Introducing Paul Gurk

In April 2020 a guest post on this website raised questions about apparent gaps in German literature, which might impede Germans from properly understanding themselves and the world. SciFi was mentioned as one apparently missing genre. A shallow dive revealed plenty of German SciFi published during the past 100 years. It also brought to light a major discovery: a Dystopian novel fit to stand alongside the best that European literature has produced!

Introducing Paul Gurk, a forgotten contemporary of Döblin’s

Piqued by queries raised from guest post contributor David Lempert, as a sideline from my more intensive work on Döblin I followed up the “missing SciFi” angle by acquiring a newly-published 500+ page digest of German SciFi from the Weimar and Nazi periods: Aufbruch in den Abgrund by Hans Frey (Memoranda-Verlag, Berlin 2020, ISBN 9783948616021). This follows Frey’s earlier digest covering 1810-1918: Fortschritt und Fiasko (2018: ISBN 9783948616182).

The bulk of titles covered by Frey can best be classed, predictably, as “pulp fiction”. But this despised category can tell a lot about the subconscious psyche of writers and their intended readers. Frey’s Aufbruch is structured firmly around the fractured political and socio-cultural malaise of the Weimar years.

For the purposes of this website – with its focus on Alfred Döblin and other writers whom he admired – one title discussed by Frey particularly caught my eye. Here’s how Frey introduces it:

A unique work

Our trip through SF literature under the brown dictatorship has to end with a novel that stands, both for its literary quality and for its message, as unique in Nazi-era German SF, and so should be counted among the great works of the genre and fine writing in general. We are talking of the dystopian Tuzub37: the Myth of Grey Humanity, or of the Number 1 (1935) by Paul Gurk (1880-1953).

So: a novel published in Berlin in 1935 – hence it passed the Nazi censorship – yet it’s a “great work” with a “message” worth noting? Let’s look first at Paul Gurk, and then at his Dystopian novel.

Who was Paul Gurk?

I had never come across the name Paul Gurk. But Frey’s account suggested a very interesting character. Via Abebooks.de I acquired a copy of the first post-WW2 reprint of Tuzub37 (1986). I checked through indexes to various Döblin volumes in case he had noticed his contemporary – and found one piece commenting on a play of Gurk’s in March 1922, when Döblin was earning useful foreign currency as a reviewer for the Prager Tagblatt:

I heard and saw the work of someone alive, it had a shape, and clearly a heart. I name Paul Gurk; his play in five Acts is called Persephone, staged by the Volksbühne in a special Sunday matinee. has felt his way into the deeply meaningful myth, has not spoiled it, has produced one of the possibilities of a modern shaping calmly and without grimaces. Act follows Act in brisk succession. The wealth, the development of motifs, is not large, we can’t look for fullness or great depth, only clean, simple, thoroughly-felt, independently achieved work. Paul Gurk, a secretary in the Berlin Magistracy, recipient of this year’s Kleist Prize for his labours, deserves thanks for his immersion in the myth, for his pure, simple presentation before a much-assailed, much-spoiled Berlin public.

(Interesting that Döblin fails to mention the use Gurk made of cine-projection in some scenes of the play – preceding Brecht’s first attempt at this new technique.)

So who is this bureaucrat, this winner of a major literary prize whom Döblin identifies as a fellow spirit? The lives of the two men show astonishing parallels, as well as instructive contrasts: they are like reflections in a cracked mirror.

PARALLELS AND CONTRASTS IN THE LIVES OF ALFRED DÖBLIN AND PAUL GURK

Parallels:

• The two writers are almost exact contemporaries: AD 1878 – 1957; PG 1880 – 1953.
• Both arrive in Berlin from the East as young children, after family breakup: AD 10 years old in 1888 with mother and siblings, after father absconds. PG 5 years old in 1885, alone, after father dies of work-induced pneumonia.
• Both depend on the charity of relatives: AD’s family has (not very generous) uncles; PG lives with an uncle, a barber.
• Both grow up in poor parts of Berlin: AD around crowded Alexanderplatz. PG in a Berlin-Mitte slum.
• Both consider Berlin their homeland, linguistic environment, source of inspiration.
• Both have musical as well as literary talent; Gurk is also a talented sketcher and painter.
• Both begin writing in their teens, but are in their 30s before publications begin to take off.
• Both develop an independent path to creative writing.
• Both produce a wide range of works: AD: epic novels, stories, plays, journalism, criticism, theoretical writings on literature, nature, politics…; PG plays, stories, novels, many still unpublished when he dies.
• Both are awarded literary prizes: AD: Fontane Prize in 1915 for Wang Lun. PG three awards in early 1920s including the major Kleist Prize, and another from a panel chaired by Thomas Mann.
• Both tap the wellsprings of their creativity via mental states beyond everyday consciousness.
• Both are recognised by leading writers, but fail to attain large sales (until Berlin Alexanderplatz).
• Both write a Dystopian novel set in the far future.
• Both write a “big city novel” set in Berlin. Hans Frey judges PG’s novel “in every respect on a par” with AD’s.
• Both have a female partner called Erna. Both women suffer from nervous disorders requiring careful attention.

Contrasts:

• AD’s family is Jewish; PG is nominally Protestant.
• AD’s family is upwardly-striving mercantile class; they pay for his school and university studies. PG’s family is working class (father = post-coach driver; uncle runs a barbershop). He learns to read and write with casual help from uncle’s assistants. Can’t afford secondary school; can’t complete teacher training, as he has voice problems.
• AD has a professional medical career alongside writing. PG is a clerk in the Berlin Magistracy for 24 years; takes early retirement to focus on creative rather than bureaucratic writing.
• AD is taken on by publisher S. Fischer as a long-term investment (a disappointment until Berlin Alexanderplatz). PG has constant trouble with publishers: often when they show interest, they shortly go bankrupt.
• AD’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) becomes a world bestseller; PG’s Berlin: ein Buch vom Sterben der Seele (Berlin: a Book on the Death of the Soul, 1934; written 1923-25) faces constant obstacles.
• AD is forced to flee into 12 years exile from Nazis. PG remains in Berlin, where he is mostly ignored as an oddball but allowed to publish occasionally; he remains aloof from the Nazi establishment.
• AD relishes ‘public intellectual’ engagement. PG remains a confirmed loner.
• AD’s reputation has grown steadily since the 1970s. PG remains even today almost entirely unknown.

 Paul Gurk’s Dystopia: Tuzub 37: The Myth of Greyhumanity, or of the Number 1

Here, slightly shortened, is Hans Frey’s view of Gurk’s novel in Aufbruch (pp. 464-467):

Tuzub37 belongs clearly to the SF genre. It is the only SF novel written by Gurk. The strange artificial word Tuzub refers to the famous Biblical story of the Tower of Babel: TUrmbauZU sector B (Tower constructed in Sector B). What this means is explained below.

Tuzub37 takes place in a distant future where humanity has formed itself into a grey, uniform, undifferentiated mass whose individual components all wear the number 1. They have become machine-people made partly of light metal (today we’d call them Cyborgs). In this state they are all under seamless observation and surveillance. All individuality is extinguished, and if against all expectation any Grey begins to formulate his own thoughts, he is at once “derusted”, i.e. liquidated.

This radical levelling is accompanied by a smoothing of the planet. Everything has been brought to the same level. Mountains are dug away, and wherever necessary (according to a grotesque logic), oceans are pumped with the aim of drying them out. The smoothed ground is lined with metal plates to make a uniform surface. Hence the monstrous system in Gurk’s dystopia is a radical declaration of war not only on humans and their culture, but on Nature too. Everything natural, considered equivalent to the wild, the unmanaged, the incalculable and chaotic, must be eliminated.

In the region where the Himalaya once stood, there is a special project. An enormous “Tower to Sector B – grid square 37” is to be built to draw fresh air down from the upper atmosphere, because the air has been polluted by industrial emissions. Accidents happen during the construction. A green gas renders the Greys unable to communicate with one another. The ensuing chaos provides the Man-machines, pure robots, with an opportunity to exterminate the half-human Greys. But not even the robots can survive: they go on to wipe themselves out.

With this, Gurk exposes the construct of a perverse, artificial evolution. The still rudimentary humans are to be replaced by full robots, who go on to make themselves obsolete leaving in the end only “The Machine”. The so-called Machine is merely an end in itself, stands only for itself, is pure function without meaning, an entity that cancels itself out and ends up as nothing.

Tuzub37 is a shocking dystopia, which in the shape of a surreal Future History castigates the fundamentally false development trend of contemporary society. The political implications are dominant. It can be interpreted as] as a bitter satire on the Nazi regime: the Grey masses march up and down, the sudden raising of arms in a (Hitler) salute, mindless choirs screaming stupid words, an environment that recalls the Nuremberg rallies, the equivalence of grey and brown, the adoption by the Greys of Nazi slogans, indeed the complete senselessness of Nazi ideology.

But Tuzub37 is remarkable also for its decidedly ecological tone. This is in a way unique. In Weimar SF eco-awareness never goes beyond an imagined garden-suburb or a Wandervogel’s “mystical” experience of Nature, and while the Nazis preached a “return to the soil” this had nothing to do with Green thinking; substantial ecological discourse lay outside the realm of the thinkable, and so never appeared. Gurk sets a very different tone.

The stylistic high points of Tuzub37 must be pointed out. Gurk succeeds in exemplary fashion in rendering his world of terror palpable through a present-tense, monotone, formulaic diction. The cold impersonal language leads to neologisms such as “Menschenfortreihung (Human Replenishment, meaning children) or “Kraftausatmung” (Power Exhalation for energy). His intentionally mechanical rhetoric brings out the abnormality of the Greys, making the ambiguity of the word “Grauen” (Greys; horrors), especially in this novel, immediately evident. The literary artificiality of its form is what makes the novel outstanding, because it combines the aesthetics and the message.

It’s hard to understand how it passed the Nazi censorship. Still: there’s probably no better example of the stupidity of the censors. But Gurk, somewhat like Zamyatin in We and Orwell in 1984, skewers not just the Nazis but totalitarianism more generally. I shall go one step further.At bottom, I believe, Gurk is expressing a fundamental critique of Western civilisation mainly from the angle of its belief in progress and the ideals of the Enlightenment. In this respect Gurk is a reactionary, because he won’t acknowledge the opportunities of a scientific-technical world, but conjures up only its destructive potential.

Gurk cuts a breach for the natural (beautiful) face of the Earth, the pitiless levelling of which is a symbol for the completely broken relationship between humans and Nature. To that extent, there is no escape in Tuzub37, and certainly not into fatuous fake idylls. The core of this SF novel is the despair of a sensitive author unable to comprehend his real world and wants – what is only all too comprehensible.

There is no question that in literary terms Tuzub37 is the finest SF novel published in the Nazi era. As Klaus Geus says: “Today Paul Gurk is almost totally forgotten. This is a shame, for his works, with their critique of techno-hubris, ecological plunder and inhuman rationality are no less pertinent today.”

 Tuzub 37 in English

I’m about a quarter of the way through my translation of Tuzub37. I shall post my full translation in due course.

NOTE: Magnus Chrapkowski’s extensive biographical sketch of Paul Gurk, appended to the 2017 edition of Berlin: ein Buch vom Sterben der Seele is gratefully acknowledged as a source for this post.