The discovery of the simultaneity installed almost everywhere today, which can transport, exchange and generate world news and stock market prices, financial transactions and television pictures via satellite transmission, first made itself felt, in spectacular fashion, at the turn of the century. As the American cultural historian Stephen Kern has shown in detail, the period between 1880 and 1918 laid the foundations for the drastic changes people experienced in the sense of space and time. It was as if the technological, artistic and scientific achievements of this epoch converged to break down the well-rehearsed spatial and temporal structures of social perception and transform them into a broad experimental field, in which new ways of seeing, different spatial forms and, not least, new, more democratic, social and political relations were to be tested and rehearsed. Spatial distances which had been insurmountable up till then were erased by the invention and regular technological improvements of the telegraph, the radio and the telephone. Through the electrification of the cities, the difference between day and night could be artificially negated for the first time. The cinematograph succeeded not just in making pictures move but in slowing down or speeding up the captured movements at will, indeed even in winding them backwards and thus creating totally new ways of seeing. It is not surprising that it was above all the artists and writers who got swept up in these changes and who attempted to give voice and expression, sound and form to the new sense of space and time. The classical narrative mode of the novel or the conventional stanzas of lyric poetry were rejected, and replaced by revolutionary innovations. The changed sense of time seized hold of music and led to the creation of atonalities never heard before, which were based on the twelve-tone scale. In the plastic and graphic arts and in painting, forms were sought which made it possible to portray several perspectives at the same time; form and colour were to be capable of reproducing the changes from moment to moment. Without any historical exaggeration, it can be said that the remarkable artistic creativity of that period, whose ‘intoxication with space and time' was to last far into the inter-war period, drew more or less consciously on the ruins of a declining social system, in which it was no longer true, as formerly, that everything had ‘its time and place'. It was rather a question of defining time and place anew, for the greatest possible – and for the first time also democratic – variety of perspectives and points of view, of positions and subjective experiences.³
The Illusion of Simultaneity
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