On top of all the chronic traffic ailments of Berlin mentioned already, there is a new and acute one that threatens to eclipse them entirely. The subway is going on strike. The subway is Berlin’s most important traffic artery. The streetcar companies and the management of the bus companies have put out all their available vehicles. But they are not enough. The crush is extraordinary even when the weather is cool and dry. If we should get a wet November day, then there will be the long awaited gridlock. The Ministry of Labor is supposed to arbitrate in the conflict, but the employees of the Berlin subway have let it be known that they will not be bound by its decision. This seems to have provoked a catastrophic torpor in both the Ministry of Labor and the management. There is no movement, even though a strike by the Berlin subway is not just a private matter between employers and employees, but one that affects the welfare of the city, and even of the whole country.
Frankfurter Zeitung, November 15, 1924
15. Affirmation of the Triangular Railway Junction (1924)
I affirm the triangular railway junction. It is an emblem and a focus, a living organism and the fantastic product of a futuristic force.
It is a center. All the vital energies of its locus begin and end here, in the same way that the heart is both the point of departure and the destination of the blood as it flows through the body’s veins and arteries. It’s the heart of a world whose life is belt drive and clockwork, piston rhythm and siren scream. It is the heart of the world, which spins on its axis a thousand times faster than the alternation of day and night would have us believe; whose continuous and never-ending rotation looks like madness and is the product of mathematical calculation; whose dizzying velocity makes backward-looking sentimentalists fear the ruthless extermination of inner forces and healing balance but actually engenders life-creating warmth and the benediction of movement. In the triangles — polygons, rather — of tracks, the great, shining iron rails flow into one another, draw electricity and take on energy for their long journeys and into the world beyond: triangular tangles of veins, polygons, polyhedrons, made from the tracks of life: Affirm them with me!
They are stronger than the weakling who despises them and is afraid of them. They will not merely outlast him: They will crush him. Whoever is not shattered and daunted and uplifted by the sight of them does not deserve the death that the divine machine is preparing for him. Landscape — what is a landscape? Meadow, forest, blade of grass, and leaf of tree. “Iron landscape” might be an apt description for these playgrounds of machines. Iron landscape, magnificent temple of technology open to the air, to which the mile-high factory chimneys make their sacrifice of living, brooding, energizing smoke. Eternal worship of machines, in the wide arena of this landscape of iron and steel, whose end no human eye can see, in the horizon’s steely grip.
Such is the realm of the new life, whose laws are immune to chance and unaffected by mood, whose course is merciless regularity, in whose wheels the brain works, sober but not cold, and sense, implacable but not rigid. For only stasis produces coldness, whereas movement, raised by calculation to the limits of the possible, always creates warmth. The weakness of the living, forced to give in to exhausted tissue, is not proof of life — and the durability of iron, a material that isn’t subject to fatigue, is no proof of lifelessness. In fact it is the highest form of life, livingness struck from unyielding, equable, steady material. What holds sway in the arena of my triangular railroad junction is the decision of the logical brain, which, to be sure of success, has implanted itself in a body of unconditional certainty: in the body of a machine.
That’s why everything human in this metal arena is small and feeble and lost, reduced to an insignificant supporting role in the grand enterprise — just as it is in the abstract world of philosophy and astronomy, the world of clear and great verities. A man in uniform wanders about among bewildering systems of tracks, a tiny human, in this context functioning only as machine. His significance is no greater than that of a lever, his efficacy no farther reaching than that of a set of points. In this world every human form of expression counts for less than the mechanical indication of an instrument. A lever is more important than an arm, a signal than a gesture. Here it is not the eye that is useful but the colored light, not the shout but the wailing whistle from an opened steam vent, here it is not passion that is omnipotent but regulation and law.*
The little house of the guard, the human being, looks like a little toy box. It is all so tiny and inconsequential, whatever he does in it, whatever happens to him. Irrelevant that he has children and that they fall ill, that he digs potatoes and feeds his dog, that his wife scrubs the floors and hangs out the wash. Even the great tragedies within his soul are lost here, as if they were no more than minutiae of his existence. His “eternal human” attributes are — if anything — merely an irritating side effect to his professional functional ones.
Can little heartbeats still make themselves heard where a big booming one deafens a world? Look at the triangular railroad junction on a still night, its vale silvered by the light of ten thousand lamps — it is as exalted as the spangled night with stars: caught in it, as within the glass bell of the atmosphere, are yearning and satisfaction. It is beginning and stopping-off point, the introduction to a beautiful and audible future music. The rails slip and glimmer away — transcontinental hyphens. Their molecules carry the hammering sound waves of distant clattering wheels, switchmen spring up by the trackside, and signals blossom in their lovely luminous green. By the grace of a mathematical system that itself remains concealed, steam escapes, hissing, from opened vents, levers move of their own accord, the miraculous becomes real.
So vast are the dimensions of the new life. That the new art which is to shape it cannot find a form for it is perfectly understandable. The reality is too overwhelming to be adequately represented. A faithful “depiction” is not enough. One would have to feel the heightened and ideal reality of this world, the Platonic ideal of the triangular railroad junction. One would have to affirm its harshness with enthusiasm, see the operation of “Ananke”* in its deadly effects, and prefer destruction by its laws to happiness by the “humane” laws of the sentimental world.
The world to come will be like this triangular railroad junction, raised to some unknown power. The earth has lived through several evolutionary stages — but following always natural laws. It is presently experiencing a new one, which follows constructive, conscious, and no less elemental laws. Regret for the passing of the old forms is like the grief of some antediluvian creature for the disappearance of a prehistoric habitat.
Gray, dusty grasses will sprout shyly between the metal tracks. The “landscape” will acquire a mask of iron.
Frankfurter Zeitung, July 16, 1924
Part V. Berlin Under Construction
16. Skyscrapers (1922)
For some weeks there has been a fascinating exhibition at the City Hall of designs for large buildings. We hear now that the construction of a skyscraper is to be brought forward. It will be Germany’s first.