In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

BEING-IN-THE-WORLDS OF 1926 471
Hans Friedrich Blunck (and, for that matter, Elfride and Martin Heidegger)
would scarcely have enjoyed the ebullient African-American culture
of contemporary Harlem, as it was so well described by the white writer
Carl Van Vechten in his popular novel Nigger Heaven, which Alfred A.
Knopf published in August 1926.122 For life in Harlem was the true
model, the original of everything that made conservative German intellectuals
such as Heidegger and Blunck so intensely hate its copy, Berlin.
Harlem, to them, meant music halls and revues, jazz and the Charleston,
booze and cocaine, prostitution, transgressive sexuality, and (diametrically
opposed to silence) an exuberant urban culture of continual verbalization.
European philosophers and poets who dreamed of dwelling
in mountain cabins or in a farmhouses near the sea dreaded New Yorkespecially
Harlem-as synonymous with that very artificiality and superficiality
into which the future threatened to dissolve their values of
profound authenticity. [see Authenticity vs. Artificiality]
This outside view of metropolitan life would not be worth mentioning
if, from an inside perspective (which, surprisingly perhaps, Van Vechten
was capable of offering), the culture of Harlem had not been a much
more ambiguous and therefore much more complex phenomenon. Mary
Love, the main character in Nigger Heaven, is a young black woman
whose parents have brought her up to be proud of her race and who is
thus free to appreciate both the classic and the contemporary canons of
white culture. In her profession as a librarian and in her private life,
Mary Love cultivates the modern taste for sobriety, and the preference
for this mode of living makes her different from her good friend Olive
Hamilton, with whom she shares a modest apartment. [see Sobriety vs.
Exuberance]
The walls were brightened by framed reproductions of paintings by
Bellini and Carpaccio which Mary had collected during a journey
through Italy. Olive's personal taste inclined to the luxurious. Her
dressing-table was hung in lace over pink satin, and her bed was covered
with a spread of the same materials. On the dressing-table was laid
out a toilet-set of carved ivory, an extravagance which had cost her a
great deal of economy in other directions. A bottle of Narcisse Nair
stood near the toilet-set. Framed, on a table and on the walls, were
many photographs of friends. A French worsted doll lay dejected in the
corner. Mary's taste was more sober. There was only one picture in her