Search results for ""Author Paul Scheerbart""

“The serene and gentle amazement with which [Scheerbart] tells of the strange natural laws of other worlds . . . makes him one of those humorists who, like Lichtenberg or Jean Paul, seem never to forget that the earth is a heavenly body.” —Walter Benjamin First published in German in 1913 and widely considered to be Paul Scheerbart’s masterpiece, Lesabéndio is an intergalactic utopian novel that describes life on the planetoid Pallas, where rubbery suction-footed life forms with telescopic eyes smoke bubble-weed in mushroom meadows under violet skies and green stars. Amid the conveyor-belt highways and lighthouses weaving together the mountains and valleys, a visionary named Lesabéndio hatches a plan to build a 44-mile-high tower and employ architecture to connect the two halves of their double star. A cosmic ecological fable, Scheerbart’s novel was admired by such architects as Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius, and such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (whose wedding present to Benjamin was a copy of Lesabéndio). Benjamin had intended to devote the concluding section of his lost manuscript “The True Politician” with a discussion of the positive political possibilities embedded in Scheerbart’s “Asteroid Novel.” As translator Christina Svendsen writes in her introduction, “Lesabéndio helps us imagine an ecological politics more daring than the conservative politics of preservation, even as it reminds us that we are part of a larger galactic set of interrelationships.” This volume includes Alfred Kubin’s illustrations from the original German edition. Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) was a novelist, playwright, poet, newspaper critic, draftsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture and would-be inventor of perpetual motion, who wrote fantastical fables and interplanetary satires that were to influence Expressionist authors and the German Dada movement, and which helped found German science fiction.

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Baron Munchausen returns with visions of mobile architecture and journeys to sausage moons, in this previously untranslated novel from Paul Scheerbart It is 1905 and a raging stupidity is holding sway over Europe. As an 18-year-old Clarissa and her family take refuge on the icy shores of Lake Wannsee, the legendary Baron Munchausen makes an unexpected appearance at their door. Returning to German society after a century of absence at the ripe age of 180, the Baron is cajoled into presenting his impressions of the World Fair in Melbourne, Australia, to a select gathering of Berlin celebrities. Over the course of a week, the sprightly Baron arrives nightly by sleighmobile to combat the dreary days with a series of fantastical visions and theories: he discusses mobile architecture, the role of technology in the arts and the need for art to ignore nature in its quest to discover new planetary organs and senses; the new household miracles of vacuum tubes for cleaning and potato-peeling machines; the repressive function of sexuality; and the need for progressive taxation. His tales of Melbourne eventually take his audience from a restaurant in the ocean depths to the dwellings of mineral giants in mountain caverns, before culminating in a spiritual voyage to outer space among sausage moons and sun-skins. Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a novelist, playwright, poet, critic, draftsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture and would-be inventor of perpetual motion. Dubbed the “wise clown” by his contemporaries, he opposed the naturalism of his day with fantastical fables and interplanetary satires that would influence Expressionist authors and the German Dada movement, and which helped found German science fiction.

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The Stairway to the Sun & Dance of the Comets brings together two short books, originally published in 1903, by the antierotic godfather of German science fiction, Paul Scheerbart. The Stairway to the Sun contains four fairy tales of sun, sea, animals and storm, each set in a different, fantastical locale, from the giant palace of an astral star to a dwarf’s underwater glass lair in the jellyfish kingdom. Scheerbart’s sad, whimsical tales provide gentle though unexpected morals that outline his work as a whole: treat animals as one would treat oneself, mutual admiration will never lead to harm and if one is able to remember that the world is grand, one will never be sad. Dance of the Comets, though published as an “Astral Pantomime,” was originally conceived as a scenario for a ballet, which Richard Strauss had planned to score in 1900 (and which Mahler accepted for the Vienna Opera). Though the project was never realized, Scheerbart’s written choreography of dance, gesture, costume, feather dusters, violet moon hair and a variety of stars and planets outlines a sequence of events in which everyone--enthusiastic maid, temperamental king, indifferent executioner, foolish poet--seeks, joins and, in some cases, becomes a celestial body: a staging of Scheerbart’s lifelong yearning for a home in the universe. Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) was a novelist, playwright, poet, critic, draftsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture and would-be inventor of perpetual motion.

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German writer, critic, and theorist Paul Scheerbart died nearly a century ago, but his influence is still being felt today. Considered by some a mad eccentric and by others an important visionary in his own time, he is now experiencing a revival thanks to a new generation of scholars who are rightfully situating him in the modernist pantheon. Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is the first collection of Scheerbart's multifarious writings to be published in English. In addition to a selection of his fantastical short stories, it includes the influential architectural manifesto Glass Architecture and his literary tour de force Perpetual Motion: The Story of an Invention. The latter, written in the guise of a scientific work (complete with technical diagrams), was taken as such when first published but in reality is a function - albeit one with an important message. Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is richly illustrated with period material, much of it never before reproduced, including a selection of artwork by Paul Scheerbart himself. Accompanying this original material is a selection of essays by scholars, novelists, and film-makers commissioned for this publication to illuminate Scheerbart's importance, then and now, in the worlds of art, architecture, and culture. Coedited by artist Josiah McElheny and Christine Burgin, with new artwork created for this publication by McElheny and beautifully designed by Purtill Family Business, Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! is a long-overdue monument to a modern master.

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Two novellas from the inventor of perpetual motion and godfather of German science fiction. Rakkóx the Billionaire (1901), a "Protean Novel," tells the tale of a multibillionaire who abandons his militaristic aspirations (and such Quixotic fantasies dreamed up by his Department of Invention as the utilization of herring in submarine warfare) in favor of a plan to convert a cliff into a work of architectural art. The Great Race (1900), a "Development Novel in Eight Different Stories," describes an intergalactic competition among worm spirits who wish to separate from their stars and achieve true autonomy in a ferocious race of winged sleds, cannon-airships, sky-high wheel-shaped vehicles and 100-mile-tall stilt machines, whose winners will be transformed into gods. Veering from humorous, aggressive slapstick to ethereal visions of cosmic philosophy, Scheerbart's fiction offers something of a cartoon space odyssey, and resembles that of no other writer, either of his time or our own. Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) was a novelist, playwright, poet, newspaper critic, draftsman, visionary, proponent of glass architecture and would-be inventor of perpetual motion. Dubbed the "wise clown" by his contemporaries, he opposed the naturalism of his day with fantastical fables and interplanetary satires that were to influence Expressionist authors and the German Dada movement, and which helped found German science fiction.

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