The normative basis of Adorno's social philosophy as I have presented it, depends on two reciprocal and mutually supporting moments: the re of Auschwitz and the mimetic response of shudder at the horror of pure identity. These two moments support a framework of arguments by analogy between the cultural conditions of the elimination of freedom that ultimately led to the murder of millions of people, and to cultural conditions of unfreedom in Western consumer culture that, in Adorno's estimation, threaten to do the same. If I am right, commentators who attempt to deduce Adorno's ethics from his aesthetics, and critics of Adorno who look for normative ethical assumptions smuggled in under the cloak of his aesthetics, are looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place. The answer to the question of the evaluative or normative basis of Adorno's social philosophy is to be found in his metaphysical views concerning the existence of secular evil. Moreover, Adorno's social philosophy, as I have presented it, is consistent with his philosophical allegiance to Hegel. It is a development of Hegelian metaphysics. Specifically, it is a dialectical and axiological inversion of Hegel's thesis that the task of philosophy is to comprehend the rational in the actual. In turn, this inverted Hegelianism fits within the broader framework of classical metaphysics which undergoes a further axiological inversion at Adorno's hands.
Whilst my interpretation of Adorno here yields a relatively simple solution to the question of the normative basis of his social philosophy, it may also be thought to lead to an unpalatable consequence. On my interpretation, the shudder is the only appropriate response to Auschwitz. More than that, it is a complex mimetic response in which negative elements and positive epistemic and practical elements are intertwined. But this interpretation saddles Adorno with the uncomfortable implication that Auschwitz—the paradigm instance of horror—has after all some positive, redemptive significance.
In fact, Adorno can and does face this consequence squarely. Auschwitz is the historical manifestation of the horror of pure identity. According to the logic of Adorno's negative dialectic pure identity passes over into pure non-identity and back again. These two moments, identity and non-identity stand in perpetual tension. They are not secured within a more overarching identity as in Hegel's logic. There is then a kind of non-identity to the re of Auschwitz in Adorno's philosophy, with a potentially redemptive significance. Auschwitz is a secular evil of such magnitude that it shatters our moral categories and exceeds our attempts to comprehend it as the mere violation of antecedent moral laws. This positive aspect of the shudder consists partly in (but is not exhausted by) its epistemic significance, namely in the apprehension of the truth that the world is radically evil. In Minima Moralia, Adorno cites F. H. Bradley, "Where everything is bad, it must be good to know the worst" (MM, 83). It is good to know the worst not just because it is good to have true beliefs. There is a more subtle dialectic in play. Not even Auschwitz, the ultimate horror, warrants the response of total despair. Adorno is a brinksman, but he is not a nihilist. So long as we can know the worst—that what is, is radically evil—then not everything can be irredeemably bad. That is because truth is, in Adorno's eyes, not just a relation of correspondence to the facts, but, as it is for Plato, the source of illumination that radiates from the good.
Adorno does not provide any philosophical discussion of the constellation of truth, evil and goodness. Instead he has recourse to an intriguing metaphor in the crucial final section of Negative Dialectics of a colorless light source, made visible and present only through its scattered and refracted traces.
Consciousness could not despair over the grey, if it did not harbour the concept of a different colour whose scattered traces are not absent from the negative whole. ( ND, 370 [377-78])
It is what is possible, never what is immediately actual that blocks off utopia: thus in the midst of existence what is possible appears to be abstract. The inextinguishable colour comes from non-being. Thought serves it, a bit of existence which, negative as always, reaches over to non-existence. Only the utmost distance would be nearness; philosophy is the prism which captures its colour. ( ND, 66 [57]) 58
As metaphors are apt to be, they are more suggestive than conclusive. They
suggest that the good is a source of illumination, invisible apart from
what it falls upon; grey (das Grau) suggests the horror (das Grauen)
of extant evil; philosophy is the prism that scatters the traces of
color; and the colors are the present traces of the absent good. The
suggestion is that philosophical truth is ineliminably related, through
the presence of secular evil, to a good that is at once transcendent and
absent. Here Adorno's criticism decisively departs from Hegel. The color
and the greyness are situated within the existing world. Philosophy,
in its pursuit of truth, tries to think the possibilities that are lit
up by the inextinguishable and invisible light source located on the far
side of the threshold between being and non-being. In this metaphor of
goodness, Adorno is thinking, not with Hegel, but against him, not only in
the manner of his presentation, but in the theological insistence on the
transcendence of the absent good. These metaphors suggest that the evil
we can know always stands in relation to a good that we cannot, and that
the pursuit of truth, even an awful one, is therefore never a worthless
exercise. The irony is that even here, in these metaphors of transcendent
goodness, where Adorno consciously and decisively breaks with Hegel,
there remains an inverse symmetry which testifies that Adorno remains
Hegel's faithful pupil. In his lectures on the history of philosophy
Hegel writes with characteristic provocation that Plato's idea of the
good "is not beyond reality, in heaven . . . the idea is just reality
brought nearer." (W 19: 39) For Adorno, by contrast, the presence
of the evil we can know shows the idea of the good to be remote indeed,
however "only the utmost distance would be nearness" (ND, 66 [57]).
59
James Gordon Finlayson lectures in European Philosophy at the University of York. He has published widely on Hegel, Adorno, and on Habermas. "Adorno on the Ethical and the Ineffable" appeared recently in the European Journal of Philosophy. He is currently writing a book on Habermas's Discourse Ethics.
1. In 1951, Adorno published Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Existence, an ensemble of micro-dialectical reflections on the good life in a post-war consumer society that was, in his view, increasingly emptied not only of goodness but of vitality. See the Dedication and the epigraph '"Life does not live' Ferdinand Kürnberger," Minima Moralia (London: Verso 1991), 15-19, hereafter cited as MM. In 1963, he held a lecture course entitled Probleme der Moralphilosophie, ed. T. Schröder (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996), henceforth abbreviated as PDM. This has recently been translated into English as, Problems of Moral Philosophy, transl. R. Livingstone, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000). Where I give two references I refer first to the German original and then to the English translation.
2. I do not mean moral "autonomy" in Kant's sense, a concept Adorno subjects to criticism. I mean something more like Mündigkeit, which is sometimes misleadingly translated as "maturity," but means the capacity to use one's own reason. Adorno takes the term from Kant's essay "An Answer to the Question 'What is Enlightenment?'" Immanuel Kant, Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54. See my note no. 18 in "Adorno on the Ethical and the Ineffable," European Journal of Philosophy 10.1 : 6.
3. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988), 22, hereafter abbreviated as ND. Negative Dialectics, transl. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge 2000), 11. Where there is a reliable English version I have cited from it. Where no reliable English version is available, I have translated from the German version, as in the case of ND, and have added a second page reference to the English version.
4. Michael Theunissen, "Negativität bei Adorno," in J. Habermas & L. von Friedeburg, Adorno Konferenz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 42.
5. See Adorno, PDM. See also the first Model in Negative Dialectics, "Freedom: On the Metacritique of Kant's Practical Reason" ND, 211 [211]. It is not so much an essay on Kant's practical philosophy as a critical commentary on Kant's metaphysics of freedom, illuminated by Adorno's interest in psychoanalysis and social-psychology. Similarly, the 1963 lectures on moral philosophy contain surprisingly little engagement with the long tradition of moral philosophy.
6. In this essay I shall make no distinction between the normative and the evaluative. What I say pertains just as much to Adorno's use of normative moral concepts such as "right" and "wrong" as it does to his use of evaluative ethical concepts such as "good" and "bad." The same problem besets Adorno's conception of the good as besets his conception of the right.
7. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A. Wood, transl. H. B. Nisbet, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21; hereafter abbreviated as EPR. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, Vol. 7, eds. K. Michel and E. Moldenhauer (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986) hereafter abbreviated by W, volume and page number.
8. Hegel, W 3: 192.
9. Roughly, we can call a criticism "moralizing" if it presupposes a prior conception of moral right and wrong or good and bad. I shall explain what makes a criticism external below.
10. Hegel's immediate targets here are Plato's recommendations on childcare and Fichte's unnervingly prescient prescription that criminals should carry a painted likeness of themselves on their passports, so that they can be identified at all times. Hegel's point is that the science of right can do without making such particular and determinate prescriptions. Such details form part of what he deems to be the "brightly coloured covering" (bunte Rinde) of the appearance of actuality, not its underlying rationale.
11. Shierry Weber Nicholson, translator of Adorno's Hegel: Drei Studien, refers to Hegel's teaching of the "rationality of the real." See Hegel: Three Studies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 85. This is an accurate translation of Adorno's very uncharitable interpretation of Hegel's notorious Doppelsatz as the mere "justification of what exists" (des Seienden), 82 & 85, but it should not be mistaken for Hegel's view. Despite Adorno's affinity with Hegel, he uncritically inherits the conflation of actuality and existence, along with the conservative and quietistic interpretation of Hegel this implies. Together they give a very misleading impression of Hegel's philosophy, albeit one which was widespread among both Old and Young Hegelians, and which later became more or less standard within Marxism.
12. On the relation between "Existenz" and "Wirklichkeit," see Hegel, W 6: 201.
13. To take a recent example from British political life, whilst the House of Lords may be said to exist for a reason, namely as a check on the legislation passed by the House of Commons, the hereditary principle does not. There is no reason at all in the 21st century why occupants of the second chamber should be born into this office.
14. A good example are the cold weather payments which have, due to a decision of the High Court, found their way into the institution of the British welfare state. If there is good reason to issue cold weather payments to women over sixty, there is equally good reason to issue the same payment to men over sixty, and not only to men over sixty-five.
15. I have taken up and adapted this way of thinking about Hegel's metaphysics from Raymond Geuss, whose essays on modern German philosophy in Morality, Culture, Spirit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) are unrivalled in their perspicuous presentation of difficult ideas.
16. The term "theodicy" comes form Leibniz who argues that God's perfection is such that this world, although it contains evil, is the best world that it was possible for God to create, because the evil in it is always accompanied by a greater good. See Leibniz: Selections, ed. Phillip Wiener (New York: C. Scribner & Sons, 1951), 509-22. This doctrine is better known for having been mercilessly and unfairly lampooned by Voltaire in Candide as Dr. Pangloss's panacea that, "all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds." (Candide, ed. J. H. Brumfitt, [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978, passim]).
17. In Hegel's eyes, organized religion, predominantly Christianity, has done most to promulgate this false theodicy. For the Christian religion has made us think that this world is simply a trial and preparation for another kingdom, in which our true interests will be satisfied. W, 19: 501. "On the appearance of Christianity it is initially claimed that: 'My kingdom is not of this world.' But the realization of this kingdom has and ought to transpire in the present world. In other words, laws, customs, constitutions and everything that belongs to the actuality of spiritual consciousness should be made rational." See Hegel, History of Philosophy III, transl. Haldane and Simpson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963 [1892]), 21-22.
18. Hegel uses the terms "bei sich" and "zu Hause sein." This quotation is actually taken from theAddition to §4, which is transcribed from the manuscripts of Hotho and Gans. The words are not by Hegel's own hand, but they are deemed to be a reliable source. See Translator's Preface, EPR, xxxv-vii.
19. See, for example, recent works by Alan Patten, Hegel's Theory of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); P. Franco, Hegel's Philosophy of Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press 1999); and Frederick Neuhouser, Foundations of Hegel's Social Theory, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
20. Hegel thought that in ancient times by contrast the law commanded respect and veneration in virtue of its mere existence. To illustrate this, he adduces lines 456-57 of the Antigone by Sophocles, lines that are spoken by the eponymous heroine. "The heavenly commands are not from yesterday or today, no they are eternal and nobody knows whence they came." Hegel W 12: 56. Sophocles The Theban Plays, transl. E. F. Watling (London: Penguin 1988), 138. See also Hegel, W 3: 322. "Thus, Sophocles in his Antigone acknowledges as the gods of unwritten and infallible right (Recht): 'not just today and yesterday but forever/ they are there, and no-one knows when they appeared.'" Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 261. As Hegel saw it, the main problem of ancient Greek political life was to make good laws and to establish good institutions. There apart, political life in Ancient Greece was all the more straightforward because the Greeks implicitly recognized the mere existence of institutions and laws. However, Socrates interrupts and corrupts this happy naïvete of Greek ethical life, by introducing into it the principle of critical reflection. Indeed, Hegel believes that, in no small measure because of the modernizing effects of world historical res like Socrates, the naive recognition of the mere existence of customs and laws is no longer possible for modern agents, who, because they are all critical and reflective, recognize only what conforms to their reason as having authority over them. The lives of modern subjects are based on recognition of the reasonsfor the existence of institutions.
21. The passage occurs in the addition to §317. See also the interesting passage in the introduction to Hegel's lectures on fine art. (Hegel, W 13: 25): "The reflective culture of our life today make it a necessity for us in respect of our will no less than of our judgment to adhere to general points of view and to regulate particular matters according to them, so that universal forms, laws, duties, maxims are what have validity as grounds of determination and are the chief regulative force." Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, transl. B. Bosanquet (London: Penguin, 1993), 12.
22. Hegel, W 13: 10, 11 & 17. Notice that Hegel does not say that the task of philosophy is to create good institutions. That is a matter for concrete historical practice, which precedes the reflective task of historical comprehension. In his own time, Hegel endorsed the reforms undertaken by Stein, Hardenberg, Humboldt, and Altenstein, and identified these relatively liberal institutions as the actuality of the Prussian State.
23. Hegel is not unaware of this. He admits that the accumulation of wealth leads to the impoverishment of a whole class of people. And he concedes that the inner logic of civil society leads to the establishing of colonies. Hegel, EPR, 265-67.
24. Generally speaking, I quote from Max Horkheimer und Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1985), henceforth abbreviated as DA. Where possible, I also refer to the English translationDialectic of Enlightenmentby J. Cumming (London: Verso 1997), abbreviated as DE.
25. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 21, 27.
26. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 115. I give a much more detailed account of the relation between unfreedom and radical evil in James Gordon Finlayson "Adorno on the Ethical and the Ineffable," European Journal of Philosophy 10.1 : 1-25.
27. Hauke Brunkhorst makes the mistake of not taking Adorno's claim that the world is radically evil at face value. For example he interprets the dictum that there is no right way to live a false life to mean "only that there is no entirely true life in a false life," in other words, that under present circumstances there is no entirely good way to live a life. That is an uninteresting and uncontroversial claim, and not what Adorno is arguing. In the next paragraph, Brunkhorst's interpretation of Adorno shifts significantly. He attributes to Adorno the claim that "true life," is not possible "in the case of a completely false life," but that a human life that is at least not misspent is nonetheless still imaginable. This is consistent with the stronger view I have outlined. Finally, two lines later, Brunkhorst attributes a third position to Adorno, namley the view that "the damaged life is not yet the completely false life." This is now more like the weaker view outlined here. H. Brunkhorst, Adorno and Critical Theory (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), 64.
28. For just this reason, Adorno rejects empirical approaches to sociology. "For the object itself is derivative, secondary, superficial. Because today the subjects are objects of society, not its substance." (Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften in zwanzig Bänden, Vol. 14, ed. R. Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970-86), 398-99. Henceforth abbreviated as GS. This is an inversion of Hegel's doctrine in the Phenomenology of Spiritthat "substance is subject," which is just another way of saying that the world basically consists in rational actuality.
29. Michael Theunissen observes that the concept of negativity with which Adorno constructs his dialectic is not the formal negativity of non-being but rather "the ontic negativity of what ought not to be," namely "the bad which can only be addressed as false, because he has a concept of untruth which picks out bad reality." Theunissen, "Negativität bei Adorno," 41-42.
30. Adorno, "Progress," in Adorno: Critical Models, transl. and ed. H. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 159; hereafter abbreviated as CM.
31. See Josef Früchtl, Mimesis. Konstellation eines Zentralbegriffs bei Adorno (Würzburg: Meisenhain, 1986).
32. The title of the opening fragment, "Begriff der Aufklärung," must be read as a subjective and objective genetive. It suggests both that the "concept" in play here is a product of Enlightenment thinking, and that it takes Enlightenment as its object.
33. This is implied by the claim that this early principle survives in Greek religion, where it is projected onto what is "unknown and alien" or what "transcends experience." (DA, 17, DE, 15).
34. "The doubling of nature into semblance (Schein) and essence (Wesen). . . which first makes both Myth and science possible, stems from the human fear which comes to expression in explanation (Erklärung)" (DA, 17, DE, 15).
35. "Enlightenment finally consumed not just magic symbols but their descendant universal concepts, and left nothing of Metaphysics in tact apart from the abstract fear of the collective, out of which it arose." (DA, 24, DE, 23)
36. Adorno, like Heidegger before him, alludes to Hölderlin's ode "Patmos": "Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst das Rettende auch" (Where there is danger, the saving power increases, too), (DA, 45, DE, 47).
37. There are echoes here of Schopenhauer's conception of the primal differentiation of the will and Vico's theory that language originates in fear of the unknown, which may well betray Horkheimer's influence.
38. "Artworks . . . are truly afterimages of the primordial shudder (Schauer) in the age of reification." See T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, transl. R. Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 79 and 51; hereafter abbreviated as AT.
39. See the passage from ND, 128 [122], already quoted in section two.
40. Actually, the quotation is from Stendhal. But Stendhal writes only that "la beauté n'est que la promesse du bonheur." He implies that beauty is not objective; it lies in whatever is found beautiful by someone. De L'Amour XVII (Paris: Gallimard, 1980), 58-59. Baudelaire cites Stendhal approvingly when he writes that the "eternal portion" of beauty is "the soul of art" and the "variable element" is "its body." The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. J. Mayne(London: Phaidon Press, 1995). The latter is closer to the thought Adorno has in mind.
41. More than any other term for making equal perhaps the Nazi word "Gleichschaltung" (to force into line, or make something conform) is most redolent with violence, simply because a lot of real violence was perpetrated under that description
42. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, transl. S. W. Nicholsen (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1993), 100.
43. I differ from critics like Jay Bernstein who elucidate Adorno's concept of metaphysical experience with the help of Hegel and Benjamin. Bernstein interprets metaphysical experience as a relation of self-recognition in otherness that obtains when one beholds an art-work appropriately, and which provides an example of a non-instrumental and non-subsumptive relation to other things and other persons, which has substantive ethical implications. J. M. Bernstein, "Why Rescue Semblance? Metaphysical Experience and the Possibility of Ethics," in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, ed. Lambert Zuidervaart (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1997), 177-212. What worries me about Bernstein's approach, insofar as it is not just an exposition but an endorsement of Adorno's philosophy, is that, at bottom, an aesthetic experience is an experience of an object, and thus does not provide an appropriate model for thinking about ethical relations, which are essentially relations between persons.
44. Not for nothing is Hegel sometimes viewed as the Aristotle of the modern world. I am leaving aside the central scholarly question of whether the difference between Hegel's and Kant's metaphysics is a difference within the Kantian paradigm or a difference from it.
45. Aristotle, Metaphysics I 2.982b, 10-20. I have altered W. D. Ross's translation in The Works of Aristotle, Vol. VIII (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1928). I cannot begin to offer an adequate exegesis of this passage, or even attempt to put it into context. I use it here simply as an illuminating point of comparison between classical metaphysics and Adorno's metaphysics. Thanks to Niko Strohbach and Burkhardt Hafeman for help with interpreting this passage.
46. Aristotle's interesting aside about the philomythos (literally: the lover of myths) is very interesting and a little puzzling. His point is that the philomythos, insofar as he too is amazed, is a kind of philosopher. Aristotle is just being respectful of the mythmaking of the Greek cosmologists who preceded him. He clearly implies that not just nature but also myths are sources (and appropriate objects) of wonder. Aristotle shows his metaphysical respect for myth also at Met. XII, 8 1074b1 where he notes that one ancient myth referred to first substances as gods. Whilst this subsequently led to a lot of mistaken anthropological projection, Aristotle claims that the underlying idea of this myth, that substance is divine, is correct.
47. On "The Impoverishment of the Subject" and "The Nominalist Aspect" see ND, 74-76 and 132 [66-69 and 126-27].
48. Hence, Adorno's judgment that the death camps rendered even the most basic human fear of death banausic. "Absolute negativity is predictable: it no longer surprises anyone." (ND, 355 [362]).
49. Adorno is at this point already reading Kant through his critics Schiller and Hegel. For Kant, there are no underlying moral goods. There are conditional goods, which are not yet moral, and there is the one unconditional moral good, goodwill. But the latter consists inthe subjective act of willing a maxim in accordance with and for the sake of duty. Hence, the criticism that moral duty is apt to become detached from the underlying substantive goods and evils, may not in fact apply to Kant.
50. For example, Adorno interprets the inability of an immigrant he encounters on the New York subway to return his sympathetic smile as "Hitler's triumph." "He has not only taken away our country, our language, our money, but also confiscated that last little smile. The world he has created will soon make us as evil as he is" (GS, 20: II 585).
51. Herbert Marcuse is attracted to this Schillerian position in chapter nine of his Eros and Eivilisation (London: Routledge, 1999), 172-97.
52. See also CM, 144: "The crisis of the situation is precisely that while everyone feels the crisis, the words bringing resolution are missing."
53. He is a moral realist according to Geoffrey Sayre-McCord's definition of realism, not because he believes that moral properties are located in the physical world, but because he subscribes to both meta-ethical cognitivism and success theory. See "The Many Faces of Moral Realism," in Essays on Moral Realism, ed. Geoffrey Sayre-McCord (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 1-15. Adorno believes that moral judgments are capable of being true and false, and he believes that some moral judgments are true.
54. Adorno may be making the point that the wrongness of Auschwitz is self-evident and that anyone who needs to be shown by argument why the new categorical imperative is valid, has a defective moral sensibility. But I don't think Adorno holds that we don't need the capacity for practical reason to find out what our obligations are. Such a view is obviously mistaken. The new categorical imperative implies other obligations, for example, the obligation not to commit genocide or mass murder. Of course, that may not be something we need to discover by reason, because genocide and mass murder are also concepts we already know how to apply. But eventually we may find that one or other of our intuitively justified concepts, or a combination of them, has implications or applications to new situations, which are not immediately obvious. The fact that we have arrived at these new judgments or norms through reason and reflection does not itself invalidate them.
55. For example, Adorno explicitly compares jazz enthusiasts to the blind followers of totalitarian regimes. "What is common to the jazz enthusiast of all countries, however, is the moment of compliance, in parodistic exaggeration. In this respect their play recalls the brutal seriousness of the masses of the followers in totalitarian states, even though the difference between play and seriousness amounts to that between life and death." T. W. Adorno, Prisms (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 128.
56. See DA, 12, DE, 9 and T. W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 39.
57. Of course Adorno was not the only person to make such observations about the flaws in a culture that made it susceptible to the ideology of the Third Reich. To take just one example, Viktor Klemperer's diaries are full of insights that are in many respects close to Adorno's. See in particular the entries for 18 February and 23 May 1938, and 10 December 1940. Victor Klemperer, Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten: Tagebücher 1933-41 (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1996).
58. See also ND, 396 [404-5]: "No light falls on human beings and things, in which transcendence does not shine back. In the resistance against the fungible world of exchange is the indelible resistance of the eye, which does not want the colors of the world to be obliterated. In the semblance is the promise of something that is not semblance."
59. Thanks to Iain Macdonald and Katerina Deligiorgi for their generous comments on earlier drafts.
Stripped down to its essentials, my T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form comprises two propositions: Eliot wrote anti-Semitic poetry and prose, which makes him an anti-Semite; Eliot's anti-Semitic poetry is innovative and imaginative, and therefore cannot be dismissed as an inconsequential blemish in his oeuvre. Few reviewers were interested in the second proposition; those who acknowledged it tended to dismiss it as perverse. The book was read merely as an attack on Eliot, which was welcome to some, objectionable to others. There is immense resistance to the simple truth that Eliot wrote anti-Semitic poems. I do not think that the book has done very much to weaken this resistance.
That it persists is evident from the following remarks of the literary scholar and critic, Barbara Everett:
A part of the literary history of the 20th century was Eliot's gigantic public status and authority, and the steady collapse of that status and authority. The collapse has for several decades now been written down in terms of a discovered or imputed misogyny and anti-semitism. The assailing of Eliot's reputation is a difficult and vexed matter; a poet professionally and substantially involved with the society of his time is likely (however deplorably) to manifest signs of that society's undoubted misogyny and anti-semitism. But these arguments seem to me rationalisations for changes of cultural climate and mere fashion. Eliot remains the superb (if highly individual) poet he always was. 1
That is to say: Eliot is out of fashion. Followers of fashion, unable to escape today's critical wisdom, justify their disregard for him by reference to anti-Semitism or misogyny. Any argument against his work will do; they have Eliot's reputation in their sights. There are those who appreciate and understand Eliot, and there are those who do not. This latter class misjudge him, and do not understand their own motives when doing so.
This is slack reasoning, conducted at that low level at which the object is not so much to refute an argument as to identify a discreditable motive. Everett begins sceptically with "discovered or imputed anti-Semitism"; she concludes with a reluctant acknowledgment of "signs" of misogyny and anti-Semitism. What may be inferred from this slippage? The following, I think. An absence of thought about anti-Semitism; a discomfort with any reasoning about a poet's responsibility for what he writes, or about the propositional content of poetry, or how the language of poetry may engage with the discourse of anti-Semitism; and last, a desire to evade the challenge of readings that attend to anti-Semitism or misogyny. These readings are "mere rationalisations." The implication? They not call for an answer, just a diagnosis.
The evasiveness of the piece, this reluctance to be forthright about Eliot's anti-Semitism, seems to me to be typical of the state of Eliot apologetics at the moment. But occasionally, as if in reaction to such equivocations as Everett's, an Eliot partisan will insist, with hectic defiance, that there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in the complaints of anti-Semitism, and that, indeed, Eliot was if anything a friend to the Jews. Such is Ronald Schuchard's argument in his lecture "Burbank with a Baedeker, Eliot with a Cigar: American intellectuals, Anti-Semitism, and the Idea of Culture." Eliot, Schuchard asserts, was a "philo-Semite" . He makes this case by:
(a) a misuse of biographical material, to the effect that Eliot:
(i) had some Jewish friends and correspondents: Horace Kallen, Sidney Schiff, Violet Schiff, John Rodker, Jacob Isaacs, Leonard Woolf, Victor Gollancz, Groucho Marx. Anti-Semites, Schuchard implies, do not have Jewish friends. He quotes Isaacs to the effect that he "saw no signs of anti-semitism" (22, n. 20).
(ii) took steps to assist German Jews persecuted by the Nazi regime: Karl Mannheim, Adolph Löwe, John Amon—and there may be others. He proved himself to be a friend to Jews at a time of need. An anti-Semite, Schuchard implies, would not behave as he did.
(iii) championed Isaac Rosenberg's poetry.
(iv) expressed admiration for Sephardi Jews.
(v) on several occasions denied that he was an anti-Semite: he was, Schuchard notes sympathetically, "always faced with the presumption of his guilt, particularly from academics whose presumption quickly hardened into fact" . Schuchard endorses Eliot's denials. "There is no anti-semitism in my poetry whatever," Eliot told a New York correspondent in March 1947 .
What is one to make of all this? That Eliot had Horace Kallen as a friend could be interesting, but Schuchard does not himself do enough with the relationship to make it so. That Eliot responded to Kallen's pleas on behalf of the German-Jewish intelligentsia is interesting, and I am glad to learn of it (even though Schuchard talks it up somewhat).
Many Jews objected to Eliot's anti-Semitism, or the anti-Semitism that they found in his work. They objected in private communications, in published correspondence or review, and even in poetry. Schuchard himself quotes some of these objectors, among them Woolf: "I think T. S. Eliot was slightly anti-semitic in the sort of vague way which is not uncommon" (23, n.24). Schuchard wants to rely on Eliot's Jewish friends, but only up to a point. When they complain about Eliot, he rejects them. It was, he says, "unjust" of Jews such as Isaiah Berlin to take offence at Eliot's remark about free-thinking Jews in After Strange Gods . That is to say: they wronged him.
There are a number of casual anti-Semitic slurs to be found in Eliot's published prose and in his correspondence, none of which Schuchard reproduces. Marx is a Jewish economist, Bodenheim has a hard semitic bitterness, Jewish philosophy is theological hocus-pocus, psychoanalysis is a parvenu science. 2 Eliot wrote to Pound of the Bodenheim family, "being Semites I suppose they will survive somehow." 3 In March 1915, he wrote to his friend Eleanor Hinkley about the "clever Jew undergraduate mind at Harvard, one which evinces wide but disorderly reading, intense but confused thinking, and utter absence of background and balance and proportion" (L, 92). The "clever Jew undergraduate mind" of 1915 will become the "free-thinking Jew" of 1933.
As for those creepy words of ethnic connoisseurship, "I have always been attracted by Sephardim" , they derive from a literary cliché at least as old as Maria Edgworth's Mr Montenero and Benjamin Disraeli's Sidonia, the pure Sephardi. 4
On Rosenberg, I agree with Frederic Raphael that Eliot's regard for Rosenberg had much to do with his sense of the poet as combatant-victim in a war in which he himself had not participated. 5 Schuchard quotes from a letter of Eliot's to E. M. Forster, though without making the connection with Rosenberg: "The War crippled me as it did everyone else; but me chiefly because it was something I was neither honestly in nor honestly out of . . ." .
None of the above has any bearing on the interpretation of the anti-Semitic poetry and prose. Schuchard asks this, wrong question: "Do we really want to believe that a dominant motive in the poetry was to exercise a little gratuitous anti-Semitism in the face of his Jewish friends?" I suspect that Eliot didn't make the connection between being unpleasant about Jews in poetry and prose, and being unpleasant to Jews of his acquaintance. Still: beliefs about motives are one kind of thing, and interpretations of poems are quite another.
Schuchard implies that the miscellany of friendships, admirations and denials that he has gathered, in itself compels a re-interpretation of Eliot's anti-Semitic poetry. It does not, for reasons that have to do both with anti-Semitism and with poetry.
Anti-Semites habitually make exceptions—Eliot's included Sephardim (or what he thought he meant by Sephardim), Isaac Rosenberg, some German-Jewish intellectuals, and the Schiffs—who were, he told his mother, "very nice Jews" (L,400). It would appear that Eliot mostly confined his anti-Semitism to his work, and committed himself in his private life to cordial relations with Jews. It might have been better—for Jews, at least—if it had been the other way around.
Poems need readers to give them contexts in order to make them intelligible. Schuchard offers a partial biographical context, at each point asking the reader (in effect), would this nice man write nasty poems? It is a banal, and hopeless, endeavour. Poems do not surrender their meanings thus. (In my book, by contrast, I offer an anti-Semitic context, thereby disclosing the poems' debts to the tropes that contribute to the discourse of anti-Semitism).
(b) the application of double standards in assessing evidence
(i) Schuchard writes: "Daily in the Times Eliot had followed reports of vicious attacks in central European cities on Jewish landlords, merchants and citizens . . ." . Gerontion's landlord, Schuchard argues, is one such landlord, sympathetically rendered by Eliot. Two objections (of several): Schuchard identifies no such Times reports, nor any evidence to support his statement that Eliot followed them. What standards of scholarship are being applied here?
(ii) While Schuchard is ready to infer Eliot's familiarity with newspaper reports of attacks on Jews in early 1919, he swallows whole Eliot's bland excuse, offered to Isaiah Berlin, for the "unfortunate statement" in After Strange Gods, that it would not have been made if he had been aware of what was happening in Germany. 6 Does Schuchard think that Eliot stopped reading newspapers in 1933-34?
(iii) Illustrative of Schuchard's inability to think through the implications of the material that he himself deploys is his citing of correspondence passing between Eliot and Kallen about the Nazi persecutions at the very time that Eliot ". . . prepared After Strange Gods for press" . Was Eliot lying, then, to Isaiah Berlin? Schuchard doesn't say.
(c) misreadings
(i) Schuchard puts "Gerontion's" landlord in the company of Europe's persecuted and dispossessed Jews: "once again pushed with his people from nation to nation, ghetto to ghetto, Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London fleeing the horrific pogroms in Poland during the peace process" .
This, apparently, is the context in which Gerontion "sees . . . a squatting Jewish landlord"—by implication, Brussels and London were persecution-sites. They were not, of course. But consider, too, the poem's preceding line: "Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp." Antwerp cannot be incorporated in Schuchard's misconceived list. It is the Jewish landlord's—the jew's—birth-place, or perhaps one should write "spawn-place." This is not a line that fits any case for Eliot's philo-Semitism; Schuchard therefore ignores it. (It is not persecution that drives this landlord from city to city, but the essential rootlessness of the Jew, lacking any blood kinship with the communities among which he moves, and the blistering, patching and peeling, are not wounds inflicted by pogromists, but badges of disease.)
(ii) "Burbank," and in particular the lines relating to "piles," "rats," and "the jew," prompts Schuchard to write: "Eliot knew the terrible irony that the new foundations of post-war Europe were being laid on the corpses of Jews" . It is hard to know what to make of this remark. So far as can be ascertained, Eliot did not know this to be so, if only because it is not true. The new foundations of post-World War I Europe were not laid on the corpses of Jews—which in any event, were not buried beneath rats. Only an anti-Semite would write: "the jew."
(iii) Schuchard says of After Strange Gods that it is not about Jews as such, but only about "free-thinkers" . To maintain this, he has to drop "Jews" and "race" from the sentence, and overlook the other references to race in the lecture: "less invaded by foreign races," "landscape . . . moulded by numerous generations of one race." Schuchard also needs to overlook Eliot's esteem of "the blood kinship of the same people living in the same place." (He quotes Eliot's lame remark that he did not know why "race" was there—but then, nor does Schuchard himself.)
Put "Jews" and "race" back into the sentence, acknowledge the pervasiveness of (a) contemporaneous "numerus clausus"-type restrictions on Jews and (b) the anti-Semitic account of Jews as free-thinkers (culturally corrosive sceptics, deniers of Christianity's truth, etc. etc.), and it is easy enough to get at the truth of Eliot's recommendation.
(iv) Schuchard quotes from a letter of Eliot's: "The peace treaty seems to be held up indefinitely in America. I hope it will not prevent America from helping in Central Europe; the destitution, especially the starvation in Vienna, appears to be unspeakable" .
He inserts the comment, after Central Europe, that Eliot was: "especially mindful of the plight of thousands of Hasidic Jews who had migrated to Vienna to join the Jewish population there when Galicia and Bukovina were taken over by Russia and Rumania during the German surrender" .
Schuchard offers no evidence to back up this statement—one, incidentally, which an inattentive reader might well take for a paraphrase of something that Eliot himself had written, rather than as a comment of Schuchard's own. (Another example of a statement unsupported by any evidence: "He was horrified by what he saw happening to ethnic groups as territorial boundaries were redrawn by the hands of the Treaty" [5].)
(d) under-interpretations and omissions
(i) By "under-interpretation" I mean this, for example: "[Bleistein's] stereotypical mannerisms are captured in ferocious caricature" . Schuchard identifies the poem's Jew-baiting, but without naming it as anti-Semitic.
(ii) Schuchard disregards the common literary attribution to Jews of occultly powerful eyes. This has been noticed often enough by scholars. Louis Harap, for example, relates it to certain medieval notions about Jews. 7 Most literary Jews are given unusual, penetrating eyes. The "dead jew's eyes" of "Dirge" and the "lustreless protrusive eye" of "Burbank" counter that literary cliché with sightless, dull eyes. Schuchard doesn't know this, or if he does know, doesn't care enough, to address this aspect of the poems.
(iii) He relates "Dirge" to a passage in Ulysses about a drowned body, but without addressing the differences between the two texts. Each alludes to Ariel's song in The Tempest, but to contrasting effect. Only Eliot deforms the song, this deformation reflecting the violence of his literary rendering of a dead Jew's corpse.
(iv) Schuchard takes Bleistein (of "Burbank" and "Dirge"), and Phlebas the Phoenician (of The Waste Land and "Dans le Restaurant") to be similarly Semitic. They are not. The differences between them are akin to the contrast that H. G. Wells made in 1922—the Hebrews were a "little semitic people" while the Phoenicians were "sea Semites," vigorous and inventive. 8
(v) Schuchard says nothing at all about "A Cooking Egg" or "Sweeney Among the Nightingales." He says nothing about Sweeney Agonistes, which sets vulgar Jews against the visionary Sweeney. He says nothing about the deployment of the lower case "j" in "Gerontion"'s, "Burbank"'s, and "Dirge"'s jew—and so nothing too about the post-War switch to the upper case. He offers no explanation for the revision to the footnote in Notes. Whatever does not fit his thesis is ignored.
(vi) Near the beginning of his essay, Schuchard explains that he "feel[s] obliged to address the widespread presumption that [Eliot's] writings are anti-Semitic" , the implication being that this is an unexamined prejudice, pervasive but unargued, and nothing more. That is, he writes as if neither Christopher Ricks's T.S. Eliot and Prejudice nor my own T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form, had been written.
I am taken aback by Schuchard's principal defence of Eliot, that is, that some of his best friends were Jewish. I doubt whether even the least sophisticated of contemporary anti-Semites would now think it possible to get away with such a statement. But it satisfies Schuchard (who I am sure is not an anti-Semite), perhaps because he is so excited about the Kallen papers. He is too easily satisfied. He is persuaded, for example, by Eliot's own denial of anti-Semitism, perhaps here because he is just unaware of how common it is for anti-Semites to make similar, bad faith denials.
Schuchard's essay itself is an example of a certain kind of response to anti-Semitic events or texts. This response may be characterised as one of "denial." The denial has four elements:
First, the refusal to acknowledge the self-evidently anti-Semitic nature of an event or text.
Second, the deployment of demonstrably bad arguments (misreadings, suppressions, the application of double standards in the assessment of similar kinds of evidence, etc. etc.) in defence of the event or text.
Third, specifically in relation to texts or events that give offence, the refusal to accept that those offended by those texts or events were right to be offended.
Fourth, a tendency to find the "true" or "real" offence in the response of those claiming to be offended or injured, a culpable error on their part (for example: it was "unjust" of Jews such as George Boas to take offence at After Strange Gods).
All four elements must be present to constitute a work of "denial." Schuchard's is such a work. If nothing else, his essay demonstrates that it is possible to say, or to write, anything. It is possible to claim that the author of "Burbank" and "Gerontion" was a philo-Semite, that the poems themselves express sympathy with Jewish suffering, and that when in After Strange Gods Eliot said "Jews" he didn't mean "Jews," just as when he said "race" he didn't mean "race."
This freedom with the truth follows upon the poet's own freedom with
Jews. There is a similar disregard, amounting to disdain, demonstrated
by each of them. Poet is
followed by critic, the one attacking Jews, the other dismissing Jewish
complaints about being attacked. Critics who excuse Eliot's anti-Semitism,
or worse, pretend that it does not exist, merely carry on his own work
of contempt towards Jews.
In the following responses, page numbers given in brackets will refer to Ronald Schuchard's essay.
1. Barbara Everett, "Distraction vs. Attraction: Ashberry, Larkin & Eliot," London Review of Books (27 June 2002): 10.
2. T. S. Eliot, "A Commentary," Criterion (April 1935); "Reflections on Contemporary Poetry," Egoist (November 1917); "The Development of Leibniz' Monadism," Monist (October 1916); "Review of The Future of an Illusion," Criterion (December 1928).
3. T. S. Eliot, The Letters of T. S. Eliot, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 384. Hereafter abbreviated as L.
4. See Maria Edgeworth's Harrington (London: Routledge, 1816) and Benjamin Disraeli, Tancred (London: Henry Colburn, 1847).
5. See Frederic Raphael, The Necessity of Anti-Semitism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997).
6. On the press coverage of early persecution of the Jews see Andrew Sharf, The British Press and the Jews under Nazi Rule (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964) and Deborah E. Lipstadt, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
7. Louis Harap, The Image of the Jew in American Literature (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1974).
8. H. G. Wells, A Short History of the World (London: Penguin, 1936).
In what way, Ronald Schuchard's essay asks us to consider, does the expression of a particular attitude in poetry resist the contextualization of that attitude? To what degree might new evidence persuade us that the line "the jew is underneath the lot" does or does not represent an anti-Semitic point of view?
Thinking of the reception of "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar," the poem in which this line occurs, Eliot said, "here I am considered by the ordinary Newspaper critic as a Wit or satirist, and in America I suppose I shall be thought merely disgusting" . Eliot made another version of this remark in a laudatory review of Edith Wharton's Summer: the novel "should add to Mrs. Wharton's reputation as a novelist the distinction of being the satirist's satirist," said Eliot, but it would "certainly be considered 'disgusting' in America." Eliot himself thought that Summer was a novel of "unrelieved horror," a quality that amply distinguishes "Burbank with a Baedeker" and other poems of the period. 1 Eliot not only admired Wharton; he saw some of his own most treasured ideals reflected in her work.
Around the same time, Eliot also made statements expressing contempt for women writers. Praising the Jewish poet Isaac Rosenberg, as Schuchard reminds us, Eliot said that an audience ignorant of Rosenberg's work must ask itself "why it has heard of the poems of Lady Precocia Pondoeuf and has seen a photograph of the nursery in which she wrote them" (23, n.22). This sentence is meaningful because it manipulates a prejudice. Eliot does not simply ask us to consider why one poet is more well-known than another; he also tells us why: the general public prefers decorative poems by women to difficult, substantial poems by men.
As any reader of Eliot knows, one can easily find other sentences in which Eliot expresses prejudices against women, homosexuals, Jews, or the Irish. At the same time, one can just as easily find sentences in which Eliot expresses the deepest admiration for particular writers who happen to be female, homosexual, Jewish, or Irish. Schuchard wonders how Eliot could have considered "Burbank with a Baedeker" an "intensely serious" poem if its motive "was to exercise a little gratuitous anti-Semitism in the face of his Jewish friends" . Missing from this argument, however, is the possibility that the prejudice is not gratuitous but essential to the poem, just as an anti-feminist prejudice is essential to Eliot's praise of Isaac Rosenberg. Does evidence of Eliot's admiration for Wharton or Rosenberg suggest that he could not have been anti-feminist or anti-Semitic? Or does the variety of his statements suggest that Eliot was conflicted, capable of admiration that did not necessarily dismantle the structure of his prejudices?
Schuchard presents a wealth of new evidence that must alter our sense of Eliot's long-documented prejudice against Jews, but the relationship of that evidence to Eliot's poetry is difficult to calibrate precisely. Thinking of these lines from "Burbank with a Baedeker"—"The rats are underneath the piles./ The jew is underneath the lot"—Schuchard suggests that they express Eliot's sense of "the terrible irony that the new foundations of post-war Europe were being laid on the corpses of Jews" . At issue in this reading of the poem, however, is the fact that this bit of parallel syntax, conjoining the fates of rats and Jews, is extremely provocative. No matter how it is contextualized, no matter what new evidence arises, this syntax will continue to be controversial, just as Eliot's comparison of the poems of Isaac Rosenberg and Lady Precocia Pondoeuf will continue to seem manipulative. For better and for worse, part of the power of "Burbank with a Baedeker" inheres in the fact that it is a highly provocative poem, a poem that asks us to feel provoked to judgment, just as Eliot's remark about poetry by women asks us to feel provoked.
I feel certain that Eliot's admiration for Isaac Rosenberg was as sincere
as his admiration for Edith Wharton. But I also believe the Eliot who
said in 1933, the same year in which he delivered the lectures published
as After Strange Gods, that "the virtue of tolerance is greatly
overestimated, and I have no objection to being called a bigot myself."

*In the following responses, page numbers given in brackets will refer to Ronald Schuchard's essay.
1. T. S. Eliot, "Short Reviews," Egoist 5 (January 1918): 10.
2. T. S. Eliot, "Catholicism and International Order," Christendom 3 (September 1933): 181.
How do we write a history of modern architecture that considers gender? What would that history look like if we read it through its photographic traces? Is it possible to derive from the case of one photographer located outside the canons of architectural and photographic history a broader lesson about gender and modernity? What if this story were told from the perspective of Spanish modernity, a situation in the story of modernism which itself undergoes continual revision? 2 In this essay, I would like to propose just such a project in order to chart a particular instance of a woman's place in the history of modern architecture.
Recently, feminist scholars have turned to women's roles as patrons and designers of modern architecture. 3 This has provided a new body of writing that addresses questions of agency, authorship, creativity, and methodology. Often, photographs of the women involved in these projects are juxtaposed with archival images of the buildings they helped to create. We imagine how the women moved in these spaces, what they looked like, and how they might have been perceived by the architects with whom they worked. Thus far, however, few have addressed the photographs as historical, biographical or artistic objects. 4 Who took them? How were they composed? What control, if any, might these women have had over their image? Fewer studies have asked the broader question: how were women involved in creating the "image" of modern architecture? It is this last question that I want to explore, not in isolation but in relation to depictions of women in architectural spaces. I will focus on the work of one female photographer, who took photographs of modern architecture in Barcelona during the 1930s, to draw out larger issues about mobility, anonymity, creativity, and exile. I hope to show that it is through an investigation of these ideas that we might begin to decipher the difficult, yet productive, place of women in modern architecture.
Margaret Michaelis, born Margarethe Gross in Austria in 1902, was a stranger in Barcelona. 5 Together with her husband, Rudolf Michaelis, she fled from Germany in 1933. (She and Rudolf separated shortly after their arrival in Barcelona, and this added to Michaelis's numerous labels: single working woman. 6) She was part of a community of exiles, who were politically active in the Mediterranean city during the 1930s. Like many of them, she was an Anarchist, like some of them, she was a Jew; neither identity was easy to negotiate in Barcelona. 7 Despite this, she was able to publish her photographs over the course of almost five years in the city's most modern magazines. One might even argue that it was largely Michaelis who supplied Barcelona with its modern photographic identity. Perhaps it was her "strangeness" which afforded her the ability to create images that were read as modern at the time they were published, and into the present. 8 Michaelis was trained in Vienna, worked with leading photographers there and in Berlin, was well-versed in the style of the "New Photography," and brought all of this foreignness to bear on the buildings that she saw in Barcelona. 9 It is probably because of their relation to international modernism, vis-à-vis Germany, that Michaelis's photographs have been used so often in catalogues and surveys about architecture in early twentieth-century Spain. They have become a kind of photographic shorthand to demonstrate the existence of a strident, forward-looking architectural avant-garde that coincided with the brief reforms of the Second Republic government. 10
The identification of Michaelis's photographs with Spanish modernity was assisted by the fact that the greatest number of them appeared in A.C. Documentos de Actividad Contemporánea (A.C. Documents of Contemporary Activity), which was the publication of the leading, reformist architectural group in Spain, G.A.T.E.P.A.C. (Grupo de Arquitectos y Técnicos Españoles para el Progreso de la Arquitectura Contemporánea / Group of Spanish Architects and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture). 11 The magazine quickly became most closely associated with the Catalan faction of this group, G.A.T.C.P.A.C. (Grup d'Arquitectes i Tècnics Catalans per al Progrés de l'Arquitectura Contemporània / Group of Catalan Architects and Technicians for the Progress of Contemporary Architecture). From about 1934 onwards, Michaelis's photographs dominate the magazine's visual content. However, neither at the time nor until recently were they attributed to her, since almost all of the material in that magazine was published anonymously in accordance with the group's belief in collective authorship. The architects of the buildings that Michaelis photographed—Josep Lluis Sert, Josep Torres Clavé, G. Rodríguez Arias, and R. Ribas Seva—were knowledgeable about the modern movement in architecture, participated in international meetings and exhibitions, and were among Barcelona's select group of progressive, financially secure, and highly educated artists and intellectuals. It was within this circle of the city's elite architects that Michaelis found her most loyal clientele.
Previously, historians have read her photographs as transparent signs of the achievements of these male architects. If they have been considered as gendered at all, it would have been as decidedly male, reflecting the architect's designs and intentions. Now that we know that Michaelis was the author of many of the most famous photographs of their buildings, the question of gender becomes something of a puzzle. In relation to these issues, but before entering into a discussion of Michaelis's work, I want to briefly examine the photographs of modern architecture which included women, that were taken by Catalan photographer Josep Sala before her arrival on the scene. Comparing Michaelis's photographs with those of the only other photographer whose services were repeatedly contracted by the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. during the same period may provide a base for interpreting gender in Michaelis's work. 12
Josep Sala was one of a handful of successful commercial photographers in Barcelona. 13 His work was published widely and he gained a reputation as an accomplished publicity photographer, whose modern style images appeared throughout the 1930s in the city's magazines. In 1932 he became artistic director of Barcelona's well established illustrated magazine, D'Ací i d'Allà (From Here and from There), and helped to initiate the magazine's new look, which featured a metal spiral binding, larger format, and the dynamic use of photography and typography. 14 Sala was commissioned by Barcelona's top companies to produce ads which ran in all of the city's major publications. He became a household name among the city's elite and its mass consumers. His work is directly relevant to Michaelis's in that her own work appeared a few years later in both D'Ací i d'Allà and, during the Civil War, in another magazine that Sala helped to direct, Nova Iberia (New Iberia), published by the Catalan government's Comissariat de Propaganda. 15
Before he became artistic director for D'Ací i d'Allà, Sala was commissioned by G.A.T.C.P.A.C. architects like Josep Lluis Sert to take photographs of their newly constructed buildings. These photographs were published in A.C. and in other articles and books edited by the group in Spain. 16 Among the most relevant for my discussion are two series of photographs that Sala took in the early 1930s of Sert's 1929 residential apartment building on Muntaner Street and the store opened by the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. on Barcelona's upper-class Passeig de Gràcia. Of the photographs that he took of these buildings, several feature modern, fashionably dressed women. The women are located both outside and within the spaces as if they were props. They are staged to become signs of modernity, like the architecture itself. This use of the female re to signal, through her presence, a state of novelty and sophistication, is radically different from Michaelis's framing of women as active participants in the creation of a scene. Michaelis's women create an axis within the visual space from which the composition is ordered. Even when women are absent from the scene, as is the case in some of her photographs, she makes evident their potential design or use of the space. In Sala's photographs, instead, the women could be removed from the scene without any disturbance or impact upon it. They occupy the space, but do not transform it.
Two photographs of Sert's residential building on Muntaner Street, taken by Sala around 1930-31, will serve as an example. In one of them, Sala has organized his horizontally composed photograph around the modern furnishings in the interior of the living space. ( 1) The woman is located at the far end, about to ascend the staircase. The scale of the architecture and furnishings dwarf her; she is framed by the darker toned door behind her. Everything in the image has been carefully arranged beforehand. A cactus is placed on a round modern table at the lower center of the room. Two architectural magazines are opened on the other side. The information in the magazines is, in fact, more legible than the individual characteristics of the woman. We see the modern line of her dress, her neatly cropped hair, the graceful, but firm, gesture of her hand on the railing, but we do not see her in detail.
In a second photograph of the same space, the woman is once again framed by the architecture in a diminutive way, this time through the use of a vertical composition. ( 2) She now sits in one of the modern chairs reading an architectural magazine from the table. Hanging from the ceiling is a large globe lamp, which out-measures the female model in size and visual importance. Like the cactus plants and African sculpture arranged along the window sill, she is merely another element of modernity to inhabit Sert's streamlined residency. 17 As Sala depicts her in the two photographs, she has no agency of her own. She does, however, actively engage in reading modern architectural magazines. Is she, then, the audience that the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. is addressing? Is she the consumer, or perhaps the client, who will call upon the group's services after glancing through the pages of A.C., or a similar, internationally minded publication?  In any of these possible scenarios, Sala establishes a relationship between women and readership that he carries over into his photographs of the G.A.T.C.P.A.C.'s showroom.
As with his photographs of the Muntaner Street residency, his publicity shots of the showroom may be read as a sequence, though it is less clear how the photographs relate to each other, especially in terms of the space represented. The one continuous element in both photographs is once again a fashionably dressed woman who is carefully located in the composition. In the first photograph, Sala positions the woman outside the showroom. ( 3) With her hand placed on the glass pane, she looks into the space from the street. Her eyes rest upon a number of A.C. that has been opened on the glass table inside. Like the first group of photographs, Sala intentionally organizes the interior of the architectural space. Accompanying the opened magazines on the center glass table is a single, closed issue of the first number of A.C. . The woman's pose leads the reader to the magazines, making the photograph an advertisement not only for the showroom and its furnishings, but also for the G.A.T.C.P.A.C.'s publications. She becomes the agent through which consumption is advertised as a progressive, reformist gesture.
In the second photograph of the series, the same woman is seated inside the showroom. ( 4) She reads an issue of the first number of A.C.; numerous copies of the same magazine are spread out upon a modern chrome table. Along the window sill are [Begin Page 146] several cacti. She does not look at the reader. In fact, in none of Sala's photographs does the woman direct herself to the photograph's viewer. Instead, she is absorbed in either the act of viewing the architectural space or its representation in the magazines. The female re in Sala's photographs becomes a nexus point for architecture and publicity; she brings both together compositionally and conceptually. 18
It would be tempting to metaphorically place Michaelis in the position of Sala's women. In many ways, she cemented the relationship between women, architecture, and publicity during the time that she worked professionally in Barcelona. Her first photo studio was even set up in one of Sert's residential buildings on Roselló Street; the building was constructed in the same year and not very different from the one on Muntaner Street. 19 But Michaelis's photographs of modern architecture were different from Sala's, though both were stylistically marked by the "New Photography." In Michaelis's photographs of architecture, surprisingly few women are represented. When women do appear, they are not merely compositional elements as in Sala's photographs. They inhabit the space in a manner that makes them the focal point of the composition, often directly addressing the viewer in their pose. With this, Michaelis demonstrates that she identifies with the women who occupy the architectural environments that she photographs.
Consider Michaelis's photographs of Sert's week-end house in the coastal town of Garraf. Sert designed the house with his G.A.T.C.P.A.C. colleague Josep Torres Clavé. It was built in 1935, and photographs of it appeared in the city's major magazines. In one of Michaelis's most widely reproduced photographs of the Garraf house, she employed a horizontal format with a strong diagonal emphasis. 20 ( 5) The interior occupies the majority of the composition, with the furniture creating lively angles within the space. A clear line through the interior leads the viewer's eye out to the brighter, lighter tones of the exterior patio. There sits a woman, casually posed with her legs crossed sitting in a modern chair. Unlike the women in Sala's photographs, she looks directly across the architectural space and confronts the viewer with her presence. Hers is not a passive pose. She is not reading nor is she placed as a transient element. Instead, she seems to claim her place within the composition (and the architectural space). Michaelis reinforces this, as the diagonal created with the placement of the furniture finds its apex with the female seated re. The woman in Michaelis's photograph has been identified as Sert's wife, Moncha (MMFVP, 90). This being the case, we have an instance where the architect's wife and the woman commissioned to photograph the house face one another. It is their gaze that fills the space between the exterior patio and Michaelis's camera located within the house. In other words, they activate the space with their capacity to create, or at least occupy, a view of modern architecture.
Of course, there are competing interpretations of this photograph. Michaelis was an outsider and, being that she was a working woman separated from her husband, she may have been considered a threat to the bourgeois propriety that even the most progressive of Catalan intellectuals sought to maintain. The exchange between Michaelis and Sert's wife might have been riddled with issues of gender, class, and nationality. Moncha's position is ambiguous, in that while she is a dominant element in the composition, she is located outside of the house itself, close to nature, and the abundance of sunlight threatens to encroach upon the clarity of her facial features and the outline of her re.
Theorists have argued that women have often been located in the liminal, transitional spaces between outside and inside. 21 Sometimes seen as a limiting function of patriarchy's construction of public and private space, the use of liminality by women has recently been opened to a multiplicity of interpretations. The margins might be seen not only as a reinforcement of hegemonic notions of status and position, but also as a potential site to challenge normative relations. In the case of this image, it may also coincide with a particular socially constructed condition that was shared by both Moncha Sert and Michaelis as women in 1930s Spain. 22 If interpreted as a challenge to patriarchal conrations of architecture and space, the photograph documents an occasion when both women collaborated in producing an image of modern architecture that was at once overseen by the architects of the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. and a challenge to their authority.
Michaelis's relationship to her female subjects must have been complex. But, for all of the questions that we may have about her biography or the specific circumstances of her commissions, there is no archival material left about these issues by her Catalan clients or Michaelis herself. 23 We must rely almost exclusively on the photographs published at the time or those conserved in archives for potential answers. The published photographs form a record of Michaelis's activities in Barcelona; they also document the editorial decisions made by her publishers. As far as we know, Michaelis did not exercise control over the final selection of photographs nor over how her images appeared in print. 24 Offering a wider view of Michaelis's work are the archival and photographic materials conserved principally in three collections: the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra), the Arxiu Històric of the Col.legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya (Barcelona), and the Arxiu Fotogràfic of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat (Barcelona). The National Gallery houses the Michaelis-Sachs Archive, composed of photographs that Michaelis bequeathed to the Gallery. 25 In the museum setting of the National Gallery, it is the identity of Michaelis as artist that determines the organization of the images: subjects are identified as much as possible, but primary importance is given to the photographs as works of art and the group as indicative of an individual author's oeuvre. Until recently, so little was known of her work in Spain that many of the photographs which appeared in Barcelona's leading magazines went unidentified. This is very different from the two groups of photographs conserved in Barcelona's collections. These archives give primacy to subject matter and locate Michaelis's photographs within a body of material related to the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. In the Col.legi d'Arquitectes, they are classified within several sub-sections of the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. archive, usually by project or building, but also within a separate photographic archive. 26 Until a few years ago, the photographs held by the Arxiu Fotogràfic of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat were unavailable for consultation. 27 They are now undergoing classification. If they are integrated into the archive and follow its existing system, they will probably either be classified by location and date, or will be maintained as a separate collection related to the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. In either case, Michaelis's authorship of the photographs probably will not be the primary mode of classification.
When organizing the first exhibition of Michaelis's work in Spain, we established her authorship of unsigned photographs in the Barcelona archives by comparing them to the photographs attributed to her in the National Gallery. Often, it was through the use of her published photographs that series of related images were brought back together. The series were complete in only a few instances in any of the three archives. An exception to this are the photographs that Michaelis took of R. Ribas Seva's Torre Eugenia. In 1936 D'Ací i d'Allà published a three-page article, illustrated by Michaelis, devoted to the building, with a small reference at the bottom of the third page to "Foto Elis." 28 The majority of the photographs are exterior shots, which emphasize the building's clean geometric forms and symmetrical lines. ( 6) One of the few photographs of the interior features a small gym off the patio. With its emphasis on clarity, cleanliness, sunlight, and physical activity, Michaelis's photographs make of the Torre Eugenia a symbol of modernity. There are few vestiges of the past included in the published photographs. Similarly, aside from the photographs of the gym and the pool, both of which refer to leisure activities, there are few elements of domesticity, either in the decoration or as part of the everyday use of the architectural space.
This contrasts with the fuller range of photographs that Michaelis took of the Torre Eugenia, which are conserved in the Col.legi d'Arquitectes. In addition to those published in D'Ací i d'Allà, there are photographs of the living room, which is adorned with memorabilia of bull ts. The furniture in the living room is decorative, with several elements bearing likeness to art deco rather than international style. While these photographs speak more to the heterogeneous nature of modernism in Spain, with its mix of tradition and modernity, Michaelis also took photographs of the efficiently designed kitchen and luxuriously equipped bathroom. ( 7) Neither of these were featured in the magazine's article, yet they are images that align Michaelis's interests with the most advanced domestic planning, namely Margarete Schütte-Lihotsky's innovative kitchen designs for Ernst May's housing complexes in Frankfurt. 29 Why would images that articulate a specific aspect of modern architecture not be included in the magazine's three-page article? Why were the leisure spaces featured above the advances in hygiene and efficient domestic management? Part of the answer may lie with the magazine's readership. 30 As an illustrated magazine, filled with articles on film, fashion, art, and tourism, its readers may not have been interested in the "behind the scenes" innovations of the Torre Eugenia.
In choosing the photographs as they did, the magazine's editors, which included Sala, also removed the spaces that were more closely related to women's work in the home. 31 Technical magazines like A.C. did include articles on modern innovations in hygiene. 32 But, when they focused squarely on the spaces of domesticity, like the kitchen, the majority of the photographs documented the unsanitary conditions of the tenement buildings of Barcelona's Fifth District, popularly called the Barrio Chino (China Town) because of its portside location and vices. 33 It is in Michaelis's photographs of these buildings that we see her searching for those markers within the architectural space that signal women's presence. Many of these were edited out of the G.A.T.C.P.A.C.'s publications. In comparing those that were included in A.C. with those that are conserved in Australia and Barcelona, we may begin to reconstruct Michaelis's complex view of women's place in architecture.
As part of their urban plan for Barcelona, the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. architects, with the collaboration of Swiss architect Le Corbusier, proposed the "Pla Maciá" to the city government. 34 Although it was never carried out, the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. published numerous articles and held several exhibitions featuring its major components during the 1930s. Margaret Michaelis was the main photographer commissioned to take photographs of the Fifth District, which was the focus of the G.A.T.C.P.A.C.'s reformist gestures. 35 It was the city's most notorious center of poverty, prostitution, drugs, and crime. The photographs by Michaelis that appeared in print showed architectural features of the cramped tenement buildings and children from the neighborhood. There were also some photographs of the district's "typical" inhabitants, which included women either leaning out of their windows or posed in doorways. 36 The signage above one woman—Habitaciones or rooms—makes an oblique reference to the women's reputation as prostitutes. For the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. photographs, Michaelis's lens was trained on the tight alleyways, the garbage-filled passages, and the dirty interiors and exteriors that characterized housing in the Fifth District. All of these images gave the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. the evidence they needed to demonstrate the logic and urgency of their proposed urban reforms, which included demolishing the old housing in favor of modern style apartment blocks and open public spaces.
Of a more ambiguous nature are the photographs of domestic interiors and of women in public spaces that were not published or exhibited by the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. Most of these photographs are conserved either in the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat or the National Gallery, and they form two distinct groups. The first series, conserved in the city's archive, centers around domestic interiors, probably taken in the Fifth District. The second series was most likely taken at a slightly later date. This series has a different, more playful tone. They feature men and women in Barcelona's cafés and stores, openly pursuing their daily activities. To my knowledge, neither group of photographs appeared in print during the 1930s. In all of the photographs, Michaelis addresses more directly than in her other work the role of women in Barcelona's society. She focuses less on the architecture itself and more on how the women inhabit or activate the space around them. In terming these photographs the "other side of modernity," I wish to address their fundamental role in illustrating the daily work (and pleasures) of the city's female inhabitants, a side of modernity that did not appear in the published photographs of the city's modern architecture. While the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. wished to demolish the Fifth District as anti-modern, because of the dirt, disease, and drugs associated with it, Michaelis's photographs vindicate the practices, routines, and gestures of its female laboring class as an undeniable and constitutive part of Barcelona's modern experience. As Michaelis shows her viewer, the disavowed spaces of modernity are filled with the stories of her female subjects.
The first series of photographs documents the inside of a tenement apartment. Michaelis offers us straight photographs of the tight quarters. Two beds and an alcove are the elements that she examines, but she also offers us a picture of the struggles of women doing piecework for a living. Michaelis could have chosen to highlight the negative aspects of the scene; instead, she turns each element into an integral part of the composition. In one photograph, two beds are framed to show their symmetry. A cross hangs between them and the area is orderly. In another, Michaelis shows us the bottom edge of one of the beds. We see a piece of fabric hanging from the left side of the wall and a single boot under the bed. She captures the light on the covers, which emphasizes the care that she has taken in composing the photograph. The most compelling of the series is a split-frame horizontal image that features one of the beds on the left side and, on the other side of the door frame, two women working in a darkened alcove. ( 8) Only one of the women is fully visible in the photograph. An outlined shadow and the slight hang of a dress over a chair hidden behind the wall are the only indicators of the second woman's presence. The woman in full view is wearing a light-toned, smartly styled dress. Michaelis shows her to be a poised, self possessed subject, who is strained in deep concentration. While she does not look up at the viewer, all of our attention is focused on her. As she had done with her photograph of the Garraf house, Michaelis has worked the composition around her female subject. She uses the formal qualities of the photograph to counter stereotypes about the living quarters and inhabitants of the neighborhood, many of which formed the core of the G.A.T.C.P.A.C.'s proposals. It is through Michaelis's unpublished photographs that we learn of her interaction with Barcelona's working women. As a single woman working to earn her own living in a strange city, Michaelis must have sympathized with the plight of her subjects. Like them, she had to negotiate her way through the city.
Michaelis's first experience in Barcelona was most likely in the Fifth District, where she stayed during a brief visit to the city prior to moving their with Rudolf in 1933. The evidence of her trip is an unsigned typescript conserved in the Col.legi d'Arquitectes and the photographs of the neighborhood that were published in A.C. in 1932. 37 In the typescript, which is written in German and makes only a single reference to the author's gender ("they hung onto my skirt"), Michaelis writes of her passage through the city's dark alleyways and her confrontation with its most picturesque and dangerous characters. 38 Her camera at once gives her mobility and restricts her actions. In the midst of taking photographs, she is threatened by the local tough men. They chase her through the alleys as she ducks knowingly into the hostel where most of the foreigners stay. Just outside the hostel, she photographs a group of children being entertained by a street musician. She voices familiar knowledge of local customs and the manners that ensure safe passage through the District's most dangerous situations. As she moves among the city's marginal inhabitants and documents the scenes that she would later write about, Michaelis experiences a sense of exhilaration. Despite the publication of the photographs that she took during her "brief raid into the Barrio Chino," her text remained unpublished. 39 One wonders whether Michaelis's reluctance to emphasize her gender or identity in the text is an outcome of her broader belief in the very modern, political gesture of anonymity. As one of the city's countless anonymous subjects, Michaelis perhaps believed she was in a position of empowerment. 40 Traveling through the city's streets with her camera, she straddled the fence between Barcelona's marginal zones and its modern ambitions.
Where her relationship with the city's female subjects comes through most unexpectedly is in the second series of photographs taken at a slightly later date, which are conserved in the National Gallery. Here Michaelis documents a social and photographic pact with her subjects. Knowing gestures and relaxed smiles characterize the women in these photographs. In one group, Michaelis photographs women in a bread shop. By their dress and the store's decor, this image may have been taken in the middle- class Eixample area instead of the Fifth District. The women's hair has been carefully styled and they stand with confidence, making their daily purchases. In one photograph, the bakery attendant comfortably pats her customer's shoulder while they stand arm in arm in front of the store. ( 9) The female customer, who has been identified as "June" in the National Gallery records, directly addresses the camera (and Michaelis); neither Michaelis nor her subject flinch away from the act of documenting women's daily routines.
In these photographs, Michaelis introduces a higher level of theatricality into her compositions. She engages her subjects as actors in creating a narrative around their actions within the city's architectural spaces. This directed use of the camera to include within the frame an active collaboration with her subjects had already been present in her earlier photographs, both of the Garraf house and the District's tenements: but now it becomes more dominant. No longer a documentarian "on the run" through the streets of Barcelona, Michaelis demonstrates entitlement over her subjects and her own place within the city's places of commerce and entertainment in these photographs. Take, for example, her photograph of a woman with two men in the Taverna dels Tenors, one of the popular music bars in the Fifth District. 41 ( 10) The Taverna was frequented by local celebrities and members of Barcelona's aristocracy, but in her photograph Michaelis plays on the criminal expectations that the Barrio Chino held for most of the city's inhabitants. A woman distracted in conversation with the man to her right does not notice a second man who grabs her purse. He looks over to her with a sidelong expression, as his cap shadows his face. He holds his suit jacket closed with one hand and a cigar hangs from the side of his mouth. As Michaelis pictures the scene, it is a caricature of the roles that men and women played in public spaces. She demonstrates her knowledge of how conventions are manipulated and how women's place in public spaces forms part of an elaborate narrative about sexuality, entertainment, crime, and spectatorship. In the other photographs of the Taverna we see how comfortably Michaelis was able to move through the space. Her mid-range photographs are carefully composed, with the audience members, employees, and entertainers all taking part in the images that she captured.
Michaelis's photographs of the city's modern architecture and its Fifth District were only one aspect of her career in Barcelona. She also took photographs of popular festivals, gypsies, political actions, and social services. In addition, her work was not limited to straight photographs of a documentary or commercial nature. She also pursued work in advertising and in portraiture. As observed by Karl Brauner, who sometimes assisted Michaelis in her studio, she had very little time for anything but work. 42 It may be because of her tremendous output and its diverse nature that Michaelis never created a single identifiable style, instead developing a market for the many aspects of her photographic work. Her strategy for surviving, as a photographer and a single woman in Barcelona, therefore contrasted radically with the characterization of the modern architectural photographer put forward by Cervin Robinson and Joel Herschman in their Architecture Transformed: A History of the Photography of Buildings from 1839 to the Present:
The task of an ambitious architectural photographer at the beginning of the 1930s was much what it had always been and continues to be to our day: to produce a print of sufficient physical quality that one's work is taken seriously, to get ahead of the pack of one's fellow photographers by some aesthetic act, and to remain inthe public eye thereafter with a recognizable, individual style. 43
All of the characteristics that we might attribute to Michaelis's work counter this limiting definition. Michaelis did not remain in the public eye, at least not in Barcelona, and her work changed visibly depending upon her environment. Much of her work was reproduced in magazines, where the "physical quality" of a single print mattered less than its mass distribution. Similarly, she did not "get ahead of the pack" in Barcelona. Instead, one might argue, she was able to capitalize upon a taste for modern images that was, at least in part, introduced by some of her colleagues, especially Josep Sala. 44 No doubt, she provided her clients with photographs of proven quality that, at the same time, were affordable and accessible. Where she differed from the rest of the photographers in Barcelona was in her training, her focus on women's and worker's issues, and her political and intellectual affinities. It was, perhaps, this last aspect of her life and work that might explain what appears to be a deliberate emphasis on anonymity as a form of photographic and political activism.
What if anonymity was a conscious, strategic choice made by Michaelis? She did not sign many of her photographs, and she participated in collective endeavors that down-played individual authorship. Though her decision may have been informed by economic and political considerations and/or a sensitivity to the sexual politics of her profession (hence, the adoption of the gender-neutral professional name "Foto-Elis"), I would like to explore an historically specific, intellectual context for her practice. 45 In making the critical and creative gesture to encourage the reception of her work as anonymous documents, Michaelis made a radically modern decision, one that she shared with the leading artists and theoreticians of her age.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the condition of anonymity and how that condition related to memory and modernity was central to international debates on photography. In some form or another during this time, in Austria, Germany, Czechoslovakia, France, and Spain (all places where Michaelis trained and worked), the document defined modernity in photographic and filmic production. As such, it is of little surprise that Michaelis should engage directly with the document's stylistic characteristics, especially in her early photographs of the Fifth District, and its wider theoretical and political implications. Among the most eloquent of the German writers to articulate the conditions of the document were Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. In addition to Kracauer and Benjamin, both of whom Michaelis could have read while living in Berlin from 1928 to 1933, the work of some of Michaelis's most famous employers and colleagues directly informed these debates.
In 1927, Kracauer explored the relation between camera-reality and historical-reality through a discussion of the difference between photography and memory. 46 In response to a series of reflections upon documentary images published in the illustrated press, Kracauer came to the conclusion that photography and memory were at odds with each other. Whereas memory was constructed through personally significant fragments, oftentimes full of gaps, mistakes, and false records, photography retained everything. Photography's ability to record, to document spatial and temporal continuums, conversely provided little in terms of identifying personal or social values. For Kracauer, the "photographic face" that the world took on with the advent of the illustrated press decreased an individual's or an object's natural connection to the world. 47 Magazines, which Kracauer categorized as photographic archives, represented a warehouse of nature alienated from meaning. The world in fragments and the proliferation of photographic documents represented nothing more than confusion. In other words, the condition of photography itself encouraged the anonymous, alienated experience of modernity.
Walter Benjamin countered Kracauer's critique of the negative effect of photography on individual and social memory with an embrace of the political potential that documentary photographs held for the masses. In both "A Short History of Photography" of 1931 and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" of 1936, Benjamin celebrated photography's ability to absolve art of its cult value. 48 Instead of the qualities of presence, genius, authenticity, and authorship that had been secured for individually created works of art, Benjamin upheld the value of non-auratic, democratically distributed mechanical reproduction. Moreover, the kinds of photographs that Benjamin exalted were precisely those that defined modern art and politics. Anonymous photographs shot with experimental viewpoints and published in illustrated magazines were the primary material from which Benjamin developed his theories on photography's political function. Most significant for Benjamin was photography's exhibition value, its place within the public sphere. It was photography's release from the constraints of memory and individual values that allowed it to have an impact on the masses; anyone could be a producer and consumer of photographic documents.
In relation to Michaelis's own photographic practice, Benjamin's writings elucidate three fundamental aspects of her work in relation to the issue of anonymity: her exposure to and participation in photographic exhibitions and publications, her professional training, and her commitment to photographing architecture.
In the years just prior to Benjamin's theorization of exhibition value, Germany, along with the rest of Europe, experienced a photographic explosion in the realms of artistic and everyday life. From 1922 to 1930, Germany held more photographic exhibitions than any other country. 49 The most influential of these was the 1929 "Film und Foto" exhibition held in Stuttgart. Defining the primary stylistic characteristics of modern photography were the diversity of photographic categories and the embrace of formal experimentation. "Film und Foto" drew upon the work of both acknowledged masters and amateurs. Most notable among them was László Moholy-Nagy, who had only recently made the public move from the category of amateur to master. 50 With his classes at the Bauhaus art school, writings on photography, and organizational role in photographic exhibitions like "Film und Foto," Moholy-Nagy influenced students, colleagues, and the public in Germany and abroad.
The two most important books to define the new photography in Germany were Moholy-Nagy's Painting Photography Film of 1925 and Werner Gräff's Here comes the new photographer! of 1929. 51 Both insisted upon the need to break with the conventional rules of representation. For Moholy-Nagy, as for Gräff, scientific and documentary photographs were among the leading areas in experimentation; the close-up, unusual view points, radical cropping, and x-ray were among the techniques that had first served the utilitarian functions of non-artistic photography. According to Moholy-Nagy, photography offered a new way of seeing with "entirely different eyes." 52 In support of their attempt to popularize this new program for photography, progressive artists in Germany and elsewhere made photography the guiding element in their books and magazines. What had initially given the avant-garde its impulse to embrace photography—the illustrated press—now guided the manufacture of a new vision for the avant-garde.
Magazines like Das Neue Frankfurt in Germany and i10 in the Netherlands, fused an embrace of photo reportage, which was the most modern of the new photographic categories, with an active leftist political agenda. 53 Photography endowed these magazines with an identifiably modern appearance and a revision of earlier assumptions about the conration of reality. As Benjamin, who contributed to i10, expressed in concert with Moholy-Nagy's writings: "The enlargement of a snapshot does not simply render more precise what in any case was visible, though unclear: it reveals entirely new structural formations of the subject" ("TWOA," 236).
Michaelis was a student of and a participant in the formation of 1920s and 1930s central European photographic culture. She practiced in Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, all of which were cities that encouraged the documentary mode of photography as one of the most avant-garde. Even more important to the issue of anonymity were the female photographers who were her mentors and colleagues. The quantity of women photographers practicing in Germany during the Weimar Republic was significant. 54 Most of the individuals undertaking the labor of providing photographic documents for the press and for exhibitions were Jewish women in central Europe, some of whom were Michaelis's employers. Her first job was as an assistant for Dora Kallmus, who opened the Atelier d'Ora in Vienna in 1907. D'Ora's fashion photographs were so popular that by 1925 she opened another studio in Paris. 55 In a later job in Berlin, Michaelis was initiated into portraiture under the guidance of Suse Byk. Byk's photographs of intellectuals and celebrities appeared widely in books and magazines of the period. Like D'Ora, Byk sustained her photographic practice for over twenty years. 56 Although Michaelis's experience with these successful photographers expanded her knowledge of a diversity of techniques and further oriented her to the photographic culture of Weimar Germany, she would really only fully exploit portraiture when she re-established herself in Australia after fleeing Europe in 1939.
For her work in Spain, Michaelis was most likely influenced by two other women photographers. Both Lucia Moholy, who created some of the most memorable documents of the Bauhaus school's architecture, products, and lifestyle, and Germaine Krull, who photographed the high and low of urban existence (the Eiffel Tower and the streets of Marseilles), had exhibited in Germany's photography exhibitions. 57 Though their direct influence on Michaelis remains undocumented, they were both widely published pioneers in the field of architectural photography. 58 Michaelis's photographs of G.A.T.C.P.A.C. architecture, her documentation of the Barrio Chino, and her own photographs of Marseilles were certainly influenced by the concurrent activities of both women. Lucia Moholy had set a precedent with her photographs of and for the Bauhaus for Michaelis's own role as the G.A.T.C.P.A.C.'s most important documentarian. The connection between the two women is even greater than formal affinities. Just about one month before Michaelis moved to Barcelona, Lucia Moholy had written to Josep Lluis Sert in search of employment as the group's new photographer. 59 While no response to the letter is archived with the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. materials and there is no evidence that Moholy ever photographed for the group, it may be that her inquiry sparked Sert and others to consider Michaelis's potential more seriously. After all, by enlisting Michaelis's services they were able to custom order affordable modern images of their buildings that could be used in both their illustrated publications and exhibitions. With Michaelis's pedigree from the photographic studios of Vienna and Berlin, she offered the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. a direct link to Europe's most advanced photographic work. In addition, she complied with the magazine's emphasis on collective authorship, allowing the group to publish her photographs without her studio name.
For Michaelis, the political significance of photographing architecture would have been equally important to having role models. In Berlin and Prague, modern architecture and photography were coterminous developments. Benjamin's remarks in the "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" are instructive. He argued that architecture, like photography, was consumed by the collective "in a state of distraction" ("TWOA," 259). In other words, as opposed to works which called attention to themselves, architecture encouraged a "tactile appropriation" based on habit ("TWOA," 240). Anonymity combined with the democratic effect of exhibition value, forged a greater connection between the image and the masses than individual works of art. Ironically, while Michaelis's identity may have been unknown, her anonymous photographs contributed to the political formation of Barcelona's collective culture. As habitual images, ones which were reproduced in some of the city's most aesthetically progressive magazines (D'Ací i D'Allà and A.C.) and featured in the G.A.T.C.P.A.C.'s didactic exhibitions of the mid-1930s (Nova Barcelona and Barcelona Futura), Michaelis's photographs, which de-emphasized authorship, had conversely achieved wide recognition.
Michaelis and the architects, advertisers, and publications she worked for in Barcelona held a shared education in photography and modernity that had its roots in German (and French) developments of the 1920s. From Salvador Dalí's 1929 "La dada fotografica," in which he reproduced associated press photographs from László Moholy-Nagy's Painting Photography Film, to the format and content of A.C., modeled after magazines like Das Neue Frankfurt, the influence of the German "New Objectivity" photography was clearly established in Barcelona before Michaelis arrived in 1933-34. 60 Nor was she alone in pursuing a career in photography that drew upon all of the medium's modern applications. Her work did, however, embody more radically than any other of her contemporaries in Spain the qualities of the "document" and photography's exhibition value as put forth by Moholy-Nagy and Benjamin. In doing so, her erasure of aura and origin as measures of artistic worth were based, as Benjamin noted, "on another practice—politics" ("TWOA," 224).
How successful her practice was, as a political gesture, depends upon
where we stand as interpreters. The photographs that she published in
A.C., and even more those which she took and published during the
Civil War in magazines like Nova Iberia, had a tremendous impact
on viewers of the period and historians of Spanish culture
into the present. However, the implications of her photographs for
an interpretation of culture that includes gender could only be more
fully established with the identification of Michaelis as the author
of these same photographs. Once acknowledged as the author of images
that were signposts for modernity in Spain, the relationship between
herself as photographer and her subjects becomes more complex. That
a Jewish, anarchist woman from Austria came and took some of the
twentieth-century's most recognizable images of Spanish architecture
and urban culture is significant, for it opens up the history of
modernity in Spain to issues of gender, class, and nationality. Moreover,
it imbeds within the fabric of modernity itself a case which rewrites
typical categories of authorship, gender, and artistic value.
Jordana Mendelson teaches modern European art history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She was co-curator and co-author of Margaret Michaelis: Fotografía, Vanguardia y Política en la Barcelona de la República (Valencia: IVAM, 1998). Her current book project, The Documentary Paradox: Modernity and the Nation in Spain, 1929-1939, studies the use of photography and film to represent rural Spain during the 1930s.
1. The writing of this article was supported in part by a William and Flora Hewlett International Research Grant, International Programs and Studies and a Humanities Release Time Grant, both from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). The research on Margaret Michaelis, which forms the core of this study, first appeared in the exhibition and catalogue that I co-curated and co-wrote with Juan José Lahuerta, Margaret Michaelis: Fotografía, Vanguardia y Política en la Barcelona de la República (Valencia: IVAM & Barcelona: CCCB, 1998; henceforth abbreviated as MMFVP). This was the first exhibition and publication to document Michaelis's work in Spain. I am indebted to Helen Ennis, whose research on Michaelis's life set the foundation for our investigations. For giving me a forum to develop the ideas presented in this essay, I thank the Centre de Cultura Contemporània (Barcelona), the School of Architecture (UIUC), the Women's Studies Program (UIUC), and Anne Cruz, Rosilie Hernández-Pecoraro, and Joyce Tolliver for their inclusion of my work in the conference on Feminismos/Hispanismos at UIUC in 1999. A version of this essay appears in Anne J. Cruz, Rosilie Hernández-Pecoraro, and Joyce Tolliver, eds., Disciplines on the Line: Feminist Research on Spanish, Latin American, and U.S. Latina Women (Newark, Delaware: Juan de la Cuesta Press, in press).
2. See, for example, Anthony L. Geist and José B. Monleón, eds., Modernism and its Margins: Reinscribing Cultural Modernity from Spain and Latin America (New York & London: Garland Publishing, 1999).
3. See Beatriz Colomina, ed., Sexuality & Space (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992); Diana Agrest, Patricia Conway, and Leslie Kanes Weisman, eds., The Sex of Architecture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996); Alice Friedberg, Women and the Making of the Modern House: A Social and Architectural History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1998); and Joan Rothschild, ed., Design and Feminism: Re-Visioning Spaces, Places, and Everyday Things (Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 1999).
4. One of the studies to address photographs of architecture as a subject of historical and theoretical analysis is Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994).
5. The information on Margaret Michaelis in this essay is based largely on texts written by myself, Juan José Lahuerta, and Helen Ennis for MMFVP.
6. Margaret and Rudolf Michaelis were officially granted their divorce in 1938, though they separated in 1934.
7. For more on the Michaelis's political activities and their connections to the German exile community in Barcelona, see Helen Ennis, "Margaret Michaelis in Context," in MMFVP, 159-62.
8. On the issue of "strangeness" as it relates to exile, and Jews, see Tibor Dessewffy, "Strangerhood without Boundaries: An Essay in the Sociology of Knowledge," in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., Exile and Creativity: Signposts, Travelers, Outsiders, Backward Glances (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998), 353-72.
9. For more on the characteristics of "New Photography" and the debates that emerged around it in Germany, see David Mellor, ed., Germany. The New Photography, 1927-1933: Documents and Essays (London: The Arts Council of Great Britain, 1978).
10. The following catalogues, published before the 1998 exhibition of Michaelis's photographs, reproduce her photographs as anonymous: A. C. Las vanguardias en Cataluña, 1906-1939 (Barcelona: Fundació Caixa de Catalunya & Olimpíada Culura, 1992); Madrid-Barcelona 1930-1936. La Tradición de lo nuevo (Madrid: Fundació "la Caixa," 1997); and Antonio Pizza, ed., J. Ll. Sert i la Mediterrània (Barcelona: Col.legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya, c. 1997).
11. For more on the history of the G.A.T.E.P.A.C., see Cuadernos de Arquitectura y Urbanismo (Barcelona) issues from July-August 1972 and January-February 1973.
12. There were other photographers who worked for the G.A.T.C.P.A.C., or who took photographs of their buildings for their own commercial practice. However, none took as many photographs of the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. as Sala and Michaelis. See the account books in the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. archive in the Arxiu Històric of the Col.legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya.
13. In recent years, a number of exhibition catalogues have been published on the history of modern photography in Spain. Among these, the following provide useful background on the relationship of commercial and amateur photography to the avant-garde: Idas & Chaos: Trends in Spanish Photography, 1920-1945 (Madrid, Ministry of Culture, 1985); Les avantguardes fotogràfiques a espanya, 1925-1945 (Barcelona: Fundació "la Caixa," 1997); and Juan Naranjo, Joan Fontcuberta, Pere Formiguera, Laura Terré Alonso, and David Balsells, Introducción a la Historia de la Fotografía en Cataluña (Barcelona: Lunwerg Editores, 2000).
14. See Visions Útils. Pere Català Pic, Josep Sala: Fotopublicistes dels anys 30 (Barcelona: Fundació "la Caixa,"1994); and Joan Manuel Tresseras, D'Ací i d'Allà: Aparador de la Modernitat (1918-1936) (Barcelona: Llibres de l'Index, 1993), 143-55.
15. For more on the publishing activities of the Comissariat de Propaganda, see Maria Campillo, Escriptors Catalans i Compromís Antifeixista (1936-1939) (Barcelona: Curial Edicions Catalanes/Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat, 1994), 142-53.
16. A.C., 2 ; and Arquitectura Contemporánea en España, Vol. III (G.A.T.E.P.A.C.) (Madrid: Ediciones de Arquitectura y Urbanización Edarba, 1935).
17. For a fascinating study on the objects in Sert's buildings and their photographic representation, see Juan José Lahuerta, "Instantáneas de viaje," in Decir Anti es Decir Pro: Escenas de la vanguardia en España (Teruel: Museo de Teruel, 1999), 150-73.
18. Sala did take a widely published photograph of a man ascending a ladder in a studio designed by Sert. It appeared in "Arquitectura moderna," D'Ací i d'Allà (Spring 1932): n.p. Notably, the photograph emphasizes the active movement of the man through the space as opposed to the confined movement of the women in Sala's other photographs.
19. For descriptions of Sert's buildings on Muntaner and Roselló Streets, see Antonio Pizza, Guía de la arquitectura moderna en Barcelona (1928-1936) (Barcelona: Ediciones del Serbal, c. 1999), 45-50.
20. This photograph is one of the only images from Spain that Michaelis published in Australia, where she lived after fleeing Europe in 1939. The vintage copy conserved in the National Gallery of Australia is a large, carefully finished print which attests to the value it held for Michaelis.
21. On this issue and the following points about marginality and borders in relation to gender, see "Introduction," in Kristine B. Miranne and Alma H. Young, eds., Gendering the City: Women, Boundaries, and Visions of Urban Life (New York and Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000), 1-14.
22. For a study on women's social roles in Spain during the twentieth century, see Mary Nash, Mujer, familia y trabajo en España, 1875-1936 (Barcelona: Anthropos, Editorial del Hombre, 1983).
23. Although the material on Margaret Michaelis's time in Spain is scarce, her husband's role in the Civil War is well documented in both primary and secondary sources. See, for example, Pere Bosch-Gimpera, Memòries (Barcelona: Edicions 62, 1980), 199; and Ennis, "Margaret Michaelis in Context," 159-61.
24. Based on documents in the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. archive in the Arxiu Històric of the Col.legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya and magazines published in Barcelona after the Civil War, it is clear that Michaelis had little to do with the publication of her photographs, which continued to appear in print even after she had left the country.
25. On Michaelis's life in Australia, see Helen Ennis, "Blue Hydrangeas: Four Émigré Photographers," in Roger Butler, ed., The Europeans: Émigré Artists in Australia 1930-1960 (Canberra: National Gallery of Australia, 1997), 102-18.
26. The G.A.T.C.P.A.C. catalogue can be consulted on line at: http://coac.net/coac/centredocumentacio/arxiu/afonsbcn.htm. In this catalogue, no separate mention of Michaelis is made nor is it indicated where her photographs are located. I thank Andreu Carrascal of the Arxiu Històric of the Col.legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya for helping me navigate the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. archive during my research on Michaelis.
27. I thank Silvia Domènech and Jordi Calafell at the Arxiu Fotogràfic of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat for assisting me in consulting the archive's collection of negatives and prints by Michaelis. These photographs were not available for consultation when the 1998 exhibition on Michaelis was researched and planned.
28. Other than this article and another published in Madrid ("Hotel en los alrededores de Barcelona, Arqu.: Ricardo Ribas," Nuevas Formas 2.9 : 450-53) there is little on the Torre Eugenia. The only reference to the owner of the house appears in the article's title, "Residencia de J. M. a Barcelona," D'Ací i d'Allà 24.184 (March 1936): n.p.
29. See Nicholas Bullock, "First the Kitchen—then the Façade," AA Files, 6 : 59-67.
30. Tresseras, D'Ací i d'Allà: Aparador de la Modernitat (1918-1936), 175-80.
31. On the role of kitchen and bathroom design in women's culture during the twentieth century, see Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller, The Process of Elimination: The Bathroom, the Kitchen, and the Aesthetics of Waste (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
32. See A.C. 7 ; and A.C. 22 in which the entire issues were dedicated to the evolution of bathing across time.
33. On the origin of the term Barrio Chino, which was coined by the journalist Francisco Madrid in 1925 because of the similarities between San Francisco's China Town and Barcelona's Fifth District, see Paco Vilar, Historia y Leyenda del Barrio Chino 1900-1992. Crónica y documentos de los bajos fondos de Barcelona (Barcelona: Edicions La campana, 1996), 121.
34. For more on Le Corbusier and the G.A.T.C.P.A.C., see Le Corbusier y Barcelona (Barcelona: Fundació Caixa de Catalunya, 1988); and Juan José Lahuerta, ed., Le Corbusier y España (Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 1996).
35. This conclusion was derived from examining the accounting books and budget proposals in the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. archive in the Col.legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya.
36. For reproductions of these photographs, see MMFVP, 54-76.
37. For a more complete analysis of Michaelis's typescript and the accompanying photographs, see my essay "'One Afternoon in Barcelona': Margaret Michaelis's Snapshots of the Barrio Chino,"in MMFVP, 169-174.
38. Michaelis's text has been translated and reproduced in its entirety in MMFVP, 163-64.
39. See A.C. 6 and 9 . These photographs are conserved in the Arxiu Històric of the Col.legi d'Arquitectes and in the Arxiu Fotogràfic of the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat.
40. On the relationship between anonymity, identity, and empowerment in the city, see Judith A. Garber, "'Not Named or Identified': Politics and the Search for Anonymity in the City," in Miranne and Young, eds., Gendering the City, 19-23.
41. Michaelis recalled the Taverna dels Tenors in a biographical statement titled "Photography is an Art for Her," ca. 1948-49, source unknown, courtesy of Helen Ennis and the National Gallery of Australia: "Her greatest love was for Spain with its uninhibited peasantry and half-pagan rituals. There she frequented the famous 'Bar of Tenoro' in Barcelona and found her subjects never had to be coaxed." For a description of the Taverna dels Tenors, see Vilar, Historia y Legenda del Barrio Chino 1900-1992, 158-59.
42. Letter Karl Brauner to Helen Ennis, 30 January 1992. Cited in Helen Ennis, "Michaelis in Context," in MMFVP, 159.
43. Cervin Robinson and Joel Herschman, Architecture Transformed: A History of Photography of Buildings from 1839 to the Present (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 112.
44. Juan José Lahuerta has argued that Michaelis was the only photographer in Barcelona who truly worked as a photo-reporter. See his "My little Leica," in MMFVP, 164-68.
45. The unnatural silencing of women from the canon for reasons of gender is an important historiographical issue that directly relates to the lack of interest in discovering Michaelis's authorship until recently and may be related to the reasons why she chose to take on a gender-neutral professional identity, a move which she shared with many other women photographers. On the issue of silences, see Elaine Hedges and Shelley Fisher Fiskin, eds., Listening to Silence: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
46. Siegfried Kracauer, "Photography ," in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and transl. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 47-63.
47. Kracauer, "Photography," 59.
48. Walter Benjamin, "A Short History of Photography ," in Alan Trachtenberg, ed., Classic Essays on Photography (New Haven, CT: Leete's Island Books, c.1980) and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction ," in Illuminations. Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, transl. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969). Henceforth abbreviated as "TWOA."
49. Van Deren Coke, Avant-garde Photography in Germany, 1919-1939 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 10.
50. Coke, Avant-Garde Photography, 10.
51. László Moholy-Nagy, Painting Photography Film, transl. Janet Seligman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); Werner Gräff, Es kommt der neue Fotograf! (Berlin: H. Reckendorf, 1929).
52. Moholy-Nagy, Painting Photography Film, 29.
53. In 1937, Michaelis accompanied Arthur Lehning, the editor of i10, on his trip through southern Spain with Emma Goldmann. Lehning recounts this trip in his diary Spaans dagboek. 7 oktober-5 november 1936, gevolgd door Aantekeningen over de revolutie in Spanje april 1937 (Oudetonge: Huis Clos, 1996).
54. For the most comprehensive study on women photographers in Weimar Germany, see Ute Eskildsken, ed., Fotografieren hiess teilnehmen: Fotografinnen der Weimarer Republik (Düsseldorf: Richter, c. 1994). For a Catalan version of this catalogue, see Les dones fotografes a la República de Weimar, 1919-1933 (Barcelona: Fundació "la Caixa,"1995).
55. Ute Eskildsen, "A Chance to Participate: A Transitional Time for Women Photographers," in Marsha Meskimmon and Shearer West, eds., Visions of the Neue Frau: Women and the Visual Arts in Weimar Germany (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1995), 62.
56. For biographies on both d'Ora and Byk, see Les dones fotografes a la República de Weimar, 1919-1933.
57. On Germaine Krull's participation in exhibitions in Germany, see Kim Sichel, Germaine Krull: Photographer of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 90-92.
58. Krull, like Michaelis, knew Arthur Lehning and she contributed to his magazine i10. See Sichel, Germaine Krull, 70-73. Lucia Moholy's photographs appeared frequently in the Bauhaus magazine.
59. Lucia Moholy's letter to Sert, dated 23 February 1933, Walter Gropius's letter of introduction for Lucia Moholy to Sert, dated 11 January 1933, and a Spanish translation of Gropius's letter, probably done by C. Alzamora, are all conserved in the G.A.T.C.P.A.C. archive in the Arxiu Històric of the Col.legi d'Arquitectes de Catalunya.
60. Salvador Dalí, "La dada fotogràfica," Gaseta de les Arts 2.6 (February 1929): 40-42. Reproduced and translated as "The Photographic Data," in The Collected Writings of Salvador Dalí, ed. and transl. Haim Finkelstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 68-69.
American poets became modernist in the 1910s not merely by embracing a new set of formal techniques, but by immersing themselves in the milieu of the machine-age metropolis. Poetry's turn in subject matter has always been neglected because it contravenes the long-consensual view that modernism was defined by its repudiation of urban-industrial modernity. 1 But one of the salient facts of early modernism is this: beginning suddenly around 1911, a vast range of American poets, whose predecessors had largely shunned modern subjects, took up the industrial city as a challenge, and an opportunity, to reimagine poetry's value for the twentieth century. Their willingness to engage with urban modernity may have been crucial to the very continuation of poetry in the United States. In the decades since the Civil War, as American life came to be defined more and more by the impersonal terms of urban experience, custodians of the nation's verse had stubbornly refused to engage with these actualities, creating a crisis in which many predicted poetry would simply wither away as "the rickety dream-child of neurotic aestheticism." 2 The many verses of the 1910s about skyscrapers, subway travel, movies, vaudeville shows, baseball games, automated lunchrooms, and other aggressively modern subjects, were responses to that crisis equally as crucial to modernism's rejuvenating capacity as poets' adoption of free verse or Imagist techniques of representation.
The richest category of this early twentieth-century urban verse is perhaps cityscape poetry, which employs a variety of representational strategies to evoke the metropolitan environment in panoramic visual terms. 3 The icon of modernity most potent in American cityscape poetry was the great building, a structure of unprecedented physical scale and grandeur that punctuated the burgeoning industrial metropolis. Most modern great buildings possessing this iconic power were venues for commerce, transport, or amusement, public not usually in ownership but in spatial accessibility, designed to accommodate a large number and variety of occupants, both permanent and transient. American verse written between 1910 and 1925 exhibits a persistent fascination with several types of modern great buildings—railroad stations, department stores, hotels, theaters, sports arenas—but most of all with the skyscraper.
The skyscraper is the central visual symbol of capitalist modernity, as September 2001 forcibly reminded us, and has been so for a hundred years. To American poets of the early twentieth century, as to painters and photographers, skyscrapers resonated with tremendous, if profoundly paradoxical, symbolic and emotional power. 4 On the one hand, soaring into the heavens, taking up whole city blocks, housing many thousands of people, the skyscraper of a century ago was understood as an exhilarating harbinger of modernity's possibilities, "the footprint of the twentieth century," as Munsey's remarked in 1899. 5 The herculean scale of these new buildings was matched by their daunting complexity as technological, social, and economic systems, which required precise mastery of "thousands of intricate details" by planners and engineers. 6 Machine-age America's abiding fascination with visual intricacy and structural accessibility was expressed in the cunning stylings of such skyscrapers as the Woolworth Building, admired by the architectural critic Montgomery Schuyler for allowing people on the street pleasing access to the detailing of the uppermost floors in all its "distinctness and sharpness." 7
But even as their synthesis of enormity, intricacy, and structural accessibility could be read as the triumph of system-building, skyscrapers also reminded observers that prevailing rationalist and individualist models of cultural value were being drastically altered by the imperatives of consolidating industrial capitalism. Skyscrapers promised to redefine the parameters of American modernity along a sprawling scale in which the individual, even the exceptional one, mattered less than the forces of the corporate, the aggregate, the mass. Walter Pritchard Eaton was only one early commentator who noted a tight parallel between the growing enormity of buildings and the magnitude and impersonality of the corporations behind many of them: "The phrase 'Big Business' has leapt into the language, because the thing itself has shot up into the economic structure, even as our skyscrapers have shot up on every street." 8 Arthur Goodrich called the drive to the skies an "inexorable force over which its makers have no control," while Eaton saw the skyscraper city's inhabitants as "midgets who have moulded mountains and who have then been moulded by them, played upon by the environment they have created" (NY, 6). 9 Many early descriptions used the staggering numbers of component parts in skyscrapers to create ritualized litanies of mass statistics: 35 million bricks in the Metropolitan Life Tower, and 2462 miles of telegraph and telephone wire; enough glass in the Woolworth Building's exterior windows to create a giant awning extending over all of Madison Square; enough horsepower in the Woolworth's giant boilers to lift a hundred Statues of Liberty at one time, and so on. 10 No matter how comically arbitrary these transformations of one type of mass into another might become, they asserted the relative insignificance of any individual element—even the owner of the building. 11 For each larger-than-life ego like F. W. Woolworth, driven to construct, in the words of Citizen Kane's sardonic newsreel, "the costliest monument a man has built to himself," there was a Metropolitan Life or Equitable Insurance Corporation, using sober actuarial paradigms to calculate the value of its skyscraper in rentable office space and public relations impact. And even Woolworth had made his fortune by selling millions of people hundreds of millions of cheap tiny things.
Not surprisingly given these tensions between individual and mass, there was a persistent paradox threaded through the futuristic hoopla surrounding early skyscrapers. On the one hand, as crowning achievements of rational system-building, they seemed to convey their inhabitants and observers toward global communication, toward efficient management of resources, toward a modern future without boundaries. Yet these very hyperrationalist significations carried an ambiguous charge: skyscrapers took shape out of "an enormous puzzle of interwoven lines and numerals and hieroglyphics worked out on many broad drawing-boards" ("BOAOB," 2959). As this imagery of hermetic codes and signs suggests, these buildings put new mysteries into play, and their vast scale confounded adequate comprehension of their possible functions or meanings. This ambiguity gave rise to a mythic-anthropological rhetoric that often ironically linked the skyscraper to exotic environments of hermetic insularity. The skyscraper city constituted a powerful challenge to the Enlightenment-capitalist ideal of rationally planned cities built in low-rise radial shapes, dominated by single-use properties, assuming healthful but not inaccessible boundaries between work and home environments. This older urban ideal seemed to be giving way to an amazingly dense vertical model in which the clamoring chaos of the streets was kept at bay by technologically advanced, communally conred modular structures, theoretically of unlimited size, so fully meeting their inhabitants' needs that leaving them might prove altogether unnecessary. What future did it augur for human society that, as Ray Stannard Baker put it in 1899, "a man might live in a modern skyscraper year in and year out, luxuriously, too, with every want richly supplied, and never pass beyond the revolving storm doors at the street entrance?" 12 One answer to that question was provided by the guidebook and travel publisher Moses King, whose postcard "Future New York: The City of Skyscrapers" (1910s) offered a paradigmatic cityscape—staple of later science fiction films from Metropolis to The Fifth Element—consisting of buildings so tall and densely grouped that they appear to give no viable access to the ground at all. ( 1)