Paul Scheerbart (1863–1915) was a multitalented German author and artist of fantasy and science fiction (under his own name and the pseudonym “Kuno Küfer”) who could legitimately be called an eccentric genius. In addition to his art, fiction, and poetry, Scheerbart envisioned vast idealistic engineering and architectural projects aimed at creating a better world, and he also tried to create a perpetual-motion machine. Blurring the lines between fact and fancy, Scheerbart incorporated all his interests into both his fiction and his nonfiction. Like Bengali women’s rights advocate Begum Rokheya Shekhawat Hossain, the impish French proto-surrealist Alfred Jarry, and other early science fiction writers, Scheerbart was influenced by the contes philosophiques, and thus this blurring had a basis in literary history.
An alcoholic who spent most of his life in poverty before he died in World War I, Scheerbart founded the Verlag Deutscher Phantasten (Publishers of German Fantasists) in 1892. At university, Scheerbart studied art history and philosophy, which fed into the beginnings of a serious attempt at a poetry career (and also, perhaps, his attempts to invent perpetual-motion machines). In 1914, Scheerbart published the work best-known during his lifetime, Glasarchitektur (Glass Architecture), which, shamefully, was not published in English until 1972. These fantastical essays and poems about glass architecture influenced noted theorist and philosopher Walter Benjamin on his Arcades Project, an impressionistic glimpse in fragments of the streets of Paris. None of Scheerbart’s other work had been published in English prior to Glass Architecture, and even today he remains little known in the English-language world, despite a sumptuous retrospective and several translations since 2001.
The most relevant translation for science fiction readers is the novel Lesabéndio (2012). Lesabéndio, in episodic chapters, details the workings of an alien civilization. The novel embodied the Utopian ideals Scheerbart had embraced and that he firmly believed would be the salvation of humankind. It also includes, well ahead of its time, treatment of environmental themes that compare favorably to modern theory.
Sadly, this novel and Scheerbart’s other science fiction have not exerted much influence on German science fiction in the modern era. But in considering influence more as diaspora, it may be useful to think about connections between Scheerbart and his contemporaries, such as visionaries like Alfred Kubin, author of the masterpiece of weird fiction The Other Side, who was commissioned to create art for Lesabéndio. Kubin is the gateway to a cascade of other connections, including Kafka. Similarities in Alfred Jarry’s and Scheerbart’s approaches suggest it also may be useful to view Scheerbart’s work in light of the French tradition of fantastic literature.
Perhaps, then, Scheerbart’s work has languished in obscurity in part because it existed adjacent to movements like the Surrealists and Decadents but occupied its own unique space. Nor is there any indication that if Scheerbart had lived past World War I, continued to write science fiction, and been translated earlier, his approach would have been much welcomed by the American pulp scene that came to define the bulk of “science fiction.” But in a wider context, his association with creators like Benjamin, Jarry, and Kubin, and the similarities in some of his work to Borges, are far more important. “The New Overworld” (1911), never before translated into English, exemplifies Scheerbart’s style and approach: light, taking liberties with science, but also unique and playful in its speculation.