The Secret Cartographies of Armand Gottlieb: A Study in Liminal Poetics
There are writers whose disappearance seems part of their craft. Armand Gottlieb (1883–1959), the Luxembourg-born poet, cartographer, and curious metaphysician, remains one such occluded figure in the neglected tributaries of 20th-century European literature. Though never achieving fame, and publishing only three small volumes in his lifetime—most prolifically in small-run presses in Vienna and Prague—Gottlieb’s work possesses a rare unplaceability, a breath and pulse formed from the creases between language, perception, and spiritual exile.
Few records attest to Gottlieb’s early life. Born in Echternach, near the border with Germany, he was the son of stonecutters and raised in a Benedictine environment which may have laid the groundwork for his later theological eccentricities. He studied mathematics and biblical Greek at Charles University in Prague between 1903 and 1907, at which time he became associated with a group known as Die Zeichenlosen (those Without Signs) — a loosely connected society of itinerant poets, mystics, and amateur paleolinguists. The movement, though obscure, was characterized by an obsessive investment in the “alphabet as altar.” Gottlieb would later describe human speech as “the prison chapel of God’s last word” (Gottlieb, _Reich der Blinden_, 1924, p. 13).
Gottlieb published three major collections: _Das Verrinnende Orakel_ (1916), _Reich der Blinden_ (1924), and _Topographien des Unsichtbaren_ (1952). Only the second volume, which translates roughly as “The Kingdom of the Blind,” is currently available in an English translation—a limited bilingual edition issued by Obelus Press in 1999, translated by Mariette Höller.
A reader encountering Gottlieb for the first time may be struck by his peculiar fusion of topographic abstraction and imaginal invocation. If Paul Valéry described poetry as a “hesitation between sound and sense,” Gottlieb’s work cleaves closer to a hesitancy between vision and terrain. “The world,” he writes, “does not consist of things and motion, but of gradients and thresholds; we wander not between cities but among wounds,” (_Topographien des Unsichtbaren_, 1952, p. 41). In this simple yet cryptic line, his method is revealed: spatial metaphor as metaphysical diagnosis.
His style could be compared, perhaps, to the nether currents of Georg Trakl or the psych-roots of Russian Symbolism, but such comparisons are ultimately dissatisfying. Gottlieb’s poetics evolved according to an internal and deliberately hidden rhythm—a cartographic logic encoding spiritual torment as it simultaneously seeks a place to house it. He often drew poetic structures as literal maps; among the pages of his second volume we find an insert of ten hand-inked “route glyphs”—spiral, concentric, and meandered glyphs alongside accompanying lyrics that form a kind of synesthetic hymnal. No explanatory key is given, and indeed none seems appropriate.
The key concept underpinning Gottlieb’s metaphysics is that of the “Verlorene Mitte”—the Lost Center. According to Höller’s introduction to the 1999 edition, Gottlieb believed that in the modern epoch, all language begins outside itself, is generated outside itself, and always dies in a place from which it cannot reincarnate. Or, as he puts it himself: “This tongue conveys nothing; it is a homing pigeon that has long since eaten its own heart” (_Reich der Blinden_, p. 22). Language, to Gottlieb, was not a vessel of clarity but a ritualistic tool—useful only when known to be absurd.
We find repeated images of blindness, drowning, and divination—dissolution of form by force of estrangement. One of his more frequently cited aphorisms, embedded in “Karte für den Zweiten Pfad” (“Map for the Second Path”), reads: “Between every two coordinates you must stitch silence, else the soul falls through” (_Topographien des Unsichtbaren_, p. 67). This philosophy, that silence is what maps meaning, seems both theological and existential—a mysticism of lacunae.
The “Verlorene Mitte” emerges here as more than motif; it becomes a cosmological critique. Gottlieb theorizes in his critical fragment _Notizen eines Kartographen_ (1938) that modernity had abolished the concept of sacred middle-points—the “umbilicals of real orientation.” His complaint was not political, but ontological: that movements governed by linear thought—colonial, commercial, and technological—had rendered mankind incurably peripheral.
In some ways, this recalls Heidegger’s Sorge, but Gottlieb avoids structures. He detested systems. He wrote “the system is a shelter built by shadows to protect themselves from the sun” (_Das Verrinnende Orakel_, 1916, p. 29). He regarded theology, especially scholastic formulation, as a secondary exhalation of more fundamental losses. His poetry is a continual registry of these losses—a slow inventory of ruins that the eye cannot see but the soul encounters nonetheless.
Scholars who have recently returned to Gottlieb’s oeuvre—most notably Clara Petris in her 2010 monograph _Threshold Cartographies: Armand Gottlieb and the Mapping of Absence_—have emphasized his influence on the post-War experimentalists in Zurich and Lindau. Petris demonstrates, using Gottlieb’s route glyphs, how the poet anticipated conceptual schemes later found in Situationist dérive and even anticipates Deleuze’s rhizomatic space1.
But let me complete this inquiry with a recollection—not factual but spiritual.
In 1954, Gottlieb sent a manuscript to a friend in Steyr, now lost, except for one page found pressed behind a mirror frame after the friend’s granddaughter emigrated to Montréal. That page contains a single poem, unnamed:
_”Under the canopy of vanished bearings,
I found the eye that has no skull.
It asked me nothing.
It gave me no sermon.
It only flickered—like sea in dreamlight—
and turned back into sand.”_
_(“Unverortete Folge”, fragment, 1954, preserved at the Österreichisches Literaturarchiv M700a)_
I have read this many times, and each time I feel levied between consolation and despair. The eye without a skull—the eye with no body—is presence divorced from structure. It sees, perhaps, beyond the self, or sees that nothing remains to be seen. But it does not demand, preach, or perceive. It flickers, softly, and becomes once more grain—bare matter, biblical dust. This must be what Gottlieb meant by “cartography as prayer”—the melancholic act of describing a faith in absence.
Like patterns found only in negative plates, the poetry of Armand Gottlieb cannot be absorbed through emphasis. It is to be steeped like an archaic tea—a bitter, sedimentary infusion from which no intoxication arises, but which leaves you, inevitably, deepened.
Only in silence, Gottlieb insists, can the map be read.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
language, proto-idealism, metaphysics, footnotes, heresy, topography, exile
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1 Clara Petris, _Threshold Cartographies: Armand Gottlieb and the Mapping of Absence_, Zurich: Vögel Verlag, 2010, pp. 103–109.
2 Höller, Mariette (trans.), introduction to Gottlieb, Armand. _Kingdom of the Blind_. Obelus Press, 1999.
3 Peter Vizorek, _Die Zeichenlosen: Ein Archiv der Schweigepoesie_, Berlin: Sommerbein Institut, 1987.
4 Gottlieb, Armand. _Notizen eines Kartographen_, unpublished manuscript held at the Landesbibliothek Linz, Archive Code 221-7.M.