Reading Notes: Kracauer - On Employment Agencies: The Construction of a Space

Social strata are reflected in the spaces that the members of different strata occupy. Suburbs are a result of the growing middle class. Employment agency is the space assigned to the unemployed – opposite of a home.

He sees the Employment agency as a physical manifestation of an economic reality. Employment agencies are necessary as places for the unemployed to go instead of work or home – a kind of anti-home. He mulls their locations at length, describing the locations of a number of different specialized employment agencies, finally settling on the metal workers’ employment agency, which is situated in a back courtyard (two layers deep into the heart of the building), behind the offices where work is contracted and the areas in which the work is done. In this world, the power, economic and social, of a person is measured by his distance from the street. The powerful are at the front of the building and the abject are in the guts of the building, waiting for the job-makers to give them some work. Kracauer maps the economic reality of the workers’ situations onto the physical layout of the building.

Also, lengthy discussion of the irony/suckiness of how work is distributed. Some professions prefer to hire those who have been unemployed the longest, others prefer to hire those most recently unemployed.

Spatial Authority also enters in the form of signs governing the use of the space: “Protect the common property” and “In the interest of a smooth flow of persons, the orders of the hall porter must be unquestioningly followed.” Though he is, you could say, only barely more employed that the unemployed around him, and though they share the same space, the hall porter gains a great deal of authority over those waiting around him.

Also, some discussion of decoration: “Ostensibly out of the need to brighten up the place a little, the walls have from time to time been adorned with coloured prints. Do landscapes interrupt the misery or artistic portraits? Not at all. Rather, pictures that are dedicated to the prevention of accidents. ‘Think of your mother’, stands under one of them that, like the rest, warns of the dangers to which the worker is subjected when working with machines. Astonishingly enough, the couple of illustrations of gloomy happenings shimmer in a friendly manner above the heads. Yet nothing typifies the character of this space more than the fact that in them even pictures of accidents become picture postcard greetings from the happy upper world. If the unemployed could be immediately transferred there from the employment agency, then the poster announcing ‘Unnecessary waiting on the steps is not permitted’, that adorns many staircase walls, would not be required. It sounds like an afterword to the collection of texts that is prefaced by the door plate at the entrance to the courtyard.”

Kracauer sees the economic/social reality of the workers’ existence exemplified by the space they have to inhabit while waiting for a job. This space is further governed not only by its situation in relation to the spaces occupied by those that have the power to give jobs, but also by the disembodied authority of the posted signs warning of the dangers of work as well as the admonishments not to loiter. All in all, rather bleak.

Reading notes: Siegfried Kracauer – The Hotel Lobby

Kracauer - primarily known for film theory – Theory of Film and From Caligari to Hitler. This essay is an extract from Mass Ornament. He fled Germany under the Nazis and worked afterward in America. He was a student of Simmel and was influenced by him. Early in his career looked and daily phenomena and their impact on and significance in human life.

In the Hotel Lobby, he sees the lobby as an “inverted image” of the House of God – any house of worship. These spaces, he says, are both specifically equipped by their function to create equals of the people that inhabit them, despite their divergent functions. In a religious congregation, the differences between them disappear because of their united focus on god – they see their lives as serving the same destiny. Equality in the hotel lobby is instead established by a relationship to nothing. The sitters in a hotel lobby are, in the act of sitting in the lobby, focusing their energy on nothing at all, whereas in the church, the congregation’s members focus their energy entirely on the same object. The House of God is a place where people congregate to encounter a certain unknown Someone, whereas the Hotel Lobby is a place where people congregate to become anonymous and encounter no one. He emphasizes the importance of Silence as it is observed in those places (example from Der Tod in Venedig), and the aims of those specific silences – in the lobby, it underscores the anonymity of the people occupying the space and acts almost as a barrier between the individuals, whereas in the house of god, silent prayer unites the anonymous worshipers in their attempt to find god. Both spaces also allow for a detachment from daily life – one with meaning in the case of the church and one entirely without meaning in the hotel lobby. Silence underlines the sense that the people in those spaces regard one another as equals.

The hotel lobby has no specific purpose “dictated by Ratio,” but does accord a certain distance from the everyday – a kind of perspective that allows the inhabitant to regard daily life from afar. Kracauer is fascinated by the recurrent role of the hotel lobby in detective novels and seems to imply that the hotel lobby is the ideal setting for action performed by the detective novel’s “emptied-out individuals” (“who, as rationally constructed complexes, are comparable to the transcendental subject”). The congregation emerges, seeing itself as having a purpose, while the individuals in the hotel lobby are stripped of a purpose. Thus, the lobby-sitters approach a kind of existential nothing. The house of god creates a community where there had been none before.

Beautiful passage:

“But if the meaning of this anonymity becomes nothing more than the representation of the insignificance of this beginning, the depiction of formal regularities, then it does not foster the solidarity of those liberated from the constraints of the name; instead, it deprives those encountering one another of the possibility of association that the name could have offered them. Remnants of individuals slip into the nirvana of relaxation, faces disappear behind newspapers, and the artificial continuous light illuminates nothing but mannequins. It is the coming and going of unfamiliar people who have become empty forms because they have lost their password, and who now file by as ungraspable flat ghosts. If the possessed an interior, it would have no windows at all, and they would perish aware of their endless abandonment, instead of knowing of their homeland as the congregation does. But as pure exterior, they escape themselves and express their non-being through the false aesthetic affirmation of the estrangement that has been installed between them. The presentation of the surface strikes them as an attraction; the tinge of exoticism gives them a pleasurable shudder.”

Kracauer uses a SPATIAL model to explain the effect of a space on the people who occupy it.

Reading Notes - Die Leiden des jungen Werther

Characters

Werther
Charlotte
Wilhelm – addressee of all the letters
Editor

Spatial analysis

Many different aspects of human interaction with landscape: impulse to control the landscape through gardening, desire to reproduce nature in all its glory through painting or writing – compare to Wackenroder’s letter where he despairs of being able to describe the landscape – the insufficiency of human art to do justice to nature. Also, there is a major rift between “culture” and “nature”. This is especially evidenced in the ball scene when Werther and Lotte go onto the balcony to watch the storm. They leave “culture” behind them in the house and enter a kind of liminal space between “tamed” culture and “wild” nature, whose power is represented by the storm’s intensity. However, their understanding of the natural is mediated by their cultural associations. Klopstock is the (human) filter through which they observe and understand nature. Klopstock = Claude glass

Also, this "flight from society" is symptomatic of the larger context of the novel. Werther's entire experience in Wahlheim (hello, placelessness!) is the result of his inability to function in society. Much of his movement is outward - going out to Wahlheim, going out of the ballroom, going out into the woods - and away from civilization. The problem with his experiences in nature, though, is that his experiences are always mediated through someone else's experiences and ideas - first Plato, then Klopstock, then Ossian (whose own writings were fictional, it turned out). There are layers of artificiality in Werther's behavior that make any kind of authentic experience impossible.

Also, Werther’s experience of landscape is marked by his own moods – or his moods are marked by what nature is doing around him. In the letter of 10. Mai, he feels at peace with nature – its peacefulness and happiness mirrors his own. At other points in the novel, though, nature takes on a dangerous, violent force that mirrors changes in his own attitude/experience. Landscapes are specifically created in Werther to mirror and echo his attitudes. Floods –Abgründe, etc.

Formal/stylistic notes

Epistolary Novel – however, also framed by the fictional editor. The reader almost takes the place of Wilhelm, the friend to whom Werther addresses his letters. We only get half of the correspondence which also reflects the entirely self-absorbed nature of the protagonist.

Frequent allusions to other writers assume a reader that is educated and informed in a similar way as Werther and Lotte are. The references don’t mean anything without their context intact in the reader.

Reading Notes - Storm: Immensee

Characters

• Reinhard – best friend of Elisabeth, five years her senior. The novella is centered on his character and narrated as a flashback to several points in his life. He is already an old man at the beginning of the narrative, and returns to old age at the end, in the quasi-frame story. He is described as a Wanderer and his main physical characteristics are his hat and walking stick, markers of his migrant character. He has a very authoritative tone even as a child talking to Elisabeth. He presumes that one day they will be married and travel together to India (Orientalist fantasy). Their relationship is predicated on this assumption and hope. Reinhard has a taxonomical interest. It is unclear what his specific field of study is, but he dabbles in Botany (and teaches it to Elisabeth), and undertakes a Grimm-style task of collecting Märchen and other linguistic Merkmale of the regions through which he travels. Oddly, as a child and young man, he wrote his own Märchen, though some of them are very reminiscent of other stories (Biblical reference: story of Daniel in the Lion’s den, Classical reference: die drei Spinnerinnen – the fates). Ends up writing verse and his gift of a volume of poems to Elisabeth after his first year of study seems to mark the end of their relationship, although the poems are all clearly dedicated to her. He seems very tuned in to his surroundings, but often finds himself going awry and having surreal, Märchenhafte experiences in nature. He seems placeless, but simultaneously at home everywhere. A typical wanderer figure
• Elisabeth – best friend, worshiper of Reinhard. Clearly still a child for the first parts of the story, but acts and is portrayed as strangely mature for her age. She also has a very strong attachment to her mother and relies heavily on her mother’s input for decisions – she claims that she will not be allowed to travel to India (Reinhard assures her that by that time they will be married and no one will be able to tell her what to do, although by positioning himself as the authority at that point, he assumes the same power that he begrudges her mother), and it is implied that her mother convinced her to marry Erich instead. While she is not entirely without free will, Elisabeth’s life seems to be largely the result of other people’s actions. Platially, Elisabeth seems very much to rely on others’ directions. The one time that she does wander into nature on her own (as a five year old), Reinhard calls her back into the house (domesticity) that he has finished building for them. She allows herself to be steered spatially and directionally just as much as she allows herself to be steered in her life decisions. Here, her spatial helplessness seems to be a symptom or symbol of her willingness to surrender her own agency.
• Erich – very much a supporting actor. He assumes the position that Reinhard leaves vacant when he leaves to study. After his third proposal, he convinces (with the help of her mother) Elisabeth to marry him. He notably replaces the bird that Reinhard had given Elisabeth with a more stylish, less wild bird in a golden cage. He brings Elisabeth out of her rustic surroundings into a much more manicured, wealthier lifestyle. He seems to represent civilization/Bourgeoisie/manicured life, whereas Reinhard seems more to represent the wilder, less constrained life they had had as children.
• Elisabeth’s mother – she only speaks a couple of times, but is a constant presence. She seems to have steered Elisabeth away from Reinhard and toward Erich. However, at a crucial moment (after Reinhard’s recitation of a song about a mother steering her daughter away from the man she loved), she keeps Erich from following the visibly upset Elisabeth into the garden saying “she has things to do in the garden” or similar. She acts as a foil to Reinhard’s mother, whom Elisabeth gives a portrait of herself for Christmas, and who facilitates Elisabeth’s sending letters and gifts to Reinhard, as if she couldn’t send them on her own (was her mother forbidding it?).
• Die Zigeuner – they appear twice in the novella. Once, when Reinhard is away studying, at Christmas. He sees the woman singing a song about a love affair gone awry, which ends “allein soll ich sterben” or similar. She seems to try to seduce Reinhard, who is, at that moment, told that a Christmas package has arrived from his home. The smell of the Christmas cakes that his mother and Elisabeth have baked him fill his room (she seems to fill the room, in a way) and spill into the hall. The cakes have the letters of his name put on them with sugar – by Elisabeth, who seems to be affirming Reinhard’s identity in lieu of her own – and he gives half of them to a beggar. The second appearance of the Zigeuner is at the very end of his visit to Immensee, when they appear begging at the house as Reinhard and Elisabeth return from rowing on the lake. Elisabeth gives them all her money and Reinhard asks what else they could want. The woman answers that they could want nothing else and then repeats the last line of her song about dying alone. At this, he recognizes the woman (unheimlich) and seems also to realize that he has to leave Immensee.

Plot points

His visit to Immensee to see Elisabeth and Erich is punctuated by a number of experiences in the landscape. He is caught in a rainstorm on his way back to the house and sees a seeming apparition of Elisabeth and is infuriated by her turning her back and going ahead of him back to the house. He goes walking along the banks of the See in the evening and swims out to see a Wasserlilie that seems to recede further away from him as he swims toward it. This results in a terrifying spatial confusion. The combination of his confusion and the belief that he is being pulled under by the water plants around him cause him to panic and head back for the shore, at which point he sees that the flower is exactly as far away as he originally thought it to be. This is a surreal almost Märchenhaft moment in the story. Finally, Elisabeth has been charged by Erich, with the task of showing Reinhard all the most beautiful places on their estate, while Erich and Elisabeth’s mother are mysteriously away on business. On their way back (with him steering, but Elisabeth still in charge of showing him the way – perhaps the only time they’re on equal footing, really), Reinhard has insights into Elisabeth’s character just from looking at her hand resting on the edge of the boat. When she realizes he’s staring at her hand, she lets it trail in the water. Later that night, he retraces their steps and ponders whether or not to leave.

Spatial analysis

Here, the question seems to be not where people are at home or what places seem to have the most importance or symbolic weight, but instead a question of who has authority in space. Reinhard is certainly the most authoritative when it comes to navigating space, doing most of the leading and almost never following. When he is following direction (given by Elisabeth at Immensee), he is still in physical control of their movements, piloting the boat. He also underscores his authority over natural space by undertaking natural historical/botanical categorization. This organizing impulse is carried over and he seems also to take control of language by trying to organize and categorize linguistic patterns and stories. His creative impulse seems to decrease after Elisabeth marries Erich – in the beginning, he composes his own Märchen and verses and clears new paths down which to guide Elisabeth (while they’re looking for strawberries, for instance – in that particular instance, however, his urge to move forward results in him leaving her behind.), whereas he ends by only categorizing others’ Märchen, sayings, and songs, and asks directions while on his approach to Immensee.

Formal/stylistic notes

Narrated in the 3^rd person, omniscient, although this seems illogical with the story playing out, as it does, in the context of Reinhard’s memories. He couldn’t know all he seems to remember. The novella is largely realistic, but has some romantic overtones, with a number of unheimlich moments and apparitions. There are many moments where one expects a magical occurrence, but Reinhard always seems to shake off any romantic/magical action.

Temporal tension. Frame narrative takes place in the Present, where Reinhard is an old man. In the space of a few moments, perhaps, of real time, he revisits his ten year old self, his seventeen year old self, and himself as a young-middle-aged man before returning to his present self in old age.

Mix of genres - Lyric moments are very important and take the place of narration for major moments in the story.