Paul Scheerbart, Fantast of “Otherness”

Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) is a most singular phenomenon among fantasts: a Prussian gifted with a sense of humor, he created a cosmos of the most colorful continuous transformations and alterations—a cosmos that is without parallel in literary history. Despite being evidently preoccupied with new contents—with curious alien beings, including sentient stars, with landscapes in the far universe, with other architectures (especially of glass), and with new art forms—Scheerbart was most interested in aesthetic problems. Accepted literary forms and genres in his hands undergo a condensation, an uttermost simplification, which has the effect of ironizing them. Nor do the conventional laws of physics rule his monstrously bizarre cosmos. Indeed, he held such laws in ridicule, claiming that they were nothing more than what the poor imagination of “earthworms” imposed upon higher, astral beings inaccessible to human reason—beings whose sympathies and ultimately aimless metamorphoses serve no goal other than to produce ever “new” and “other” vistas of the incredibly wide cosmic spaces. Scheerbart proclaimed that he was in love with the “world spirit.” That is no doubt true enough, but his attachment to it gives his aesthetic universe of surface form a curiously soulless and static quality. His cosmos is in fact a purely literary construct. Pacifist and free from the drudgery of work, the necessity for food, and the pains of sexual conflicts and disappointments, it stands as a counter-world, implicitly invoking the real world, Earth bound in the fetters of terrestrial gravity, only as its absolute antithesis. (FR, RMP)

Art · Art, Aesthetics, and Perception · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · German Literature and Culture Studies