Joachim Kalka

"Gaslight: Lantern slides from the nineteenth century" is written very much in the lineage of Walter Benjamin's "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century," in its form, its scope, and in its subject matter. Just as Benjamin draws on the developments in technology and their impact on nineteenth-century lifestyles (the invention of iron and new applications for glass in architecture; the commodification of the world with the advent of the department store and the world fair, etc.), Kalka pulls together a variety of social, cultural, and technological developments to paint a portrait of a century which, as he shows, is still very much alive in ours.

With Benjaminian fondness for cultural rag-picking, Joachim Kalka unearths an unfinished play by Friedrich Schiller, Der Polizei. Written before crime stories had become popular, the dramatic fragment sets up an impossible plot featuring, not, as might be expected, a detective working within or outside the system or a sympathetic villain trying to undermine it, but an impersonal hero: the police apparatus itself. Bound to fail, the premise reveals, however, a turning point at which the police as such might have been seen as a benevolent force of civic order, before becoming a faceless institution with dubious moral standards (see the career of one of Balzac's protagonists, Vautrin, who goes from a wanted criminal to the chief of police).

In 'Last Chance Saloon', Kalka examines the construct of the "woman of thirty" articulated by Balzac, but no less true in Hollywood representations of women a century later. "The year thirty, dictated seemingly by biology alone -- and of course the fluke of the decimal system -- emerges entirely from [the context of marriage]." Until a certain age, women are traditionally haunted by the prospect of spinsterhood. Once trapped in a marriage, however, they face the gloomy fate of sexless solitude. The only solution, as shown in La Comédie Humaine, is adultery. While, "nowadays, adultery has lots its luster" ... "at that time -- by dint of law, theology, and public morals -- the *act* was still able to have an existential aspect." "This is the glamor not of 'sin'," Kalka continues, "but of the heroic transgression of boundaries. Marriage is the boundary, and it is one whose dangerous violation is worthwhile." Against this background, the emergence of a social type, such as "the woman of thirty," has the authority of pseudoscience. How much is the twenty-first century still beholden to those stereotypes?

As in Walter Benjamin's work, the nineteenth century emerges in Kalka's essays as a fertile ground in which, unbeknownst to us, much of our cultural commonplaces are still well rooted, and only become revealed as such through the examination of their mirror reflection; while others, which now seem to enjoy an unwelcome revival, like xenophobia, are refracted in what is often (wrongly) considered as purely academic attitudes.

Not unlike Walter Benjamin, Joachim Kalka's strategy is often to start out with a seemingly minor and marginal phenomenon only to take the reader into the heart of a topical preoccupation. Thus the essay "Good German" opens with a close examination of the now-forgotten figure of a nineteenth-century literary critic, Wolfgang Menzel. The editor of an influential literary journal, Menzel set out to purify German literature of all that he considered immoral and ... un-German. Goethe, the "immoral" poet, was his nemesis; and the reader shudders at having him labeled as "entartet," or "degenerate." In contrast to Menzel's call for a (monolithic) "national literature" -- that is, as Kalka points out, no longer a literature unified by the use of a single language, but "national literature as the instrument that must edify the nation, confronting it with the great historical destiny that is its due, and obliged to see its moral stability" -- Goethe proposed a "world literature." That Menzel's dogmatism and chauvinistic rage is the forefather of something far more sinister need not be made any more explicit. As Kalka sums up, "The longer [Menzel] fails to provide a positive definition of what is 'German', the more aggressively he defines it in negative terms, by way of rejection -- through Francophobia and anti-Semitism." In that context, Goethe's own diagnosis rings particularly true in our century: "... national hatred is something peculiar. You will always find it strongest and most violent where there is the lowest degree of culture. But there is a degree where it vanishes altogether, and where one stands to a certain extent above nations, and feels the weal or woe of a neighboring people, as if it had happened to one's own."

Every single of Kalka's essays, fluently translated by Isabel Fargo Cole, takes the reader on a meandering journey of the mind, tying together disparate phenomena into a coherent narrative of the nineteenth century that goes to the core of who we are now, in the twenty-first. They tackle such subjects as the Dreyfus affair and Proust's position in it; the rise of anti-Semitism in the 19th C; gastronomy; terrorism; and the titular gaslight, among others. The essays are to be savored, which can be truly done only at a second reading.… (plus d'informations)