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by Hans-Dieter Gelfert

Lucas Cranach the Elder: Adam and Eve in Paradise, Gemäldegalerie Berlin (Image: public domain, source: Wikimedia Commons)

Love and Evil are the driving forces of most, if not all, plots of dramatic and fictional literature. For a binary opposite of Evil one would expect the Good instead of Love – but Goodness, as every reader knows from experience, does not yield much aesthetic gratification. Aesthetics is concerned with the pleasure and displeasure of sensuous perception, which depends on the rise and fall of our level of arousal; expectancy and gratification, therefore, are the two basic sources of psychic pleasure. It is easy to see that goodness, no matter how much and in what shape, will not arouse much expectancy, because there is little point in desiring with our senses what our conscience forces us to demand, and any gratification it yields when it actually happens is only a confirmation of our trust in the moral order of the world. With evil, things are different. Whether we desire it against our conscience, or genuinely fear its imminence, it will arouse us to a high level, and when it actually happens the gratification will be either perverse pleasure or a cathartic upheaval of our moral beliefs. In both cases, in a fictional context, we are able to enjoy evil, either openly, in defiance of morality, or secretly, knowing that we are on safe ground. Therefore, the evildoer and the moral sufferer, the dragon and its slayer, the devil and the martyr are inexhaustible sources of aesthetic pleasure, provided they stay in the realm of fiction and make us only gather our moral forces without compelling us to give the signal for attack.

Having said that much, one can only wonder why the aesthetics of evil has attracted so little attention from literary scholars. Peter André Alt, professor of German literature at the Free University of Berlin, whose president he became in 2009, is not the first to break this ground, but he is the one who did so most thoroughly, by harvesting from widely dispersed fields of scholarship and shaping his material into a compendium of breath-taking erudition. 160 of the 712 pages of his book are taken up by notes and a bibliography of intimidating scope and completeness. The main part of the book is divided in seven chapters, the titles of which give an idea of the range and philosophical depth of his study. Chapter One echoes Nietzsche’s book on the birth of tragedy in its title “Prelude in myth: The origin of evil from the spirit of literary fiction”. In this chapter, Alt starts from Genesis and moves on to discuss the biblical sources of Lucifer’s and Adam’s fall and the theological debate about evil from Augustine to Kierkegaard.

Chapter Two is entitled “Enlightenment and psychology: New arts of the devil”. It is here that Alt comes into his own, since the first half of the chapter deals with German authors such as Georg Friedrich Meier, Jean Paul, Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann, while the second half gives a lucid discussion of Freud and Jung in the context of the early history of psychoanalysis. Chapter Three, “The Shift towards introspection: Evil as seen from the inside”, begins with ‘black poetics’ in Schlegel and Rosencrantz, goes on to the ‘archaeology of the evil soul’ in Schiller and Jean Paul, dedicates over 20 pages to Kleist’s “muddled circumstances and soiled concepts” and ends with a discussion of Kierkegaard, Baudelaire, Stefan George und Thomas Mann under the heading “From imagination to de-differentiation”.

9/11 Attacks on the World Trade Center, New York City. (Image remixed and released under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic; source: Wikimedia Commons)

Chapter Four bears the title “Repetition as the literary manifestion of evil”. In this chapter, what is commonly associated with black romanticism comes most prominently to the fore. The subtitles give an idea of the subject matter: “The myth of hell and the phantasma of eternal punishment (Blake, Barlach, Sartre, Mann)”, “The rhythm of the orgy (de Sade, Mirbeau, Suesskind)”, “Satanic masses (Huysman)” and “Monotony and aestheticism (Sacher-Masoch, Wilde)”. A second structural feature of evil is added in Chapter Five under the title “The aesthetic pleasure of transgression: Extreme figures and deviating behaviour”. Here, too, the subtitles provide a guideline through the chapter: “Androids and vampyres (Shelly, Bram Stoker)”, “Crime in the spirit of the perverse (Poe, Stevenson)”, “Criminological case-studies (Lombroso, Krafft-Ebing, Gross)”, “The poetry of madness (Przbyszewski, Heym, Benn)” and “An invented sex (Wedekind, Weininger, Ewers)”. In Chapter Six, “Snapshots of excess: On conjuring up the monstrous”, Alt zooms in on the very centre of transgression. The chapter begins with “The killing of God as a rhetorical feast (Nietzsche)”, then goes on to the concept of ‘Holy pornography’ by Bataille, Genet and Foucault, turns to Kafka and the little known German writer Robert Mueller (who seems to deserve a rediscovery) and ends with “Narrated war experiments of violence (Ernst Juenger, Malaparte)”. The final Chapter Seven, at last, raises the question the reader would have asked right at the beginning: “Moral implications of immoral literature”. Here, the theoretical discussion of the views of Baudrillard, Wolfgang Iser, Karl Heinz Bohrer and Niklas Luhmann frames a detailed analysis of two contemporary novels: Jonathan Littell’s Les bienveillants and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho.

Dennis Oppenheim: 'Device to Root Out Evil', sculpture, Vancouver, Canada. (Image released under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License; source: Wikimedia Commons)

The summary of the contents gives the reader an idea of what Alt has to offer, but it also reveals what he fails to deliver. In theological, philosophical and psychoanalytical terms he has a firm grasp of his subject, even more so, of course, when it comes to the phenomenology of evil in art, since this is what his study is about. One cannot blame a book on the aesthetics of evil for excluding the ethical aspects, but ignoring the social dimension is a different matter. Evil is something the evildoer does to a victim. This is a social relation and, therefore, must be dealt with as a material aspect of evil irrespective of its ethical evaluation. The other conspicuous gap in Alt’s book – in fact, the missing link in his chain of argument – is the total absence of that period in European literature where evil for the first time literally took to the stage, i. e. Elizabethan and, more precisely, Jacobean drama. From Marlowe through Shakespeare to Webster, Tourneur and all the other writers of ‘sex and crime’ plays in the Jacobean age, evil became such a central driving force that one can hardly understand why Alt mentions Marlowe and Shakespeare only in passing and leaves the others unnoticed. From Adam’s Fall to the end of the Middle Ages, evil had been a question of sin, which presupposed a hierarchical relation between God and the devil. But with the early rise of a middle-class society in England the medieval hierarchy underwent a slow and steady process of horizontalization, which transformed the theological concept of sin into the social concept of crime. Henceforth, evil was no longer something the pious man looked down upon deep in hell, but something he was confronted with at eye-level. The Elisabethan and Jacobean age was the first literary period in which the villain achieved the status of a hero, though a negative one. (If further proof is needed for the eye-level view of evil in a ‘horizontalized’ society, think of the United States, a society that likes to think of itself as having overcome traditional hierarchies, yet which at the same time is the most obsessed with evil).

The omission of the Jacobean drama is the gravest flaw of Alt’s book. This flaw, however, does not come unexpected in a book whose ‘Introduction’ begins with a quotation from Hegel. Alt’s method resembles more that of medieval scholasticism than that of scientific scholarship. Instead of referring to observations grounded in empirical data, he defers to authority figures such as Hegel, Kierkegaard, Benjamin, Foucault, Baudrillard and Luhmann. This will leave readers with a more bottom-up approach to literature irritated and frustrated. On the one hand, one cannot help admiring Alt’s erudition, his power of penetration and the often lucid analyses of literary works, on the other hand one waits in vain for answers to questions so obvious that one can hardly understand why they are not raised. First: How is the fictional experience of evil transformed into aesthetic pleasure? Second: Under what social conditions is the public most likely disposed to crave for such pleasure? and Third: Where is the dividing line between the aesthetic and the ethical that must not be transgressed? Only this last question is addressed by Alt, but it comes like an afterthought and not as a target aimed at from the beginning.

Although Alt starts from the myth of Adam and Eve and works his way up to the very real horrors of Auschwitz and beyond, the whole book lacks a sense of the gravity of social history. Furthermore, it shares with much of German literary scholarship an undeniable touch of national – or, to be more precise, Continental – parochialism. No one in his right mind would underrate the impact of the French Revolution nor that of Kant and Hegel on the intellectual tradition of Europe, but these names and events stand for the climax of a development that had begun much earlier – to a large extent in England. Alt, like most of his German colleagues, tends to give Schlegel more credit as an innovator than he deserves. Although he does not explicitly date the “Shift towards introspection” (Chapter Three) around 1800, he at the very least makes his readers think so. But the founding fathers of introspection and the psychological interest in literature were the English puritans of the 17th century. They triggered what, via Shaftesbury, Richardson, the sentimentalists and the Gothic novelists, eventually made its way to Germany. Readers well-versed in fact-free Theory may feel elated by Alt’s brilliant command of what is en vogue in contemporary German and French literary debate, but those who crave for empirical insight will feel somewhat disappointed – and may well conclude that a writer of such acumen should have produced more solid enlightenment and fewer sparkling lights.

Peter-André Alt: Ästhetik des Bösen
C.H. Beck, Munich 2010.
ISBN-13: 978-3406605031
Hardcover, 714 pages, EUR 34.00 

Hans-Dieter Gelfert was Professor of English Literature and Culture at the Free University of Berlin until 2000, and was described by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as ‘one of the most prolific and most widely read Anglicists in Germany’. His most recent book, a major new biography of Charles Dickens, is published this month by C.H. Beck (Munich).

by Katrina Gulliver

Crawford Market, Mumbai. (Photo by Greg Younger, used under Wikimedia/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License)

In this book, Gyan Prakash offers not a traditional history of a city, but rather a portrait of the city’s culture and image. By using its popular culture, he reflects the kaleidoscope of this multiethnic community. From the grand colonial architecture to more recent land reclamation projects, he traces the spatial dimensions of the city and their cultural meanings. In so doing, he emphasises the ways in which history, particularly urban history of a still-changing community, is made up of the myths we choose to remember, or the fables of his title. Like all great cities, Mumbai has more than one fable in its story. As he describes:

“The nostalgic ‘tropical Camelot’ and the dystopic city of slums appear as compelling bookends of Mumbai’s story because they seem to have the force of historical truth. In fact, it is a trick of history, inviting us to believe its Bombay-to-Mumbai tale as an objective reading of the past when it is a fable.” (p. 23)

The Bombay Chronicle, January 26th, 1931. (Source: Wikimedia Commons/public domain)

Prakash links the real city to its many depictions in popular culture. Bombay’s rapid growth in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and diversity of religion and language, meant it developed a multiplicity of communities within the city. Prakash argues that the act of reading the newspaper served as the secular version of morning prayer, and in this multicultural society, newspapers could serve to link readers together. However, as he points out, this world — in the mid twentieth century – was still largely limited to those who could read English. Nonetheless, popular culture in the form of tabloid press, such as Blitz newspaper, which offered a downmarket popular option in the English-language press. Through such media, celebrity scandals and other tales of the city were promulgated. As Prakash describes, the cues Blitz offered about the lives of the rich and (in)famous informed the residents of the rest of the city about how the other half lived, and bound many readers in fascination with their lurid stories.

Prakash, a professor of history at Princeton University, is particularly drawn to the creators (writers and film makers) who made Bombay their home in the twentieth century and the ways they presented the city’s many layers in their work. In demonstrating this, he expends many pages summarising the plots of short stories and films created in or about Bombay – the creation of these “fables” becoming part of the city’s narrative.

Eros Movie Theatre, Mumbai. Opened in 1938, exemplifying the late Art deco style. (Photo: Colin Rose. Used under Wikimedia/Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License)

From the creative to the theoretical, Prakash uses the analyses of Henri Lefebvre and other urban theorists to discuss the use of space, and the ways that urban planning, with its focus on abstract “efficiency” failed. He also acknowledges the effect of political corruption, with the assignment of land and contracts for new development schemes. He also discusses at length the architectural style of Art Deco, which flourished in Bombay in the interwar period. Its acquistive, eclectic nature — taking on motifs from other styles — meant it offered a bridge to modernity in the machine age. The glamour of this period is clearly part of Mumbai’s visual heritage, as well as being the point — before independence and partition — when the city shone for many of its nostalgic fans.

But for all the glitz of the Marine Drive denizens, the situation of shanty-town dwellers is not overlooked here. As he describes the cycle, poor people arrive in the city, and build their own makeshift housing. Although the settlement is illegal, the municipal authorities are forced to provide some civic facilities. But once the land has thus become habitable, it is valuable, and the residents will be evicted so the land can be sold for development. (p. 310) Prakash draws on the plot of the comic book Doga, a hero of the slums, to illustrate these issues and their popular presentation. (While this is interesting, spending over 30 pages on the plotline of a comic book seems perhaps a little indulgent.)

The book contains some unfortunate repetitive phrasing (which looks like some cut and paste) and some rather infelicitous colloquialisms — people “get on like a house on fire”, noses are “thrown out of joint” — which are somewhat jarring in the context. There is also a small glitch in his passing account of the Sassoon family tree (p. 41), as part of his discussion of David Sassoon, one of a number of merchants who were influential in the city’s industrial development.

Mumbai Fables is an engaging narrative, and offers a different way for urban historians to write the biography of a city. But it will have more to offer for those familiar with the city, for whom the gleam of recognition will be a benefit.

Gyan Prakash: Mumbai Fables. A History of an Enchanted City
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010.
ISBN-13: 9780691153179
Paper, 424 pages, US$19.95

Katrina Gulliver is a cultural historian and postdoctoral research fellow based at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Her current project examines the development of four colonial port cities, Malacca, Havana, Pondicherry and New Orleans, from the early sixteenth century to 1900.

by Christiane Peitz

2nd of December, 2009: National Day in the United Arab Emirates. To mark the occasion, Dubai is offering fitness events and family entertainment, local musicians perform alongside folklore ensembles from Syria and Andalusia, another highlight are Egyptian show horses: all attractions courtesy of the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Community Development. Only Burj Dubai, the world’s tallest building at 811 metres, was not completed in time for the festive occasion. Its opening had to be postponed until early 2010.

Who knows what else is in the offing for Dubai. At the end of November, government-owned holding company Dubai World asked its creditors for an extension on debt re-payment, citing its 60 billion dollar debt as the reason. Hotel and real estate prices plummeted immediately, along with stock markets in the Gulf region. The one-time wonderland seemed to turn into one giant yard sale.

Bubble within a bubble: Dubai airport. (c) BRB

Michael Schindhelm is one of many who has left. In March 2007, the luckless former director of the Berlin Opera Foundation (which runs the German capital’s three opera houses) arrived in Dubai. As Cultural Director of Dubai’s Culture and Arts Authority, he was supposed to spearhead the construction, from March 2008 onwards, of an opera house and a Museum of World Cultures. Leaving Berlin, whose coffers were empty, Schindhelm was hoping to be able to draw on Dubai’s abundant financial resources. Surrounded by ten-lane highways, artificial islands, and towering skyscrapers, his new employers nourished dreams of, amongst others, a new multiplex theatre for entertainment and music, with a dozen or so stages and a supersized museum complex attached to it. In the summer of 2009, Schindhelm threw in the towel; he now lives in Rome. Whereas construction of the Louvre’s Abu Dhabi branch is well underway and I.M. Pei’s Museum of Islamic Art has just celebrated its first anniversary in neighbouring Qatar, Dubai’s cultural bubble has burst.

Is this a case of visionary turned disillusionist? 49-year-old Michael Schindhelm – trained as a chemist in East Germany, and active since as a translator, dramatist, artistic director at the Basel Opera House, arts manager, and writer – has always been reinventing himself and his career; perhaps because of this he fits well into Dubai with its artificiality and allure to fortune-seekers. Fortunately, during his stint in Dubai, Schindhelm was vain enough to keep a diary of his adventures as one among the many well-off ‘new nomads’ that used to flock there. In fact, ‘vain enough’ may be an understatement. As a reader one does not really care which brand of car Schindhelm drives in Dubai, how he copes with the heat, which swearwords he uses when he gets into a tussle over a parking spot, and what he feeds his two tortoises (the female, in case you are wondering, is called ‘Europa’). In other respects, Schindhelm’s vanity is to the benefit of the reader. ‘Dubai Speed’, Schindhelm’s chronicle of his year-long stay in this ‘bay of paradise’, offers an insightful view from inside the bubble.

Schindhelm does not bother with the pretense of understanding. His attitude is one of wonder. He allows himself to lower his guard, and simply describes his experiences in the mega-construction site that is Dubai: The sudden changes in scenery, from desert to highway, from idyllic beach to the synthetic world of shopping malls. Artificiality, kitsch, hubris, simulation, conspicuous consumption. “This city is a case of total mobilization”, Schindhelm writes. It embodies “not merely a race against time, but an objection to time itself”. And yet, he still sees in Dubai “a tiny nucleus of hope” – the promise of a multicultural existence, in the face of political and religious radicalization among such neighbours as Iran, Saudi-Arabia, or Jemen. The final image of the book is a pavilion by the beach, a temporary exhibition hall under the scorching Arabian sun: a happy end, wrung from adverse circumstance, and quite possibly spurious.

Schindhelm hopes for a portion of the global flow of capital to be diverted to cultural projects and purposes. He wants to transmute the greed of the financial markets and turn it into a sense of curiosity; he imagines an opera house whose programme would include Così fan tutte, Lebanese dance theatre, the Cirque du Soleil, Chinese opera, and a Bollywood musical.

More interesting than Schindhelm’s visions for the future, however, are his run-ins with an understanding of ‘culture’ that equates art and commerce without so much as a flinch. None of Schindhelm’s interlocutors gets his point that a musical theatre with a capacity of 3000 is hopeless, simply because of the bad acoustics this would entail. In the eyes of his business partners, anyone who believes that for a museum to be successful it need not yield a high return on investment, is simply stuck in an obsolete European mindset. Dubai, an “imagination of a world made purely by humans”, also wants to redefine culture: as a means of profit maximization, which drives up real-estate values. Culture becomes just another show horse.

Schindhelm’s eventual failure is not so much due to overt confrontations of this sort, but is the result of inscrutable hierarchies of men of some importance, and of strange forms of non-communication that characterize the meetings and discussions he holds with the Cultural Council. Who is really in charge? When is a concession merely an instance of stonewalling, whose handshake is binding?

Schindhelm takes exception to the accusation that he is ignoring the existence of censorship in the Arab world. Instead he portrays himself as a victim of the “Idomeneo” affair, in which a controversial, modernist production of the Mozart opera, to be staged by Berlin’s Deutsche Oper, was cancelled, for fear of reprisals by Muslim groups. Schindhelm pokes fun at the “three generals” – the overeager Heads of the State Museums of Berlin, Dresden, and Munich – who visit Dubai in their quest for cooperation. He notes, with a tone of bemusement, how translating a catalogue for the exhibition “Muslim Faces” (the only project Schindhelm completed while in Dubai) led to problems, because of uncertainty about the attributes of prophet Muhammad. Schindhelm accuses the West of arrogance – and yet he himself embodies it. His zest for action, coupled with good intentions, is a phenomenon that is typical of the West.

As a result, the scintillating bubble that is Dubai becomes a bizarre reflection of our modern age. Schindhelm hints at a number of parallels and comparisons: between the construction from scratch of a modern megacity, the square layout of the city of Mannheim (conceived during absolutist rule), and the imported Florentine style of architecture found in St. Petersburg: “The city is a product of genius coupled with savage contempt for human life. In some sense this is probably true of all cities… Who built Babel? Who St. Petersburg? Who Dubai?”

The plot of land that was reserved for Schindhelm’s opera house, in the meantime has been sold on. The new investor plans to build a car park.

Michael Schindhelm: Dubai Speed. Eine Erfahrung
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 2009.
ISBN-13: 978-3-423-24768-9
Softcover, 256 pages, EUR 16.90

Christiane Peitz is a journalist and head of the cultural section of the Berlin daily Der Tagesspiegel.

The German version of this article first appeared in Der Tagesspiegel, 2 December 2009 (original article); translated and reproduced with permission. Translation: The Berlin Review of Books. All rights reserved.

“It is the master who establishes the rules and not the pupil,
and the master is permitted to break the rules, even his own.

–  Jan Tschichold to Dorothy Sayers.

No discussion will take place.

–  from a poster announcing a Tschichold
lecture on ‘the New Typography’.

 Jan Tschichold is always described as a pioneer of typographic and design modernism. But if he were invariably described as the prodigal son of classical typography and design—that would be true, too. You could say he had two careers, crowned by achievements that are almost mutually antagonistic, in design sensibility. But there is an aesthetic continuity through it all, a cool, temperamental steadiness. This is interesting not just for what it says about Tschichold but about the limits of labels like ‘modernism’ and ‘classicism’.

One sympathizes with Dorothy Sayers, who didn’t like the asterisks on the title page of her book, and had the temerity to point out to the designer that they were in violation of the designer’s own stated rules concerning the placement of such things. Even if one agrees the asterisks look fine, one might reasonably inquire as to what are the real rules, if everything spoken is only made to be broken.

Which brings us to a new book: Jan Tschichold, Master Typographer (Thames & Hudson, 2008). If we want to judge this master by a life of works, this book is a solid success. We have here a generous and representatively broad sample, judiciously selected and handsomely presented. There are many examples of Tschichold’s ‘new typography’ from the 20’s. The posters—particularly the film posters—are perhaps the most broadly appealing expressions of Tschichold’s modernist dreams, all sans serif, asymmetric boldness and strong color. These early works are what Tschichold’s modernist manifestos never manage to be: true prophecies. (We’ll return to this point.) Master Typographer also showcases book cover designs from all periods of Tschichold’s career. Here the great achievements, in both quality and quantity, are late. Tschichold took the design helm at Penguin between 1947 and 1949. During this brief tenure, he designed and oversaw production of 500 titles (consider what that means, as a daily rate.) Master Typographer also contains numerous type and calligraphic specimens, from early to late. Most welcome are the complete presentations of various modernist faces which, unlike Tschichold’s late, classical masterpiece, Sabon—are not so easy to see today.

But if we want to judge Tschichold by his works and words; or rather, since he was a worker with words, if we want to judge him by what he worked in the medium of other people’s words and by what he meant by his own; if we want to see the unity, solve the puzzle of Tschichold’s apparent departures and reversals of his own line; then, I think, we may find this new book just a bit lacking in discussion at one crucial point.

There might have been something Tschicholdian about that, too. But I think it was a minor breakdown in planning – a thoroughly un-Tschicholdian thing. Master Typographer contains an introduction and four solid essays, by different authors. There is some overlap and not as much synthesis as might have been achieved. One particular quote—an important one, no doubt—is repeated in no less than four places in the book (in the timeline of Tschichold’s career, then on pages 21, 64, 302). But, as the quote (reproduced below) reflects on the overall arc of Tschichold’s career, and as the introduction is relatively short, and the essays more piecemeal in their respective attentions, none of the contributors makes it his or her business to achieve a full synoptic view. What does this quote really mean?

But first, some basics, for the benefit of readers not so familiar with this master. Tschichold (born in Leipzig in 1902) was a child prodigy where letters were concerned. ‘Prodigy’ means wonderful sign. Johannes—later he changed his name to Ivan (1923), then Jan (1926)—was a wonderful sign of wonderful signs to come. He was the son of a lettering artist and sign painter and, by the tender age of twelve, was an earnest, enamored and—what is more remarkable—precociously historicist student of letterforms. The 1914 International Exhibition of Graphic Arts, and his native Leipzig’s Hall of Culture exposed him to the breadth and depths of the European book arts. As a teen he studied calligraphy, etching, engraving and bookbinding. It is worth emphasizing that Tschichold was, at all stages of his career, the purist lover of Form who kept a firm hold on the material basis: practical production methods. He may have been (even into his humane and tolerant old age) ever the dogmatically opinionated dweller in a Platonic Book Heaven of his own devising. But he never took an impractical step when it came to making an actual book.

Perhaps only a man who had deeply studied 16^th Century writing masters  before the age of 16 could be so thoroughly of the early 20^th Century as to declare, by the time he was in his 20’s, that there is—and must be—a fundamental, henceforth un-bridgeable gap between ‘the old typography (1440-1914)’ and the New. From Tschichold’s The New Typography (1928):

None of the typefaces to whose basic form some kind of ornament has been added (serifs in Roman type, lozenge shapes and curlicues in Fraktur) meet our requirements for clarity and purity. Among all the types that are available, the so-called “Grotesque” (sanserif) or “block letter” (skeleton letters would be a better name) is the only one in spiritual accordance with our time.

To proclaim sanserif as the typeface of our time is not a question of being fashionable, it really does express the same tendencies to be seen in our architecture. It will not be long before not only the “art” typefaces, as they are sometimes called today, but also the classical typefaces, disappear, as completely as the contorted furniture of the eighties.

Skipping ahead, rapidly, through several stages of Tschichold’s career—most dramatically, arrest and brief ‘protective custody’ detention by the Nazis on charges of un-German typography and ‘cultural bolshevism’, followed by emigration to Switzerland, where Tschichold spent most of the rest of his life—we eventually come to our four-times repeated quote, from 1959:

In the light of my present knowledge, it was a juvenile opinion to consider the sans serif as the most suitable or even the most contemporary typeface. A typeface has first to be legible, nay, readable, and a sans serif is certainly not the most legible typeface when set in quantity, let alone readable … Good typography has to be perfectly legible and, as such, the result of intelligent planning … The classical typefaces such as Garamond, Janson, Baskerville, and Bell are undoubtedly the most legible. In time, typographical matters, in my eyes, took on a very different aspect, and to my astonishment I detected most shocking parallels between the teachings of Die neue Typographie and National Socialism and fascism. Obvious similarities consist in the ruthless restriction of typefaces, a parallel to Goebbel’s infamous Gleichschaltung (enforced political conformity) and the more or less militaristic arrangement of lines.

For the benefit of the typographically un- or semi-initiated: serifs are the horizontal sharp bits on Roman letterforms.

Fig. 1: Serif typefaces.

Sans serif (a.k.a. grotesque) faces (fonts) lack the pointy bits. Here are two famous and popular sans serifs.

Fig. 2: Sans serif typefaces

Finally, Fraktur (a.k.a. blackletter, or broken, or gothic type) designates a range of faces that seem distinctively Germanic (the Gutenberg Bible was set in Fraktur); but which can also seem, and are sometimes called, ‘Olde English’.

It is obvious that a typographer must be professionally preoccupied with the shapes of letters. But it can seem ridiculous to take, say, the serif/sans serif divide so seriously. Tschichold’s early statements are almost comic in their ‘Typocalypse Now’ absolutism, their evident sense of bestriding an historic chasm, when surely it is just a question of filing down the little bits (or not), is it not?

Fig. 3: Example of a Fraktur typeface

It helps to know that in Germany in this period (up until the end of World War II) most printed matter was set in some form of Fraktur, in contrast to the rest of Europe, where Roman letterforms have long dominated. Perhaps predictably, the result was intense attachment, elective affinities for particular letterforms, and occasional eruptions of us-vs.-them Kulturkampf: romanticism vs. classicism; (French) civilization vs. (German) culture. (What hand will children first be taught to write in school? This becomes a vital question.) Bismarck declared he would not read a German book set in Roman type. The aphorist Georg Lichtenberg said that he felt such books had been translated. The Nazis mandated Fraktur; then, in 1941, in a dramatic typeface about-face, outlawed it as ‘Jewish’. But situating Tschichold in this cultural context, while it may make some sense of his early proclamations, hardly makes them sound sensible.

Tschichold’s 1959 statement of the reasons for his shift away from the new typography (a statement he might have made already in the 30’s: his change of mind did not occur in 1950’s) seems humane and moderate. Yet it is still in danger of tipping over into equal and opposite extremism. Should shop talk about type be so lightly projected outwards—onto the world of politics? One is tempted to show the absurdity by standing the argument on its head: we would hardly try to prove that fascism was only an aesthetic sensibility by comparing it to the new typography. (‘I was just a graphic designer,’ would hardly have served defendants at Nuremberg, unless the point was to make ‘I was just following orders’ sound convincing by comparison.) Why, then, make the new typography sinister by associating with fascism? Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that there might be a common denominator at the level of Wille zu Stil [will to style], as Tschichold terms it—some purist drive to eliminate and reduce—surely the fact that this can manifest itself evilly or innocently goes to show the drive itself is neither. (If we cannot tell the difference between fascism and a certain degree of fussiness or minimalist fastidiousness—what difference can we tell?)

To be fair, this is Tschichold’s precise point in 1959: not that modernism was evil but that it wasn’t necessarily good, hence not necessarily necessary. He concluded, in the end, that serifs are not the functionless ornaments he had taken them to be. They are graceful indications of line, efficiently ushering the reading eye on its way down the hall of words. His asymmetric juxtapositions of word and image—all the possibilities opened by New Typography—seemed to him, looking back, not so much a dead-end, let alone a disaster, as a confined, local district. The new typography is fine for a certain class of advertising product: posters, very notably. It is not so suitable for other, more traditional print products: most classic books. Sans serif faces work for eye-catching and eye-aiding display: public signage, anything that must be taken in at a glance, at a distance, on the move. Serifs suit eye-leading reading.

It sounds sensible and moderate, to the point where one wonders whether the expense acknowledged in the following passage from a late Tschichold essay was really necessary:

Fifty years of experimentation with many novel, unusual scripts have yielded the insight that the best typefaces are either the classical fonts themselves (provided the punches or patterns have survived), or recuttings of these, or new typefaces not drastically different from the classical pattern. This is a late and expensive, yet still valuable, lesson.

It makes a good story. The precocious student of classical letterforms, who prematurely consigned all that to the dustbin of history, crowned his career with classic book designs, and a classical typeface named after Sabon, a contemporary and follower of the great Garamond. (Sabon inherited and preserved a portion of Garamond’s type collection upon the master’s death.) To quote T.S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Nice travel tale or not: was Tschichold’s journey really necessary? Grant that it was necessary personally, for him—due to peculiar personal situation and idiosyncratic temperament—was it impersonally necessary? (The logic of good typography should always be impersonal: Tschichold says so, early and late.)

Why is ‘Master Typographer’ a good title for a book about Tschichold, when it might be objected that he was not just a typographer, but a book designer and graphic artist as well? Typography is the art of arranging shapes into letters, also the art of arranging letters into shapes. Graphic design is a matter of arranging two-dimensional shapes—some of which are typically letters—into two-dimensional shapes, and book design is a part of that. Tschichold’s contribution was to be a unifier of this field and, at the same time, a distinguisher of it from others. He was one of the first to conceive of graphic designer, particularly where books are concerned, as an autonomous and distinctive field of artistic achievement. Or rather, he was one of the first to make it a reality, by combining vision with will and sufficient practical know-how. His lifelong, formalistic obsession with rules and grids and abstract geometry allowed him to separate the profession of graphic designer from the crafts of production editor, compositor, printer, so forth, giving the former complete control over the latter. (The tale of how Tschichold achieved this at Penguin, by combining four pages of rules with sheer force of personality, is a fascinating one. Richard Doubleday’s essay in the present volume tells the tale.) The common denominator of the new typography and Tschichold’s later, thoroughly classical Penguin work, is fine engineering—a talent for consistent production; something that is neither here nor there, with regard to the ideological lines between modernism and classicism.

We could say that Tschichold’s true competitor was never classicism, while he was a modernist – or modernism, in his late classical phase. The alternative was always ‘Arts and Crafts’-style ‘boutique’ book artistry: William Morris and his Kelmscott Press, very notably. There obviously was a pre-modern period when the ‘book artist’ could enjoy the complete control that industrial methods portioned out along a production line. Hand-copyists and illuminators did it with their own hands. The argument between Tschichold and the likes of William Morris comes down to the question of whether the need to re-establish artistic control necessitates rejection of these modern, industrial methods, or instead their technically-knowing adaptation. Can you break the machines to the yoke of art? Tschichold always took the ‘modernist’ line against the ‘medievalist’ (I would call it) alterative, in this argument. Tschichold was proudest of how, at Penguin, he brought into the world a million well-designed, relatively inexpensive books. That industrial achievement was the trump over cottage ‘book artistry’. (Morris’s Kelmscott Press made handsome books, no question. But they were expensive, exclusive items.)

We can make a related point by considering modernist typography as an inherent paradox. Let us start by noting Tschichold’s (and other modernists’) penchant for rules that aren’t, because they can be broken. How are faux-rules—that is, apparently load-bearing elements that can in fact be omitted, without the roof coming down—different from the faux-classical Greek pillars-as-facades, or mock-Tudor fake beams that are the targets of modernist purism? If it is hideous to perpetrate false-front deceptions in architecture, how not in philosophy of typography? But then all modernist manifestos are hideous, betraying their own ‘form follows function’ spirit with every strictly false, sweeping declaration on behalf of the New.

The trouble goes deeper, where typography concerned. Fashion in type is sometimes analogized to fashion in clothing (a typeface is a suit of clothes for the alphabet); or, more frequently, to architecture. But there is a problem with the former comparison: namely, there is no such thing as ‘naked’ letters ‘in themselves’. This shows up a limitation with the architectural analogy (generally sound though it is). What is the ‘function’ of a letter—of an A, say? Its function is, simply, to look clearly like an A. That is, its function is to imitate, appreciatively, earlier forms that looked like A’s. But if ‘function must follow form’ is the solution to the riddle of how form can follow function, this is a paradox that challenges the coherence of the modernist philosophy.

This is not to say that letter shapes cannot be objectively well-suited to (or ill-suited to) materials or media—stone and chisel, pen and paper, moveable type, software and display. Still, given that the function of an A is to look like an A, there can be no ahistorical reading off of a formal solution to the problem of what ‘functions best’, from the underlying material conditions. This is, in a sense, the burden of at least one late Tschichold essay, “The Importance of Tradition”. It is an insight well illustrated by the diversely successful design products on display in Master Typographer.

In The New Typography, before he sees this, Tschichold discusses the ‘problem’ of ugly proliferation of typefaces as if it were analogous to the problem facing an engineer tasked with getting a train from one end of Europe to the other, before there has been any standardization of track gauges. Such a problem no doubt calls for a simple, uniform, even authoritarian (if you want to put it that way) reduction of the ugly many to the functionally optimal one: an engineering standard. But a reading eye, thrown by a shift from Roman to Fraktur, or from serif to sans serif, is not nearly enough like a train unable to run on a different track gauge to warrant the conclusion that modern typography is an engineering problem like the track problem.

An ‘A’ does not aspire to be (if only we scraped off the ornament) a pure geometrical form. If you design a font with an elegantly minimal triangle A—that’s nice. But it is not ‘truer’ to the nature of A than some ornamental alternative. The puzzle of how to instruct and enable compositors, printers, so forth, to do exactly what is wanted, consistently, is not the same as the question of how to make a really elegantly exact and consistent set of letterforms, or book pages. Tschichold wanted both—and always got them. Still, the problems are quite distinct.

One final thought about Tschichold’s legacy: in time he came to see his youthful modernist enthusiasm as—not so much a mistake, but a blinkered insight about design solutions in an industrial, engineering age. He took the exception—a narrow set of design challenges—for the rule. But, in an odd way, in an internet age, with easy access to Photoshop and all sorts of sophisticated word processing and design software, the exception has become the rule. Perhaps we should now say Tschichold’s limited, modernist truth was a premature post-modern truth (post-something; post-Gutenberg, perhaps). What his modernist associate László Moholy-Nagy called ‘typofoto’—the aesthetically distinctive synthesis of image and type—is now the norm, for better or worse. Mixed words and images are the design default, from which pure text and pure image are the departures. Architecturally speaking, a classic book poses a most worthy, yet non-paradigmatic design problem: namely, how to design a handsome door, leading into a very long hallway, down which one walks until one comes to the exit. (A novel, for example.) One would hardly make the solution to the problem of how to design a hallway the template for evolving solutions to every other sort of problem in architecture.

Tschichold’s modernism becomes ever more irrelevant and fantastic-sounding, insofar as it consists of statements of alleged engineering necessity. I have a thousand fonts on my computer; there is not much point pretending this is much of a technical drag on my system. But Tschichold is ever more relevant, the more fonts I collect, the more Photoshop effects I can generate, as a teacher of ‘tact’ (as he called it), as a master maker of things of beauty worthy of study and admiration.

Cees W. de Jong (ed.): Jan Tschichold — Master Typographer. His Life, Work, and Legacy
Thames and Hudson: New York 2008
ISBN 13: 978-0500513989
Hardcover, 384 pages, 350 illustrations (150 in colour), US$ 75.00

John Holbo is an Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore. He is also a regular contributor to cultural-political blog Crooked Timber.