The first new translation in a century of prophetic international bestseller: a radium-age techno-utopian epic about a monomaniacal engineer's mission to build a railway tunnel connecting Europe and America.
When it was published in 1913, Bernhard Kellermann's The Tunnel became one of the most successful novels ever published, in any language. At once a radium-age techno-utopian pulp novel of rip-roaring action and a devastating critique of human ambition, capital, and progress, it tells the story of Mac Allan, an engineer determined to build the world's first trans-Atlantic train tunnel, from his "futuristic" New York all the way to France.
Kellerman implacably details every aspect of this impossible undertaking: from the raising of funds to the hiring of workers; from the press frenzy to the opposition of the steamship conglomerates. Likewise, as work progresses, The Tunnel portrays the literal descent of conditions underground into a living hell, as the tunnel diggers' inhuman treatment at the hands of capital threatens to blow up in everyone's faces.
As celebrated poet and translator Michael Hofmann writes in his introduction, "Reading The Tunnel now, more than a hundred years after its first appearance, we may be astonished to see its astute identification and dramatization of forces and tendencies in society and civilization that we think of as recent and exclusive to us . . . We see our own ecological disasters, the morphing and leaching of money into publicity, publicity into politics, politics into gimmickry, gimmickry into industrial production, and vice versa and every which way."
About the Author :
Bernhard Kellermann (18791951) was a poet and popular novelist of the early twentieth century. Wildly popular in his lifetime and largely forgotten thereafter, he was censored and criticized for his anti-militaristic views. The Nazi regime burned his books; he moved to East Germany after the War and died in Potsdam, calling for the two Germanys to reunite.
Review :
“Bernhard Kellermann’s spectacular and thrilling narrative of a rail tunnel dug under the Atlantic, linking Europe and North America, was first published in April 1913 in Berlin . . . By 1930, The Tunnel was onto its two hundredth printing; by 1939, it had topped a million sales . . . His masterpiece . . . Reading The Tunnel now, more than a hundred years after its first appearance, we may be astonished to see its astute identification and dramatization of forces and tendencies in society and civilization that we think of as recent and exclusive to us . . . His book [is] hardly obsolete; in our “infrastructure”-obsessed times, it fits as well now as then. Better, I would say.”
—Michael Hofmann, from the Foreword
“The story of the construction of a tunnel from New York to Europe. Deep under the Atlantic, hordes of people burrow towards one another. It’s a crazy story: science fiction mixed with realism, social criticism with engineering romanticism, capitalist belief in progress with wearily apocalyptic fantasy. The tunnel collapses, leading to strikes, rage and misery below the earth, and stock market flotations, dreams of marriage and disillusionment above . . . And so Kellermann succeeds in creating a great novel.”
—Florian Illies, 1913: The Year Before the Storm
“The Tunnel shows what it means to sweat and toil for a great dream. Compared to the dramatic impact of Kellermann’s book, other novels about similar titanic undertakings are pale things indeed.”
—Frank N. Magill, Survey of Science Fiction Literature
