5 - Hymns to Chicago: Progress, Myth, and the Music of the Metropolis

Summary

ON A CRISP, CLEAR FALL MORNING, thousands of New Yorkers stopped whatever they were doing and stared up into the sky, waiting and watching for the zeppelin to appear. On this “unforgettable morning,” as Leitich describes it, the city's buildings stood out against the sky with a “Tollkühnheit sondergleichen” (unsurpassed daring), possessing the kind of peace and confidence that can only be found in ancient mountains. As the zeppelin “ZR-3.” broke through the clouds, New York City erupted in joy: “Und dann plötzlich ein Schreien, ein Stampfen, ein Wimpelwinken, ein Böllerschießen, ein Menschenwimmeln auf Straßen und Dächern” (And then suddenly there was screaming, stomping, flag waving, fireworks, swarms of people on the streets and on the rooftops). Compared with the ecstatic, percussive sounds of the crowds, the framing silhouette of the city formed an altogether different kind of music: “Newyorks berühmte Skyline, Newyorks Himmelslinie—Zacken, Grate, Dome, Schluchten—sie hat zwar viele Ausrufer, aber noch keinen Sänger gefunden. Wie sie aus dem Meer heraus gerade sich selbst emporträgt, ein Kyrie eleison!” (New York's famous skyline—jags, ridges, towers, canyons—many have proclaimed its advent, but none have yet sung its praises. How it soars upward from out of the sea—a Kyrie Eleison!) The city may still have been waiting for its Orpheus, but the skyline was already a sacred song: a vehement, moving “Kyrie Eleison” in the architectural requiem of human achievement. Thus begins “Z.R.3.,” one of the lead-in essays in Leitich's book Amerika, du hast es besser. Whereas many of Leitich's essays in her book—including her rebuttal to Zweig's “Die Monotonisierung der Welt”—are critical of the “trostlose Häßlichkeit” (inconsolable ugliness) of American cities and the dehumanizing mechanization that they represent, her musical image of the Manhattan skyline in “Z.R.3.” turns Leitich herself into the singer who praises the frightful beauty of a new, urbanized geography. Like so many of Leitich's articles, “Z.R.3.” resonates with her European readers’ ambivalent feelings about America. On one hand, she appeals to their fascination with the spectacles of modern existence, using suspense, hyperbole, and a first-person viewpoint to describe the exotic, the new, and the enormous. On the other hand, she plays to her readers’ feelings of cultural superiority, using the familiar language of bourgeois aesthetics to create a sublime, mythical dread of the phenomena she describes.