Cracks, collapses and decay: Narrative strategies of creating and coping with contingency (1947-1972)

While architectural modernism responded to the accelerated flow of movement in the industrial world with structural calculations and constructions and set itself the goal of channelling and directing them, scenes of destruction were at the same time projected onto the built environment through the cultural imaginary. The numerous descriptions of inexplicable formations of cracks and unforeseen collapses in literary and cinematic narratives of the post-war period testify to a conflict between the structural engineering efforts to minimise contingency experiences and the simultaneous creation of new moments of error-proneness as well as the human failure to subordinate themselves to the rules of use of their own design objects and technologies. With Ingeborg Bachmann's «Ein Ort für Zufälle» and «Malina», Giuseppe de Santis' Roma Ore 11 and Boris Vian's L'écume des jours, the fictionalised cities of Berlin, Vienna, Rome and Paris are chosen as exemplary settings for Western European modernity.

The filmic or literary scenes of ruptures, collapses and decays refer to a broader cultural, social and political confrontation with experiences of contingency and show an uncertainty that is spreading in the face of the modern world. It is only in the fragmentary and multi-perspective narratives in the realm of the imaginary and fiction that an aesthetic translation of this experience takes place, which can be analysed through close reading. In the scenes of crack formations and collapses, physical and social forces become visible that have an effect on the building and social structures and can activate a destructive potential. They deal with a classic sociological controversy: between statics and dynamics, between calculation and indeterminacy, between structures that shape society and the unpredictability of human dynamics.