Preliminary tarrying: Bodestrasse 1-3
Who knows—or cares—about Adolph Menzel?[1] Once a highly regarded realist painter and the first artist to be awarded the Order of the Black Eagle, the highest order of chivalry in Prussia, Menzel now languishes in the memorial vaults of nineteenth-century art’s dusty and dim-lit purgatory. The Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin probably holds the world’s biggest collection of Menzel’s paintings, and it is there that I recently came across his work—a single ray of light on an otherwise cloudy day. The Nationalgalerie’s exquisite rooms host many an outstanding picture by Menzel (how about the one of the artist’s stocky right foot![2]), but one work in particular struck me, for a variety of reasons; it depicted a coronation scene in Königsberg cathedral, the soon-to-be-crowned head in question being that of the Prussian king Wilhelm I, who would later become the first German Emperor. For it was under this Wilhelm’s imperial leadership that his prime minister Otto von Bismarck finally achieved that most fateful of state-building manoeuvres and one of the defining events of the modern era: the unification of Germany.
The once-glorious Eastern Prussian city of Königsberg (literally meaning “royal mount”), which had been the coronation city of the Prussian kings for more than a century and a half, is probably just as well remembered today, in the larger scheme of things, as Adolph Menzel—and, in accordance with the cruel fate that history inflicts on both peoples and lands, it even acquired a different name: Kaliningrad. A new name was chosen after the Soviet army conquered the Baltic port city in 1945, forever wiping out the region’s centuries-long and rich history of German occupation and habitation. (The name change in honour of Mikhail Kalinin, then one of the last remaining veterans of the 1917 October Revolution, in fact took place in 1946, shortly after the death of Kalinin, who until then had acted as the Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet—a position he had occupied during the better part of Stalin’s reign, and which had protected him from the terrorist excesses of Stalinist purges and show trials. Kalinin in fact acquired something of a reputation as a saviour and the last bulwark of benevolence and sanity amid the rage of Stalin’s plunge into the abyss of mass-scale self-destruction; his personal interventions often helped to reconsider the fates of some of the Great Purges’ countless innocent victims. It is worth remembering, however—especially in view of Königsberg/Kaliningrad’s complex position in German, Lithuanian, Polish and Russian history—that Kalinin also helped authorize, rather casually it appears, the infamous Katyn massacre in Poland in 1940.[3]
Today, Kaliningrad is probably best known (among those who, like myself, have an interest in knowing these things) as the birthplace and lifelong home of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), whose philosophical contribution to the development of the modern state of mind (“modernity” and/or “modernism”) surely ranks as one of the most formidable achievements of German high culture; which, in turn, up until the beginning of the Second World War, counted Königsberg among its crown jewels. In some sense, then, Königsberg—as the city which provided Kant both with the ample inspiration and the lack of diversion, and enough opportunities for both concentration and peace of mind, to be able to give us such foundational texts of modernity as Beantwortung der Frage: Wass ist Aufklärung (1784), Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), the three Kritiken (“Reinen Vernunft”, 1787; “Praktischen Vernunft”, 1788; “Urteilskraft”, 1790), and Zum ewigen Frieden (1795)—could be thought of as one of the cradles of modernity. It was one among a select few nursing places which helped to hatch out the ‘modern spirit’—the consciousness of “being modern”, of partaking in the modern era, and of inhabiting a shared modern world. It is strange to think that during its pre-war existence, this once-bustling Prussian port city and hive of cultural activity never, exceeded the demographic mark of 300,000 (fourteen times less than pre-war Berlin) yet it became home to such formidable heroes of the German Geist as Hannah Arendt, Käthe Kollwitz, E.T.A. Hoffmann et al.. Stranger still is the thought that a largely forgotten backwater a post-Soviet Russian exclave sandwiched between the new EU member states of Poland and Lithuania, has played such an oddly decisive role in the conception and incubation of the modern world-view. Yet the awareness of modernity as such—as a complex of ideas and experiences—has now, in its turn, become ‘our’ antiquity, much like ancient, enlightened Königsberg has long since become the spectre that, from its unmarked grave, haunts the deserted windswept expanse of Kaliningrad’s Leninskiy Prospekt.
What better place than the city of Immanuel Kant, then, to both rethink this abandoned, discontinued modernity and to question that which has come in its place—provided, of course, that this has been the case at all —and which has relegated modernity to the status of an ‘antiquity’ languishing in the memorial vaults of the nineteenth-century’s dusty and dim-lit purgatory? Where else but in this rather improbable port of call of ‘the Modern’ can we better ask ourselves whether modernity has truly become our antiquity—or, if not our, who else’s instead? Or, if not our antiquity, our unsuspected future ahead instead perhaps?—and what today’s relations between the old and the new, between the long-gone, the recent past, the contemporary and the future, mean to us? And what better way to go about this business of self-questioning than, in the spirit of the great Kant himself, by walking?
Ulitsa Universitetskaya 2
Kant, like many other philosophers, is famous for having led an extremely uneventful life: he was born and raised in Königsberg (his father was a craftsman of modest means from Memel, then Germany’s northern- and easternmost city, which was renamed Klaipeda after the war and is now Lithuania’s only seaport), studied in Königsberg, became a professor of logic at the city’s Albertina University, never married, and died in Königsberg at the blessed old age of 80—I know of virtually no Kant biographies to this date, and it is easy to see the reason why.[4]
[Likewise, there are no noteworthy biographies of Hegel, who, as Kant’s immediate heir and greatest critic, lived a life of similar disregard for the world outside the study. It took a historic figure of Napoleon’s unique stature to break the spell of Hegel’s obsession with all things universal and timeless and force him to pay attention, however truculently, to the philosophical validity of the here and now. Interestingly, Hegel himself owed his training and formation to an intellectual climate not unlike that of Königsberg. While a student residing at the famous Tübinger Stift, he befriended the likes of Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Schelling. As one of the founding fathers of modern aesthetics and (as it so happens) the subject of Jürgen Habermas’ dissertation, Schelling has, in turn, played a pivotal role in shaping notions of early modernity, especially for Habermas, who militantly espouses modernity as an “unfinished project”—as our present and future instead of our so-called ‘antiquity’. Hegel later moved on to the University of Jena, the site of his famous first clash with his lifelong nemesis Arthur Schopenhauer (and soon thereafter Karl Marx’s Alma Mater), and then to the University of Heidelberg, which would in time foster the formidable philosophical talents of Königsberg-bred Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas and Karl Jaspers. Finally settling at the University of Berlin, the long-time home of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hegel would then again encounter Schelling and Schopenhauer. A veritable criss-cross odyssey across the crucible of that which would soon be called the modern era, the story of Hegel’s intellectual life begs to be told. And further begs the million dollar question why he devised a philosophical system known primarily for its total disparagement of, or (at best) indifference toward, the Real—as in factually lived life, ‘real’ historical events etc. Hegel himself would of course call this tantalizing paradox a textbook test case for his newly devised science of dialectics —and the historical emergence of the dialectical method itself is inextricably linked to the advent of modernity, as demonstrated by French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, in his epochal Introduction to Modernity (1961), when he singles out the “melancholy science” of dialectics as modernity’s preferred mode of self-analysis and self-knowledge. A famous portrait of Hegel, painted by his contemporary Jakob Schlesinger, now also hangs in Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie, one floor above the Menzel paintings.]
One (possibly apocryphal, but who cares?) anecdote keeps popping up in all discussions of Kant, however—that of his daily walking habits. These were so notoriously predictable and trustworthy that the inhabitants of Königsberg used to set their clocks to the exact moment the philosopher would pass by their houses, a habit which (again, according to philosophical folklore) he seems to have forsaken only once in his life: on the very day when he became so engrossed in reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. (We must assume Emile had just come out, having been first published in 1762, when Kant was 38 years old). Did this anecdote—which, in its fantastical state, could serve as a springboard for a more in-depth reflection on the dialectics of attention, absorption and absentmindedness, on dispersion and forgetfulness as cardinal features of modern consciousness—help to trigger Joachim Koester’s photographic 2003 project, “The Kant Walks”? The photographs in “The Kant Walks,” which appear elsewhere in this issue, may at first glance seem to be monuments of remembering—Koester’s imagining what the city may have looked like in Kant’s time, which really lasted up until the beginning of the Second World War, or Koester’s reconstruction, by way of those daydreams that come naturally to the ritual of walking, the past (Königsberg) that lies buried underneath the concrete expanse of the present (Kaliningrad)—but they are also part of a performance, wherein the artist seemingly re-enacts the philosopher’s daily stroll through a fabled city that is no more, recording not so much what is left of it, but rather what is gone—which is to say: almost everything, up to and including its name. It is rather fitting, of course, that this process of recording took place by way of photography, which, as we have known since its early beginnings, has always been a melancholy, elegiac art preoccupied as much (if not more) with disappearance and dissolution as it is with apparitions, appearances and representation. (William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of photography proper, was an avid chronicler of ruins and scenes of ruination). As this “melancholy art,” photography is modernity’s representational riposte to the “melancholy science,” of dialectics. Thus, both Königsberg and Kaliningrad—and it is worth remembering that they are two entirely different places after all—are eminently photographable cities; they are time capsules and time machines, cauldrons of temporal movement in which past, present and future, oblivion and remembrance continuously collapse into each other. The inhabitants of Kaliningrad will photograph (the remains of) Königsberg as if it belonged to some remote and forbidden city in a different country on a different continent (not to say different era) —and vice versa.
[In an appropriate enactment of historical irony, Kant—along with amber, the so-called “Gold of the Baltic”—has long been Kaliningrad’s foremost tourist commodity, and the one relic of the city’s German past that has not been completely enmeshed in the post-1991 upsurge of Prussian Heimat tourism, which is of course being greeted with a predictable mixture of mild political alarm and economically motivated eagerness. The university has been (re)named in his honour—the world’s only statue of Kant is posited directly opposite its entrance—and once housed an authentic Kant museum; this museum has now moved into the main tower of the city’s famed red-brick cathedral, which is still in the process of being restored to its pre-war glory, thanks to a steady stream of German euros. Attached to the apse of the cathedral, in a rather unorthodox, after-the-facts kind of way (given Kant, as a non-believer of sorts, apparently never entered the building himself, and even the funeral procession is said to have remained outside the cathedral) we find the philosopher’s Spartan tomb, a decidedly forbidding, Prussian affair with huge, square columns linked by an iron fence to prevent the casual admirer from depositing a commemorative flower on the philosopher’s grave. In some sense, it was Kant’s tomb that saved the cathedral from imminent destruction in the seventies, the decade that saw many of contemporary Kaliningrad’s eyesores come into being. The cathedral, however badly damaged during the war, was still standing, and therefore something of an embarrassment to the atheist Soviet authorities, who had only then decided to raze the ruins of Königsberg’s fabled royal castle, surely as an all too glaring reminder of enlightened Prussian despotism. Kant, as a progenitor to the tradition of critical thought which would eventually (through no fault of his own, one might add) yield the state-sponsored doxa of Marxist philosophy, could be more easily inducted into the pantheon of revolutionary thinkers; his grave thereby helped save a house of worship which the man himself never entered, and which today has again become the urban locus of Kaliningrad’s awkward negotiations with its own obliterated past—that of Europe proper.
Somewhere midway between the cathedral and the present-day site of the royal castle’s miserable ‘archaeological’ remains, facing a boarded-up abomination of Soviet eighties architecture that is known among the city’s inhabitants (not without a faint hint of endearment, it seems) as the “Monster”, the discerning flâneur will encounter a memorial plaque containing the following fragment from the Kritik der reinen Vernunft: “Two things fill the mind with ever-increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more intensely the mind of thought is drawn to them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.” Of course, this moral law has been largely disqualified by the advent in this city, as in the totality of post-Soviet public space, of a wholly different set of laws—those of a wild, rapacious free market that, has made Russia home to, on the one hand, many of the world’s richest people and, on the other, the abysmal misery of many more others. (When I visited Russia in March, many of the flags were drooping at half-mast—I had come in the closing days of a week that saw more than 100 people die in three different security-related accidents.)
There is also a modest display of Kantiana in the city’s deserted History and Art Museum, a riveting feat of oddball encyclopaedism void of any attempt to reckon historically with the decade’s defining cataclysmic event—the collapse of the Soviet world-view. (There is, however, a small chapel-like room in which Kaliningrad Oblast mourns its Chechnyan dead.) Everywhere, we are greeted by a picture of Kant as a devout walker —accompanied by a cane in some instances, holding both his hands on his back in others. (It is safe to say that philosophy, or the imagery of philosophy for that matter, is well nigh unthinkable without walking). Curiously, there is a striking resemblance between the posture in Kant’s statue in front of the University, and that of Mikhail Kalinin in front of the city’s main railway station—a rather predictable manœuvre meant to secure Bolshevism’s critical pedigree. Western melancholy over the demise of state socialism—the type that is exemplified by Charity Scribner’s book “Requiem for Communism,” for instance—is certainly bound up with the typical western intellectual’s envy of the status accorded both philosophers and philosophical gestures by Soviet public art programs.]
Königsberg was home to another urban legend that involves walking, and which has equally assured the city’s fantastical survival in living memory after its erasure by the Soviets’ cynical effort at ‘reconstruction’.
Like many other cities, Königsberg owed its existence and wealth to a river—the Baltic-bound Pregel or Pregolja, which weaves its way around a small island from which the city historically grew, and on which the cathedral now stands. In the eighteenth century, this island was connected to the mainland north, south and east by way of a network of bridges, the famed “Seven Bridges of Königsberg” which are today primarily known as the mythical ingredients to a (by now solved) riddle in the branch of mathematics that is called topology. The riddle held that it was impossible to make a tour of the seven bridges that would cross each bridge only once, and by the middle of the eighteenth century—when the young Kant was about to enter the city’s public life—it had become so potent that on Sundays whole flocks of well-educated bourgeois Königsberg families allegedly traipsed around the city in a vain attempt to solve the mystery. Eventually, the era’s greatest mathematician Leonhard Euler (a native of Basel and a resident of relatively nearby St. Petersburg for the better part of his life) set about proving the impossibility of said venture and, in the process, gave birth to graph theory and the formidable field of topology; Euler was also the recipient of the famous letter, written by the Prussian mathematician Christian Goldbach in 1742 (as it so happens, another native of Königsberg), in which the latter casually expounded his so-called “Goldbach Conjecture”, still one of the most tenacious riddles in contemporary mathematics.[5]
During the British bombing of Königsberg towards the end of the Second World War, two of the city’s seven bridges were completely destroyed (along with most of the cathedral, the royal castle, all churches of the old city, and both the old and the new university), never to be rebuilt; two others were shortly thereafter demolished by the Soviet army, leaving very little intact of the architecture that had once nourished Euler’s enigma. According to specialist tourist services however, a so-called “Eulerian path” is still possible across the remaining bridges and newly built highway-bridge, and some romantically inclined mathematicians still brave the occasional pilgrimage to the site of one of mathematics’ most picturesque problems.
Did Kant’s walks at any point in time include an extra lap directed at trying to solve this apparently fashionable riddle with which the city’s cultured and wealthy few pledged their allegiance to the polis? Did Kant meet Euler and Goldbach at all? This seems very likely, as all three men were at the height of their intellectual powers—all intricately bound up with the civic spirit of Königsberg—in the couple of decades that presaged the French Revolution of 1789.
In some sense, the challenge of the “Seven Bridges of Königsberg”, with its austere and fatalistic beauty that is typical of mathematics’ arcane poetry, also allegorizes one of the defining features of the esprit moderne, and one of its most traumatic truths: like Heraclitus’ bather, who never gets to wade through the same river, we will never cross the same bridge twice. We must carry on. As the storm of progress, that demonic deity of Modernity, blows in from Paradise, we are forced to continue on our chosen (Eulerian) path and will not be allowed to return to the shelter of tradition—and unlike in Euler’s Königsberg, there are no second chances, no weekly Sunday entertainment. “Enlightenment,” thus spake Kant in one of the era’s defining pamphlets, “is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!” – that is the motto of enlightenment.”[6] This is the perennially mild-tempered Kant at his most militant, urging his contemporaries to emerge from the dungeon of willed ignorance (there are not just a few Platonic overtones here), yet fully aware of the grave dangers that await those brave enough to burn their bridges—as is amply demonstrated by the wholesale destruction of the bridges of Königsberg upon which he himself may once have walked, mulling over the far-reaching consequences of his revolutionary thoughts, once again lost, not just in thought, but in the labyrinthine maze of modernity’s many challenges.
Ploschad Kalinina
Surprisingly perhaps, Kaliningrad is not a city of ruins – apart from the obvious ruins of Socialism, that is (such as the “Monster”). Its predecessor, Königsberg, is not so much an archaeological excavation site, like Pompeii, Machu Picchu or the Acropolis rising above present-day Athens—a comparison that would have thrilled many of its former inhabitants—but rather a ghostly (and ghastly) anecdote: a figment of the uncanny that would surely have inspired one of the city’s most famous native sons, Ernst Theodor Wilhelm Hoffmann. (Perhaps it is not altogether frivolous to think of Kant as an incarnation of Der Sandmann, Hoffmann’s most enduring creation.) We can really only read about Königsberg, instead of visiting or ‘seeing’ it—which is probably where the city’s elusive attraction lies. However zealous its attempts—for whatever reason, political, economic, or otherwise—at ‘remembering’ or imagining its past, it is clearly a place without antiquity, forever chained to the tyranny of the here and now. A city used to reinventing itself, as its Soviet past is now also fading at an alarmingly (?) quick rate, even though there is still much here to consider—Kaliningrad is a poignant relic of the good old Soviet times in ways that have become impossible with regards to a city such as Moscow. It is already living with another past than that of comfy, snug Prussian Königsberg, a past that is simultaneously more remote—in that the utopian enterprise that animated it now strikes us as alien beyond any possible recognition or redemption even—and more present—in that Mikhail Kalinin is still standing (in stone), trying to make sense of his adopted city’s feverish immersion in a rampant new capitalism, the brutality of which will strike many a western visitor as wholly unimaginable. In this, Kaliningrad/Königsberg in fact remains remarkably true to what so many theorists of modernity have singled out as that era’s defining characteristic, namely the crude fact of contradiction, the understanding of which can only be achieved fully by the dialectical imagination. In many ways, Kaliningrad has only started to become modern, and in this, it both resembles and symbolizes a vast majority of peoples and nations that are only just gearing up to partake in the endeavour of modernity as “the discovery and appropriation of desire.”[7]
I have already remarked upon the alien-ness of Königsberg to present-day Kaliningrad, and the ways in which this jarring discord produces an utterly confused, promiscuous experience of temporality. This again reminds me of the opening chapter of T.J. Clark’s magnificent Farewell to an Idea, which I have referred to at the very beginning of my text. Consider the following extended passage:
Now that I sit down to write my introduction, I realize that what I had taken for a convenient opening ploy [Clark refers to his discussion of Menzel’s drawing of Moltke’s Binoculars, ed.] speaks to the book’s deepest conviction, that already the modernist past is a ruin, the logic of whose architecture we do not remotely grasp. This has not happened, in my view, because we have entered a new age. That is not what my book title means. On the contrary, it is just because the “modernity” which modernism prophesied has finally arrived that the forms of representation it originally gave rise to are now unreadable. The intervening (and interminable) holocaust was modernization. Modernism is unintelligible now because it had truck with a modernity not yet fully in place. Post-modernism mistakes the ruins of those previous representations, or the fact that from where we stand they seem ruinous, for the ruin of modernity itself—not seeing that what we are living through is modernity’s triumph.[8]
Clark’s whole argument revolves around the conflation of, and contrast between, “modernism” and “modernity,” a subject too complex to tackle in the present essay and too far removed from the reality of Königsberg/Kaliningrad, where there is hardly a trace of “modernism” to be found.[9] All the same, it does point to the aporias and absurdities implied in any attempt to establish neatly trimmed timelines that separate ‘contemporaneity’ from ‘antiquity’, to the sheer impossibility of naming anything ‘antique’ today (or ‘modern,’ for that matter). A ruin is not a ruin—the present, as is amply demonstrated by the eternally metamorphosing city of Kaliningrad/Königsberg, has always been the only fate we have had: thinking this fate a thing of the past (or, more presumptuous still, a condition resembling ‘antiquity’) has long been the pathological privilege of art, a practice and mode of cognition that long ago ceased being ‘progressive’ or future-bound. It is no coincidence that Clark’s aptly titled “Farewell to an Idea” begins its closing chapter, the final farewell, with a reference to one of modern philosophy’s most damning—yet in many ways also its most laudatory—comments on the realm of art. The quote is from Hegel, Kant’s most formidable heir and challenger: “art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.” Does this mean that art has become our antiquity? Perhaps. Hegel’s dictum has meant many things to many people, and continues to provoke debate even today, long after the “end of art” thesis has itself come to an end. (T.J. Clark wryly remarks, evoking another hallmark of the modern world-view, that “Hegel could never have guessed that the disenchantment of the world [another hallmark of the modern world-view] would take so long.”) Whether it is called pre-modern (‘antique’), modern or post-modern, we certainly inhabit a world that continues to understand itself in Hegelian, i.e. dialectic terms—who would really want to argue that progress is passé? —so there must be some truth to Hegel’s categorical maxim, no matter how painful and downright heretic that may sound to our partisan art lovers’ ears. If art really is our antiquity—“a thing of the past”—then it cannot help us any longer to imagine the world otherwise, but it can help us remember the world differently.
ENDNOTES
1 This is, of course, a partially rhetorical question. None other than Michael Fried, arguably America’s greatest living art critic, has devoted a monumental study to this artist who is, by Fried’s own admission, still too little known outside his native Germany: see Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. On a related note, I was pleasantly surprised to read the opening lines of T. J. Clark’s monumental Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) and find the first work of art quoted in Clark’s heroic eulogy to be a drawing by Adolph Menzel of Prussian General Fieldmarshall Helmuth Graf von Moltke’s pair of binoculars! Finally, much to my pleasant surprise, Menzel’s work also figured prominently in an exhibition that was opened in Brussels’ Palais des Beaux Arts shortly after I had begun writing this essay; however, it did not include the painting discussed in these opening lines.
2 Adolph Menzel’s “Der Fuss des Künstlers” from 1876 is the subject of a work of art by Belgian artist Sophie Nys, who first pointed me in the direction of said work (and whom I also owe a hearty acknowledgment).
3 Kalinin’s implication, as one of the signatory’s of the death sentence that would consume virtually the whole of the Polish officer class, in this gruesome high mark of Stalin’s genocidal terror, has of course led many to wonder why Kaliningrad is one of the last remaining cities in Russia to not have changed its name back to that of its more innocent pre-revolutionary days. The only other city in the former Soviet Union to be named after Kalinin was renamed Tver (as it had been known from the mid-thirteenth century onwards) as early as 1990. It is clear to see, however, that renaming Kaliningrad “Königsberg” would be ill-advised to say the least: it is estimated that only 0,2% of Kaliningrad’s present-day population is of German origin. (The vast majority of Kaliningrad’s inhabitants are of Siberian extraction.) Apparently, one of the options for renaming the city that is being juggled around today is the rather silly-sounding “Kantstadt”. With the unique precedent of the former East German city of Karl-Marx-Stadt now a distant, fading memory (it is now called Chemnitz once again), this would make Kaliningrad/Königsberg the world’s only city named after a philosopher.
4 Manfred Kuehn published a 556-page biography of Kant in 2002 (with the Cambridge University Press) which I haven’t had the opportunity to consult as of yet, but I am confident the reader gets my point: there are currently more than ten biographies (readily available) I know of recounting the life of Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in his lifetime published just one book (as opposed to Kant’s thirty-plus titles).
5 Even though in no way rivalling the fame of Göttingen as the foremost epicentre of mathematic activity in nineteenth and twentieth century Europe, Königsberg has sheltered and produced its fair share of extraordinary number crunchers, its most famous native son being David Hilbert, who was also active in the field of topology. Hilbert was easily mathematics’ most ambitious and idealist system builder, actively believing that a formalization of all existing theories to a finite, complete set of axioms was possible, and that the consistency of these axioms was demonstrable. This quasi metaphysical, Hegelian claim was famously sunk by Gödel’s theorem, which irreversibly proved that even the most basic arithmetic cannot be used to prove its own consistency. Gödel’s logical foundation of the irresolvable inconsistencies and undecidabilities of all logical systems proved equally influential in the fields of quantum physics and early computer science, and was thus quickly picked up in some eccentric theorizations and historiographies of postmodern thought. I am no advocate of enlisting certain (highly complex) developments in the field of mathematics and philosophical logic as arguments in a grand cultural narrative of modernism’s gradual unravelling, but it is obvious that David Hilbert’s worldview is that of a typical nineteenth century positivist, confident that the whole of reality will eventually be made legible, and hence, controllable—a very ‘modern’ conviction. The epitaph of his grave in Göttingen, “We must know, we will know”, is the creed of an incurable Kantian.
6 See Kant, I. ‘What is Enlightenment’ in James Schmidt (ed.) What is Enlightenment?: Eighteenth Century Answers and Twentieth Century Questions. Berkeley, California: University of California Press, p. 58. The original pamphlet was published in 1784.
7 This magnificent capsular definition belongs to Henri Lefebvre. See Lefebvre, H. 1995. Introduction to Modernity. London: Verso, p.191. The French original Introduction à la modernité was first published in 1962.
8 T.J. Clark, op. cit., pp. 2-3. This passage – in particular its closing sentence, “Modernism is our antiquity, in other words; the only one we have” – is further elaborated upon in Mark Lewis’ “Is Modernity our Antiquity?”, originally published in After All, 14, London & Los Angeles, winter 2006.
9 Clark’s art-historical tour de force may have very little direct bearing on the quandaries of daily life in Kaliningrad, its underlying assumptions and foundational sentiments are all the more relevant to the city’s post-Soviet hangover: it is as much a “farewell to the idea” of modernism, as it is a “requiem for socialism.” Clark’s book was written after the Fall of the Wall, “that is, at a moment when there was general agreement, on the part of the masses and elites in most of the world, that the project called socialism had come to an end – at roughly the same time, it seems, as the project called modernism. Whether those predictions turn out to be true, only time will tell. But clearly something of socialism and modernism has died, in both cases deservedly; and my book is partly written to answer the question: If they died together, does that mean that in some sense they lived together, in century-long co-dependency?” Ibid., p. 8
