Drei Gleisdreiecke. Boris Pasternak, Viktor Šklovskij und Joseph Roth sehen Berlin
Three times “Gleisdreieck”. Berlin through the eyes of Boris Pasternak, Viktor Shklovskij and Joseph Roth

Summary/Abstract: The article compares three perspectives on a symbol of modern Berlin between the World Wars: the central railway junction Gleisdreieck, which is seen as the “iron heart of Berlin and of modern Germany”. Two of these perspectives are from a point of view of Russian writers, who spent a rather short time in emigration, keeping close ties with Russian culture: Viktor SHKLOVSKY makes Gleisdreieck an issue in his epistolary novel ZOO. Письма не о любви или третьа Елоиза [Zoo. Letters not on Love or Third Eloise], Boris PASTERNAK, who lived in Berlin for less than a year, wrote a poem in Russian with the German title Gleisdreieck, and the Austrian writer Joseph ROTH published an essay called Bekenntnis zum Gleisdreieck [Commitment to Gleisdreieck]. PASTERNAK makes the entanglement of rails a symbol of urbanization, shaped against the background of rural, Biedermeier Germany, which PASTERNAK knew from his years of study in the picturesque town of Marburg. He sees Germany in a rapid process of modernization, which does not extinct its petty bourgeois identity, but blows it up to monstrous dimensions. In SHKLOVSKY’s novel, Gleisdreieck symbolizes life in a cage, cold iron reigns over human beings in an anonymous, deserted and inhuman world. ROTH also emphasizes mechanization and dehumanization, symbolized in Gleisdreieck, but for him, man has to comply with the fast pace of modernity, and this leads to a warm future, because movement implies heat.

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