Paula Allhorn
Interiors

I happened to go to Savannah because my boyfriend was working at a film festival there. I spent days taking long and methodical walks around the small city. It is an unusually well-preserved city for American standards. If you are attentive, the whole history of the United States will be laid out visually before your eyes.

The city of Savannah flourished during the transition from Mercantile to Industrial Capitalism as men from all kinds of places arrived there and made their fortunes through the production and export of cotton and rice. As a port city, Savannah served as a transloading site in which these goods were produced on the nearby plantations and sent to Europe or the nothern states. Early industrialists built themselves large, magnificent houses, but not necessarily in order to live in them. The houses were only inhabited a quarter of the year to keep buisness under control; they carried a symbolic value which created respect among the working men left behind. For the rest of the year, they resided in places which were more culturally flourishing or less plagued by heat. The profitable plantation economy of the American south was built on the labor of people who were robbed of their homelands and deprived of their rights. This system collapsed after the Civil War was lost. As a result, the South went financially bankrupt and lost its economic relavance. Subsequently the wealthy plantation and mansion owners left the region for more lucrative locations.

What remained was a small abandoned city wearing the representative costume of early 19th century capitalism. However, the Historic Savannah Foundation, founded in 1955, prevented the houses from being torn down. Unlike elsewhere in the South, the Neo-Classical and Greek Revival style buildings were not replaced by malls and parking lots, but sold and restored. What remains today is a landscape of several house museums which preserve and conserve the history and interiors of the early industrial founding families of the United States.

In 19th century Europe, a newly emerging middle class began to define and assert itself in contrast to the nobility and even more so to the lower working class. Among other things, they did this through the accumulation of prestigious and decorative interiors. Such an elaborate overview of small and large objects from the 19th century as is found in Savannah reminded me of Benjamin’s historical-materialist analysis of the European interieur of that period. Through Benjamin’s analysis, which consists of a collection of quotations, I came across an early text by Adorno on Kierkegaard, written in 1931. Adorno attempts to understand Kierkegaard through the time in which the Danish philosopher lived, the early 19th century. A time in which the expanding capitalist world outside started to entice the masses through temptations in all their material forms. As a result of this, the outside world was attributed a greater role in educating consumers than in cultivating an intellectually stimulating inner life. Kierkegaard’s writing emerged from a position of alienation within that reality. In order to flee the reification, he withdrew into his inner world. Thought alone commanded this field, leading him to conceive objectless inwardness as the ideal.

“and he who has the world’s treasures, has them, however he got them. It is different in the world of spirit.-”¹

Although the world of things is left out of Kierkegaard’s absolute inwardness, it continues to determine his metaphors unconsciously, which often originate in the constraints of his bourgeois private existence. Adorno argues that the descriptions of interiors in Kierkegaard have an objective-historical meaning, despite the fact that Kierkegaard himself would have denied such an interpretation. Adorno finds informative strength in Kierkegaard’s writing, precisely because it derives from the ensealed confines of nineteenth-century middleclass living rooms.

“The contents of the intérieur are mere decoration, alienated from the purposes they represent, deprived of their own use-value [...]. Their illusory quality is historically-economically produced by the alienation of thing from use-value. But in the intérieur things do not remain alien. It draws meaning out of them. Foreignness transforms itself from alienated things into expression; mute things speak as ‘symbols.’ [...] In the intérieur archaic images unfold: the image of the flower as that of organic life; the image of the orient as specifically the homeland of yearning; the image of the orient as specifically the homeland of yearning; the image of the sea as that of eternity itself. For the semblance to which the historical hour condemns things is eternal.”²

Paula Allhorn finished her studies at the art academy in Düsseldorf under Trisha Donnelly in 2023. Since then, she has been enrolled in the directing program at the German film and television academy (dffb) in Berlin.

1. Sören Kierkegaard: „Stadien auf dem Lebensweg“, Sämtliche Werke Band 4.
2. Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno: „Kierkegaard. Konstruktion des Ästhetischen“, Habilitationsschrift, 1931.

Text by Paula Allhorn