The Moment of Danger - The Earthquake Observers - page 126

into wildness itself.” 69 The writer becomes, or longs to become, a body that
speaks in the convulsive language of the earth itself: a seismograph.
At the same time, Kafka's fantasy of vertigo encompasses another fan-
tasy: the discovery within the self of a hidden, inner equilibrium. in the
moment that he releases control, the rider is “instantly alert.” in this sense,
Kafka writes in the tradition of Humboldt and Darwin, parallel to Baelz's
“cool attention,” James's “spontaneous perceiving,” and Jünger's “entomo-
logical gaze.” The earthquake, literal or figurative, was experienced simulta-
neously as an instant of wild abandon and of acute perception. surely, this
keenness of perception was a habit acquired through training, a product of
these men's scientific backgrounds and of the nineteenth-century culture of
popular science. Yet these trained observers insisted otherwise. They attrib-
uted their own acuity to a mysterious cosmic affinity.
By the 1930s, the human seismograph was no longer a geoscientific tool.
The acuity of earthquake witnesses had been reinterpreted as a symptom of
hysteria. The realism of felt reports came to be read as a mere literary exer-
cise. This transformation was evident in the 1931 volume Der Gefährliche
Augenblick (The Moment of Danger). This specimen of Weimar modernism
was a collection of photographs and first-person accounts of various crises:
a plane crash, the sinking of the Titanic, the assassination of Archduke Franz
Ferdinand, battles of the Great War. The editor explained that the intention
was to display instances in which “a highly primitive experience intersects
with a very complicated one in a few seconds of decision.” 70 First, as if set-
ting a template for what followed, came natural disasters: photographs and
narratives of earthquakes and volcanoes, from Vesuvius, Etna, and Mount
Pelée, to san Francisco and Tokyo. Like the earthquake stories we have been
examining, these narratives had eclectic origins: accounts of the eruption of
Mount Pelée, on Martinique, for instance, came from a scientist, an impris-
oned “Negro,” a shoemaker, and a journalist. in the volume's introduction,
Ernst Jünger described such cold-blooded visions of catastrophe as the “new
style of language” of the modern age. 71 Readers have puzzled over these
“moments of danger,” which seem to be oddly detached and impersonal
by the standards of bourgeois memoirs. 72 They seem incongruous only be-
cause they have been torn out of the context of nineteenth-century disaster
science. As iconic of modernism as these accounts may now appear, they
conformed to the scientific norms of an earlier modernity.