Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film

363 Pages·2015·2.15 MB·English

by  Andreas Huyssen

Miniature Metropolis

Miniature
Metropolis
LITERATURE IN AN AGE OF
PHOTOGRAPHY AND FILM
Andreas Huyssen
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, En gland 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
Ac know ledg ments ix
Introduction 1
1 Urban Spleen and the Terror of Paris in
Baudelaire and Rilke 2 3
2 Kafka’s Betrachtung in the Force Field of Photography
and Film 5 2
3 Benn in Occupied Brussels: The Rönne Novellas 8 4
4 Photography and Emblem in Kracauer and Benjamin’s
Street Texts 118
5 Double Exposure Berlin: Photomontage
and Narrative in Höch and Keun 1 55
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

Ac know ledg ments
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 rop ea n newspapers or in little magazines and always engaged
with the challenges literature confronted from new media such as
photo graphy 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