Paul Scheerbart

By Paul ScheerbartFirst 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.Paperback280 pagesWakefield Press, 2012Originally published in 19136 x 9 inchesISBN 9780984115594 Utopian Fiction, Illustration

Lesabéndio

By Paul ScheerbartIntroduction and translation by Christina SvendsenBaron 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.Paperback152 pagesWakefield Press, 20214.5 x 7 inchesISBN 9781939663511 Fiction

Munchausen and Clarissa: A Berlin Novel

By Paul ScheerbartIllustrations by Félix Vallotton and ornaments by JossotTranslated, with an introduction, by W. C. Bamberger “Scheerbart often reads like an apocalyptic mystic out of the Middle Ages who was somehow transported to the age of railroads and telegraphs.[…] Scheerbart is a mellow Marinetti; his faith in modern technology is not suffused with Futurist aggression, but with a dreamy aestheticism.”—Adam Kirsch, The New York Review of Books“This is Scheerbart at his most psychedelic, the lush intergalactic descriptions intercut with self-reflexivity (‘Do we think only in order to get intoxicated, or—do we get intoxicated only in order to think?’) and daffy, Neo-Kantian conversations on idealism and identity, all in the service of some sort of cosmic allegory."—M. Kasper, Rain TaxiTwo 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.Paperback109 pagesWakefield Press, 2015Originally Published in 1900 and 19014.5 x 0.4 x 7 inchesISBN 9781939663122Short Story, Humor, Philosophy

Rakkóx the Billionaire and the Great Race

By Paul ScheerbartTranslated by John A. Stuart "In The Gray Cloth, Scheerbart shows that even in the most edifying buildings, the human comedy finds a home."—Architecture"This novel will delight art historians, Brentano fans, and lovers of sophisticated irony."—Library JournalThe German expressionist, architectural visionary, author, inventor, and artist Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) wrote several fictional utopian narratives related to glass architecture. In The Gray Cloth, the first of his novels to be translated into English, Scheerbart uses subtle irony and the structural simplicity of a fairy tale to present the theories of colored glass outlined in his well-known treatise Glass Architecture.The novel is set forward in time to the mid-twentieth century. The protagonist, a Swiss architect named Edgar Krug, circumnavigates the globe by airship with his wife, constructing wildly varied, colored-glass buildings. His projects include a high-rise and exhibition/concert hall in Chicago, a retirement complex for air pilots on the Fiji Islands, the structure for an elevated train across a zoological park in northern India, and a suspended residential villa on the Kuria Muria Islands off the coast of Oman in the Arabian Sea. Fearing that his architecture is challenged by the colorfulness of women's clothing, Krug insists that his wife wear all gray clothing with the addition of ten percent white. This odd demand brings him notoriety and sensationalizes his international building campaign. For the reader, it underlines the confluence of architecture with fashion, gender, and global media.In his introduction, John Stuart surveys Scheerbart's career and role in German avant-garde circles, as well as his architectural and social ideas. He shows how Scheerbart strove to integrate his spiritual and romantic leanings with the modern world, often relying on glass architecture to do so. In addition to discussing the novel's reception and its rediscovery by contemporary architects and critics, Stuart shows fiction to be a resource for the study of architecture and places The Gray Cloth in the context of German Expressionism.Paperback136 pages, 5 color illustrationsMIT Press, 2003Originally published in 19147 x 0.5 x 9 inchesISBN 9780262692960Fiction, Architecture

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Paul Scheerbart

Lesabéndio

Munchausen and Clarissa: A Berlin Novel

Rakkóx the Billionaire and the Great Race

The Gray Cloth: Novel on Glass Architecture

Shop at Neue Paul Scheerbart

Lesabéndio

Munchausen and Clarissa: A Berlin Novel

Rakkóx the Billionaire and the Great Race

The Gray Cloth: Novel on Glass Architecture

Shop at Neue
Paul Scheerbart