THE CITY AS METAPHOR, METONYM AND SYMBOL

JOACHIM VON DER THÜSEN

Literary images of the city cannot really be seen in isolation from other forms of
image-making of the city. American city sociologists have pointed to the fact
that it is not only travellers who need images for the ordering of their
experiences, but city dwellers also have to orient themselves by images.1 In
addition, inhabitants bond themselves to cities/neighbourhoods by specific forms
of image-making. Architects and planners, too, develop images of the city when
complementing or changing parts of an urban landscape. In this last case, the
term “image-making” seems to retain its original sense: that of drawing and
mapping. However, if one looks more closely at the underlying principles that
produce the mental images which steer all perceptions of the city, one discovers
that the image-making process follows procedures which are basically linguistic
operations. Image-making of the city is concerned with the assignment of
meaning to an otherwise meaningless medley of heterogeneous phenomena. The
three main linguistic operations that govern images of the city are the symbolic,
the metaphoric and the metonymic.
On the symbolic level, the city is seen as an image of something larger than
the city itself. Here, the city often becomes “an image for the articulation of an
encompassing ideal”.2 Image-making on this level has a very long tradition; it
reaches back to the very beginning of city dwelling. When in antiquity, for
instance, the city was mapped as a crossroad within a walled confine, this was
meant to be representative of the cosmos itself. Another projection was the city
of Jerusalem as heaven on earth, foreshadowing the divine civitas and pointing

1
See especially the seminal study by Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City, Cambridge:
Mass, 1959.
2
Thomas A. Reiner and Michael A. Hindery, “City Planning: Images of the Ideal and the
Existing City”, in Cities of the Mind: Images and Themes of the City in the Social
Sciences, eds L. Rodwin and R.M. Hollister, New York and London, 1984, 133-47, esp.
133. I have based my classification of city images on the introductory remarks in this
article: Reiner and Hindery talk about three “planes” of image-making. Overlooking,
however, the basic linguistic procedures involved, the authors do not employ the terms
“metaphoric”, “metonymic” and “symbolic”.

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to “the human potential for holiness”.3 In the construction of medieval cities the
same topos was used. Thus the medieval layout of Utrecht, the largest city in the
Low Countries before 1500, shows a cross formed by the cathedral, marking the
centre, and four churches at the end of the bars. On less sacred ground, the fact
that utopias have often been given an architectural and urban form points to the
same pattern: the city represents human existence in its most ideal form.
We could say, then, that on this symbolic level the city reveals through its
form a more general truth. This does not always have to be an ideal; the city can
represent a neutral entity as well. Thus a particular city may be seen as the
expression of a culture or of a phase of civilization, as in the nineteenth century
when London became the representative image of industrial capitalism. In our
own time, a city like New York provides us with one of the most radical and
most telling images of modern life itself.
Literature is full of such images of the city with a representational and
symbolic function, especially when we think of the urban novel or the great city-
poem of the last two hundred years. Literature has both celebrated the city as the
supreme expression of wealth, of energy, of the amalgam of living styles and,
conversely, as representative of modern society’s ills, its anonymity, egotism,
oppression and anxiety.
On the metaphorical level of image-making, the city is expressed in terms of
relatively concrete constructs and processes that often have no overt connection
to urban life. Thus the city is seen as body, monster, jungle, ocean or volcano.
Such metaphorical equations usually have an ideological quality. The traveller
who perceives eighteenth-century London as “the great Wen” passes an
unmistakably negative judgement, while the visitor or flâneur who sees this
same city as “the great bazaar” usually assigns an attractive quality to it. Some
metaphors, however, can be used in a fairly neutral sense: aquatic metaphors –
such as river, stream, sea, ocean – commonly have this quality.
City metaphors have a holistic tendency. Speakers who use them search for
the one encompassing image that will contain the potentially unstructured and
will give meaning to the otherwise incomprehensible energies that threaten the
onlooker. Literature, however, frequently demonstrates how difficult it is to stick
to one such holistic image. As the testing ground of ideologies, literature often
shows how inadequate a first guiding metaphor proves to be: in its stead, a
whole cataract of metaphors appears. Such subsequent images complement each
other or, as more often happens, cancel each other out.
Nature, the safe haven of metaphorical meaning, often proves insufficient for
the comprehension of city life – of that form of existence which is so stunningly
new and utterly non-natural. Literature frequently demonstrates that the holistic
thrust of the city metaphor precludes precisely that which it is supposed to
describe: the new experience. Thus, when all the big metaphors are shed,

3
Reiner and Hindery, 134. See also Lewis Mumford, The City in History, Penguin, 1961,
rpt. 1979, 282-87.

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 The City as Metaphor, Metonym and Symbol 3

literature often comes into its own as the tentative and experimental scription of
that which, as yet, neither has a name nor a familiar cognitive pattern.
On the metonymic level of image-making, a totally different procedure
emerges. Here, the image of a city is made up of the customs, structures and
buildings which are specific to that particular city. For example, the image of
Paris is co-determined by the Eiffel Tower, the image of Athens by the
Acropolis, that of Cologne by its cathedral. Customs and traditions that are
associated with certain cities can also contribute to their images: thus Siena’s
image is in part defined by the Palio, while the image of New Orleans is
determined by its jazz tradition and its carnival, the Mardi Gras.
As my examples on this level of image-making show, the tourist cliché and
the advertisement slogan are never far away. But not all is banal and trite on this
plane. One must not forget that city residents also orient themselves along
metonymic lines. To be sure, inhabitants of a big city gain little by identifying
the whole of their town with one or two monuments or customs, but they are
always guided by markers within their own city. Orientation takes place through
characteristic buildings, peculiar architectural ensembles, the form of open
spaces, the rumour attached to neighbourhoods, and so forth. Residents also
identify with their city by taking over the rhythm of its customs and festivities.
American sociologists have conducted extensive studies on this internal mapping
of cities.4
It is clear that on this level of image-making there is hardly any holistic
tendency. Rather, the city appears as an aggregate of diverse images, as a
collection of partial visions which are marked by a certain degree of
heterogeneity. The city is not represented by a distinct phenomenon outside
itself, as in the metaphoric mode, but by various parts of itself. It might therefore
be more correct to call this the synecdochic mode, but, as the word “metonym” is
frequently used in its broader sense which includes synecdoche, I prefer to retain
the term “metonymic”.

Let me illustrate these three modes of image-making with some examples from
literary descriptions of London between 1800 and 1930. In the nineteenth
century, London was the city that posed the greatest challenge to its observers.
Nobody had seen anything like it. The growth of London was unparalleled; its
traffic was overwhelming, and the intensity of its economic life was beyond
comparison. London was the capital of the technologically most advanced
nation, indeed the very centre of the largest empire of modern times.
It comes as no surprise, then, that the Romantics (with their basically
Rousseauistic view) looked with horror upon this new form of life. But there
were exceptions. Wordsworth, for one, was able to write a tranquil sonnet on an

4
See the references in Kevin Lynch, “Reconsidering The Image of the City”, in Cities of
the Mind, 151-61.

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early morning departure from London, “Composed upon Westminster bridge,

September 3, 1802”:

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!5

We see a panorama of serene quiet, a vista of a city at some distance. To be on

this bridge means distancing oneself from the potential din and turmoil of the
city. Another distance is added: a temporal detachment from the city’s daytime
activities. The visual sense dominates the experience; the eye as the sensory
organ of distance creates order. Indeed, order and silence are the dominant
impressions. There is but slight motion, that suggested by the effect of light
(“glittering”) and the gliding of the river.
What is perhaps most surprising in a poem of the Romantic age is the fact
that the city is not opposed to nature. Instead, the city is embedded in the great
cosmic order, “lying open unto the fields and to the sky”. The place of culture
(“towers, domes, theatres, and temples”) is integrated into the realm of nature,
the whole of nature being suggested by “earth”, “fields”, “sky”, “sun” and
“river”. In this context of reconciliation of culture and nature, the bridge has an
added significance; it is, after all, a tangible symbol of connection.
Looking at the metaphors in the poem, one discovers that lines 4 and 5 are
governed by the theatre image:

This city now doth, like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning ....

This resonates with the beginning of the poem. The first line, “Earth has not
anything to show more fair”, already points to a theatre/stage situation. What is
suggested here is, of course, a traditional image, well-known from Renaissance
and Baroque art: “the world as a stage.”
Not surprisingly, this traditional metaphor disappears as the poetic

5
William Wordsworth, Selected Poems, London, 1963, 254-55.

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description progresses and enters the domain of nature. The end of the sonnet
shows the city as the heart of a large body. The Romantic metaphor – “nature as
organism” – takes over. The city becomes the central organ of nature itself,
which in turn is conceived as a living body. This also means that the bridge as a
supportive symbol has become superfluous. The end of the sonnet does not deal
with the reconciliation between two antagonistic forces; instead, it thematizes an
ultimate unity.
Such tranquil and consoling images of the city cannot be found in the famous
London passages of Wordsworth’s long autobiographical poem The Prelude:

Rise up, thou monstrous ant-hill on the plain

Of a too busy world! Before me flow, 150
Thou endless stream of men and moving things!
Thy every-day appearance, as it strikes –
With wonder heightened, or sublimed by awe –
On strangers, of all ages; the quick dance
Of colours, lights, and forms; the deafening din;
The comers and the goers face to face,
Face after face; the string of dazzling wares,
Shop after shop, with symbols, blazoned names,
And all the tradesman’s honours overhead:
Here, fronts of houses, like a title-page 160
With letters huge inscribed from top to toe;
Stationed above the door, like guardian saints,
There, allegoric shapes, female or male,
Or physiognomies of real men,
Land-warriors, kings, or admirals of the sea,
Boyle, Shakespeare, Newton, or the attractive head
Of some quack-doctor, famous in his day.

Meanwhile the roar continues, till at length,

Escaped as from an enemy, we turn
Abruptly into some sequestered nook, 170
Still as a sheltered place when winds blow loud!
At leisure, thence, through tracts of thin resort,
And sights and sounds that come at intervals,
We take our way. A raree-show is here,
With children gathered round; another street
Presents a company of dancing dogs,
Or dromedary, with an antic pair
Of monkeys on his back; a minstrel band
Of Savoyards; or, single and alone,
An English ballad-singer …. 180
....
Thence back into the throng, until we reach,
Following the tide that slackens by degrees, 190
Some half-frequented scene, where wider streets
Bring straggling breezes of suburban air.

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Here files of ballads dangle from dead walls;

Advertisements, of giant-size, from high
Press forward, in all colours, on the sight;
....
Now homeward through the thickening hubbub, where
See, among less distinguishable shapes,
The begging scavenger, with hat in hand;
The Italian, as he thrids his way with care,
Steadying, far-seen, a frame of images
Upon his head; with basket at his breast
The Jew; the stately and slow-moving Turk,
With freight of slippers piled beneath his arm!

Enough; – the mighty concourse I surveyed, 220

With no unthinking mind, well pleased to note
Among the crowd all specimens of man,
Through all the colours which the sun bestows,
And every character of form and face: ….6

Here, the speaker is in the middle of things. For a moment, he looks at the city as
a scene, but he cannot keep this distance. Structure, overview, order – they are
all lost. He has to give up the facile nature metaphor that comes to him first
(“monstrous ant-hill”). The dominant image of the following lines is the
metaphor of flowing water (“endless stream of men and moving things”).
Eventually, the speaker himself starts moving. He perceives “shop after
shop”, while he becomes the medium forming the links in the endless chain of
things (“the string”). The speaker has become part of the dynamics of the city.
This corresponds to the fact that sounds take over (“deafening din”, “roar”),
taking from him the last vestiges of distance granted by the visual sense. The
individual has become powerless, giving way to the turmoil against which there
is no protection.
Having fled into an alley and having regained some of his composure, the
speaker eventually experiences the great city as a bazaar. The city appears as a
fair, with travelling artists and exotic animals. This image is extended when the
visitor comes upon advertising walls and encounters representatives of other
nations and cultures: Italian, Jew, and Turk. But even the relatively comforting
image of the bazaar cannot be retained for long. The restless dance of images is
taken up again in the passages that are to follow.
As may be clear by now, in such a text no stable significance of the city can
be found. Where confrontation with the city is actively sought, no one metaphor
will suffice. Images pile up, and it may be that it is only in the endless stream of
metaphors itself that the new experience of the London traveller can be
adequately expressed. There is a sense that life in the city is recognizable as life,

6
William Wordsworth, The Prelude: A Parallel Text, ed. J.C. Maxwell, Penguin, 1986,
259-63, lines 149-80, 189-95, 211-23 (the version quoted is the 1850 version).

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 The City as Metaphor, Metonym and Symbol 7

too, yet that the ways in which it moves can only offer glimpses of potential
meaning. The whole of it remains unreadable.
There are many authors in the nineteenth century who tried to capture some
of the novelty and the shock of the London experience, as Wordsworth had done
before them. The well-known study by Raymond Williams, The Country and the
City, lists many of the metaphorical techniques employed by writers such as
Cobbett, Dickens, Gissing, and Hardy.7 I will not, therefore, go into further
details here but would like to point to the fact that the rural authors – with their
usually negative outlook on the big city – were the most likely to cling to one
reductive metaphor. Not willing to open themselves up to the complexities of
modern urban life, these writers tried to contain their perceptions within a single
overarching image.
Alongside these metaphorical reactions to London in nineteenth-century
literature, we also find examples of the symbolic mode. The city as symbol was
less prominent in literature around 1800, but gained momentum in the later
Victorian era. By then, the newness of the London experience had lost some of
its sharp edges. After 1850 the urban landscape of London changed: squares and
thoroughfares were widened, monumental buildings were erected. With these
changes, the comments of many observers changed as well.8 London now tended
to be seen as the symbol of the force and grandeur of the British Empire itself.
Yet, since the squalor had by no means completely disappeared, some observers
stressed additional symbolic relationships. In the juxtaposition of London’s West
End and East End, for instance, they saw an image of the dichotomy between
rich England and its exploited colonies.
Even before 1850, there had been occasional references to a wider symbolic
horizon: no other city represented modern industrial capitalism the way London
did. The German visitors Heinrich Heine, Georg Weerth and Friedrich Engels
were among the socially conscious authors who pointed to this connection. In
their view, one only had to study the lonely mass of Londoners in order to get a
vivid and gruesome picture of capitalism in the working. Engels wrote:

The very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against
which human nature rebels. The hundreds of thousands of all classes and all ranks
crowding past each other, are they not all human beings with the same qualities
and powers, and with the same interest in being happy? And have they not, in the
end to seek happiness in the same way, by the same means? And still they crowd
by one another as though they had nothing in common, nothing to do with one
another, and their only agreement is the tacit one, that each keep to his own side
of the pavement, so as not to delay the opposing streams of the crowd, while it
occurs to no man to honour another with so much as a glance. The brutal

7
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City, Oxford and New York, 1973. See esp.
ch. 19, “Cities of Darkness and of Light”.
8
See The Idea of the City in Nineteenth-Century Britain, ed. B.I. Coleman, London, 1973,
120-23.

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indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each in his private interest becomes the
more repellent and offensive, the more these individuals are crowded together,
within a limited space. And, however much one may be aware that this isolation
of the individual, this narrow self-seeking is the fundamental principle of our
society everywhere, it is nowhere so shamelessly barefaced, so self-conscious as
just here in the crowding of the great city. The dissolution of mankind into
monads, of which each one has a separate principle, the world of atoms, is here
carried out to its utmost extremes.9

Literature increasingly made use of this symbolic mode when the perspective
was broadened even further. Only when authors proclaimed that the experience
of the big city stood for the experience of modern life in all of its facets was the
representational force of city life fully exploited. The first to use this equation,
however, was not a Londoner but the Parisian poet Baudelaire. For him the city
offered the most compressed and most exciting experience of modern
existence.10
Later in the century, this view was taken up by Henry James who said that
London offered “the most complete compendium of the world”.11 Henry James
had tried to illustrate the modern condition in his city novels, yet the first London
novel that succeeded in portraying the city experience as the epitome of
contemporary life was Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Whereas Henry James
had not been able to shed the traditional negative judgements – there is
something old-fashioned about the horror that his notebook entries betray – Mrs

9
Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, with a pref.
written in 1892, trans. F. K. Wischnewetzky, London, 1968, 24. See the Appendix for the
original text.
10
First explored by Walter Benjamin in his studies on Baudelaire (1937-1939). The
completed parts were published as Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des
Hochkapitalismus, Frankfurt am Main, 1974.
11
James said the following about his London experience: “It is difficult to speak
adequately or justly of London. It is not a pleasant place; it is not agreeable, or cheerful, or
easy, or exempt from reproach. It is only magnificent. You can draw up a tremendous list
of reasons why it should be insupportable. The fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the
wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosity of
society, the manner in which this senseless bigness is fatal to amenity, to convenience, to
conversation, to good manners – all this and much more you may expatiate upon. You
may call it dreary, heavy, stupid, dull, inhuman, vulgar at heart and tiresome in form. I
have felt these things at times so strongly that I have said – ‘Ah London, you too then are
impossible?’ But these are occasional moods; and for one who takes it as I take it, London
is on the whole the most possible form of life. I take it as an artist and as a bachelor; as one
who has the passion of observation and whose business is the study of human life. It is the
biggest aggregation of human life – the most complete compendium of the world. The
human race is better represented there than anywhere else, and if you learn to know your
London you learn a great many things” (The Complete Notebooks, eds Leon Edel and
Lyall H. Powers, New York, 1987, 355).

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 The City as Metaphor, Metonym and Symbol 9

Dalloway’s city experience is one of fascination and delight. For Clarissa

Dalloway, the city is a place of benign anonymity and of ravishing abundance.
She enjoys the unlimited movement and the feeling of freedom that results from
this. Freedom also means that everybody is the creator of his own city:

For having lived in Westminster – how many years now? over twenty, – one
feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a
particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense (but that might
be her heart, affected, they said, by influenza) before Big Ben strikes. There! Out
it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable. The leaden circles
dissolved in the air. Such fools we are, she thought, crossing Victoria Street. For
Heaven only knows why one loves it so, how one sees it so, making it up,
building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh; but the veriest
frumps, the most dejected of miseries sitting on doorsteps (drink their downfall)
do the same; can’t be dealt with, she felt positive, by Acts of Parliament for that
very reason: they love life. In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in
the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich
men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the
jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she
loved; life; London; this moment of June.
For it was the middle of June. The War was over .... And everywhere, though
it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of
cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft
mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind
them, and set down on their lawns and pitches the bouncing ponies, whose
forefeet just struck the ground and up they sprung, the whirling young men, and
laughing girls in their transparent muslins who, even now, after dancing all night,
were taking their absurd woolly dogs for a run; and even now, at this hour,
discreet old dowagers were shooting out in their motor cars on errands of mystery;
and the shopkeepers were fidgeting in their windows with their paste and
diamonds, their lovely old sea-green brooches in eighteenth-century settings to
tempt Americans ... and who should be coming along with his back against the
Government buildings, most appropriately, carrying a despatch box stamped with
the Royal Arms, who but Hugh Whitbread; her old friend Hugh – the admirable
Hugh!
“Good-morning to you, Clarissa!” said Hugh, rather extravagantly, for they
had known each other as children. “Where are you off to?”
“I love walking in London”, said Mrs. Dalloway. “Really, it’s better than
walking in the country.”12

The fact that the city consists of signs which are difficult to grasp is no reason for
despair anymore. The very openness of meanings is a challenge and an offer of
adventure for Clarissa Dalloway. She is an upper-class figure and, as such, she
shares some of the features of the nineteenth-century flâneur. This means that
she reacts in an aesthetic way to the vibrant and heterogeneous world that

12
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway, New York, 1925, 6-7.

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surrounds her.13
It is doubtful, however, whether she is quite as free and detached from her
environment as the nineteenth-century flâneur had been. The fact that she does
not leave “her district”, Westminster, makes for rather restricted movements,
even resulting in circular patterns of motion.14 Mrs Dalloway’s activities are
connected to surroundings that have historical depth and that she can relate to.
As a consequence, she is never fully exposed to the shock of the new.
In this context, the tower of Big Ben has a special function. It is the stable
orientational sign for the movements for all of the characters in the novel.
Thereby the third mode of image-making comes into play: the metonymic.
Clarissa Dalloway and the other characters relate to Big Ben, not only because
Big Ben is their major topographical marker, but also because it creates order in
the temporal sense: the sound of Big Ben divides the continuous flow of life in
the city.15 Big Ben establishes what could be called a common rhythm. In
addition, Big Ben has a symbolic quality: some of the characters view the tower
as the sign of British power and of a shared history.
Ultimately, however, there are no fixed meanings on the metonymic level.
Even though Big Ben has a shared basic significance, each character projects his
own personal meaning onto the building. This is a phenomenon we come across
in other twentieth-century urban novels as well: every individual reads and
interprets his city in his own manner.
In the modern urban novel, then, the symbolic and the metonymic modes of
image-making come together. On the symbolic level, life in the city becomes an
image of the modern condition itself, mirroring its curiosity, its craving for
adventure and its mobility. On the metonymic level, the novel foregrounds the
specific markers of a city – precisely because its inhabitants are depicted as
isolated individuals who are in need of an orientational network and cannot
thrive on the freedom of movement alone.
In closing, we might ask whether all of this means that in the twentieth-
century city novel the metaphoric mode has disappeared altogether. At first
glance, this seems to be the case. Since metaphor curbs what is incomprehensible
and controls what is heterogeneous in city life, the metaphoric mode must
necessarily become the least adequate form of image-making in the modern
urban novel. Consequently, straightforward metaphors of the city are few and far
between in modern city texts. Yet, viewed from a different angle, the matter is
somewhat more complicated. For one could rightfully ask whether there is not
something intrinsically metaphoric about the modern city novel. After all, it
depicts urban experience as a continuous “flow” of phenomena, as a never-

13
On this point, see especially Hana Wirth-Nesher, City Codes: Reading the Modern
Urban Novel, Cambridge, 1996, 188-89.
14
As has been shown by Avrom Fleishman, Virginia Woolf: A Critical Reading,
Baltimore, 1975, 71-73.
15
See Wirth-Nesher, 184.

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 The City as Metaphor, Metonym and Symbol 11

ending “stream” of perceptions. On its presentational level the modern city novel
follows “aquatic patterns”: its narrative arrangement of perceptions and episode
has “meandering” and even “oceanic” qualities. Some novels indeed thematize
these structural characteristics. Thus, the literary presentation of the very
openness and boundlessness of modern city experience resonates with a
metaphoric field that has always been one of the least ideological of all
metaphoric domains. Yet it is precisely here that a borderline is reached: in such
“aquatic” images the metaphorical tendency to arrest all fleeting impressions and
to contain the incomprehensible is reduced to a minimum.

APPENDIX

Schon das Straßengewühl hat etwas Widerliches, etwas, wogegen sich die menschliche
Natur empört. Diese Hundert-tausende von allen Klassen und aus allen Ständen, die sich
da aneinander vorbeidrängen, sind sie nicht Alle Menschen, mit denselben Eigenschaften
und Fähigkeiten und mit demselben Interesse, glücklich zu werden? und haben sie nicht
Alle ihr Glück am Ende doch durch ein und dieselben Mittel und Wege zu erstreben? Und
doch rennen sie aneinander vorüber, als ob sie gar nichts gemein, gar nichts miteinander
zu tun hätten, und doch ist die einzige Übereinkunft zwischen ihnen die stillschweigende,
daß jeder sich auf der Seite des Trottoirs hält, die ihm rechts liegt, damit die beiden
aneinander vorüberschießenden Strömungen des Gedränges sich nicht gegenseitig
aufhalten; und doch fällt es keinem ein, die andern auch nur eines Blickes zu würdigen.
Die brutale Gleichgültigkeit, die gefühllose Isolierung jedes Einzelnen auf seine
Privatinteressen tritt um so widerwärtiger und verletzender hervor, je mehr diese
Einzelnen auf den kleinen Raum zusammengedrängt sind; und wenn wir auch wissen, daß
diese Isolierung des Einzelnen, diese bornierte Selbstsucht überall das Grundprinzip
unserer heutigen Gesellschaft ist, so tritt sie doch nirgends so schamlos unverhüllt, so
selbstbewußt auf als gerade hier in dem Gewühl der großen Stadt. Die Auflösung der
Menschheit in Monaden, deren jede ein apartes Lebensprinzip und einen aparten Zweck
hat, die Welt der Atome ist hier auf ihre höchste Spitze getrieben.16

16
Friedrich Engels, Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England. Nach eigner
Anschauung und authentischen Quellen, 1845, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke,
10 vols, Berlin, 1972, II, 257.

JOACHIM VON DER THÜSEN - 9789004333031

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