A Psychogeographical Tale of Two Cities

Review of Peter Jüngst, Territorialität und Psychodynamik: Eine Einführung in die Psychogeographie [Territoriality and Psychodynamics: An Introduction to Psychogeography]. Gießen, Germany: Psychosozial-Verlag, 2000. 357 pp.

To find an author’s thesis familiar is reassuring. Peter Jüngst’s chapter, “Regarding Changes of Territoriality and Representational Symbolic from the Early Modern to the Recent Period” (pp. 205-281), deals with Kassel in Germany but he might as well have written it about Olomouc in the Czech Republic. Some American readers know Olomouc from Austrian Imperial history when it was called Olmütz and the young Francis Joseph, sidestepping the revolutions spreading eastward from Paris, was crowned Emperor there in 1848.

Olomouc should actually be more famous for its outstanding assemblage of buildings that rival each other in style as well as political, economic, and social significance. One core of this assemblage is the city hall; the other, the sacred administrative buildings surrounding the much later neo-Gothic cathedral. While the town hall in the “upper square” retained its political and social significance ever since the Late Middle Ages, the archbishop and the Imperial government created a massive administrative center a stone’s throw from the cathedral in the 18th century. This latest center contains several exquisite baroque churches; elegant but massive baroque, rococo and Paladian sacred and secular administrative structures; and Palacky University.

When one reads about this 18th-century center with Jüngst’s Kassel in mind, the inescapable impression is distance, elegance, power, and fear. The newer administrative center is so massive that traversing or bypassing the center is an undertaking of about 15 minutes. One may even suspect that this center was erected in part to rival the religious, economic, and political core symbolized by

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the upper square (and its associated lower square) as that part of town leaned toward Protestantism. One may confidently doubt that ordinary people in the 18th or 19th centuries, just like some today, felt invited into this center. Just as importantly, and again with Jüngst, one can show that the persons and families who lived around this center served the archbishop and the Imperial government. As late as the later 19th century, the elegant yet huge burgher housing blocks created adjacent to the city wall, below the center and in view of the new cathedral, indicate apartments of well-to-do citizens.

Even more fascinating is that Olomouc has recently overcome (without plan, it would appear from a conversation with a city official but in accord with Jüngst’s suggestions) its autocratic and so-called undemocratic heritage. While the town center at the upper and lower squares continues to serve its traditional political and economic functions, the 18th-century administrative center is being penetrated successfully by a post office, restaurants, hotels, and the varied populations and functions of the university. While university buildings are guarded, two of the passages across the town wall are locked at night, the churches remain usually locked, and most mortals would not dare enter the archbishop’s quarters, this commercial infiltration reduces fear but not grandeur. Olomouc thus follows Jüngst’s suggestion that one can tone down the forbidding nature of traditional centers by mixing people and functions. If Jüngst in addition had also concentrated on Vienna, then he would have discovered that the various social classes and functions infiltrated each other’s spaces at least as early as the 17th century.

Jüngst addresses successfully many other issues in his study of human spatial arrangements. Among these are constants in space and time (pp. 29-139); approaches to understanding and decoding the symbolism of spatial surroundings (pp. 140-183); methodological access and obstacles (pp. 184-204); and a psychogeographic discussion of “development” and “underdevelopment” (pp. 282-323). In the first of these, he includes a lengthy exposition of male and female understanding of space and, in the last, a fascinating exposition of different childrearing practices in black Africa and the West and their social and spatial consequences.

Nevertheless, Jüngst’s study is not for the timid. It is written for the specialist of both human spatiality and German. While his points about spatiality are familiar to specialists (like academics and urban planners) and take them to the next level, much of his German is inaccessible to all but the most sophisticated readers of that language.

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