Doctor Criminale

So, sitting there in my grey-upholstered compartment, I began to think about how different European centuries had ended. I recalled, for instance, that in 1889, one hundred years before the Berlin Wall came down, the Eiffel Tower went up. It went up because just a hundred years before that, in the turbulent ending of the previous century, the French Revolution had exploded, the world had turned upside-down, even the calendar had briefly begun anew. And so, in the same year as the Mayerling tragedy, when Vie

What they didn’t know was that Eiffel’s thoughts had recently shifted from sideways to upwards. In a matter of months Eiffel got out his ironwork and built his tower. One morning in 1889 Parisians woke up and there, by God, it was. You couldn’t miss it; but, like a building that had a cabbage on top of it, it seemed to make no sense at all. It was fairly evidently a monument to something, but unfortunately there was nothing written on it to say what it was a monument to. It looked like the spire of a great cathedral, but the nave was missing, and there was no altar to worship at and no particular deity mentioned. It resembled the great new American business skyscrapers going up in the cities of Chicago and New York, but because there was no inside to its outside, there was not too much hope of doing any real business in it. Thirteen years earlier, to celebrate the cente

Today, of course, high on our fine postmodern wisdom, we know exactly what Gustave was all about. Eiffel’s Tower was a monument to only one thing: itself. It was a spectacle, and there was nothing much to be done with it, except look up at its head from its feet, or down at its feet from its head, or clamber up and down in it, staring at the panorama of Paris it opened up and controlled on every side. So of course it a

Then, a decade or so later, the French suddenly discovered what the Eiffel Tower was really for. It made the perfect radio transmitter, and this meant it was a perfect act of prescience on Gustave’s part, because radio hadn’t even been invented when he put it up. Instead of putting him in prison, Eiffel was feted and given the Légion d’Ho

And why not? Don’t we live now not in modern but postmodern times, the age of pluristyle, form as parody, art as quotation, the era of culture as world fair? In Berlin Honecker’s wall was coming down and turning into art-work, everywhere politics and culture were becoming spectacle. So, that July, lit by lasers and beamed worldwide (courtesy the transmission facilities of the Eiffel Tower), an international soprano sang the Marseillaise, and in the Champs-Elysées Egyptian belly-dancers gyrated with Caribbean limbo dancers, gays danced with, les­bians, Structuralist philosophers bu

But even the thought that new times needed new thoughts was not itself all that new. For example, I remembered, when Gustave was pushing up his great phallic tower over Paris in 1889, a young philosopher named Henri Bergson was publishing his book Time and Free Will, which argued that the i

But such things were happening everywhere in 1889. On that other great European river, the Rhine, in the Swiss city of Basel, another great professor, Professor Doktor Friedrich Nietzsche, had devoted himself to bringing the modern about. It had not been an easy job, and in fact in 1889 he started to go mad from rather too much of it. He began singing and grimacing uncontrollably in the streets, was found embracing carthorses, and he took to predicting, not very accurately, various plagues, earthquakes, droughts, global warmings, world wars and other mille