2023-09-25 16:42:58
Among German historians, Karl Schlögel is one of the outstanding experts on Russia and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, whose history and territories are interconnected. His book “The Soviet Century” was published in 2017, and now “American Matrix” is a look back at the American century, which for Schlögel begins with the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 and ends on September 11, 2001 with the collapse of the World Trade Center towers . Schlögel discovered parallels early on in the development stages of the Soviet Union and the USA. In “American Matrix” the moments of “easy, natural harmony” between Russian and American industrial pathos occupy an important place.
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Historian Karl Schlögel
An integral part of the early travel reports from the “New World” is the overview of America and Russia. It can be found in Tocqueville’s “De l’Amérique”, as well as in the American panoramas of the geographer Friedrich Ratzel and in the letters of the “world-addicted observer” Max Weber, who traveled to the USA with his wife Marianne in 1904. Schlögel places it at the beginning of his book – and adds an episode that is as amusing as it is insightful: the report on a “Soviet Grand Tour into the 20th Century”.
It is about the trip to America of the two Russian writers Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, who became famous for their satires. Her travel report appeared in Pravda from November 1935 to October 1936. In the year of the “Great Terror,” 1937, it became a book called “One-Story America.”
For Russian readers it was a sensation; Ilf and Petrow’s praise of the “comfort and service culture” in American gas stations and laundries seemed like a fairy tale to them. The satirists made sure that their fascination with America would not become a problem for them when they returned to Russia. Your report ends with criticism of America, “Home, home” is the final word. It was as if a Soviet superego had reminded the two travelers where their homeland was.
America as a spatial management
The Eastern European historian Karl Schlögel is one of the representatives of his field who paid just as much, if not greater, attention to the “horizontal of space” than to the “chronological sequence of epochs”. At the center of “American Matrix” is the “production of American space”; Schlögel confronts the American conquest of land with the powerlessness of the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union to “penetrate Russian space.”
In the United States, natural wonders on the one hand and industrial and engineering marvels on the other are equally astonishing. When trying to describe the 446 km long, in some places 29 km wide Grand Canyon, words fail. In view of the enormous book of earth’s evolution that has lasted millions of years open before our eyes, all that remains is “sighing and silence”. The Hoover Dam, built between 1931 and 1935, with its 221 meters high and 201 meters wide, is an icon of the “New Deal”, the “9th Dam”, which arouses the same “feeling of powerlessness and bewilderment” in visitors. Symphony of our days” in which the “technically sublime” is embodied.
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American history is a history of space management. Its stages can be traced through the expansion of the rail network and the highway system. The United States became a railroad country early on; by 1920, over 1,000 railroad companies were competing with each other. Even though airplanes have replaced railways as the most important means of transport since 1951, the USA has remained a railway country – in terms of freight transport. Up to two and a half kilometers long, often pulled by three or more locomotives, freight trains are responsible for 43 percent of transport volumes; in the EU it is just seven percent.
The “movement history” of the USA is reflected in the highway system just as precisely as in the rail network. There is something imperial about them; Schlögel calls them the Roman roads of the 20th century. Experienced in greyhounds, the American driver quotes Gertrude Stein, who spoke of highways as a “space of time” that is “always in motion.”
“American Matrix” is shaped by urban space. In Detroit, the urban symbol of the industrial decline in the USA, Karl Schlögel admires the wall frescoes by the Mexican painter Diego Rivera in the courtyard of the Detroit Institute of Art; he calls them a “Sixtina Americana” of fine art in the “Machine Age”.
Socialist Realism in Detroit? Diego Rivera’s mural depicting Ford Motor Company factory workers
Quelle: picture alliance/dpa
In New York, he was fascinated by the “total work of art” of the Rockefeller Center, which was completed within twenty months. For him, the architect Rem Koolhaas embodies “Manhattanism” in an unsurpassed and exemplary manner.
In addition to the city physiognomies, excellent “places” mark the American space, fixed points of everyday life and labels of cultural self-evidentness. These include the “mall”, the shopping center as a “common place of the American way of life”, these include the “caravanserai” of the 20th century, which can be seen in the pictures of Edward Hopper and in novels such as Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” and Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” immortalized Motel. The university campus is part of it, the baseball stadium and the museum. The National Museum of African-American Culture and History and the National Museum of the American Indian recall the dark places of the “American Matrix.” Santa Monica, the “Weimar on the Pacific,” remains unforgotten as a place where the Nazis threatened German culture found refuge.
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Not everything in Karl Schlögel’s monumental book is new. But the stylistic certainty and accuracy of his observations are incomparable; he is also, as the artists of the “Machine Age” were admiringly called, a “precisionist”. And he has an eye for insightful constellations like at the beginning of his book, when, looking back to 1904, he projects Max Weber’s trip to America onto Baedeker of the same year and remembers that at the time when the courageous German sociologist, despite everything Warnings visited the slaughterhouses of Chicago, Sinclair Lewis wrote his Chicago novel “The Jungle”, which was set in the slaughterhouses.
In the “American century,” Schlögel encountered Russian admiration and Soviet envy. The simultaneity of large-scale industrial projects often led to a surprising camaraderie between American and Soviet engineers. The Hoover Dam is a signature of the New Deal, just as “Dnieproges,” the large dam/power plant on the Dnieper, is one of the flagship projects of the First Five-Year Plan. Stalin described a synergy linking national ideologies when he called for combining “American pragmatism” with “Bolshevik passion.” An example of this was “Soviet Detroit on the Volga”, the car factory in Nizhny Novgorod, which could not have been built without the commitment of Henry Ford and his architect Albert Kahn. The Kahn office was involved in the planning of Russian tractor factories, which later also produced tanks – an American contribution to the “military capability” of the Red Army, as Stalin had to acknowledge.
The “comradeship” had its limits. Two American and Russian books with architectural drawings published in the 1930s are informative. Both authors have New York and Rockefeller Center in mind. Hugh Ferriss’ “The Metropolis of Tomorrow” is a homage to “Manhattanism”, Vyacheslav Oltarschewsky’s “Contemporary Babylon” is a sharp rejection of skyscraper euphoria. Oltarschewsky contrasts the skyscrapers with Moscow’s “high-rise buildings,” which emerge from a humane architecture, while Manhattan, on the other hand, shows that architects are powerless, and in America the role of city builder is played by “predatory capital.” The Soviet pavilion at the New York World’s Fair in 1939/40 was similarly impressive. Unlike its American counterpart “Futurama,” it did not show an imaginary future, but rather proudly proclaimed the message that the future already existed in the USSR.
Fascinated by “managing space”: Karl Schlögel
Source: Martin UK Lengemann/WELT
Schlögel concludes his book with a chapter about the architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright was a sharp critic of the urban America that was emerging in “skyscraperism”: “His vision contrasted the vertical with a horizontal America.”
Invited to the All-Union Congress of Soviet Architects in Moscow in 1937, he confirmed the prejudice of his Russian audience in his speech, which was received with great applause, when he complained that private property made sensible urban planning impossible in the USA. His criticism of the “palatial style” also affected those present; Wright called on Soviet Russia to honor its “great architectural masterpieces” but not to imitate them.
Wright found his greatest admirer in Alina Rosenbaum, who came from St. Petersburg and who, as Ayn Rand, had become a militant suffragette for the neoliberals and neoconservatives in the USA. In her novel “The Fountainhead” – made into a film directed by King Vidor and starring Gary Cooper – she created a monument to Frank Lloyd Wright, the critic of “Manhattanism”.
Karl Schlögel’s review of the American century ends somewhat abruptly. The reader wonders what will become of the “American Matrix” in the “Chinese Century” proclaimed by Xi Jinping.
Karl Schlögel: American Matrix. Visit to an era. Hanser, 832 pages, 45 euros
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