An Uncanny Utopia in Daniel Kehlmann’s Mahlers Zeit

“Das wäre das Ende der Welt” (32). Such is Marcel’s dismissive assessment of his friend’s utopian, but ultimately disconcerting, plan to overturn the Second Law of Thermodynamics and thus introduce a universe no longer advancing inexorably toward disorder, death, and decay. Marcel’s friend, the one who seeks to accomplish this incredible feat, is David Mahler, the main character in Daniel Kehlmann’s Mahlers Zeit (1999), and Mahler admits that his dream would result in “eine ziemliche Veränderung” (32). There are numerous expressions of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, but most relevant in this context is its understanding as a law of increasing entropy. In a closed system, a process can occur only if it increases the total entropy of the universe. Hot becomes cold, fast becomes slow, dense becomes less dense, organized becomes less organized, life becomes death. The process is unidirectional and often observed as time. Mahler envisions a utopian world not by changing its external characteristics but by altering its underlying physical composition. He will bring such a world into existence by conducting revolutionary experiments in which a new basic law will take effect. For Mahler, mathematical savant and lecturer in physics at the university, the status quo of the Second Law and even the hope of discovering a unifying principle to reconcile inconsistencies between quantum mechanics and relativity theory are unacceptable. He is convinced instead that the inconsistencies in the universe, such as the seemingly contradictory particle and wave nature of the electron (97), are evidence that the natural order is irrevocably flawed and that its contradictions are irreconcilable errors. Mahler feels compelled to rectify such imperfection by formulating new universal laws that are internally consistent and by then setting in motion a chain of events that will replace the flawed order with a perfect one. Marcel’s pessimistic assessment of Mahler’s plan, however, alludes not only to the impossible realization of such utopian thinking in this world. It also challenges the radical, science-based changes his friend proposes that are likely to introduce unforeseen, in fact, terrifying consequences (“das Ende der Welt”) into the perfect reality he promises.

Although the novel begins optimistically with Mahler’s discovery of the formulas to overturn the Second Law, the discovery is not simply the culmination of Mahler’s lifelong quest to eliminate error and decline from the world, but also an alarm to the forces of the current universe that they must prevent Mahler from implementing his findings and upsetting the given order. In the three days that follow and end in Mahler’s death at the hands of these forces, we witness Mahler’s futile attempt to communicate his finding to the scientific community and his friends and to persuade them of the desirability of its implementation. The following discussion will demonstrate how Mahler’s inability to achieve these goals involves the role of postmodern science in utopian thinking as well as the fundamental inadequacy of an individual to articulate the means by which one can achieve the radical new world order he envisions.

Time is a critical dimension in the Second Law, and reversing its flow is the primary component of Mahler’s utopian thinking. As early as 1952, Werner Heisenberg speculated that the inconsistencies of modern physics might be overcome, not by the nonintuitive theory of complementarity, where contradictory states of being may be copossible, or by a unifying theory that resolves inconsistency within a broader, more universal context, but by imagining, perhaps just as nonintuitively, that (quantum) time can proceed in a direction contrary to what causality seems to require – in other words backwards (Heisenberg 126). Mahler’s utopian vision for the universe follows Heisenberg’s solution for inconsistency in the quantum realm by establishing a universe free from the destructiveness of the Second Law with its ever increasing entropy and the one-directional nature of time and causality. He explains to Marcel that “Unter gewissen Umständen, bei einer gewissen Strahlung, unter Anwendung von vier Formeln – lässt [das zweite Gesetz] sich umkehren” (32). For Mahler, his vision is not hypothetical, not...