LESABÉNDIO: AN ASTEROID NOVELBy Paul Scheerbart
Illustrations by Alfred Kubin
Translated, with an introduction, by Christina Svendsen
“The serene and gentle amazement with which the
author tells of the strange natural laws of other worlds, the great
cosmic works undertaken there, and the naively noble conversations of
their inhabitants makes him one of those humorists who, like Lichtenberg
or Jean Paul, seem never to forget that the earth is a heavenly
body.”—Walter Benjamin
First published in German in 1913 and widely considered to be Paul Scheerbart's masterpiece, Lesabéndio
is an intergalactic utopian novel that describes life on the planetoid
Pallas, where rubbery suction-footed life forms with telescopic eyes
smoke bubble-weed in mushroom meadows under violet skies and green
stars. Amid the conveyor-belt highways and lighthouses weaving together
the mountains and valleys, a visionary named Lesabéndio hatches a plan
to build a 44-mile-high tower and employ architecture to connect the two
halves of their double star. A cosmic ecological fable, Scheerbart’s
novel was admired by such architects as Bruno Taut and Walter Gropius,
and such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (whose wedding
present to Benjamin was a copy of Lesabéndio). Benjamin had intended to devote the concluding section of his lost manuscript The True Politician
to a discussion of the positive political possibilities embedded in
Scheerbart’s “Asteroid Novel.” As translator Christina Svendsen writes
in her introduction, “Lesabéndio helps us imagine an ecological
politics more daring than the conservative politics of preservation,
even as it reminds us that we are part of a larger galactic set of
interrelationships.”
Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915)
was a novelist, playwright, poet, newspaper critic, draughtsman,
visionary, proponent of glass architecture, and would-be inventor of
perpetual motion. A member of avant-garde art and
architectural circles, his ideas were crucial for participants in the
Glass Chain movement, a group that included major architects such as
Walter Gropius, Bruno Taut, and Hans Scharoun. Scheerbart
opposed the naturalism of his day with fantastical fables and
interplanetary satires that were to influence Expressionist authors and
the German Dada movement, and which helped found German science fiction.
After suffering a nervous breakdown over the mounting carnage of World
War I, Scheerbart starved to death in what was rumored to have been a
protest against the war.
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