In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

182 ARRAYS
phones] The simultaneity of these two innovations epitomizes the paradoxical
rule according to which the increasing internal autonomy of a
system (automatic coupling) occurs in tandem with a greater degree of
openness toward its environment (on-board telephones). Meanwhile, the
railway system has reached a point of such internal complexity that it
has become a metonym for the entire civilized world. The German poet
Johannes Becher sees urban environments as already dominated by
trains: "Trains soar above you; / dig yourself into invisible slices of track.
/ Zigzag!" (90). The painter Edward Hopper, in contrast, is fascinated
by the smooth integration of railroad tracks into the rural landscape
(Levin, 265-266). Having become independent from and almost coextensive
with the social world, the railway system even fosters the emergence
of specialized criminal gangs on its margins. A group of thieves
organized by a Hockenheim cigar-producer has filled an entire warehouse
with merchandise stolen from the Berlin-Babel freight train (Berliner
Volks-Zeitung, November 6). At the other end of the social spectrum,
owners of expensive suburban houses desperately seek ways to
protect their neighborhoods from what they see as a rapidly spreading
blight: the use of decommissioned railway cars as family homes (Kisch,
264). Regardless of social or legal status, whoever lacks contact with the
railway system seems doomed to the life of an outcast-or blessed with
a life that is not controlled by the State bureaucracy. The hero of Bertolt
Brecht's unfinished novel Der Lebenslauf des Boxers Samson-Korner
invents for himself a birthplace "far from the railroad tracks," because
this allows him to maintain the fiction that he is an American citizen.
Nobody would travel all the way to a small village in the State of Utah
to prove him wrong: "So let me say right off that I was born in Beaver,
Utah, USA, in the Mormon area close to the Great Salt Lake. I can also
suggest why I was born there: because Beaver, Utah, isn't on the railroad.
It's a place where you can have twelve wives. But if you want to see the
house where I was born, you can't get there except on foot. That's one
side of the matter. It's very important, because that's the only reason I
came to be a proper Yankee ... To look at the other side: I was born in
Zwickau, Saxony, because that's where I first saw daylight" (Brecht,
121).
The internal structures and laws of railroads cannot be negotiated by
individuals-and they are therefore seen as an emblem of imposed existential
randomness. But they also have grown into systems which, being