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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 Axel Vieregg

Günter Eich (Photo by Hilde Zemann; used with kind permission of the copyright holder, H. Mulzer)

At last a major portion of the poetry of Günter Eich (1907 – 1972) has been made accessible to an English-speaking readership in a new translation. Angina Days is the title that Michael Hofmann, the translator and himself an acclaimed poet, gave to his selection, quoting a line from one of Eich’s poems. Eich would have enjoyed the ambiguity: “Angina”, in German, is a harmless tonsillitis, and so it is in the poem, while in English it is a critical heart disease. On another  level, the difficulty any translator of poetry has with rendering not just words but also meaning is, in this instance, resolved: “Angina” is a cognate of “Angst” – and that is a feeling which pervades much of Eich’s work.

In an interview of 1964 Eich stated that his main concern had been to “make suffering visible”, to prevent it from being overlooked. He had had high hopes after the end of the war in 1945 that a better world would rise from the ashes. His famous Inventur (Inventory), written when he was still in an American P.O.W. camp on the banks of the Rhine ranks as one of the most striking examples of that spirit of “Zero Hour”, which saw in a radical break with tradition the precondition of a new beginning. Defiantly, the poem lists the writer’s building blocks, his most basic possessions:

This is my cap,
my coat,
my shaving kit
in the burlap bag.

This tin can:
my plate and my cup.
I scratched my name
in the soft metal.

Scratched it
with this precious nail,
which I keep out of sight
of thieving eyes. [...]

The pencil lead
is my favourite:
by day it writes out lines
that come to me at night.

This is my notebook,
this is my canvas,
my towel,
my thread.

Language is here pared back to the minimum, rhyme and conventional poetic vocabulary have disappeared. The poem culminates in the utensils of the craft of the writer, “pencil lead” and “notebook” as if to say: Mind will triumph over matter. The pen will be mightier than the sword.

Michael Hofmann’s judicious selection allows the reader to follow Eich’s development as a poet in detail. It is a journey which accompanies and reflects upon the personal, political and social issues of his time, the Cold War, rearmament, the German “Economic Miracle”, the  Vietnam War, the suffering of the poor and oppressed. It is also an inner journey which was going to lead Eich far away from his earlier beginnings. Needless to say that the optimism expressed in Inventur was not going to last.

In his poetry Eich hardly ever addresses issues directly. Rather, they seem to loom behind his texts, affecting imagery, mood and tone – one of the characteristics that make Eich’s later texts seemingly enigmatic. That is a challenge, and in most cases Michael Hofmann has met it admirably. Fluid and succinct, his translations catch Eich’s dry and laconic sound extremely well. Problems, however, arise when subtleties are overlooked, or when the nature of the text is such that an adequate rendering into readable English is well-nigh impossible.    

What follows here is therefore not intended as a critique, but as annotations and footnotes  meant to clarify some of Eich’s major concerns. Too awkward in a handsome volume of poetry, they seem to me nevertheless required in order to shed additional light on the work of one of the leading poets of post-war Germany, who has been “unjustly neglected in English”, as Hofmann rightly says.

Older Germans will remember the hours they spent listening to their valve radios when a new radio play by Günter Eich was broadcast at primetime. In the 1950s, television, in both East and West Germany, was still a novelty and few people owned a set. Radio plays provided the sounds that entered the mind more deeply and affected it more personally than any TV image ever could. Voices became inner voices, dramatic conflicts became inner conflicts. The medium suited Eich ideally: “I perceive the world through the ear rather than through the eye”, he once said, and his probing, questioning and searching enquiry into ever elusive certainties and realities made for an enthralling radio experience.

Eich’s approach was also ideally suited for the early post-war period. There was in Germany, at a time when the  Cold War was looming and before the  “economic miracle” began  benefiting the individual, an all-pervading sense of unease, of Angst  (Eich uses the word repeatedly). There was an awareness of loss: the loss of lives, of property, of beliefs and old certainties, even of self-worth. There was also an underlying feeling of guilt, mostly unacknowledged and hidden under self-pity, complacency and – almost frenzied – efforts to rebuild one’s own life, home, and self-respect. Eich saw through such efforts, exposed the unease and underlying guilt, but, first and foremost, he called for vigilance to avoid a relapse into an unfeeling barbarism.

The point of departure – and often it is an actual departure – of his “classic radio plays (1950 – 1958) is the sudden loss of the security of empirical reality. Träume – “Dreams”- is the characteristic title of the first of his great post-war radio-plays (1950). It hit the German radio audience like a bombshell and drew furious responses from many listeners who wanted to be entertained rather than disconcerted.

In “Dreams” Eich describes our waking state as a sleep “into which we have all been lulled” while to dream means in fact to awaken in the true reality. The listener is confronted with five endgames, each located in a different continent and hence universal. They are parables of man’s bleak existential situation, recognised with terror in the dream, but immediately forgotten on awakening. The play ends with the ever louder gnawing sound of termites and the crumbling to dust of a world where “the ground on which we stand is just a thin skin, everything is hollow inside.”

Eich then adds a coda which became famous as a poem in its own right (translation Hofmann, my own closer reading in square brackets):

Wake up, your dreams are bad! Stay awake, the nightmarishness [horror] is coming nearer.
To you it is coming, though you live far from the places of bloodshed. [...]
No, don’t sleep while the governors of the world are busy!
Be suspicious of the power they claim to have to acquire on your behalf!
[...]
Do what is unhelpful [what cannot be used], sing songs from out of your mouths that go against expectation [those songs they don’t expect to hear from your mouths]!
Be ornery [Be obstreperous], be as sand, not oil in the thirsty machinery of the world!

Or: “Gum up the works” as Hofmann himself suggests, in his introduction, as an alternative rendering of Eich’s ringing appeal: “seid Sand, nicht Öl im Getriebe der Welt!” – “be the spanner in the works” would be the closest idiomatic equivalent of the German saying. A clear understanding of these lines is important. Because it is from here that Eich’s concerns, his motives and motifs, as well as his imagery can best be traced.

Few people recognised at the time to what extent the appeal owed its intensity to Eich’s very own and very personal feelings of guilt. Not until the 1980s, through the investigations of Glenn R. Cuomo in the United States and those by Hans Dieter Schäfer and Wolfram Wessels in Germany, did it become apparent that Eich had indeed been “oil in the machinery” of Hitler’s Third Reich. The 1991 edition of his Collected Works, as well his correspondence which had by then become accessible, could confirm that, with over 160 contributions to the Nazi broadcasting system, which culminated in the 1940 anti-British propaganda play Die Rebellion in der Goldstadt, Eich had been one of the most prolific and popular radio authors of the Third Reich. He was no follower of the regime, but, as the title of Cuomo’s investigation Career at the Cost of Compromise suggests and his investigation then shows, had certainly not sung songs “which go against expectations”. His ”songs” had met them rather: numerous pieces of light, folksy entertainment, as demanded by the authorities, precisely to “lull” the German audience “asleep”. His assertion, in his CV of 1946 or 47, which Hofmann quotes, that in the previous “ten years I did not write a line” (i.e. of poetry, but that, too, is not strictly correct) rings hollow.   

While Eich never revealed his involvement in Third Reich broadcasting openly and in plain prose, much of his post-war production reflects his attempt to come to terms with the past, to distance himself from it, to warn against gullibility and to draw the moral and aesthetic consequences. Fallibility and awakening, guilt and atonement, the appeal to recognise and to mitigate suffering, self-sacrifice in the service of others – these then become the dominant themes. Despair that so little has been learnt, indeed that Creation itself is deeply flawed, characterises the work of his final years.

A poem written in 1961 and dedicated to the Jewish (!) poet and Nobel-Prize winner Nelly Sachs comes closest to a confession. It also clearly develops Eich’s aims as a writer:

Game Paths

for Nelly Sachs

Don’t mention the hunters!
I sat by their fires,
I understood their language.
They know the world from the beginning
and do not question the woods.
You nod to their answers,
the smoke of their fires, too, affirms them,
and they are practiced
not to hear the scream
which annuls all world orders.

No, we want to be alien
and be astounded at death,
collect the breaths of the uncomforted,
cut across the tracks
and deflect the barrels of the rifles.

(translation A.V.)

It is hardly necessary to consult Nelly Sachs’ poetry for the numerous inter-textual references Eich makes to recognise what is meant by the hunters, their game, their fires, by the smoke. Michael Hofmann, in his introduction, talks about Eich’s many “gestures of refusal”: “Eich affirms one of the most ancient human freedoms, that of saying ‘no’”. This poem, which Hofmann does not include, could have served as an illustration.

There are other, oblique references which Eich makes to his past. The shortest is a three-line poem where the “gesture of refusal”, the rejection of any demands made on him is dialectically linked to his early entrapment. Unfortunately, due to the impossibility of rendering the ambiguity in English, the reference is lost. Michael Hofmann translates:

Thank you, but leave us.
We have already been to the caves
of the rat catchers.

Whereas Eich really says: “Long ago we had already been inside the caves / of the Pied Pipers”, (“in den Höhlen der Rattenfänger“). It is a “Once bitten twice shy”, or, as the equivalent German saying goes: “Gebranntes Kind scheut das Feuer”, a burnt child shies away from the fire. That is the meaning of “the burnt children” – “die gebrannten Kinder” – in the poem Brothers Grimm, an allusion which the literal translation in Angina Days also cannot convey. German 20^th ct. history is indeed a Grim(m) fairy tale!

Increasingly, Eich developed a cryptic, hieroglyphic style of writing. “Templates for meditation” he called his late texts. The reader is sent on a quest for meaning – through empathy, through following cross references and deciphering key words, through unravelling plays on words. This presents a daunting challenge to any translator. Michael Hofmann translates the last lines of Bestellung (Order) as follows:

hurry up and serve the dishes
that don’t exist,
and uncork the marvels!

Then we won’t mind
opening our mouths
and paying what we owe.

Lost in this translation is Eich’s play on words in the last line, and lost with it is the theme of the poem: “was wir schuldig sind” translates not just as “what we owe” but as “for what we are guilty of”. Currency is the obolus for Charon: “the penny under the tongue”. An early draft of the poem underscores the context of guilt and atonement. One of the “marvels” the speaker wants “uncorked” is a “brandy distilled from tears”.  A similar constellation occurs in the earlier poem Andenken, (Memorial). While the fires are out, their smoke still lingers: “The wind is full of black dust. / It scours the names off the gravestones / and etches in ours / on this day today” – and not “etches this day into us” as Michael Hofmann translates.

Eich’s “gestures of refusal” focus on the opposition to all forms of “Einverständnis”, i.e. agreement, acceptance, assent and affirmation. In Dreams and in its coda, or in Wildwechsel, the emphatic “no” can be understood as a largely political and social protest. Gradually, however, Eich’s rejection of any “establishment” widens into an all-embracing existential revolt, a revolt against God: “I am mad at the establishment, not just the political, but the establishment of Creation”, he said in 1970 in an interview with students from a Berlin High School. Or again in 1971, a year before his death: “Today I no longer accept nature: even although it is unalterable. I am against acceptance [das Einverständnis] of things in Creation. It is always the same thought process: acceptance no longer [das Nichtmehr-einverstandensein].”

Such a rejection of consent calls for persistent questioning, for a rejection of “answers” to which one simply “nods”, as in Wildwechsel.  “With my verse I raise questions. My faith in answers is minimal, my agreement [Einverständnis] is lacking.” The ultimate question for Eich is that which, with the black humour so characteristic of his late work, he calls the “Schlupfwespenfrage (I, 341), i.e. the “ichneumon-question”. It is, of course, the age-old philosophical problem of theodicy, the question why God allows evil and suffering to exist. A passage from the project of a requiem (1957) which remained unpublished during Eich’s lifetime illustrates what is meant:

[...] you can add Creation,
tally-ho and feast of slaughter,
the mouse between the teeth of the cat,
eggs of the ichneumon
in the paralysed body of the caterpillar,
the harmony of horror…

The ichneumon-fly with its sting paralyses the caterpillar, lays its eggs into its body, which is then eaten alive by the larvae. That, for Eich, made Creation a scandal. Such is the scandal that it makes even the dead stir in protest: “the shaking of the gravestones / when the caterpillar arches under the paralysing sting” (Two in the Afternoon). But this is not what the reader finds in Angina Days. Michael Hofmann’s translation fails to evoke the significance of this central concept of Eich’s, and so the line reads instead: “the crippled caterpillar wriggles” – which eliminates the sting, and with it the ichneumon-fly.

Such a scandalous state of the world convinced Eich that any seeming harmony and beauty in nature were just a thin veneer, a ploy even, to make us acquiesce, so as to obtain our “Einverständnis” with the world as it is: “In the evenings / the sunsets are intended to reassure you”, he wrote already in 1955. In his late subversive prose pieces, the Maulwürfe (“moles”, because they undermine all accepted tenets), Eich revisits his themes in a self-mocking theatre of the absurd. In Hausgenossen (“Flat Mates”) “Mother Nature” enters, her mouth smeared with blood, and proudly displays her latest model: “Here, the praying mantis. While his abdomen copulates with her, she gobbles up his thorax. Yuck, mama, I say, you are unappetising. But the sunsets, she giggles.”

In Michael Hofmann’s selection all these aspects are present, but, unfortunately, his translations frequently obscure or ignore them. In Poor Sunday he gives a splendid English rendering of Eich’s mocking picture of the good citizens, all dressed up for their Sunday outing: “it’s hoist all sails and nipples / erect and health here we come.” Basking in self-satisfaction it is their hour: “hour of the magnificent” (“Stunde der Prächtigen”), and one might well hear an echo of “Lorenzo der Prächtige”, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Medici banker. (Before the advent of leisure-wear, conservative Germans used to don their “Sunday Best” – “hoist all sails” – for a stroll through the park; that was then to become designer sportswear.) These are the yes-men, those who have all the answers. But Hofmann translates the line as “hour of splendor” and so the people and the allusions disappear. For Eich, after all, it is but a “poor Sunday”. He mocks the show of wealth and jollity which cannot hide the existential void, nor can the beauty of nature, in this case that of the “sycamore glades”. Their “abgekartete Schönheit” does not translate as “hand-me-down beauties”, as Hofmann has it, but as a beauty “rigged”, a beauty “connived”. Consequently, a useless reject, it can now be consigned to “the museum of consolations” [where] “the drooling sun / points at the merry dust.” Dust to dust – it is a poem about the vanity of all things, a mockery of all solace.

There is a similar derision in Ohne Unterschrift where Eich does list “The answers: caterpillars under the bark / of felled poplars [...] // A world order of cut flowers / and the pleasing line of forest edges. [...] // no more questions now, assent [Einverständnis]…” But, with the caterpillars, the ichneumon is not far. These answers are not his answers: he refuses to subscribe to such cheap and naive satisfaction. The title translates as Unsigned. Rather, these answers are those of “my enemies / with their assent”, as he says in Zwei [Two]: “die Feinde / mit ihrem Einverständnis.” Here, however, Michael Hofmann translates: “with their common purpose”. Consistency is lost and with it a central element of Eich’s thinking.  

Eich’s late work is steeped in utter pessimism: “Vain the cruel hope / that the screams of the tortured / might pave the way for a brighter future” (Topography of a Better World). Vain also – Eich had come to realise – was any hope that his writing, intended “to make suffering visible”, could have any consequences. The optimism expressed in the Inventory of 1945 is refuted in a poem from 1966, not included by Hofmann. The similarity of its minimalism makes it almost look like a companion piece, but this time it is a balance sheet – with nothing under the bottom line:

Less

Fewer goals
and smaller,
rice-grain sized.

Not lavish,
most things
in meditations.

Already suited
for poverty and
toothlessness.

Brief screams still
across the tarmac,
unnoticed.

Told or
untold,
and rice-grain sized.

(Translation A.V.)

The “screams” of the suffering which Eich wanted his readers to hear in so many of his texts (cf. Game Paths) still re-echo, but whether “told or untold”, it makes no difference. By now, Eich had reached his ultimate position: that of the Oriental sage, withdrawn into his “rock garden”, meditating over a grain of rice: “I have been here / and here / I could have / gone there too, or stayed at home. / You can understand the world / without leaving home. / I encountered Lao Tse / before I met Marx.[...]”. (Delayed, from Occasions and Rock Gardens) Eich had indeed studied Sinology.

The “meditations” are reflected and passed on in what became Eich’s final literary triumph, the anarchic short prose texts of his “Moles”, “Maulwürfe”, most of them still waiting to be translated into English. They are cackling deconstructions of any form of “Einverständnis”, of acceptance, including that of logic and grammar, a rejection of and reduction to absurdity of a world gone awry. A poem written shortly before Eich´s death, and definitively rendered by Michael Hofmannn, points the way:

AND

Fog fog fog,
hair
in my ears, a
noncommittal
friendliness
and
and
and Raissa’s sweet laugh.

Experience tells
what belongs with what
what belongs with and,
only with and.
No rationale.

It will last
as long as the and doesn’t
slip my mind like the other words.
It’s enough, thanks, it’s plenty.

Günter Eich: Angina Days. Selected Poems
Translated and introduced by Michael Hofmann
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4008-3434-1
Cloth, 216 pages, US$24.95

Axel Vieregg has written extensively on  Günter Eich and edited Vols. I and IV of his Gesammelte Werke (Collected Works), 1991. He lives in Palmerston North, New Zealand, where he was a professor of German literature at Massey University.

(c) 2011 The Berlin Review of Books.

by Rupert Thomson

The Poetry Lesson is a lucid yet playful book, that slips between memoir and fiction, jaunty anecdote and pure tangent, as it describes the first lesson of an ‘Introduction to Poetry Writing’ course, in the last year of its teacher’s institutional career. This subject allows Andrei Codrescu to take in many themes, often from a subtly double perspective, such as retirement and youth, or memoir and fiction. One could push this a little further to identify another theme as a sort of ‘double-double’, as Codrescu explores both the intense reality of poets’ lives and the intangibility of their writing, as well as what could be thought of as the intangibility of life and the intense reality of poetry.

Codrescu is himself a veteran poetry teacher, and also a fine poet, essayist and speaker. This book concerns itself with teaching, with poetry, with 20th century cultural history, the impact of age on one’s perspective, and, to an extent, the state of the world today. But above all it is a work of literature, a meditation on writing and experience. Codrescu has acquired an impressively light touch in both his poetry and his prose, but he does not write lightly. The weight he puts behind the elegant frivolity on display throughout The Poetry Lesson is often in this vein: playing with the inherent mysteries of the everyday, and making merry with the parallels of continuity and contradiction.
 

Andrei Codrescu (Photo by Eduard Koller, used under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License)

The book is quite short (a little over one hundred pages), and as an account of a university teaching session has a built-in narrative. Codrescu adds a further level of structure by having his teacher work his way around the class, finding a bit about each as he goes, and assigning them a ‘Ghost-Companion’ (‘G-C’) – a poet whose life and work will be their spiritual guide through the course. This allows Codrescu to present, and to judge, various stereotypes of contemporary American youth. He makes no attempt to pretend these are not stereotypes – from the radicalised lesbian to the heir of an eccentric milk-farming family; this way, and by being unrestrainedly sweeping in his judgements, Codrescu is able to pull this otherwise patronising approach off charmingly and effectively. A sample comment: ‘Jason feigned indifference, which is about the only thing the young are very good at. Ours is not a heroic age and it embarrasses them. They prefer doom to nothingness, but there it is: if you can’t have doom, feign indifference.’ He may mean it, but there is also evident a subtext of self-mockery, or at least amused self-awareness.

The class teacher (who shares his profession, wife’s name, and swathes of personal history with Codrescu himself) reminisces, both in his head and while rambling to the assembled students, and as he does so he recalls passages from the lives of notable twentieth century poets. Ranging from the famous to the less well-known – from visiting Laurence Ferlinghetti’s bookshop in San Francisco, to all-night arguments with Ted Berrigan – these are, for the most part, presented in such a way as to give a sense of ‘the poet’ as a fairly normal person. Even when the stories become more showbiz – of topless girls, Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen at the Chelsea Hotel – there is no sense that these artists are ‘better’ than the rest of us: they’re simply living the life their choices directed them to. There is, in truth, little judgement made of the poets Codrescu describes (in contrast to the students), but the implicit comment remains: you too could be one of these people. In this sense, Codrescu is not just imposing his jaunty pedagogy on his students, but the reader too.

Codrescu’s anecdotes often combine the far-fetched with the familiar, giving them an enjoyable mix of plausibility and exaggeration. Drinking gin and smoking spliffs, naked in a hot pool overlooking a volcano, could conceivably be possible. It becomes markedly more so when accompanied by a mid-ranking New Zealand academic, and not, say, Edie Sedgwick.

Despite Codrescu’s writerly self-awareness being evident throughout, there is an enjoyable arrogance to his countercultural references: this isn’t a late-middle aged writer showing he is ‘still hip’, so much one who knows he is ‘more hip’ – at least compared to most of the students his double is now teaching. This applies to his informed analysis of contemporary culture too, exemplified by his sophisticated observations about the relationship between cloud computing and human social relations.

All this being said, the only poetry to feature is in fact one of the students’. And, while it may be Codrescu’s own impersonation of the style a relative novice might adopt, it is not bad – and in the context of the teacher’s generally cutting take on his students’ lack of wisdom, this is significant. The clear sense is that all these kids are worth teaching, and there is every reason to hold hopes for their creative futures.

In lieu of poetry, Codrescu’s wit and concision are reserved more for a series of smart one-liners, that stand alone as well as contributing to his general take on things. ‘The only good imagination is unused imagination’ he quips, intently. Or this more perspicacious suggestion: ‘the right to a prolonged childhood was hard fought-for and laboriously won by generation after generation, wherever and whenever. The long, physical strain of standing and fighting only to earn the right to lie down and dream was humanity’s story.’ This is accomplished irony, and this subtle approach applies to paragraph as well as sentence structure. It is often the short last sentence, delivered after the punch-line (a sentence which could just seem like a pause for the ‘audience’ to laugh, or a segue between ideas) where Codrescu makes his most important point.

But this clever, even seductive approach to meaning is also where The Poetry Lesson slightly falls short of its mark. Codrescu makes a clear point about postmodernism by imagining a ‘crossroads’ in the text (and in the lesson), between the self-reference of the ‘pedagogical-memorialistic mode’ he has so-far employed; and the other route, where ‘something dramatic, momentous, horrible, tragic’ must happen. The teacher takes, as does the book, the former route. Nothing wrong with that, it’s true. But no matter what alertness and sensitivity this may encourage in the reader, the consistent sense of intangibility it creates does rather diminish the sense that a passion for poetry will achieve anything. This may be because this is genuinely how Codrescu feels. That despite a love for teaching his students, their generation is not living up to the radical attitude his own almost took for granted. But nevertheless, there is a feeling of bathos. Of sorts an ode to possibility, The Poetry Lesson unfortunately leaves the reader feeling a little deflated. Entertained, yes, and wiser, for sure. But not exactly inspired. Codrescu has – one has no doubt – had a fantastic teaching career, and inspired many students. Now it seems, still possessed of all his wit and insight, he is retiring from this part of his profession, quietly.

Andrei Codrescu: The Poetry Lesson
Princeton University Press, Princeton 2010.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4008-3604-8
Cloth, 128 pages, US$19.95

Rupert Thomson is a playwright and former artistic director of The Roxy Art House, Edinburgh. Previously, he was an editor at The Skinny magazine. He lives in Edinburgh.

(c) 2011 The Berlin Review of Books.

Interview by Sophie Roell  

Leading Arabic-English literary translator Humphrey Davies, who has lived in Cairo for the past 35 years, paints a picture of contemporary Egypt through words and graphic narratives. Speaking to Sophie Roell, co-editor at FiveBooks and contributor to The Browser (which commissioned the interview), Davies explores the political dimension of everday life in pre-2011 Egypt by looking in depth at five recent books by Egyptian writers: Alaa Al-Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, Ahmed Alaydi’s On Being Abbas El Abd, Khaled al-Berry’s Life is More Beautiful Than Paradise, Khalid Al Khamissi’s Taxi, and Magdy El Shafee’s Metro.  

Demonstrators on Cairo's Tahrir Square, February 2011. (Photo: Ramy Raoof; used under Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic Licence)

Are many members of the expat community spending time in the Square?  

Some of them are. I’ve been down once, not more than that. I personally feel a little awkward pretending to be an Egyptian, even though I’ve lived here for 35 years, to the degree of actually shouting slogans that concern Egyptians and only an Egyptian can say with true sincerity. Meanwhile I entirely support what they’re doing and I try and support it by doing what I can do, which is being a translator.  

I love your choice of books, and especially liked the phrase you used in your email to describe them — that they ‘may help the non-Egyptian reader to understand where Egyptians are at’.  

Yes. They’re all recently written; the oldest was published in Arabic in 2002. They all deal with or reflect some of the main themes in present-day Egyptian society and life.   

Your first book is Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building.  

The Yacoubian Builiding is celebrated, possibly even notorious, for being a real bestseller — originally in Egypt and the Arab world and subsequently in the West, in English and in many other languages. It tells the story of a building in downtown Cairo, and the changes that have affected the building and its inhabitants. So it encapsulates the last 80 years of Egyptian history and it provides a series of extremely sharply drawn sketches of what you might call archetypal figures of our day. You have the aging aristocrat; you have the doorkeeper’s son who becomes a terrorist when his career ambitions are thwarted by the system. There’s a corrupt mega-businessman who winds up trying to battle the government when it wants to take what he considers too big of a bite of his business — and a whole range of other poor and middle class characters who are adapting to the situation as best they can. It’s beautifully written; it’s incredibly readable; it’s often very funny — and I suspect it will go on being read for many years as a kind of portrait of Egypt on the eve of the events that are taking place now.  

So it rings true? These are people you do actually meet?   

I find them incredibly recognisable people, yes.  

One of the reviews said it was ‘gripping’, which seems like a good sign.  

Oh yes. I don’t suppose this was in the author’s mind, but it almost feels like a soap opera. Each new story, each thread, is taken to a certain point — and then he leaves it just at the point when you’re really, really keen to know what happens next and moves on to a different thread. It’s very deftly written.  

Next you’ve chosen On Being Abbas El Abd, by Ahmed Alaydi.  

This book is totally different, conceptually and in style, from the one we were just talking about. It’s a wickedly complex tale. People debate what actually takes place in the book. It’s about a terminally grumpy twenty-something negotiating Cairo’s shopping malls and high-rises. The book as a whole reflects a culture that will be familiar to anybody in Egypt, who sits, as so many here do, at that meeting point between global culture — the internet and the cellphone and so on — and Egyptian street life, the general craziness (and, in the case of this book, the literal craziness) of Cairo. I’ll use a word that will only reveal my age and total squareness when I say it’s very hip. I’m sure there are better words than that now. It’s funny and very smart and fairly weird.  

Is it all about madness? What’s the opening line?  

The introduction is entitled, ‘An Introduction You Can Suck or Shove’, and it starts off with: ‘She wasn’t a corpse yet.’ But yes: the main protagonist, Abbas El  Abd, meets somebody at a psychodrama therapy session that he is attending for reasons that are gradually revealed during the book. (They have something to do with his uncle, who was an experimental psychiatrist who rather overstepped the bounds when he raised his nephew.) So madness is very much at the heart of the book, and there’s a wonderful, several page long list of phobias at one point – most of which, it would seem, the protagonist suffers from himself.  

How does the protagonist fit with the stereotype that seems to feature in every newspaper article about Egypt – the disgruntled youth?   

I wouldn’t go too far down that route, because the hero, or the anti-hero, is not exactly suffering from serious socio-economic problems. He’s not poor; he’s not unemployed. He works in a video store — which is, of course, slightly dated already. He’s disgruntled, but more in the sense of an underlying anger, which is dealt with in a very non-didactic, non-stereotyped way. But there’s a very strong tension running through the book, which perhaps reflects precisely the class to whom the mobilisation of people today is attributed. This is the class of young people who are savvy with the internet, with global communications, and who are totally disenchanted with almost everything about the system in which they’ve grown up. However, you could never call this, on the face of it, a political book. This is a very personal book, though the politics is there in the texture of it.   

On to your next book: Life is More Beautiful Than Paradise [by Khaled al-Berry].  

This is a very interesting counterdose to On Being Abbas El Abd. It’s not fiction, but the autobiography of a young man who grew up in a city in Upper Egypt. His parents are middle class and he drifts into joining one of the most important Islamist groups, the Jama’a Islamiya. A few years later, after spending six months in prison, he drifts out again, as he becomes acquainted with, and attracted to, a humanistic, secular world view. But he explores, from the inside, many of the issues that we in the West never gets to grips with about the Islamist movement: the sorts of things that really matter to them, the sorts of debates that they have. Some of it is almost abstruse. But these issues are vitally important to those people, and make it clear why, for example, the Jama’a Islamiya is at daggers-drawn with other Islamist group[s]. It shows the internal debates and jealousies and tensions that exist there. But despite being a very straightforward, insightful exposition of that sort of material, the book never loses sight of the fact — and this is really interesting and nice — that this was a rebellious, grumpy teenager who really cared about what he looked like and the way he wore his hair.  

So do you often feel, when you read Western media stories about these groups, that journalists just don’t get it?  

Absolutely. They don’t get it because, first of all, they look at them simply as actors on a political stage, and in relationship to the non-Islamist world view. They don’t ever bother to try and get inside the Islamist world view and see what that is. It’s very different, but it’s not without its logic, and it’s carefully elaborated.  

Can you give an example from the book?  

For me as a non-Islamist it may be difficult to summarise. But there’s a rather interesting passage in which Khaled al-Berry recounts how, one day, he was sitting on his own in the mosque, and a stranger came and sat down next to him and got into conversation with him. The older man raises a very complex issue of theology, and the young man, who is only 14 or 15, realises that he’s swallowed the whole of Jama’a Islamiya’s — his particular group’s — thinking. He’s been told what their stands are on various issues, but he’s never had to think it through, he’s never been subjected to debate. And he doesn’t know how to answer this guy, who, as it turns out, represents a different group and is fishing for new adherents. Then a person from Jama’a Islamiya is furious with him, and says, ‘Don’t ever let yourself get into conversation with a stranger again. If someone comes along you tell me and we’ll deal with them…’  

The other thing that’s interesting about this book, and the insider view it gives, is the way the group deals with quite ordinary issues. For example, one of the members of the group turns out to be gay, or is discovered in a compromising situation. How does an Islamist group deal with a gay member?  

How does it?  

How can an Islamist group even have gay members? Well, life is life, people are people, and some people are gay. And even in Islamist groups some people are gay. So what do you do about it?  

Are they able to adapt?  

No-oo. Not adapt. No, definitely not. Though they don’t actually finally expel the guy from the group. But they do subject him to very vicious punishment. But how exactly that is handled is really interesting. The author himself asks, ‘But I thought we were all saints, we’re all good — otherwise we wouldn’t be in this movement. So how can somebody break the rules to do something so taboo?’ And he has to deal with that. All the way through it’s a teenager’s voice, and it’s very authentic.  

One of the other nice things about this book is that the author scrupulously avoids demonising the Islamists. Right at the beginning, he says, ‘I’m not an Islamist, but some of the best people I knew and ever met in my life were members of that group.’ He has immense respect for some of them, even though he has totally rejected their actual point of view.   

What about your next choice, Taxi [by Khalid Al Khamissi]?  

Khalid Al Khamissi (Photo: Asma Al Khamissi, used under Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Licence)

Taxi is a delightful book. It’s 58 short passages each of which is a taxi ride during which the author gets into conversation with the driver. These conversations range over just about every aspect of Egyptian life,  but with a very strong political flavour too — which is the way that conversations with taxi drivers tend to go. It’s very much the view from the street. Obviously the writer is a sophisticated person — he’s a journalist, and he doesn’t try to come off as anything else. But the taxi drivers are taxi drivers, and they represent a wide range of opinion and some are very admirable and some are absolute shits. It’s written largely in Egyptian colloquial, rather than the literary language, and that gives it a lot of the flavour of real life. It rings very, very true – and it’s deceptively easy reading. It’s fun to read but covers a lot of very important subjects in Egyptian society.  

There’s a sweet review on Amazon.com that calls it ‘a book that’ll make you feel guilty you ever tried to bargain down a cab fare in any poor country.’ But is this fiction or non-fiction?  

They’re based on real conversations. I’m sure he’s tidied them up and presents them to make them as cogent as possible, but they’re based on real conversations.  

Your last choice is a graphic novel, Metro [by Magdy El Shafee].   

Yes. This is the first graphic novel in Arabic. It’s almost uncannily prescient. Its hero is a young computer engineer who is gypped out of his rightful earnings by collusion between corrupt businessmen and foreign companies. He’s initially very against the activism that his girlfriend is involved in. His girlfriend goes on marches and takes part in demonstrations. But, by the end, the hero also feels himself pulled into it. He feels finally convinced of the need to do something.  

One thing people have said quite often about the recent demonstrations is that people seem to have lost their fear. And this is one of the things that Magdy wrote about in this book, in 2007. One of the characters says: ‘We’re all in a mousetrap, but no one realises that all we have to do is walk out.’ And elsewhere the hero says something along the lines of, ‘everybody is afraid and that’s what he would most like to see an end to’.  

Magdy deals with corruption, street demonstrations, frustrations of young people — not only of the bright middle class, but other characters too. There’s a blind shoeshine man, a young guy in the slums who wants to be a singer, who ends up being killed when he is hired by the police to be a thug to rough up and molest demonstrators…  

So really very prescient.  

Yes, a very timely book. It was confiscated when it was published. It’s not available in Egypt. Its author was tried and found guilty of offending public morals.  

On what grounds?  

There is one frame in which a woman’s breasts appear. Of which there are a fair number in the Egyptian Museum of Modern Art, but never mind. They needed an excuse because the real motives were political; that’s fairly obvious. At one point in the book, for example, the hero decides that he is going to rob a bank because he can’t think of any other way to get on in life. When he gets inside the bank, he finds a corrupt politician just about to walk off with a suitcase of cash in an unsecured loan —and the politician bears an unfortunately close resemblance to a known public figure… This almost guaranteed that it would be confiscated. It’s not yet published in English, but it has been translated. The author does have an agent, Will Lippincott, and we hope that it will find a publisher.   

This interview was conducted on 9 February 2011, two days before the resignation of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. It was commissioned by The Browser, on whose website it was first published on 16 February 2011. It is here reproduced with permission.  

(c) 2011 by   

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.