Exploring the terrain

thought. The second part of the book, “reading Maps,” includes a brief examination of the cultural nature and political significance of maps and an engaging, though rudimentary, outline of the evolution of cartography in relation to systems of power and knowledge. For these sections, the author relies heavily on a limited range of mainly English-language secondary sources, all well-known to anglo-american scholars but perhaps less familiar to his German readership. The work is at its most interesting when the author ventures beyond the well-trodden territory of historiographical synthesis to offer NEW SPaTIaL HISTORIES OF 20TH-CENTURY RUSSIa aND THE SOVIET UNION 435 his own studies of modern space and the spaces of modernity, constructing an anthology or “sampler” of methods, approaches, and styles in the new spatial history. In part 2, Schlögel dedicates chapters to the 1938 Philo-Atlas (a handbook published in Berlin in 1938 to facilitate Jewish emigration), a tourist map showing Sarajevo under siege during the Bosnian conflict of the mid-1990s, the life of Sándor Radó (the Soviet “agent Dora” based in Switzerland during World War II), and the historical role and meaning of the map-table. Each proceeds from description of the particular artifact, text, or biography to general meditations on 20th-century cartographic strategies, sensibilities, and technologies. In part 3, “Working with the Eyes,” and part 4, “Diaphanous Europe,” the author uses the same approach to reflect on the material and mental spaces of modernity and postmodernity, and on the means of knowing and understanding these spaces. among other subjects, he analyzes a photograph of John F. Kennedy’s assassination; the markings on city pavements; town plans; the life-stories of houses, hotels, and apartment blocks; room interiors; Berlin directories from 1932 to 1962; railway timetables; the fingerprint; Baedeker’s travel guides; the poetics of the american highway; Diaghilev’s cultural and erotic peregrinations; European cemeteries; and the gates to auschwitz-Birkenau. These essays are idiosyncratic, provocative, incisive, and insightful. They bring space into the foreground, as an historical actor in its own right rather than a mere backdrop to action, and enliven our appreciation of how history inscribes itself in spatial forms and ideas. at the same time, they constitute a significant challenge to historians—as well as to scholars of other disciplines, policymakers and planners, and the general reader—to engage with space in new ways. In particular, Schlögel proposes that we should “go out into the world” and experience space directly, through “working with the eyes” as much as with the intellect, studying nature at first hand like the explorerscholar von Humboldt, treading city streets like Walter Benjamin, flaneur of 20th-century urban modernity. Following this method, Schlögel suggests, our narrative will be structured by the routes we take and observations we make, by our perception of analogies, contiguities, or disjunctions between or among phenomena, rather than by chronology or causality. This new history will no longer privilege diachronic development at the cost of acknowledging rupture and discontinuity, since it is grounded in our acute sensation, as well as our critical reading, of the juxtaposition of physical traces of the past in space. It is a history that asserts simultaneity and confrontation above progress and flow. 2 Schlögel’s analysis bears a striking resemblance to Michel Foucault’s 1967 assertion, “We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed,” in Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16, 1 (1986): 22.