In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

98 ARRAYS
Man treads boldly on streets paved with flagstones.
Crystals elude the magic of reflection.
The government has closed the perfume shops.
The machine immortalizes its musical compasses.
(Garcia Lorca, 618)
What unites the lyrical "I" with his addressee is a "desire for forms and
limits," which finds a response in the arrival of a "man who measures
with a yellow meter" (619). Dalf's ultimate intellectual and artistic passion,
however, is architecture: "You love a defined and precise matter, /
Where the mushroom cannot set up camp. / You love architecture, which
constructs in empty space" (620).
Thomas Mann is sensitive to the same erotic flavor-but his reaction
remains far more ambiguous than Garcia Lorca's. In his story "Unordnung
und fruhes Leid" ("Disorder and Early Sorrow") it is a student of
engineering, Max Hergesell, whose dancing attracts the attention of
Professor Cornelius and who becomes an object of envy for the professor's
frustrated paternal ambitions. And it is again Hergesell whose
coquetry in playing with the professor's little daughter causes the emotional
"disorder" to which the title of the novella alludes. In its final
scene, when the engineering student stands beside the girl's bed, calming
her down with his soothing voice, Cornelius is torn between admiration
and hatred: "Young Hergesellieans over the bars of the crib and rattles
on, more for the father's ear than the child's, but Ellie does not know
that-and the father's feelings toward him are a most singular mixture
of gratitude, embarrassment, and hatred" (521).
The dark side in Professor Cornelius'-and Thomas Mann's-ambivalence
toward the engineer goes back to the traditional prejudice against
industrialization and its consequences-a prejudice which the German
foreign secretary, Gustav Stresemann [see League of Nations], revives in
a speech on July 6 to the Verein Deutscher Studenten (Association of
German Students): "The age ... of initial industrial development is
considered a time of marked spiritual decline in literature and other
intellectual areas. What German cities once had to offer in the architecture
of their marketplaces has been swept away by powerful and impersonal
forces" (Stresemann, 276). Whereas Stresemann's argument refers
to the past, a different type of criticism views technology from the
perspective of the future-a future in which the utopian dreams of