Water

Conversations with Calypso

Döblin invented a neologism to describe something like relationality: Beziehlichkeit. For Döblin, people, all the arts, and our world inhere in Beziehlichkeit, although we do not always recognize it. Just as waves lick the sand, people, too, seek material union. Calypso confesses to Odysseus that there had been a time in which she simply “swam my own way, like a feather-light cloud on a flat sky.” But then she became “obsessed with presenting myself to things” (58). She suddenly cries out: “Wind, wind, oh, sea, sea! I envy the fish, the algae in the water, above all the seagulls. I want to be a sail, or a ship’s sharp keel. I don’t want to tred cautiously and fawningly forward; I want to press through the flowing waves and cut through the bitter wind” (58). Döblin suggests that the interconnected flow of objects and beings in the wind or in the waters is how life truly is, but that it is difficult to apprehend such relationality. Calypso beseeches another god: “Rip my masts to pieces, lay the boards across the water!” (58). Some pages before, we may have mourned Odysseus’s shipwreck, but here we are invited to imagine joining Calypso as she cavorts in and across the sea. She longs to be free of masts, and this Odysseus learns to share her desire.

The German musicologist Klaus Wolfgang Niemöller was the first in his field to pay Döblin’s early work serious attention. He reviews the work’s genesis, noting that it began long before its appearance, which included all but the ninth conversation, in Der Sturm in 1910.4 “Already in 1903,” he reports, “Döblin reflected in his notebook on the fundamental questions of music.” Thereafter, Döblin was “forever rereading, reworking, and enriching what he had written.” In the summer of 1904, however, Döblin attached a title page, on the back of which he inscribed: “Die Musik ist tief bis zum Unsinn,” which translates as “Music is as deep as nonsense” or “Music is deep to the point of nonsense” (383).5

Niemöller reports that Döblin’s visit to the Kunstmuseum Basel in July 1905 proved inspirational. Döblin was apparently riveted by Arnold Böcklin’s Odysseus and Calypso (1882, Figure 2.1).6 In the painting, we see Odysseus from behind, as he looks out to the sea from the rocks on the left. Covered by a blue robe, he appears as a self-enclosed shape against the much lighter blue-gray of sea and sky. In contrast, the almost naked Calypso lounges on the rocks in front of her grotto’s “arched” entrance. It might seem to enclose her, but the red robe on which she sits flows out and beyond her outstretched right foot. Her left leg appears languorously bent behind her as her left arm curves upward (in mirror image of the grotto’s “arch”), holding out her harp. An ethereal, gauzy fabric is discreetly wrapped around her lower body. Its immateriality contrasts with the ponderous, rocky materiality that separates the two figures yet binds them together.

This self-sufficient Odysseus might hark toward the autonomous one that Horkheimer and Adorno envision, but if he did inspire Döblin, he has not yet undergone the transformation that he will in that writer’s version of the myth. In his telling, the myth is about learning to acknowledge and experience relationships, such as the reciprocal arch of Calypso’s arm and grotto entrance, the polarities of light, female Calypso (against a dark cavern) versus dark, male Odysseus (against a pale sky), and the embedded material existence of us all.

In 1904, the year that Döblin inscribed his folder, he initiated a creative relationship of his own. He wrote a letter introducing himself and asking Walden to play his Richard Dehmel Lieder at a gathering in honor of that poet.7 A friendship ensued. Walden premiered Döblin’s first one-act play, Lydia und Mäxchen, at the Verein für Kunst in November 1905.8 As Niemöller reports, the form that Döblin envisioned for his aesthetics of music developed after he saw the Böcklin. In January 1906 Döblin wrote to Walden that he planned to integrate “a series of notes and impressions, which are weighing down my notebook: into a dialogue.”9 The initial, apparent polarity of the Böcklin likely suggested this two-part form. Döblin’s project needed more time, however. Later in 1906, he confided to Walden, “I continue to fiddle around with all sorts of philosophical, aesthetic material.”10 It was not until 1910 that Döblin wrote to Walden, “I’m enclosing the aesthetics of music.”11

Unfortunately, the extensive correspondence between Döblin and Walden tells us nothing about the decision to publish the eleven conversations (with the exception of the ninth) in Der Sturm. As Niemöller attests, the text’s analysis of music is by no means traditionally musicological. For him, it is “more poetic-philosophical,” but he suggests that it reflects the period’s musical questions precisely through this extra- or nondisciplinary mode.12 Before returning to the literary elements, let us explore this nonmusicological music theory, which conveys the significance of water as metaphor.

Calypso to Odysseus: “You say you are a musician. Tell me about music,” and so it begins (50). Right away, Odysseus condemns mimesis, but he is awed by music’s capacities: “It is more real and more effective than something real.” He asks, “How is this possible; it is as if music were pregnant with reality; how can it speak ‘as if’ [gleichsam] when it cannot speak a word? Sounds go here and there. How can music absorb and become so full of life that it appears to be the primordial form of the world, to be both mother and generative god?” (50). Later he repeats himself: “Music absorbs and becomes full of life? What makes it capable of this ‘as if’? Or is the ‘as if’ a dream? And yet, as you sense, this most confusing of confusing things sheds light on the world and deep underground, too; it is more concrete than language, it bears itself as a prelude of creation” (51). Odysseus closes this conversation, the third: “Now, Calypso, you see the two points I paint [between music and reality],” and she answers, “Almost the line between them, too” (51).

We already gather from this strange text that music is emphatically not representational. It is abstract, yet it seems “full of life.” Almost miraculously, it is “more real” than the real; it is “realistic” without being anything like conventional realism in art. We must also note how many often-contradictory metaphors are invoked to approach the “as if”: the word absorbs suggests water, but the “concrete” quality of music counters that image. There is a light shining both above- and underground, but it is contrasted with the generative darkness of pregnancy, the mysterious fluidity of the womb. At the end of this passage, two points and “almost” the line between them, that is, things that are usually very abstract, geometric elements, are realized metaphorically as Odysseus “paints” them and Calypso recognizes or produces the connection between them.

It might appear that Döblin confuses or mixes up the arts—after all, he speaks of painting points in a dramatic dialogue about music—but we read on several occasions that each art is different. Calypso says, for example, “Each art should go its own way; it should follow and observe its material, sound, color, and stone. It should grasp the characteristic, essential will and freedom of the material and let it thrive as art” (101). A strange bird-like creature warns us of the dangers of the Gesamtkunstwerk:

Wherever two or more arts line up and run into each other, there will be corpses and wounded. . . . They cannot walk together for more than a short distance, because the stone is subject to different rules than the word is, sound is subject to different rules than dance, paint, and so on. And either they build no unity together in a Gesamtkunstwerk, or some number of subordinate ones serves a dominant art. This must be observed, if you do not want to blur and therefore erode the borders between the arts. (173)

Before returning to the problem of the Gesamtkunstwerk, let us proceed with this unconventional theory of music. Odysseus declares:

A sound, a whistle, hangs for a moment in the air, then falls as if dropped to the ground. Yes, there are many, now there is a round of sounds, and as soon as one sound stops, the next one appears. . . . What binds the sounds together, all of these sounds, how do they come together? (67)

In short: “How do sounds become music?” Odysseus begins to reveal the secret: “There are images and models of relationship in time. Life itself is a forceful model.” More specifically, he says:

Life serves as a model for every temporal relationship. If, however, things in the world are themselves alive and develop thus: not so, the sounds in music. A sound is finished, round, flat, stopped; it sounds, passes and disappears without a trace. . . . for it to exist, music must offset the death of sound. . . . As Calypso taught me, sound materializes the connections between things; sound represents life itself. (67–68)

According to Odysseus, then, sound is the “carrier of relationality [Beziehlichkeit]” (67).

“In sound,” he continues, “relationship appears not conceptually but materially. That which is between things appears itself as a thing” (58). In other words, and very poetically, “the spaces between the tones are the spaces of music” (93). Odysseus elaborates: music works “in balance, in repetition, the elemental form of relationship; music gives us the schema of our life” (92). People, though, are not all the same: “The sound is there in all its specificity. . . . I hear it differently than others do, but it is not different in and of itself.” Odysseus immediately jumps from this abstraction to material examples: “The mussels here do not become mussels through sand; blue does not become blue because of green; if they did, the world would drown in a pale infinity and lose its specificity. No, Beziehlichkeit does not just come to things; it comes to them—through me. Things become related only through their relationship to me” (68). And so it is with music: “For it to count as music, what comes together must appear as meant to be” (76). Appearance is critical: “A series of sounds is in and of itself non-relational; its appearance of relationship arises only when something else, with which it has a relationship, approaches it” (119). But how is it possible for a nonrelational series to have—or seem to have—a relationship with something else? In a crucial passage, Odysseus explains:

For a repeated series of sounds to approach the first one, of which it is the repetition, and to induce the appearance of relationship, the first one must somehow exist. It cannot disappear without a trace; there must be a way in which the one-after-another of the temporal metamorphoses into a next-to-each-other. I do not know how this metamorphosis happens, though there is a name for the making present of what cannot in reality be made present, namely: memory. (119)

This, too, is different for each of us: “The collection of memory is not enlarged like a heap of stones; instead, it grows” within every individual. Living a life in sound and music, sound relationships eventually “appear” to be “necessary and natural,” but they are always embedded in our material existence and memory (119).

Having navigated this novel text thus far, we see that Döblin tightly binds an aesthetic of pure “points” with the rhythmic happening of real, individual life. It is an abstract theory of repetition that gains meaning only in relationship with the material of life, that is, human experience and memory. Reception is paramount; things may appear to have connections that are inherent to them, but it is only in our perception of them that those relations arise, and they arise because they remind us of other relations that we have experienced before—either earlier in the very same melody or earlier in our lives. This is a theory of music, but it does not unfold theoretically: rather—and here we return to the literary mise-en-scène—it unfolds in a representation of the Odysseus myth.

Niemöller notes that interest in the dialogue form around 1900 is part of a broader European interest in ancient Greece and Rome.13 However, the dialogue is clearly more than that for Döblin, because it realizes a relationship. Our own perception thereof is essential. We begin to grasp the relationality of music (and the sea, and all things, dead and alive) at the same time we notice the increasing intimacy of Odysseus and Calypso. A prisoner, the musician is chained at first; then the chain is gone; soon they say “my friend” to each other, and so on.14 We also notice that they repeat themselves. For example, we hear more than once that “the spaces between the tones are the space of music.”15 Memory leads us to notice this repetition, just as we learn from the dialogue that memory and repetition are critical to the perception of music. Then we notice that the entire presentation is artistic; it affects us like music. And that “like” returns us to the “as if.” The dramatic presentation of a pure aesthetic works on us as if it were music. Döblin uses multiple literary means—poetry, drama, dialogue, myth, metaphor—to present and represent an abstract theory of art and music.

The “as if” is essential. We remember that all the arts are materially different. Yet leaps between the arts seem to be made possible by the “as if.” Odysseus says that “it is hard to talk about music. It seems to me as if it is a bridge between being and not-being” (50). Calypso says, “What can take shape in music seems invisible to me. It resembles a mother, who has so many similar children. . . . Music is deep to the point of nonsense” (135). We note another feminization of music, and we remember that Döblin inscribed his own notebook with this last line. It is another repetition, this time from the author’s material record of his thought into his dramatized aesthetic. Here he employs the line to suggest that it is impossible to see into the depths, into the “womb,” of music. Calypso says to Odysseus:

What an image you have drawn of your art [music]. Fine, not a thief and not the loot. But what a barbarian art it is! It dances, it sings, it cries out, it jokes, it paints, it speaks. Definitely a predatory woman. I don’t know any art that is more powerful or more greedy or that expands its boundaries more. . . . Yes, you have shown me a pond like none I have ever seen, a huge one, in which so much swims and crawls, all mixed up: sharks, pikes, otters, frogs, jellyfish, worms; filled with life, like nothing else. (135)

We must keep this feminized “pond” of music in mind when we learn, at the end of the conversations, that a young god and an old Olympian kill each other. According to the “scene” directions, Calypso “looks fearfully for him [Odysseus], wraps her arms around her hips. She grinds her teeth as a wave smashes the musician’s corpse on a protruding rock.” Calypso then “glides over the dancing sea with roaring cries and laughter, swaying her hips, singing deep and drawn out, slapping her thighs” (182). Fin. We recall that a minor character warned us earlier about the dangers of the Gesamtkunstwerk, but let us remember his precise words: “Wherever two or more arts line up and run into each other, there will be corpses and wounded.” Niemöller quotes the passage earnestly and declares that Döblin’s text is a critique of the Gesamtkunstwerk.16 He fails to recognize, however, that neither Calypso nor Odysseus utters these words or that Odysseus himself becomes a corpse at the end of this work. At the same time, Calypso dances, sings, and swims in and with the sea, that is, she becomes part of the “life-filled pond” that she described shortly before. Although Niemöller recognizes that this tantalizing work is “more poetic-philosophical” than theoretical, he forgets to read it as literature, or, as if it were literature. Yet Döblin’s “Conversations” presents us, I believe, with an exquisite example of boundary crossing, if not of the Gesamtkunstwerk itself.

The readers of the conversations from March to August 1910 in Der Sturm would have been more likely to notice this connection, not only because they were presented with other examples of the Gesamtkunstwerk in its pages, but also because they missed the ninth conversation. In other words, immediately after they read the bird-like creature’s condemnation of the Gesamtkunstwerk in the eighth conversation, they came upon the end of the world, with its corpses and wounded, in the tenth and final conversations (182).17 Perhaps that is why the ninth one was left out of Der Sturm; to date no one has accounted for its absence.

In 1928 the literary critic Rudolf Kayser recalled:

It is fifteen years ago. In the back room of a café on Potsdamerstrasse, a strange little society has gathered. Very young people: painters, writers, poets—among them Else Lasker-Schüler and the other doctor-poet, Gottfried Benn. A small, nimble man with a reddish, pointed beard and sharp eyeglasses jumps to the podium; he reads from a manuscript, “Conversations with Calypso: On Music,” full of life and never tiring; he reads with great passion, half teaching, half preaching; he is at once thinker and poet. It is Alfred Döblin. We twenty-year-olds had a premonition back then of a new vision of life: in which the self jumps over its walls, in which the monad breaks through its windows into the world and finds community with the magic of the forces and voices of the whole world.18

At the reading that Kayser invoked, possibly for the Verein für Kunst, Döblin performed his aesthetic in relation to a live audience.19 Walden may have accompanied him at the piano. The artistic audience was sure to draw the connections, to realize the relationships between the media and each other, for this testimony confirms that the new life vision promulgated by Döblin was not only about art but also about people. Neither artistic object nor human subject is autonomous; both jump their walls into the life-filled pond of Beziehlichkeit.

If Döblin’s water model provided a vital Gleichnis for Der Sturm and, later, for the Société Anonyme, it nevertheless had to compete with other aqueous aesthetics and ideologies, especially in regard to gender. Thus it behooves us to explore some of these other invocations of water, because they help account for the ambivalence that attends modern artists’ desire for union.

Water from Wagner to Lasker-Schüler

Conflicting readings of Döblin’s invocation of the Gesamtkunstwerk point us first to Wagner. Water flows through Wagnerian music dramas, from The Flying Dutchman (1843), whose title character is condemned to ride the waves for eternity; to Tristan and Isolde (1859), whose tragic love story is structured by voyages across the Irish Sea; to The Ring of the Nibelungen, the monumental, four-opera cycle that begins (Rheingold, 1869) and ends (Götterdämmerung, 1876) with the Rheinmaidens’ happily swimming under water in the Rhine.20 Henri Fantin-Latour’s painting The Rheingold (1888, Hamburger Kunsthalle) is a classic representation of the three maidens blithely flowing with the current.

Aqueous metaphors appear in Wagner’s writings as well, not least in The Artwork of the Future (1850). In that foundational Gesamtkunstwerk text, the various arts are repeatedly “absorbed” into a greater whole, and the sea is Wagner’s most insistent Gleichnis. A close examination of these flows is revelatory, since they both reproduce and upset traditional gender expectations. Wagner’s fourth chapter, “The art of sound, or: Music,” opens: “The sea divides and binds countries: so does music divide and bind the two opposite poles of human art, the arts of dance and poetry.”21 He develops the metaphor further, then acknowledges its power: “We cannot yet give up this image of the sea as the essence of music.”22

Indeed, Wagner accustoms himself to the water metaphor and takes the plunge:

Man dives into this sea; only to give himself once more, refreshed and radiant, to the light of day. His heart feels widened wondrously, when he peers down into this depth, pregnant with unimaginable possibilities whose bottom his eye shall never plumb, whose seeming bottomlessness thus fills him with the sense of marvel and the presage of infinity. It is the depth and infinity of Nature herself, who veils from the prying eye of Man the unfathomable womb of her Seed-time, her Begetting, and her Yearning.23

Although he is not explicit, Wagner constructs the music listener as a male heterosexual subject who desires to penetrate a female object. “Man’s” vision is limited, while she withholds secrets of her “unfathomable womb,” but he emerges “refreshed and radiant” after the encounter.

This autonomous masculine subject can enjoy the waters and emerge still stronger for the experience. He differs from Horkheimer and Adorno’s Odysseus in that he can abandon the mast and return to it unscathed—but he shares their fantasy of autonomy. As such, Wagner’s text is a variation on a theme and does not challenge traditional gender roles. Juliet Koss also locates traditional gender roles in this text. Regarding Wagner’s characterization of the blending of the arts in a “sisterly community,” for example, Koss deduces that “the Gesamtkunstwerk would operate like a traditional marriage; its success depended on a feminine sacrifice that was disguised by the rhetoric of freedom and autonomy.”24 Feminine passivity preserves the purported autonomy of masculine activity.

Elsewhere in The Artwork of the Future, however, Wagner reverses expectations for activity and passivity. He exhorts each artist to “lose himself” in other arts, to “impart himself to the highest expression of his receptive power.”25 The artist must also respond to the audience, which ideally gives itself to him. In Wagner’s words, “the spectator transplants himself upon the stage, by means of all his visual and aural faculties; while the performer becomes an artist only by complete absorption into the public.”26 Koss’s gloss on the role of the Wagnerian spectator—elsewhere in her book—is provocative in this context: “Spectators discarded their own identities as individuals to become a unified audience.”27 Although Koss does not bring gender to bear on this insight, we might infer from her earlier observation about traditional marriage that the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk requires its audience to be a self-sacrificing wife. In this reading, listening to Wagner feminizes the subject.

It is impossible to square the image of the feminized listening subject with Wagner’s representation of the masculinized music listener who “dives into this sea” and resurfaces when he has had his fill. These opposing images reveal a tremendous ambivalence about gendered, modern subjectivity that is articulated through considerations of art and especially through the Gleichnis of water. Thus it is fascinating to learn that the year before Charles Baudelaire wrote his essay on Tannhäuser, he attended a Wagnerian concert and wrote to the composer that the music had given him a feeling “of letting myself be penetrated, invaded, a truly sensual pleasure, and which resembles that of rising into the air or rolling on the sea.”28 Baudelaire thus acknowledges the thrill not of penetrating but of being penetrated, a position usually relegated to women or to homosexual men. If Wagner’s narrative usually resorts to conventional, heteronormative gender roles, Baudelaire’s simpler formulation, in contrast, doubly upsets expectations: by having the metaphorical sea assume the active role of invader and by having the presumably heterosexual male find the experience of his own penetration profoundly satisfying.

Friedrich Nietzsche registers the range of possible responses to these literal and figurative boundary crossings. The Nietzschean readings we reviewed from the Verein für Kunst in 1905 were inconsistent in their use of this metaphor. At times, the speaker exulted in himself as a “fountain.” Is that a sympathetic merging with the water’s flow or symbolic ejaculation or both? At other times, his will “stilled the waters below.” In that case, he may have “her” under his control. Nietzsche seems to have had other desires as well. In a short poem that precedes “To the Mistral” in the appendix to The Gay Science, the philosopher dedicates himself, as the title has it, “Toward New Seas.” He writes: “Out there—thus I will, so doing / trust myself now and my grip. / Open lies the sea, its blueing / swallows my Genoese ship.”29 Astonishing that the prophet of the Übermensch could “will” the sea to “swallow” his ship! In a touching detail, Nietzsche titled a draft of this poem, “To L.” (Lou Andreas-Salomé), his erstwhile intimate.30 Did she represent a “sea” that he hoped might engulf his “ship,” reversing the power dynamics of Wagner’s far more stereotypical representation of male penetration? Is this “swallowing” a different kind of penetration, more akin to absorption?

As is well known, Nietzsche turned from avid supporter to intense critic of Wagner. That shift, too, is figured by water, but, as such, its valence continues to fluctuate. Still admiring the composer in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth (1876), Nietzsche imagines the creative artist as a kind of lover: “For his creative moments in art occur when . . . his proud astonishment and wonder at the world combine with the ardent desire to approach the same world as a lover. The glances he then bends towards the earth are always rays of sunlight which ‘draw up water,’ form mist, and gather storm-clouds.” In this formulation, the water happens, it becomes water, through the interaction of subject and object—although the masculine subject, in traditional fashion, initiates the encounter. Nietzsche adds dance to the image: “In a dance, wild, rhythmic and gliding, and with ecstatic movements, the born dramatist makes known something of what is going on within him, of what is taking place in nature: the dithyrambic quality of his movements speaks just as eloquently of quivering comprehension and of powerful penetration as of the approach of love and self-renunciation.” It is frankly unclear here if “nature” has “penetrated” the “dramatist” or vice versa, an instability affirmed by the “approach of love and self-renunciation.” Nietzsche closes this passage with “a dream apparition, like and unlike the image of Nature and her wooer,” who experiences “a most delicious collapse and cessation of will.”31

If, however, in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, Nietzsche welcomes the “most delicious” pleasure of orgasmic release as relinquishment of control—a potential feminization of the masculine “wooer” of Nature—he rejects it completely in The Case of Wagner (1888), in which he accuses Wagner, metaphorically, of stormy, seductive, yet ultimately unsatisfying weather: “It is Wagner’s genius for forming clouds. . . . Tremulously they [his admirers] listen while the great symbols in his art seem to make themselves from out the misty distance, with a gentle roll of thunder.”32 What he finds lacking in Wagner includes “la gaya scienza . . . the vibrating light of the South, the calm sea—perfection.”33 Now, it seems, he wants to maintain his masculine composure, his autonomy. Yet la gaya scienza, as we know, includes a powerful image of the philosopher’s ship ecstatically engulfed by the seas—which could hardly be “calm” in such a case. Baudelaire opened to the immense possibilities of metaphorical and literal border crossing in his simile of “rolling on the sea,” but Nietzsche appears to have closed the border(s) in his call for “calm sea.”

Although Nietzsche, over time, revealed his own ambivalence about the matter, historians have typically considered his late, anti-Wagnerian stance the decisive one, thereby shutting down worlds of possibility envisioned in the earlier period that might have been developed further. For example, François Noudelmann credits Nietzsche with having recognized the immense societal implications of Wagnerian music, long before Adorno tried to do so in the aftermath of the Third Reich and World War II. He writes, “Nietzsche intuited the appropriation of this music into a politics of the sacred, which would erect a State, an Idea, or some other idol.”34 The water is to blame. Noudelmann explains:

Wagner’s oeuvre, with its tonal indeterminacies and continuous melody, stimulates the nerves. . . . Nietzsche likens the effects of this music to alcoholic beverages, which cause a degeneration of one’s sense of rhythm. Indeed, Wagner sought these very effects and worked to wear down any resistance to them in order to plunge his listeners into an “oceanic feeling.”35

Noudelmann borrows the closing phrase from Adorno without comment. But we suspect that the water matters, so let us situate it in Adorno’s writing. First, Adorno, together with Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, theorizes Odysseus bound to the mast: “The allurement of the Sirens remains superior; no one who hears their song can escape.” Further, “the strain of holding the I together adheres to the I in all stages; and the temptation to lose it has always been there with the blind determination to maintain it.”36 Historically, Horkheimer and Adorno maintain, “narcotic intoxication” allows for the apparent suspension of self, but it is obviously dangerous. This fear of (feminized) intoxication that will debilitate or destroy the autonomous (male) subject reappears in Adorno’s direct condemnation of Wagner, In Search of Wagner (1952). He contends: “The very form of the music drama is a permanent invitation to intoxication, as a form of ‘oceanic regression.’ The Twilight of the Gods, which conducts the listener, as it were interminably, on a great voyage, seems to flood the whole world with music.”37

In all likelihood, Adorno places quotation marks around “oceanic regression” because he has borrowed it from yet another source: Sigmund Freud’s “Civilization and Its Discontents” (1930), in which he argues that an “oceanic feeling” is symptomatic of infantile narcissism.38 Adorno does not offer his own diagnosis, but he agrees that “the monad is ‘sick.’ It is too impotent to enable its principle, that of isolated singularity, to prevail and to endure. It therefore surrenders itself.”39 He laments that Wagnerian music flooded the world, or at least the German psyche, weakening it irreversibly. For Adorno, Odysseus fails to keep himself safely tied to the mast; the Sirens seduce and abandon him, powerless, at sea. Enter the Third Reich, to which debilitated egos cling.

That version of events has prevailed for decades, but Kaja Silverman, in Flesh of My Flesh (2009), revisits the “oceanic feeling” in Freud’s text with singular attentiveness. Contrary to Adorno, she calls it an “extraordinarily expansive concept,” and she identifies its origin in the thought of Romain Rolland, a French writer and musicologist, as well as a correspondent with Freud. Rolland, Silverman explains, uses the metaphor to evoke “a sense of limitlessness,” but it is absolutely not “the manic pleasure of an imperial ego; the oceanic feeling is ‘imposed’ upon us as a ‘fact,’ and it is a ‘sensation’ instead of a thought—the sensation of the ‘contact’ between ourselves and other beings.”40

Silverman asserts that Western civilization, especially from Nietzsche to Freud, suffered from a preponderance of the “a-relational male subject” that feared and resisted the “oceanic feeling.”41 There were other thinkers, however, who prized relationality, even merging. In the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Einfühlung (empathy) designated the psychological and aesthetic study of “feeling into” another person or thing.42 Scholars such as Robert Vischer and, later, Theodor Lipps explored the intersection of physiological response and psychological projection. Vischer explains: “I project my own life into the lifeless form, just as I quite justifiably do with another living person. Only ostensibly do I keep my own identity although the object remains distinct. I seem merely to adapt and attach myself to it as one hand clasps another, and yet I am mysteriously transplanted and magically transformed into this Other.”43

Empathy, too, was figured by water. Vischer continues: “In its contractive form (ice melting), this feeling of becoming is always synonymous with a weakening or renunciation of the self, while in its expansive form (expanding, concentric rings on water), it is synonymous with a strengthening and liberation of the self.”44 The objectification of such aqueous Einfühlung is the work of art, which “reveals itself to us as a person harmoniously feeling himself into a kindred object, or as humanity objectifying itself in harmonious forms.”45

Although the “science” came later, Koss correctly links Einfühlung to Wagnerian expectations of the audience: “Just as the individual arts were absorbed into one another to create the work of art of the future, both individual spectators and the performers whom they faced were absorbed into the surrounding audience through a process of empathy or emotional and psychological transference.”46 As Koss also reports, the idea of Einfühlung lost popularity during the twentieth century. She surmises that an increasing awareness of difference among subjects, corroborated by widely divergent responses to psychological tests, corresponded to the demise of the idea of a “universal aesthetic response.”47 Koss asserts, finally, that Wilhelm Worringer’s popular tract Abstraction and Empathy (1908) represents the “death knell” of Einfühlung: Worringer argues that only harmonious living is conducive to aesthetic empathy, whereas periods of great disruption—which he claimed for his own—induce abstraction, a willful assertion of form as opposed to a passive acquiescence to it.48

However, I contend that Einfühlung did not disappear when Worringer heralded the advance of abstraction. First, Worringer does not in any way question the validity of Einfühlung. In fact, drawing on Lipps’s theories, Worringer describes empathy as just “one pole of human artistic feeling.”49 Second, he locates evidence of a society’s urge toward abstraction in its ornament, whereas previous theorists, such as Henry van de Velde, had identified that very site with Einfühlung.50 That overlap suggests that they share some relation. Indeed, Koss points out that Worringer identifies self-alienation as the impulse common to abstraction and to empathy.51 With (Worringer’s) abstraction, one wills form beyond, outside oneself. With (Worringer’s) Einfühlung, one merges with something exterior to oneself, thus losing oneself, even as one experiences unity with another. Worringer, however, was not the first to recognize this self-alienating aspect. As I have shown, Vischer’s theory already provides for a “renunciation of the self” as a potential effect of empathy. Perhaps this characteristic does not discredit Einfühlung so much as alert us to its ambivalence.

The ambivalence of empathy may have made it harder for historians to trace. We should note, too, that empathy is making a comeback: the identification of oxytocin as a hormone and brain transmitter that is released in empathetic circumstances and the discovery of “mirror neurons” are two scientific contributions that lend credibility to an idea that only recently seemed passé. Or consider Jeremy Rifkin’s rewriting of the history of civilization as The Empathic Civilization (2009).52 Whatever truth-value one attaches to empathy, many early twentieth-century artists believed in it, even if they also embraced Worringer’s theories. For example, in 1910, the Blaue Reiter artist and Sturm contributor Franz Marc wrote his editor, Reinhard Piper: “I try to intensify my sensitivity for the organic rhythm of all things; I seek pantheist empathy with the vibration and flow of the blood of nature—in the trees, in the animals, in the air.”53

Empathetic Beziehlichkeit was the basis of the aesthetic that flowed through Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme. Yet it often bumped against personal and cultural gender expectations. Stereotypically, the masculine subject wants to enter the feminine subject, who is figured by water, which also signifies music and art more generally. But the living male subjects of this period often suffered ambivalence about whether or how deeply to “dive in”; some feared complete ego dissolution, but others, like Baudelaire, loved to be “penetrated” themselves. Döblin himself appears to have been open to porous ego boundaries; Kayser conveys that Döblin represented the model of opening the monad’s “windows” into the world beyond. Admittedly, as a heterosexual male with a reputable profession (medicine), he may have been privileged to have the prerogative to throw caution to the wind, as it were. (He was Jewish, however, and reportedly had difficulty securing a post because of it, so his “privilege” was not unassailable.)54

To return, briefly, to the subject of “traditional marriage”: the female subject did not share this privilege. She was expected to submit; it was understood that she was already embedded in the materiality of life. An aesthetic model of merging might thus appeal to her “intuitively,” but as women were still fighting for equal rights with men, trying to win full subjecthood in the eyes of themselves and society, such merging would come with a cost. Lasker-Schüler proves remarkable in this instance. She left her first husband, bore a child out of wedlock, and entered into a love affair with a man ten years her junior, Walden. Breaking these societal rules, in addition to being Jewish, she could not have enjoyed the “privilege” of a Döblin. Yet she embraced the flow like a modern Calypso. Her first book of poems, Styx—which appeared just as Teloplasma opened—takes its name from the mythological river all souls must cross after death. In addition to “Fortissimo,” which celebrates ecstatic union in the weave of a carpet, and “Dann,” which her new friend Walden set to music, the collection offers this stirring, watery rhyme:

In this image, the poet longs to flow with life and death alike. Another poem, “Viva!” (To life!), closes with an equally powerful water image of another kind:

In this poetic vision, two lovers blend together with no indication of gender or sexuality; in this case, the female writer, Lasker-Schüler, provides the most exhilarating image of border crossing—and border elimination—of all.

Of course, not all women (or men) followed her lead, but Lasker-Schüler provided a compelling model of fearless life and art beyond conventional boundaries. Walden cherished her (at least at the beginning). He too was extraordinary, considering some of the “a-relational male subjects” he no doubt encountered as potential role models. He loved her poetry, and he let it move him so deeply that he created music in response. He let the poems’ rhythms guide his songs, even writing about the necessity of the composer’s receptiveness for successful Lieder. Some of this openness likely translated into Walden’s receptiveness to other women’s artwork, which he exhibited and promoted considerably more than did his peers. Walden even let Lasker-Schüler name him, casting off his given name once and for all. And he let her bestow a name upon his journal, followed soon thereafter by the gallery: Der Sturm. It is not known when he began to consider the name for the journal, but another poem from the Styx collection suggests that Lasker-Schüler associated Walden himself with a storm already in 1901. The poem, “Dein Sturmlied” (Your storm song), may have been inspiration enough:

In this poem, the water is masculine, likened to Zeus, and the poetic “I” craves his musical ejaculation or ejaculatory music—in this storm of desire, differentiation becomes impossible. It must remain speculative that this poem led in some way to Walden’s Sturm beginning in 1910, but the poet August Stramm’s later response to a survey question, “What is Der Sturm?”—“Der Sturm is Herwarth Walden!”—suggests that others, too, associated Walden with generative storms.58 The organization Der Sturm was inspired by the conflicted legacies of Wagner, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Lasker-Schüler, and it raged. Döblin articulated the aesthetics of aqueous Beziehlichkeit most clearly. The art at Der Sturm and, later, the Société Anonyme bore little outward appearance to that of his visual source, Böcklin’s painting. Some of it, though, resonated deeply with their shared Gleichnis, namely, water.

Futurist Waves

On 12 April 1912, Walden’s Sturm organization opened its second art exhibition at the rented villa on Tiergarten Strasse in Berlin. Just as he had done with the Blaue Reiter for his inaugural show, Walden caught wind of the Italian Futurists’ first-ever art exhibition (at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune in Paris, 5–24 February 1912), and he invited them to forward it to the German metropolis (after its stopover in London, at the Sackville Gallery, March 1912).59 Of the four exhibiting artists—Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini—only Boccioni made the trip north to Berlin. After the opening, Boccioni wrote to Carrà that interest appeared minimal.60

Their luck, though, was about to turn. Filippo Marinetti, Futurism’s founding force, arrived in Berlin two days later, and he, Boccioni, and Walden unleashed a flood of Futurist publicity. Walden had begun the campaign already. In March, Der Sturm published a translation of the “Manifesto of Futurist Painters,” followed by a translation of the original “Manifesto of Futurism.”61 (The latter had introduced the world to Futurism—prior to the painting of anything recognizably “Futurist”—when it had appeared on the front page of Le Figaro in Paris in February 1909.) The week before the Futurist exhibit opened in Berlin, Der Sturm published a translation of the text first presented at Bernheim-Jeune in February: “Futurism: The Exhibitors to the Public.”62 Walden published an extensive catalog for the exhibition; it included these three Futurist texts in German, eight reproductions, and brief explanatory text for each of the thirty-five works in the catalog.63

The media wave, however, was just beginning. Perhaps the most spectacular event was Boccioni’s, Marinetti’s, Walden’s, and (second wife) Nell Walden’s alleged ride through the streets of Berlin in an open motorcar. In Nell’s recollection, the four stood during the whole drive—which is improbable, unless they had someone else at the wheel, but possible, considering the slower velocities on thoroughfares more familiar with horse-drawn carriages. In any case, all four are said to have tossed copies of the Futurist Manifesto to passersby, shouting “Eviva Futurista!” (long live Futurism) as they went.64

Then, on 22 April 1912, Marinetti introduced Berlin to the practice of the Futurist serata, a live performance of readings, song, and audience provocation, if not universal participation. Boccioni’s caricature of one such serata in Treviso in 1911 (Figure 2.2) probably reflects greater turbulence than what attendees experienced at Der Sturm.65 After all, only Boccioni and Marinetti were on hand, not the five artists gesticulating wildly on stage in this image, and there are no known reports of blaring tubas and beaten drums in Berlin; but in all likelihood, Marinetti, at least, roared with characteristic force. Newspapers advertised “a conference about Futurism . . . about Futurist literature, music, and painting, especially about the exhibited paintings,” and a “recitation of Futurist poetry,”66 but exactly what transpired remains something of a mystery.67

Still, the caricature provides clues and brings us back to the Gleichnis of water. The central image of the three “paintings” that serve as a backdrop bears a striking resemblance to a painting exhibited in Berlin, Carrà’s The Swimmers (1910–12, Plate 5). The caricature of the painting depicts at least two apparently nude female swimmers, with oversized buttocks, flowing with the water toward the left, in the direction of the outstretched right hand that belongs to the artist, Carrà, who is depicted standing in front of and gesturing toward his work. In Carrà’s actual painting, there may be as many as four swimmers, all gliding in the same direction, to the left. The central one, still with something of an exaggerated bottom, appears to wear a modern, orange swimming costume, but the other figures are neither identifiable securely as to gender or state of dress; the one to the right seems to have longer hair and a feminine top, but to the bottom left all we see are the legs and a flash of dark green, presumably clothing, of the figure darting away. The figure at the top is even more ambiguous; what could be orange shorts on a slimmer man appear, after considerable observation, merely to reflect the suit of the female below; is it a man wearing a yellowish body suit, or is that the reflection of the sun and is he naked? All their bodies rise and fall out of the water, appearing to be in several positions at once, thanks either to the passage of time or to the deception of looking at and through water—or both. The viewer’s perspective is close to the surface, so close that the long, green, white, and blue horizontal brushstrokes near the bottom of the painting could be nearly coincident with the water’s surface itself. Could we, too, dive in? Intuitively, we know that if we did, the current would swiftly carry us to the left, beyond the picture’s edge.68

As such, the painting shares the Futurists’ intention to bring the viewer into the center of the painting. Mark Antliff argues that such immersion is an integral part of their politics, although he concentrates on apparently very different examples. In Carrà’s Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1910–11, Museum of Modern Art), which also appeared in Berlin, Antliff explains that Carrà depicts the aftermath of a failed anarchist strike in 1904: “the moment when police, mounted on horseback, armed with lances, assaulted the funeral cortege . . . only to be confronted with fierce resistance.”69 The “Exhibitors to the Public” text, available to viewers in 1912, identifies the “force lines”; they are “sheaves of lines corresponding to all the conflicting forces, following the general law of violence.” These radiating lines affect the viewer, Antliff affirms; it is as if he or she is “obliged to struggle himself with the personages in the picture,” as the Futurists themselves explain.70 He then builds on his argument that the Futurists harnessed (Henri) Bergsonian “intuition” to (Georges) Sorelian “violence” in order to effect a masculine, Nietzschean, “will-to-power”; interspersing his text with more of the artists’ own words, he determines, “The ‘continuity’ of these lines, whose emotive impact ‘must envelop and sweep along the viewer,’ is ‘measured by our intuition.’ In short, the Futurists employ intuition to capture the emotive force of political violence and then oblige the spectator ‘to be at the center of the painting,’ to relive the intensity of the battle.”71

Antliff’s case for Futurist envelopment toward masculine, politicized, violent ends appears to be substantiated by another painting exhibited at Der Sturm, Boccioni’s The Street Enters the House (1911, Figure 2.3). In Antliff’s view, Boccioni portrayed “his mother stationed on a balcony . . . perceptually overwhelmed by the dynamic sensations emanating from the laboring male workers inhabiting the space below.”72 Such passive, domestic femininity—in contrast with an active, masculine ideal—supports the conventional attribution of at least some misogyny to Futurism. However, the Boccioni’s own description of the painting in the Sturm catalog renders the case less straightforward:

The main impression of the painting: when one opens a window, all of the noise of the street, the movements and the materiality of the things outside are suddenly in the room. The painter limits himself, not like a photographer, who presents what he can see through the small, square cutout of his window. He [the painter] brings everything to the picture that one can experience on an open balcony.73

Boccioni does not say that a woman is overwhelmed by the street noises. Rather, when one opens a window, all the senses are engaged by the sights and sounds of the metropolis; they penetrate anyone to one’s core (as signified by the pointed yellow shapes that plunge into the depicted figure’s midsection). Here we might recall Kayser’s summary of the Döblinian ideal: “The monad breaks through its windows into the world and finds community with the magic of the forces and voices of the whole world.” In the former image, the “street” enters the subject; in the other, the subject enters the world.

The juxtaposition of Carrà’s Funeral with Swimmers further complicates Antliff’s otherwise justifiable claim of masculine violence as inherent to Futurism. In addition to the widely disparate subject matter, the latter does not include the “force lines” that Carrà integrated into the Funeral painting and that Futurists employed with increasingly regularity after 1911. Boccioni’s caricature of the serata in 1911 has led conservators to confirm that Carrà’s painting as it appeared then did feature nude female swimmers; Carrà apparently “dressed” the central figure in modern swimming attire later, when the female nude (and the academicism it represents) became anathema to Futurists (as suggested in the initial manifesto, but apparently not universally respected).74 The modern swimming dress does update the painting, but swimming hardly seems urban and aggressive, let alone masculine. Finally, the fastest swimmers could never match the speed of trains, automobiles, and airplanes (beloved modes of Futurist transportation).

The “Futurist” modernity of the painting may be found elsewhere. The appearance of the painting in Boccioni’s caricature has led some historians to link it to a favorite reading at Futurist serate, namely, Libero Altomare’s poem “Nuotando nel Tevere” (Swimming in the Tiber). Sharon Hirsch, for example, writes that the painting was “probably inspired” by this poem and that it “visually represents that poet’s energetic description of his first plunge into the water.”75 If the attribution is correct, then his plunge was initially represented by nude women swimmers and later by swimmers of indefinite genders.

Both poem and poet draw from the Gleichnis of water. First, the poet: Libero Altomare, which translates as “free high-sea,” is the pseudonym of Remo Mannoni, who had fifteen poems—including this one—in the collection Poeti futuristi (Futurist poets), edited by Marinetti in 1912. His works’ prominence in the volume suggests his relative importance to the movement, and his choice of pseudonym intimates that aqueous subject matter may be more integral to Futurism than we might have guessed. He is also included in the list of thirteen poets who, along with the painters and one musician, Ballila Pratella, constitute the “leaders of the Futurist movement,” according to the final page of the April 1912 Sturm exhibition catalog.76 All in all, then, Altomare was a considerable force within the movement, rendering the influence of his poem more likely.

Second, the poem “Swimming in the Tiber”: I am not aware of a complete English translation in print, so I offer one here:

Identifying the Poeti futuristi collection as Futurist “poetry of transition,” Davide Podavini points out that this particular poem contains “no traces of free verse” and that it includes a “constant presence of hendecasyllables” (lines of eleven syllables), which were common in ancient Greek and Latin verse. He also points out that “dawn, awakening, the morning, vigorous nudity, [and] water” were frequent themes in the poetry of Altomare’s forbears.78 In these ways, the poem is not startlingly modern, but neither is it a representation of an idyllic, peaceful swim. With “streetcars rushing,” it is urban, and its poetic “I” revels not only in the flow of the water but also in his bodily, material union with the life and death of Rome. For him, water is a body, a “beloved ballerina”; he even “drinks” the “suicides,” which every urban waterway must sometimes contain. Although there is no evidence that Altomare read Döblin’s “Conversations with Calypso,” or vice versa, we might suppose that they would have felt an affinity for each other’s works. Indeed, Altomare’s “I” hears a “wave” of music, “seafaring songs,” as they waft through his mind, the material of memory, much as Döblin might have imagined it himself.

Even if these two writers did not know each other’s works, they likely did know of Henri Bergson, whose works Antliff demonstrates were formative for Futurist thought. Bergson’s highly influential Matter and Memory (1896) was translated into German in 1908, so it might have colored Döblin’s “Conversations,” which were not complete until 1910.79 Matter and Memory posits the interdependence of body and mind; they “flow” together in experience, to borrow Bergson’s frequent verb. It was not until the translation of Creative Evolution (1907) in 1912, however, that “water” and, specifically, “swimming” were thematized for Bergson’s German-reading audience.80 In opposition to mechanistic reason, Bergson posits the vital source of creativity in intuition, and he invokes the water metaphor more than once: “Thousands upon thousands of variations on the theme of walking will never yield a rule for swimming: come, enter the water, and when you know how to swim, you will understand how the mechanism of swimming is connected with that of walking.”81 Or, on the potential of action to break the standstill of reason:

If we had never seen a man swim, we might say that swimming is an impossible thing, inasmuch as, to learn to swim, we must begin by holding ourselves up in the water and, consequently, already know how to swim. . . . But if, quite simply, I throw myself into the water without fear, I may keep myself up well enough at first by merely struggling, and gradually adapt myself to the new environment: I shall thus have learnt to swim.82

Most important, however, it was Döblin who responded most passionately to the Futurists’ paintings at Der Sturm in the spring of 1912. If he read their statement, “Exhibitors to the Public,” he likely delighted in a line that closely resembles a repeated one in the “Conversations”: “The spaces between the tones are the spaces of music.”83 The Futurists, for their part, declare: “We do not draw the tones, rather, the vibrating spaces between them.”84 It was the paintings, however, that drew Döblin in. He opens his May 1912 essay, “The Paintings of the Futurists,” with the following:

First of all, let me say something about viewing these paintings. For a symphony, a quartet, a drama, it is understood that it takes a while to listen your way in [Hineinhören], to read your way in [Hineinlesen] to the work; in fact, you see the difficulty in understanding it, the slowness it takes to grow in [Hineinwachsen] to the work as a characteristic, as an index of its value. It’s not like that for painting and sculpture; the enlightening is supposed to just pop off the walls. . . . This is the primary negation of the Futurists. They require time. Every painting is a poem, a novella, a drama; you can’t read one of those in two minutes.85

Thus the poetic theorist of music borrows the primary condition of the temporal arts and declares, against common knowledge and Lessing’s original Laocoön (reprised by Greenberg), that the visual arts actually require time. It is Bergsonian time, as well: each of us must experience a durée (duration) with a work. Döblin adds, “The viewer must learn from the picture, must empathize with it.” The viewer has to let himself or herself go with the flow of the work. Once the viewer has entered the work, there is “no foreground, no background, not time, not space; everything lies leisurely on the primordial ground.” Everything mixes together on the primordial ground, the “life-filled pond” of experience. Döblin does not invoke the water metaphor here, or mention Carrà by name, but he does not have to for us to intuit the affinities. He closes: “I sign my full name in support of Futurism and give it a resounding ‘Yes.’”86 That is affirmation; that is diving in.

The Futurist movement may be predominantly masculinist, then, as historians have claimed for some time, but the swimming metaphor opens up other possibilities. In Altomare’s poem, the conventionally male swimmer enjoys the dance of his conventionally feminized “water as beloved ballerina,” but he also gives himself over, blissfully, to the current. Carrà’s painting, likely inspired by the poem, in some ways revolutionizes the representation of the “feminine” in water. The central figure, at least, does not offer her body for our delectation as thousands of nudes have done before (and will do after) her; instead, she wears sleek, flexible clothing that allows her to swim as actively as any other swimmer. Gender is indefinite throughout the rest of the painting—which is not to say that it is erased. Rather, it no longer seems to matter so constitutively; whoever these people are, they love to swim and to swim together. And although “Conversations with Calypso” feminizes the sea, Döblin’s passionate response to the Futurist paintings does not position artist, art, or viewer in a conventionally gendered way. Openness to the water can wash away distinctions of many kinds.

Walden, indeed, registered an openness to women in Futurism that the Italian movement itself likely did not match. On 25 March 1912, Valentine de Saint-Point, painter, dancer, and choreographer, published the “Manifesto of the Futurist Woman” in France.87 Just two months later, with the Futurist exhibition still hanging in Berlin, Walden published this new manifesto in translation in Der Sturm.88 The essay opens with the infamous quotation from Marinetti’s first manifesto that Futurists would “glorify war . . . and scorn for woman.” Saint-Point—Marinetti’s erstwhile lover—counters: “Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. . . . Both deserve the same contempt.” More positively, she exults, “It is absurd to divide humanity into men and women; it is composed only of femininity and masculinity.”89 Further, “every superman [Übermensch] . . . is composed of feminine elements and masculine elements at the same time: he is a complete being.”90 Thus Saint-Point demonstrates that Nietzscheanism was by no means limited to men. She goes on to distance herself from organized feminism (which, in her view, defeats individualism) and to valorize more traditional mothering (which she did not pursue herself), but her embrace of gender characteristics across the sexes, particularly against the reputed machismo of Futurism, is worth noting.91 Walden’s publication of her piece, in quick succession after the other Futurist manifestos, is yet another sign that Der Sturm was not traditionally patriarchal, either.

Despite its auspicious beginnings, the height of the Sturm–Futurist alliance was past. After the April 1912 Sturm show, the banker Wolfgang Borchardt purchased twenty-four works, and Walden organized a traveling show to a dozen European cities, but there were typically Sturmian complications: the Futurists were angered when Borchardt’s payment was late and when they were not consulted about their own traveling exhibit.92 The Futurists did exhibit at the First German Autumn Salon in 1913. In fact, this photograph of Marinetti, flanked by Severini’s (lost) portrait of him (1913) on the left and Carrà’s Simultaneity: Woman on the Balcony (1912, Collection R. Jucker, Milan) on the right, is the only known photograph of this landmark exhibit (Figure 2.4). Marinetti has his back to her, but Carrà, in his painting, offered up another woman on the verge: of being submerged or of joining the flow of life beyond her balcony. Futurist waves sometimes flow in two directions simultaneously. At the opening, Marinetti kept his direction clear: he reread the Futurist Manifesto, again declaring “scorn for women.” Hans Richter, the future Dadaist, recalled his “honorable assignment” to hand out the manifesto to carriage drivers on Potsdamer Platz.93 World War I, in any case, largely brought the movement to an end. Walden honored the passing of Boccioni in 1916 with a glowing and fitting tribute to the artist’s appreciation for Gleichnis.

By the founding of the Société Anonyme in 1920, Futurism no longer existed as a coherent movement. Dreier knew of it, though, and asked the Italian American painter Joseph Stella, who had met some Futurists when they exhibited in Paris in 1912, to invite them to exhibit in the United States. He did write to Carrà, but nothing materialized.94 Later, the Société Anonyme supported the work of some second-generation Futurists, including Fortunato Depero, Ivo Pannaggi, and Enrico Prampolini.95 Although the ties between the Société Anonyme and Futurism were not as strong as others explored in the present volume, Sturmian Futurism, the Gleichnis of water, and Altomare’s “beloved ballerina” are revived in two paintings that did come to the United States: Severini’s Sea = Dancer (1914) and Dancer = Propeller = Sea (1915, Figure 2.5).96 Peggy Guggenheim bought the former, now in Venice, and Alfred Stieglitz acquired the latter, willing it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1946. The Met’s current label reads:

Like other artists associated with Italian Futurism, Severini was fascinated by the interactions of movement and matter and the dynamic speeds of the modern world. In his manifesto “Plastic Analogies of Dynamism” (1913–14), written just before this work was painted, he describes the sensory and visual “analogies” that resonate across seemingly unrelated objects. . . . Here, he uses the same shapes and colors to convey the movements of a dancer, a spinning airplane propeller, and the roiling sea.97

Analogy is Gleichnis, and this painting, too, invites us to swim.

Kandinsky and Münter

As I showed in act 1, Kandinsky was the first painter whom Walden embraced and promoted at Der Sturm’s gallery. An early highlight was Kandinsky’s first retrospective—also the first Walden orchestrated—in October 1912. In January 1913 Walden granted the second solo show at Der Sturm to another Blaue Reiter artist, Gabriele Münter, Kandinsky’s partner at the time. Kandinsky is more widely known today, so it may surprise readers that Walden gave both him and Münter two more solo shows each (Kandinsky, in September 1916 and July 1918; Münter, in November 1915 and December 1917). Although his paintings were larger than hers, Kandinsky showed just one more work (seven) than Münter at the Autumn Salon in 1913.98

Despite this apparently equitable history, feminist art historians have wrestled with the recognition that Kandinsky’s painting may be more formally innovative than Münter’s.99 Most recently, though, Bibiana Obler has addressed their collaboration with an admirable evenness and subtlety. She notes, for example, the sensitivities each showed for the other: Münter left abstraction to her partner, because she “did not choose to compete on Kandinsky’s ground,” while Kandinsky bristled when Münter’s painting was praised for its manliness, because he championed her femininity, which he believed ought to be valued in its own right.100 Obler even argues that Kandinsky was “avowedly feminist. His ambition was to show that women are different from while also equal to men.”101 At the same time, she acknowledges Kandinsky’s misogyny in his description of “painting as a conquest of virgin canvas with ‘imperious brush.’”102

Let us consider how the two artists’ engagements with water accord with this complex picture. In the Blaue Reiter Almanac (1912), Kandinsky writes that with abstract paintings it must be “possible to hear the whole world just as it is, without objective interpretation.”103 Such thinking allowed the artist to move beyond pictorial references, such as the piano in Impression III, Concert (Plate 4), to the purer abstraction of a Picture with White Edge (1913, Figure 2.6). Following Riccardo Marchi, I take Kandinsky’s words seriously: a painting can be “abstract” without having to sever all its ties to the world.104 In other words, a nonrepresentational painting by Kandinsky is not autonomous; it maintains its Beziehlichkeit to and with the world.

Picture with White Edge is exemplary in this way, and it also suggests Kandinsky’s ambivalence about water and gendered relationality.105 In his short essay on the work in the monograph (Figure O.10) he and Walden timed to appear during the Autumn Salon, Kandinsky writes that the painting was the result of “powerful impressions” from a trip to Moscow or, “more correctly, of Moscow itself.”106 At the same time, however, it is a “dissolving” of colors and forms. On the upper left, a troika motif (the traditional Russian sled with three horses, although we see no horses here) “remained.” Kandinsky identifies two “centers” to the painting: on the left, a “combination of standing forms”; on the right, “broad, curving brushstrokes” of lighter and darker blues “with a more or less egg-shaped background.” He explains that “following this edge with one’s eye, one experiences an inner sensation like a succession of waves.” Although the second center is “like a small, autonomous realm,” he also maintains that “these two centers are separated, and at the same time linked, by numerous more or less distinct forms . . . simple patches and areas of green.”107

Kandinsky did not intend for us to recognize Moscow or an egg in the painting. Indeed, Kandinsky does not even specify what viewers familiar with his iconography surely would have seen, namely, remnants of a St. George figure (the white, triple arch on the left side of the second center), wielding a white lance (the white horizontal bar crossing the actual center of the canvas) that is directed at the ghost of a dragon in the tumble of forms of the first center. Instead, Marchi argues that we are meant to recognize a “specific experience of the world” that does not depend on representing specific objects in the world.108 As I do throughout this book, Marchi also appeals to a Nietzschean principle of analogy to support his claim.109 Kandinsky’s claim that an apparently “autonomous realm” is “separated, and at the same time linked” to everything else might also lead us to recognition of a Döblinian Beziehlichkeit of life.

Kandinsky was not yet satisfied, however. On the bottom left, he explains, “there is a battle in black and white”; he calls it the “inner boiling within diffuse form.” The struggle engulfed him: “It tormented me.”110 Yet he was rewarded for his patience: “It was not until after nearly five months that I was sitting looking in the twilight at the second large-scale study, when it dawned on me what was missing—the white edge.” Inspiration came to him with the insistence and unexpectedness that Nietzsche once ascribed to the experience thereof. It offered the painter a metaphor: the white edge (Rand), which is often translated as “border.”

A border maintains boundaries, and the white edge that Kandinsky painted around a considerable part of this picture might be said to contain the “inner boiling,” the “succession of waves,” all of which “tormented” him. If so, we might conclude that Kandinsky was not comfortable with flow or that he needed to contain it. In that case, his conclusion would be surprising:

I treated this white edge itself in the same capricious way it had treated me: in the lower left a chasm, out of which rises a white wave that suddenly subsides, only to flow around the right-hand side of the picture in lazy coils, forming in the upper right a lake (where the black bubbling comes about), disappearing toward the upper left-hand corner, where it makes its last, definitive appearance in the picture in the form of a white zigzag. Since this white edge proved the solution to the picture, I name the whole picture after it.111

This is a representation not of water but of its Gleichnis. It is a wave that flows around other waves, to contain them, yes, but only so far: the “chasm” at lower left is not contained; neither is the “battle,” the “inner boiling,” on the left side near the bottom. Without wanting to read into the painting—although we feel encouraged to do so, with this plethora of Gleichnisse—do we see the “lance” reverse its initially perceived trajectory and phallicly penetrate the triple-arched “St. George,” unnamed, now a vagina? We recall that the blue “center” is “more or less” shaped like an “egg”; does that become a watery womb? And if so, does the white wave that surrounds it, the “white edge [that] proved the solution to the picture,” promise—or threaten—to engulf everything and to dissolve all distinctions between subject and object?112

Kandinsky was perennially troubled by the illegibility of his paintings, but some viewers responded with an ecstasy akin to the “oceanic feeling.” These lines from “To Kandinsky,” by the Dutch poet Albert Verwey, demonstrate this response:

We do not know to which painting Verwey responded, but it could have been Picture with White Edge. The poem appeared in translation in Der Sturm in February 1913.114 Kandinsky immediately wrote to Walden that the poem “is fine and demonstrates a great understanding of my paintings.”115 He liked the poem so much that he asked Karl Wolfskehl to provide a fresh, more expressionist translation for the monograph Kandinsky, 1901–1913. Thus at least part of Kandinsky sought to dive in and merge—or at the very least, to promote a vision of his work’s aqueousness.

Obler argues that Kandinsky’s paintings “sought to bust through barriers between self and other,” that he saw his painting as a “Bergsonian solution to the woes of early twentieth-century society, mired in materialism, characterized by relationships between people and objects that technically sustain life but have killed the inner flux of experience that makes living worthwhile.”116 Having located two copies of Bergson’s Time and Free Will (1889) in Kandinsky’s library, Obler legitimately emphasizes the importance of this particular text for Kandinsky.117 This Bergson is different from the one to whom Antliff points in his analysis of Futurist efforts to stir up revolutionary fervor. The early part of Time and Free Will focuses on the possibility of communication between artist and audience. As Obler makes clear, this text stresses passivity on the part of the spectator, who must temporarily abandon sense of self in order to “think and see with the poet,” as Bergson puts it. He concludes, “Thus will be broken down the barrier interposed by time and space between [the artist’s] consciousness and ours.”118

Obler may be right that this is the Bergsonian text that best accounts for Kandinsky’s aims, but Bergson does not always demand passivity. Hazarding a summary, we might say that he calls for a receptiveness in order to develop a deep engagement with life. Further, Kandinsky was ambivalent about how to achieve such union, as one sentence in his 1913 monograph reveals: “For many years I have sought the possibility of letting the viewer ‘stroll’ within the picture, forcing him to become absorbed in the picture, forgetful of himself.”119 Obler focuses on the latter part of the sentence, the forced dissolution of the spectator, but perhaps one needs to let oneself go in order to learn to “stroll” within a picture?120 Kandinsky, himself, wanted to be “in” the picture. Earlier in that text he describes a visit to Russian peasant houses: “In these magical houses I experienced something I have never encountered again since. They taught me to move within the picture, to live in the picture.”121 His description of his entrance into one of the colorfully decorated rooms implies a reversal, however: “When I finally entered the room, I felt surrounded on all sides by painting, into which I had thus penetrated.”122 He is “surrounded” and yet he has “penetrated”? A few lines later, he seemingly welcomes the viewer to take a “stroll” in his picture, but in fact he “forces” her or him to submit to it. Passive, active, passive, active: Kandinsky moves back and forth, unwittingly offering us a Gleichnis of ambivalent, modern (masculine?) subjectivity, flowing and contained.

Obler is especially brilliant in her contrasting assessment of Münter: “The crux of her [Münter’s] ambition lay in the distinctiveness of her theoretical stakes: through her apparently more humble figurative approach, she offered a suggestion on how to unite matter and spirit that Kandinsky thought complemented his, but that could be more accurately described as serving as a corrective.”123 Obler observes: “But if some of her compositions seem simple, cheerful, and open at first glance, upon closer inspection, even the most apparently forthright reveal a distance between artist, viewer, and subject and a self-consciousness about representation that belie claims of unmediated intuition,” which are conventionally attributed to women and to Münter, in particular, by Kandinsky himself.124 Münter, in short, may share Kandinsky’s desire for a union of matter and spirit, but she comes to it from an entirely different subject position. She does not share his privilege to wield an “imperious brush,” and her experience as a woman in early twentieth-century Germany (and France, where the couple lived from 1904 until 1906) gave her insight into complicated negotiations of boundaries. As Obler writes, “If there was anything consistent about her approach, it was an emphasis on and investigation into the separation between entities.”125

Although it is not her primary subject matter, Münter’s representation of water proves enlightening in this context. Obler analyzes the apparent frankness, yet inscrutability, of Münter’s paintings, Boating (1910, Plate 6) and Sofa Table (1910, Figure 2.7), which Münter hung one above the other (with Boating on top) at her exhibit at Max Dietzel’s Neuer Kunstsalon (New art gallery) in Munich in spring 1913 (Figure 2.8), and possibly also at her solo exhibit at Der Sturm the preceding January (although no photograph of that installation is known to survive).126 Let us look at each in turn and then, with Gleichnis in mind, together as a pair.

We assume the woman in the boat, whose back is to us, is Münter. Across from her sit Marianne von Werefkin and her stepson, Andreas Jawlensky. Kandinsky, as Obler reports, “takes center stage, steering the vessel, while Münter does all the hard work of both rowing and painting.” Does Münter resent his head in the clouds, his apparent autonomy, as his verticality peaks at his face, set against blue mountains that rise in succession and approach the heavens above? Is this the rising spiritual triangle (and its attendant prophet) of which he writes in Concerning the Spiritual? Obler writes, perceptively, “We see with her but not through her. Note the contrast with Kandinsky’s desire to have us experience his precise inner vision.”127 It is hard to say, then, what Münter wants us to take from this image, but it does reveal something of the work required in the world for a great (male) artist to appear self-sufficient.

Obler describes Sofa Table as “perhaps even more inscrutable in its privacy.” It is an interior of the couple’s home (owned by Münter) in Murnau, but the vantage point makes it difficult to discern the drop from table to couch, and the plants and the lamp on the table seem too obviously contrived in their placement, “posing,” as it were, for a still life.128 The objects on the table do not dissolve, yet there is a curious unity, suggested partly by the flow from table to couch. In addition, the broken stripes of the yellow wallpaper offer a quiet staccato, unifying rhythm across the scene.

Münter does offer a “corrective” to Kandinsky. Yes, she seems to say in her paintings, we are in the constant flux of life, but in real life, her real life, we have to name things, water the plants, and place the throw just so on the sofa armrest. One wonders if the juxtaposition of Boating above Sofa Table was not considered just as carefully. With the Gleichnis of water in mind, we see Sofa Table differently: the profile of the brown sofa from the bottom of its armrest on the bottom left through its rising and undulating across the painting to the right becomes a metaphorical “wave” that unites the endless multiplicity of the phenomena of life. As Döblin contends, the relationship is not inherent; it becomes one through our perception of it. In this way, the “wave” of the sofa below becomes the “water” over which Münter rows and Kandinsky steers above. Her maintenance of the safe domestic space, with all its Bergsonian rhythms, allows for Kandinsky to stand so confidently above it all—regardless of his own ambivalence.

An expansive understanding of Gleichnis makes such a reading possible. It also helps us appreciate how modernism could include both abstraction and representation. Kandinsky’s abstract forms present Gleichnisse of the rhythms, forces, and feelings of lived experience. Münter’s paintings show us more of the stuff of life, but the ways in which she juxtaposes them, both “in” paintings and “between” paintings, reveal other analogues of experience and present us, together, with parables of Beziehlichkeit.

One last example underscores this view. As Obler reports, conservators recently discovered a lost Münter painting underneath Kandinsky’s Sketch I for Picture with White Edge (1913, Phillips Collection, Washington, DC).129 Obler reasons: “Given Kandinsky and Münter’s collegial supportiveness, it seems inconceivable that he co-opted her canvas without her permission.”130 She then explains that the hidden painting appears to be a larger version of Münter’s Garden Concert, of which two other versions survive (a gouache, 1912, Figure 2.9, and an oil painting on cardboard, 1912, Figure 2.10) and theorizes that Münter’s hidden painting may have been a response to Kandinsky’s similarly sized painting, Impression III, Concert (Plate 4).

Walden never exhibited Kandinsky’s memorial to a Schoenberg concert, but he did include one version of Münter’s Garden Concert—likely the oil on cardboard (Figure 2.10)—in her solo exhibition at Der Sturm in January 1913.131 In all three versions, an arched bandstand appears in the upper right, where the musicians, led by a waving conductor, play their concert. Between “us” and “them” is a circular pool with a fountain shooting water straight up, nearly to or just missing the top of the painting. The ring of the pool echoes the arch of the bandstand, especially in the surviving oil, in which both arcs are punctuated by rhythmically interspersed dots (globes or lights?). Obler argues that Münter abandoned the series because she could not decide “whom to include and how.”132 A woman and child appear in the lower left of the hidden painting; the gouache has two like-sized figures of indiscernible age; the oil features a lone figure, with hands behind its back. All three images include two adults on the far right, who appear to be about to walk out of the picture. Obler considers: “Münter, I have the sense, would like to have thought that she was not alone in her experience of that quietly memorable evening, but wondered whether she could really know what the other passersby were feeling or thinking. The pair scurrying off in the background . . . hardly seem to be luxuriating in the understated pleasures of the summer night.”133

The Gleichnis of water may help solve this mystery. The visual echo of the round pool and the round bandstand is a signal that the water is the visual metaphor for music in these paintings—as it was for Döblin and others. If so, the hidden painting and the smallest version, the gouache, feel least successful to me: in them the vertical fountain, emphatically placed in the center of the painting, is too darkly outlined and contained; frankly, it appears oddly phallic, but it does not command attention, since the two figures to the right simply walk away. However, in the oil on cardboard, the fountain positively flows, in long, waving brushstrokes it gushes to the edge of the painting from three clearly demarcated sources. There is no outline, and this is not one phallus but a flowing together of forces that nevertheless retain some distinction. In this painting, the couple to the right appears least ready to leave; unlike in the other two, there is no striding figure, although the one on the left appears to have his back to the fountain. Are they considering their options? Should they stay a while? Münter, I believe, gives us our options; she does not force a Gleichnis on us. In this case she offers the fountain as metaphor for the music that a silent painting cannot provide. More ambitiously, Münter may also present a parable of responding to art. It is up to us to stay, watch, and listen, or go. So hesitant to force us, Münter never completed the scene as a major painting, even if she included a version of it at Der Sturm.134

Münter’s lack of forcefulness has its appeal, but it likely inhibited her career and reputation, especially across the Atlantic. Katherine Dreier shared many of Walden’s tastes in art, especially for Kandinsky and Schwitters, but she did not actively support Münter. Dreier did, however, include three of her paintings at the International Exhibition in Brooklyn of 1926.135 Perhaps Dreier’s friendship with Kandinsky, forged in the years following the bitter end of his relationship with Münter, colored her perceptions of Münter and her painting.136 Be that as it may, Dreier’s oddly worded description of the German artist in the 1926 catalog reveals respect: “A strong personality which she has kept intact.”137

Ironically enough, Dreier did, in fact, purchase one “Münter”: the hidden “Garden Concert” under Kandinsky’s Sketch I for Picture with White Border, which she bought at Der Sturm in 1920.138 She almost certainly had no knowledge of the Münter underneath, but in that small way she preserved something of the relationship vital to both artists. The “lance” in this Sketch nearly coincides with the phallic “fountain” covered forever beneath it. It seems clear that Kandinsky wielded—and Münter let him wield—the phallic power in this relationship. However, there are other Kandinskys that offer alternative possibilities. Dreier bought two gorgeous examples from this period, and both have water themes. One is The Waterfall (1909, Yale University Art Gallery), which shows a loosely contained blue shape, “falling” over a peak between two white shapes. A painting titled Improvisation VII, Storm (1910) was featured in Kandinsky’s first retrospective at Der Sturm, but Dreier bought another version (1910, Figure 2.11) much later.139 In 1922 she traveled to the Bauhaus to meet the artist, offering him his first solo exhibit in the United States, which opened in New York in the spring of 1923. It was not until 1930 that Dreier bought her Improvisation VII, Storm, from a dealer in Cologne.140 One has to wonder whether its German subtitle, Der Sturm, was part of its allure, but the painting itself offers more. As Dickran Tashjian writes, the painting “is not completely abstract, [but] its veiled drama of figures adrift in a roiled sea nonetheless allegorizes Kandinsky’s sense of human striving toward spirituality through the threatening forces of materialism.”141 Exactly. Still more, there are two like-sized brown and reddish circles to the right of center. The white wave rises over and touches them. The green and blue areas below the circles transform for me into windswept jackets; are these figures embracing as they huddle, bracing for the wave? But the wave does not dissolve or annihilate them; it seems, rather, to caress them lightly. I do not insist on a representational interpretation—following Kandinsky’s advice—but I like to envision these two circles as metaphors for Kandinsky and Münter, “separate, and at the same time linked” by “patches and areas of green,” like the two “centers” Kandinsky described long ago.

Water Problems

If the Futurists, Kandinsky, and Münter demonstrate the desire for aqueous union, as well as reservations about its potential, Dadaists associated with Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme more candidly address its detriments. In this way modernism engaged directly with modernization and its pitfalls, which Marshall Berman and others have explored. As Berman suggests, Goethe’s Faust—Walden’s inspiration for Teloplasma long before Der Sturm—presages modern development. Faust, in Berman’s retelling, “contemplates the sea and evokes lyrically its surging majesty, its primal and implacable power, so impervious to the works of man.” But then Faust reconsiders: “It is outrageous that, for all the vast energy expended by the sea, it merely surges endlessly back and forth—‘and nothing is achieved!’”142 Berman reports:

He [Faust] outlines great reclamation projects to harness the sea for human purposes: man-made harbors and canals that can move ships full of goods and men; dams for large-scale irrigation; green fields and forests, pastures and gardens, a vast and intensive agriculture; waterpower to attract and support emerging industries; thriving settlements, new towns and cities to come—and all this to be created out of a barren wasteland where human beings have never dared to live.143

Faust proceeds—at great cost to lives, livelihoods, and nature. Before Berman examines the tragic costs of actual, historical development, human and environmental, he summarizes the fictional character’s “achievement”: “He has helped mankind assert its rights over the anarchic elements, ‘bringing the earth back to itself, / Setting the waves a boundary, / Putting a ring around the ocean.’”144 Not surprisingly, the metaphors of water’s control also gained currency in the course of modernization: recall Rolland’s complaint that organized religion “channels” and therefore “dries up” the otherwise expansive “oceanic feeling.”

Modern plumbing, circa 1900, destabilizes what many have heretofore understood as “truths” of modernism. Karl Kraus, Walden’s friend and mentor from Vienna, is exemplary in this regard. One of Kraus’s famous quips is that he and Adolf Loos, whom Walden also admired, tried to show that there is “a difference between an urn and a chamber pot,” the canonically modernist point being that function is essential to proper distinction between objects (not to be sullied by inessential ornament).145 Vienna was well behind the United States in installation of plumbing in middle-class homes (a fact that Loos decried when a visit to Philadelphia introduced him to the pleasures of sanitation with modern plumbing),146 so it is likely that Kraus knew what to do with a chamber pot well into the twentieth century. Yet the modern, domestic toilet rendered the chamber pot quaint, such that it became a vessel like many others, available for use or decoration. Kraus’s call for specificity is matched by his dislike of metaphor, which he also viewed as improper. However, his urn and chamberpot are nothing if not metaphorical, for his concern was not limited to pots. Further, Kraus’s desire to maintain boundaries between objects parallels his valorization of human autonomy. Here, too, his theoretical claims belie the reality of the modern world. In 1911 he declared, “I require the following from a city in which I live: asphalt, street cleaning, building key, forced air heat, and hot water plumbing. I am comfortable by myself.”147 Robert Hodonyi interprets this aphoristic remark to mean that “the culture of modernity should be freed from excessive aesthetic ballast,”148 but I see all the infrastructure and interconnected systems that are necessary for Kraus to maintain his “self-sufficiency.” I am reminded of all the labor in Münter’s rowing, painting, and housework necessary to maintain the upright stature of Kandinsky. Kraus’s insistence on purity, interestingly enough, contributed to his break with Walden and Der Sturm in 1912.149 The messy realities of Walden’s expanding Sturm outlets proved too much for him.

In contrast, in 1919, Schwitters embraced the impossibility of controlling water in the Merzbühne (Merz stage), which he theorized in the short-lived, offshoot journal Sturm-Bühne. He imagined theater as a capacious assimilation of gaseous, liquid, and solid elements, one that could include a dripping faucet, the mechanical contrivance meant to halt and unleash water’s flow at our command, but also inevitably subject to failure.150 He happened upon and welcomed water in real life, too, when digging beneath the balcony of the Merzbau in Hannover revealed a hidden cistern. John Elderfield captures its significance: “The principal sculptural motif of this final addition of the Merzbau was arrow-shaped, pointing down to the water, where it was reflected, to point back upwards—thereby reminding visitors to this most astonishing structure that the Merzbau, while not as vast as is commonly assumed, did in fact stretch . . . from the subterranean to the sky.”151 A forgotten water supply under one’s house surely threatens its foundation, but Schwitters’s acceptance of it reveals his embrace of all Beziehlichkeit.

Two artworks “made” in America were not so immediately welcoming: Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) and Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s God (ca. 1917, Figure 2.12). Both Duchamp and Freytag-Loringhoven were Europeans, likely impressed by American plumbing. Duchamp, indeed, famously quipped: “The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.”152 Fountain initiated the friendship between Duchamp and Dreier, and its name alone encourages us to consider it in the context of water, although the dry urinal is clearly neither an imagined, Nietzschean fountain nor a pictured surge in a Münter painting. Fountain has become canonical, both for its radical decentering of authorship and originality (Duchamp affixed a fictitious name to a “readymade,” industrially produced object) and for its introduction of “institutional critique” (it dramatized how “art” becomes “art”—or in this case did not!—within recognized institutional frameworks, such as the exhibition). The art historian Helen Molesworth intervenes in this discourse to insist that we consider the historical situation of plumbing at the time and, in particular, its mechanization of bodily processes. She identifies the potential disjunction of encountering a public male urinal in a public setting for art. The exhibition setting would prohibit its practical use, but so would its placement on its side—because urine would splash back on one’s toes. The latter would not only be embarrassing, Molesworth continues; it would also contribute to a growing contemporary concern about germs—especially in public restrooms and with public drinking fountains.153 Hence the male viewer might recoil from the upended toilet, just as a female might: as a woman, I find that the sight of a male urinal is always attended by the shock of “I am not in the right place”—a sensation that accompanies my sight of Fountain even after years of exposure to its image.154

In that moment of recoil, autonomy of artistic object and viewing subject is maintained (or reasserted). Yet, as Molesworth argues, “The Fountain demands to be hooked up, both to a body and to a plumbing network.” By “stalling the urinal,” she contends, “Duchamp suspended and magnified the moment of machine-body interaction. In the breakdown of the machine its workings and its social conditions become manifest.”155 Perhaps Kraus liked his chamber pot, then, because it allowed him to perpetuate his illusion of autonomy. But as another European national, Siegfried Giedion, recognized when he came to the United States, the American “home was re-structured around water availability in order to incorporate standardized plumbing, was wired for electricity, saw the rise of centralized heating, and experienced the introduction of the telephone” during the first two decades of the twentieth century.156 In a way, then, Duchamp’s Fountain might lay bare modern ambivalence about absorption in a different way. Some moderns reveled in the metaphorical “oceanic feeling,” while others were not so sure. But rapid modernization began to mean literal embeddedness in endless circuitry of wires and pipes, which must have raised new anxieties about dissolution.

While Duchamp’s Fountain raises these issues, Freytag-Loringhoven’s God confronts them. A word about her affiliation with Der Sturm and the Société Anonyme, since she did not exhibit with either organization. She left Berlin in 1909, one year before the first issue of Der Sturm journal, and she left New York in 1923, just three years after the founding of the Société Anonyme. She seems almost but never quite “hooked up” with either organization; she might symbolize the imperfect connections of the modern system at the same time that she demonstrates the prevalence of Gleichnis of water.

Freytag-Loringhoven’s lover in Berlin in 1896 was Melchior Lechter. A Wagnerian and Nietzschean, he orchestrated a Gesamtkunstwerk in his Berlin apartment, complete with a stained glass design dedicated to Nietzsche (1895, now lost). Freytag-Loringhoven’s biographer claims that she assumed a “central part” in the “artistic Gesamtkunstwerk” that Lechter cultivated around him.157 In a compelling instance of gender bending, she was likely the model for his painting Orpheus (1896, Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, Münster), in which a lone figure fingers his lyre and gazes intently into the distance.158 In 1900 Lechter portrayed a more clearly female musician, a pianist, on the cover of Walden’s teacher Ansorge’s new Lieder to poems by Stefan George.159 Yet in Freytag-Loringhoven’s memoir, she describes bitter loneliness in the Lechter and George circle; it is probable that many of these men, including Lechter, were homosexual, so this “total” environment could not “actually” include her.160 In 1901 Freytag-Loringhoven tried to “hook up” again; she married August Endell, the Jugendstil architect who designed Munich’s famous photographic studio, the Atelier Elvira (1898, destroyed), as well as Ernst von Wolzogen’s Buntes Theater in Berlin (ca. 1901, destroyed), the first theater intentionally designed for cabaret (and for one far more successful than Teloplasma).161 The marriage was unhappy, though; Endell’s architecture promised envelopment in flow, but he was, in Freytag-Loringhoven’s estimation, impotent—in any case, unable to fulfill her desires.162

Freytag-Loringhoven married again and landed in America. Although they are not known to have met, Lasker-Schüler’s flamboyant bohemianism is an oft-cited precedent for the “lived Dada,” the performative integration of life and art that Freytag-Loringhoven realized in New York.163 Freytag-Loringhoven likely shared little with the more reserved Dreier, but the two did share the experience of Duchamp’s rejection: he rebuffed her sexual advances, and she turned her bitterness into poetry for the Little Review.164 Finally, Richard Boix’s caricature DA-DA (1921, Figure 2.13), which represents Dreier, Duchamp, and other associates of the Société Anonyme, points obliquely to Freytag-Loringhoven: the abstract sculpture in the center, titled La Femme (Woman), likely alludes to her often wild assemblages and outfits.165

Although it is a restrained example, God (Figure 2.12) is one such assemblage. The story goes that Freytag-Loringhoven obtained the broken plumbing trap when Morton Schamberg took it apart in his apartment; some say he collaborated on the project with her, helping attach it to an upside-down wooden mitre box.166 Rudolf Kuenzli demonstrates that Freytag-Loringhoven mocks both the American obsession with cleanliness (calling it God) and what she interpreted as Duchamp’s capitulation to American shallowness (explicitly, because he had recently introduced Fountain, and implicitly, because he had rejected her amorous advances).167 Amelia Jones agrees that God is essentially critical: “God, a contorted phallus, is the perfectly succinct indictment of masculinity and phallocentrism (not to mention Fordism), pointing to the ludicrousness of its aspirations to transcendence (to divinity) through the violent rechanneling of the vertical thrust of metal pipe.” Jones champions the work as an explicit “comment” on “the failure of the attempt to channel the flux of modernity through rationalization.”168

While I concur that God likely mobilizes these critiques, neither of these analyses addresses the intense curiosity and desire to touch and look inside that I have experienced in the presence of Freytag-Loringhoven’s God. It is not a twisted pipe. It is a system of connections and breakages, achieved with ease and labor. The top opening, with what Jones describes as a “lip,” was sliced through with some ease; it is a pliable alloy, likely including lead, which makes it “soft” and comparably easy to cut. In contrast, a lot of pressure had to be applied to disconnect the bolt at the bottom of the pipe (now resting on the wooden box); the visible impressions on the pipe indicate a wrench that grasped and jerked the bolt to unthread it from something else, likely another pipe under Schamberg’s sink. This is also, importantly, not one continuous pipe. The lowest section of pipe (1¼² in diameter) has been soldered into a larger pipe (1½² in diameter) before the whole “pipe” arches over and down to a another bolt (larger) and a bulbous extension, faced by a flat disk with a central, circular bulge, which is completely corroded. This corroded part is the “clean out,” designed precisely for cleaning out the “trap,” which is the lower curve of this pipe system. The “trap,” I have learned, is an ingenious invention, and one will find it, if one looks, under every sink and behind every toilet.169 Extensive interconnectedness with water systems also means sewers, and to keep their stench from entering the home or any building, plumbers take advantage of gravity such that some of the flowing water always comes to rest and fill that lower curve, protecting our lived environment from gaseous fumes.

We cannot know whether Freytag-Loringhoven knew all this about the plumbing she incorporated into God. She almost certainly knew that Schamberg’s sink was not working, since that was how she obtained the broken fixture; so it is possible that they discussed, however briefly, what was not working. The corroded “clean out” offers itself as a likely suspect. It turns out that the brilliance of the “trap” depends on the potential to “clean out” what might get stuck in there: garbage, possibly, or a precious ring. The point is that modernization brought the so-called first world connectivity that has expanded exponentially over the past century. Our Beziehlichkeit may be wonderful to contemplate, but it is complicated and even dangerous to live. Freytag-Loringhoven did not simply twist a phallus (or thumb her nose at God, America, and Duchamp); she invites us to explore the making and unmaking of connections, the necessity of some barriers, however transitory, and the recognition that all our careful planning will someday fall apart. Calypso would have loved her.