March 6, 2018 Arts & Culture Mean Streets: The Life and Afterlife of Berlin Alexanderplatz By Dustin Illingworth George Grosz, Panorama (detail), 1919. The German artist George Grosz emerged from the decadence of Weimar culture as an unlikely moralist. His grotesque paintings of Berlin street life—seething, ugly, claustrophobic, often thick with malice—skewered the city’s lurid postwar demimonde. Though today Grosz is best remembered as a gifted caricaturist, his contemporary Hannah Arendt considered him a documentarian: “[his] cartoons seemed to us not satire so much as realistic reportage,” she wrote. Within the crucible of the metropolis, Arendt suggests, one must be prepared to enlarge one’s conception of the real. One of Grosz’s works, Panorama (Down with Leibneicht), adorns the cover of a new edition of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 Expressionist masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz, published by New York Review Books and translated from the original German by Michael Hofmann. Dense, death-haunted, bleakly erotic, Panorama pairs perfectly with Döblin’s immense and splendidly gritty novel, on whose shoulders rests, as Hofmann has it in his afterword, “the literary name and fame of the city of Berlin, if not the idea of modern city literature altogether.” The book follows the petty criminal Franz Biberkopf—“transport worker, housebreaker, pimp, manslaughterer”—as he attempts to go straight after a stint in Tegel, a Berlin prison, for beating his girlfriend to death. His fate, as relayed through dozens of slangily titled episodes (“Reunion on the Alex, Bitching Cold”), unspools with the sensational power of tabloid melodrama. While Biberkopf regains his bearings in the city, he vows to lead the life of a respectable man, selling newspapers and tie holders in the proletarian Alexanderplatz district. But after a friend’s betrayal upsets this delicate stasis, he returns to a life of crime, falling in with a band of con men, and eventually losing an arm after a failed heist. Following a period of convalescence, he meets and falls in love with Mitzi, a prostitute, who is then murdered by the devious, predatory Reinhold, a criminal associate. Biberkopf, distraught, opens fire in a crowded bar, and wounds a policeman. While in custody, he starves himself and enters a self-induced catatonic state. After a climactic confrontation with the figure of death, he returns to his senses and finds a stable but much diminished life as a menial laborer. Ground beneath the boot of rude, rapacious Berlin, Biberkopf, in lieu of love or purpose, is left “sniffing the air, sniffing the streets, to see if … they will still accept him.” The final chapter concludes with bitterly humbled wisdom: “We know what we know, we had to pay dearly enough for it.” Read More
March 1, 2018 Arts & Culture Astrid Lindgren, the Gutsy Creator of Pippi Longstocking By Chantel Tattoli Original art by Ellis Rosen. In Jens Andersen’s biography, published this week in English by Yale University Press, Astrid Lindgren, the famed Swedish author of the Pippi Longstocking series, is a Walden-loving modern mind taken with loneliness. Lindgren, as Andersen notes, believed that we ought to learn to be solo artists at every stage of life. “If they’ve never learned to be alone, people develop only weak and fragile defenses against the ways life decides to hurt them,” she said. “It’s almost the most important thing of all.” Even love can barely renegotiate the fact of everyone’s self-containment, when it can at all. Lindgren writes in a letter to her best friend, “Suddenly, a person comes rushing up to you and says, ‘We’re kindred souls, we understand each other.’ And inside you hear a voice saying with painful clarity, ‘Like hell we do.’ ” Lindgren was the eldest, dance-crazy daughter of farmers in a small town in southern Sweden. By 1924, at sixteen, she was dressing in slacks, jackets, ties, and caps and scissoring her blonde hair to boy length like the radical bachelorette in Victor Margueritte’s La garçonne (a mode Scandinavian male columnists scorned as the “Apache cut”). Her instinct for storytelling—so evident to her teachers—landed young Lindgren a gig as a trainee journalist at a local paper. There, the tomboy geared into temptress. She was not yet eighteen when her romance with the fifty-year-old married editor in chief resulted in pregnancy. “I didn’t know a scrap about contraceptive methods, so I never realized how dreadfully irresponsibly you behaved toward me,” Lindgren wrote to him later. Elsewhere she explained, “I wanted the baby but not the father.” As her belly swelled, her hometown swirled with gossip, so Lindgren left for Stockholm. “I threw myself out!” she said. Read More
March 1, 2018 Arts & Culture What Would W. E. B. Du Bois Make of Black Panther? By Clint Smith Chadwick Boseman and Lupita Nyong’o in Black Panther. “Suppose the only Negro who survived some centuries hence was the Negro painted by white Americans in the novels and essays they have written. What would people in a hundred years say of black Americans?” This is the question posed by W. E. B. Du Bois in his lecture “Criteria of Negro Art.” The remarks were made at the 1926 NAACP annual meeting in Chicago and later published as part of a multi-issue series titled “The Negro in Art” in The Crisis, the NAACP’s official magazine. Du Bois gave the speech at a ceremony honoring the contributions of the eminent author, editor, and historian Carter G. Woodson. Woodson had made it his life’s work to document the positive cultural, social, and political contributions black Americans had made to the development of the United States. He did so in an effort to combat the empty but popular rhetoric of those who suggested that black people had no history, no culture, and had nothing to add to the country beyond the labor of their bodies. That same year, Woodson developed Negro History Week, the precursor to what would eventually become Black History Month, an extension of his effort to illuminate black contributions to the American project. And while Du Bois sought to honor Woodson in his remarks, he also used the opportunity to espouse his own beliefs regarding the role and importance of black artists as America wrestled with the evolution of white supremacy only a generation after the end of slavery. I was thinking of Du Bois and the concerns he raised when I entered the theater to watch Black Panther. I was thinking of what he might make of the scene unfolding across the country: sold-out cinemas with lines snaking out the door and around the block; the intergenerational thrill experienced by families of every hue ornamented in African garb, an array of spectacular patterns and colors exploding across theater lobbies from Atlanta to Oakland. I imagine Du Bois and his distinctive handlebar mustache, its thick, curled edges accentuating his smile as he observes black children and adults dressed as a cast of characters too often unseen in a mainstream cultural production. Read More
February 28, 2018 Arts & Culture Corsets and Cotillions: An Evening with the Jane Austen Society By Ted Scheinman From the Jane Austen Society of North America’s 2013 Netherfield Ball. In Minneapolis that fall, while my mother lay on a couch in upstate New York with her legs elevated as she healed from a recent knee replacement, it fell to me to deliver her paper at the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA). During the Q&A that followed my rendition of her paper, I was roundly congratulated for this service to my mother, though no one voiced the rather obvious question of why such an apparently dutiful son wasn’t where he ought to be: at her bedside. The answer would have been that I was working on a book, researching and trying to understand the Janeites, this intoxicating secret society of superfans that was beginning to feel like an unexpected birthright. But they were too polite to ask, and I would have been too guarded to offer the answer. At the grand ball in Minneapolis, my dancing showed certain improvements since the long weekend I had spent at the Jane Austen summer camp three months before. Though still clumsy in following the choreography, I was at least not a total amateur the second time around. Nevertheless, the size alone of the annual JASNA meeting meant the ball would be far more populous, collisions would be more frequent, and no one was safe from a camera. As the ball was set to begin, the writer Deborah Yaffe dragged over a friend, the two of them insisting that “Jane Bennet” (an elegant-looking historical novelist with bouncy blonde ringlets) had been eyeing me. Read More
February 28, 2018 Arts & Culture Memoirs of an Ass By Anthony Madrid 1. Just to give you the essentials: Probably around 180 A.D. (which is to say probably during the reign of the emperor Marcus Aurelius), a novel was written in Latin. It really is a novel. Trot out any definition of novel: it’s that. Also, it’s the only one, complete, that we have from ancient Rome. Other similar books in Latin have been reduced, over the centuries, to rubble. The one I’m talking about is still whole. Corrupt, but whole. The author’s name was Apuleius. He was famous during his lifetime as a Platonic philosopher. There were statues of him in North Africa, where he was from. They’re all gone now. And we don’t know how many copies of the novel existed during his lifetime. We do know that every one of ’em had to be copied out by hand. The text requires about two hundred pages of modern type, I don’t know how many pages of Latin holograph. Read More
February 27, 2018 Arts & Culture The Sultan, the Armenian, and the Gaslight Mystery By Aysegul Savas Monsieur Ara in his lamp workshop. Photo: Aysegul Savas. Through wider labyrinths of lamplighted city. —Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Of the ten thousand books in the library of Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II, two thousand were detective novels. Abdülhamid also founded the first secret service and sent spies across the empire to report to him. Many sources cite these two facts—the Sultan’s love of mystery novels and his secret service—back to back. I agree that the story, told like this, stirs the imagination. * Inside a blue shop at the end of rue Flatters in Paris, lamps hang from every inch of the ceiling. There are globes and barrels, in brass and opaline, in marbling swirls of orange and red, dark green, blue, and pink. Lamps line the shelves, spilling over to the crimson carpet on the wooden floor; mantles, finials, and valves are stacked in every nook. The shop, however, is dimly lit, a faint smell of gas coming from the back room where the proprietor, Monsieur Ara, with large square spectacles, trimmed beard, bow tie, and vest, sorts through his collection of thousands of pieces. Bent over the large worktable on his high stool, he fixes lamps, strings glass beads for fringes, and demonstrates the history of lighting to his visitors—from round wick to flat yellow flame to blue—illuminating the scientific discoveries of the Industrial Revolution one by one. Finally, there is the switch from oil to gas lamps. This is the birth of the mystery novel as well, the gaslight novel. Read More