in 1913 was tellingly entitled The Junk Shop of Happiness, suddenly had to get to work. Get to work is meant literally here. The book Walking in Berlin begins with the author's description of himself as a troublemaker. He strolled through the streets so slowly, Hessel wrote, that he was constantly in the way of busier people. To those who rushed hastily by, he appeared as an outsider, even as someone shady.
In these parts, one has to must, otherwise one may not. Here, one does not go somewhere, but two somewhere. It is not easy for our kind. In fact, the 1929 Street Traffic Act permitted stopping only when pedestrians are not disturbed or obstructed by it. France Hessel didn't have to must. In his mind, he was still a gentleman of leisure. His wife, Helen, worked as a fashion journalist for the Frankfort-Artsaiton, and her income helped. In every respect, the two were a remarkable pair, and more than that. With France's best friend, the French author, Arie-Pierre-Rochet, they had a menager trois that lasted over thirteen years. They even kept a shared diary together.
In 1962, François Truffor filmed the story of their cohabitation in Jules-Gim, which would build a kind of spiritual bridge between the libitinism of the 1920s and that of the late 1960s. Hessel took up the profession of Flannur with the same enthusiasm with which he had followed the twisted path of his heart. He was not afraid of instructing his readers in the proper ways of strolling. The most important thing was not to have a fixed destination in mind when promenading, but rather to allow oneself to drift through the city. He said, Flannurring is a kind of reading of the street, in which human faces, stalls, shop windows, pavement cafes, tram tracks, cars, and trees become letters of the alphabet with equal status, which assemble into words, sentences and pages of a book constantly renewed. The city is text. That was a central image of newspaper arts pages in the 1920s.
Siegfried Karkauer, who had been Berlin correspondent of the Frankfort-Artsaitung since 1930, wrote a little city column with the title The View from the Window. From his apartment in Zibuchtarsa in Berlin, he looked westwards over a somewhat chaotic cityscape. The exhibition centre could be seen, a tangle of train tracks, allotments, and the radio tower, on which a sphere of light rotated at the time, pointing the way for aircraft to Templeauf Airport. The blinking light looked like a lighthouse. And when the storm wails, it flies over the high sea whose waves wash the field of train tracks.
This urban landscape had not been intentionally shaped by planners, but by random events and the needs of an increased volume of traffic on land and in the air. Karkauer, and it is painfully beautiful text with a sentence which, on closer inspection, is nonsensical in several ways at once, and which can still cast light, if not necessarily illuminate. Understanding of cities is tied up with the decipherment of their dreamily uttered images. One should not spend too much time reflecting on the sentence, but if one does, one might wonder, can images be uttered and dreamly at that? Can they be deciphered? And what might an understanding of cities be?
Hard to imagine finding such a sentence in a newspaper today, but special times require special measures. The excessive demand on logic in Karkauer's closing sentence corresponded to the excessive demand that cities made on the senses and on reason. To that extent, the sentence was extremely precise, and somewhat habit-forming. It is because of such wayward stylistic escapades that the melancholic flaners of the arts pages remain popular even today. Benjamin, Karkauer, and Hesse posthumously became the sweet poison of a generation of students of German.
At the peak of his fame in the 1980s, the figure of the flaner practically enjoyed cult status, but one other species of traffic pioneer in the 1920s lives out a shadow existence in the cultural memory, although one that has proved much more crucial for the problems of the contemporary world – motorcar drivers. Thinking or and singing cars. In the 1920s, the motorcar assumed a high status from which it still benefits in the present. That decade saw its potential to influence the social psyche unfolding, along with a problematic promise of individual freedom that makes it so difficult to bid it farewell.
At the beginning of the century, the motorcar was still the exclusive province of the wealthy, for businessmen, ministers, and senior officials. It was quite natural that a paid chauffeur should be sitting at the wheel. Passengers allowed themselves to be driven about, usually with the roof up. But soon, the self-drivers began to arrive. They had passed their driving tests and enjoyed the intoxication of speed, at least until a speed limit of 65 km an hour was imposed.
The playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht dreamed of owning a car, although he could also be scathing about the Weimar culture industry's credulous devotion to technology. God has returned in the form of an oil tank. He wrote in his poem 700 Intellectuals Pray to an Oil Tank. But he was equally happy to pen a hymn to the elegant automobiles of the Steyer Company. The fact that Steyer also manufactured weapons, including the Manlechia Studsen, a hunting rifle, only made Brecht's heart beat all the faster.
We come from a gun factory. Our little brother is the Manlechia Studsen. Our mother, though, a Steyerian ore mine. We have six cylinders and thirty horsepower. We cling to the bend like adhesive tape. Our engine is a thinking awe. We drive you so smoothly that you imagine you're in bed, that you imagine you're driving your car's shadow. Steyer was so touched that it gave the poet a four-cylinder vehicle as a fee for his advertising verse, and a second when Brecht immediately crashed the car into a tree.
But the accident had not happened out of sheer clumsiness, and, according to Brecht at least, it was only pure presence of mind that it hadn't been much worse. The business-minded Brecht was smart enough to report the accident, in which he sustained slide injuries, to the illustrated magazine Oohoo, and supply them with material for a story that was several pages long. According to this narrative, the poet had found himself driving straight towards another overtaking vehicle that was unable to re-enter its own lane in time. In order to avoid a collision, Brecht had needed to steer his car to the side.
Oohoo reported, Brecht's car was thus forced to dodge, and by pulling powerfully on the brake and immediately releasing it again, he managed to drive into the nearest available tree. He succeeded in hitting the tree with the middle of the radiator and thus stopping the car. The radiator was crushed, and the belching front side of the chassis bent around the tree, but it also held the car firmly in place. The accident resulted in insignificant injuries. The magazine illustrated the report with several impressive photographs. Staya was grateful for the extra advertising. After all, Brecht had done everything correctly. The use of the snub brake was exemplary, and the poet had demonstrated that even a serious accident with such a valuable car, with truly thinking awe, could have a happy outcome.
There was one prominent voice on the left who had already discovered the threat from the motor car that many people see in it today. In his 1929 novel, 10HP, the Soviet author Ilya Iranborg, also widely read in Germany, saw the car not as a source of all evil, that was capitalism, but as a symptom of it. For Iranborg, the motor car tears flesh apart, it blinds the eye, devours the lungs, strips reason away. The motor car laconically drives over pedestrians. It is only fulfilling its purpose. Its vocation is to eradicate human beings.
Storm of steel author Ernst Junga, still eager for the experience of battle, saw some form of compensation in traffic. He experienced the honking in commuter traffic as whistling, wailing notes in which an imperious threat of death finds direct expression. He saw the many victims of traffic as a kind of collateral damage of the modern age and of Neuys Achlichkeit. Saying, traffic has really developed into a kind of mollock, which, year in, year out, devours a quota of victims comparable only to that of war. These victims fall in a morally neutral zone, the way in which they are perceived is statistical in nature.
The number of deaths from traffic accidents in Germany was 5,867 in 1929, a high price to pay for the fact that the car connected city and country, beach and mountain, bringing the country closer together. Many people lost their lives in twisting villages that suddenly saw themselves having to cope with overland traffic for which they had not been built. New roads were needed and in 1926, planning began for the first autobahn's. One of these, the HaFraba between Hamburg, Frankfurt and Basel, did not make much progress, but the first cars only rode between Cologne and Bonn was inaugurated as Germany's first autobahn on the 6th of August 1932 by Conrad Aadnauer, mayor of Cologne from 1917 until 1933 and a resolute anti-Nazi in the ranks of the centre party.
The notion that Hitler had brought autobahn's to the Germans is pure propaganda. To lay claim to the idea, the Nazis later demoted the Cologne Bonn stretch to a mere country road. For the other stretches of autobahn, in most cases they used the already existing plans from the Weimar Republic. Even the idea of building autobahn's as a way of creating labour came from Conrad Aadnauer, in order to give work to as many unemployed people as possible he had forbidden the use of bulldozers.
The improvement in overland traffic made it easier to escape the city for a moment. Blissful hours in nature, hours of freedom, far from the bonds of the everyday, an awful advertisement promised in 1930. The car was a symbol of modernity and at the same time a means of escaping it. Twin aspects of its seductive force. People could drive into the countryside, to the beach and into the mountains with a picnic basket and a gramophone in the boot. Often the journey was the destination. And movement the chief purpose of the outing.
One incorrigible traffic hooligan was Ilkaman. The daughter of Tormus, the Nobel laureate, was a passionate devotee of speed. She loved hurtling through the villages and getting chickens between her wheels in such a way that they then reappeared unharmed in the rearview mirror. She gave readers of the illustrated magazine Tempor her recipe for driving away the blues, dashing out of the city and scaring the villages. It is only when you are roaring through the sullen rainy cow towns so that the puddles spray around the ears of the passersby and only sheer chance protects you against disaster on the bends that you start feeling better.
On the open country road the chickens, spirited creatures that they are, shambled towards you as you hurl along at 70. Now you can even ensure that they pass directly under the car unharmed by the wheels exactly as if the sun were shining. In the press she talks cachetishly about her many finds. It was only when she was driving her father about that Ilkaman had to watch her speed. The Nobel Prize winner owned two large automobiles, a hush and an open-topped Buick but couldn't drive himself. Instead he loved waving graciously from the back seat as the Buick glided through Munich.
In Berlin it was possible to indulge in an addiction to speed without endangering the lives of chickens. On the arvus you could really put your foot down. The first racetrack in Germany had been opened in 1921 as an automobile traffic and training road, automobile for chaos and eubungstrasse. You couldn't get very far on it, nine kilometers in a straight line and nine back again with two elevated bends in between. The private road was not connected to the public traffic network until 1940. Anyone who wanted to dash along the arvus amidst swarms of other cars dashing by like planetoids or gunshots as the Swiss author Jakob Schaffner exalted had to pay 10 marks. A three-month ticket cost a thousand marks, a sum that must have seen obscene to most Berliners.
Part of this price was down to the fact that it was the inflation king Huagushtinus whose investment had made the construction of the arvus possible in the first place. Schtinus' villa on Douglass Strasse to the west of Berlin where his daughter Cleonorre grew up was within hearing distance of the arvus. The roar of engines may have contributed to the fact that Cleonorre had a lifelong addiction to cars. When the arvus was opened she was 20. At 24 she won the All-Russian Test Run and a year later in 1926 the German Grand Prix on the arvus, a stone's throw from our house. A year later at the age of 26 she set off on a round-the-world trip by automobile much of it through regions that had never seen a car before.
As her family objected to the journey she had to seek sponsors. The Adler company gave her a three-speed 50 horsepower standard six which she called the little one. She had reclining seats put in for sleeping. She set off with 148 eggs as an emergency store, three pistols for self-defense and three evening dresses for diplomatic purposes, accompanied by the Swedish photographer Carl Axel Zudochtruum and a technical team in a lorry. Foreign Minister Strazemann had issued her a diplomatic passport and had oil and petrol stored at German embassies as a precautionary measure. The support team gave up in Moscow. Cleonorre Stennis and Zudochtruum continued on the journey alone over the frozen lake Baikal through the Gobi desert via Beijing to Japan.
Here they loaded the little one on a ship and made the crossing to Lima from where they travelled over the Andes. Back in Berlin after almost 47,000 kilometers Cleonorre Stennis married her Swedish companion. She had been required to persuade him several times not to interrupt the hellish journey and in the end he was hardened enough to marry her. They had drunk water from the radiator to keep from dying of thirst. They had escaped tribal princes and warlords by the skin of their teeth and they had nearly frozen to death on several occasions. Cleonorre Stennis was one of the incredible number of strong women of this decade who dared to travel out into unknown continents, into the air, into science and art.
And in spite of that sensational journey she was not even the most prominent in the circle of popular women drivers, some of them were real virtuosos at dealing with the media. Up and away women at the wheel. In the trend-setting glossy magazines cars and women were a magical combination that kept reappearing in different forms. It was THE sign of changing times. The new age was dashing onwards with a woman at the wheel. Eight cylinders controlled with no apparent effort and the gentleman racer had been overtaken once and for all.
There are countless front pages and advertisements in which beautiful women sat in beautiful cars often accompanied by a beautiful slender greyhound that looked as if it obeyed every word. Like their cars however, these women had to be able to present themselves well. They had to look elegant and majestic, or else athletic, boyish and unattached. Ire Kamann knew how to give outings in her beloved Ford a new twist and keep her temple readers engaged with spirited travel columns. She and her brother Klaus published a travel guide to the Riviera.
For the series What You Won't Find in Baedica, they proposed an early form of individual tourism, now recommending a grand hotel, now a small pension, often accompanied by tips for cheap parking. Soon however, the driving became much more important for Ire Kamann than the places she visited. Happiness came in the form of a journey, while the landscape became mere shadows and Europe merely a place to drive through, as she put it. On a 10,000 kilometre rally launched by the German automobile club from Munich through Switzerland via France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Yugoslavia, and Hungary, and back to Berlin, she zoomed 1200 kilometers over land every day, and in the short breaks, she even found time to dictate her racing reports to the temple editorial team. Once, she herself summed up this rather questionable way of experiencing space, Rome? Just a washing opportunity.
For women such as Ire Kamann, driving at speed was intoxicating. The automobile gave the sexes equal opportunities, it allowed the modern woman to leave her classical role in the dust. Small wonder that the liaison between women and cars almost assumed cult status. The self-portrait of Tamara de Wampitska in a green Bugatti was practically ubiquitous. The jet-setting painter of Russian Polish origins had painted the image for the cover of the July 1929 edition of the Women's Magazine, D'Darma. She sat grandly at the wheel, her hand gloved in soft leather, a scarf wrapped opulently around the neck of the Madonna of the motor car. While her eyes beneath her leather cap were narrowed to skeptical slits and her red lips in a frivolous moo. One long scarf was the undoing of an equally elegant woman.
In Nice, in September 1927, the dancer Isadora Duncan was throttled by her loose red silk scarf after it got caught in the spokes of the wheel of her sports car. Another reputation, inseparably identified with cars, is that of RØud Lansauf, one of the most glittering figures of Berlin's party and culture scene. Girl driver RØud, as she called herself, loved cars with all her heart. The niece of the publisher Zamoef Fischer and daughter of the opera singer Els El Unsof Levy was one of a kind in Berlin High Society. Even as a young girl, she hurled herself with insatiable curiosity into the cultural scene, drifting through its parties, gallery openings and premieres. She tried everything, modeling, dancing, acting, writing, dog-breeding, the sexes.
在1927年9月的尼斯,舞蹈家伊莎多拉·邓肯因为她松散的红色丝巾被卷入跑车车轮的辐条中而窒息。另一个与汽车不可分割的名声属于RØud Lansauf,她是柏林社交和文化界中最耀眼的人物之一。她自称"女司机 RØud",对汽车充满热爱。作为出版商Zamoef Fischer的侄女和歌剧歌手Els El Unsof Levy的女儿,她是柏林上流社会中的独特存在。从小她就以无尽的好奇心投身于文化圈,穿梭于派对、画廊开幕和首映礼。她尝试过许多事情:模特、舞蹈、表演、写作、养狗以及探索性别。
There was hardly anyone that she couldn't be which. RØud Lansauf was a real it-girl, and more than that. The painter Oscar Kukoszka broke into her boyfriend's apartment to paint her portrait. She played croquet with Thomas Mann and was disappointed at his stiff performance. When she'd read the thousand pages and more of the diaries of Haigarff Kessler, probably the busiest socialite of the decade, she noted proudly, of the people listed in the index, I knew 315, personally, of course. She even played a minor role in F.W. Mournaus, 1922 film Nosferatu. At the age of 18 RØud Lansauf moved out of the parental home and lived for a few years with Kyle Follmiller, 26 years her senior and no less illustrious.
Follmiller was truly multi-talented. He had already proved himself as an archaeologist, poet, dramatist, theatrical entrepreneur, racing driver and aeroplane engineer by the time Lansauf moved in with him. His play The Miracle was such an international success that he had made a fortune from it alone. Later he would work on the screenplay of Jules F. von Stenberg's Blue Angel, 1930, and secure for the main role. The fact that young RØud was living with Follmiller did not mean that she had abandoned her desire for experimentation. Outwardly it even appeared as if he subsidized her erotic escapades or at least she appeared even more in love with life by his side than she had before.
Follmiller确实是一位多才多艺的人。在Lansauf搬来和他住之前,他已经在考古学家、诗人、剧作家、剧场企业家、赛车手和飞机工程师等领域证明了自己的才华。他的剧作《奇迹》取得了国际上的巨大成功,仅凭此作他就赚取了一大笔财富。后来,他参与了1930年由Jules F. von Stenberg创作的电影《蓝天使》的剧本工作,并为主角一角确保了一位演员。而年轻的RØud与Follmiller同住并不意味着她放弃了对实验的渴望。表面上看,仿佛是他在资助她的情感冒险,或至少表明她在他身边时对生活的热爱比以前更加浓烈。
She lived an openly bisexual life. Like many women of that decade, she liked to dress in men's suits and ties and did everything she could think of to escape the narrow limits of her gender role. She had an intimate friendship with the wealthy Swiss industrialist's daughter, photographer and author Anna Marie Schwarzenbach, whose attractive masculine features also made her an icon of the 1920s, and who was also of course wild about cars, her own took her as far as Persia and Afghanistan. Carl Follmiller loved girls and so did RØud Lansauf.
In the Follmiller system, she had assumed the dubious role of constantly bringing new and younger women to this man in his mid-40s. The author Jan Berger writes, One must imagine the Follmiller house as a casting studio for some of the most important film and theatre productions of the Weimar Republic. In his memoirs, the director Giza von Sifra describes Lansauf's role for Follmiller in these terms. She always gathered young girls around her. She sorted them and those selected ended up in the bed of Follmiller, who passed them on to his friends after a time, like a used car. Whenever Follmiller and Lansauf turned up with two or three pretty girls for afternoon tea in the Aidenbar, people whispered to each other using car language. The Follmiller's are having a test drive.
Hari Graf Kessler spoke of Follmiller's Harim on Parisa Platz. There is one often quoted passage from his diaries in which he gives an account of a Follmiller party with a famous dancer and actress Josephine Baker. I drove to Follmiller's Harim on Parisa Platz and found there, apart from Reinhardt and Horschinsky, among half a dozen naked girls. Miss Baker also completely naked apart from a pink muslin apron and little Lansauf as a boy in a tuxedo. Baker danced with extreme grotesque artfulness and stylistic purity, like an Egyptian or archaic figure performing acrobatics without ever falling out of her style. The dancers of Solomon and Tutankhamman must have danced like that. The naked girls lay or danced around among the four or five tuxedo clad gentlemen and little Lansauf, who really looks like a handsome boy, danced modern jazz dancers to the gramophone with Baker.
Hari Graf Kessler 在Parisa广场谈到Follmiller的Harim时,有一段文字经常被引用。他在日记中描述了一场由著名舞者和演员约瑟芬·贝克出席的Follmiller聚会。我驱车来到Parisa广场的Follmiller的Harim,除了Reinhardt和Horschinsky,我还看到大约六个裸露的女孩。贝克小姐也一丝不挂,只系着一条粉色薄纱围裙,而小Lansauf穿着男孩的礼服。贝克的舞蹈极具夸张的艺术性和风格纯粹性,犹如埃及或古代的人物,不失风格地表演杂技。所罗门和图坦卡蒙时代的舞者们一定也是那样跳舞的。裸露的女孩们在四五位穿礼服的男士和小Lansauf周围躺下或起舞,而小Lansauf这个漂亮的男孩则伴随着留声机声,与贝克一起跳起现代爵士舞。
Between Reinhardt, Follmiller and me, all of whom were standing around, Baker and Lansauf lay in an embrace like a pair of young and beautiful lovers. Quite a scene, three men appraising a group of naked women and trying to imagine ways in which they could be used in the culture industry. Carl Follmiller wanted to write a ballet for Josephine Baker, a courtesan's tale, of course. Kessler wanted to contribute a mime based on images from the Song of Solomon with Baker in costume or non-costume, and little Lansauf as Solomon in a tuxedo. The Follmiller system demonstrates the complete ambivalence towards sexual liberation in the Vymer Republic. No one can rule out with any certainty the possibility that Follmiller Salon was as repellent in its way as the office of the film producer Harvey Weinstein.
However, Houdlansauf stood by Follmiller after she had split from him and became a promising author, and in 1930 she married the young and extremely handsome businessman, David York von Wadenborg. Even later on, after Follmiller's death in 1948, she took care of his literary estate. She doesn't seem to have felt exploited. Houdlansauf knew very well that she was living outside the rules. I don't refer back. I anticipate, she wrote, but she still felt like a typical representative of her generation, and even sometimes considered herself its voice. From 1927 onwards, she began to work as an author for Ulstein. The publishing house placed big hopes in her, and her provocatively cheeky fresh tone was intended to lift writing out of the stiff and torturous prose that had become commonplace among many Ulstein authors.
Things began brilliantly. With her first article, The Low HP Girl, she was introduced in the magazine Diderma as the coming thing. What was crucial was her visual appearance. She posed twice for the article with her white six-cylinder Adler convertible, a dazzlingly beautiful car with a light blue leather top. In one photograph, she sat at the wheel. In the second, she was sitting on the kickboard, her hair ruffled by the wind, a cigarette in her mouth, absolutely stroking her dog. Even down to the pied coat, whose pattern repeats the fur of the pretty animal, the picture is a perfect image of wealth, youth, beauty, and female independence.
Within the circle of car-driving women writers, Roudlansauf concentrated on the lifestyle aspects of the subject. Unlike Irekaman, she was less interested in speed than in what one looked like. But no leather trimmings. If you imagine having to repair breakdowns yourself, bring an overall with you and a leather blanket to put on the ground. She recommended to her women readers. She kept them constantly up to date with new tips on equipment. Opportunities for spending money were inexhaustible. Of course, you already have a practical cigarette lighter in your car. But wouldn't it also be nice to have a nice silver case on the dashboard of your car that spits out cigarettes when you press a button? Such a thing was a must-have.
Roudlansauf promoted and marketed wrote spontaneously and very youthfully in a skillful teenager style that was particularly striking in the context of the often fussy mode of her milieu. She didn't even balk at the idea of a love story in which a car could feel and suffer, and served as a faithful, pastel-coloured boyfriend to its owner. She reminded her girl drivers to give their sensitive cars grateful kisses on their shiny radiator noses before leaving them alone in the garage. The erotic charge of the relationship between woman and car became a fixed idea in the fashion conscious circles of the Republic.
In 1932 in the magazine Kvershnet, also published by Ulstein, Kyle Follmiller claimed, the telephone and the car are currently secondary sexual characteristics of the young girl. He reported from America that at student dancers, 2000 cars belonging to young girls stood outside the club houses or hotels. After the dance, the young people would regularly make their way to the cars for erotic purposes. Strict morals from Boston to San Francisco raise no objections to this. It's the universal fashion, and it's quite seemingly the car hides everything. At the end of the article, he asked himself and his readers, where would today's young girl be without her light blue dove-gray or white cabriole?
This article was written at a time of high unemployment following on from the economic boom. When even a tram journey was too expensive for millions of young women, the freedom embodied by Houtlanshof was light years away and yet quite close, proclaimed as it was from every newspaper kiosk. In the eyes of the unemployed, this kind of freedom must have looked like either an invention by the wealthy or simple mockery. When emancipation comes from above and is so closely related to wealth, at a moment of crisis, it cannot be perceived as anything but humiliating and insulting.
The majority of Germans went on foot sat crammed together on the commuter train or took the standing carriage in the Reich railway. In the famous 1927 silent film, Berlin Symphony of a Great City by Walter Roddmann, a swift filmic cross-section through 24 hours of urban life, traffic was defined not only by car tyres, but by train wheels and coupling rods, by tram lines and horses hooves, cartwheels and hand carts, but above all by shoes, people ran, dawdled, strutted, sauntered and marched. Berlin was above all still a city of pedestrians whose paths were constantly being crossed by the flow of vehicles. Like Franz Biebocov in Berlin Alexander Platz, many struggled to make their way through the city, anxious lest they lose the thread of their fragile life story in the tumult of an increasingly uncertain metropolis.
Marie-Louis Eflicer presented a less glamorous picture of women drivers in her novel Milgeis de Frida Geyer, Flower Saleswoman Frida Geyer, published in 1931. Frida Geyer is a travelling saleswoman in southern Germany. In her Opel-Laupe-Frosch tree frog, the little 4HP model, she drives around the country and tries to sell flour to wholesalers, flour that poor people always find overpriced. For Frida, a free-acting agent, a woman under stress, the laupe-frosch is not a boyfriend but a work tool and a reluctant one at that. The laupe-frosch makes a spectacle like a little green demon and rattles and shakes her bones to the marrow.
She knows every bend in the road by heart. She knows where the laupe-frosch makes an involuntary jump into the air. Today she's a bit late, she lets the frog have its leap, it looks ridiculous when she cranks the light vehicle to the brink of its peak performance. It wouldn't have occurred to Frida Geyer to write a hymn to traffic as the writer Martin Kessel had put it in 1925 in Far off Berlin. Bear cobblestones from you I draw triumph and victory, he wrote, and continued, now carousel forget all thought of danger.
Seven years later in Kessela's office novel Herbréches Fiasco, there is a wonderfully melancholy sketch of traffic in rainy Berlin, not a trace now of triumph and victory. Frau Perlevitz, an elderly unhappy secretary, unsuited to life's daily struggle, snuggled up into the falling damp and hurried home along Friedrich Schreiser. Behind her, Kessela wrote, loomed the rugged maseif of Friedrichstadt, a big, rocky, mists-wathed shadow above which mirrored in the ether an eternal dust trickled a millionfold reflection of the energy that is light and is repeatedly coaxed forth by machines and human hands.
The trams rang out, crowded, illuminated coffins. They were clearing out for Sunday, they were depopulating the office buildings and of the countless passengers, each one who had reached his house number, paused, gripped the handle and disappeared. For now, traffic had done its duty. They were home.