Spatial representations are also connoted conceptually, not just affectively. As explained above, a conceptual outlook takes so much distance from the surrounding space that its entities are no longer considered for themselves, but as the visible symbols of some abstract, invisible concept, set of ideas, theory, or ideology in the strict sense of the term. Such is the case of World Peace Road, for example, when it is considered ‘no longer solely a local street’ because ‘it (…) has grown into a symbol of socialist reconstruction and a leading example of our aesthetic conceptions in architecture’ (Heym 44). The novel
being set in 1956, the Road is indeed of emblematic value for the young German Demo- cratic Republic seeking to legitimise itself.
The earliest mythical conceptualisation of space can be exemplified by the augurs. They abstracted the area around the temple into four zones divided by two intersecting axes and sought to predict the future from the flight of birds, which bore their own symbolic mean- ing, over them (Cassirer 1925: 100). Our day and age bears few traces of such early con- ceptualisation. With time, however, myth stabilises in the well-wrought forms of religion, as another kind of conceptualisation sets in that tends towards the universal and results in the elaboration of an all-embracing body of thought that, once materialised in space, would bring redemption. From Cassirer’s writings on the subject, we can distil two main characteristics of this pattern of thought: an allegorical reading of space and a teleological narrative structure.
The first feature ensues from the tendency towards the universal. When magical force uni- versalises, it is no longer understood as a particular, instantaneous force acting on a spe- cific place at a given moment because its radius is maximised up to the point of being uni- versal: it is thought capable of laying its spell over the whole of reality, thus turning it into a single, all-embracing inside space. In the second volume of Spheres (a three-volume study first published between 1998 and 2004), Peter Sloterdijk refers to such metaphysical and universalised inside spheres as ‘globes’: ‘the attempts of classical metaphysics to organize the totality of what exists as a concentrically organized monosphere’ (2007: 53). If the magical spirit is universal, it is unique. It is considered the only spirit that can enchant the sum total of reality and serve as a panacea to all of its injustices and imper- fections, following a logic that is well-known from monotheistic religions. As a conse- quence, the magical spirit acquires an undertone of irrefutable truth. The all-encompass- ing inside space it can create becomes a ‘sacred order’, the sole ‘eternal order of justice and truth’ (Cassirer 1955: 170). Once instantiated, this sacred order would bring ultimate redemption, while conversely, any reality preceding that moment can only signify the absence of sacred truth. Cassirer refers to such a reading of space, which verifies the pres- ence of transcendent truth, as ‘allegorical’. What it registers of reality ‘is never its imme- diacy but the transcendent meaning which finds its mediated representation in this reality’ (1955: 257; our emphasis).
In what seems to be a laicised, Marxist variant of an allegorical reading, Julia insists that it is ‘obvious to any person of honesty and good will that … the Road combined the spir- itual essence of the people’s aspirations with the best traditions of the past and symbolized something noble and worth the struggle’ (Heym 21). And hers is not an isolated case: most architects on the team have interiorised the socialist teachings of ‘how to differentiate between right and wrong, good and bad’ (56) in architecture. Since it ‘is un-Marxist … to separate form and content’ (57), a one-to-one relationship links architectural forms to an inherently true or false meaning. Where the socialist body of thought applies, such a dis- tinction is easy to make since only socialist-realist architecture ‘rises organically out of the great experiences of mankind’ (47). Other architectural styles can only attest to artifi- ciality, mere appearance, or plain hypocrisy. The functionalist architecture of the West, in
particular, is discredited as being ‘in essence negative and soulless, anti-humanistic – repugnant to the healthy instinct of our working people’ (69-70), as Arnold, Julia’s hus- band and head of the City Architects’ Bureau, describes it. It is nothing but ‘petty bour- geois radicalism’ (69), ‘decadence, cosmopolitanism’ (209) and ‘mannerism’ (70) look- ing for cheap success through ‘the sensational, the outlandish, the experiment in form’ (47). Those who turn against socialist realism can only be ‘detractors and belittlers (…) revisionists and fault-finders’ (211).
A second characteristic of the mythical conceptualisation of space arises from the first one. In the final analysis, an allegorical understanding of space is always oriented towards an ultimate moment when the whole of space would perfectly materialise the transcendent truth, according to Cassirer: ‘there is one point at which the world of spiritual, transcend- ent meaning and that of empirical-temporal reality come into contact, despite their inner divergence’, and that is the point of ‘redemption’ to which ‘(a)ll allegorical (…) interpre- tation relates (…) as its fixed center’ (1955: 257; original emphasis).8 This end point, the
secular remnant of which we would call utopian, is the frame of reference for the allegor- ical reading of any reality preceding it. Cassirer goes on to explain that ‘(a)ll temporal change, all natural events and human action obtain their light from this center; they become an ordered, meaningful cosmos by appearing as necessary links in the (…) plan of salvation’ (257). The whole of reality is thus seen in terms of its utopian telos. From this conceptual angle, spaces tend to be envisaged from the angle of the broader socio- historical development of which they constitute a phase; they appear as functions of a tel- eological narrative.9
This kind of traditional story arc progressing towards an ultimate equilibrium via a detour of struggle and adventure is, of course, particularly well known from structuralist literary theory (see Keunen 2011: 62 and 71). The conceptualisation of space can thus go hand in hand with such imagined stories or narratives that recount the general future of certain kinds of places, of the city in general, or ultimately, the whole of mankind. In other words, space may be, as Ricoeur would have it, ‘emplotted’ (see Keunen 2011: 14). In Urban Planning and the Pursuit of Happiness (2009), Arnold Bartetzky and Marc Schalenberg put forward that ‘(a)rchitecture and urban planning have played a prominent role in con- cepts aiming to achieve happiness by means of changing living conditions’, and that ‘(u)rban projects have often been conceived and staged as model islands, in anticipation of a bright(er) future for a city, a country or even the whole of humanity’ (7).10 As a show-
piece of the socialist society to come, World Peace Road is mainly envisaged from such a broad socio-historical outlook. If the Road has an unusual poetic glow for Julia, it is because she already catches a glimpse of its future guise: the site is laden with concepts of what a socialist world ought to look like. Because of her socialist education, Julia con- siders things ‘always with the common cause, the common goal in view’ (Heym 15). Sim- ilarly, her husband Arnold frequently repeats in front of his team of architects that the project of World Peace Road serves the higher purpose of a better future. The telos pre- cedes the present, and the general conceptual values of the Road overshadow its specifi- city. ‘(H)ad Marx, Lenin, or Stalin ever promised that the road to socialism would be straight and well paved?’ (43), Arnold asks his fellow architects, indicating thereby that
any problems encountered along the way are but negligible hurdles in the broad socio-his- torical project of stimulating ‘man’s all-around physical and mental development’ (96). It is because of such fierce rhetoric that Arnold is at one point described in religious jargon as a ‘sectarian zealot ready to cut down anyone unwilling to follow his major and minor prophets’ (209). Wollin, another architect, perceives Arnold in this way when Arnold is militantly defending the principles of socialist-realist architecture that had allowed him to make a name for himself. After Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s abuses, however, these principles are in jeopardy because of their ties with Stalinism. In desperation, Arnold tries to defend the teleological narrative of socialist-realist architecture, the back- bone of his entire career, in a way that reminds Wollin of the relentlessness and the obdu- racy of the religious: he ‘continued railing; the spirit was upon him; he must defend his holy grail’ (209). Similarly, when Julia loses faith in socialist realism, she is described as ‘seek(ing) the oracle’ (126-127), which she ends up finding in a new, functionalist archi- tecture at the service of a more humane socialism.11