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