German Studies Association

37th Annual Meeting

Denver, Colorado
October 2013

An Intergalactic Utopia: Scheerbart, Benjamin, Glass Architecture

In 1913 writer and architectural critic Paul Scheerbart published Lesabéndio, a work of
fiction from another galaxy. A quick glance at the plot of this ‘asteroid novel’-- wherein
the eponymous suction-footed hero, a visionary ecologist with dreams of architectural
harmony and grandeur, decides to build an enormous glass tower to connect his planet
Pallas’ double star-- suggests it might not be difficult to dismiss this wild piece of prose
as a curious, if innovative, historical pit-stop in the early development of German
science fiction. Yet the novel’s overwhelming utopian force, at once naïve and daring,
certainly caught the attention of Walter Benjamin, who had devoted the concluding
section of his now-lost final manuscript to it, and it deserves some renewed critical
attention.

My paper reads Scheerbart’s post-human ecological fantasy as well as a few of his

poetic epigrams along the lines of its positive and lighthearted style. A work like
Lesabéndio perfectly exemplifies the utopian function of literature “intentionally to test
human possibilities, to conserve human demands for happiness and playfully to
anticipate what in reality has not at all been produced” (Bloch). Furthermore, since
Lesabéndio’s tower looks and feels eerily similar to Eiffel’s, I also turn to examine two
works of visionary glass architecture contemporaneous with Scheerbart: Bruno Taut’s
Glass Pavillion at the Köln Werkbund Exhibition (1914) and Vladimir Tatlin’s design for
a Monument to the Third International (1920). In so doing, I call attention to Benjamin’s
thesis, at work in all three structures, “that technology, by liberating human beings,
would fraternally liberate the whole of creation.” This utopian impulse of the
unification of nature and technology, I would submit, can still speak to the ecological-
political problems that face us today.

Josh Alvizu
Yale University