Paul Scheerbart’s Kaleidoscopic Fantasies

Abstract

The work of the German polymath Paul Scheerbart is attracting a renewed attention in recent years. During his prolific career, his unconventional fiction, art and poetry influenced a range of intellects, from architect Bruno Taut to Walter Benjamin, who even quoted his ideas on glass in his Arcades Project. Scheerbart wrote dozens of outer-space novels and utopian stories, plus articles and reviews, always about things like glass architecture, perfect outer-worlds and realities, reflecting extreme dreams, ambitions and fears. In this essay I will revisit Scheerbart’s various writings with an emphasis on the book Glass Architecture (1972) and the novel The Gray Cloth and Ten Percent White: A Ladies’ Novel (2001), in order to understand the metaphor of glass and colour that shaped the fantastic dimension of his work while, at the same time, reveal a myriad of ambivalent, and often opposed, meanings.

Keywords

• Scheerbart
• fantasy
• architecture
• gender
• fairytales