Framing Attention: Windows on Modern German Culture

4. Underground Visions

127 4 The window of the moving railway train has often been discussed as a site at which we can locate a paradigmatic modernization of visual perception. Nineteenth-century railway travel, it has been argued, helped industrialize the viewing subject, causing the observer to incorporate motion and speed into the very process of seeing. As perceived through the window of a train compartment , even seemingly pristine and timeless countrysides suddenly did not look the way they used to look. For aside from causing local administrations to standardize time for the sake of establishing reliable time tables,1 nineteenthcentury railway journeys fundamentally restructured the traveler’s desire for voyeuristic pleasure and scopic control. The train’s windows at once expanded and shrunk people’s spatial horizons. They also led to a shocking disintegration of the visual field, asking travelers to learn how to establish new kinds of links between their sensory systems and their physical environments. Adolph Menzel’s 1892 gouache Traveling through the Countryside documents the extent to which this industrialization of sight affected individual practices of seeing as much as it reorganized the forms of social interaction.The travelers in Menzel’s first-class compartment are portrayed as sleeping, leaning out of the compartment window, looking at passing scenery, reading, and conversing with each other. Although Menzel’s point of view does not allow us to gaze at the countryside ourselves, his image emphasizes the way in which railway journeys produce a buzzing hunger for visual distractions. Visual prostheses such as binoculars and spectacles dominate the scene. Several passengers are shown looking intently at objects that remain outside of the gouache’s frame, located Underground Visions Framing Attention 128 on either side of the compartment’s rows of windows. Touristic voyeurism and restless intoxication here displace more contemplative modes of traveling. Unable to keep his eyes on his book, one passenger is shown speaking animatedly to a fellow traveler whose posture—seen from the rear only—suggests sleep rather than attentive listening. Not one person’s gaze meets another person’s gaze or establishes any sense of visual reciprocity. Menzel’s compartment is clearly not a space for empathetic looking in the Wagnerian sense. Instead, the train’s spectacle of motion, progress, and speed has entirely taken hold of this group of travelers, disintegrating unified sights as much as atomizing existing communities. Restlessly consuming fleeting sceneries, the traveler’s thrill is shown in comical opposition to the compartment’s sedate luxury. Only the uniformed ticket inspector in the background peeking into the car and the sleeping child in the middle of the image seem to evade the way in which the train’s windows here reorganize people’s attention. Menzel’s principle of composition , by contrast, more or less compels the viewer to assume the traveler’s nervous modes of visual perception. Overwhelmed by the relay of disconnected looks, the viewer cannot but fail to find something to relax his or her own act of looking. Each compositional element directs our gaze somewhere else—toward that which remains unseen yet spurs our curiosity. Thus decomposing space and defying any sense of visual closure, the frame of Menzel’s Traveling through the Countryside ends up allegorizing the very industrialization of sight it represents. Though Menzel’s painting seems to mock the passengers ’ edgy voyeurism, it frames its own pictorial space just as nineteenthcentury railway windows at once displayed and produced passing landscapes for the traveler’s eye. When looking at this image, we as viewers too are cut off from the possibility of immersive transport and empathetic identification. Nineteenth-century railway travel, as depicted in Menzel’s gouache of the early 1890s, fundamentally transformed the relationship between the passenger and the landscape. Train travelers no longer belonged to the spaces they traversed. They instead saw “the objects, landscapes, etc., through the apparatus which move[d] him/her through the world.”2 As they were thrust into a new universe of velocity and speed, railway travelers experienced a profound loss of depth perception. The train’s mobility dissociated the viewing subject from the visual field while erasing any reliable distinction between visual foreground and background. The prominence of prosthetic viewing devices in Menzel’s image—reading glasses, spectacles, and binoculars—might be seen as an expression of this disruption of spatial homogeneity and palpability. In the absence of fixed and stable points of observation, nineteenth-century rail- 129 way...