Connections: from Plugging Gibraltar to Shakespeare’s Memories in One Step

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"Simply the thing I am shall make me live."

--from Jorge Luis Borges, "Shakespeare’s Memory"

 

It is interesting to pursue a loose thought to its not-necessarily logical end.  Such is the case with the Paneuropic ideas of Hermann Soergel (1885-1952). Soergel was a Bauhaus architect and author of a number of works on design and far more ethereal, floating-castle ideas. His most spectacular contribution—incubated in the mid-1920’s and still clinging by its fingertips as an idea among some current thinkers—was to put a dam across the straights of Gibraltar.  The dam would generate electricity of course, but most importantly to Soergel, it would also empty an enormous amount of water from the Mediterranean leaving vast new expanses of land to be developed and colonized over generations into the future.  The master plan at work was that the world would be divided into three economic spheres in the future, all beginning with the letter “A”:  American, Asia, and the new land to be created by Soergel, “Atlantropa”, which was the former Europe expanded into the new dry beds of the Mediterranean and North Africa.  And also of course Egypt, which would be covered with canals and semi-submerged by the new borders of the meandering sea.  This would be the way for Europa to compete with the rest of the world in the future. 

 

Perhaps it is actually three steps to get from the idea of damming up the straits of Gibraltar to the osmosis of Shakepeare’s memories into someone else’s brain—a squinting acquiescence of the middle touch being the brilliant Jorge Luis Borges.  You see it was in the Argentine master’s last published story, "Shakespeare’s Memory", that we meet Herr Soergel (as Hermann Sorgel) again.  But so far as I can remember Soergel exists only as a fictional character, with no reference to his real-life self.  In this wonderful story, Soergel inherits the memories of William Shakespeare—these bits come to him slowly but surely, until they start to conflict with his own memory, and things get difficult.  The man with Shakespeare’s memories winds up phoning strangers on the telephone, giving them away at random, until Soergel is left with his own mind again.  Superior as Bill’s memories were, they still weren’t Hermann’s, who wanted his own life back in the end. 

 

And so from the titanic, pan-europic technodream of Bauhausian Hermann Soergel to the dead brains and living memories of William Shakespeare, all through the fingers of the beautiful Jorge Luis Borges.  

I should point out that the image above comes from the Illustrierte Zeitung (Leipzig) for August 1931, and is a drawing by an artist named "AS. Christ" after Soergel's Panropa's ideas.

 

Some of the works by Soergel include the following:

 

Atlantropa. Fretz & Wasmuth, Zurich / Piloty & Löhle, Munich 1932

Vorwort zu: Wayne W. Parrish : Technokratie - die neue Heilslehre , Piper, München 1933

Die drei großen A, Amerika, Atlantropa, Asien , 1938. The three large A, , Atlantropa, Asia,

1938

Atlantropa-ABC. Atlantropa ABC. Kraft, Raum, Brot. Kraft, Raum, Brot. Erläuterungen zum Atlantropa-Projekt , Arnd, Leipzig 1942

 

Some works about  Soergel: 

 

Alexander Gall: The Atlantropa project. Die Geschichte einer gescheiterten Vision. The story of a failed vision. Herman Sörgel und die Absenkung des Mittelmeers .

Herman Sörgel and the lowering of the MEditerranean . Campus, Frankfurt am Main 1998.

Wolfgang Voigt: Atlantropa. Wolfgang Voigt: Atlantropa. Weltbauen am Mittelmeer. Building the Mediterranean world. Ein Architektentraum der Moderne . An architects dream of modernity. Dölling und Galitz. Hamburg  1998.

Comments

[Jeff]

This made me think of lines from Borges' poem, "Limits."

"There is in the South more than one worn gate,
With its cement urns and planted cactus,
Which is already forbidden to my entry,
Inaccessible, as in a lithograph.

"There is a door you have closed forever
And some mirror is expecting you in vain; ...

"There is among all your memories one
which has been lost beyond all recall ...

"At dawn I seem to hear the turbulent
Murmur of crowds milling and fading away;
They are all I have been loved by, forgotten by;
Space, time, and Borges now are leaving me. "

Maybe you'd better read the whole poem.