Martin Atlas

Martin Atlas (born February 23, 1878 in Tasádfö , Bihar County , Hungary ; died after 1926) was an Austro-Hungarian writer. In the years before the First World War, he published the science fiction, Liberation and Titan .

Life

Atlas was the son of a village ruler. After attending elementary school, high school and business school in Grosswardein , he graduated from the “Royal Hungarian Oriental Business Academy ” in Budapest . In 1898 he became an official of the Hungarian Trade Museum in Constantinople , from where he made trips to various areas of the Ottoman Empire over the next seven years . From 1905 he was a representative of the Museum of Commerce in Cairo during the winter months and traveled to Hungary, Germany and France during the summer months. In 1927 he lived in Budapest; later life dates are not known.

The Liberation

On "Penon", a newly emerged island in the Atlantic, on which the first-person narrator is to set up the news system. The best scientists and technicians in the world have come together here to communicate using a planned language called “Fimol”. There, groundbreaking discoveries will soon be made and a technical paradise will be realized through the “mial”, a “form of general long-range effect”. One is planning something huge:

“Away with the valley of misery, away with lamentations and tears, away with hardship and suffering, we want to empty the cup of life completely, it should foam, it should glow the heavenly nectar, and like the Olympic gods we want long, young and live happy!"

The army of the German emperor, who wants to oppose this happiness for humanity, is disarmed from a distance:

“The soldiers, the officers, the generals looked at each other with horror. They saw themselves disarmed, without being able to defend themselves, without knowing how it all came about and how it had happened. This daring, invisible power had spared no one, not even the most holy person of the supreme warlord, who, like his brilliant entourage, saw himself without sabers and weapons and shuddered all over and left the square immediately, so that the people no longer saw the sight of a disarmed ruler to offer."

The mial not only transmits optical and acoustic signals, but also objects are "dispatched" from a control center, where their properties are stored, and materialized at their destination. The clothes and home furnishings etc. produced in this way are only “impressions”, but differ from real objects only in their transformability. The result is a utopia of total reproducibility:

“To mention just a few, all works of art, pictures, statues, architectural peculiarities, all museums, libraries and collections have found material inclusion, which can be evoked as material as well as Tiat. Likewise all more interesting scenes, natural processes, performances and more important occurrences, so that you can e.g. B. the view of the Gulf of Naples with the smoking Vesuvius and all the colorful life, as it is happening there at that moment, in your room, spatially-pictorially, but also physically, you can really have in front of you as if you were out of it looking at a hotel room in Naples or strolling around at the Villa Nazionale . would have in front of them. "

This mial reproduction of course also allows unlimited reproduction, making factories superfluous. With all basic human needs met, states become superfluous and eventually disappear. And it can not only be reproduced, it can also be modified, i.e. properties can be changed and time sequences accelerated or slowed down. The technical power implied has exclusively positive effects and only serves to put mankind freed from work and plague into a state of total well-being. Rottensteiner's characterization of the novel as a “debilitating utopia” calls Saprà “tough, but not unjust”. The contemporaries were more friendly. So who wrote Nobel laureate Wilhelm Ostwald at Atlas: "I am very pleased to welcome a Energizers in you, who conceived the essential aspects of this doctrine properly and fruitfully, and also your cultural ideals are largely sympathetic to me; I also find a lot of my own and original in them. "

titanium

The protagonist Paul Hardt is a lonely inventor who has succeeded in “collecting the energy of the sun, converting it into electricity and storing it as desired” in a device known as “heliodite”. The German government wants to appropriate the power connected with this. Hardt defends himself against it and would rather become world ruler himself. Hardt also invented a flying machine called the “Parahel”, the propellers of which are powered by solar energy stored in electrical accumulators . The attempt to steal Hardt's inventions develops into a conventional plot in the style of the crime or agent novel . Ultimately, the governments succeed in inciting the masses against Hardt and in getting possession of his invention. Hardt has to flee and builds a secret Parahel factory in the Sahara , equips himself with a new weapon, an "electric cannon", flees on to America and in the end destroys the heliodite factory in a hopeless situation, rises the sun with his flying machine towards the highest heights and from there plunges into the depths.

Innerhofer notes that in the figure of Paul Hardt, the claim of the engineer and inventor as a class to participation and social advancement is registered. These include the relationships Hardt to women in whom Hardt level climbs by stage starting with a former student from modest, a "piano artist" to the countess influential circuits with the together it at the end after the pattern of the Icarus in the depth falls. These love relationships like to find their climax in symbolically charged flight experiences. It reads like this:

“And they forgot the world, its storms and struggles, its joys and sorrows. The shackles with which she holds every earthly person to herself seemed to have been stripped from them, the thousand threads through which she pulls her children back and forth like puppets no longer seemed to exist for her, and like them of any earthly weight free, they also believed they were mentally and physically free, no longer belonging to earth. They were hugged and their lips joined in a passionate, never-ending kiss. The flame of love flared brightly in her eyes, and a stream of fire, mighty and primeval, flowed from body to body and dragged the two with it into its glowing elemental element.

And the Parahel rushed through the air like an arrow thrown by the hands of gods, drawing a violent raging storm that carried everything with it.

The sea of ​​air roared and moaned after it, it was accompanied by a roar and rustling, and the clouds that it broke through in its unstoppable flight remained behind it like torn rags. And while the highly increased wild haste of the machine unleashed a turmoil in the whole of nature, inside the two lay in a close embrace and forgot everything, the world, the parahel, all the heights and dangers to which they were exposed and believed to be participants of heavenly delight be.

Hardt first awoke from this rush of love, almost forcibly escaped the embrace, took the wheel and mumbled doubtfully to himself:

"Little would have been missing and we would be shattered on the ground."

Rottensteiner and Innerhofer also note that in the novel, as in the quotation, there is more than once a titanic fall from the heights of Nietzschean superhumanism to the depths of kitsch. Saprà calls the novel "symbolic [...], but mostly only pathetic."

bibliography

• Liberation: a science fiction. 2 vols. Ferdinand Dümmlers Verlagbuchhandlung, Berlin 1910 (2nd edition 1915 ibid.).
• Titan: A literary aeronautical and science fiction. Theodor Gerstenberg, Leipzig 1913 (at least three editions).

literature

• Franz Brümmer : Lexicon of German poets and prose writers from the beginning of the 19th century to the present. 6th edition Reclam, Stuttgart 1913, vol. 8, p. 129, sv Atlas, Martin .
• Hans-Edwin Friedrich: Science Fiction in the German-Language Literature: A Paper on Research Until 1993. De Gruyter, 1995, ISBN 3-484-60307-0 , pp. 173, 199.
• Roland Innerhofer: German Science Fiction 1870-1914: Reconstruction and analysis of the beginnings of a genre. Böhlau, Wien, Köln & Weimar 1996, ISBN 3-205-98514-1 , pp. 79, 207-211, 432-434, 450.
• Tessy Korber: Technology in Early Modern Literature. Dissertation Erlangen-Nürnberg 1997. Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag, Wiesbaden 1988. Reprint: Springer, 2013, ISBN 978-3-663-09029-8 , p. 34 f.
• Franz X. Riederer: The German Acceptance and Reaction. In: Sylvia E. Bowman (Ed.): Edward Bellamy Abroad: An American Prophet's Influence. Twayne Publishers, New York 1962, pp. 189 f.
• Claus Ritter : Struggle for Utopolis or The Mobilization of the Future. Verlag der Nation, 1987, ISBN 3-373-00083-1 , pp. 224-236.
• Franz Rottensteiner, Michael Koseier (Hrsg.): Works guide through the utopian-fantastic literature. Corian-Verlag Heinrich Wimmer, Meitingen 1989 ff., Article Liberation and Titan .
• Nessun Saprà: Lexicon of German Science Fiction & Fantasy 1870-1918. Utopica, 2005, ISBN 3-938083-01-8 , p. 36.

Web links

• Literature by and about Martin Atlas in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ischl bathing list , September 2, 1927, accessed on August 16, 2019.
2. ↑ The Liberation. 1910, Vol. I, p. 45.
3. ↑ The Liberation. 1910, Vol. I, p. 161.
4. ↑ The Liberation. 1910, Vol. I, p. 260.
5. ↑ "Tiat" is the term used in the novel for a visual representation.
6. ↑ The Liberation. 1910, Vol. I, p. 57.
7. ↑ ^{a b} Nessun Saprà: Lexicon of German Science Fiction & Fantasy 1870-1918. Utopica, 2005, ISBN 3-938083-01-8 , p. 36.
8. ^ Franz Rottensteiner: Martin Atlas. The Liberation. In: Factory guide through the utopian-fantastic literature. Corian-Verlag Heinrich Wimmer, Meitingen 1994.
9. ↑ Roland Innerhofer: German Science Fiction 1870-1914: Reconstruction and analysis of the beginnings of a genre. Böhlau, Wien, Köln & Weimar 1996, ISBN 3-205-98514-1 , pp. 432-434.
10. ↑ Claus Ritter: Battle for Utopolis. Verlag der Nation, 1987, p. 225.
11. ↑ Titan. Leipzig 1913, p. 22.
12. ↑ Titan. Leipzig 1913, p. 4.
13. ^ ^{A b} Roland Innerhofer: German Science Fiction 1870–1914: Reconstruction and analysis of the beginnings of a genre. Böhlau, Wien, Köln & Weimar 1996, ISBN 3-205-98514-1 , pp. 207-211.
14. ↑ Titan. Leipzig 1913, p. 63 f. Quoted from Roland Innerhofer: Deutsche Science Fiction 1870–1914. Böhlau, 1996, p. 209 f.
15. ^ Franz Rottensteiner: Martin Atlas. Titanium. In: Factory guide through the utopian-fantastic literature. Corian-Verlag Heinrich Wimmer, Meitingen 1989.