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FS II 92-502

Walther Rathenau’s Media Technological Turn as Mediated Through W. Hartenau’s ’’Die Resurrection Co.”

An Essay at Resurrection

by Louis Kaplan

Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung gGmbH (WZB) Reichpietschufer 50, D-1000 Berlin 30 Tel. (030)-25 491-0 Fax (030)-25 491-684 ’S MEDIA TECHNOLOGICAL RETURN AS MEDIATED THROUGH W. HARTENAU’S "DIE RESURRECTION CO?’. AN ESSAY AT RESURRECTION

Abstract

In 1898, the young Walther Rathenau published the short story, "Die Resurrection Co," under the pseudonym of W. Hartenau. At the border between science and fiction, this text considers the establishment of a futuristic telephone network to communicate with the dead. This research paper begins with the first English translation of the story ever and it ends with the original German version. In between, the interpretative essay offers a close analysis of "Die Resurrection Co," which foregrounds a resurrective reading of modem electronic media technologies and which stresses how these media have transformed the writing of the history of technology. In a number of scenarios, "An Essay at Resurrection" contests a traditional historical reading or a systems approach to the story which would overlook the resurrective dimensions of the media technological object of the study. The essay takes up a number of issues which focus on the production and the generation of the text in terms of the media technological turn towards resurrection (i.e., pseudonymity, relation of technology and the occult, the use of parable, etc.). The article offers a contribution to an interdisciplinary study of media technology and literature on the level of their shared (trans)figurative structures.

WALTHER RATHENAUS MEDIENTECHNOLOGISCHE WIEDERKEHR VERMITTELT DURCH W. HARTENAUS "DIE RESURRECTION CO?’. EIN ESSAY ÜBER WIEDERERWECKUNG

Zusammenfassung

Unter dem Pseudonym W. Hartenau veröffentlichte der junge Walther Rathenau 1898 eine Kurzgeschichte mit dem Titel "Die Resurrection Co.". Im Grenzbereich von Wissenschaft und Fiktion angesiedelt, handelt der Text von der Einrichtung eines futuristischen Telefonnetzes zur Kommunikation mit dem Jenseits. Am Anfang des vorliegenden Beitrags findet sich eine erstmalige Übersetzung der Kurzgeschichte ins Englische, das Ende nimmt eine Wiedergabe von Rathenaus deutschem Text ein. Der zwischen Übersetzung und Original gestellte interpretierende Essay bietet eine eingehende Analyse der Kurzgeschichte, wobei der Autor die Interpretation moderner Medientechnologien als "Wiedererweckung" in den Vordergrund stellt. Besondere Betonung wird darauf gelegt, wie diese Medien die Geschichtsschreibung der Technologie transformiert haben. In einer Reihe von Szenarios stellt der Autor traditionell historische Lesarten oder eine systemische Herangehensweise an die Kurzgeschichte in Frage, weil beides die Wiedererweckungsdimensionen des medientechnischen Gegenstands von Rathenaus Studie vernachlässigte. Der Essay greift einige Fragestellungen auf, wobei der Autor den Fokus auf Erzeugung und Entwicklung des Textes im Sinne einer medientechnischen Hinwendung zur Wiedererweckung setzt (d.h. Pseudonymität, Verhältnis von Technologie und dem Okkulten, die Verwendung von Parabeln etc.). Mit dem Essay soll ein Beitrag geleistet werden zu einer interdisziplinären Untersuchung von Medientechnologien und Literatur auf der Ebene ihrer gemeinsamen (trans)figurativen Strukturen. Table of Contents

W. HARTENAU: ’’The Resurrection Co.” 1

Walther Rathenau’s Media Technological Turn as Mediated through W. Hartenau’s ’’Die Resurrection Co.”. An Essay at Resurrection 7

A. Introducing Resurrection 7 1. Media Technology and History 8 2. The Systems Metaphor and Resurrection 8 3. Technology and Literature 9

B. Instrumentation: Pen/Machine 10

C. Genre: Satirical Literature/Prophetic Technology 11

D. The Corporate Setting: /Dakota: Major Monopoly/Minor Narrative 13

E. Mechanics: Materialist and Soulless/Ghostly and Alchemical 15

F. Parables of Resurrection: Talmudic and Evangelical 17

G. Authorship: Proper Name/Pseudonym 20

H. The Rainbow Effect: Secular History/Sacred History 24

I. Final Comeback 26

J. Resurrective Hymn 27

W. HARTENAU: Die Resurrection Co. 29 W. HARTENAU: ’’Die Resurrection Co.”

The burial facilities in the city of Necropolis, Dakota are the best in the United States. A narrow-gauge electric railway travelling at a velocity of 20 miles per hour leads the corpse onto the graveyard, a dredger (U. S. Patent Number 398,748) digs the grave before the eyes of the mourners in four minutes flat, the coffin is lifted from the tracks by a revolving crane, and the machine smoothes and flattens out the four-cornered mound with great exactitude. They avoid reading the funeral oration through a loud speaker system. On the contrary, there is an automated jukebox right on the premises of the burial place where one can hearken to words of consolation from the most famous preachers of the English-speaking tongue with the mere deposit of a twenty cents piece. A mechanical coffin factory borders the burial grounds which includes a grinding shop for gravestones. Their exemplary products satisfy the needs of even the most fastidious customer. Elihu Hannibal I. T. Gravemaker was the creator of this undertaking. At his funeral on May 17, 1894, the record was set for internment techniques in the United States. The funeral procession put itself into gear at the stroke of noon, the burial began at 12:10, the return jour­ ney of the mourners followed seven minutes later, and they met for lunch at 12:25 in the Forty- Sixth Avenue Hotel. At one o'clock, the reports about the funeral appeared simultaneously in the Necropolis Sun and in the Dakota Herald. The auction of the testator's estate began at one thirty. At four o'clock, they unveiled a granite monument with the image of the departed on Central Union Square. And a new clubhouse was dedicated at six o'clock in Gravemaker's apartment house in accordance with the provisions of his last will and testament. I felt the urge to express my amazement regarding the clever and carefully arranged grounds to the Director who lived in the upper story of this friendly mortuary. But at the moment when I was about to step into the elevator, I was surprised and even offended by an unpleasant impression. I could not help consulting the director about this incident. "I am able to appreciate and to esteem your facilities highly," I told him. "Nonetheless I can not conceal that I have come across one piece of the layout by accident which embarrasses me. What made you desecrate this sanctified place with a telephone booth? I have noticed that the one in the morgue near the chapel is broken. The incessant ringing is quite disturbing. What do you have in mind with that?" "I am sorry that the door was open," answered the director curtly. "Our guests usually do not notice it otherwise. Unfortunately, I can not give you any further information." It appeared to be the time to play a trick for which I am grateful to my dear friend in New York, the Reverend Tiberius Q. Lewisson. This was a trick—I am sorry to have to say it- -which, while not very noble in nature, appeared appropriate to the occasion. "Sure. As you wish." I remarked. "In any case, you will have no objection then if I wire an article to the newspapers which I have the honor to represent—the New York Herald, the Times, the Figaro, and the Berlin Exchange Currier—to appear on the front page tomorrow morning with the headline CORPSE DESECRATION IN DAKOTA. You will allow me to forward three sample copies to you." After some deliberation, he retorted: "I propose the following deal. You don't publish your impressions before June 15, 1898. That is the day on which our contract with the Resur­ rection Co. expires. On that condition, I will give you a complete disclosure immediately. You can be certain that you will have the sensation of the year with your article." Before I proceed with the Director's report, I make a point of declaring that the present essay was received by the editor of this magazine bearing a large postal stamp on its envelope which was dated the 16th of June, 1898. The Director fulfilled his promise as follows: "All o f our facilities are guided by the principle of shortening the distressful period between the demise of a member of society and the moment when the survivors can take up their occupations again undisturbed. These certainly laudable ends bring a danger with them. On July 24th of last year, the corpse of an honorable and wealthy man which had been buried eight days earlier was exhumed by order of a judge because of the strong suspicion of peijury, irredeemable falsehood, deceit, pandering, and suicide. Unfortunately, it was a suspicion which turned out to be grounded. The look of the corpse was shocking. It was lying face down. Many fingers were broken, the nails were tom off, and there were bruises and wounds on the knees and shoulders. It was evident that the man had been buried alive. A nervous agitation spread throughout the city as the case became known. The clergy sought to appease the masses by emphasizing that the vengeance and punishment of Divine Providence had been brought to bear upon these criminal offenses against the dead. The issue was debated. The level of anxiety increased from befitting at first to senselessness. A few of the most respectable citizens, the Deputy Mayor, and the Director of the Church Council committed suicide. No one knew what to do. While the columnists entertained the wildest suggestions in the upcoming months, they organized an undertaking in all quietness which promised to solve the horrible controversy in one stroke: the Dakota and Central Resurrection Telephone and Bell Co., a shareholding cor­ poration with 750,000 dollars capital. The prospectus brought unparalleled success. Within two hours, the initial capital was oversubscribed on the stock exchange fourteen times. The life insurance company and the orphan administration decided to invest all available means for shares in the new corporation. The daughter of a high school headmaster threatened the direc­ tor of the syndicate with a revolver because she had not been given enough consideration dur­ ing the allotment o f shares.

2 The idea of the enterprise appeared to be simple and convincing. Each buried coffin should be linked via electric cable with the administration building. Telephone and electric bell were connected on the lines and each customer could not only report to the administration instantaneously but could also give the necessary orders to his doctor, his banker, and to his family if the occasion arose. The legislative body of the corporation resolved by a great majority that the introduction of safeguards (fuses) should be obligatory, and at once, the city administration granted the Resurrection Co. the exclusive right to install its apparatus for a two year period. The people's anxiety grew less and less, and even more so, given that no other case of a premature burial cropped up during the course of nearly a year. In the same way, interest in the Resurrection Co. weakened and the price of their stocks sunk on the exchange from 459 to 117 1/2. Then an unexpected incident occurred. Someone reported to me shortly after dusk on February 23rd that a bell had been ringing in short intervals for the first time. The switch that had been turned on was Number 169. This number astounded me because we had already passed on to Number 1200 at the time. I immediately read the churchyard journal and found out that the inhabitant of No. 169 was a certain Johnson whom I had known personally. He was a lean old man who caused his tenants great anxiety for a long time and who died from nervous disorders in the end. At the same time, I noted with horror that Mr. Johnson had been resting in the earth for nine months already. I assumed that something was wrong with the wiring and notified the electrician. He spoke—as is the rule with these people—of short circuits and earth currents. He unscrewed all the apparatuses and brought the house into an unbelievable state of disarray. After three days, he explained the damages away and charged me 275 dollars. In the meantime, you can rest assured that Nr. 169 rang each evening in the customary intervals. Now I made my official report. The commission ordered an exhumation upon the recommendation of the Resurrection Co. This was executed, but without any solution. Mr. Johnson showed the normal disposition of a man who had been buried for nine months. The electrical apparatus worked to perfection and only the coffin was in need of small repairs. They finished shutting up the grave—and Number 169 was to be heard from no more. The Resurrection Co. was not afraid to publicise this deplorable incident in spite of the official established findings. They explained that Mr. Johnson was prevented from returning to life through the fault of my administration and they put my picture in all the morning papers with the headline, THE CEMETERY MURDERER OF NECROPOLIS. Two thousand five hundred Resurrection shareholders and other interested persons held a protest demonstration. I would not have given two cents to save my job if my work as an election agent in the city district where Mr. Johnson's tenants lived would not have been indispensable for the govem-

3 ment. In addition, his survivors, whose interests have to be considered next, gave no value to Mr. Johnson's resurrection. The following case was more serious. Perhaps fourteen days after Johnson's reburial, Number 289, a Miss Simms (who had not enjoyed a special reputation or a particular calling in her lifetime) rang in the evening at the usual time. She was already with us for many months as well. According to the new office directives of the commission, I instructed my inspector to call back Miss Simms although I took the proposition of dialing a lady who was partaking of a better life for a long time as a ridiculous if not a frivolous idea. You should have seen how the inspector came back! Pale and hollow-cheeked, the eyes popping out of his head like glass balls. I can only say that his look reminded me of Mr. John­ son. "Well, what's the matter?" I asked. "Well, I called and put the telephone to my ear and I'll be damned if it did not answer 'Hello' quite clearly out of the apparatus. But with a voice like out of a hollow thorax". . . I went down myself and I screamed into the telephone: "By the devil, what do you want?" . . . And do you know what that old spinster answered me? "I would like be connected with Number 197." The Resurrection Co. was in a predicament this time. Both the clergy and the Theo- sophical Club already had thrown out the question whether the subterranean telephone net­ work might not disturb the holy rest of the dead. When the incident became known, the relig­ ious party had won the day and that was most dangerous for us. There came an agreement with the standing corporation whereby the press volunteered and pledged 50,000 dollars to remove all the telephones in the next fourteen days. They could not, it goes without saying, take away the electric bells because that would have meant com­ plete disentanglement. Inconceivably, our administration was not willing to make the conces­ sion that these accursed bells could be disconnected without a penalty for breach of contract. We are even obligated today to let them be serviced by one of their own employees. Miss Simms stopped ringing as soon as she realized that verbal interaction was no longer possible. But a new correspondent announced himself soon and, remarkably enough, only in rainy weather. It occurred to one of my people to go down in order to see what was wrong. It happened that the mound was spilling over on account of a mistake in the drainage equip­ ment. As I discovered later, the customer had been predisposed to a severe case of rheuma­ tism. The mistake was removed immediately and there was peace and quiet yet again. But it was soon revealed that it had been a mistake to pay heed to this complaint. Now they came on all sides with private wishes and grumblings. One guy called up because the sewer door wasn't closed; another's bench had become rickety; a third needed fresh gravel; the fourth had earthworms. The activities of the cemetery staff had tripled in one season, and the standard assignments had risen fourfold. The ramblings of a neighborhood cat was enough for individual customers to alarm the administrators in the middle of the night.

4 The final stage in this sad development was caused by a completely routine case. An old unmarried woman signaled constantly with no recognizable motive. There remained nothing to do but to notify the survivors in the nicest way and they found out that an angry relative had laid a myrtle wreath on the grave in a revengeful allusion to an earlier incident. It was easy to calm down the old woman but this resulted in our customers bringing the commissions and omissions of their survivors into the circles of their complaints in general. For example, one woman finds that her four step-sons advance to the state of half-mourning too early. She rings up between 6 and 8 daily. A writer is not satisfied with the gravestone inscription. A tele­ phone administrator wires a critique of his successor in the short and long intervals of a type of Morse Code. There is an example of a particularly scandalous interference in the family rela­ tions of the survivors which persists even until today. It concerns the case of a certain Hopkins whom I can not fail to name and specify on these grounds. Mr. Hopkins, a sixty-five year old and very wealthy man, left behind a wife of about thirty-two years of age. It was to be expected that she would find devoted admirers. And certain family friends felt that Mr. Hopkins should not have been entitled to take the least offense. The bell went haywire hardly three months after the burial. When Mrs. Hopkins re­ ceived knowledge of this, she was wretched. The coincidence between the jealous outbursts of her late husband and the visits of her lovers was quite conspicuous. Sometimes the spouse called in the morning, sometimes in the afternoons, but mostly in the evenings from 7 to 11 (the most animated and liveliest time). And the telephone rattled for a quarter of an hour non­ stop in his own personal, cadenced tempo shifts. The poor woman withdrew by taking a trip across the ocean with her admirer for many months on end. She came back just early yester­ day—and this infamous Hopkins had called four times already last night! " The story be­ gan to tire me. The Director lost himself in details. "Now, what are your views concerning the future?" I asked. "It can't go on like this in the long term. We're completely overworked. I've spoken to my brother who is the manager of the Forty-Sixth Avenue Hotel. He tried to make it clear to me that his guests might be even more demanding and he suggested to raise the prices. But that is difficult. My hope lies in the termination of the contract with the Resurrection Co." "But you told me that the existence of the corporation is endangered." "Perhaps not any more at this moment. It is under negotiation in three more cities now. Our Commission issues shining recommendations for the Company. We are also ready to offer indemnification. But above all, there lies a even more compelling reason. One of the Directors is a high-grade consumptive who has been given up by the doctors. Naturally, he will be buried here. His colleagues could not get along with this man in his lifetime— Now, just think about it, when he gets the bell into his hand!"

5 That was clear to me and I understood why the cemetery administrator had made me keep silent until June 15, 1898. Someone cabled me from New York that the sick Director has recovered through the application of Dr. Hamilton S. Myerstine's Hemotosis (available in all pharmacies). He trav­ elled all the way from Necropolis, Dakota to Key West by bicycle and they are now conducting tests for yellow fever. The Resurrection Co. is now occupied with the execution of eight cemetery installations in the United States and it has raised its capital to 7 1/2 million dollars. Some bank institutions whose aim it is to represent the interests of German capital in America are just in the process of securing sizeable shares of this great undertaking. Given these circumstances, I look upon it as a timely task from the economic point of view to provide information about the actions of this company in so far as possible.

(1898)

Translated by Louis Kaplan All Rights Reserved

6 Walter Rathenau's Media Technological Turn as Mediated through W. Hartenau’s ’’Die Resurrection Co.”. An Essay at Resurrection

A. Introducing Resurrection

"The horrible news? Do you mean something other than Rathenau's murder? It is incom­ prehensible that they let him live so long. Already there were rumors of his murder two months ago in Prague." Franz Kafka to Max Brod, June 30, 19221

There is always something in the nature of the unnatural act of political assassination or relig­ ious crucifixion—the way in which it cuts off a public or popular life before its time—which makes the desire for a resurrection of the mourned object that much more acute. One might even say that it is the deadly deed itself which enables and empowers the resurrection of the sacred political or religious body and which guarantees the necrological attention devoted to it in the gift of an after-life. Or, given a literal Kafkaesque turn of events, the terminal rumors might be strong enough to trigger the tidings of resurrection even before the horrible catastro­ phe itself and in one's own lifetime.2 In the case of Walther Rathenau, the gunfire in the Grünewald on June 24, 1922 transfigured a man of too many qualities into the sacrificial sym­ bol of Weimar Germany and, in prophetic hindsight, into one of the first of too many identity- related losses in the oncoming era of organized fascism. This essay addresses then a figure who bears a dramatic and unique relationship to resur­ rection through his untimely demise and through the historical disaster to come. But, in this particular case study, the question of resurrection will not be confined to the biographical narrative. For there is a strange text in the Rathenau literary remains which speculates about the problematic of resurrection under the title of "Die Resurrection Co." and which is signed in the pseudonym of W. Hartenau. This is nothing less than a latter day attempt to resolve the spiritual riddle of resurrection by applying the instruments of an age of media technology. W. Hartenau's "Die Resurrection Co." reviews the setting up of a telephone network to communi­ cate with the dead and to service the entire necropolitan area. In this way, the text uses the

1 The German text reads: "Die Schreckensnachrichten? Meinst Du etwas anderes als Rathenaus Ermordung? Unbegreiflich, daß man ihn so lange leben ließ, schon vor zwei Monaten war das Gerücht von seiner Ermordung in Prag." Franz Kafka, Briefe: 1902-1924 (, 1973), p. 378. All translations in this essay are my own transfigurations from the German into the American. 2 The rumors of assassination are planted prophetically into the subtext of "Die Resurrection Co." itself when the "director of the syndicate" (not hard to identify or resurrect) is threatened amid an economic panic and crisis by a dissatisfied customer who can not get enough of the corporate action.

7 telephonic medium to bring the problematic of media technological resurrection into the foreground. This story is a demonstration (or a living proof) of the strange affinity which con­ nects modem media technology and a spectral domain of resurrection (whether in its spiritist or occultist forms). Modem media technologies always generate a site of resurrection and reproduction, a wave of feedback and playback, a ghost dance of noise and signals. Operating in a simulated limbo, the electronic media transmit the haunting return of the absent in a veri­ table raising of the dead. Without a fundamental acknowledgement of electronic media as resurrective and transfigurative. there will be no way to hear or overhear "Die Resurrection Co." nor to have access to the legion of technological subjects which it has programmed in multiple generations. The following speculations are guided by the premise that "Die Resurrection Co." can not be read nor interpreted without speculating upon how media technological resurrection has transformed the scene of (its) reading and interpretation in general. This resurrective turn will be felt along three lines of inquiry.

1. Media Technology and History The first consideration involves how electronic media technologies have transformed the study of history. The media technologies have invaded the classical space of history and its linear accounting. Indeed, media technologies call for a rethinking of history as a particular type of resurrective technology. But, the resurrection of the past in the present is no longer the only viable sequencer. Through the reversibilities of time, the simulations of the real, and the trans­ figurations of death posed by modern media technologies, the present too will have become resurrectable on the cutting room floor of edits and splices. The cause and effect assumptions of linear historiography have given way to time's special effects (whether fast forward, slow motion, or delay feed) as relayed via the reproductive strategies of the media technologies.3 This essay raises some of the questions which arise when "Die Resurrection Co." (or its his­ tory) is rerun through the transfigured light of electronic media technology and its haunting logic of resurrection.

2. The Systems Metaphor and Resurrection In a recent essay entitled "Walter Rathenau: system builder", the historian and sociologist of technology Thomas P. Hughes has argued that the life and work of the biographical subject can only be understood in relation to the ruling metaphor which constructs the large techno­ logical system. "I have maintained the thesis in this essay that Rathenau the engineer and the

3 Throughout there is a indebted complicity and unconscious rapport with Avital Ronell's The Telephone Book; Technology, Schizophrenia. Electric Speech (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1989) as an exemplar of writing and wiring the telephone in line with the media technological problematic and its historical repercussions.

8 industrial theorist thought in systems and was a 'system builder' himself."4 As it turns out, Hughes uses "Die Resurrection Co." as a case study to support his argument. While the sys­ tems rhetoric frames technology in terms of order, design, and totality, the essay at resurrec­ tion spells out the desire for closure at the basis of this systemization of Rathenau. It exposes how resurrection and an unaccountable logic of the return problematizes the desire for control, order, and totality when dealing with large technological systems and Rathenau's life and work. In this manner, the rhetoric of resurrection attempts to think media technology through what and as what evades systematicity and totalization.

J. Technology and Literature The third point of emphasis in a resurrective approach involves an insistence upon certain types of affinities between technology and literature. This does not mean that one must understand technology in literature or technology as literature. The connection is rather on the structural level in how both the technological and the literary machines share a space that thrives upon figuration and transfiguration as the incessant motor of their operations. The reproductive structures of both literary mimesis and technological media reanimate a return or a "coming back to life". It is not that this essay imports contemporary literary theory in order to illumi­ nate the technological dynamics in "Die Resurrection Co." It is rather an exploration of the conjunctures wherein literary and technological terms cross over—and particularly in matters related to resurrection—in order to offer a reading of this singular text. The present exhumation can not escape the fact that its own memorializing labors par­ ticipate in or engage the resurrection company on one level. These speculations return to the writing of history as a practice that recovers—a veritable technology of salvage operations which are undertaken to recover lost meaning and identity. This consuming exhuming practice can not help but raise ghosts and spectres as an essential and unconscious by-product of its digging and dredging up of the dead. The historical excavation party is the Resurrection Co.. According to the terms of this assessment, the measure of speculative success for such an inquiry lies in both the quality and the quantity of the ghosts which are raised during the dig­ ging. The goal of this essay is not an exorcism to drive out the ghosts, but rather a summoning and an invocation of resurrective possibilities. The following set of scenarios offers a variety of vantage points to access "Die Resur­ rection Co." Rather than advancing an argument, it provides an ongoing comparative analysis of two approaches which underscore a technological divide in reading—between a history of media technology and a media technological history, between a myth of system informed by

4 "Ich habe in diesem Aufsatz die These vertreten. Rathenau, der Ingenieur und Industrietheoretiker, habe in Systemen gedacht und sei selbst 'system builder' gewesen." Thomas P. Hughes, "Walther Rathenau: 'system builder"1, in T. Buddensieg, T. Hughes, J. Kocka, eds., Ein Mann Vieler Eigenschaften: Walther Rathenau und die Kultur der Moderne (Berlin, 1990), p. 28.

9 totality and a system of myths informed by resurrection, between the study of technology in literature and a literary-technological transfigurative convergence. These scenarios map out Walter Rathenau's media technological turn as mediated through W. Hartenau's "Die Resur­ rection Co." in an essay at resurrection.

B. Instrumentation: Pen/Machine

The initial pre-electric technological prejudice involves the type of instrumentation which went into the making of "Die Resurrection Co.". It takes up the use or the misuse of the pen. If one looks closely at Hughes' description of "Die Resurrection Co.", there is a quite literal attempt to frame its instrumentation in line with an older media technology. Quite simply, Hughes' scripterly reading assumes that the story has been written via pen and ink. With its emphasis upon this traditional mode of inscription, the argument attempts to read the object of study as an unproblematic piece of literature flowing from authorial genius to pen and paper. It privi­ leges a mode of literary production untouched by the contamination of mechanized parts. Operating like a recording device (despite) himself, Hughes' account has been resurrected through a second hand. He introduces (or returns to) "Die Resurrection Co." as follows: "Koonz gives a summary of a parody of American funerals from Rathenau's pen"5 (my empha­ sis). But any investigation of the work habits of Rathenau—not to mention Hartenau (the double or author who signs the story)—show that this instrumental preference could not be the case. For this body of texts, the pen is not mightier than the sword nor any other inscription device. The figure of the "Feder" is literally a slip of the pen.6 This remark is an attempt to sidestep what transforms literature into the daily outputs of the technological media. Shadow­ ing Bram Stoker's vampire killers, the preferred mode of inscription avoids the pen and oper­ ates via mechanical dictation.7 The authorial voice will translate into the necessity of

"Koonz gibt eine Zusammenfassung einer Parodie amerikanischer Bestattungen aus Rathenaus Feder." Hughes, p. 26. Working in the second generation, Hughes acknowledges that he takes his cues from Claudia Ann Koonz, Walther Rathenau's Vision of the Future: The Etiology of an Ideal, Dissertation, Rutgers University, pp. 67-69. Given the confusions in this reading (to which we will return), there must be an unreli-able source somewhere in this telephone network. For starters, the reader is informed in Footnote 59 of'system builder' that "Die Resurrection Co." was published in (and I copy) "Die Zukunft VI (9. Juli 1918), S. 72-78." This fast forwarding and re-recording from the year 1898 to 1918 brings the discrepancy of one generation—what is always at stake in the practice of the resurrective technologics-to the forefront. 6 This would follow the structural lines of Friedrich Kittler's Discourse Networks 1800/1900 (Stanford, Ca., 1990). In other words, the slip of the pen imposes the outmoded constructs of 1800 literary penmanship unto 1900 media inscriptions. 7 Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897/1979). This comment is directed primarily towards Dr. Seward who brandishes a "Phonograph Diary" as his weapon in the modem Vampire Wars. For a bite-sized reading of the staging of the vampirical effects as a media war that pits old and new resurrective technologies to the finish (and thereafter), see Friedrich Kittler, "Draculas Vermächtnis" in Dieter Hombach, hrsg., Mit Lacan, ZETA 02, (Berlin, 1982), pp. 103-136.

10 (unspecified) machines for resurrection. As one commentator records it: "the author dictated the thoughts which were preoccupying him at that time into the machine and did not make them the object of an artistic reworking."8 The art and artifice of a literary treatment yield to the resurrective demand of playback in a transcribed medium. It is the recording medium itself that helps to explain the prodigious literary output of our multi-talent as well as the rough spots that continue to be heard on the written record, later on. This mechanized logic also works from the perspective of oral history. Thus, the humorist and essayist Alexander Moszkowski recalls how the stentorious speeches and sparkling tones of the orator were built for the age of technical reproduction. "What a shame that one could not record (the speeches) with a stenogram or a phonograph at any time. That would have been an immense project of an incomparable and sparkling uniqueness."9 This phonographic record gives new biographi­ cal insistence to the resounding playlist of graveyard smashes and hit sermons which are to be found on the cemetery jukebox in Necropolis.

C. Genre: Satirical Literature/Prophetic Technology

There is a genealogy of criticism which reads "Die Resurrection Co." as a satire, pure and simple. This is how it appears to its primary reader and editor, Maximilian Harden, even before its publication in Die Zukunft. As a post-script to a letter which bears a cryptic and fractional signature ("Your 3/4 dead H."), Harden guides the hand of his ffiend(s) to the return of the text in the following manner. "I request the satire back after friendly editing. Oh, this Hartenau!!!"10 Ninety odd years later, Hughes' essay not only classifies "Die Resurrection Co." in the same vein, it even invokes a system (or a way of life) as the direct object of its satirical thrust. "Also for the satire upon American capitalism, 'Resurrection Co.'"11 A generic reading is bolstered by the further remark that this soulless text knows only the doubling and duplicitous devices of parody ("the soul does not come forth in this parody"12). If one were to globalise this set of instructions as the categorically imperative way in which to read the narra­ tive intentions, then "Die Resurrection Co." is not to be taken seriously. The reader can do nothing but laugh at the institution of this telephone exchange to and from the dead. How­

8 "...daß der Verfasser die Gedanken, die ihn zu jeder Zeit beschäftigen, in die Maschine diktiert hat, und sie nicht zum Gegenstand einer künstlerischen Ausarbeitung gemacht hat." Joh. E. Hohl