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Miniature Metropolis
Miniature
Metropolis
LITERATURE IN AN AGE OF
PHOTOGRAPHY AND FILM

Andreas Huyssen

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England 2015
Copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

First Printing

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Huyssen, Andreas.
Miniature metropolis : literature in an age of photography and fi lm /
Andreas Huyssen.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-674-41672-7 (alk. paper)
1. Cities and towns in literature. 2. City and town life in litera-
ture. 3. European prose literature—20th century—History and
criticism. 4. Feuilletons—History and criticism. 5. Literature and
photography—Europe. 6. Modernism (Literature)—Europe. I. Title.
PN56.C55H79 2015
809'.93358209732—dc23
2014035332
To my students
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 Urban Spleen and the Terror of Paris in

Baudelaire and Rilke 23

2 Kafka’s Betrachtung in the Force Field of Photography

and Film 52

3 Benn in Occupied Brussels: The Rönne Novellas 84

4 Photography and Emblem in Kracauer and Benjamin’s

Street Texts 118

5 Double Exposure Berlin: Photomontage

and Narrative in Höch and Keun 155

6 Benjamin and Aragon: Le Paysan de Berlin 181

7 War and Metropolis in Jünger 218

8 Musil’s Posthumous Modernism 244

Coda. Diving into the Wreck: Adorno’s

Minima Moralia 270

Notes 299

Index 337
Acknowledgments

I t took many years of teaching modernist literature

and culture in comparative perspective before I discovered the
metropolitan miniature as a major and largely misrecognized mode
of modernist writing. First published in the feuilletons of major
Eu ropean newspapers or in little magazines and always engaged
with the challenges literature confronted from new media such as
photography and fi lm, the metropolitan miniature was hiding in
plain sight. But its trajectory from Baudelaire to Benjamin and
Musil has never attracted the historical and theoretical attention it
deserves.
In retrospect, I can discern several dimensions of my earlier work
that had to come together to make this book possible. From the start
of my intellectual life as an academic immigrant to the United States,
there was the challenge modern mass culture posed to high culture
and avant-gardism, a topic that has occupied me since After the Great
Divide (1986). Later came my immersion in urban studies, triggered
by the post-1989 transformation of Berlin, which I wrote about in a
number of essays in Twilight Memories (1995) and Present Pasts (2003).
I then developed my interest in cities beyond the German case in the
wake of a Sawyer Seminar I taught in cooperation with Columbia’s
program in the history and theory of architecture. This resulted in
the edited volume Other Cities, Other Worlds: Urban Imaginaries in a
Globalizing World (2008). The contemporary transformation of the
modernist metropolis in an age of neoliberalism raised questions
about the earlier development of the metropolis and its attendant

ix
x ACK NOW LEDGMENTS

modernisms across the world. Finally, the recent turn in literary

criticism toward visual studies provided a framework that led me to
ask new questions about the specificity of literature in relation to
other media. A seminar on words and pictures I co-taught with Orhan
Pamuk, whose literary imagination is intensely visual, increased my
desire to get back from broader cultural history questions about
the politics of memory in the post-1989 world to the trade I was
originally trained in— close reading of literary texts, expanded of
course to include historical and political context as immanent to the
literary texts themselves. For me such an expanded technique of
close reading remains a sine qua non of literary criticism and cultural
history and their transmission to our students. All of this work over
the decades owes a great deal to constant discussions and exchanges,
academic and non-academic, with David Bathrick, Anson Rabin-
bach, and the late Miriam Hansen, my fellow editors at New German
Critique.
For practical pedagogic reasons, teaching German and Austrian
modernist prose to nonnative speakers always involved teaching
shorter texts alongside the long novel. Fortunately there were a lot of
well-known short prose texts by modernists to choose from, texts
written not just by novelists but also by poets. But it was the street
texts by Kracauer and Benjamin read in light of the Frankfurt School’s
critical theory of modernity that made me ask whether there wasn’t
something like a common trace that ran through this whole trajec-
tory of short prose from Baudelaire to Musil and Benjamin. The an-
swers this book suggests owe a lot to several cohorts of graduate stu-
dents who took my seminars on the modernist novel and on the
metropolitan miniature over these past ten to twelve years and whose
readings, conversations, and papers have influenced the outcome in
more than one way. To them I dedicate this book.
Sustained writing did not begin until a sabbatical year in 2010–11 in
Paris, where four chapters, including the ones dealing with Baude-
laire and Aragon were written while I was a fellow at Columbia’s Reid
Hall. With its inner courtyards, hedges, and sunlit rose garden, Reid
Hall was an oasis of peace and quiet in the midst of bustling Mont-
parnasse. I am grateful for the welcoming ambiance and practical
help Reid Hall’s staff, especially Brune Biebuyck and Nebahat (Naby)
ACK NOW LEDGMENTS xi

Avcioglu, provided for me to do my work, split between Reid Hall

and the new Bibliothèque Nationale. Over lunches at a nearby
bistro on boulevard Raspail, I cherished the companionship and
conversations about modernism with Michael Gorra, who was
then writing Portrait of a Novel, his celebrated book on Henry
James’s Portrait of a Lady. A visit with Jay Winter to the battlefields
of the Somme and the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne
resonated strongly with me while I was writing about Gottfried
Benn in occupied Brussels. It was during that intense and rewarding
year in Paris that the conceptual frame of the project solidified
around the issue of literature’s relationship to media and the modern
metropolis.
Major thanks are due to friends and colleagues who have given
me their reactions to and suggestions about earlier chapter drafts.
Many conversations in Broadway bistros and cafés have gone into the
mix as well. Here I thank Leslie Adelson, Mark Anderson, Stefan
Andriopoulos, David Bathrick, Eric Bulson, Noam Elcott, Devin
Fore, Isabel Gil, Axel Honneth, Helmut Lethen, Reinhold Martin,
Johannes von Moltke, Harro Müller, Dorothea von Mücke, Anson
Rabinbach, Klaus Scherpe, and Abigail Susik. I need to single out
Tony Vidler and Tony Kaes, who read the whole manuscript and gave
invaluable advice for major and minor revisions. Mark Anderson
translated the strangely hermetic passages from Gottfried Benn’s
Rönne Novellas. My assistant Nick Fitch organized image permissions
in an efficient and timely fashion. Diana Reese created the index. Bill
Dellinger and Peggy Quisenberry in my department provided all
kinds of help over the long haul with tasks both small and large. Spe-
cial thanks also go to Matteo Galli, who invited me to the Università
di Ferrara as Copernicus Visiting Scientist to teach a compact sem-
inar in the fall of 2013. It was there under Italian skies, in that very
first European city to feature a completely geometrical urban plan
centuries before Kracauer’s uncanny natural geometry, that I began
to revise the book manuscript. Finally I must acknowledge Rosalind
Krauss, who came up with the title Miniature Metropolis. I feel deep
gratitude to all for their hidden hands in the emergence of this book.
Versions of some of the chapters were given as invited lectures at
the University of Aarhus, the University at Buffalo, Cooper Union,
xii ACK NOW LEDGMENTS

the University of Copenhagen, Cornell University, Dartmouth Col-

lege, Emory University, the Getty Research Institute, the Hammer
Museum in Los Angeles, the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin,
the Institute for Fine Arts in New York, the Institut für Kulturwis-
senschaften in Vienna, Johns Hopkins University, the University of
Illinois in Urbana-Champaign’s School of Architecture, the Univer-
sitá Católica in Lisbon, the Museu de Arte do Río in Río de Janeiro,
the New School University, Northwestern University, Oxford Uni-
versity, Princeton University, the Reina Sofia in Madrid, Stanford
University, Trinity College in Connecticut, Washington University,
Universität Wien, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. My
gratitude goes to all of my hosts and interlocutors at these venues,
friends, colleagues, and students from whose engaging comments
and queries I have benefited more than I can possibly acknowledge
here.
I must acknowledge an earlier essay that took a first exploratory
stab at the topic of the urban miniature and was published in the
PMLA 122:1 ( January 2007): 27–42 in a special issue dedicated
to cities. A much shorter version of the chapter on Benjamin and
Kracauer appeared in two somewhat different versions as “Urban
Miniatures and the Feuilleton in Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Ben-
jamin,” Culture in the Anteroom: The Legacies of Siegfried Kracauer,
ed. Johannes von Moltke and Gerd Gmünden (Ann Arbor: Mich-
igan University Press, 2012) 213–225 and as “The Urban Miniature
and the Feuilleton in Kracauer and Benjamin,” in Literatur inter-
und transmedial, ed. David Bathrick and Heinz-Peter Preusser (Am-
sterdam, New York: Rodopi: 2012), 173–188. I am grateful for the
permission to reprint parts of those last two publications, which
have been incorporated in chapter 4.
Lindsay Waters at Harvard University Press, a friend of many
decades going back to the early days of New German Critique and
his editorship of the Theory and History of Literature series at
the University of Minnesota Press, was the perfect editor to shep-
herd this project to completion. I also thank Shan Wang, Jennifer
Bossert, and Kate Babbitt for their organ izational help and line-
editing savvy.
ACK NOW LEDGMENTS xiii

My deepest thanks and love remain reserved, as always, for my

wife, Nina Bernstein, who was there when I first started writing in
English and has never stopped editing me since then in any number
of ways. To her, our sons, Daniel and David, their partners, Tara
and Mary, and to our grandchildren, Benjamin and June, I owe that
most special debt of gratitude that comes from lifelong love, inti-
macy, and commitment.
Miniature Metropolis
Introduction

The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.

—Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

E ver since the publication of Carl Schorske’s seminal

book Fin de siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (1980) or T. J. Clark’s
The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers
(1984), the culture of metropolitan modernity has challenged the
imagination of humanists and social scientists: the Paris of Baude-
laire and Manet; the Vienna of Klimt and the Secession; the London
of the Bloomsbury group; the Berlin of Taut and Höch, Brecht and
Döblin; the Prague of Kafka and Brod; the Moscow of Eisenstein
and Tretyakov; the New York of Zora Neale Hurston and the Harlem
Renaissance. The spectrum of cities and themes has grown consid-
erably since those earlier seminal publications to include modernist
and avant-gardist circles in Oslo, Milan, St. Petersburg, Barcelona,
Munich, and other cities. Questions of new media; theories of per-
ception, visuality, and aurality in urban life; commerce and fashion;
typologies of gender and sexuality; and the impact of technology
and science have displaced literature, painting, architecture and
even politics from the center of modernism studies to the margins.
There is no question that our understanding of metropolitan cul-
tures has greatly benefited from such an expanded vision. But so far

1
2 MINI AT UR E MET ROPOLIS

the triangular constellation of new media, the modern metropolis,

and modernist literature has not been adequately explored. By fo-
cusing on what I call the metropolitan miniature as a neglected lit-
erary form hidden in plain view, this book undertakes the project of
reading a selected body of texts written by major authors as a sig-
nificant innovation within the trajectory of literary modernism.
This book is the first analytical study that differentiates among the
various uses of the miniature form by canonical writers and theorists
from Baudelaire via Rilke and Kafka to Kracauer and Benjamin,
Musil and Adorno. In fine-grained readings combined with broad
panoramic and comparative vistas, the metropolitan miniature
emerges as one of the few genuinely innovative modes of spatialized
writing created by modernism. In its focus on visual perception, the
rise of new media, and urban time and space, the miniature as a form
also reveals the constitutive relationship between modernist litera-
ture and German critical theory, whose major figures contributed
compellingly to this literary project.
Just as our own time is characterized by the conflation of lived
urban space with digital interconnectedness, new media, and changing
patterns of social interaction, the modernist city of the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries is unthinkable without the rise of mass
publications, new forms of print and image making, illustrated pa-
pers, photography, film, and radio. All of it contributed to a sense of
an accelerating speedup of life, crystallized in the compression of time
and space, as David Harvey has described it.1 The new media of that
earlier metropolitan modernity and all their related social and eco-
nomic practices first challenged the status of high literature and art
as it had solidified in the bourgeois age since the eighteenth century.
Photography, as has often been said, replaced portraiture and cer-
tain forms of painting, with time of exposure shrinking from sev-
eral minutes to the click of the camera. Film took over drama from
the theater and narrative from the novel at the speed of twenty-four
frames per second. The vinyl record and the radio remediated the
live concert. Photography, film, and the recording of sound together
challenged and even threatened the dominant culture of the book
and live performance. Reciprocal porousness between media accel-
erated in the age of mechanical reproducibility, leaving none of the
INTRODUCTION 3

traditional arts untouched. Hybrid forms became commonplace in

conjunction with cultural and social massification in the new metrop-
olis. For many critics at the time, this was not cultural progress but
undesirable contamination, if not plain decline.2 Literary and artistic
high culture kept claiming superiority and tried hard to delegitimize
the new forms of mass entertainment that increasingly invaded and
shaped traditional modes of high culture itself. From the mid-
nineteenth century on, high culture and mass culture, united in in-
creasingly industrialized modes of production and distribution, per-
formed an obsessive pas de deux. At first the dancers still had their
separate bodies. But not for long, as remediation between media and
an ever-increasing interchange between high and low came to be the
norm.
This is the cultural context that generated the metropolitan min-
iature as a paradigmatic modernist form that sought to capture the
fleeting and fragmentary experiences of metropolitan life, empha-
sizing both their transitory variety and their simultaneous ossifica-
tion. As the early work of Kafka shows, motion and its sudden ar-
rest, standstill and its transformation into renewed motion were
central aspects of the urban experience. Akin to the snapshot, the
faits divers, and the news flash, the miniature took its cue from the
new media. As a deliberately short form, it found its privileged venue
in the feuilletons of large urban newspapers and magazines serving
a rushed and distracted readership. Only later were such texts reas-
sembled, reorganized, and often rewritten for book publication as we
now know them. It is telling that critical theorists such as Kracauer,
Benjamin, and Adorno, who in different ways wrote compellingly
about photography and film, are among the major practitioners of
the miniature form. Indeed, this book argues that the literary min-
iature, in its emphasis on visual perception and urban life, always im-
plied a critical theory of bourgeois society. This is true not only of
the interwar Marxist theorists but also of Baudelaire, Rilke, Kafka,
Benn, Aragon, Jünger, Keun, and Musil, the other major figures
treated in these pages. The critique manifested itself in a wide va-
riety of textual practices and in very different politics that this book
analyzes in an alternation of large panorama shots and close-up tex-
tual analysis.
4 MINI AT UR E MET ROPOLIS

Rather than resorting to traditional genre definitions such as frag-

ment, poème en prose, Denkbild, récit poétique, or even short prose (Kurz-
prosa), I interrogate each of my authors in terms of their respective
contexts, influences, and intentions. I illuminate the respective nar-
rative arc of their assemblages to throw light on the trajectory of the
metropolitan miniature as a whole, from Baudelaire in Paris to Adorno
in Los Angeles. The metropolitan miniature permits primary access
to the ways the notion of the literary was transformed from within
the literary project itself rather than from without. Novels had been
published in the newspapers in installments since the early nineteenth
century, and various new forms of feuilleton writing emerged, of
which the miniature is but one example among others such as celeb-
rity gossip, commentary on culture and fashion, and glosses of all
kinds. It is worth noting that all feuilleton texts, rather than being
relegated to a separate cultural segment of the newspaper as they are
today, appeared on the bottom third of the newspaper’s pages, sepa-
rated by a printed line from the main body of reporting.
Much has been written about the late nineteenth century’s pref-
erence for the small form, which seemed to be favored by urban
readers and spectators who looked for stimulation and quick con-
sumption in line with the accelerated speed of modern life. Caba-
rets, variety shows, vaudev ille, panoramas, dioramas, nickelodeons,
and revues flourished. Early silent film, the cinema of attractions with
its slapstick, melodrama, and urban scenes, satisfied the need for en-
tertainment while at the same time training human perception in new
forms of urban life. Cinematic modes of writing using the quick cut,
the close-up, and montage editing invaded literary production. New
narrative, dramaturgical, and poetic techniques were developed that
guaranteed the legitimacy of avant-garde literature as it showed it-
self to be porous to the new technologies and transformations in per-
ception that came in their wake. This was a kind of high cultural ad-
aptation to the new, sometimes facile mimicry or fashionable
grandstanding and at other times creative and critical transforma-
tion. What I call the metropolitan miniature is central to under-
standing this constellation. The disorienting and exhilarating nov-
elty of the metropolis at the end of the nineteenth century and the
immediately following decades must be recaptured and historicized
INTRODUCTION 5

if we want to understand how that crisis of perception and experi-

ence generated the modernist miniature as part of a much broader
process of what one could call the urbanization of modern literature
and the creation of a modernist urban imaginary as an embodied ma-
terial fact, a cognitive and somatic image of city life rather than a
figment of the imagination.3
The term “miniature” to designate this mode of writing is not orig-
inal with this book. I chose it for several reasons. More important
than simply scale is the fact that “miniature” relates intensely to the
visual in the history of art and that it conjures up objecthood: text as
material object in the feuilleton. A main inspiration is owed to Walter
Benjamin who once described the 19th-century arcade or passage as
a city, “a world in miniature.”4 The literary miniature in turn opens
up passages to the metropolitan world of that earlier time. It makes
the metropolis both legible and visible.
The place of the restructuring of temporal and spatial perception,
for which the modernist miniature, like photography and film, was
an important field of experimentation, was the metropolis at a time
when it was still an island of accelerating modernization in a society
in which the slow pace of country and small-town life was still dom-
inant but losing ground—the period of high modernism and the his-
torical avant-garde. Metropolitan cities such as Vienna, Berlin, or
Paris became laboratories of perception. New urban imaginaries and
a whole new scientific discourse about perception itself emerged in
the wake of fast changing cityscapes and scientific experiments with
vision, hearing, and other sensual experiences. There was the emer-
gence of automobile traffic, the electrification of public space, the cre-
ation of the first subways, new forms of mass housing, and the rise
of modernist architecture and urban planning, all of which contrib-
uted to the creation of new visual imaginaries of urban dwelling and
to the accelerated speed of urban experience.5 The constitutive
link between technological media such as cinema and radio on the
one hand and automobile speed, its promises and its dangers, on the
other is nowhere captured better than in the laconic introductory
chapter of Ilya Ehrenburg’s 1929 montage novel 10 PS, one of the
most scintillating reportage novels of Eu ropean modernism.6 Pre-
dictably, in that first chapter, the seduction of ever-accelerating
6 MINI AT UR E MET ROPOLIS

speed combined with media hype in film and on radio ends in a

deadly car crash.
All of this is well known. But it doesn’t quite answer the question:
What specifically was it that made these metropolitan feuilleton texts
modernist beyond the standard tropes of fragmentation, condensa-
tion, acceleration, disjunction, estrangement, and montage? Various
answers will emerge in the course of my readings, but certain fea-
tures are shared by all of these texts. They all understand the urban
condition as the sine qua non of modern life and experience. But they
avoid realistic description, keeping their distance both from the
nineteenth-century urban novel and from the urban sketch in the
tradition of Louis Sébastien Mercier’s 1781 Tableau de Paris, a mode
of journalistic writing found around 1900 and after in the work of
Peter Altenberg, Robert Walser, and Joseph Roth. They avoid plot,
psychological development, and storytelling through fleshed-out
characters, offering instead, as Musil had it, “unstorylike stories” (the
subtitle of a section in his Posthumous Papers of a Living Author). On
the positive side, they offer protocols of dreams rather than descrip-
tions of urban sites, hallucinations rather than ekphrasis, oneiric ef-
fects linked to a cinematic imaginary, inner visions triggered by
threatening urban perceptions, elusive memories rather than eviden-
tial accounts, metamorphoses of spaces in the mind. Psychic experi-
ences are more than simply internal as they are always embodied and
related to the urban environment. There is interpenetration and reci-
procity between the external and the internal. The visible world is
always accompanied, if not haunted by the shadow of what remains
invisible. The compression of space and time that David Harvey has
analyzed so compellingly is always accompanied by a simultaneous
expansion of space and time in the urban imaginary. The miniature
is thick with urban realities that become visible only in their poetic
and narrative metamorphoses—that is, in language.
All of these writers share the obsession with sensual experience,
including sound and tactility besides vision;7 the feeling of terror and/
or exhilaration emanating from space; the loss of boundaries between
private and public space, interior living space, and street space; the
ever-recurring motif of Leere and Hohlraum, void and hollow space;
the Schrift-Bilder (scriptural images or hieroglyphs) of urban adver-
INTRODUCTION 7

tising and their excess of legibility; the pervasive presence of dream

images pointing to an urban unconscious that is fed by photography
and film’s impact on perceptions of urban space. I will give not one
but multiple frames to my discussion, as called for by the respective
texts in question. The frames will be taken as needed from photog-
raphy and film, from the tradition of the emblem, from psychophys-
iology, from discourses about architecture and urban space, and from
the post–World War I critique of anthropocentrism and its ques-
tioning of the relationship of humans to animals and things.

Literary Eigensinn and Remediation in Reverse

The metropolitan miniature was a mode of writing that did not simply
adapt itself to the new technologies and emerging mass cultural forms.
It rather insisted on the Eigensinn (translated as obstinacy, Negt and
Kluge) of literature as medium in its “differential specificity” (Sam
Weber, Rosalind Krauss) in relation to photography and film.8 Its
practitioners did not opt for hybridity, a merging of the visual and
the verbal, pictures and words. Instead they recognized the consti-
tutive thresholds between literature and the visual media. At the same
time, its preferred initial place of publication was the transitory feuil-
leton of metropolitan papers and magazines rather than the fi nite
form of the book. It is this fundamental contradiction of an ambi-
tiously new mode of urban writing first published in organs of mass
circulation that makes the metropolitan miniature sit like a foreign
body in the feuilleton. It is no surprise that its success with readers
only came at a much later time when these texts were reassembled
and revised for book publication, the form in which we read them
today.9 As a major experimental mode of urban writing, the minia-
ture articulated the aesthetic specificity of literary language in its re-
lationship to the new media of photography and film, both of which
took the city and urban life as their major subject. The miniature
did not imitate photography and film but worked through both their
deficiencies and achievements in representing urban life. The goal
was to make these new media productive for the literary enterprise
without resorting to imitation, and it is significant that none of these
miniatures were ever published with photographs or other visual il-
lustrations. The miniature never indulged in the crisis of language,
8 MINI AT UR E MET ROPOLIS

which was such a pervasive theme in modernism around 1900.10 It

rather attempted to show what language could do differently and
sometimes perhaps even better than photography or film. Rather than
falling silent or simply trying to imitate structures and techniques
of photography and film in language, the metropolitan miniature thus
insisted on a notion of the literary that would absorb critically and
imaginatively new ways of seeing and experiencing the city that had
been generated by the new image media. This is what I call the min-
iature’s Eigensinn, or its differential specificity.
This differential specificity is fundamentally linked to remedia-
tion, a phenomenon much discussed in media studies today. The term
“remediation” goes back to McLuhan’s Understanding Media.11
McLuhan argued correctly that every medium was bound to become
the content of the next and newer media technology: manuscript into
print; portraiture into photography; photography and the novel into
film; film into television; television, by extension beyond McLuhan,
into the Internet, which increasingly threatens any differential spec-
ificity of mediums. This is what he called remediation. But it worked
in one direction only, on a linear trajectory. Remediation today is
seen in a more complex multidirectional sense, but the older privi-
leging of the new has been a hard habit to kick.12 Today it is com-
monly acknowledged that older media will often adapt to the newer
ones. Thus the modernist novel adopted cinematic techniques of
narration (Döblin); drama adopted montage (Brecht); film now uses
computer graphics; contemporary prose experiments celebrate hyper-
text. But it is telling that Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s book
Remediation: Understanding New Media chooses to call the refash-
ioning of an older medium a retrograde remediation.13 While there
surely are retrograde uses of new media superficially in the ser vice
of marketing and updating an older medium, there will always be
moments when an older medium reasserts itself by critically working
through what the new medium does and does not do. This is what I
will call remediation in reverse. In the metropolitan miniature, litera-
ture remediates photography and film, thus reasserting its differential
specificity rather than simply clamoring for a facelift. I would further
suggest that it was the prevalence of a multidirectional remediation
around 1900 brought about by the increasing porousness among
INTRODUCTION 9

media that in reaction called forth the intense desire at that time for
the purity and transcendence of language in literature or of vision
in the painting of an emerging high modernism. But even film, in the
1920s, aspired to an absolute cinema, un cinéma pur, and photography
too was very much concerned with its differential specificity, its
Eigensinn. The line between the insistence on a medium’s differen-
tial specificity and the delusion that purity was attainable, however,
is sometimes difficult to draw.
At stake with the metropolitan miniature, then, was not a claim
for the purity of language and literature as in late-nineteenth-century
symbolism but instead the profound transformation of the literary
project itself that challenged the disciplining borderline between lan-
guage and the visual, between narrative and spatial representation,
as it had been codified in the eighteenth century in Lessing’s Lao-
koon.14 The texts discussed in this book provide a wealth of examples
for this largely undertheorized phenomenon within modernism, the
other side of what Franco Moretti has called the modern epic as dis-
tinct from the novel.15 Similar to the scholarly neglect or domestica-
tion of the modern epic, the miniature has been seen as a minor genre
at best by comparison with the heroic efforts of the modern novel or
the seminal cycle of poems. And even where it has been recognized
as an important part of a given writer’s oeuvre (Kafka, Jünger, and
Benjamin come to mind), it is more often described summarily rather
than actually read. Despite the fact that “the minor” has become such
a major concern in poststructuralist theory (petits récits in Lyotard,
littérature mineure in Deleuze and Guattari), the miniature has not
yet found the treatment it deserves as a significant rather than a sec-
ondary or supplemental mode of modernist writing. If it is supple-
mental at all, then it is so only in a post-Derridean sense: the major
wouldn’t be the major without the minor. To put it differently: the
modernist city novel looks different if seen in light of the metropol-
itan miniature. It is enough to compare the great city novels of the
nineteenth century, including Fontane’s Berlin novels, written as late
as the 1880s and 1890s, with Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
or the somewhat later modernist city novels by Joyce, Dos Passos,
and Döblin to realize that something fundamental had changed in
the literary representation of social space and regimes of perception
10 MINI AT UR E MET ROPOLIS

in the city. A new urban imaginary took shape characterized by un-

stable subject positions, the breakup of plot, discontinuous narrative,
hallucinatory imaginaries, and fragmented spaces of perception. In-
deed, one claim of this book is that the trajectory initiated by the
Baudelairean prose poem and culminating with the modernist min-
iature of the interwar years is one of the few genuinely novel modes
of writing created by modernism in its complex and often tortured
love affair with the feuilleton of European papers such as La Presse
or Le Figaro in Paris, the Neue Presse in Vienna, the Neue Rundschau,
the Frankfurter Zeitung, the Vossische Zeitung, and other dailies, week-
lies, or monthlies in Germany, Austria, and France. Eventually, the
fragmentation of experience combined with a disorientation of per-
ception and their rendering in non- or anti-narrative form was to be-
come part of the modernist novel itself. It was the urban miniature
in which new forms of spatialized writing were first experimentally
tested before they found their place in the city novels of Döblin or
Keun, Joyce or Dos Passos. As a form, the miniature is fi rmly
grounded in the micrological experience of metropolitan space, time,
and life at that earlier stage of modernization when new shapes and
scales of urban modernity emerged at accelerated speed but did not
yet penetrate the totality of national social and political space. If the
modern epic in Moretti represents something like national encyclo-
pedias in the form of macroscopic fictional maps, then the modernist
miniature in all its incredible variety represents the microscopic con-
densation of a metropolitan imaginary that never gels into or even
aims at some encyclopedic totality.

The New Form That Could Not Be Named

The metropolitan miniature as a specific historical form tied to a
stage of metropolitan developments in Europe emerges only in ret-
rospective. Testimony about its novelty and elusiveness at the time
comes from the authors themselves who engaged in the writing of
miniatures. They simply did not know how to name this new mode
of writing. Thus, Ernst Bloch, another contributor to the miniature
with his Spuren (Traces) and sections of Heritage of Our Times, lamented
in a letter to Kracauer of June 6, 1926: “If only we had a name for
the new form, which is no longer a form.”16 In his diaries, Kafka spoke
INTRODUCTION 11

of his “little pieces” (“Stückchen”) and “things” (“Sachen”), and in a

letter to Felice Bauer he added a self-deprecating dimension and spoke
of “my little prevarications” (“meine kleinen Winkelzüge”).17 Benjamin
used a variety of terms such as “aphorisms, witticisms, dreams” (“Aph-
orismen, Scherze, Träume”); only later did he introduce the term
‘thought images” (“Denkbilder”).18 Robert Musil in turn, in a review
of Kafka’s first book publication, Betrachtung, singled out Kafka’s short
prose and Robert Walser’s feuilleton pieces as the prototype of a new
mode of writing that was “not suitable to preside over a literary
genre.”19 The new form emerged as anti-form, then, resistant to the
laws of genre as much as to systemic philosophy or urban sociology,
crossing the boundaries between poetry, fiction, and philosophy, be-
tween commentary and interpretation, and, centrally, between the
verbal and the visual. This instability of genre, I would suggest, is
owed primarily to what I call remediation in reverse.
Despite the chronological arrangement of the chapters, the point
of this book is not to construct a continuous or even teleological tra-
dition of the metropolitan miniature from Baudelaire to the interwar
period in twentieth-century Europe. There never was a blueprint for
a new genre, nor should it be constructed retrospectively. What in-
terests me is the contingent constellation of new and powerful urban
experiences from the mid-nineteenth century on, new modes of mass
publication, and an emerging competition between print literature
and visual media that created the metropolitan miniature as a major
form of literary modernism. As always in such matters, there were
discrete cases of influence (Baudelaire on Rilke and Benjamin, Kafka
on Kracauer, the closeness between Benjamin and Kracauer), but
overall there is just a felicitous juxtaposition of analogous writing
projects that all preserve their differential specificity vis-à-vis each
other. At the same time, the experience of the modern metropolis
and the perceptual changes wrought by the new visual media appear
consistently as a common denominator of these texts. So if in the
end there should appear some arc spanning those decades, all the
better.
One difficult question is why this new form, which as form seems
less bound than the novel or the modern epic to a national culture,
flourished so emphatically in German and Austrian writing after its
12 MINI AT UR E MET ROPOLIS

emergence in mid-nineteenth-century Paris in the unique work of

Baudelaire.20 It may have been an effect of the exceptionally fast-paced
late-nineteenth-century processes of urban growth in cities such as
Vienna and Berlin compared with such older Eu ropean cities as
London and Paris, which, by the end of the nineteenth century, had
slower growth rates than either Vienna or Berlin.21 But it also reflected
the impact of an ever more aphoristic and anti-systemic mode of
writing philosophy that had emerged with Kierkegaard and Nietz-
sche and influenced many of the miniaturists. When it comes to the
miniature in the interwar period, it surely can be related to the col-
lapse of the German and Austrian Empires in 1918. In Germany and
Austria, the losers of the Great War, urban transformations were ex-
acerbated in the 1920s and 1930s by extreme economic instability and
political volatility. After World War I, it was not uncommon to see
the city described as a battlefield, a metaphor that came to be reality
in the civil war–like armed confl icts in the early and late Weimar
Republic. Benjamin’s theory of urban shock as an aesthetic phenom-
enon is hardly thinkable without reference to the phenomenon of shell
shock in the war which itself gave rise to the Freudian theory of
trauma and accounts for the privileging of a shock aesthetic in the
historical avant-garde. Specifically urban shock appears frequently
in the description of car accidents, as in texts by Kafka, Brecht, and
Musil. But these texts are not part of miniature collections, and the
theme of shock has perhaps been overemphasized in the wake of Ben-
jamin’s writing. Benjamin’s own literary miniatures after all are rather
devoid of urban shock experiences.
Today the specific crisis of perception that initiated a new relation-
ship to space and time as it is articulated in the modernist miniature
has become history, if not nostalgia and cliché. All too often today
the texts resulting from this crisis are simply read as anticipating post-
modernism. Witness the scholarly focus on Weimar surfaces (as op-
posed to modernist depth), the cult of the flaneur (as opposed to bour-
geois inwardness), rhizomic culture (as opposed to the teleology of
modernity), minor literature (as opposed to canonical high mod-
ernism), and the culture of the spectacle (as opposed to real art).
Whatever Weimar was, it was not postmodern. To read it that way
is the kind of presentist appropriation and backshadowing we must
INTRODUCTION 13

resist if we are interested in the specificity and non-identity of cul-

tural phenomena over time. It is precisely because there is some truth
to the argument that something fundamental has changed in post–
World War II urban modernity that we should guard against such
elisions of historical difference. For since World War II, in contrast
to the decades preceding it, metropolitan urbanity in the West has
invaded and saturated all social space via consumerism, the automo-
bile, extended freeway systems, air travel, and mass communications.
It was a development Adorno could already observe in the larger Los
Angeles area in the 1940s when he was writing his Minima Moralia.
While short prose is still being written in various forms, we’d have
to look to other media and their effects on our lives if we wanted to
find out whether or not the perceptual regime of modernism has it-
self been altered or transformed into something new in our own
time.22 One author who still works with the legacies of the modernist
miniature today is filmmaker and storyteller Alexander Kluge, but
he is an exception and fast becoming historical himself in a media
world in which his main media, film and story, are themselves be-
coming obsolete or at least appear dated. When Kluge described the
storyteller as the guardian of time, he had Benjamin in mind, and
his own stories from Lebensläufe to Chronik der Gefühle and beyond
can be read as yet another transformation of the miniature. They
differ significantly, however, from the earlier tradition in that they
no longer focus as centrally on urban life as the laboratory of the
new.23 They also no longer shun the inclusion of photographs and
other visual materials. By the post–World War II period, the urban
condition had become all encompassing. The world now was inter-
connected and planetary issues were pushed ever more to the fore-
ground in Kluge’s writings. That is why with Kluge as guidepost I
let the metropolitan miniature end in a coda with Adorno’s Minima
Moralia. In the second half of the twentieth century, the metropol-
itan city in the West becomes either invisible, as in Italo Calvino’s
marvelous book Invisible Cities, with its strong dose of nostalgia, or
it assumes another kind of (in-)visibility requiring different forms of
aesthetic mediation. The question of how to represent the urban in
an age of digital interconnectedness, global megacities, and ever-
expanding urban conglomerations clearly has entered another stage.24
14 MINI AT UR E MET ROPOLIS

Bilder
As remediation in reverse emerges as a major characteristic of the
metropolitan miniature, we need to determine how precisely these
writers approached photography and film, thus generating affinities
in difference. It was the shortness of their texts, their frequent focus
on a single phenomenon of metropolitan life, their shunning of ex-
tended narrative structures, and their investment of observation with
philosophical and conceptual penetration that marked both affinity
and difference. The careful use of metaphor as imagery in language
itself guarded them from falsely opposing picture and word, image
and language. Obsessed as they all were by the power of the image
in its relationship to language, they considered Bilder as central to
their writing (“Bild” in German means picture as well as image). This
obsession was a key factor within modernism, the art and culture of
a time in which new image media and new means of reproduction
threatened the primacy of the original poetic word, that key pillar
of bourgeois understanding of a national language-based culture. One
might think mistakenly that these texts were generated as a mise-
en-scène of a kind of fear of images common to book-oriented civi-
lizations, but rather than ushering in iconoclasm, they critically ar-
ticulated the constitutive dialectic between image and language.25 Of
course this dialectic has a long history through the centuries, but it
entered into a new constellation with the rise of photography and film
in the modern metropolis. Here radical critiques of photography and
film stood side by side with utopian hopes that the new image media
would be the harbingers of a new age and of social transformation.
All of the writers, critics, and artists discussed in this book were keen
observers and radical critics of the urban modernity that was emerging
around them, but they also saw the social and political potential of
the new media. Rather than embracing the rejectionist version of
bourgeois Kulturkritik, which saw film and photography endangering
high culture, their approach was dialectical to the core.
If the spread of photography and film was one of the factors that
created the ground for the metropolitan miniature to emerge, de-
velopments internal to philosophy provided another important im-
petus. With philosophy becoming ever more literary in the apho-
INTRODUCTION 15

ristic writings of such anti-systemic philosophers as Kierkegaard and

Nietzsche, the Baudelairean prose poem underwent a significant shift:
it became that specific kind of highly condensed short prose that self-
consciously merged conceptual and metaphoric language, following
Nietzsche’s insight that the concept is always contaminated by meta-
phor. This new kind of writing has come to be known as Denkbild
(Benjamin), Raumbild (Kracauer), Wortbild (Hofmannsthal), Körper-
bild (Jünger), or Bewusstseinsbild (Benn). Musil, in turn, in his Post-
humous Papers of a Living Author, subtitled the first three sections “Pic-
tures”; “Tempered Observations”; and “Unstorylike Stories.” The
writing of such Bilder was now a separate enterprise from the writing
of the novel or, as in Rilke’s case, the fictional diary of a protagonist
who was learning how to see. The recourse to the visual in naming
this literary form is striking, but it also poses certain problems. All
these Bilder come in the medium of written language, never accom-
panied by pictures, and thus they have to be read as scripts (Schriften).
They play off the fundamental difference between Schrift and Bild,
attempting to strike sparks from their confrontation in the miniature.
As Schrift-Bilder they draw on the tradition of the hieroglyph, as
Miriam Hansen has shown in her brilliant work on hieroglyphic
writing and mass cultural images in Kracauer and Adorno.26 As such
they are not easily legible. The visual dimension disturbs legibility,
and the promise of linguistic transparency is denied in the complex
texture of ekphrasis, metaphor, and abstraction. “Bild” is never meant
here simply as a stand-in for Gemälde, or painting, another one of its
German meanings, and its post-Renaissance regime of perspectival
visuality. Even less is it identical to photography, often understood
at the time as unmediated realism offering transparent evidence. We
may want to remember here the Benjaminian distinction between
“Bild” and “Abbild,” with only the latter referring to simple mimetic
representation as photography offers it. After all, there was a wide-
spread skepticism about the new image media in both Viennese and
Weimar culture, but it was precisely this skepticism that led to the
ambitious remediation experiments on the thresholds of language and
image represented in the urban miniature.
In another pragmatic register, the recourse to textual images
(Schrift-Bilder) could of course be easily explained. As early as the later
16 MINI AT UR E MET ROPOLIS

nineteenth century, the streets of the metropolis were full of them:

store signs, street signs, electric advertising, neon signs, the marquis
of theaters and movie palaces, Litfasssäulen (advertising pillars), the
sandwich-board man, shop window displays, ads on trams and busses,
and so forth. And then there was the medium of publication itself.
Before being gathered in book form under an overarching title, most
of these miniatures were first published separately in the feuilleton,
an urban literary medium, which, as part of a newspaper, itself often
combined text and image, though never together with the metropol-
itan miniatures. The popularity and mass circulation of postcards
featuring urban sites accompanied by captions is but another instance
of the relationship between words and pictures in the everyday met-
ropolitan world. Panoramas, dioramas, and eventually silent cinema
increased the flood of images exponentially, thus challenging the lit-
erary imagination and putting pressure on the privileged position
of the written word.
But such pragmatic observations fall short of addressing the deeper
question. As photos or postcards, Bilder are typically two-dimensional
and suggest perspectival organization. It was, however, precisely per-
spectival viewing that metropolitan experience threw into turmoil.
Time and again, texts by Hofmannsthal and Schnitzler, Kafka, Kra-
cauer, Benn, Jünger, and Musil articulate this crisis of perspectival
vision, focusing at the same time on the cacophony of urban noise
and the resulting disturbance of directed perception.27 Photomon-
tage, cinema, and offset printing in the illustrated papers of course
introduced a multiperspectivalism that was already present in Baude-
laire’s Paris texts. So a central question emerges: What if all these
modernist miniatures, described as Bilder, actually were to account
for a different organization of sensual and embodied perception that
the metropolis generated? It seems that the advantage the Bild of-
fered to these writers lay in the fact that a Bild in this more-than-
photographic sense compresses the extensions of time and space, con-
denses them into an overdetermined, seemingly synchronous image
that is significantly different from the photograph, just as it differs
from ambling description, sequential observation, or the merely em-
pirical urban sketch. On the one hand the miniature reflected on the
prevalence of the new visual media; but on the other it recognized
INTRODUCTION 17

the visual media’s mimetic insufficiency and lack, which it tried to

transcend literarily in images made up of words. After all, images
emerging from the miniature are never only synchronous and their
mimetic indexical dimension is more mediated than that of a photo-
graphic picture. Just as temporality still lingers in the apprehension,
say, of a painting when the eye scans and wanders over the canvas, the
miniature in its sequential verbal composition opens up a dimension
of temporality in the movement of reading itself. Its own temporality
can thus support and strengthen the residual temporality that exists
in proper images; that is, pictures, themselves. What results is a com-
pression of space and time in the literary image, image here, however,
as script: concise, provocative, surprising, sudden.

Architecture and a New Spatial Experience

The remediation of film and photography into the metropolitan min-
iature accounts for its often-haunting, ghostly, hallucinatory, and de-
lirious qualities. In architectural discourse, the notion of remedia-
tion fi nds a loose analogue in the concept of Durchdringung
(interpenetration) as it was codified by Sigfried Giedion in his sem-
inal 1928 book Bauen in Frankreich, Eisen, Eisenbeton.28
Just as the boundaries of literature were challenged by the metro-
politan miniature, Giedion’s spatial interpenetration, achieved by
building in steel, glass, and ferroconcrete, abolished borders between
inside and outside, above and below, public and private, street and
interior, fi xed and fluid space. As in Italian futurism, where the no-
tion of compenetrazione dei piani (interpenetration of planes) had as-
sumed expressive and often violently dynamic dimensions, Giedion’s
notion of spatial interpenetration pertained both to objective built
space and to the internal space of perception. But in the late 1920s, he
gave the term its “new-matter-of-fact” (neusachlich) coding, shorn of its
vitalist futurist dimension.29 Interpenetration and relationality came
to be perceptual and social categories for modernist architecture,
replacing the fixed and structured separation of spaces, volumes, and
planes as they had characterized an earlier architecture in stone. In
this programmatic statement about the promises of modern archi-
tecture, which was extensively excerpted in Benjamin’s notes for his
arcades project, Giedion described a new spatial experience that
18 MINI AT UR E MET ROPOLIS

opened up new forms of seeing. His major examples were the iron
constructions of the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the industrial Pont
Transbordeur in the harbor of Marseille, and Walter Gropius’s Bau-
haus building in Dessau. According to the felicitous phrasing by ar-
chitectural historian Hilde Heynen, Durchdringung “stands for a
weakening of hierarchical models on all levels— social as well as ar-
chitectural.”30 What often appears as terrorizing spatial experience
in the modernist miniature appears here as the liberating dimension
of interpenetration and a new understanding of architectural space
expanded to include traffic, rail lines, trains, stations, and urban
movement in general. It opened up the closed city to the circulation
of air, movement, and dynamism. Read through the miniature and
its focus on interpenetrations, the openness and interpenetration
Giedion, modernist architecture’s ghostwriter, sought in large-scale
engineering and urban plans may correlate with the microscale and
fleeting contingency of the miniature. On the other hand, Giedion,
like Corbusier, aimed at converting these new spatial qualities into
the basis for rather epic master plans, analogous perhaps to the way
Döblin deployed the fragmenting techniques of photomontage and
the small form to create a modernist epic in Berlin Alexanderplatz.31
The miniature, on the other hand, never aimed at such a utopian scale.
There were indeed two kinds of Durchdringung in the urban imag-
inary of the 1920s. Whereas Durchdringung of inside and outside, sub-
ject and object, private and public space took on entirely positive, even
utopian connotations in the architectural and urban planning dis-
course of the 1920s, it appears in the modernist miniature in all its
ambiguity both as exhilarating novelty and as Angst-Raum (space of
anxiety) or Angst-Traum (nightmare). This is where Giedion’s chal-
lenge to Cartesian rational space differs from Kracauer’s theoretical
critique of the rational urban plan as laid out in the miniatures in
the lead section of The Mass Ornament, ironically entitled “Natural
Geometry.”32 Giedion’s positive coding of a new spatiality also dif-
fers from Simmel’s warning that the overwhelming intensity of stimuli
in city life threatens subjective culture, generating a blasé attitude
and indifference in the city dweller.33 At any rate, space had become
central to cultural production and political understanding, as can also
be seen in Carl Schmitt’s political ruminations about geopolitics or
INTRODUCTION 19

in Ernst Cassirer’s suggestion “that the problem of space may be-

come point de départ for a new self-reflection of aesthetics.”34 And as
we think about the spatial experiments in the projects of the Bau-
haus, especially during the directorship of Làszlò Moholy-Nagy, one
can easily observe how a new understanding of urban space is very
much linked to experiments with photography and film.
What Giedion has in common with the writers treated in this book
is the insight that all urban space is permeated by social relations and
that space leaves its marks on bodies and subjectivities. There is no
longer a single firm and defined standpoint from which to observe
and judge. Visual and bodily disorientation abound, and at the ex-
treme there is Jünger’s dreamlike fall through a series of tin sheets,
none of which can stop the ever-accelerating downward plunge (“The
Horror”) or Kafka’s miniature from his Diaries in which a body is
being pulled up by rope through floors and ceilings and made to dis-
appear on the roof.35
While Durchdringung in Giedion refers exclusively to architecture
and urban space, as a conceptual metaphor it resonates with those
other dimensions of reciprocal border crossings and remediations that
are central to my argument in this book. Key for the argument is
the Durchdringung in the miniature of the verbal and the visual,
whereby the visual media are simultaneously recognized for their ex-
pansion of human knowledge and perception and criticized for their
inherent limitations. What is being questioned or even undermined
is not the visual itself but the triumphalism of the visual as organized
and exploited by the capitalist media. All writers discussed in this
book were deeply skeptical of the unlimited promise of the new media,
even when they tried to turn this promise toward political transfor-
mation. Outright political critique of the capitalist cultural apparatus
and its exploitation of the image found its appropriate aesthetic form
in the miniature, where literature asserted its Eigensinn in relation
to the visual media and mass circulation. It did so in a mass medium,
the newspaper feuilleton, rather than in some hermetic high-cultural
isolation. The metropolitan miniature foreshortened and compressed
temporal and spatial coordinates of urban experience. Subjective and
objective perceptions of the metropolitan life world were condensed
in the structure of language, text, and medium itself in such a way
20 MINI AT UR E MET ROPOLIS

that these feuilleton texts subverted the very claims of transparency,

easy understanding, and entertainment the popular press laid claim
to. From its very beginning in Baudelaire all the way to Musil and
Benjamin, the miniature thus performed a kind of “affirmative sab-
otage” of the popular press and of the image-based media that dom-
inated the metropolitan public sphere.36 It critically articulated the
changes in perception brought by urbanization and the new visual
media; it registered the move from a post-romantic individual con-
sciousness to the psychic constitution and iteration of identity in mass
society as average and statistical. It thus traced historical changes in
the understanding of subjectivity. It tried to draw the consequences
from its insight into urban mass society by thinking intensely about
alternative uses of modern mass media and yet insisting on the crit-
ical power of literature. This is the simultaneously aesthetic and po-
litical legacy of the modernist metropolitan miniature.

The Literary Miniature and Critical Theory

My attention was originally drawn to the miniature when I realized
that not only canonical modernist writers, poets and novelists alike,
wrote in this mode but major critical theorists practiced it as well:
not only Baudelaire, Rilke, and Kafka but Kracauer, Benjamin, and
Adorno. The connection was plain to see, but it had never been ex-
plored in depth. At that point, I began to read the miniature as a lit-
erary project that pushed against the boundaries of traditional nar-
rative forms of fictional literature while opening up the dimension
of conceptual, social, and philosophical thought to aesthetic percep-
tion and vice versa. At the same time, it articulated compelling in-
sights into the social and political transformations of the metropolis
in that key period of late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century mo-
dernity and when radical political change came to be on the agenda
after World War I and the Russian Revolution.
The miniature allowed me to understand modernist literature as
umbilically tied to critical theory rather than theory imposed from
the outside on literary texts. Indeed, the critical theories of Kracauer,
Benjamin, and Adorno are themselves modernist to their core. Since
Kracauer and Benjamin wrote extensively about perception and
media, social stratification and experience in the metropolitan city,
both in their theoretical essays and in their literary texts, I had found
INTRODUCTION 21

my focus on the metropolis. Given the fact that both writers pub-
lished their miniature texts first in the feuilletons and that as crit-
ical theorists they are identified with the history of media theory and
history, I had found my second focus on the relation between writing
and the visual media. Their micrological approach to urban phe-
nomena all but required the small form offered by feuilleton. In Inka
Mülder-Bach’s felicitous formulation, the feuilleton became the “pro-
duction site of a fragmentary theory of modernity” more than simply
the site of reportage that Egon Erwin Kisch in his classical reportage
book described as an “unretouched snapshot of the times.”37 The
German word Zeitaufnahme, however, also means a photograph of
time itself, and in that sense Kisch’s defi nition is pertinent here. In-
deed, Kracauer and Benjamin’s Zeitaufnahmen can be seen as chro-
notopes, as they add temporality to the spatiality of the snapshot and
the emblem. As all the miniatures treated in this book, they are
heavily retouched, subtly worked through, and given a kind of depth
that the traditional form of the journalistic urban sketch and reportage
lacked as much as the photograph did.
If throughout I emphasize the notion of literary Eigensinn, I de-
ploy it in a more than intertextual sense that makes Rilke’s minia-
tures different from Baudelaire’s, Kracauer’s from Benjamin’s, Mu-
sil’s from Jünger’s. It is the Eigensinn of literary texts in their relation
to other media that concerns me primarily in this book. New his-
toricism, discourse theory, and other forms of contextualized read-
ings of literary texts have all too often abandoned the question of
what literature can do that other discourses or media fail to do. To
insist on the Eigensinn of literature, then, is not to return to an older
notion of literary closure and “intrinsic criticism.” Nor do I want to
resurrect a notion of the absolute autonomy of literature in relation
to mass culture and other media. I rather stay with Adorno’s point
about the double character of art as being “both autonomous and fait
social.”38 The miniature’s main characteristic is precisely that it un-
dercuts any notion of medial autonomy or purity in its constitutive
relation to the metropolis and visual technological media. But it is
by articulating this social and technological relationship that it as-
serts its autonomy as Eigensinn. This is part of the fraying of the arts
that Adorno analyzed in one of his late essays of the 1960s and that
was always already part of modernism itself.39 What this book shows
22 MINI AT UR E MET ROPOLIS

is that the metropolitan miniature as a specific project within the lit-

erature of modernism and as dependent on the historical context of
major urban transformations suggests Eigensinn as a relational rather
than an ontological concept, since it is always determined by a va-
riety of media practices at a given time. Rather than only occupying
the margin left to literature by the new technological media, as Fried-
rich Kittler had it in his influential book Discourse Networks, the met-
ropolitan miniature shows that literature can do more than simply
occupy an ever-shrinking margin.40
The analogies to our own time are striking. The reordering of per-
ception in the metropolis of 1900 parallels the reordering of time and
space in our own time by a whole new set of digital media and re-
lated new social practices.41 Again, compression and miniaturization
are at stake in different forms, and their effects on the human per-
ceptual apparatus are the fulcrum of a wide-ranging debate about the
benefits and downsides of our contemporary media culture.42 This
is where the topic of this book may serve as a template for current
debates about literature. Time and again these days, literature and
the book are lamented as obsolete media, if they are not happily and
condescendingly written off, just as reality itself was written off in
the 1990s by the triumphalists of the virtual. Miniature Metropolis
shows in paradigmatic ways how once before literature was under
siege by mass media, photography, silent film, and, somewhat later,
the radio.43 In the decades around 1900, older literary and artistic
forms underwent a process of metamorphosis that we now admire
as the great surge of modernist innovation. It remains to be seen if
the digital age will ever produce literary and artistic innovations on
a comparable scale. At any rate, there always was as much Eigensinn
in photography and the cinema as there was in literature. In the age
of the digital, analog media such as photography and film may them-
selves be experimenting with a remediation in reverse, insisting on
their differential specificity in relation to their transformation by the
digital. It is always premature to declare the obsolescence of litera-
ture or any other medium. The “death of . . .” discourse has proven
wrong several times before, and obsolescence does have its own
powers of revival from a grave that is never deep enough.
 
Q
Urban Spleen and the Terror of Paris
in Baudelaire and Rilke

Any discussion of the metropolitan miniature in

German and Austrian literature in the early decades of the last cen-
tury has to take account of the seminal point de départ for this mod-
ernist mode of feuilleton writing in the work of Charles Baudelaire.
Baudelaire had begun to experiment with this new form of urban lit-
erature by the mid-1850s, searching for a more liberated form of
writing the city than the one of the Tableaux parisiens and other poems
in Les Fleurs du mal, first published in 1857. The seminal impact Le
Spleen de Paris: Petits poèmes en prose had on the rise of the metro-
politan miniature results from the fact that Baudelaire radically trans-
formed the older genre of the impressionistic and discursive urban
sketch in the tradition of Mercier’s Tableau de Paris. His new kind of
prose writing was equally distinct from the main genre of the
nineteenth-century urban narrative à la Balzac or Dickens, and it an-
ticipated new modes of writing the city that emerged only later in
the novels of Kafka, Joyce, Aragon, Dos Passos, and Döblin. Its main
long-distance aftereffects, however, both direct and indirect, are to
be found in the urban miniature written by some of the major German
and Austrian modernists in the years leading up to World War I, the
war years themselves, and the interwar period. Rilke’s novel The Note-
books of Malte Laurids Brigge (1911), with its explicit citations and mul-
tiple resonances of Baudelaire, occupies a mediating position between
Baudelaire’s short prose texts and the interwar miniature written in
the first Austrian Republic and the Weimar Republic. Poetically close

23
24 MINI AT UR E MET ROPOLIS

to Baudelaire’s imagination, it already highlights the uncanny and

surreal dimensions that would become dominant in the later metro-
politan miniature.
While Baudelaire and Rilke’s prose works have been extensively
discussed in scholarship, we lack any direct comparison. The reason
for this lacuna may be simple. Even though Rilke himself used the
term “poems in prose” in a comment to his translator, The Notebooks
of Malte Laurids Brigge is a novel, a novel in fragments, to be sure,
but not a collection of poèmes en prose.1 And yet the roughly first two
dozen prose fragments with which The Notebooks open are unmistak-
ably in the tradition of the urban miniature. Similar to Baudelaire’s
Spleen, with its multiple, even serial narrator positions, they feature
a narrator whose intense perceptions of Paris ultimately shape his in-
nermost metropolitan consciousness. Despite other significant dif-
ferences, both texts articulate a sensual and bodily experience of the
city without ever drawing on realistic description of concrete urban
spaces, as the traditional urban sketch or the nineteenth- century
urban novel would do. Both authors shared a visceral dislike of pho-
tography, a medium they believed threatened the integrity of the
imagination and disabled poetic creativity itself. Of course, they ex-
perienced photography at a technically less developed stage than the
later miniaturists, but despite their rejection of the new medium,
traces of its presence abound in their work.
A selection of twenty Baudelairean miniatures was first published
by Arsène Houssaye in 1862 in the feuilleton of the Parisian paper
La Presse. They condense, displace, and juxtapose, to use the formu-
lation from the dedication to his publisher, “the soul’s lyrical move-
ments, the undulations of reverie, the jolts of consciousness.”2 While
these characterizations by no means exhaust the anonymous narra-
tors’ moods, attitudes, and strategies, the format of the miniature,
with its experimental mix of genres, intense subjectivities, and
roaming reflections, was picked up, appropriated, and transformed
by Rilke, Benjamin, Kafka, Kracauer, Benn, Jünger, and Musil. As
in Baudelaire himself, the soul’s lyrical movements are juxtaposed to
outright cynicism, if not male hysteria (Benn); the undulations of rev-
erie turn into nightmare or the emptiness of ennui (Rilke, Kracauer);
the jolts of consciousness escalate into terror (Rilke, Kafka, Jünger).
New imaginaries of time and space are created by the short prose
U R B A N S P L E E N A N D T H E T E R R O R O F PA R I S 25

texts themselves, just as they provide new transitory reading experi-

ences for the overstimulated and distracted urban reader of the
feuilleton.
However, Baudelaire’s miniatures did not meet with much success
among the reading public. The first publication in La Presse was cut
short after three installments, and another publication in Le Figaro
two years later was also not completed, since, as the editor let Baude-
laire know, they bored readers. While in length and reflective mode
they attempted to satisfy the needs of their medium, they also re-
mained something like a foreign body in the feuilleton, which at that
time tended more toward entertainment, celebrity anecdotes, and so-
ciety gossip. And yet it was in Baudelaire’s feuilleton texts that Paris
first became legible as a modern metropolis.3 They responded in novel
ways to the disorienting urban condition as analyzed by Georg
Simmel four decades later in his seminal Berlin essay “The Metrop-
olis and Mental Life.”4 But whereas Simmel analyzed only one typ-
ical reaction to the proliferation of stimuli in metropolitan life, the
self-protective blasé attitude, Baudelaire displayed a whole gamut of
reactions among which the blasé self-protection from urban stimuli
would be only one, and not even the dominant one.
Baudelaire recognized that a new kind of writing the city was called
forth by the city itself. Thus, in the dedication of 1862, published in
an Appendix and entitled Preface in the recent English translation,
he stated:

This obsessive ideal [of writing a poetic prose that was musical,
subtle, and choppy, as he put it] came to life above all by fre-
quenting enormous cities, in the intersection of their countless
relationships. (129)

The choppiness of his little work is exacerbated by the fact that it

has “neither head nor tail.” Addressing his editor, he continued with
cutting irony:

Consider, I beg you, what admirable convenience that combi-

nation offers us all, you, me, and the reader. We can cut wher-
ever we want, I my reverie, you the manuscript, the reader his
reading. (129)
26 MINI AT UR E MET ROPOLIS

As he offered the “entire serpent” (129) to his editor and the public,
his hope must have been that the act of seduction would be successful.
Despite the sarcastic authorial irony in this metaphoric description,
it also holds a Baudelairean belief. It matches Baudelaire’s concept of
aesthetic creation as inevitably transitory and ephemeral, as he laid
it out in his seminal essay “Le peintre de la vie moderne,” which fo-
cused on the transitoriness of life, art, and fashion in the modern
metropolis, from which a new kind of eternal beauty was to spring.5
With that text about Constantin Guys, the Monsieur G of the essay,
a minor figure in the visual arts of the time rather than one of its
giants, Baudelaire was also the fi rst influential theoretician of the
metamorphoses of aesthetic creation and reception in an increasingly
commercialized and technologized metropolitan culture. Constantin
Guys published his sketches in the Illustrated London News, a leading
European paper at the time that also had begun to publish photo-
graphs. Indeed, photography is the great unspoken dimension of the
essay on Guys. We know how Baudelaire hated photography not only
as mere copy but also as a sign of hateful progress and mass culture,
a technological contraption that could not possibly compete with art.
Thus, in “The Salon of 1859,” we read:

As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be

painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete
his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of
a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. I
do not believe, or at least do not wish to believe, in the absolute
success of such a brutish conspiracy, in which, as in all others,
one finds both fools and knaves; but I am convinced that the ill-
applied developments of photography, like all other purely ma-
terial developments of progress, have contributed much to the
impoverishment of the French artistic genius, which is already
so scarce.6

Baudelaire of course came to be the key figure in Benjamin—theorist

par excellence of modern visual media of technical reproducibility
and reader of Paris as the capital of the nineteenth century. In typ-
ical avant-gardist fashion of the interwar period, Benjamin also em-
U R B A N S P L E E N A N D T H E T E R R O R O F PA R I S 27

phasized the link between urban writing and the feuilleton: “Liter-
ature submits to montage in the feuilleton.”7 And montage— always
associated with photography and film at the time—it is. Baudelaire’s
miniature as form— creatively appropriated by Benjamin himself in
One-Way Street and Berlin Childhood around 1900— embodies para-
digmatically what David Harvey has described as the compression
of time and space in the social world of modernity.8 Montage is the
principle that shapes the collection of the miniatures into an open-
ended whole that can be said to represent a model of seriality before
film. The claim is not that somehow literature prophesies film; in-
stead, the seriality of miniatures formally reflects and constructs
the very nature of urban experience. Both the theory and the prac-
tice of Baudelaire’s writing the capitalist city in transition to the
modern metropolis at the time of the Baron Haussmann’s radical
interventions into the older city fabric provide the perfect entry
point into that body of literature I call the metropolitan miniature.
Baudelaire’s transformation of the older genre of journalistic urban
prose since Mercier, a tradition that was well and alive in many Paris
books of his time, did for Paris in the mid-nineteenth century what
the later German and Austrian writers did for metropolitan life, not
only of Paris but of Vienna and Berlin as well. Reading all these short
urban texts together allows us to focus on shared cross-national as-
pects of the experience of metropolitan space in major European cities
during an earlier phase of what now is called globalization. What
emerges in the modernist miniature is not some kind of literary city
guide but a reflection on the changing perceptions of city life and
the city’s effects on structures of subjectivity at a time of rapid ur-
banization, industrialization, and the evolution of bohemian subcul-
tures. At stake was the creation of a modernist urban imaginary that
would account for historical changes in the mode of attentiveness and
reading.
Baudelaire is so crucial for this development of new city writing
since he stripped the older genre of le tableau de Paris of much of its
impressionistic urban description of recognizable Parisian sites, of-
fering instead philosophical reflections and narrative or dialogic frag-
ments mixed with extreme mood swings and contrarian states of
mind. The multiplicity of clashing perspectives, which modern
28 MINI AT UR E MET ROPOLIS

metropolitan life generated in that key phase of urban and social

transformation after the bloodbath of 1848 and the Napoleonic
putsch, recurs in his miniatures in a variety of moods from euphoria
to lament and melancholy, from the epiphanies of reverie to the de-
crepitude and paralysis of the spleen, all the way to aggressiveness,
sarcasm, and cynicism, with the latter becoming increasingly preva-
lent in the late miniatures written in the 1860s, during the twilight
of Napoleon III’s dictatorship.
Baudelaire’s Spleen is also fundamentally different from a precursor
he mentions explicitly in the Preface: the minor romantic poet Aloy-
sius Bertrand, whose 1842 collection of prose fragments Gaspard de
la nuit: Fantaisies à la manière de Rembrandt et de Callot presumably
inspired him

to try something similar, and to apply to the description of

modern life, or rather of one modern and more abstract life, the
procedure he [Bertrand] had applied to the depiction of ancient
life, so strangely picturesque. (129)

Bertrand’s Gaspard was indeed picturesque and descriptive, whereas

Baudelaire aimed at abstraction from the picturesque. More impor-
tant, Bertrand’s writing was deeply visual in its execution and in its
dedication to visual artists, and thus its posthumous editions always
included visual representations with the prose fragments.9 Baudelaire,
however, despite his own highly visual imagination, did not include
any visuals with his texts, which, given modern times, could only have
been photographs of the city. The verbal and the visual had merged
emblemlike in the editions of Bertrand’s work, but like Benjamin later
on, Baudelaire insisted on the Eigensinn of the literary in his minia-
tures. At stake, after all, was the power of language to conjure up
urban scenes and create an urban imaginary.
In all of his multifaceted and heterogeneous miniatures, Baude-
laire’s relationship to the social and the political remains oscillating,
amorphous, anarchic. Central are the intellectual’s, the poet’s rad-
ical mood swings. Thus, in “The Double Room,” an intérieur is
described lyrically as an aesthetic hot house of voluptuous sensations
of timelessness. Suddenly, clock time and the spleen of a banal
U R B A N S P L E E N A N D T H E T E R R O R O F PA R I S 29

everyday reenter the narrator’s world with a vengeance, transforming

what appeared as a “truly spiritual room” into “the abode of eternal
ennui” (7). In a way, this fateful doubling is given an analogy in dis-
placed form in the structure of the social world. Here the carefree
world of the hated bourgeoisie is opposed to the world of poverty,
deprivation, and vice with which the narrator identifies time and
again, sometimes via empathy (“The Old Woman’s Despair”;
“Widows”; “The Old Acrobat”; “Eyes of the Poor”), other times
via an aloof and disillusioning understanding (“The Cake”; “The
Rope”). The collection opens with a soliloquy that establishes the
narrator as perfect stranger and loner, prone to Rousseauean rev-
erie. But it concludes with an allegory of social life, an elegy on the
city’s muse in which the social “double room,” as it were, is allego-
rized in the opposition between the “good dogs, pitiful dogs, mud-
died dogs, those everyone shuns,” just as everyone shuns paupers,
poets, and prostitutes, and the

foppish dogs, those conceited quadrupeds, Great Dane, King

Charles spaniel, pug or lap dog, so enchanted with themselves,
and so sure to please, that they leap indiscreetly onto the legs
or knees of visitors, unruly like children, stupid like easy women,
sometimes sulky and insolent like servants! (125)

Baudelaire was relentlessly critical of the society of the Second Em-

pire, but in his later years he never embraced an explicit political po-
sition. Thus, the two prevailing readings of Baudelaire either as es-
capist aesthete or political radical need to be merged. Baudelaire was
both—urban aesthete living on the margins of “good” society and
that society’s radical critic. His schizophrenic position oscillating vi-
olently between the pursuit of beauty and “the mire of the macadam”
(“Loss of Halo”) perhaps found its best expression when he wrote in
Mon Coeur mis à nu: “It might perhaps be pleasant to be alternately
victim and executioner.”10 Such oscillation between extreme states
of mind generated by the urban environment characterize the nar-
rating voices of the prose poems, distinguishing them quite clearly
not only from that earlier tradition of writing le tableau de Paris (Mer-
cier) but also from Balzac’s and Zola’s narrators weaving of their
30 MINI AT UR E MET ROPOLIS

cyclical urban narratives in La comédie humaine and Les Rougon-

Macquart. This constant doubling and shifting of perspective also re-
quires a flexible and multiperspectival approach on the part of the
reader. Reading Baudelaire straight has led to serious misunder-
standings. Thus, “The Bad Glazier,” with the poet’s cruel and wanton
treatment of the old glazier, who does not have any colored glass
panes on offer, triggered the reproach that Baudelaire advocated an
art for art’s sake. But multiple phrasings in the text referring ironi-
cally to clichés like “la vie en rose,” or “la vie en beau” make it very
clear that Baudelaire is criticizing the aestheticism of bourgeois
beautification. When the poet-narrator suggests to the glazier that
he should sell rose-colored panes in poor neighborhoods in order
to “make life beautiful,” it is hard to miss the satirical intent. This is
a perfect example of affirmative sabotage, here the sabotage of a
bourgeois kitsch aesthetic turned against itself, thus revealing its
hidden violence. A text like that must be read anamorphically, not
frontally, but from the side, as it were. Only then does it reveal its
critical intent. The same is true of the much-discussed “Let’s beat
up the poor,” which in similar close reading reveals itself as a satire
of utopian socialism rather than a cynical theory of liberation as
theory of insufficient oppression.
Le Spleen de Paris offers a model of writing that translates the raw
energies of the city, its scandals and miseries as well as its tempta-
tions and ecstasies, into a new language. Even if some of this lan-
guage remains mired in male misogyny and in a traditional catholic
imaginary of evil and bliss, the satanic and the divine, its provoca-
tions to traditional literary culture secure it pride of place in the ge-
nealogy of modernist urban imaginaries. Baudelaire’s miniatures are
seminal in that neither the concrete spaces nor the overall social ge-
ography of the city ever appear as they would in the urban novel or
the short urban sketch. Instead, Paris appears as if seen through the
veil of a ner vous and vulnerable consciousness that takes account of
the city’s aesthetic, human, political, and economic contradictions
without transcending them evasively in poetry or escaping deliber-
ately into l’art pour l’art. Despite Baudelaire’s great admiration for
Balzac’s Comédie humaine, the urban miniature demonstrates implic-
itly why the coherent Balzacian narrative, held together by one om-
U R B A N S P L E E N A N D T H E T E R R O R O F PA R I S 31

niscient narrator and the trajectory of plot, is no longer adequate to

the writing of the city in the age of Haussmann’s radical interven-
tions in the city fabric. Instead we get a series of fragments, mon-
tages of different discourses even within those fragments, short pieces
with ever-changing moods and outlooks. In Baudelaire’s late work,
Paris emerges as a fragmented and fragmenting space of the hetero-
topias of the imagination. It is an urban imaginary of a specific phase
of metropolitan modernization later articulated in different ways by
Benjamin and Kracauer and finding its perhaps last and by then al-
ready nostalgic instantiation in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Indeed,
the Paris, Vienna, or Berlin of the miniatures read in this book have
become invisible in the post–World War II era.
But what of the term “prose poem” still used by many to describe
a whole trajectory of short prose? As Todorov put it quite well, Baude-
laire did not invent the prose poem,

but it was he who gave it its seal of nobility, who introduced it

on the horizon of his contemporaries and his successors, who
made it into a model of writing.11

At the same time, the subtitle petits poèmes en prose has led many critics,
including Todorov himself, to focus on genre issues and to ask whether
we are dealing with poetic prose or prosaic poetry, a discussion that
more often than not gets stuck in a dead end. And since many of the
miniatures are not close to poems at all, critics have spoken of aes-
thetic failure or have even attributed perceived deficiencies to Baude-
laire’s worsening syphilitic condition and mental disturbance.12 An-
other explanation offers itself. Ever since Mercier, the tableau de Paris
came in the form of prose. Baudelaire turned the tables and versi-
fied it in Les Fleurs du mal. Once he himself turned to writing the
city in prose, he needed to distinguish his miniatures from the tra-
dition of the urban sketch, and thus he provocatively poeticized the
idea of the tableau by calling it prose poem. A conscious strategy of
reversal appears in both cases. Thus, ruminating about poetic prose
vs. prosaic poetry, tied as it is to an unchanging notion of high Lit-
erature with capital L, whether prose or poetry, blocked more in-
teresting historical and aesthetic questions regarding the changing
32 MINI AT UR E MET ROPOLIS

function of literature under the impact of proliferating new print

and visual media, something Baudelaire was not only acutely aware
of but to which his texts explicitly respond.
Even though Baudelaire severely criticized the mimetic dimension
of photography— something he has in common with Kracauer and
Benjamin, who nevertheless also saw the potential of the new visual
media—it is this relation to the popular print media that again links
Baudelaire to the later writers of the urban miniature who wrote their
feuilleton miniatures in explicit relation to the visual media of their
day, primarily photography and film. Baudelaire, by contrast, devel-
oped his visual aesthetic by privileging the social and political draw-
ings and sketches Constantin Guys published in the Illustrated London
News, a paper that had also begun to publish photographs of events.
Indeed, it is the link to the boulevard press of his day that makes
Baudelaire’s urban miniatures into a “modèle d’écriture” (Todorov) that
is perhaps more palpable in the German and Austrian urban minia-
ture of the interwar years in writers such as Kracauer, Musil, and Ben-
jamin than in Baudelaire’s immediate French “successors” of the poème
en prose such as Rimbaud, Lautréamont, Mallarmé, or even the
surrealists.
Baudelaire, while still writing sonnets in traditional alexandrine
verse in Les Fleurs du mal, delved into and exploited the language of
the everyday, as it appeared in la petite presse. He published both his
poems and several installments of his Petits poèmes en prose in the pa-
pers before either were collected in Les Fleurs du mal and in Le Spleen
de Paris; the latter appeared only posthumously in 1869 as volume
IV of the Oeuvres complètes. As a practicing art critic since the 1840s,
Baudelaire also had a very close relationship to the day-to-day cul-
tural debates as they were played out in the Parisian papers and feuil-
letons. Even if a primary purpose of the prose pieces was to make
some money from contributions to the feuilleton, Baudelaire took
his urban miniatures very seriously. He tied them directly to Les Fleurs
du mal when he wrote to his mother “that the fashioning of these
little knick-knacks is the result of a great concentration of the spirit”
and called it “a singular work, more singular, at least more headstrong
than The Flowers of Evil.”13 And one year later he wrote to Jules
Troubat: “In sum, it [the prose poems] are the Fleurs du mal again,
U R B A N S P L E E N A N D T H E T E R R O R O F PA R I S 33

but with much more freedom, detail, and mockery.”14 As usual, there
are striking contradictions in Baudelaire’s phrasing that should not
be harmonized: “great concentration of the spirit” stands against
“these little knick-knacks”; “singular work” stands against “Les Fleurs
du mal again.” But it is above all the spirit of mockery that distin-
guishes Le Spleen de Paris from Les Fleurs du mal as a carefully crafted
cycle of poems.
The German critic Karl Heinrich Biermann has perhaps best de-
scribed what is indeed singular in Le Spleen de Paris. He has shown
how the prose poems inscribe themselves in the specific media con-
text of the Second Empire.15 Given the strict censorship of any op-
positional or politically critical press coverage after the coup of De-
cember 2, 1851, the 1850s saw a proliferation of nonpolitical and
literary boulevard magazines and papers that created and saturated
a depoliticized reading public that wanted to be entertained and
pleased. Instead of political coverage, magazines such as La chronique
parisienne, La Revue anecdotique, and Le Boulevard preferred genres
such as narrative short prose, miniature portraits, celebrity anecdotes,
brief dialogues, fictive letters, reflections, society gossip, most of them
focusing on issues of private rather than public life. Rather than seeing
the variety of clearly nonpoetic writing practices in the prose poems
as an atrophy of Baudelaire’s poetic imagination, we must read them
as a strategy to appropriate and to transform the genres of la petite
presse. His goal was to reach the broader public and convey to that
audience his urban perceptions and acute sense of the threat to the
poetic imagination in metropolitan modernity (particularly evident
in “The Double Room” and “Loss of Halo”). After all, very few of
the texts of Le Spleen de Paris are real prose poems in the traditional
sense. “A Hemisphere in Tresses,” “Twilight,” and “Invitation au
voyage” count among them, but they were written fairly early and
do have their complements in Les Fleurs du mal as poems with the
same title. The other miniatures offer anecdotes (“A Joker”; “The
Counterfeit Coin”), dialogues (“The Stranger”), short novellas (“A
Heroic Death”), portraits of social types (“Widows”; “The Old
Acrobat”)—all of them genres prevalent in the unpolitical entertain-
ment press of Paris.16 Baudelaire never commented himself in detail
on his relation to the petite presse; he simply digested and transformed
34 MINI AT UR E MET ROPOLIS

these found modes of writing. His authorial role was that of a cre-
ative rag-picker in the media world of the boulevard. But then he con-
densed what he found, intensifying his urban perceptions and em-
bodying them in seemingly simple texts whose meanings are revealed
only to the reader who does not read for information or transparent
understanding. The figure of the narrator putting on diverse masks
of urban flâneur and moralist, cynic and boulevardier, mystic and poet
served him to register repressed social phenomena either by mim-
icry or aggression—the loneliness and solitude of widowhood and
old age (“Widows”; “The Old Woman’s Despair”), the artist’s fall
from an audience’s favors (“The Old Mountebank”), the latent vio-
lence of poverty (“The Eyes of the Poor”; “Let’s Beat Up the Poor”),
the destructiveness of bourgeois clichés (“The Bad Glazier”), the link
between art and prostitution (“Loss of Halo”). This critical mimesis
of urban phenomena, rendered in a variety of genres found in the
printed press of his day and then transformed into his own multi-
layered voice, has its analogy in those later attempts by Kracauer, Ben-
jamin, and Musil to write the city for the feuilleton in relationship
to the spread of photography and cinema in the metropolitan public
sphere. Except that the role of an explicit aesthetic subjectivity, still
strong after Baudelaire in Rilke and Benn, will be greatly reduced
in most of these later miniatures in favor of objectivist expression,
Sachlichkeit, and a generic, sometimes collective, or at least imper-
sonal rather than individualizing ethos.

Even if Baudelaire’s critical awareness of the impact of the mass

media on literary forms seems lacking in Rilke’s Notebooks, a book
that clearly inscribed itself in the tradition of high literature, traces
of photography and photographic vision are hauntingly present in
the protagonist’s project of “learning how to see,” which is trans-
formed in the novel into a kind of serial writing of fragments.17 The
experience of Paris posed a long-lasting threat to Rilke’s still post-
romantic poetic imagination, but it ultimately generated a new kind
of poetic language in Rilke’s later years. The Notebooks played a cen-
tral role in that transformation.
The terror of metropolitan modernity resonates powerfully in Ril-
ke’s letters to Lou Andreas-Salomé and in Maltes’s experiences and
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entire household; Levon brought him sweets, Archag read to him, and
Gulenia, who had constituted herself head nurse, poured down his throat
concoctions which tasted abominably. Aram dared not resist, but he took his
revenge by ridiculing her narrow ideas, for like many aged persons, she
unfortunately found something to criticise in all modern ways.

As soon as Aram was able to be up, the two friends resumed their long rides
about the country, and one morning they set out to thank Toros Ammi for
his hospitality, and to take him a present of coffee and sugar, with a box of
lokums (Turkish sweetmeats) for his children. After paying their visit, they
rode out a little way on the Bitlis road, to give Aram the pleasure of the fine
view from a certain hilltop. They had dismounted, and were sitting for a
moment under a mulberry tree, when all at once they were startled by the
sound of hurried footsteps, and looking around, they saw a man clothed in
rags running toward them.

“Save me!” he cried, as he came up panting. “In the Name of God, save me!
The zaptiehs are after me; they will be here in twenty minutes at latest.”

The man was still young; he could not have been more than twenty-five or
six; his face was pale, his cheeks hollow, as if from recent illness, and partly
covered by his black whiskers; his clothes were hanging in tatters, and his
feet were bandaged with blood-stained rags. Yet he did not give the
impression of a mendicant, but of a leader, accustomed to command; his
thin lips, his brilliant eyes told of an energy which death alone could
conquer.

After a moment’s reflection, Archag said: “I know a capital hiding-place,

and we can get there in two hours, for we have fast horses. Get up and ride
behind me.”
No sooner said than done. The horses, spurred on by their riders, flew over
the ground, and Archag led the way over cross-roads, to avoid any awkward
encounters. The cave where he and Aram had found shelter on the night of
the storm seemed to him a safe asylum, for the entrance was concealed by
high rocks, and the place was known only to a few fishermen.

Before entering the village of Bos-Ujuk, Archag let his companion

dismount, bidding him wait while he and Aram went to leave their horses
with an acquaintance. They soon returned with their arms full of provisions.

Toros Ammi had served fifteen years in the household of Boghos Effendi;
he was a discreet person, and loyally devoted to his former master, so
Archag took him aside and told him all about his meeting with the fugitive.
Toros approved the lad’s decision, and thought the cave a good hiding-
place; he gave the two boys a basketful of supplies on the spot, and
promised to take some food to the refugee every evening, an offer which
was gratefully accepted by Archag.

When the man saw his companions coming back, he went to meet them.

“Oh, how kind you are!” said he. “You are bringing me something to eat.
This morning I managed to find a few berries, but I have eaten nothing else
since last evening.”

He fell upon the bread and olives which Aram offered him, and ate greedily.
It was growing dark, and they made their way over the rocks with extreme
caution. At last, after a thousand difficulties, they reached the cavern, a spot
which awakened many recollections in the boys’ minds. Aram and Archag
took out the treasures from their basket: dolmas,1 eggs, cucumbers and figs,
and the fugitive ate ravenously, his eyes eager with appetite.

When his hunger was appeased, the boys begged him to tell them his story.
They were sitting cross-legged at the entrance to the cave, with the full
moon shining on them, and jackals yelping in the distance.

“I am a native of Moosh,” said the man, “that unfortunate city, continually

exposed to the attacks of wandering Kurds. My name is Rupen, and I was
for three years the inseparable companion of Andranick; perhaps you may
have heard of him?”

Heard of Andranick and Rupen, the heroes of the ballads they so often
sang? What a question! Their guest rose high in their estimation, and they
looked at him with deep respect and admiration.

“We are twice and thrice happy to know you,” said Archag, “and we shall
always remember this day as long as we live. We have wept with joy when
we have heard the songs of your exploits and Andranick’s, for,” he added,
with simple pride, “we are partisans of the good cause.”

“What, you boys are fédaī? Then I am saved!”

“We shall do everything we can, so that you may be! But do tell us how you
came to join Andranick’s band.”

“Willingly,” replied Rupen. “My father was a merchant well-esteemed by

his fellow-citizens; his business was prosperous, and we had a very
comfortable home. There was no happier hearth than ours, but alas,
misfortune lay waiting for us! I had an only sister, two years younger than I,
and celebrated for her beauty. My father in his foresight, never allowed her
to go out unveiled; but one evening, as she was taking the air on our roof,
she was obliged to uncover her face because of the suffocating heat. She
walked about slowly, without a suspicion that there was a man at the corner
of the street, watching her carefully. It was Ibrahim Khan, one of the most
powerful chiefs of Kurdistan.

“A few days later, he came, accompanied by his attendants, to ask the hand
of my sister, and was refused. The Kurd was furious, and began to insult my
father, who, driven to desperation, struck Ibrahim in the face. Then there
was a fight between our men and Ibrahim’s. The Kurds were repulsed; but
they returned in a body, and burned and pillaged our house. My father was
killed, my sister carried off by the bandits; my mother was overwhelmed by
these events, and survived her husband only a few months. Thus I found
myself at the age of twenty alone in the world, and deprived of all; but one
thing remained to me: vengeance. I fled to the mountains, and begged aid
and asylum from Andranick. Together we made a desperate struggle. When
the hero left us for Bulgaria, I was chosen captain of the band. During all
these five years I have had but a single wish: to kill Ibrahim Khan. At last,
one month ago, I succeeded in gratifying my desire for vengeance. We drew
the Kurd into ambush, but a bullet was too good for that miserable wretch;
we hung him like a dog, and his black soul fled to hell. Three hundred
Kurds pursued us, to avenge the death of their chief. They annihilated my
band, and I am the sole survivor of our forty companions. A price was set
on my head, and for weeks, I have been wandering in the mountains,
making my way toward Van, and hoping to get from there to Tabriz. The
zaptiehs have been on my scent since morning, when I met you my my
strength was spent; an old wound in my leg had re-opened, giving me great
pain. But for your generous help, I should now be in the hands of my
enemies.”

The two boys listened to this tale with eager sympathy. It was the same old
story of murder and rapine, painful indeed to the heart of an Armenian.
They assured Rupen of the concern they felt in his misfortunes, and
promised to come back often to see him.

The next day Archag told his father about the fugitive, and Boghos Effendi
approved his son’s conduct. Without being a fédaī, he had already been won
to the new ideas, and was impatiently awaiting an era of liberty and
progress.

To avoid suspicion, the boys went to see their friend only twice a week. The
zaptiehs were searching for him at Van, and as long as they were there,
caution was necessary. Rupen had a violent attack of fever, and his wound,
aggravated by the pursuit and the heat, caused him great suffering. For
several days he was delirious, and turned and tossed on his couch without
recognizing any one. Toros Ammi never left his side (being a fisherman he
could easily account for his absence); night and day he made and applied
compresses of plants gathered in the mountains, and at last the fever
yielded, and Rupen was once more able to recognize his friends. After this,
his convalescence was very rapid, and at the end of three weeks his health
was quite restored.
Aram and Archag took keen delight in their visits to the fugitive; they never
wearied of hearing details about Moosh and Andranick and his band.
Rupen, for his part, had become attached to his rescuers, and his heart was
heavy at the thought of the coming separation. But the zaptiehs had been
gone from Van two weeks; moreover he would not be really safe until he
had crossed the frontier, for some chance was liable at any time to lead to
the discovery of his hiding-place. Our boys realized this, and fixed the date
of departure themselves. They procured a complete disguise for Rupen, that
of an old merchant with white hair and a long beard, in which it was
impossible to recognize him. Boghos Effendi filled the purse of the poor
exile, that he might not lack the necessaries of life.

The three friends parted with tears in their eyes, not knowing if they would
ever meet again. If all went well, Rupen would be able to reach Tabriz in
three weeks, and he promised to write at once.

After his departure, the days seemed long to Aram and Archag, and they
were glad when the end of the vacation drew near. No letter came from
Rupen, so they had to leave for Aintab without news of their friend.

1 Dolma: minced meat wrapped in a vine-leaf. ↑

CHAPTER XV
 THE DEATH OF SAMOUĪL
The courtyard of the college was all astir with life: the students were
arriving in small groups, and there was a constant succession of salutations
and embraces, for Orientals are more demonstrative than northern people.
Among the new Juniors, we find our friends of last year: the two cousins,
Nejib and Dikran, Boghos and his inseparable companion Soghomon, fatter
than ever; Aram, Archag and Garabed, who had traveled together from
Moosh; and lastly Sumpad and Samouīl. The latter was not at all well; he
had taken cold during the holidays, and since then had been growing very
weak; his cheeks were sometimes burning with fever, again ashen pale. His
uncle had been alarmed by his cough, and unwilling to let him go away, but
Samouīl had begged so hard to be allowed to return to his beloved college,
that he had been allowed to come.

“Oh! What is the matter with you?” asked Archag, as he came upon him in
the midst of a fit of coughing.

Samouīl could not reply for a moment; then he said:

“It’s this cough that hangs on so, and I’m so tired all the time, I can hardly
move.”

“The good air of Aintab will make you feel better, and we’ll all look after
you. Take my arm to go upstairs, and lean hard on me.”

On rejoining their classmates they heard an unexpected piece of news:

Professor Hagopian had sent in his resignation, desiring to take a few years’
rest. His place was filled by Mr. Hairemian, who thus became proctor of the
Junior class.
The first recitation was scarcely over when the boys poured into the hall to
see if the postman had come. The mail was brought to Aintab only on
Fridays, and professors and students, Armenians and Americans, awaited
this great day with equal impatience. Twenty times during the day the boys
would run to the porter and ask:

“Posta geldiné? (Has the mail come?)”

“Yok, yok, Effendis.”

But this time it really had come. A cry rang through all the buildings:

“Posta gelmidé! Posta gelmidé! (The mail has come!)”

Boys, big and little, came running downstairs. Badvili Melikian opened the
bag and distributed the letters scattered over the table, with a word for each:

“Nejib, here’s a letter from your father in Heidelberg. Is he going to stay

much longer in Germany?”

“Garabed, the letter from your parents.”

“Monsieur Bernier, a letter from Switzerland, and a parcel of newspapers.”

“Professor Piralian, three letters from your friends in America.”

“Boghos, a letter from your father. Please give him my greetings when you
write.”

“Three more letters for Monsieur Bernier. Is it your birthday, or what?”

“Soghomon, the ‘Avedaper.’ Please lend it to me after you have read it.”

“Samouīl, there is nothing for you this week.”

“Aram, two letters from Diarbekir.”

“Archag, one letter from Van, and one from—what, Tabriz? I didn’t know
you had acquaintances in Adgemistam?”

Archag was blushing with pleasure, for he guessed at once from whom the
letter came. He stammered out that one of his friends had been in Persia for
the last few months; then, making a sign to Aram to follow, he went out of
the room and upstairs to the dormitory. The two boys sat down on a trunk
and Archag opened the precious letter, and lowering his voice, read as
follows:

“Siréli paragamner, (My dear friends)

“What must you think of me? It is five weeks yesterday since I left Van, and it is
only to-day that I am able to keep my promise and tell you that, thanks to the
mercy of Astwatz (God, in Armenian), I have arrived at Tabriz; but it was not
without difficulty, and my adventures have been little less than miraculous.

“But let me not anticipate. When you left me, and I saw you disappearing all too
quickly from the shore of Lake Van, I stopped for a moment, to follow in thought
those faithful friends whom I shall probably never see again.

“I used to walk at night, avoiding the highways for fear of some misadventure; at
daybreak I would lie down at the foot of a pine tree, in the shadow of a rock, no
matter where, provided the place was deserted. A fortnight passed in this way; I
had accomplished more than half of my journey, and everything led me to hope
that I should reach the end without hindrance. Alas! it must needs be otherwise.
My provisions were now gone; the country was barren, there was no fruit, not
even wild strawberries or whortleberries. One day, toward nightfall, I ventured to
knock at the door of a solitary house. I was well received, and my host, an old
Kurd, gave me a bountiful supper, to which I did full justice. I speak Turkish
fluently, so it was easy to pass myself off for a Mussulman merchant on my way
to Tabriz, and I said that I had been attacked by thieves who had made off with
my horse and my baggage.

“‘May the will of Allah be done!’ said my host. ‘He will repay you fourfold for
what he has taken from you. But a curse on these brigands who rob the servants of
the Prophet, instead of contenting themselves with Christian dogs!’

“While he was talking, one of his grandchildren, a little boy of four, had climbed
on my knee and was playing with my watch; suddenly he took hold of my beard
and pulled it with all his might, and the string that held the false hair broke,
leaving the beard in his hands, to his great terror. I saw my host’s eyes grow big
with fright.

“‘Ah!’ said he, ‘so you are not the old merchant Abdallah, as you pretended.’ He
rose, and by a quick movement pulled off my turban and white wig.

“‘You are doubtless a spy, one of those fédaī that infest our country. A curse on
you!’ and he spat on the ground, as a sign of scorn.

“Seeking safety in flight, I rushed to the door; it was locked. I tried to force it
open, but my host had already thundered out his orders:

“‘Hola, Jousif, Raschid, Hamid! Seize this dog!’

“In an instant I was thrown to the ground, and bound fast; then my tormentors
took me to an underground room and double-locked the door. I was convinced
that my last hour had struck, and resigned myself to my fate, but as the days
slipped by I began to wonder, from curiosity, rather than fear, what they were
going to do with me. Every evening the door of my prison was opened, and a
hand passed me a jug of water and some bread. The continued suspense began to
weigh upon me. Five days had now passed since the catastrophe. I was lying in a
troubled sleep, when a slight sound made me wake up with a start.

“‘Who is there?’ I cried.

“‘Don’t stir,’ replied a voice, ‘it is a friend.’

“‘A friend? Then I have not been forgotten?’

“‘No; I am an Armenian like yourself, and all the sons of Haīk are brothers.
Everything is ready for our flight; there is not a moment to lose. Come.’

“We went out of the cellar, and I breathed in the pure night air with delight. The
watch dog gave a threatening growl when he saw us, but as soon as he recognized
my companion he became quiet and wagged his tail with joy. Two horses were
waiting for us, with a pistol attached to each saddle. We mounted them and soon
disappeared in the night. I waved my arms for joy; I was free; fortune was smiling
on me again.

“As we galloped along over a by-way, my companion told me his story. His name
was Puzant, and he was the son of Armenian farming people. When he was twelve
years old, the Kurds plundered his village, his parents were killed, and he himself
was taken prisoner and sold as a slave. The same old story, so common in
Armenia.
“My host had bought him, and converted him to the Mussulman faith, giving him
the name of Hamid. The child became a youth; he was diligent, and apparently
submissive and attached to his master, but he had not forgotten; he steadfastly
cherished the purpose of fulfilling the oath of revenge which he had taken before
his dying father.

“When my disguise was discovered, he made a vow to set me free and at the same
time to regain his own liberty. Fate had favored him, for Rhasoul Khan, instead of
cutting my throat immediately, had sent one of his men to fetch zaptiehs from the
neighboring town. This delay had given Puzant time to get everything in readiness
for our flight. First he put poison in the Kurd’s rhaki (liquor) and that of his men;
then he saddled the horses, took arms and ammunition, and finally opened the
door of my prison. The zaptiehs could not reach the farm before morning; we had
Rhasoul Khan’s best horses, and at least six hours’ start.

“For three days all went well. We were nearing the end of our journey, without
having met with any hindrances; only a few miles more lay between us and the
frontier, which we planned to cross during the night. When the full moon was up,
we set out, and made our way very cautiously across a marsh, leading our horses
by the bridles, and attentive to the slightest sound. The hoot of a screech-owl
startled us, and as we stopped, in momentary hesitation, the sound of a pistol-shot
rang out, and a bullet went whistling over Puzant’s head. We could hesitate no
longer; we were discovered, so we left our good horses, regretfully, and took to
our heels, rushing madly forward. It was a wild chase. In the darkness we had
many a slip and fall, and our hands and faces were torn by thorns. Our enemies
were in hot pursuit, and shooting at random, guided by the sound of our voices.
Our strength was spent: then, at last, we heard the sound of rushing water; it was
the stream that separates the two countries. We sprang forward and leaped into the
surging waters—we set foot on the other side! As a response to our shout of joy,
came a howl of rage and five pistol-shots. I felt a sharp pain in my shoulder: the
bullet had entered the flesh, but I nerved myself to bear the pain, for liberty was
opening her arms to me. We soon disappeared behind the rocks; we were saved,
for our enemies would not dare follow us on Persian territory.

“What more shall I tell you? We had come to the end of our adventures, and the
rest of the journey was child’s play. After resting a few days in the village, where
the hodja dressed my wound and applied a healing balm, we resumed our journey
to Tabriz, no longer on foot, but by carriage, and in broad daylight.

“I have found again the generous friends of whom I spoke to you: Doctor
Harontounian and the Vartabet (priest) Gerdulian. They got work for Puzant with
an Armenian weaver. As for me, the hour has again struck for my departure, and I
leave by automobile for Djoulfa to-morrow; there, I shall take the train for Tiflis,
 where I expect to stay several weeks. Then I shall go to Bulgaria to rejoin
Andranick. I take leave of you, my friends: thank you again and again, and, if
God so pleases, may we meet again.

“Yours devotedly,

“Rupen.”

“Shall we ever see that brave fellow again?” said Archag.

“Why not?” replied Aram. “We’ll run away to Europe and join him,” he
whispered in his friend’s ear.

The dormitory was now full of boys, and it was necessary to guard their
speech. Archag put the letter back in his pocket, and went over to the
window, where he began to chat with Samouīl.

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked, observing his friend’s pallor.

“I—I—” stammered Samouīl; but his speech was checked by a rush of

blood. The handkerchief which he had put to his lips was stained crimson.
There was a murmur of pity from the boys, and they made haste to carry the
sick lad to his bed: Archag kneeling beside him, bathed his temples, while
Garabed ran for Dr. Spencer.

The doctor’s face grew grave as he examined Samouīl, and listened to his
breathing.

“He must be taken to the hospital,” said he to Badvili Melikian; “he will get
better care there than here.”

The change was made at once. Samouīl was not suffering, but his life was
ebbing away. Badvili Melikian told the boys that their comrade was going
to die, and they were moved and saddened by his words. The Juniors took
turns in going to spend their spare hours with the sick boy, taking him gifts
of flowers and fruit. Samouīl never complained, but always welcomed his
friends with a smile.
“You know,” he said once to Garabed, “I’m not going to live much longer. I
am so glad; I have no one left on earth, and I’m so tired all the time.”

For a few days he felt a little better, and was able to get up and walk about
in the hospital garden; then he had another hemorrhage, more violent than
the last.

“It is the end,” said Dr. Spencer. “I don’t think he will live through the
night.”

The boy was drowsy all day, but about five o’clock he opened his eyes and
smiled, as he saw Archag sitting by his bed.

“You all spoil me,” he said to his friend, as he smelt the flowers he offered.
“When I am down there” (and he pointed to the hospital cemetery), “you
will cover my grave with cyclamen, won’t you? It’s my favorite flower.”

“Oh Samouīl! You’re not going to leave us! What shall we do without
you?”

“Without me?” repeated the sick boy in surprise. “I didn’t suppose there
was any one who would miss me.”

“Hush, hush! We all loved you” (Archag was already using the past tense,
unconsciously). “Whenever we had a favor to ask, whenever we had no
time to do our work and were afraid of being punished, to whom did we
turn? To you, always to you!”

Samouīl listened, happily.

“Is it true, is it really true, what you are telling me?”

“I swear it.”

“Then I’m very happy, for I’ve been of some use in the world, and there
will be somebody to mourn for me when I’m not here any more.”
The two boys were silent for a moment. Archag was too much moved to
speak. Samouīl seemed very weary; he looked at his comrade in silence,
and after a little while he said:

“I’ll wait for you. Up there. I so hope you will all come and join me. You
will do your best to, won’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And when you want to do something wrong, just think that it hurts me, and
perhaps that will help you resist the temptation.”

Archag bent his head in assent. Never before had he seen death so near, and
he was completely overcome.

The sun had disappeared behind the hills that outline the horizon; the sky
had faded from brilliant red to pale yellow. Samouīl slept for a few
moments, then he opened his eyes again and said:

“I have just seen the new Jerusalem, the city with streets of gold. Angels
were holding out their arms to me, and I saw my mother among them; I
don’t remember her face, for she died when I was only three years old, but I
knew her at the first glance. It’s strange, isn’t it?”
 THE HOSPITAL COURTYARD

His voice was altered, and in his great black eyes was reflected the mystery
of the Beyond. Then he was seized with a choking fit, and Archag held a
glass of lemonade to his lips. He drank a few drops, and thanked his friend
with a smile.

“How beautiful my mother is! And she looked at me so lovingly! But—she

—is—here—and——”

He could not go on; his features contracted in a spasm of pain, then they
resumed their expression of peace and happiness.

Archag, terrified, sprang to the bell.

The nurse came running in.

“Is he worse?” she asked.

“I don’t know; I think—he has fainted.”

The nurse gave one look at the bed, and divined the truth.

“He is dead,” she whispered, kissing the marble brow.

“Good-by, my darling boy; God has taken you to His rest.”

Archag was convulsed with tears, as he knelt at the foot of the bed.

The boys planted cyclamen on Samouīl’s grave, as he had wished, and in

the spring, when the fields are full of flowers, it is covered with a wonderful
carpet of pink and white.
CHAPTER XVI
 THE STUDENTS PRESENT A TRAGEDY
Great news: the students were to act a tragedy during the Christmas
holidays. The winter was very severe this year, and the proceeds of the play
were to be distributed among the poor.

Mr. Piralian selected the Christian tragedy of Santourt, by Thomas Terzian.

Every one approved the choice, but when the poor professor came to assign
the parts, he found himself in an embarrassing situation. For the boys, with
unbounded confidence in their aptitude for high tragedy, all wanted to play
the leading rôles, and refused to take any others, as being beneath their
dignity. The college was all topsy-turvy; Dr. Mills had to threaten to forbid
the performance altogether before these embryo actors could be pacified.

The president then commissioned Mihran hodja Kurkjian, professor of

Armenian, to assign the parts. This measure met with approval, for the boys
were very fond of Mihran hodja. The part of Santourt, the martyr-princess,
was given to Garabed, because of his pretty face and rather feminine
features. Aram and one of the Freshmen were to be his attendants. Archag
was to play Yervant, the fiancé of the fair Santourt; Nejib the old king,
Sanadroug; Soghomon, the future pastor, was chosen to represent Saint
Thaddeus, the Missionary Apostle of Armenia. So they were all satisfied,
and set themselves in good earnest to study their parts. All the talk was now
about tragedies, famous actors, costumes and acting. The boys called one
another by the names of the heroes they were to impersonate, and some of
them embellished their conversation with lines from the tragedy.

When the dinner-bell was heard, Dikran, who had the part of the king’s cup-
bearer, would say to his comrades:

“Come, noble sons of Haīk, to assist at the feast of the gods. The table
groans beneath the weight of succulent viands, and the fair-haired
Aphrodite will pour us out ambrosia.”
The others, quite carried away by his poetic ardor, would reply with the
chorus of the third act:

“Glory be to Aphrodite, the Queen of Cyprus! The whole world

acknowledges her power; the flowers bloom in her honor, and the birds sing
her praises——,” then, O sad return to mundane matters, they would fall to
eating their bread, their olives and their cucumbers, and would drink
ambrosia—in the form of clear, cold water!

Soghomon, in the process of learning the part of Saint Thaddeus, had

become convinced that though he was not yet the Apostle of Armenia, he
should be some day. Already he beheld the Gregorian Church
revolutionized by his mighty words, and the people won by his preaching.
He scanned his lines; he labored to make his pronunciation more impressive
by dragging out the last syllables, and raised his arms as if in the act of
blessing a thousand heads bowed at his feet, to the great amusement of his
companions.

In the course of a Turkish lesson, in which Saint Thaddeus II had been

conspicuous for his stupidity, Professor Hairemian became exasperated, and
sent him to his seat.

“Go and sit down, Soghomon; you will stay in for an hour and learn this
lesson over again for to-morrow morning.”

The culprit hung his head and murmured, just loud enough to be heard:
“Scorned by men, I will take refuge on the barren mountain tops; the birds
will provide me with sustenance, and my soul will sing acts of thanks-
giving.”

The whole class broke out into a great shout of laughter, and the professor,
dumbfounded, asked:

“Come now! Are you making game of me, or have you really gone mad?”

“These words of the Saint, expressing my feelings, seemed to me to be

adapted to the situation.”
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