2 2 6 Typewriter
tion, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motorcar, the aeroplane.
tion, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motorcar, the aeroplane.
Kittler-Gramophone-Film-Typewriter
A typist had to have both practice and a vivid imagination to read what he had written, and most of them worked for him for only a short time.
He was constantly distracted by this difficulty: "I can always find plenty of women to sleep with," he once blurted out, " but the kind of woman that is really hard for me to find is a typist who can read my writing.
" 122
Case 6. In I93 5, Dr. Benn quit his medical practice to serve as chief medical officer for the recruitment inspection offices in Hannover. Re- maining in Berlin were two female friends whom Thomas Wolfe would have had no trouble finding: the actresses Tilly Wedekind and Ellinor Biiller-Klinkowstrom. But the military, Benn's aristocratic form of emi- gration, had its everyday problems. After two "terribly lonesome and se- cluded years," he wrote to the second of the two women:
The sheets are torn, the bed isn't done from Saturday through Monday, I've got to do the shopping myself, even getting the heating stove going, sometimes. I don't respond to letters, since I've nobody to do the writing for me. I don't do any work, since I neither have the time nor solace nor anybody to dictate to. At 3:30 in the afternoon, I make some coffee, that is the one content ofmy life. At nine in the evening I go to bed, that's the other. Like cattle. 123
On the Genealogy of Morals predicted it all: in the chaos without recording technologies, literature basically had to take the shape de- scribed by Benn's tripartite organization: First, a beer or wine pub, read- ing, meditating, and radio listening, in order to bring highbrow poetry up to par with the sound and standard of popular songs. Second, an "old desk ( 7 3 cm x I 3 5 cm) " with unread " manuscripts, j ournals, books, sample medication packages, an inkpad (for recipes), three pens, two ash- trays, one phone," in order to "scribble" the poem the next day in one of those physician's scrawls that Benn "himself could not read. " Finally, an- other desk, "the decisive one," equipped with microscope and typewriter,
2 I 8 Typewriter
to convert the "scribbles" into "typewritten materials," in order to make the material "accessible to judgment" and prepare for "the feedback flow from the inspired to the critical 1. "124 The whole process operated as a perfect feedback loop, with the hitch that Benn "himself did not type well. "125 With "nobody to dictate to," it was hardly possible to deal ade- quately with the material on paper, and hence the media competition of radio and cinema was overwhelming.
More fortunate than his colleagues Nietzsche and Wolfe, however, the writer made a find in Hannover. Benn entered a "marriage of companion- ship" 126 that was to come to an end only during the World War, when his typewriting wife committed suicide. In Berlin two women friends received their last handwritten letters; the fact that one of them answered with a typewritten letter127 was no match for the technological competition.
I must make one more try to establish a serious human relationship and, with its help, to escape from the morass of my life.
Morchen, you may know everything, but nobody else does. And when I now describe to you what kind of a person she is, someone who will almost certainly become unhappy, you will be surprised.
Much younger than myself, about 30. Not a bit pretty in the sense of Elida and Elisabeth Arden. Very nice body, but negroid face. From a very well-respected family. No money. Job similar to that of Helga, well paid, types about 200 sylla- bles, a perfect typist. 128
Two hundred syllables per minute are pretty close to 773 keystrokes, the German typing record of 198 5 . Modern literature could be produced in the Wehrmacht and the Army High Command simply because the daughter of an officer's widow, Herta von Wedemeyer-following the ex- ample of the female protagonist of a 1 894 noveP29-worked as secretary.
Case 7. (so as not to forget, amidst all those writers, "les Postes en general," that is, general secretaries and general field marshals). 130 " By virtue of a decree of the erstwhile Prussian Ministry of Commerce and Trade of July 17, 1897, typewritten documents were deem? d admissible in dealings with the government. "l3l Official (or government) texts were rendered anonymous and laid the groundwork for Herta von Wede- meyer's profession. Which had consequences not only for chief medical officers but also for their ultimate superior, the minister of war. Nine days prior to Benn's second marriage and in the same city,
on January 1 2 [ I93 8 ] , General Field Marshal von Blomberg, who since I93 2 had been widowed and had two sons and three daughters, married the former stenog-
? August Walla, typeface, 198 5 . (Reproduced courtesy of Dr. Johann Feilacher, Die Kiinstler aus Gugging, Vienna)
? 2 2 0 Typewriter
rapher Erna Gruhn, a secretary of the Imperial Egg Center (Reichseierzentrale), in the presence of a small circle of friends. Witnesses: Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goring. The couple went on their honeymoon immediately. Shortly thereafter, senior investigator Curt Hellmuth Miiller, chief of the Center for Personnel Iden- tification in the Central Office of Criminal Justice, received a load of indecent photographs.
"Mrs. General Field Marshal," more faithful to Bertillon than Minnie Tipp, was "registered" with the authorities. 132 Hitler could take over chief command of the army himself.
Case 8. Once, shortly before the onset of war, fear of cancer drove Hitler to "the extraordinary effort" of "writing down his will by hand. " Other than that, like most people in command, Hitler "had for years been used to dictating his thoughts into the typewriter or the shorthand re- port. "133 A specially constructed typewriter with larger type was at his disposal. This typewriter, however, did not solve all the problems involved in coordinating a world war from the Fuhrer's headquarters, Wolfs- schanze. The official historian of the Army High Command saw reason to record a rather inofficious version of the end of the war. It was widely known that great situation conferences would take place around 1300 hours. Hitler, by contrast, had set up "his daily routine" so that
Jodi could present to him at around II and, surrounded by a small circle, the mes- sages and the maps of engagements be compiled overnight. Sometimes it got later, since Hitler was fond of drinking tea with his close advisers after a day's work Of, as happened regularly, of staying with his stenographers until about 4 A. M. Mili- tarily speaking, it was highly inconvenient that he then slept well into the day and was not to be disturbed. 134
But even Fuhrer-typewriters and secretaries, which Hitler preferred over his joint General Staff at the Wolfsschanze, could not decide wars. In order to do that, the Second World War had to produce somewhat more complicated typewriters that did away with literature altogether. . . . First, we need to conclude that fictive cases 9 (Mina Harker + Dr. Seward in Stoker), 10 (Minnie Tipp + poets in Bermann), II (Mademoiselle Lust + Faust in Valery), and their numerous successors (Breidenbach, Bronnen, Gaupp, Heilbut, Kafka, Keun) are anything but fictive. Desk couples have replaced literary love pairs. Only in film scripts or romances do both co- incide in a happy end. After Mina Harker for half the novel has collected, recorded, typed, and carbon-copied all discourses on Dracula until the latter has been done away with, she still ends up being a mother. After her
? Typewriter 2 2 I
German namesake has made a poet successful and sterile, "they type" (paraphrasing Dante) "no more on that day. " According to a beautiful tautology, sexes relayed through media will reunite through media as well. Heilbut's Friihling in Berlin (Spring in Berlin), Gaupp's Nacht von heute aufmorgen (Sudden night) are novels about typewriter romances. And the 30 film renditions of Stoker do not even show phonography and type- writing, so that true love comes to triumph over Dracula. The good for- tune of media is the negation of their hardware.
Empirically speaking, women employed in processing discourses are likely to have a successful career. Word processing, somewhere amidst the relays of technological communications networks, breaks up couples and families. Precisely at that gap evolves a new job: the woman author. Ri- carda Huch became one (in I9 IO) after studying in Zurich ( I 8 8 8-9 I ) and working as a secretary in the university's main library ( I 89 I-97). Ger- trude Stein became one after working in the office of and conducting ex- periments at the Harvard psychological laboratory headed by her patron, Munsterberg. Theodora Bosanquet became one after working for eight years in the delirious general staff. Tatjana Tolstoy, inspired by her sister's Remington, wrote her first article on a typewriter and mailed it anony- mously to her father, who would not have been "impartial" otherwise. Tolstoy was instantly enthused. 135
Anonymity and pseudonymity (as formerly with the female poets who wrote in the shadow of the Ur-author, Goethe) are hardly necessary these days. Whether typewriting authors are called Lindau, Cendrars, Eliot, or Keun, Schlier, or Bruck does not count for much in relation to the mass media. A desexualized writing profession, distant from any au- thorship, only empowers the domain of text processing. That is why so many novels written by recent women writers are endless feedback loops making secretaries into writers. Sitting in front of autobiographical type- writers, Irmgard Keun's heroines simply repeat the factual career of their author. Paula Schlier's Konzept einer Jugend unter dem Diktat der Zeit (Concept of a youth under the dictates of time), that extraordinarily pre- cise subtitle for a secretary, hears in "the regular clanging of letters . . . the melody accompanying all the madness of the world:"136 from world- war field hospitals and lectures in Munich to the editorial office of the Volkische Beobachter and the Beer Hall Putsch. Christa Anita Bruck's Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen (Destinies behind typewriters) is an autobiography without mention of love, only the desire to help those
? 2 2 2 Typewriter
"women who are not interested in motherhood" to have a breakthrough as women writers. 137 And since, during office dictation, "a self-regulating machine somewhere in the head chops up the meaning of what the hand, antenna-like, receives,"138 ecriture automatique is no longer difficult:
Tempo, Tempo, faster, faster.
Man funnels his energy into the machine. The machine, which is he himself, his foremost abilities, his foremost concentration and final exertion. And he him- self is machine, is lever, is key, is type and moving carriage.
Not to think, not to reflect, on, on, fast, fast, tipp, tip, tipptipptipptipptipp- tipp . . . 139
At its high point, typewriter literature means repeating ad infinitum Minnie Tipp's proper name or the advertising slogan on her office door. (Up until Helene Cixous, women will write that only writing makes women into women. ) The relay unit of human and machine exercises a pull that can even replace love. First with female typists, then with their male counterparts. That Kafka's love was a media network is confirmed at the height of German literary history by Case 1 2 .
Felice Bauer (1887-1960), who was employed after graduation in 1908 as a stenographer for the Odeon record company, switched in 1909 to Carl Lindstrom A. -G. , the largest German manufacturer of dicta- phones and gramophones (with a daily output of 1,500 units). 14o Within three years there, beginning as a simple typist, she made a business career highly unusual for women: with her power of attorney she was entitled to sign "Carl Lindstrom A. -G. " At exactly that time, during a trip to Bu- dapest in the summer of 19 1 2, Ms. Bauer visited the family of Max Brod, the head of personnel for the Prague postal service. 141
Present on this occasion was a young and little-published writer who was just putting together his first book for Rowohlt and who, at first, saw in the traveling woman nothing but a "bony, empty face" that "wore its emptiness openly. "142 Until the potential inscription surface dropped a sentence that "so amazed" Dr. Kafka "that I banged on the table":
You actually said you enjoyed copying manuscripts, that you had also been copy- ing manuscripts in Berlin for some gentleman (curse the sound of that word when unaccompanied by name and explanation! ). And you asked Max to send you some manuscripts. 143
That is how quickly a typist's lust taught a (hand)writer a love that, even in the shape of jealousy, wasn't one. Since only professors in Berlin and friends involved in information technology were privileged to have
? Typewriter 2 2 3
their manuscripts typed and readied for publication, Kafka had no choice but-in an unusual step for him-to go to work on the typewriter him- self. Whereas the "main" and "happy" part of Kafka's work consisted in "dictating to a living being" in the office,144 the endless stream of love let- ters to Felice Bauer started, as if negating love itself, with a typescript.
"But dearest Felice! " Kafka wrote a year later, "Don't we write about writing, the way others talk about money ? " 145 Indeed: from the first letter to the last, their impossible relationship was a feedback loop of text pro- cessing. Time and again, Kafka avoided traveling to Berlin with his hand, the hand that once held Felice Bauer's. Instead of the absent body there arrived a whole postal system of letters, registered letters, postcards, and telegrams in order to describe that "hand" with "the hand now striking the keys. " What remained of "personal typing idiosyncrasies" was only what was simultaneously of interest to The Criminological Uses of Type- writing, namely, the "types of mistake correction" : first, with skilled typ- ists; second, with unskilled typists; and third, with "skilled typists on an unaccustomed system. " 146 Kafka counted himself among the third group, and of the twelve typos in his first letter, four, that is, a highly significant 33 percent, involved the pronouns "ich" (I) and "Sie" (you). As if the typ- ing hand could inscribe everything except the two bodies on either end of the postal channel. As if the "fingertips" themselves had taken the place of his insufficient "mood" by the name of Ego. And as if the self-critical "mistake," which Kafka "realized" in self-critical amplification while "inserting a new sheet of paper," coincided with nervous typos.
Kafka's call For the Establishment and Support of a Military and Civilian Hospital for the Treatment ofNervous Diseases in German Bo- hemia stated:
This great war which encompasses the sum total of human misery is also a war on the nervous system, more a war on the nervous system than any previous war. All too many people succumb to this war of nerves. Just as the intense industrial- ization of the past decades of peace had attacked, affected, and caused disorders of the nervous system of those engaged in industry more than ever before, so the enormously increased mechanization of present-day warfare presents the gravest dangers and disorders to the nervous system of fighting men. 147
Under its initial conditions of a "war of nerves" between literature and Carl Lindstrom A. -G. , the exchange of love letters was doomed to fail, even though it later switched to handwriting and returned to "in- creased mechanization" only in 1916, when typed postcards were the fastest way of passing through the war censorship between Prague and
? Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt
! 'OR DAS KONiORmCH IIOHMEN IN PRAo.
? a. -CO. t . 1o . . . . to to P? am. leI; Ko. 18. 113.
N"' i! .
ai 191
? SehrgeehrtesFrau1ein
? Fur den leieht megliehen Fall,dass Sie sieh meiner aueh im gering. sten nieht rnehr erinnern kennten, stelle ieh rnieh noeh einmal vor :
Jeh heisse Franz Kafka und bin der Menseh,der Sie zum? erstenmal
am Abend beirn Herrn Direktor Brod in Prag begrusste ,J
ann liber
den Tisch hin l'hotographiBll von einer Thaliareise, eine. naeh der andern)
reichte und der schleesslieh in dieser Hand,mit der er jetzt die 1'asten sehlagt , ihre Iland hielt ,! Oit der Sie das Versprechen bekra:(- tigten,im naehsten Jahr eine Palastinareise mit ihm machen zu wollen.
Wenn iie nun d iese Reise noeh immer machen wollen-3ie sagten d a- mals,Sie waren nicbt wankelmlithig und ich bemerkte auch an Jhnen niehts dergleichen-dannwird es nieht nur gut,sondern unbedingt not- wendig sein,dass wir schon von jetzt ab liber diese Reise uns zu ver- standi3'ln suchen. Denn wir werden unsere gar fUr eine Palastinareise viel zu kleine Urlaubsze i t b i s auf d en Grund ausnutzen mUssen und das. werden wir nur kennen,wenn wiT uns so gut als me? :lich vorberei- tet haben und liber aIle Vorber? itungen einig sind.
Eines muss ich nur eingestehen,so schlecht es an sich klingt und
so schlecht es uberd ies zum Vori? en passt :Jch bin ein unplinktl icher Briefschr? iber. Ja es ware noch arger,als es ist,wenn ia&k ich nicht die Schreibmaschine hatte;denn wenn aueh einmal meine Launen zu einem Brief nicht hinreichen sollten,so sind schliesslieh die Fin- gerspitzen zum Sohreiben immer noeh da. Zum Lohn daflir erwarte ieh aber aueh niemals , d ass Briefe pilnktlieh kommen; selbst wenn ieh e i nen Brief mit taglieh neuer Spannung erwarte ,bin ieh niemals enttauseht , wenn er nieht ko? t und kommt er sehliesslieh,erschreekex iehgern.
Jch merke baim neuen Einlegen des Papiers ,dass ich mich vielleich1 viel Bchwierir,er gemacht habe,als ich bin. Es wurde mir ganz recht ge- schebn, "enn ich d iesen Fehler gemacht haben soll te , d enn waru? : schrei bE ich auch diesen Brief nach der sechsten BUrostunde und auf einer
Scbre ibmascbine , an d i e ich nicbt sehr gewobnt bin.
Aber trotzdem,trotzdem -es ist der einzige Nacbteil des Schreib- maschinenschreibens , dass man sicb so verlauft-wenn es aucb dagegen ? e. denken geben sollte,pr? ktische Bedenken meine icg,mich auf eine Rei- se als TIeisebegleiter,-fuhrer,-Ballast,-Tyrann,and was sich noch aus mir ent"ickeln konnte,mitzunehmen,gegen mich als Korrespondenten -und d arauf kiime es j a vorlaufig nur ap. -d'arfte nichts Entscbeidendes XIII:Jl von vornberein e inzuwendlln se in und S ie konnten es wohl mit mir ver- suchen.
Prag , am 20. September 1912.
Jbr herzlich ergebener
? . :;? ? +
Berlin, Austria and Prussia. 148 In 19I7, while Lindstrom's acoustical me- dia network, with its financial leverage, helped the Army High Command establish the film corporation UFA,149 Kafka terminated his engagement to Felice Bauer. Shortly thereafter, the woman, freed from the bombard- ment of letters, married an affluent Berlin businessman.
In one of his last letters to his last female pen pal, however, Kafka took stock: of misused love letters and communications vampires, of re- duced physical labor and information machines.
How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one an- other by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold-all else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enor- mously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create natural communica-
Typewriter 2 2 5
? ? Franz Kafka's first letter to Felice Bauer.
2 2 6 Typewriter
tion, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motorcar, the aeroplane. But it's no longer any good, these are evidently inventions made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal ser- vice it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won't starve, but we will perish. ISO
Hence only ghosts survive the Kafka-Bauer case: media-technological projects and texts reflecting the material limitations of the written word. Even though, or because, Kafka considered the "very existence" of gramophones "a threat,"151 he submitted to his employee of a phono- graph manufacturer a series of media links that were supposed to be able to compete with Lindstrom's empire. Aside from a direct link involving a parlograph, which "goes to the telephone in Berlin" and conducts "a lit- tle conversation" with a "gramophone in Prague," Kafka envisions a "typing bureau where everything dictated into Lindstrom's Parlographs is transcribed on a typewriter, at cost price, or at first perhaps a bit below cost price. "152 That was not, of course, the most up-to-date proposition (thanks to Dr. Seward and Mina Harker), but one with a future. In Bron- nen's monodrama Ostpolzug of I926, "an electrically hooked-up dicta- phone dictates into an equally electric typewriter. "153 And since "the ma- chine makes further inroads" into "the function of brains" themselves, instead of merely "replacing the physical labor of man, . . . a typewriter is announced [in I925] that will make the typist superfluous and will translate the sound of words directly into typed script. " 154
Kafka, however, for whom Ms. Bauer did not type a single manu- script, let alone construct media networks, stuck to old-fashioned litera- ture. From the typewriter he only learned to dodge the phantasm of au- thorship. As with his first love letter, the "I," "the nothingness that I am,"155 disappeared under deletions or abbreviations until all that re- mained was a Joseph K. in The Trial and a K. by itself in The Castle. The office machines of his days also freed the Kafka of his literary nights from the power of attorney, that is, the authority to sign documents:
I could never work as independently as you seem to; I slither out of responsibility like a snake; I have to sign many things, but every evaded signature seems like a gain; I also sign everything (though I really shouldn't) with FK only, as though that could exonerate me; for this reason I also feel drawn to the typewriter in any- thing concerning the office, because its work, especially when executed at the hands of the typist, is so impersonal. l56
Mechanized and materially specific, modern literature disappears in a type of anonymity, which bare surnames like "Kafka" or "K. " only em-
? Franz Kafka's postcard to Felice Bauer.
? 2 2 8 Typewriter
phasize. The "disparition elocutoire du poete"157 urged by Mallarme be- comes reality. Voice and handwriting treacherously could fall subject to criminal detection; hence every trace of them disappears from literature. As Jacques Derrida, or "J. D. ," observes in a May 1979 love letter whose address must also be without (a) proper name(s):
What cannot be said above all must not be silenced, but written. Myself, r am a man of speech, r have never had anything to write. When r have something to say r say it or say it to myself, basta. You are the only one to understand why it really was necessary that r write exactly the opposite, as concerns axiomatics, of what r desire, what r know my desire to be, in other words you: living speech, presence itself, proximity, the proper, the guard, etc. r have necessarily written upside down-and in order to surrender to Necessity.
and "fort" de toi.
r must write you this (and at the typewriter, since that's where r am, sorry: . . . ). 158
Hence Derrida's Postcard consists of one continuous stream of typed letters punctuated by phone calls that are frequently mentioned but never recorded. Voice remains the other of typescripts.
"I, personally," Benn says about Problems ofPoetry (Probleme der Lyrik), "do not consider the modern poem suitable for public reading, neither in the interest of the poem nor in the interest of the listener. The poem impresses itself better when read. . . . In my judgment, its visual ap- pearance reinforces its reception. A modern poem demands to be printed on paper and demands to be read, demands the black letter; it becomes more plastic by viewing its external structure. " 159 Hence a Pallas named Herta von Wedemeyer solves all problems of poetry because she trans- forms Benn's scribbled ideas-"a lifeless something, vague worlds, stuff thrown together with pain and effort, stuff brought together, materials that have been grouped, improved upon and left undeveloped, loose, untested, and weak"16? -via transcription into art. Under the conditions of high technology, Pallas, the goddess of art, is a secretary.
"Fundamentally, the typewriter is nothing but a miniature printing press. " 161 As a doubled spatialization of writing-first on the keyboard, then on the white paper-it imparts to texts an optimal optical appear- ance. And, following Benjamin's forecast, as soon as "systems with more variable typefaces" (such as rotating head typewriters or thermal print- ers) become available, "the precision of typographic forms" can directly enter "the conception of . . . books. " "Writing [is] advancing ever more deeply into the graphic regions of its new eccentric figurativeness":162
0000000000Q (R)(R)0(R)00(R)CD000
00(R)(R)0(R)00@0(R) 00008000000
Image of a T3 Remington "Ur-keyboard," 1875.
from Mallarme's "Coup de des" and Apollinaire's "Calligrammes," those typographic poems that attempt to bring writers on par with film and phonography,163 to poesie concrete, that form of pure typewriter poetry.
T. S. Eliot, who will be "composing" The Waste Land "on the type- writer, " "finds" (no different from Nietzsche) "that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. " Instead of "subtlety," "the typewriter makes for lucid- ity,"164 which is, however, nothing but the effect of its technology on style. A spatialized, numbered, and (since the r 8 8 8 typewriters' congress in Toronto) also standardized supply of signs on a keyboard makes pos- sible what and only what QWERTY prescribes.
Foucault's methodical explanation, the last and irreducible elements of which are at the center of his discourse analysis, can easily eliminate the sentences of linguistics, the speech acts of communications theory, the statements of logic. Only to be confronted by two factual conditions that seem to fulfill all the criteria for an elementary "statement" of discourse analysis: "The pile of printer's character which I can hold in my hand, or the letters marked on the keyboard of a typewriter. "165 Singular and spa- tialized, material and standardized, stockpiles of signs indeed undermine so-called Man with his intentions and the so-called world with its mean- ing. Only that discourse analysis ignores the fact that the factual condi- tion is no simple methodical example but is in each case a techno-histor- ical event. Foucault omits the elementary datum (in Latin, the casting of dice or coup de des) of each contemporary theoretical practice and begins discourse analysis only with its applications or configurations: "the key- board of a typewriter is not a statement; but the same series of letters, A, Z, E, R, T, listed in a typewriting manual, is the statement of the alpha- betical order adopted by French typewriters. "166
Foucault, the student of Heidegger, writes that "there are signs, and
Typewriter
2 29
2 3 0 Typewriter
that is enough for there to be signs for there to be statements,"167 only to point for once to the typewriter keyboard as the precondition for all pre- conditions. Where thinking must stop, blueprints, schematics, and indus- trial standards begin. They alter (strictly following Heidegger) the rela- tionship of Being to Man, who has no choice but to become the site of their eternal recurrence. A, Z, E, R, T . . .
Until Arno Schmidt's late novels, beyond Foucault, which repeat or transcribe all keyboard numbers at the top of the page and all keyboard symbols in the margin, and thus can only appear as typescripts.
Until Enright's collection of poems The Typewriter Revolution and Other Poems celebrates "the new era" in unsurpassable material appro- priateness. 168
THE TYPEWRITER REVOLUTION
The typeriter i s crating
A revlootion in peotry Pishing back the frontears And apening up fresh feels Unherd of by Done or Bleak
Mine is a Swetish Maid
Called FACIT
Others are OLIMPYA o r ARUSTOCART RAMINTONG or LOLITEVVI
TAB e or not TAB e
i. e. the ?
Tygirl tygirl burning bride Y, this is L
Nor-ryo -outfit
Anywan can od it
U 2 can b a
Tepot
C! *** stares and III strips
Cloaca nd t -
Farty-far keys to suckcess !
A banus of +% for all futre peots ! ! LSD & $$$
? ? The trypewiter i s cretin A revultion in peotry
" " All nero r
o how they ? away
@ UNDERWORDS and ALLIWETTIS without a .
FACIT cry I! ! !
Remington's and Underwood's invention ushered in a poetics that William Blake or John Donne with their limits/ears could not hear, for it transcends mystical tigers in the silence of the night, or a metaphysical erotics between heaven and confessional. Only the excessive media link of optics and acoustics, spellings and acronyms, between the letters, num- bers, and symbols of a standardized keyboard makes humans (and women) as equal as equal signs. Blake's "tiger, tiger, burning bright," is succeeded by the stenographer, that burning poet's bride. The history of typewriter literature in nuce. And always to continue and/or copy-hu- mans, U. s. flags, or spy aircraft. "You too are a poet" with typos (errata).
Toward the end of the First World War, a young and ironic Carl Schmitt conceived the world history of inscription. To rewrite it here in its entirety is impossible, simply because res gestae and res narratae coincide. It is enough that the diary-typing machines called Buribunks, as well as the "twenty divisions" of buribunkological dissertations,169 have evolved from humble beginnings into a modern loop of endless replication.
CARL SCHMITT, "THE BURIBUNKS: A HISTORICO-PHILOSOPHICAL MEDITATION" (1918)
Today, because we have been granted the privilege of enjoying the glorious notion of the diary at its zenith, we tend to overlook what a majestic deed man performed when-perhaps as the unknowing instrument of the world spirit-he planted with the first innocuous note the first seed, which now overshadows the earth as a gigantic tree. A certain, I would say, moral feel- ing of obligation urges us to question what historical personage embodies the precursor to this wonderful epoch, the messenger pigeon that the world spirit has sent in advance of its last and most highly refined period. We are obliged to put this question at the center of our principal investigation.
Typewriter 23I
? ? ? ? 2 3 2 Typewriter
It would be a mighty triumph for Buribunkology if it could identify a hero such as Don Juan as its ancestor and-in opposition to the charge of scholarly absentmindedness-take pride in its paradoxical descent from this virile and decidedly unscholarly cavalier. Indeed, Don Juan's conquests have been registered, but the crucial point is to whom the intellectual prop- erty of this idea can be attributed. In his champagne aria, Don Juan himself smgs-
Ah, la mia lista doman mattina d'una decina devi aumentar
-a feeling of which the true Buribunkologist is frequently possessed when he ponders the daily increasing scope or the daily rising number of his pub- lications. He may very well be tempted to compare his sense of achievement with the plucky self-confidence of the frivolous conqueror of women. Still, this seductive parallel should not distract us from the profound seriousness of our endeavor or lead us to lose the distance from our possible founding father, which sober objectivity and detached science dictate to us. Did Don Juan really have the specifically buribunkological attitude that urged him to keep a diary, not for the sake of recording, superficially, his manly con- quests, but-if I may say so-out of a sense of sheer obligation and debt vis-a-vis history? We cannot believe so. Don Juan had no interest in the past, just as he fundamentally had no interest in the future, which for him did not go beyond the next conquest; he lived in the immediate present, and his interest in the individual erotic adventure does not point to any signs of a beginning self-historicization. We cannot detect any signs of the attitude characterizing the Buribunk, which originates from the desire to record every second of one's existence for history, to immortalize oneself. Like the Buribunk keeping a diary, Don Juan relishes each individual second, and in that there is certainly a similarity of psychological gesture. Instead of conse- crating his exploits on the altar of history in the illuminated temple, how- ever, he drags them into the misty cave of brutal sensuality, devouring them animal-like to satiate his base instincts. ". Not for a single moment does he have what I would like to call the cinematic attitude of the Buribunk-he
". Hence, one could say that Don Juan is not one who ruminates upon lived experience, if one were to charge the buribunkological keeping of a diary with being a kind of intellectual rumination. That such a claim is untenable is easy to prove, for the diary-keeping Buribunk does not experience anything prior to his entries; rather, the experience consists precisely in the making of an entry and its subsequent publication. To speak of rumination is thus simply nonsense, because there is no initial act of chewing and swallowing.
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never apprehends himself a s the subject-object o f history-in which the world soul, writing itself, has become realized. And the register that Lep- orello keeps for him he takes along only as an afterthought, as a delectable flavoring for his horizontal delights. Hence, we have legitimate doubt whether, for example, from the 1,003 Spanish representatives, more than three owe their entry into the register to the very existence of the register it- self. Put differently, we wonder whether Don Juan has been prompted into action by his inner need to start and keep a register, if only in those three cases, the way numerous major achievements in the arts, in science, in everyday life have been produced solely with the idea of their recorded exis- tence in a diary or newspaper-the diary of the masses-in mind. The reg- ister was never the final cause; in implementing the acts of innervation at is- sue, it was-in the rectangle of psychological forces-relegated to the role of an accidental, of an accompanying positive motor. Thus, for us Don Juan is finished.
All the more interesting is the behavior of Leporello. He relishes the sensuous leftovers of his master, a couple of girls, a couple of choice
morsels; for the most part, he accompanies his master. A Buribunk does not do that, for a Buribunk is unconditionally and absolutely his own master, he is himself. Gradually, however, what awakens in Leporello is the desire to partake in the escapades of his master by writing them down, by taking
note of them, and it is at this moment that we see the dawn of Buribunk- dom. With the aid of a commendable trick he surpasses his master, and if he does not become Don Juan himself, he becomes more than that; he changes from Don Juan's wretched underling into his biographer. He becomes a his- torian, drags Don Juan to the bar of world history, that is, world court, in order to appear as an advocate or prosecutor, depending on the result of his observations and interpretations.
Was Leporello, however, cognizant of the implications of starting his register as the first step in a gigantic development? Certainly not. We do not want to dismiss the mighty effort behind the small register of the poor buffo, but we cannot under any circumstances recognize him as a conscious Buribunk-how should he have done it, anyway, the poor son of a beautiful but culturally retrograde country in which the terror of papal inquisition
has crushed and smashed all remaining signs of intelligence? He was not meant to see his nonetheless significant intellectual work come to fruition;
he holds the treasure-laden shrine, but he does not hold the key to it. He has not understood the essential and has not said the magic words that open the way to Aladdin's cave. He was lacking the consciousness of the writing sub- ject, the consciousness that he had become the author of a piece of world
? 2 3 4 Typewriter
history and hence a juror on the world court-indeed, to exercise control over the verdict of the world court, because his written documents were proof more valid than a hundred testimonies to the contrary. Had Leporello had the strong will to this kind of power, had he ventured the magnificent leap to become an independent writing personality, he would first have writ- ten his own autobiography; he would have made a hero of himself, and in- stead of the frivolous cavalier who fascinates people with his shallow dispo- sition, we would quite probably have gotten the impressive picture of a su- perior manager who, with his superior business skills and intelligence, pulls the strings of the colorful marionette, Don Juan. But instead of taking pen into fist, the poor devil clenches his fist in his pocket.
Upon close scrutiny, the utter inadequacy of Leporello's registration method appears in numerous defects. He puts photographs in sequence without ever making an attempt to shape the heterogeneous discontinuity of successive seductions into a homogeneous continuity; what is missing is the mental thread, the presentation of development. We don't get any sense of demonstrated causal connections, of the mental, climatic, economic, and so- ciological conditions of individual actions, nothing relating to an aesthetic observation about the ascending or descending bell curve of Don Juan's evolving taste. Similarly, the register has nothing to say about the specific historical interest in the uniqueness of each individual procedure or in each individual personality. Leporello's disinterest is utterly incomprehensible; he does not even communicate any dismay when he is daily witness to his mas- ter's ingenious sexuality-how it is aimlessly scattered to the winds instead of being rationally disseminated into purposive population growth. Still
less evident is his willingness to provide reliable research data on details: nowhere does Leporello inquire into the deeper motivations of individual seductions, nowhere do we find sociologically useful data on the standing, origin, age, and so on of Don Juan's victims, as well as their pre-seduction lives-at most, we are left with the summary conclusion (which is probably not sufficient for a more serious scientific investigation) that they came from "every station, every form, and every age. " We also don't hear anything
about whether the victims later organized themselves into a larger, commu- nal mass initiative and provided mutual economic support-which no doubt would have been the only right thing to do, given their numbers. Naturally, what is also missing is any statistical breakdown within the respective cate- gories, which would have recommended itself in light of the high number of 1,003; even more, what is missing is any indication as to how the dumped girls had been taken care of by the welfare system, which in many cases had become necessary. Naturally as well, there is no inkling that, in light of the
Typewriter 23 5
brutal exploitation of male social superiority in relation to defenseless women, the introduction of female suffrage is a most urgent and legitimate demand. It would be in vain to ask for the larger precepts that underlie the development of the collective soul, the subjectivism of the time, the degree of its excitation. In a word, inadequacy here is turned into reality. Leporello is oblivious to the welter of the most urgent scientific questions-much to his own disadvantage, because he has to submit his obliviousness to the judgement of history. Oblivious to pressing questions, he did not engage in as much as one investigation that the most immature student of the humani- ties today would have pounced upon, and hence missed the opportunity of evolving the consciousness necessary to recognize the significance of his own identity. The dead matter has not been conquered by the intellectual labor of its workman, and the flyers on the advertisement pillars continue to an- nounce: Don Juan, the chastised debauchee, and not: Leporello's tales. . . .
Not until Ferker did the diary become an ethical-historical possibility; the primogeniture in the realm of Buribunkdom is his. Be your own history! Live, so that each second of your life can be entered into your diary and be accessible to your biographer! Coming out of Ferker's mouth, these were big and strong words that humanity had not yet heard. They owe their distribu- tion into the nooks and crannies of even the most remote villages to a worldwide organization aimed at disseminating his ideas, an organization well managed and having the support of an intelligent press. No village is so small that it is without a blacksmith, as the old song went; today, we can say with not a little pride that no village is so small that it is not imbued with at least a touch of Buribunkic spirit. The great man,'" who presided like the chief of a general staff over his thousands of underlings, who guided his enormous business with a sure hand, who channeled the attention of the troops of researchers to hot spots, and who with unheard-of strategic skill focused attention on difficult research problems by directing pioneering dis-
. ' On this issue, all relevant documents show a rare unanimity. In his diary, Maximilian Sperling calls him "a smart fellow" (Sperling's Diaries, vol. 12, ed. Alexander Bumkotzki [Breslau, 1909], p. 8 16). Theo Timm, in a letter of August 21 to Kurt Stange, describes him as "a fabulous guy" (Timm's Letters, vol. 21, ed. Erich Veit [Leipzig, 1919], p. 498). In her diary, Mariechen Schmirrwitz says, "I find him splendid" (vol. 4, ed. Wolfgang Huebner [Weimar, 1920], p. 43 5 ). Following his first meeting with the man himself, Oskar Limburger exclaims, "He is enormous, watch out for him" (Memories ofmy Life, ed. Katharina Siebenhaar [Stuttgart, 1903], p. 87). Prosper Loeb describes him as of a "de- monic nature" (Konigsberg, 1899, p. 108). He is a "heck of a guy," says Knut vom Heu in his letters to his bride (edited by their son Flip; Frankfurt a. M. , 1918, p. 71), and so on.
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sertations-this impressive personality experienced a truly sensational rise. Born of humble origins and educated without Latin in the middle school of his small town, he successively became a dentist, a bookmaker, an editor, the owner of a construction company in Tiflis, the secretary of the head- quarters of the international association to boost tourism on the Adriatic coast, the owner of a movie theater in Berlin, a marketing director in San Francisco, and, eventually, Professor of Marketing and Upward Mobility at the Institute of Commerce in Alexandria. This is also where he was cre- mated and, in the most grandiose style, his ashes processed into printer's ink, as he had specified in detail in his will and which was sent in small por- tions to printing presses all over the world. Then, with the aid of flyers and billboards, the whole civilized world was informed of this procedure and was furthermore admonished to keep in mind that each of the billions of letters hitting the eye over the years would contain a fragment of the im- mortal man's ashes.
Case 6. In I93 5, Dr. Benn quit his medical practice to serve as chief medical officer for the recruitment inspection offices in Hannover. Re- maining in Berlin were two female friends whom Thomas Wolfe would have had no trouble finding: the actresses Tilly Wedekind and Ellinor Biiller-Klinkowstrom. But the military, Benn's aristocratic form of emi- gration, had its everyday problems. After two "terribly lonesome and se- cluded years," he wrote to the second of the two women:
The sheets are torn, the bed isn't done from Saturday through Monday, I've got to do the shopping myself, even getting the heating stove going, sometimes. I don't respond to letters, since I've nobody to do the writing for me. I don't do any work, since I neither have the time nor solace nor anybody to dictate to. At 3:30 in the afternoon, I make some coffee, that is the one content ofmy life. At nine in the evening I go to bed, that's the other. Like cattle. 123
On the Genealogy of Morals predicted it all: in the chaos without recording technologies, literature basically had to take the shape de- scribed by Benn's tripartite organization: First, a beer or wine pub, read- ing, meditating, and radio listening, in order to bring highbrow poetry up to par with the sound and standard of popular songs. Second, an "old desk ( 7 3 cm x I 3 5 cm) " with unread " manuscripts, j ournals, books, sample medication packages, an inkpad (for recipes), three pens, two ash- trays, one phone," in order to "scribble" the poem the next day in one of those physician's scrawls that Benn "himself could not read. " Finally, an- other desk, "the decisive one," equipped with microscope and typewriter,
2 I 8 Typewriter
to convert the "scribbles" into "typewritten materials," in order to make the material "accessible to judgment" and prepare for "the feedback flow from the inspired to the critical 1. "124 The whole process operated as a perfect feedback loop, with the hitch that Benn "himself did not type well. "125 With "nobody to dictate to," it was hardly possible to deal ade- quately with the material on paper, and hence the media competition of radio and cinema was overwhelming.
More fortunate than his colleagues Nietzsche and Wolfe, however, the writer made a find in Hannover. Benn entered a "marriage of companion- ship" 126 that was to come to an end only during the World War, when his typewriting wife committed suicide. In Berlin two women friends received their last handwritten letters; the fact that one of them answered with a typewritten letter127 was no match for the technological competition.
I must make one more try to establish a serious human relationship and, with its help, to escape from the morass of my life.
Morchen, you may know everything, but nobody else does. And when I now describe to you what kind of a person she is, someone who will almost certainly become unhappy, you will be surprised.
Much younger than myself, about 30. Not a bit pretty in the sense of Elida and Elisabeth Arden. Very nice body, but negroid face. From a very well-respected family. No money. Job similar to that of Helga, well paid, types about 200 sylla- bles, a perfect typist. 128
Two hundred syllables per minute are pretty close to 773 keystrokes, the German typing record of 198 5 . Modern literature could be produced in the Wehrmacht and the Army High Command simply because the daughter of an officer's widow, Herta von Wedemeyer-following the ex- ample of the female protagonist of a 1 894 noveP29-worked as secretary.
Case 7. (so as not to forget, amidst all those writers, "les Postes en general," that is, general secretaries and general field marshals). 130 " By virtue of a decree of the erstwhile Prussian Ministry of Commerce and Trade of July 17, 1897, typewritten documents were deem? d admissible in dealings with the government. "l3l Official (or government) texts were rendered anonymous and laid the groundwork for Herta von Wede- meyer's profession. Which had consequences not only for chief medical officers but also for their ultimate superior, the minister of war. Nine days prior to Benn's second marriage and in the same city,
on January 1 2 [ I93 8 ] , General Field Marshal von Blomberg, who since I93 2 had been widowed and had two sons and three daughters, married the former stenog-
? August Walla, typeface, 198 5 . (Reproduced courtesy of Dr. Johann Feilacher, Die Kiinstler aus Gugging, Vienna)
? 2 2 0 Typewriter
rapher Erna Gruhn, a secretary of the Imperial Egg Center (Reichseierzentrale), in the presence of a small circle of friends. Witnesses: Adolf Hitler and Hermann Goring. The couple went on their honeymoon immediately. Shortly thereafter, senior investigator Curt Hellmuth Miiller, chief of the Center for Personnel Iden- tification in the Central Office of Criminal Justice, received a load of indecent photographs.
"Mrs. General Field Marshal," more faithful to Bertillon than Minnie Tipp, was "registered" with the authorities. 132 Hitler could take over chief command of the army himself.
Case 8. Once, shortly before the onset of war, fear of cancer drove Hitler to "the extraordinary effort" of "writing down his will by hand. " Other than that, like most people in command, Hitler "had for years been used to dictating his thoughts into the typewriter or the shorthand re- port. "133 A specially constructed typewriter with larger type was at his disposal. This typewriter, however, did not solve all the problems involved in coordinating a world war from the Fuhrer's headquarters, Wolfs- schanze. The official historian of the Army High Command saw reason to record a rather inofficious version of the end of the war. It was widely known that great situation conferences would take place around 1300 hours. Hitler, by contrast, had set up "his daily routine" so that
Jodi could present to him at around II and, surrounded by a small circle, the mes- sages and the maps of engagements be compiled overnight. Sometimes it got later, since Hitler was fond of drinking tea with his close advisers after a day's work Of, as happened regularly, of staying with his stenographers until about 4 A. M. Mili- tarily speaking, it was highly inconvenient that he then slept well into the day and was not to be disturbed. 134
But even Fuhrer-typewriters and secretaries, which Hitler preferred over his joint General Staff at the Wolfsschanze, could not decide wars. In order to do that, the Second World War had to produce somewhat more complicated typewriters that did away with literature altogether. . . . First, we need to conclude that fictive cases 9 (Mina Harker + Dr. Seward in Stoker), 10 (Minnie Tipp + poets in Bermann), II (Mademoiselle Lust + Faust in Valery), and their numerous successors (Breidenbach, Bronnen, Gaupp, Heilbut, Kafka, Keun) are anything but fictive. Desk couples have replaced literary love pairs. Only in film scripts or romances do both co- incide in a happy end. After Mina Harker for half the novel has collected, recorded, typed, and carbon-copied all discourses on Dracula until the latter has been done away with, she still ends up being a mother. After her
? Typewriter 2 2 I
German namesake has made a poet successful and sterile, "they type" (paraphrasing Dante) "no more on that day. " According to a beautiful tautology, sexes relayed through media will reunite through media as well. Heilbut's Friihling in Berlin (Spring in Berlin), Gaupp's Nacht von heute aufmorgen (Sudden night) are novels about typewriter romances. And the 30 film renditions of Stoker do not even show phonography and type- writing, so that true love comes to triumph over Dracula. The good for- tune of media is the negation of their hardware.
Empirically speaking, women employed in processing discourses are likely to have a successful career. Word processing, somewhere amidst the relays of technological communications networks, breaks up couples and families. Precisely at that gap evolves a new job: the woman author. Ri- carda Huch became one (in I9 IO) after studying in Zurich ( I 8 8 8-9 I ) and working as a secretary in the university's main library ( I 89 I-97). Ger- trude Stein became one after working in the office of and conducting ex- periments at the Harvard psychological laboratory headed by her patron, Munsterberg. Theodora Bosanquet became one after working for eight years in the delirious general staff. Tatjana Tolstoy, inspired by her sister's Remington, wrote her first article on a typewriter and mailed it anony- mously to her father, who would not have been "impartial" otherwise. Tolstoy was instantly enthused. 135
Anonymity and pseudonymity (as formerly with the female poets who wrote in the shadow of the Ur-author, Goethe) are hardly necessary these days. Whether typewriting authors are called Lindau, Cendrars, Eliot, or Keun, Schlier, or Bruck does not count for much in relation to the mass media. A desexualized writing profession, distant from any au- thorship, only empowers the domain of text processing. That is why so many novels written by recent women writers are endless feedback loops making secretaries into writers. Sitting in front of autobiographical type- writers, Irmgard Keun's heroines simply repeat the factual career of their author. Paula Schlier's Konzept einer Jugend unter dem Diktat der Zeit (Concept of a youth under the dictates of time), that extraordinarily pre- cise subtitle for a secretary, hears in "the regular clanging of letters . . . the melody accompanying all the madness of the world:"136 from world- war field hospitals and lectures in Munich to the editorial office of the Volkische Beobachter and the Beer Hall Putsch. Christa Anita Bruck's Schicksale hinter Schreibmaschinen (Destinies behind typewriters) is an autobiography without mention of love, only the desire to help those
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"women who are not interested in motherhood" to have a breakthrough as women writers. 137 And since, during office dictation, "a self-regulating machine somewhere in the head chops up the meaning of what the hand, antenna-like, receives,"138 ecriture automatique is no longer difficult:
Tempo, Tempo, faster, faster.
Man funnels his energy into the machine. The machine, which is he himself, his foremost abilities, his foremost concentration and final exertion. And he him- self is machine, is lever, is key, is type and moving carriage.
Not to think, not to reflect, on, on, fast, fast, tipp, tip, tipptipptipptipptipp- tipp . . . 139
At its high point, typewriter literature means repeating ad infinitum Minnie Tipp's proper name or the advertising slogan on her office door. (Up until Helene Cixous, women will write that only writing makes women into women. ) The relay unit of human and machine exercises a pull that can even replace love. First with female typists, then with their male counterparts. That Kafka's love was a media network is confirmed at the height of German literary history by Case 1 2 .
Felice Bauer (1887-1960), who was employed after graduation in 1908 as a stenographer for the Odeon record company, switched in 1909 to Carl Lindstrom A. -G. , the largest German manufacturer of dicta- phones and gramophones (with a daily output of 1,500 units). 14o Within three years there, beginning as a simple typist, she made a business career highly unusual for women: with her power of attorney she was entitled to sign "Carl Lindstrom A. -G. " At exactly that time, during a trip to Bu- dapest in the summer of 19 1 2, Ms. Bauer visited the family of Max Brod, the head of personnel for the Prague postal service. 141
Present on this occasion was a young and little-published writer who was just putting together his first book for Rowohlt and who, at first, saw in the traveling woman nothing but a "bony, empty face" that "wore its emptiness openly. "142 Until the potential inscription surface dropped a sentence that "so amazed" Dr. Kafka "that I banged on the table":
You actually said you enjoyed copying manuscripts, that you had also been copy- ing manuscripts in Berlin for some gentleman (curse the sound of that word when unaccompanied by name and explanation! ). And you asked Max to send you some manuscripts. 143
That is how quickly a typist's lust taught a (hand)writer a love that, even in the shape of jealousy, wasn't one. Since only professors in Berlin and friends involved in information technology were privileged to have
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their manuscripts typed and readied for publication, Kafka had no choice but-in an unusual step for him-to go to work on the typewriter him- self. Whereas the "main" and "happy" part of Kafka's work consisted in "dictating to a living being" in the office,144 the endless stream of love let- ters to Felice Bauer started, as if negating love itself, with a typescript.
"But dearest Felice! " Kafka wrote a year later, "Don't we write about writing, the way others talk about money ? " 145 Indeed: from the first letter to the last, their impossible relationship was a feedback loop of text pro- cessing. Time and again, Kafka avoided traveling to Berlin with his hand, the hand that once held Felice Bauer's. Instead of the absent body there arrived a whole postal system of letters, registered letters, postcards, and telegrams in order to describe that "hand" with "the hand now striking the keys. " What remained of "personal typing idiosyncrasies" was only what was simultaneously of interest to The Criminological Uses of Type- writing, namely, the "types of mistake correction" : first, with skilled typ- ists; second, with unskilled typists; and third, with "skilled typists on an unaccustomed system. " 146 Kafka counted himself among the third group, and of the twelve typos in his first letter, four, that is, a highly significant 33 percent, involved the pronouns "ich" (I) and "Sie" (you). As if the typ- ing hand could inscribe everything except the two bodies on either end of the postal channel. As if the "fingertips" themselves had taken the place of his insufficient "mood" by the name of Ego. And as if the self-critical "mistake," which Kafka "realized" in self-critical amplification while "inserting a new sheet of paper," coincided with nervous typos.
Kafka's call For the Establishment and Support of a Military and Civilian Hospital for the Treatment ofNervous Diseases in German Bo- hemia stated:
This great war which encompasses the sum total of human misery is also a war on the nervous system, more a war on the nervous system than any previous war. All too many people succumb to this war of nerves. Just as the intense industrial- ization of the past decades of peace had attacked, affected, and caused disorders of the nervous system of those engaged in industry more than ever before, so the enormously increased mechanization of present-day warfare presents the gravest dangers and disorders to the nervous system of fighting men. 147
Under its initial conditions of a "war of nerves" between literature and Carl Lindstrom A. -G. , the exchange of love letters was doomed to fail, even though it later switched to handwriting and returned to "in- creased mechanization" only in 1916, when typed postcards were the fastest way of passing through the war censorship between Prague and
? Arbeiter-Unfall-Versicherungs-Anstalt
! 'OR DAS KONiORmCH IIOHMEN IN PRAo.
? a. -CO. t . 1o . . . . to to P? am. leI; Ko. 18. 113.
N"' i! .
ai 191
? SehrgeehrtesFrau1ein
? Fur den leieht megliehen Fall,dass Sie sieh meiner aueh im gering. sten nieht rnehr erinnern kennten, stelle ieh rnieh noeh einmal vor :
Jeh heisse Franz Kafka und bin der Menseh,der Sie zum? erstenmal
am Abend beirn Herrn Direktor Brod in Prag begrusste ,J
ann liber
den Tisch hin l'hotographiBll von einer Thaliareise, eine. naeh der andern)
reichte und der schleesslieh in dieser Hand,mit der er jetzt die 1'asten sehlagt , ihre Iland hielt ,! Oit der Sie das Versprechen bekra:(- tigten,im naehsten Jahr eine Palastinareise mit ihm machen zu wollen.
Wenn iie nun d iese Reise noeh immer machen wollen-3ie sagten d a- mals,Sie waren nicbt wankelmlithig und ich bemerkte auch an Jhnen niehts dergleichen-dannwird es nieht nur gut,sondern unbedingt not- wendig sein,dass wir schon von jetzt ab liber diese Reise uns zu ver- standi3'ln suchen. Denn wir werden unsere gar fUr eine Palastinareise viel zu kleine Urlaubsze i t b i s auf d en Grund ausnutzen mUssen und das. werden wir nur kennen,wenn wiT uns so gut als me? :lich vorberei- tet haben und liber aIle Vorber? itungen einig sind.
Eines muss ich nur eingestehen,so schlecht es an sich klingt und
so schlecht es uberd ies zum Vori? en passt :Jch bin ein unplinktl icher Briefschr? iber. Ja es ware noch arger,als es ist,wenn ia&k ich nicht die Schreibmaschine hatte;denn wenn aueh einmal meine Launen zu einem Brief nicht hinreichen sollten,so sind schliesslieh die Fin- gerspitzen zum Sohreiben immer noeh da. Zum Lohn daflir erwarte ieh aber aueh niemals , d ass Briefe pilnktlieh kommen; selbst wenn ieh e i nen Brief mit taglieh neuer Spannung erwarte ,bin ieh niemals enttauseht , wenn er nieht ko? t und kommt er sehliesslieh,erschreekex iehgern.
Jch merke baim neuen Einlegen des Papiers ,dass ich mich vielleich1 viel Bchwierir,er gemacht habe,als ich bin. Es wurde mir ganz recht ge- schebn, "enn ich d iesen Fehler gemacht haben soll te , d enn waru? : schrei bE ich auch diesen Brief nach der sechsten BUrostunde und auf einer
Scbre ibmascbine , an d i e ich nicbt sehr gewobnt bin.
Aber trotzdem,trotzdem -es ist der einzige Nacbteil des Schreib- maschinenschreibens , dass man sicb so verlauft-wenn es aucb dagegen ? e. denken geben sollte,pr? ktische Bedenken meine icg,mich auf eine Rei- se als TIeisebegleiter,-fuhrer,-Ballast,-Tyrann,and was sich noch aus mir ent"ickeln konnte,mitzunehmen,gegen mich als Korrespondenten -und d arauf kiime es j a vorlaufig nur ap. -d'arfte nichts Entscbeidendes XIII:Jl von vornberein e inzuwendlln se in und S ie konnten es wohl mit mir ver- suchen.
Prag , am 20. September 1912.
Jbr herzlich ergebener
? . :;? ? +
Berlin, Austria and Prussia. 148 In 19I7, while Lindstrom's acoustical me- dia network, with its financial leverage, helped the Army High Command establish the film corporation UFA,149 Kafka terminated his engagement to Felice Bauer. Shortly thereafter, the woman, freed from the bombard- ment of letters, married an affluent Berlin businessman.
In one of his last letters to his last female pen pal, however, Kafka took stock: of misused love letters and communications vampires, of re- duced physical labor and information machines.
How on earth did anyone get the idea that people can communicate with one an- other by letter! Of a distant person one can think, and of a person who is near one can catch hold-all else goes beyond human strength. Writing letters, however, means to denude oneself before the ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don't reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by the ghosts. It is on this ample nourishment that they multiply so enor- mously. Humanity senses this and fights against it and in order to eliminate as far as possible the ghostly element between people and to create natural communica-
Typewriter 2 2 5
? ? Franz Kafka's first letter to Felice Bauer.
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tion, the peace of souls, it has invented the railway, the motorcar, the aeroplane. But it's no longer any good, these are evidently inventions made at the moment of crashing. The opposing side is so much calmer and stronger; after the postal ser- vice it has invented the telegraph, the telephone, the radiograph. The ghosts won't starve, but we will perish. ISO
Hence only ghosts survive the Kafka-Bauer case: media-technological projects and texts reflecting the material limitations of the written word. Even though, or because, Kafka considered the "very existence" of gramophones "a threat,"151 he submitted to his employee of a phono- graph manufacturer a series of media links that were supposed to be able to compete with Lindstrom's empire. Aside from a direct link involving a parlograph, which "goes to the telephone in Berlin" and conducts "a lit- tle conversation" with a "gramophone in Prague," Kafka envisions a "typing bureau where everything dictated into Lindstrom's Parlographs is transcribed on a typewriter, at cost price, or at first perhaps a bit below cost price. "152 That was not, of course, the most up-to-date proposition (thanks to Dr. Seward and Mina Harker), but one with a future. In Bron- nen's monodrama Ostpolzug of I926, "an electrically hooked-up dicta- phone dictates into an equally electric typewriter. "153 And since "the ma- chine makes further inroads" into "the function of brains" themselves, instead of merely "replacing the physical labor of man, . . . a typewriter is announced [in I925] that will make the typist superfluous and will translate the sound of words directly into typed script. " 154
Kafka, however, for whom Ms. Bauer did not type a single manu- script, let alone construct media networks, stuck to old-fashioned litera- ture. From the typewriter he only learned to dodge the phantasm of au- thorship. As with his first love letter, the "I," "the nothingness that I am,"155 disappeared under deletions or abbreviations until all that re- mained was a Joseph K. in The Trial and a K. by itself in The Castle. The office machines of his days also freed the Kafka of his literary nights from the power of attorney, that is, the authority to sign documents:
I could never work as independently as you seem to; I slither out of responsibility like a snake; I have to sign many things, but every evaded signature seems like a gain; I also sign everything (though I really shouldn't) with FK only, as though that could exonerate me; for this reason I also feel drawn to the typewriter in any- thing concerning the office, because its work, especially when executed at the hands of the typist, is so impersonal. l56
Mechanized and materially specific, modern literature disappears in a type of anonymity, which bare surnames like "Kafka" or "K. " only em-
? Franz Kafka's postcard to Felice Bauer.
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phasize. The "disparition elocutoire du poete"157 urged by Mallarme be- comes reality. Voice and handwriting treacherously could fall subject to criminal detection; hence every trace of them disappears from literature. As Jacques Derrida, or "J. D. ," observes in a May 1979 love letter whose address must also be without (a) proper name(s):
What cannot be said above all must not be silenced, but written. Myself, r am a man of speech, r have never had anything to write. When r have something to say r say it or say it to myself, basta. You are the only one to understand why it really was necessary that r write exactly the opposite, as concerns axiomatics, of what r desire, what r know my desire to be, in other words you: living speech, presence itself, proximity, the proper, the guard, etc. r have necessarily written upside down-and in order to surrender to Necessity.
and "fort" de toi.
r must write you this (and at the typewriter, since that's where r am, sorry: . . . ). 158
Hence Derrida's Postcard consists of one continuous stream of typed letters punctuated by phone calls that are frequently mentioned but never recorded. Voice remains the other of typescripts.
"I, personally," Benn says about Problems ofPoetry (Probleme der Lyrik), "do not consider the modern poem suitable for public reading, neither in the interest of the poem nor in the interest of the listener. The poem impresses itself better when read. . . . In my judgment, its visual ap- pearance reinforces its reception. A modern poem demands to be printed on paper and demands to be read, demands the black letter; it becomes more plastic by viewing its external structure. " 159 Hence a Pallas named Herta von Wedemeyer solves all problems of poetry because she trans- forms Benn's scribbled ideas-"a lifeless something, vague worlds, stuff thrown together with pain and effort, stuff brought together, materials that have been grouped, improved upon and left undeveloped, loose, untested, and weak"16? -via transcription into art. Under the conditions of high technology, Pallas, the goddess of art, is a secretary.
"Fundamentally, the typewriter is nothing but a miniature printing press. " 161 As a doubled spatialization of writing-first on the keyboard, then on the white paper-it imparts to texts an optimal optical appear- ance. And, following Benjamin's forecast, as soon as "systems with more variable typefaces" (such as rotating head typewriters or thermal print- ers) become available, "the precision of typographic forms" can directly enter "the conception of . . . books. " "Writing [is] advancing ever more deeply into the graphic regions of its new eccentric figurativeness":162
0000000000Q (R)(R)0(R)00(R)CD000
00(R)(R)0(R)00@0(R) 00008000000
Image of a T3 Remington "Ur-keyboard," 1875.
from Mallarme's "Coup de des" and Apollinaire's "Calligrammes," those typographic poems that attempt to bring writers on par with film and phonography,163 to poesie concrete, that form of pure typewriter poetry.
T. S. Eliot, who will be "composing" The Waste Land "on the type- writer, " "finds" (no different from Nietzsche) "that I am sloughing off all my long sentences which I used to dote upon. Short, staccato, like modern French prose. " Instead of "subtlety," "the typewriter makes for lucid- ity,"164 which is, however, nothing but the effect of its technology on style. A spatialized, numbered, and (since the r 8 8 8 typewriters' congress in Toronto) also standardized supply of signs on a keyboard makes pos- sible what and only what QWERTY prescribes.
Foucault's methodical explanation, the last and irreducible elements of which are at the center of his discourse analysis, can easily eliminate the sentences of linguistics, the speech acts of communications theory, the statements of logic. Only to be confronted by two factual conditions that seem to fulfill all the criteria for an elementary "statement" of discourse analysis: "The pile of printer's character which I can hold in my hand, or the letters marked on the keyboard of a typewriter. "165 Singular and spa- tialized, material and standardized, stockpiles of signs indeed undermine so-called Man with his intentions and the so-called world with its mean- ing. Only that discourse analysis ignores the fact that the factual condi- tion is no simple methodical example but is in each case a techno-histor- ical event. Foucault omits the elementary datum (in Latin, the casting of dice or coup de des) of each contemporary theoretical practice and begins discourse analysis only with its applications or configurations: "the key- board of a typewriter is not a statement; but the same series of letters, A, Z, E, R, T, listed in a typewriting manual, is the statement of the alpha- betical order adopted by French typewriters. "166
Foucault, the student of Heidegger, writes that "there are signs, and
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that is enough for there to be signs for there to be statements,"167 only to point for once to the typewriter keyboard as the precondition for all pre- conditions. Where thinking must stop, blueprints, schematics, and indus- trial standards begin. They alter (strictly following Heidegger) the rela- tionship of Being to Man, who has no choice but to become the site of their eternal recurrence. A, Z, E, R, T . . .
Until Arno Schmidt's late novels, beyond Foucault, which repeat or transcribe all keyboard numbers at the top of the page and all keyboard symbols in the margin, and thus can only appear as typescripts.
Until Enright's collection of poems The Typewriter Revolution and Other Poems celebrates "the new era" in unsurpassable material appro- priateness. 168
THE TYPEWRITER REVOLUTION
The typeriter i s crating
A revlootion in peotry Pishing back the frontears And apening up fresh feels Unherd of by Done or Bleak
Mine is a Swetish Maid
Called FACIT
Others are OLIMPYA o r ARUSTOCART RAMINTONG or LOLITEVVI
TAB e or not TAB e
i. e. the ?
Tygirl tygirl burning bride Y, this is L
Nor-ryo -outfit
Anywan can od it
U 2 can b a
Tepot
C! *** stares and III strips
Cloaca nd t -
Farty-far keys to suckcess !
A banus of +% for all futre peots ! ! LSD & $$$
? ? The trypewiter i s cretin A revultion in peotry
" " All nero r
o how they ? away
@ UNDERWORDS and ALLIWETTIS without a .
FACIT cry I! ! !
Remington's and Underwood's invention ushered in a poetics that William Blake or John Donne with their limits/ears could not hear, for it transcends mystical tigers in the silence of the night, or a metaphysical erotics between heaven and confessional. Only the excessive media link of optics and acoustics, spellings and acronyms, between the letters, num- bers, and symbols of a standardized keyboard makes humans (and women) as equal as equal signs. Blake's "tiger, tiger, burning bright," is succeeded by the stenographer, that burning poet's bride. The history of typewriter literature in nuce. And always to continue and/or copy-hu- mans, U. s. flags, or spy aircraft. "You too are a poet" with typos (errata).
Toward the end of the First World War, a young and ironic Carl Schmitt conceived the world history of inscription. To rewrite it here in its entirety is impossible, simply because res gestae and res narratae coincide. It is enough that the diary-typing machines called Buribunks, as well as the "twenty divisions" of buribunkological dissertations,169 have evolved from humble beginnings into a modern loop of endless replication.
CARL SCHMITT, "THE BURIBUNKS: A HISTORICO-PHILOSOPHICAL MEDITATION" (1918)
Today, because we have been granted the privilege of enjoying the glorious notion of the diary at its zenith, we tend to overlook what a majestic deed man performed when-perhaps as the unknowing instrument of the world spirit-he planted with the first innocuous note the first seed, which now overshadows the earth as a gigantic tree. A certain, I would say, moral feel- ing of obligation urges us to question what historical personage embodies the precursor to this wonderful epoch, the messenger pigeon that the world spirit has sent in advance of its last and most highly refined period. We are obliged to put this question at the center of our principal investigation.
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It would be a mighty triumph for Buribunkology if it could identify a hero such as Don Juan as its ancestor and-in opposition to the charge of scholarly absentmindedness-take pride in its paradoxical descent from this virile and decidedly unscholarly cavalier. Indeed, Don Juan's conquests have been registered, but the crucial point is to whom the intellectual prop- erty of this idea can be attributed. In his champagne aria, Don Juan himself smgs-
Ah, la mia lista doman mattina d'una decina devi aumentar
-a feeling of which the true Buribunkologist is frequently possessed when he ponders the daily increasing scope or the daily rising number of his pub- lications. He may very well be tempted to compare his sense of achievement with the plucky self-confidence of the frivolous conqueror of women. Still, this seductive parallel should not distract us from the profound seriousness of our endeavor or lead us to lose the distance from our possible founding father, which sober objectivity and detached science dictate to us. Did Don Juan really have the specifically buribunkological attitude that urged him to keep a diary, not for the sake of recording, superficially, his manly con- quests, but-if I may say so-out of a sense of sheer obligation and debt vis-a-vis history? We cannot believe so. Don Juan had no interest in the past, just as he fundamentally had no interest in the future, which for him did not go beyond the next conquest; he lived in the immediate present, and his interest in the individual erotic adventure does not point to any signs of a beginning self-historicization. We cannot detect any signs of the attitude characterizing the Buribunk, which originates from the desire to record every second of one's existence for history, to immortalize oneself. Like the Buribunk keeping a diary, Don Juan relishes each individual second, and in that there is certainly a similarity of psychological gesture. Instead of conse- crating his exploits on the altar of history in the illuminated temple, how- ever, he drags them into the misty cave of brutal sensuality, devouring them animal-like to satiate his base instincts. ". Not for a single moment does he have what I would like to call the cinematic attitude of the Buribunk-he
". Hence, one could say that Don Juan is not one who ruminates upon lived experience, if one were to charge the buribunkological keeping of a diary with being a kind of intellectual rumination. That such a claim is untenable is easy to prove, for the diary-keeping Buribunk does not experience anything prior to his entries; rather, the experience consists precisely in the making of an entry and its subsequent publication. To speak of rumination is thus simply nonsense, because there is no initial act of chewing and swallowing.
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never apprehends himself a s the subject-object o f history-in which the world soul, writing itself, has become realized. And the register that Lep- orello keeps for him he takes along only as an afterthought, as a delectable flavoring for his horizontal delights. Hence, we have legitimate doubt whether, for example, from the 1,003 Spanish representatives, more than three owe their entry into the register to the very existence of the register it- self. Put differently, we wonder whether Don Juan has been prompted into action by his inner need to start and keep a register, if only in those three cases, the way numerous major achievements in the arts, in science, in everyday life have been produced solely with the idea of their recorded exis- tence in a diary or newspaper-the diary of the masses-in mind. The reg- ister was never the final cause; in implementing the acts of innervation at is- sue, it was-in the rectangle of psychological forces-relegated to the role of an accidental, of an accompanying positive motor. Thus, for us Don Juan is finished.
All the more interesting is the behavior of Leporello. He relishes the sensuous leftovers of his master, a couple of girls, a couple of choice
morsels; for the most part, he accompanies his master. A Buribunk does not do that, for a Buribunk is unconditionally and absolutely his own master, he is himself. Gradually, however, what awakens in Leporello is the desire to partake in the escapades of his master by writing them down, by taking
note of them, and it is at this moment that we see the dawn of Buribunk- dom. With the aid of a commendable trick he surpasses his master, and if he does not become Don Juan himself, he becomes more than that; he changes from Don Juan's wretched underling into his biographer. He becomes a his- torian, drags Don Juan to the bar of world history, that is, world court, in order to appear as an advocate or prosecutor, depending on the result of his observations and interpretations.
Was Leporello, however, cognizant of the implications of starting his register as the first step in a gigantic development? Certainly not. We do not want to dismiss the mighty effort behind the small register of the poor buffo, but we cannot under any circumstances recognize him as a conscious Buribunk-how should he have done it, anyway, the poor son of a beautiful but culturally retrograde country in which the terror of papal inquisition
has crushed and smashed all remaining signs of intelligence? He was not meant to see his nonetheless significant intellectual work come to fruition;
he holds the treasure-laden shrine, but he does not hold the key to it. He has not understood the essential and has not said the magic words that open the way to Aladdin's cave. He was lacking the consciousness of the writing sub- ject, the consciousness that he had become the author of a piece of world
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history and hence a juror on the world court-indeed, to exercise control over the verdict of the world court, because his written documents were proof more valid than a hundred testimonies to the contrary. Had Leporello had the strong will to this kind of power, had he ventured the magnificent leap to become an independent writing personality, he would first have writ- ten his own autobiography; he would have made a hero of himself, and in- stead of the frivolous cavalier who fascinates people with his shallow dispo- sition, we would quite probably have gotten the impressive picture of a su- perior manager who, with his superior business skills and intelligence, pulls the strings of the colorful marionette, Don Juan. But instead of taking pen into fist, the poor devil clenches his fist in his pocket.
Upon close scrutiny, the utter inadequacy of Leporello's registration method appears in numerous defects. He puts photographs in sequence without ever making an attempt to shape the heterogeneous discontinuity of successive seductions into a homogeneous continuity; what is missing is the mental thread, the presentation of development. We don't get any sense of demonstrated causal connections, of the mental, climatic, economic, and so- ciological conditions of individual actions, nothing relating to an aesthetic observation about the ascending or descending bell curve of Don Juan's evolving taste. Similarly, the register has nothing to say about the specific historical interest in the uniqueness of each individual procedure or in each individual personality. Leporello's disinterest is utterly incomprehensible; he does not even communicate any dismay when he is daily witness to his mas- ter's ingenious sexuality-how it is aimlessly scattered to the winds instead of being rationally disseminated into purposive population growth. Still
less evident is his willingness to provide reliable research data on details: nowhere does Leporello inquire into the deeper motivations of individual seductions, nowhere do we find sociologically useful data on the standing, origin, age, and so on of Don Juan's victims, as well as their pre-seduction lives-at most, we are left with the summary conclusion (which is probably not sufficient for a more serious scientific investigation) that they came from "every station, every form, and every age. " We also don't hear anything
about whether the victims later organized themselves into a larger, commu- nal mass initiative and provided mutual economic support-which no doubt would have been the only right thing to do, given their numbers. Naturally, what is also missing is any statistical breakdown within the respective cate- gories, which would have recommended itself in light of the high number of 1,003; even more, what is missing is any indication as to how the dumped girls had been taken care of by the welfare system, which in many cases had become necessary. Naturally as well, there is no inkling that, in light of the
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brutal exploitation of male social superiority in relation to defenseless women, the introduction of female suffrage is a most urgent and legitimate demand. It would be in vain to ask for the larger precepts that underlie the development of the collective soul, the subjectivism of the time, the degree of its excitation. In a word, inadequacy here is turned into reality. Leporello is oblivious to the welter of the most urgent scientific questions-much to his own disadvantage, because he has to submit his obliviousness to the judgement of history. Oblivious to pressing questions, he did not engage in as much as one investigation that the most immature student of the humani- ties today would have pounced upon, and hence missed the opportunity of evolving the consciousness necessary to recognize the significance of his own identity. The dead matter has not been conquered by the intellectual labor of its workman, and the flyers on the advertisement pillars continue to an- nounce: Don Juan, the chastised debauchee, and not: Leporello's tales. . . .
Not until Ferker did the diary become an ethical-historical possibility; the primogeniture in the realm of Buribunkdom is his. Be your own history! Live, so that each second of your life can be entered into your diary and be accessible to your biographer! Coming out of Ferker's mouth, these were big and strong words that humanity had not yet heard. They owe their distribu- tion into the nooks and crannies of even the most remote villages to a worldwide organization aimed at disseminating his ideas, an organization well managed and having the support of an intelligent press. No village is so small that it is without a blacksmith, as the old song went; today, we can say with not a little pride that no village is so small that it is not imbued with at least a touch of Buribunkic spirit. The great man,'" who presided like the chief of a general staff over his thousands of underlings, who guided his enormous business with a sure hand, who channeled the attention of the troops of researchers to hot spots, and who with unheard-of strategic skill focused attention on difficult research problems by directing pioneering dis-
. ' On this issue, all relevant documents show a rare unanimity. In his diary, Maximilian Sperling calls him "a smart fellow" (Sperling's Diaries, vol. 12, ed. Alexander Bumkotzki [Breslau, 1909], p. 8 16). Theo Timm, in a letter of August 21 to Kurt Stange, describes him as "a fabulous guy" (Timm's Letters, vol. 21, ed. Erich Veit [Leipzig, 1919], p. 498). In her diary, Mariechen Schmirrwitz says, "I find him splendid" (vol. 4, ed. Wolfgang Huebner [Weimar, 1920], p. 43 5 ). Following his first meeting with the man himself, Oskar Limburger exclaims, "He is enormous, watch out for him" (Memories ofmy Life, ed. Katharina Siebenhaar [Stuttgart, 1903], p. 87). Prosper Loeb describes him as of a "de- monic nature" (Konigsberg, 1899, p. 108). He is a "heck of a guy," says Knut vom Heu in his letters to his bride (edited by their son Flip; Frankfurt a. M. , 1918, p. 71), and so on.
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sertations-this impressive personality experienced a truly sensational rise. Born of humble origins and educated without Latin in the middle school of his small town, he successively became a dentist, a bookmaker, an editor, the owner of a construction company in Tiflis, the secretary of the head- quarters of the international association to boost tourism on the Adriatic coast, the owner of a movie theater in Berlin, a marketing director in San Francisco, and, eventually, Professor of Marketing and Upward Mobility at the Institute of Commerce in Alexandria. This is also where he was cre- mated and, in the most grandiose style, his ashes processed into printer's ink, as he had specified in detail in his will and which was sent in small por- tions to printing presses all over the world. Then, with the aid of flyers and billboards, the whole civilized world was informed of this procedure and was furthermore admonished to keep in mind that each of the billions of letters hitting the eye over the years would contain a fragment of the im- mortal man's ashes.
