text:
Astral Travels with Jack London

By Benjamin Breen
November 22, 2016

On the centenary of Jack London's death, Benjamin Breen looks at the writer's last book to be published in his lifetime, The Star Rover — a strange tale about solitary confinement and interstellar reincarnation, which speaks to us of the dreams and struggles of the man himself.

Twenty times a day, a catamaran sets out from the Northern California town of Larkspur. The vessel traces a graceful arc southward toward the San Francisco Ferry building, passing outcroppings of red boulders, low hills of golden grass, and the occasional houseboat. Before long the skyline of San Francisco appears, pearly white and silver towers surmounting the permanent bank of fog that shrouds the Golden Gate. The tourists who throng at starboard to take in the view rarely notice that another landmark looms directly behind them. San Quentin.
The prison’s environs are disarmingly beautiful. The building itself, of course, is as stern as one would expect a maximum-security penitentiary to be — all stained concrete walls and grim, cathedral-like buttresses. But the landscape is enchanting. At night, with crickets humming in the hills and mist-shrouded stars glowing above San Francisco, the juxtaposition feels dreamlike, hallucinatory. It is here, in this prison amid paradise, that the action of Jack London’s The Star Rover plays out.
London’s sole foray into the realm of science fiction and fantasy is simultaneously a hard-bitten, minimalist monologue about life in solitary confinement and an exuberant tour of the universe. The book’s narrator, Darrell Standing, moves disarmingly from the agony of his confinement in a straitjacket to his travel amidst the stars equipped with a glass wand that allows him to access an infinity of past lives, including a fourth-century hermit, a shipwrecked seal hunter, a medieval swordsman, and a confidant of Pontius Pilate. It is a novel about sensory deprivation in a shared reality, and sensory overload in a private one.
This is a deeply eclectic book. It borrows liberally from the forebears of the fantasy genre: fairy stories, Norse legend, Greek myths. But it also manages to include feuding UC Berkeley scientists, “dope fiends”, Neolithic hunter-gatherers, kimchi, and a journalistic exposé of the modern prison system. The bizarre multiplicity is precisely the point. London’s narrative does many things, but it always seems to circle back to the question of how the worlds encompassed within a single consciousness can interfere with the shared reality of modern society. As we hurtle towards a near future of immersive virtual reality and unceasing digital connectedness, The Star Rover has much to tell us.
The novel’s evocation of confinement sprang from a painful first-hand experience. London grew up impoverished and fatherless, and he lived rough as a teenager. During the winter of 1894 he served thirty days in the Erie County Penitentiary in Buffalo, jailed for the crime of vagrancy at the age of eighteen. The grimness of this wintry prison stint stuck with London. “Man-handling was merely one of the very minor unprintable horrors of the Erie County Pen”, he wrote in his memoir The Road (1907):
I say “unprintable”; and in justice I must also say indescribable. They were unthinkable to me until I saw them, and I was no spring chicken in the ways of the world and the awful abysses of human degradation. It would take a deep plummet to reach bottom in the Erie County Pen, and I do but skim lightly and facetiously the surface of things as I there saw them.
London’s experiences of prison and riding the rails in the fallout of the Panic of 1893 radicalized him. He joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1896 and began giving fiery speeches in Oakland parks. By the time he began The Star Rover — which originally entered the world as a magazine serial in February 1914 — London drifted away from Socialist politics. Yet the narrative retains a vein of gritty realism that recalls the work of his friend Upton Sinclair. The central character Darrell Standing’s confinement in “the jacket” was inspired by London’s interviews with Ed Morrell, a former Old West outlaw who had suffered a brutal period of confinement in San Quentin. Amidst his star roving, Darrell Standing also finds time to reflect on the evils of the Philippine-American War: “It was laughable to behold Science prostituting all the might of its achievement and the wit of its inventors to the violent introducing of foreign substances into the bodies of black folk.”
London was wrapping up the writing of The Star Rover when the First World War began. Although he couldn’t have anticipated the looming cataclysm of August 1914, London’s personal life had been in a shambles since the previous summer. That August, his beloved country estate, Wolf House, had burnt to the ground under mysterious circumstances. In the same year, he penned Jack Barleycorn, an autobiographical novel about what London, a severe alcoholic, called “the clear white light of alcohol”. Olivia Laing, in her fabulous book The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, observes that alcoholic novelists often circle around their disease in their fiction, never quite acknowledging the extent of their own denial. London’s self-described “alcoholic memoir” manages, somehow, to dance around its central subject, never fully acknowledging the substance abuse that would kill him at age forty. “Read John Barleycorn and you will soon enough discover what ails him”, wrote one of London’s acquaintances. “The tragedy is that he does not even seem to know how far gone he is.”
Yet London, at some level, did know it. His writings in this period reveal a keenly intelligent man attempting to work through the metaphysics of his own addictions. We see this in John Barleycorn’s personification of alcohol intoxication as a dialogue with a nebulous force that London calls “the White Logic”. We see it in the same book’s references to “Hasheesh Land . . . the land of enormous extensions of time and space”, and in the odd detail of Darrell Standing using needles to escape his prison cell in The Star Rover (London had become an IV morphine user by this time). And we see it in the central motive force of The Star Rover, which is propelled not by drugs or drink but another form of altered consciousness — the hallucinations brought on by sensory deprivation.
The book, in short, centers on that famous concept of another drug-taking adventurer-writer, Arthur Rimbaud: “the systematic derangement of all the senses”.
It is tempting to speculate about the degree to which London also found inspiration in the various occult currents running through the bohemian circles of the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1910s. It was a time and place in which members of Aleister Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis might meet the first wave of American Buddhists, or a young Gertrude Stein cross paths with John Muir. The Star Rover certainly channels the cosmopolitanism of the Bay Area in this pre-War era. Standing’s astral projection borrows from the aesthetics of post-Victorian occultists, just as his astral travels reflect London’s fascination with the lands across the Pacific. In one passage, Standing tries to use his bizarrely detailed knowledge of kimchi (“the best kimchi is made by the women of Wosan”) to convince his fellow inmates that he has tapped into a previous life as a shipwrecked sailor in Korea “who through, various births and deaths, bequeathed his experiences to me, Darrell Standing.”
There is something here of the eighteen-year-old Jack London’s desire to be what he called “a brain merchant”. Reading as much as nineteen hours a day (by his own perhaps unreliable count), London studied for his entrance exams at UC Berkeley with an urgency that almost suggested an erasure of the self, a desire to mentally inhabit other lives through books. Standing goes a step further: with his astral projection, he becomes these other lives, and the reader can follow him.
This desire to gain access to worlds beyond the self carried over from London’s obsessive self-education to his uncontrollable drinking. As London put it in 1913, there are two type of alcoholics: the first are those who drink to numb consciousness, abandoning reality in favor of “pink elephants” (the first use of the term in print, it would appear). The second seek a drunken brain and not a drunken body — an escape into creativity rather than oblivion. London reckoned himself among the latter camp, and we might read The Star Rover as an extended exploration of London’s own attempts to harness sensory derangement to creative ends.
Darrell Standing also likens his hallucinatory visions of astral projection to what “men enjoy in drug dreams, and deliriums”. This, too, was a form of escape that London knew well. His most recent biographer, Alex Kershaw, describes London’s drug chest — filled with “strychnine, strontium sulphate, aconite, belladonna, morphine” and opium — as “the most important object in his life”.
Yet despite its themes of captivity, addiction, and murder, The Star Rover is also a celebration of the power of storytelling to overcome personal misery. Standing’s fantasies are an escape from reality, but, London seems to argue, a healthy escape. “Incessantly to remember”, narrates Standing, “means obsession, lunacy.  So the problem I faced in solitary, where incessant remembering strove for possession of me, was the problem of forgetting”.  To record everything, to forget nothing — Standing’s malady is familiar to us because it is ours as well. Perhaps the joyous and unrestrained creativity of The Star Rover suggests a solution.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 22, 2016

author: enjamin Breen


text:
Stuffed Ox, Dummy Tree, Artificial Rock
Deception in the Work of Richard and Cherry Kearton
By John Bevis
May 17, 2017

John Bevis explores the various feats of cunning and subterfuge undertaken by the Kearton brothers — among the very first professional wildlife photographers — in their pioneering attempts to get ever closer to their subjects.

Although to use deception in any action is detestable, nevertheless in waging war it is praiseworthy and brings fame: he who conquers the enemy by deception is praised as much as he who conquers them by force.—  Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy
To excel in deception is not a very laudable accomplishment, but the heinousness of the crime may, perhaps, be softened in the eyes of the moralist by a knowledge of the fact that in this case the duplicity employed has been as entirely harmless to the deceived as it has been profitable to the deceiver.— Richard Kearton, Wild Nature’s Ways
It might stretch credulity for Richard Kearton, a benign man in a benign profession, to be labelled “the Machiavelli of bird photography”. But the fact is that he and his brother, Cherry, adapted a number of the tactics of dell’arte della guerra in their search for ways of going undercover into “Birdland” to secure untainted images of wildlife at home. Between the years 1897 and 1903, their experiments included variations on such quasi-military techniques as the smoke screen, in which surprise through deception is achieved by camouflage; the feigned retreat, when a false sense of security leads the foe into ambush; the Trojan horse, famously gaining admittance to a restricted area under false pretences; and further ploys under the catch-all heading of misinformation.
Richard and Cherry Kearton were foremost among the small coterie of British nature photographers working before the end of the nineteenth century. They took the first ever photograph of a bird’s nest with eggs, in April 1892, and three years later (with British Birds’ Nests: How, Where and When to Find and Identify Them) published the first nature book illustrated throughout with photographs. But their next project — photographing the birds themselves — would be fraught with difficulties. Richard Kearton noted that birds were so disturbed by human presence, the “great eye” of the camera lens, and the click of the shutter, that it was nearly impossible to obtain natural studies.
Sound trauma was addressed with the aural smokescreen of the almost-silent window-blind shutter, while it was found that a false situational familiarity with any residual noise could be created by releasing the shutter repeatedly until the bird ignored it. The harder task of concealing the human form came with the commission of matching suits and caps of reversible material, brown one side and meadow green the other. This deployment of camouflage clothing was ahead of the curve: khaki uniform, recently introduced for troops stationed in British India, would not become standard issue on the home front until 1902. To hide their faces, the Keartons employed the first of many items from their wonderful props cupboard: visors chiselled out from ash-tree stubs, inscrutable as Noh masks.
The first device for concealing both camera and photographer was the “Artificial rubbish heap” (1897-1903). This was constructed from an old umbrella whose ribs were extended with bamboo and covered with linen; photographer and gear went underneath, while on top were piled whatever straw, leaves, sticks, or dirt were to hand. It could be positioned on the ground, on a rick, or better still on a wheeled farm cart, which could be set up some distance from the nest or perch and moved gradually closer before being put to use. The heap’s versatility made it one of the Keartons’ most successful interventions, with good photos obtained of wheatear and sandpiper in the Dales, and wren on the Surrey downs.
A number of experiments were made in 1902 with site-specific fixed hides, built in situ and utilising — like miniature Arts and Crafts houses — locally-sourced materials. They were deployed particularly on open and featureless terrain where there was little natural cover, and relied for their effect on camouflage by homogeneity. They had the appeal of the secret “dens” of boyhood literature, boltholes where thrilling adventures might be plotted.
The “Heather house” came first, conceived to solve the problem of photographing a merlin at its nest on Nateby Fell, Cumbria. Heather was thatched over a homemade hiding tent, a canvas skirt on a conical frame of iron rods, set up within twelve feet of the nest. The merlin, suspicions aroused, “flopped about in heather all round for about twenty minutes, then she went on to nest”, allowing Richard Kearton a chance to get his pictures.
Two hides were built of turf (not lawn turf but slabs of moorland peat). The first, the “Sod house”, was constructed as with building blocks: horseshoe-shaped walls were completed with a roof supported by “the dilapidated remains of a neighbouring sheep-fold gate”. Access was through a doorway on the side farthest from the nest, while the camera was set up inside a hole punched in the facing wall. The subject matter here was a golden plover’s nest above Swaledale, and the Keartons were persuaded that the hide could be built as close as five feet from the nest. Four plates were secured, at a cost of kneeling for two and a half hours “with water dripping steadily down the back of my neck from the roof sods”.
Similarly, a “Turf hovel” was built to photograph the Arctic skua with nest, eggs, and young on heather uplands in the Hebrides. They dug out a pit for the accommodation of Richard’s feet and legs, built a frame of tent irons above it, and covered the whole in “great strips of turf”. The following day the weather closed in, but despite the darkness, the waving of bent grass and heather, and the constant head movements of the bird, of the ten “more or less haphazard” exposures he made, a couple turned out “good beyond all expectation”.
On the Hebridean foreshore, Richard hit upon the idea of building a rough stone house to photograph oystercatchers at nest. Boulders were hefted “a great distance on my back” to shape walls to the “sod house” footprint, while driftwood made a makeshift roof and doorway. He got his shots at a cost of “three hours of cramped misery”, with a “bitter wind whistling through every chink in the dry walls”. Undaunted, he followed up “Oyster-catcher house” with a similar “Ringed plover villa”.
Among the useful tactics borrowed from warfare was the feigned retreat. The Keartons had learned that if the bird saw the photographer enter his hide and not emerge, she would remain alarmed. To deceive the bird into the placidity only exhibited in human absence, an assistant would accompany the photographer to the hide, “tuck him in” and ostentatiously walk away, taking with him the taint of humankind.
It was, however, with variations of the Trojan horse that the Keartons really made their mark. In 1898 came the “Artificial tree-trunk”, anticipating by nearly twenty years the observation trees, made of angle iron and camouflaged with bark, that were used by the British and French on the Western Front. The Kearton tree was a pantomime prop-like contraption whose wigwam frame of bamboo uprights was dressed with mesh and covered with fabric camouflaged with paint, moss, and lichen. The photographer stood to attention inside, pressed against his camera, whose tripod legs could be only partially spread. It may have lacked versatility, but when it came to photographing a bird perched six feet above ground level, in woodland, the dummy tree trunk was hard to beat.
The most outlandish — and, paradoxically, photogenic — of the mimetic hides was created for the Keartons in 1900 by society taxidermist Rowland Ward of Piccadilly. This was the “stuffed ox”, a hide realistically shaped over a padded frame, whose interior was just sufficiently capacious for both camera, mounted in the brisket and focussing through a hole in the hide, and photographer, bent into an excruciatingly uncomfortable posture. The ox was tried first on a skylark’s nest with young, and then beside a dew pond, where it “distinguished itself by completely deceiving every species of creature that came to drink”. The stuffed ox enjoyed a brilliant but brief working life, being retired damaged at the end of the 1900 season after being blown over with Cherry inside. ※※Indexed under…Concealmentin cow
Two further hides were commissioned from another taxidermist, Charles Thorpe of Croydon. The “Stuffed sheep”, intended to blend in on the fells of Cumbria, was a hide for the camera alone, operated remotely. Once the camera was positioned on a rock in front of the nest, the carapace of the sheep (which had been set up sitting down) was placed over it, the chest wool being tied back so that it would not wave in front of the lens. Richard Kearton tethered his hiding tent at a vantage point overlooking the nest, and operated the shutter release via a fifty-foot length of pneumatic tubing. A few satisfactory shots were made when the sheep was tested out in Potts Valley, although the remote control introduced an element of luck into the timing.
The following year Richard Kearton returned to Potts Valley with a lightweight “Artificial rock”, a flat-pack of four walls and a roof, large enough to accommodate photographer and camera, and painted limestone grey. It was left overnight mounted on an existing large boulder, and moved in the morning behind a crag close to a dipper’s nest. The dippers took no alarm and Richard was able to secure some good shots. For a nearby curlew’s nest, the rock was placed sixty yards from the nest and moved closer over the course of a week, until within sixteen feet of nest and eggs. The bird was so deceived that photographing her became a thing of “monotonous ease”, so Richard took to mewing like a cat to provoke the bird into different postures and behaviour.
When Cherry Kearton first visited East Africa in 1909, he was again confronted by the problem of bringing the camera within range of the subject—in this case, herds of mammals that would “bound away in terror when I walked within two hundred yards of them”. One possible solution crossed his mind: “instead of a dummy sheep, I thought I might have a dummy zebra”. Luckily, he shared his thoughts with some local hunters, who anticipated what might happen when the immovable object of a stuffed zebra was met by the irresistible force of lion, cheetah, or bullet. Kearton retired, perhaps to consult the small-print of his travel insurance, and the matter was quietly dropped.
Subsequent investigations persuaded the Keartons that mimetic or autochthonous structures were redundant, the imperative being to create something not that the bird would actively register as familiar, but that its reflexes could safely ignore. So in place of the portable rubbish heap and ox, a small tent, similar to what is used today, would suffice, while the fixed hides, the turf and stone houses, have their modern counterpart in the wooden chalets with viewing shutters familiar from nature reserves.
As a postscript, in the mid-1930s, Cherry Kearton bought some land in Firs Road, Kenley. The Tudoresque villa he built on the plot, “The Jungle”, was designed with long, low windows opening onto a varied garden habitat, so that Kearton could continue birdwatching from indoors. It was the last, and most opulent, of the site-specific Kearton bird hides. Sadly it lasted little longer than the others, being destroyed by a bomb during the Battle of Britain, a few weeks before Cherry Kearton’s death in September 1940.
But perhaps the most subliminal of the Keartons’ deceptions was the psychological manipulation of the audiences who read their books and attended their numerous lectures. By showcasing the effortful hides and by emphasising the robust and stubborn constitution needed to operate them, the Keartons were setting a marker on their own exclusive access to “real” nature. In this scenario, the audience became civilians and the Keartons a paramilitary commando unit operating behind the lines, their photographs and observations the hard-won spoils of war.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: John Bevis

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
Woodcuts and Witches

By Jon Crabb
May 4, 2017

Jon Crabb on the witch craze of early modern Europe, and how the concurrent rise of the mass-produced woodcut helped forge the archetype of the broom-riding crone — complete with cauldron and cats — so familiar today.

The publishing revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries witnessed an explosion of printed material, democratising information and pushing it into the hands and sight of more people than ever before. A large single sheet of cheap paper could be printed with a proclamation, adorned with a woodcut, and sent out among the masses. These broadsides were sold for a penny on street corners, pasted on ale house walls, and stuck up on market posts. In 1592, the playwright and stationer Henry Chettle described how ballads “infected London the eie of England”, then travelled through the country via ballad-mongers, who could “spred more pamphlets by the State forbidden than all the Booksellers in London”.1 There was a hunger (then as now) for tales of sex and scandal, and, for the first time, a network of illustrators, printers, and distributors were able to glut this desire. The Jacobean playwright Thomas Middleton referred to ballads as “fashions, fictions, felonies, fooleries”.2 Cheap print was the medium of the masses, and the crude woodcuts were the visual language of early modern England.
This revolution in publishing coincided with what has been termed “the European witch craze”: a moral panic and collective psychosis that spread through Europe and Scandinavia during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The seed of this hysteria was planted in 1484 when two Dominican Inquisitors appealed to Pope Innocent VIII for permission to launch a witch hunt, and he responded by issuing a papal bull authorising their efforts. Two years later they published their treatise, the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of the Witches), which, for the first time, elevated witchcraft to the crime of heresy and justified its extermination with papal authority. Leaning heavily on the supposed papal endorsement, the Malleus Maleficarum painted a terrifying picture of witchcraft and preached the absolute necessity of vanquishing this largely unrecognised evil.
Apparently, witches were everywhere. Torture was recommended for extracting confessions, the death penalty was revealed as the only remedy against sorcery, and burning at the stake was proposed as a suitable method of execution. With one fell swoop, the persecution of witches was begun and an entire methodology was established. The book was a bestseller and strongly influenced the obsession with witchcraft for two hundred years, spreading slowly through continental Europe and then the Scandinavian countries, which became particularly obsessed with the subject. In Britain, the witch craze hit later, but it was rewarded with numerous pamphlets and ballads devoted to salacious details of devilish mischief.
One of the earliest and most notorious British witchcraft pamphlets was published in 1579: A Rehearsall both Straung and True, of Hainous and Horrible Actes Committed by Elizabeth Stile, alias Rockingham, Mother Dutten, Mother Deuell, Mother Margaret, Fower Notorious Witches. Stile was a sixty-five-year-old widow and beggar accused of bewitching an innkeeper. The pamphlet describes her association with three other old women known as Mother Margaret, Mother Dutten, and Mother Devell, as well as a man named Father Rosimunde, who could transform himself “into the shape and likenesse of any beaste whatsoever he will”. Woodcuts show these old women and several animal familiars, which they reportedly fed on their own blood.
The folkloric image of the crone was established through these images and repeated in similar pamphlets over the next century. These witches were usually bitter old women who lived on their own and kept cats or other animals as pets. The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower, Daughters of Joan Flower neere Beuer Castle (1619) and A Most Certain, Strange and True Discovery of a Witch (1643) are particularly famous examples that reinforced this archetype. Latent sexism and fear of those who lived on the fringe of society doubtless motivated much of this persecution. The latter pamphlet manages to mix sexism with scorn by doubting that women are even capable of performing the same sorcery that certain men have achieved:
Many are in a belief, that this silly sex of women by no means attaine to that so vile and damned a practice of sorcery and Witch-craft, in regard of their illiteratenesse and want of learning, which many men have by great learning done, Adam by temptation toucht and tasted the deceiving apple, so some high learnd & read by the same temptation that deceived him hath bin so insnared to contract with the Divel; as for example, in the instancing a few, as English Bacon of Oxford, Vandermast of Holland, Bungay of Germany, Fostus of the same, Franciscus the English Monke of Bury, Doctor Slackleach and divers others which were too tedious to relate of, but how weake women should attain unto it many are incredible of the same, and many too are opposite in opinion against the same, that giving a possibility to their doubtings, that the malice, and inveterate malice of a woman entirely devoted to her revengefull wrath frequenting desolate and desart places, and giving way unto their wished temptation, may have converse with that world roaring lion.
In 1589, King James VI of Scotland sailed to Copenhagen to marry Princess Anne of Denmark. The return journey was troubled by bad weather, and during their voyage to Scotland terrible storms forced the ship to seek shelter in Norway. The voyage was finally completed safely, but all involved were suitably rattled. In a stunning series of events, Danish courtiers subsequently accused women of sabotaging the journey using magic, prompting witchcraft trials first in Denmark and later, when James decided to follow suit, in North Berwick, Scotland. Several Scottish nobles were implicated, and the seething jealousies and suspicions of two Royal houses bubbled into further accusations on both sides of the North Sea. King James grew paranoid that his life was in danger from witches, personally examined those on trial, and caused over a hundred people to be arrested. A 1591 pamphlet, Newes from Scotland, Declaring the Damnable Life of Doctor Fian, a Notable Sorcerer, who was Burned at Edenbrough in Januarie Last, 1591, chronicled the sensational trials and featured two illustrations with a number of interesting details.
The primary woodcut condenses several episodes from the story into a single image. The witches were accused of sending devils to stir up waves, and in the top left of the image, demons are seen swimming around James’ ship. In the top right, women are portrayed toiling around a cauldron, suggestive of sorcery, as they watch the fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Interestingly, this particular illustration was actually a stock image that appeared in other pamphlets divorced of any nefarious magical implications; woodcuts were often repurposed for different stories either on their own or incorporated into larger images. The Doctor Fian of the title was a local schoolmaster accused of leading the coven, and in this image he is portrayed as a clerk for the devil, who preaches from a pulpit. Fian suffered extreme torture, including having his feet crushed by an iron boot, before being burned alive at a stake. Newes from Scotland is one of the only surviving illustrations of Scottish witchcraft from this period but had lasting significance as an influence on “the Scottish play”, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, which includes several references to the North Berwick trials and saw its first performance during a visit by Queen Anne’s brother, the king of Denmark, in 1606.
This episode in King James’ life was a profound one and inspired a deep interest in sorcery and witchcraft, some of which he absorbed through his young Danish wife and the Scandinavian court, which had already witnessed considerable hysteria around the phenomenon of witches. The monarch’s interest in the dark arts even gave birth, in 1597, to his very own work on the dangers of black magic, Daemonologie, which included Newes from Scotland as an addendum. Six years later the Scottish and English crowns were unified for the first time, and James VI was declared King James I of England and Ireland. Although he grew more lenient and sceptical later in his reign, James took his interest in magic with him to the English courts and was so surprised by England’s permissive legislation on the subject that he had the law changed.
Death was now the penalty, even for a “good” witch. As a result, famous soothsayers and “cunning folk” were prosecuted by an increasingly suspicious and vengeful population. Matthew Hopkins, the notorious and self-styled “Witch-Finder Generall” behind the deaths of at least three hundred women, cited James’ Daemonologie as a primary influence on his own work. Arguably, a bad storm off the coast of Scotland was responsible for inspiring the deaths of hundreds of people and an entire paradigm shift in the perception of British “cunning folk”. An exact number of witches killed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is hard to arrive at, but, according to court records, there were about three thousand executions in Britain, most of them in Scotland. Across the whole of Europe the figure is likely to be in the tens of thousands and includes men as well as women. Although this number is shocking enough, the attempts by some neopagans to characterise the period as “The Burning Times” — a holocaust of several million women — appear to be a well-meaning but misguided exaggeration.
Some of the more significant cases of the period were immortalised in plays, novels, and longer books. And the woodcuts that illustrate these works have been largely responsible for the cultural archetype of the “witch” now so familiar to us: pointed hats, broomsticks, cauldrons, cats. The same woodcut would often be used multiple times in different sources, and with each new appearance, the trope repeated and solidified into a recognisable iconography. Eventually some of the best stories and images were collected into popular reference works, such as The Kingdom of Darkness: Or, the History of Dæmons, Specters, Witches, Apparitions, Possessions, Disturbances, and Other . . . Supernatural Delusions . . . and Malicious Impostures of the Devil . . . Collected from Authentick Records . . . With Pictures of Several Memorable Accidents, by R.B. (1688). Most of the really iconic images found on the internet today come from just one collection, The History of Witches and Wizards: Giving a True Account of All Their Tryals in England, Scotland, Sweedland, France, and New England . . . Collected . . . By W. P. (1720).
Here we find witches and demons dancing together, wax poppets baptised by the devil, spirits leaping from a circle of flames, and a feast at the witches’ sabbath. This is an energetic and dynamic portrayal of witchcraft, much more tantalising than old women with chips on their shoulders. Whether the authors intended it or not, they managed to make witchcraft seem rather exciting and attractive. The stories are easy, compelling reads and the images feature young men and women doing extraordinary things. There is also a clear undercurrent of eroticism running through both books. There are numerous mentions of carnal acts, lusty satyrs, undressings, drunken feasts, love spells, and devilish, handsome men appearing to innocent, young maids.
After the initial witchcraft pamphlets in the late sixteenth century, the publications became increasingly stylised in the seventeenth. As King James grew more and more sceptical about the reality of witches, his kingdom slowly grew more and more paranoid. It took decades for the hysteria to subside. While the early pamphlets were based on relatively sober court records, later pamphlets took more time to describe the accused’s terrible tortures, or the wondrous miracles they had performed. By the time popular histories of witchcraft were published, sensationalism ruled and the woodcuts became more striking. In a period racked with plague, civil war, and poverty, there must have been a certain sympathy for the devil.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Jon Crabb


text:
American Freedom
Sinclair Lewis and the Open Road
By Steven Michels
March 22, 2017

Some three decades before Kerouac and friends hit the road, Sinclair Lewis published Free Air, one of the very first novels about an automobile-powered road trip across the United States. Steven Michels looks at the particular vision of freedom espoused in the tale, one echoed throughout Lewis' oeuvre.

Sinclair Lewis is experiencing a renaissance of late — but not for a reason he would have liked. His 1935 novel, It Can’t Happen Here, depicts an authoritarian American president, whose rise and rhetoric very much resemble the current commander in chief.
Criticized at the time for making American fascism sound too European, Lewis’ prescience is remarkable. Eschewing the conservative fear of moral and cultural relativism, the libertarian fear of a regulatory state, and the progressive fear of economic elites and corporations, Lewis follows Plato in pointing to democracy itself as the cause for the slide to tyranny. It Can’t Happen Here, like The Republic, shows how someone elected to satisfy the severe passions of the mass can quickly run afoul of legal norms and institutions.
Lewis’ most affirmative vision of what he means by freedom is found in his novel Free Air, which was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in the spring of 1919, the year before Main Street and Babbitt made him a household name. Free Air is the story of two young people, Milt and Claire. Milt is a small-town mechanic and garage owner, and Claire is from Long Island and in the middle of a coast-to-coast trip to Seattle with her father. Like many Northeasterners, Claire believes that the rest of the country is filled with folks who are good but simple. Milt knows better. He had been plotting an escape from its dreary doldrums, but is enthralled with Claire when she comes through town, and he ends up following her and her father on their journey west. Claire quickly falls for the heartiness of the outdoors, even though she sees Milt more like a brother than a romantic partner. “There is an America!” Claire cheers by her tent, after she and Milt forgo her usual hotel. “I’m glad I’ve found it!”
Once they get to their destination, however, they discover that everyone is obsessed with “the View” and ranks houses accordingly. What’s worse is that everyone builds and buys from the assumption that houses ought to resemble the East Coast as much as possible. Milt and Claire were looking for something unique and interesting, but instead find a stale sameness and imitation. The book ends with the couple heading back on an open-ended road trip. It might be, Lewis suggests, the only place where they are unburdened by society and its conventions enough to be together.
Free Air is not kind to the petty and conniving rural dwellers, but Lewis’ most devastating take on small-town life appears in Main Street. Lewis, a product of Sauk Centre, Minnesota, rails against the idea that these remote burgs are the source of all that is good. Rather, they infect their residents with “the village virus”, symptomized by a firm ignorance, self-satisfaction, and general intolerance of anyone who doesn’t look or think like they do. Will Kennicott loves weekend driving, but he never gets too far out of town. All the roads he takes lead him back to Gopher Prairie.
That’s not to say that Lewis touts cities as unqualifiedly good. What is gained by their cosmopolitan sensibility, culture, and good food is lost in a lack of intimacy and familiarity. There is a reason Claire and her exhausted father had left the East Coast. It’s easy and hard in different ways. “We need to know men like that in this pink-frosting playing at living we have in the cities”, she says to an aristocratic suitor, in defense of Milt’s working-class father. The Innocents, the novel Lewis wrote before Free Air, follows the long-married Applebys as they leave New York City to open a tea room in the quiet country. It’s a rare soul that can reside in a city and not be corrupted by it.
This is not just about travel; for Lewis, it is about positive freedom and control. He never presents train travel as especially desirable, constrained as it is to tracks, and his early love of planes is directed at those who can fly them. Americans are rightful captains and pilots, not passengers or spectators. He would have agreed with Thomas Wolfe, who, in You Can’t Go Home Again, posited: “Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America — that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement.” It is only when Wolfe’s protagonist George Webber arrives at a destination, that he feels a sense of homelessness. The expansive country and its prairie makes motion the most natural and comfortable condition.
Business travel provides both an opportunity and a threat. On the one hand, people who travel for work go through small towns and bring with them information and a perspective about the world outside. Milt is much improved by his time with them. Yet as “missionaries of business”, theirs is a hollow gospel. Business also provides opportunities for independence. Una Golden, Lewis’ protagonist in The Job, moves from a small town in Pennsylvania to New York and uses her business acumen to make a decent life for herself, which for a woman at the time was no small feat. Yet George F. Babbitt and his clique travel to cheat on their wives and expand their bourgeois lifestyle.
Lewis loves America for its individualist philosophy and its pioneer spirit. For him, progress is more about exploring than putting down roots and putting up buildings. Growth is a matter of psychology, not economics. The eponymous anti-hero of Our Mr. Wrenn has to go off to Europe to gain some perspective on his workaday routine. “Adventure, like fear of adventure, consisted in going one step at a time, keeping at it, forming the habit . . .” Lewis instructs. He operates from a grand and romantic vision of what our expansive territory has made possible, and he worries that we have squandered too much of our good fortune.
Lewis lived his nomadic philosophy — moving from Minnesota to New Haven for school, through New York City, D.C., and with stints in Europe, never in one location for very long and often returning to the same place. “It’s always easier to be a bold adventurer in some town other than the one in which you are”, Lewis writes in The Innocents. His perception of and even his fondness for his native land grew during the time he lived in Europe. “No American, if he can help it, dies in his birthplace”, he wrote. Of course, that did not prevent him from being buried in his hometown.
Among Lewis’ gifts are his willingness to probe the essential tension at the heart of American moral and social life. It’s a land of boundless opportunity and fierce competition; it’s also a land of individualism that too easily bends toward conformity. Who else could have said: “Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every other country”? Lewis understands both sides of American exceptionalism. How much better would the country be if it had more of that kind of patriotism.
In some respects, Lewis’ extreme form of freedom could be said to resemble what you find in Rousseau’s “state of nature”, where individuals are untethered by property or people. But Lewis never advocated solitude and he was too much a fan of progress. Two of his early books, Hike and the Aeroplane and The Trail of the Hawk, take the new technology of aviation as their themes. Lewis saw air travel as a modern form of daring, and he held out great hope for what it could do for the American psyche.
There are, however, some interesting parallels between Lewis and the road’s other great prophet, Jack Kerouac. Lewis would certainly approve of Kerouac’s discipline and stream-of-consciousness method. Kerouac is said to have written On the Road in three weeks on a 1200-foot scroll of teletype paper. Lewis, after doing his research, could write 3000-5000 words a day.
For Lewis, however, writing was more about self-improvement than self-expression. He wanted a kind of noble and pioneering freedom and would judge other modes accordingly. He would see Kerouac as a hedonist. Nor did Lewis tout the virtues of alcohol or drugs. He reflects on “the torture of being bored by the two-frequent presence of his own self”, in Cass Timberlane, one of Lewis’ more mature characters. It was the reason Lewis drank, even though he recognized it as a temporary cure. He was, by many accounts, a problem drinker. Self-doubt is a prerequisite for improvement, but it too has its risks. Sometimes the greatest obstacles to freedom are not other people, but ourselves.
Most importantly, Lewis’ moralism was utterly conventional. Although one of the more prominent subtexts of his novels is the extent to which moralists are all hypocrites, he is equally bothered by anyone who operates without a compass of any kind. For instance, there is a rawness and physicality in Kerouac that Lewis would likely have found off-putting. Kerouac’s sex scenes are tame by today’s standards, but they were risqué enough at the time to have been edited by his publisher. Lewis’ sex scenes are ridiculous. Sometimes it’s not even clear what has happened — what might be called coitus obscurus.
Lewis’ greatest gifts as a novelist were his abilities of perception and mimicry. For the first part of his life, Lewis wanted to be in theater and would regularly delight others with his character portraits and impressions. As a political writer, his greatest asset was his ability to present what he observed without the filter of his own ideology. He was not an activist and not terribly political. It didn’t exactly make him a great citizen, but it made a superior novelist. He had a reporter’s sensibilities, which is why he made a newspaper man, Doremus Jessup, the protagonist of It Can’t Happen Here, his most political novel.
It’s not a stretch to say that he is among the best writers on democratic freedom. More than anyone, Lewis understands its aims and its limitations for both individuals and the country. For him, freedom is playful but serious, directionless but purposeful, and essential to knowing true happiness. Lewis sees that kind of freedom as America’s greatest virtue and best export. It would be tragic if we were to somehow lose it.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Steven Michels


text:
Master of Disaster, Ignatius Donnelly

By Carl Abbott
September 27, 2017

The destruction of Atlantis, cataclysmic comets, and a Manhattan tower made entirely from concrete and corpse — Carl Abbott on the life and work of a Minnesotan writer, and failed politician, with a mind primed for catastrophe.

The magnificent civilization of Atlantis shattered and plunged beneath the sea in February 1882. Or, to be more precise, the eccentric American Ignatius Donnelly published Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, the first book of a trio that would highlight a series of imaginary catastrophes. The book — a rehash of Atlantis speculation supported with flood myths from around the globe — was an instant success and has continued to draw readers over the decades. Newspaper reviews were laudatory: Harper and Brothers issued seven printings in the first year, and W. E. Gladstone took time out from pondering the Irish Question to write Donnelly a four-page fan letter.
It was easy to imagine the worst in 1882. President James Garfield had been assassinated only months earlier — the second president shot to death in sixteen years. The economy was dropping into a new recession even as it struggled to emerge from the dark years of the 1870s. Farmers in Donnelly’s state of Minnesota were especially hard hit. In September, thirty thousand New York workers marched in the nation’s first Labor Day parade, remembering the violent railroad strike of five years earlier.
Atlantis might have seemed to offer relief from the turmoil. Its densely packed pages of pseudoscience and mythology recounted the supposed golden age of the lost continent and world-spanning civilization first mentioned by Plato. But the subtext was the fragility of a golden age. When Atlantis sank beneath the waves in a global cataclysm, a powerful and nearly perfect society perished. For Donnelly, Atlantis was a model and mirror for the United States, where urbanization, industrialization, and the accumulation of vast wealth were a social deluge destroying the nation’s own golden age of the agrarian frontier.
It was personal. That mythicized American frontier had promised much to Donnelly and delivered less. He began as an enthusiast who tried to make it as a farmer, land developer, and politician in a nation that seemed to offer unlimited opportunity but was riven by social and economic conflicts. He was also a prickly character. He started out as a lawyer in Philadelphia, but quarrels with clients and family propelled him to Minnesota in 1858, just as it was being admitted as a state. He plunged into land speculation and politics. Nininger City, an undeveloped townsite seventeen miles from St Paul needed only his promotional talents to become a major river port and make Donnelly a rich man, or so he hoped. Alas, few residents came. Readers of Charles Dickens might think of Martin Chuzzlewit’s ill-fated visit to Eden, another Mississippi Valley “city” that never matched its press notices.
Undeterred, Donnelly got in with the new Republican Party and was elected Lieutenant Governor of Minnesota at age twenty-eight: he then served as US Congressman for three terms from 1863–68. Not a man to hold his tongue, however, he split with Republicans because they were becoming conservative, returned to his lonely mansion at Nininger, ran an anti-monopoly newspaper, and tried out a series of third parties and splinter factions, which failed to propel him to the offices he thought he deserved.
Twenty years of personal frustration turned his thoughts toward catastrophe. Reporting on the Dakota War of 1862, in which Sioux tribes struck back at encroaching settlers in western Minnesota, he had seemed to revel in the horrors of war. For a St Paul newspaper he described refugees from the town of New Ulm: “There were mothers there who wept over children slaughtered before their eyes, strong men . . . who had escaped into the grass with the death shrieks of parents, brothers, and sisters, ringing in their ears.”
Those death shrieks were just the start for a writer who came to specialize in cataclysms that could rend entire cities, ravage entire civilizations, or destroy entire continents. As his ambitions and plans repeatedly fell short — his agrarian golden age failed to materialize — he took up his pen to explore increasingly extreme visions of apocalypse. First came “factual” accounts of two very different prehistoric disasters — Atlantis (1882), followed by Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel (1883) — and then, seven years later, Caesar’s Column: A Story of the Twentieth Century (1890), a futuristic novel that major publishers rejected as dangerously revolutionary.
The description of disaster in Atlantis was relatively low-keyed. Donnelly did not bother to recreate the catastrophe in his own words because he could cite deluge myths and legends from all over the world.
An event, which in a few hours destroyed, amid horrible convulsions, an entire country, with all its vast population — that population the ancestors of the great races of both continents, and they themselves the custodians of the civilization of their age — could not fail to impress with terrible force the minds of men, and to project its gloomy shadow over all human history. And hence, whether we turn to the Hebrews, the Aryans, the Phœnicians, the Greeks, the Cushites, or the inhabitants of America, we find everywhere traditions of the Deluge; and we shall see that all these traditions point unmistakably to the destruction of Atlantis.
In Ragnarok Donnelly went extraterrestrial. The book shows a cataclysmic mind at work, with its core assumption that change comes via revolution, upheaval, and calamity. In Atlantis he had riffed on a well-known story. Now he invented his very own cataclysm. Louis Agassiz, Charles Lyell, and other geologists had been replacing a catastrophe-driven history of Earth with gradual processes, but Ignatius Donnelly was having none of that. Churning out four-hundred-fifty pages in seven weeks (rewriting was not his thing), he described a supposed cosmic disaster in which a comet grazed Earth, showering it with “the Drift”, his name for the layer of sand, gravel, and soil that lies over our planet’s bedrock.
Atlantis had been a financial success, throwing off enough income to encourage more writing. Ragnarok was a different story. It started off well, but sales crashed after a few weeks and its author grew frustrated with New York’s literary and scientific establishments (his publisher failed to push the second book; scientists ignored or ridiculed the cometary catastrophe). E. L. Youmans, the editor of Popular Science Monthly and the nation’s most influential science journalist, called Ragnarok “absurd” (although it may have influenced the similarly crackpot thesis of Immanuel Velikovsky in Worlds in Collision in 1950). It didn’t help that this man of the prairies not only found the New York literary establishment unhelpful but thought New York itself an unpleasant place, calling out its “endless roar and hurry” and “seething whirlpool of struggling humanity”.
Donnelly tried to fight back, damning the arbiters of American science as pedantic schoolmasters who parroted the orthodoxy of European experts rather than look to new creative ideas. “Neither will an American Scientist accept any American thought until it has the brand of foreign approval”, he lamented in his diary. A third book that claimed to find cryptograms by Francis Bacon hidden within Shakespeare’s Henry IV met another chilly reception (“mountebank” was one reviewer’s judgment on the author). “My book is a failure, and my political prospects are dark”, he grieved in July 1888. A few months later he let his manic side loose: he ran for governor of Minnesota but dropped out part way through the campaign, lost an election to the state legislature that was supposed to be a sure thing, and put his name forth as a sadly hopeless candidate for US Senate.
The day after his senatorial bid failed, Donnelly began work on his second bestseller. He had ended Ragnarok with a tacked-on assault on the evils of capitalism and its tacit belief that “heaven is only a larger Wall Street, where the millionaires occupy the front benches”. Caesar’s Column, which appeared in April 1890 from an obscure Chicago publisher after New York houses wouldn’t touch it, took the ills of capitalism head-on. It sold an impressive sixty thousand copies in nine months, gained three English editions, and was translated into German, Swedish, and Norwegian.
Caesar’s Column imagined a dystopian United States of 1980 plunged into chaos by the class divisions that so deeply worried contemporary Americans and Europeans. The Haymarket bombing in Chicago in 1886 was fresh in mind when Donnelly sat down to write. So was the upheaval of the Paris Commune, which had already inspired reformer Charles Loring Brace to warn about The Dangerous Classes of New York (1872): “Let the law but lift its hand from them for a season, or let the civilizing influences of American life fail to reach them, and if the opportunity offered, we should see an explosion from this class which might leave this city in ashes and blood.”
Donnelly turned Brace’s fears into fiction. Caesar’s Column was proto–science fiction rather than pseudoscience. It follows the standard utopian/dystopian trope of a visitor from afar who records his experiences and observations. In this case the visitor is Gabriel Weltstein, a wool merchant from the peaceful white society of Uganda who travels to New York by airship and writes a series of letters home. He finds a technologically advanced city with subways under glass, televised newspapers, and unlimited electricity tapped from the aurora borealis. He also finds a city deeply riven by class divides. Through accident, he falls under the guidance of Max Pelton, one of the members of the Brotherhood of Destruction, who shows him the immense inequality engendered by the oligarchy that rules the United States.
Jack London, writing a few years later and with a grasp of socialist theory, would posit a sophisticated resistance movement in The Iron Heel (1908), with a clear ideology and roots in organized labor — even if it falls short of its goals. Donnelly’s revolutionaries are a degraded lumpenproletariat, visceral rather than intellectual, a mob bent on destruction. Caesar Lomellini, the leader of the Brotherhood, is half Italian and half African American, telling ethnic markers that connoted animal instinct rather than reason in contemporary racist thought. His revolution destroys the oligarchs but sheds rivers of blood and plunges the city of ten million into fiery chaos. Faced with the problem of disposing of tens of thousands of bodies, Lomellini has an inspiration:
“Burn em up,” said Caesar.
“We can’t,” said the man; “we would have to burn up the city to destroy them in that way; there are too many of them; and it would be an immense task to bury them.”
“Heap em all up in one big pile,” said Caesar.
“That wouldn’t do — the smell they would make in decaying would be unbearable, to say nothing of the sickness they would create.”
Caesar was standing unsteadily, looking at us with lackluster eyes. Suddenly an idea seemed to dawn in his monstrous head — an idea as monstrous and uncouth as the head itself. His eyes lighted up.
“I have it!” he shouted. “By G-d, I have it! Make a pyramid of them, and pour cement over them, and let it stand forever as a monument of this day’s glorious work! Hoorrah!”
As New York plunges into the fires of revolutionary destruction, Weltstein escapes in an airship to the highlands of Uganda, where white men and women have another opportunity to build a simpler and more equitable society — Donnelly’s effort to reimagine the hopeful white settlement of early Minnesota.
Caesar’s Column was the high point of Donnelly’s career. He continued to write for another decade, turning to parables and political tracts that found few readers. He ran for vice president in 1900 on a ticket splintered from the waning Populist Party — getting one vote out of every three hundred.
With his facile pen and taste for the extreme, a reincarnated Ignatius Donnelly would flourish today as an internet blogger. He would be quick to spin calamities into conspiracies and tweet dire predictions about national collapse and global chaos. Perhaps fortunately for us, he remains stuck in the nineteenth century, a man who had to make do with pen, paper, and his own imagination of disaster.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 27, 2017

author: Carl Abbott


text:
“Let us Calculate!”
Leibniz, Llull, and the Computational Imagination
By Jonathan Gray
November 10, 2016

Three hundred years after the death of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and seven hundred years after the death of Ramon Llull, Jonathan Gray looks at how their early visions of computation and the “combinatorial art” speak to our own age of data, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.

Each epoch dreams the one to follow”, wrote the historian Jules Michelet. The passage was later used by the philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin in relation to his unfinished magnum opus, The Arcades Project, which explores the genesis of life under late capitalism through a forensic examination of the “dreamworlds” of nineteenth-century Paris.1 In tracing the emergence of the guiding ideals and visions of our own digital age, we may cast our eyes back a little earlier still: to the dreams of seventeenth-century polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
There was a resurgence of interest in Leibniz’s role in the history of computation after workmen fixing a leaking roof discovered a mysterious machine discarded in the corner of an attic at the University of Göttingen in 1879. With its cylinders of polished brass and oaken handles, the artefact was identified as one of a number of early mechanical calculating devices that Leibniz invented in the late seventeenth century.
Supported by a network of professors, preachers, and friends — and developed with the technical assistance of a series of itinerant and precariously employed clockmakers, mechanics, artisans, and even a butler — Leibniz’s instrument aspired to provide less function than even the most basic of today’s calculators. Through an intricate system of different sized wheels, the hand-crank operated device modestly expanded the repertoire of possible operations to include multiplication and division as well as addition and subtraction.2
Three centuries before Douglas Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos” received a standing ovation in 1968, Leibniz’s machine faltered through live demonstrations in London and Paris.3 Costing a small fortune to construct, it suffered from a series of financial setbacks and technical issues. The Royal Society invited Leibniz to come back once it was fully operational. There is even speculation that — despite Leibniz’s rhetoric spanning an impressive volume of letters and publications — the machine never actually worked as intended.4
Nevertheless, the instrument exercised a powerful grip on the imagination of later technicians. Leibniz’s machine became part of textbooks and industry narratives about the development of computation. It was retrospectively integrated into the way that practitioners envisaged the history of their work.  IBM acquired a functioning replica for their “antiques attic” collection. Scientist and inventor Stephen Wolfram credits Leibniz with anticipating contemporary projects by “imagining a whole architecture for how knowledge would . . . be made computational”.5 Norbert Wiener calls him the “patron saint” of cybernetics.6 Another recent writer describes him as the “godfather of the modern algorithm”.7
While Leibniz made groundbreaking contributions towards the modern binary number system as well as integral and differential calculus,8 his role in the history of computing amounts to more than the sum of his scientific and technological accomplishments. He also advanced what we might consider a kind of “computational imaginary” — reflecting on the analytical and generative possibilities of rendering the world computable.
Leibniz’s interest in this area can be traced back to his 1666 Dissertatio De Arte Combinatoria — an extended version of his doctoral dissertation in which he explores what was known as the “art of combinations” (or “combinatorial art”), a method which would enable its practitioners to generate novel ideas and inventions, as well as to analyse and decompose complex and difficult ideas into more simple elements. Describing it as the “mother of all inventions” which would lead to “the discovery of all things”, he sought to demonstrate the widespread applicability of this art to advance human endeavour in areas as diverse as law and logic, music and medicine, physics and politics.
Leibniz’s broader vision of the power of logical calculation was inspired by many thinkers — from the logical works of Aristotle and Ramus to Thomas Hobbes’ proposal to equate reasoning with computation. But Leibniz’s curiosity around the art of combinations per se was sparked by a group called the “Herborn Encyclopaedists” through whom he became acquainted with the works of Ramon Llull, a Majorcan philosopher, logician, and mystical thinker who is thought to have died seven centuries ago, in 1316.9 Llull’s Ars magna (or “ultimate general art”) from 1308 outlines a form of analysis and argumentation based on working with different permutations of a small number of fundamental attributes.
Llull sought to create a universal tool for helping to convert people to the Christian faith through logical argumentation. He proposed eighteen fundamental general principles (“Goodness, Greatness, Eternity, Power, Wisdom, Will, Virtue, Truth, Glory, Difference, Concordance, Contrariety, Beginning, Middle, End, Majority, Equality, and Minority”), accompanied by a set of definitions, rules, and figures in order to guide the process of argumentation, which is organised around different permutations of the principles. The art was to be used to generate and address questions such as “Is eternal goodness concordant?”, “What does the difference of eternal concordance consist of?”, or “Can goodness be great without concordance?”.
Llull held that this art could be used to “banish all erroneous opinions” and to arrive at “true intellectual certitude removed from any doubt”. He drew in turn on the medieval Arabic zairja, an algorithmic process of “letter magic” for calculating truth on the basis of a finite number of elements. Its practitioners would give advice or make predictions on the basis of interpretations of strings of letters resulting from a calculation.10 Llull’s experimentation channelled this procedural conception of reasoning, and was drawn upon by the intellectual milieu in which Leibniz developed his early ideas.
While critical towards the details of Llull’s proposed categories and procedures, Leibniz was taken with his overarching vision of the combinatorial art. He drew two key aspirations from Llull’s work: the idea of fundamental conceptual elements, and the idea of a method through which to combine and calculate with them. The former would enable us to reformulate more complex ideas in terms of simpler ones (for “everything which exists or which can be thought”, Leibniz wrote, “must be compounded of parts”).11 The latter would enable us to reason with these elements precisely and without error, as well as generate new insights and ideas.
Just as all words in a language could be represented by the comparatively small number of letters in an alphabet, so the whole world of nature and thought could be considered in terms of a number of fundamental elements — an “alphabet of human thought”. By reformulating arguments and ideas in terms of a characteristica universalis, or universal language, all could be rendered computable. The combinatorial art would not only facilitate such analysis, but would also provide means to compose new ideas, entities, inventions, and worlds.
Leibniz spared no modesty in promoting the art and the various initiatives associated with it for which he hoped to raise funds from prospective patrons. He presented his project as being the world’s most powerful instrument, an end to all argument, one of humanity’s most wonderful inventions (fulfilling a timeless dream shared by everyone from the Pythagoreans to the Cartesians); the ultimate source of answers to some of the world’s most complex and difficult theological, moral, legal, or scientific questions; and a foolproof means to converting people to Christianity and propagating the faith, amongst other things.
In support of his project he argued that “no man who is not a prophet or a prince can ever undertake anything of greater good to mankind or more fitting for the divine glory”, and that “nothing could be proposed that would be more important for the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith”.12 In a 1679 letter to one of his patrons, Johann Friedrich, he described his project of the universal language as “the great instrument of reason, which will carry the forces of the mind further than the microscope has carried those of sight”. Later he wrote:
The only way to rectify our reasonings is to make them as tangible as those of the Mathematicians, so that we can find our error at a glance, and when there are disputes among persons, we can simply say: Let us calculate, without further ado, to see who is right.13
Ultimately he hoped that a perspicuous thought language of “pure” concepts, combined with formalised processes and methods akin to those used in mathematics, would lead to the mechanisation and automation of reason itself. By means of new artificial languages and methods, our ordinary and imperfect ways of reasoning with words and ideas would give way to a formal, symbolic, rule-governed science — conceived of as a computational process. Disputes, conflict, and grievances arising from ill-formed opinions, emotional hunches, biases, prejudices, and misunderstandings would give way to consensus, peace, and progress.
Jonathan Swift’s satirical classic Gulliver’s Travels (1726) parodied the mechanical conception of invention advanced by Llull and Leibniz. In the fictional city of Lagado, the protagonist encounters a device known as “the engine”, which is intended by its inventor to enable anyone to “write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius or study”:
He then led me to the frame, about the sides, whereof all his pupils stood in ranks.  It was twenty feet square, placed in the middle of the room.  The superfices was composed of several bits of wood, about the bigness of a die, but some larger than others.  They were all linked together by slender wires.  These bits of wood were covered, on every square, with paper pasted on them; and on these papers were written all the words of their language, in their several moods, tenses, and declensions; but without any order.  The professor then desired me “to observe; for he was going to set his engine at work.”  The pupils, at his command, took each of them hold of an iron handle, whereof there were forty fixed round the edges of the frame; and giving them a sudden turn, the whole disposition of the words was entirely changed.  He then commanded six-and-thirty of the lads, to read the several lines softly, as they appeared upon the frame; and where they found three or four words together that might make part of a sentence, they dictated to the four remaining boys, who were scribes.  This work was repeated three or four times, and at every turn, the engine was so contrived, that the words shifted into new places, as the square bits of wood moved upside down.14
The mechanical, combinatorial approach to cultural creation that Swift treated as an absurd caricature became a productive experimental technique for later writers, artists, and musicians — from the permutational works of American composer John Cage, to the generative poetic experiments of the French literary group Oulipo, to more recent procedural approaches of digital and software art.15 Moreover, the mechanization and externalization of reasoning processes exhibited by machine learning technologies and algorithms has not only become socially and culturally productive, but economically lucrative for today’s silicon empires.
There are few contenders in the history of philosophy to rival the optimism that Leibniz had for his project as a kind of panacea. Many of the ideas of his youth never left him. In a 1714 letter, two years before his death, he laments that he was unable to make more progress:
I should venture to add that if I had been less distracted, or if I were younger or had talented young men to help me, I should still hope to create a kind of spécieuse générale, in which all truths of reason would be reduced to a kind of calculus. At the same time this could be a kind of universal language or writing, though infinitely different from all such languages which have thus far been proposed, for the characters and the words themselves would give directions to reason, and the errors (except those of fact) would be only mistakes in calculation.16
As ever more aspects of earthly life are rendered quantifiable, harvested into clouds, funneled into algorithmic engines — leading to what has been called “planetary-scale computation” — these dreams of the vast creative and emancipatory possibilities of procedural reasoning processes endure.17 The initial trickles of Llull’s and Leibniz’s arcane combinatorial fantasies have gradually given way to ubiquitous computational technologies, practices, and ideals which are interwoven into the fabric of our worlds — the broader consequences of which are still unfolding around us. The objects of their embryonic faith have become the living a priori of the digital age — providing the conditions of possibility for our experience and our reflection, our genres of deliberation, our forms of sociality, and our institutions of judgement — regardless of whether or not the machines operate in the ways that we imagine.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: November 10, 2016

author: Jonathan Gra


text:
Defoe and the Distance to Utopia

By J. H. Pearl
January 25, 2017

In the wake of recent political shifts and the dystopian flavour they carry for many, Jason Pearl looks to the works of Daniel Defoe and the lessons they can teach us about bringing utopia home.

How do you get to utopia? You don’t, of course. It’s unreachably distant. Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) are set in what were then uncharted waters, far enough away to have escaped both the attention and interference of the rest of the world. That’s what makes these islands, for a moment, plausible: no one can deny their existence with positive knowledge. And that’s how they stay perfect: no one’s colonized them, traded with them, influenced them in any way. Distance and difference were understood as directly relational: the greater the distance, the greater the difference. And utopias are radically different. Granted, in some cases, the distance is temporal: we call these “euchronias”. The point is we’ll never get there, never live long enough, never see fiction turned to fact.

Today’s readers demur. Too far-fetched, they complain, rejecting the distance. Others see utopias as prescriptive, rigidly so, even fascistic. People think of head-in-the-clouds dreamers or dogmatic philosopher kings, though Fredric Jameson argues, persuasively, that utopias give us not blueprints but open-ended possibilities. At any rate, we now prefer dystopias: The Road, The Hunger Games, and countless others, many adapted as films. Such scenarios seem not distant but close, potentially imminent, and fans of the cult movie Idiocracy have already noted, with horror, the accuracy of its predictions: our vulgar entertainment; the corporatization of everything; the dumbing down — and worse — of the highest office in the land. Dystopias speak to us because they’re practically adjacent.
But there are exceptions to the rule of utopian distance. In the early history of the novel, writers from Aphra Behn to Jonathan Swift tried to bring utopia nearer, tried to bring it back home to England. This was a time of rambling adventure fiction: pseudo-true stories of merchants, pirates, captives, and castaways, all scattered to the four winds. In Gulliver’s Travels (1726), for instance, Gulliver goes to Barbados and New Holland (modern Australia) but also the Country of the Houyhnhnms, a utopian land of naturally virtuous horses. It’s at once a satire on tall tales and a very serious philosophical provocation. But Swift doesn’t stop there. Gulliver comes home and recreates Houyhnhnm society in miniature, shunning humans for the company of the horses in his stable. It is a plot pattern that recurs throughout the period, most notably in the novels of Daniel Defoe, best known as the author of Robinson Crusoe (1719).
When we think of Crusoe, we remember his island, but at the end of the novel he too returns to England, bringing the ideal of peaceful stoicism with him. In Defoe’s Captain Singleton, published a year later, the eponymous pirate comes back home with new notions of equality and communal property. Indeed, as Defoe teaches us, the highest ideals can be merged with everyday life, and we can relocate utopia, make it practicable, rescale it to manageable proportions. What’s distance, anyway, when ships connect the earth’s farthest corners?
In Defoe’s first novel, considered by some to be literature’s first novel, Crusoe grows up in York wanting to see the world, believing fulfilment lies far from England. He gets enslaved by Barbary pirates; he grows tobacco in Brazil; at the end, he treks across the Pyrenees. But he always wants more, and an ill-fated voyage for slaves runs into a storm and strands him on his famous island. At first, Crusoe bewails his loneliness, but then he sets to work, retrieving supplies from the wreck, building a shelter and all manner of furniture, growing crops, drying grapes, penning goats, even trying to his hand at beer making. For many pages, nothing happens but work, work, work — and still it’s engrossing. You read it, sitting at the library or curled up on a couch, aware of your own solitude, too, thinking through what you’d do and how you’d fare in that situation. The work redeems him, but what satisfies Crusoe most is the stable rhythm of life on the island, its meditative peacefulness, its safety from the vicissitudes of life everywhere else. The distance to utopia — or rather its distance from the rest of the world — turns out to be the defining characteristic.
But the idyll can’t last, not in the Caribbean, where native islanders plied the waters in longboats, where, since Columbus, multitudes of Europeans sailed in and planted flags wherever they could. Exactly halfway through the novel, Crusoe finds a footprint that’s not his — a major shock that provokes a spell of existential panic. And we’re jolted too. It’s like realizing someone’s spying on you. Crusoe flies to his shelter, now his “castle”, and retrenches. He sees a party  of so-called “savages”, then saves one of its victims, who he names Friday (it happened to be a Friday). The two get on, thanks to Friday’s deference, but more natives arrive, then pirates. Crusoe becomes a governor ruling English, Spanish, and indigenous subjects, and throughout much of the sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, published later in 1719, they’re almost always fighting — against either each other or marauding tribes from nearby islands. Finally, the smoke clears, and the island, once a sanctuary, is left a corpse-strewn battlefield. Crusoe sails away and keeps traveling, from Madagascar to China to Siberia, along the way committing a string of brutal acts against ethnic and cultural others — deeply disturbing to modern readers. You’ve got to cut out a lot to make these books suitable for kids.
But the return home isn’t a total loss. In the seldom-read Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (1720), there’s a chapter entitled “Of Solitude”, where Defoe reclaims the experience of seclusion inside, of all places, the London Stock Exchange, one of the beating hearts of modern globalization. “Man under a vow of perpetual silence,” he writes, “if but rigorously observed, would be even in the Exchange of London as perfectly retired from the world as a hermit in his cell or a solitaire in the deserts of Arabia.” Utopia becomes a withdrawal inward, a monkish asceticism, a life severed from worldly attachments. True, such quietism precludes this as an answer to larger social problems. More than that, the ideal of isolation seems at odds with fulfilling connections to friends and family. But Defoe concedes the value of friendship, extolling “the company of religious good men” — devotion to God being his highest ideal. What’s remarkable is the refusal to let go of the epiphany of the first volume, the insistence that all of us might find room for solitude even in otherwise dense and busy cities.
The ideals of Captain Singleton are very different. Here, Defoe unfurls a similar narrative pattern: utopia found; utopia debunked; utopia recreated on a smaller scale in England. But this is a novel about piracy in which the pirates — villains in the prior novel — are now cast as heroes. Crusoe’s utopia is solitary; Singleton’s is social.
One trait of early pirate culture, often overlooked in the colorful (now campy) mythology that followed, was the formation of parallel societies notable for egalitarianism. Pirates voted for their captains and shared their spoils equally. They accepted identity differences for the greater good of all, welcoming women and African slaves, condoning disparate religions and queer sexualities. They developed their own cultures, their own pidgin languages, and even established colonies in remote outposts, for instance Madagascar, where Henry Avery was believed to have founded a colony called Libertalia. Never mind the Disney ride turned into a blockbuster movie franchise. Pirates were, in the popular phrase, “enemies of all mankind”, and their ships couldn’t have been more unlike the strictly normative and hierarchical merchant and naval vessels that vastly outnumbered them. Pirate societies, therefore, were radically separate, different, oppositional — distant.
Avery makes a cameo in the novel, and Singleton and his crew agree to a just agreement. Everyone promises to “live and die together”, to “kill no food but what we would distribute in public”, to be “guided by the majority”, to “appoint a captain among us . . . during pleasure”, everyone taking a turn, and to “obey him without reserve on pain of death”, though “the captain was not to act in any particular thing without the advice of the rest, and by the majority.” They pool both their labor and treasure, and, in imitation of Avery, they hatch a plan to retire on Madagascar, a firmer footing for their waterborne utopia.
But stability eludes them, and the tight-knit group cracks from pressures within and without. Ship politics shift constantly with mutinies and divisions, killings and defections, and the periodic addition of conquered prisoners and willing recruits. And that’s how it worked in real life, too. Only a handful of pirates got to enjoy their riches in peace. It’s rumored Avery died penniless, unable to afford his own coffin. Singleton and his crew get hunted by Europeans and repelled by native islanders, all while Singleton himself hordes a private cache. Eventually, he absconds with his confidant, William, a Quaker surgeon. They disguise themselves as Persians, then Armenians, then Greeks, trading their ill-gotten gains into a fortune before finally returning to England, despite the danger of being hanged.
Crusoe internalizes utopia; Singleton shares it with others. He’s faithful to William, who is much more an equal than Friday ever is. William, by contrast, becomes a crypto-lover, described as “my guide, my pilot, my governor, my everything.” There’s a marriage of convenience between Singleton and William’s widowed sister, and the three live together, enjoying a domestic arrangement reminiscent of the ideals aboard the pirate ship. They swear a new oath of secrecy and loyalty, promising never to reveal themselves and to live out their days as a family — a very different sort of family from that formed at the end of a courtship novel. The ideal spreads outward, starting with Singleton’s conscience, then encompassing William, then his sister, then others when Singleton ponders giving his money to “charitable uses, as a debt due to mankind,” reasoning, “It was due to the community, and I ought to distribute it for the general good.” Utopia, a place, becomes a practice. And finally, the narrative goes blank, ending at a moment of unadventurous peacefulness, pushing us too away from the secret.
What’s remarkable here is the relocation of hitherto far-fetched ideals. In More’s Utopia, Raphael Hythloday merely recounts his travels to an unreceptive court. In Bacon’s New Atlantis, the narrator never even makes it home — the text was left unfinished. These utopias stay distant, too remote for everyday imitation. Defoe’s utopias are practicable anywhere, anytime.
Of course, we still have to try. Do nothing and we get dystopias. Extrapolated from the present, they project a future that might seem inevitable, pulling us forward as if by tractor beam. For Margaret Atwood, this is literature that deals with “things that really could happen”.
The great power of utopias is to disrupt our surrender to orthodoxy, freeing us to understand the status quo as contingent, not predetermined, as changeable, not inevitable. And by smuggling utopia home, Defoe unsettles our notion of the totality of state power, the power to which his utopias are opposed.
Perhaps the seeds of utopia are within us already. Drawing on Ernst Bloch, Ruth Levitas argues, “The essential element in utopia is . . . desire — the desire for a better way of being.” By this light, utopia becomes only natural human longing. What we need these days is a new literature to express this longing and give it shape and detail. All the better if it can show us alternatives close at hand.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 25, 2017

author: J. H. Pearl


text:
Gustav Wunderwald’s Paintings of Weimar Berlin

By Mark Hobbs
May 31, 2017

The Berlin of the 1920s is often associated with a certain image of excess and decadence, but it was a quite different side of the city — the sobriety and desolation of its industrial and working-class districts — which came to obsess the painter Gustav Wunderwald. Mark Hobbs explores.

Berlin in June 1945 was not at all a pleasant place to be. As the dust settled on what was left of the city, blown to smithereens and now occupied by Russian and Allied forces, the landscape painter Gustav Wunderwald died from water poisoning in a hospital in the western suburb of Charlottenburg. He was sixty-three years old.
In the seventy years or so that have passed since his death, the city that Wunderwald painted over and again during the years of the Weimar Republic has been divided, rebuilt, reunified, and revived. And yet, despite the waves of history that have beat relentlessly, remorselessly against Berlin, were he alive today, Wunderwald would still recognise many aspects of the city that he painted during the late twenties. And now, with the lapsing of copyright on his paintings in many parts of the world, digital copies of these paintings are becoming more widely available, making it easier to view his work, and to better appreciate an artist who deserves wider recognition.
Born in Kalk, an industrial suburb on the outskirts of Cologne, Wunderwald experienced first-hand the modern, industrialised city from a young age. Showing early signs of a proficiency in painting, he undertook a two-year apprenticeship under the guidance of the painter Wilhelm Kuhn. Wunderwald quickly found his niche in theatrical and stage set design, taking a job as a scenery painter in Gotha in 1899. For the next thirteen years, his skills led him through a succession of jobs in a variety of cities. After a year in Gotha, he spent four years in Berlin (1900–1904) working at the studio of Georg Hartig and Company, where he specialised in theatrical set painting. From Berlin, Wunderwald moved to Stockholm, and then onwards to Düsseldorf, Innsbruck, and Freiberg over the course of the next eight years, before moving back to Berlin in 1912 to work as a stage designer at the German Opera House.
In 1915, Wunderwald was conscripted into the German army. Training in Königsberg was followed by despatch to Macedonia, as part of a replacement battalion for the German Army’s 43rd Infantry. Wunderwald was fortunate in that the Macedonian Front was a stable one, which saw little of the bloodshed that characterised both the Western and Eastern Fronts. Wunderwald even had time to paint pictures of the Macedonian landscape and towns that he saw, giving him the opportunity to hone his distinctive palette of dark colours.
In the wake of Germany’s defeat in 1918 he returned to Berlin, where he sought to establish himself as an independent artist, using his Charlottenburg apartment as a studio. Some eight years later, in 1926, Wunderwald’s persistence paid off when he came to the attention of Berlin gallery owner Karl Nierendorf and the prominent art critic Paul Westheim. Later that year, seven of Wunderwald’s paintings appeared in an exhibition entitled Das Gesicht von Berlin (The Face of Berlin) at Nierendorf’s gallery. To coincide with the exhibition, Westheim wrote a lead article on Wunderwald in his own art journal Das Kunstblatt, reproducing several works by the artist.1 For a few brief years, Wunderwald’s urban landscapes attracted attention in high places. Among those who brought his works were Gustav Böß, then mayor of Berlin, and the screenwriter Hans Kyser, writer of the script for F. W. Murnau’s 1926 filmic adaptation of Faust. Wunderwald continued to paint and exhibit until 1934, but without doubt his most prolific phase, and the period in which he produced his very best works, was between 1926 and 1929, when he repeatedly painted scenes from Berlin’s industrial areas. He worked as a film colourist for the German film conglomerate Ufa from 1934 until his death in 1945.
Wunderwald’s oeuvre consists chiefly of landscapes, many of which depict Berlin and its surroundings. The grey streets of the city’s working-class areas, to the north of the city centre, are just as often depicted as the cleaner, airier streets of the city’s affluent west end. Rural landscapes also figure, including views of Berlin’s lakes and the countryside around the Havel river. Despite the variety of scenes, it is for his depictions of Berlin’s working-class areas that Wunderwald is best known, largely thanks to Westheim’s article in Das Kunstblatt, in which he praised the artist’s “unromantic and objective [sachlich] approach” to the “bare and unprepossessingly rough world” of Berlin’s industrial neighbourhoods. Subsequent art historical writings have continued to associate Wunderwald with the so-called Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) style of painting that emerged during the Weimar Republic, in which urban landscapes — with their typology of tenements, smokestacks, gasometers, and railway lines — were a dominant genre.2
Wunderwald’s paintings of Berlin’s working-class neighbourhoods have an enigmatic quality about them. They employ a sooty palette of warm browns and greys, and have a stillness and architectural solidity to them that can perhaps be accounted for by the artist’s prior experience as a painter of theatrical scenery. One could well image scenes such as Fabrik von Loewe & Co. or Brücke über die Ackerstraße as backdrops to theatrical adaptations of Weimar-era novels like Alfred Döblin’s Berliner Alexanderplatz, Hans Fallada’s Little Man What Now?, or Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin.
Amidst the tenement blocks, factories, smokestacks, and advertising hoardings, Wunderwald found no shortage of subjects to paint. In a letter to a friend, written in the winter of 1926, he wrote: “Sometimes I stagger back as if drunk from my wandering through Berlin; there are so many impressions that I have no idea which way to go.”3 Wunderwald, describing his search for inspiring scenes to paint on the streets of the city, was not the first and by no means the last individual to find themselves overwhelmed by the sights and sounds of Berlin. His description of feeling drunk through sensory overload brings to mind fellow Berliner and sociologist Georg Simmel’s description of the “intensification of nervous stimulation” that the modern city-dweller encountered on the streets of the metropolis.4 Most urban inhabitants, argued Simmel, adopted a blasé attitude in order to protect themselves from the excess of sights, sounds, and movement encountered in the urban public sphere. By contrast, some individuals — like Wunderwald — consciously chose to immerse themselves in the tumult of the big city, wandering around its streets in a state of rapture, just as Baudelaire had done in Paris half a century earlier.
Wunderwald was not the only person wandering the streets of Berlin in search of inspiration during the late 1920s. Writers like Siegfried Kracauer, Franz Hessel, and Joseph Roth were also on the prowl, attracted to the city’s relentless pace of change, and in search of subjects worthy of writing about in the newspaper feuilletons. These flâneurs, like Wunderwald, wandered back and forth through the streets of Berlin’s urban landscape, obsessing over the ways in which the scenes that they encountered had endured and changed. In late 1932, the writer Siegfried Kracauer recounted his surprise and sadness upon finding out that a favourite café on the Kurfürstendamm had shut down. Kracauer’s first inclination that something is wrong comes when he tries to open the door, only to find it locked. Startled, he peers through the window and sees that the interior is empty. Surely, thinks Kracauer, it must have been cleared out overnight, as the premises had been lit up just the previous evening. “Or”, he asks, questioning his ability to adequately recollect the passage of time, “am I deluding myself?” Walter Benjamin also acutely felt the shock of change upon the streets of Berlin. He explored them in his text A Berlin Chronicle, which he claimed was not so much an autobiographical account of his childhood, than an account of the experience of place, “of a space, of moments and discontinuities.”5
Berlin was — and still is — a city of “moments and discontinuities”. In 1910, the architectural critic Karl Scheffler wrote of Berlin as “always becoming, never being”.6 Scheffler’s phrase, oft-quoted thanks to its enduring relevance, referred to the city’s rapid growth throughout the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. When the city became the capital of a unified Germany in 1871, it was already well on the way to becoming one of the new nation’s most important industrial centres, thanks to its burgeoning railway construction industry. From 1890 onwards the city’s rapid growth was further bolstered by a new electrical engineering industry, spearheaded by Emil Rathenau and his Allgemeine Elektricitäts Gesellschaft (AEG). Between 1871 and 1910 Berlin’s population jumped from 824,000 to over two million inhabitants.7 A large proportion of the new inhabitants were immigrants from the surrounding provinces, who moved to Berlin in search of work in industrial districts such as Wedding, Moabit, and Prenzlauer Berg, districts characterised by long streets of densely populated tenements and factories.
The city that Scheffler wrote of was that very same encountered by Wunderwald during his first stay in Berlin between 1900 and 1904, and this sense of constant flux is key to developing a better understanding of Wunderwald’s portraits of the city. Thanks to his frequent tendency to specify the places he painted in the titles he gave to his works, and with the aid of the city’s digitised address books, it is possible to look at the paintings he produced of the city in the twenties and figure out what the same scenes looked like years earlier, when he first saw them (if he did at all). What’s clear from such an exercise is that in many cases significant changes had taken place in the scenes that he painted.
This is best illustrated in a 1927 painting by Wunderwald of Travemünder Straße, in the north Berlin neighbourhood of Gesundbrunnen. Travemünder Straße was a relatively new street, having been constructed in 1906; that is, after Wunderwald had departed Berlin for the first time. In order to lay out the new street, Berlin’s municipal authorities partially demolished one of the city’s most ostentatiously decorated tenements, built in the 1890s and known as the Luisenhaus, the rear of which can be seen at the right of the painting.
In spite of the wholesale destruction of the city during the Second World War, it is still possible to visit some of the streets that Wunderwald painted in the 1920s, and recognise the scenes he depicted. Any tour would have to include a trip to the northern district of Wedding, to see the monumental iron railway bridge that weighs heavily over Ackerstraße, the busy street intersection of Müllerstraße and Seestraße, and factory buildings and tenements on Lindowerstraße. Given how much has survived and how much has changed — moments and discontinuities — I like to think that Wunderwald would be happy to wander about present-day Berlin, a city that remains in a perpetual state of flux, just as it was in his own day.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Mark Hobbs