Jacob Shell: Visual Work + Short Essays

Königsberg Counterfactual – with counterfactual Curonian Canal and counterfactual neighborhoods outside Kneiphof and Aldstadt.
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I created this during Dec 2017-Aug 2018.
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The map is 39 x 30 inches, colored pencil.

These maps show pencilwork prior to color:

This counterfactual version of the city of Königsberg separated from the Hohenzollern Kingdom of Prussia around the 1850s, becoming a sovereign multilingual and multireligious state. The map shows the late 20th or early 21st century urban morphological result. At the very center of the map is the original, pre-19th century city, spatially organized around a small island (Kneiphof) at a river confluence (two branches of the Pregel River). Much of the rest of the map outside this core, including streets, highways, railroads, canals, wharves, and campus complexes, is my own fictitious extrapolation and projection.

The real Königsberg was an important center of the Enlightenment in the 18th century. Immanuel Kant spent his whole life there. Kneiphof Island and its configuration of bridges inspired the famous “seven bridge problem” formulated by the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. During the 19th and early 20th centuries, the city’s status waned, as it became a marginal eastern frontier city for the Prussian state and German Empire. The city was completely destroyed during WW2, and rebuilt by the USSR as Kaliningrad. Kaliningrad/Königsberg is unusual in the degree of erasure–both cultural and morphological–which it experienced. In addition to being razed, the city was rebuilt according to a different plan. This map-art project seeks to recover something which was lost in the past and reimagine it as incorporated into our own present.

Map of Königsberg in 1763:

Map of Königsberg in 1832, prior to counterfactual:

Map of Königsberg in 1860, just after counterfactual (railroads have different orientation):

Map of Königsberg in 1928:

Map of Kaliningrad circa 2015:

Below shows traced areas (mostly from 1860 map) vs. fictitious extrapolation.

WHY COUNTERFACTUAL CARTOGRAPHY?

Counterfactual cartography seems to be a growing genre among amateur and some professional cartographers, map-artists, and narrativists. One can find an impressive and ever-growing collection in Imaginary Maps Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/imaginarymaps/) and Alt History Reddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/althistory/).

One of the more famous examples of the genre is Nicolaj Cyon's Alkebu-lan (drawn circa 2010). Alkebu-lan shows a counterfactual political geography of a version of modern Africa which never underwent European colonization. Evidently, some Arabian colonization has still taken place. Cyon has mentioned being inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson's counterfactual epic novel "Years of Rice and Salt" (2002).

What is the point of counterfactual cartography? Imagining alternative political outcomes, and finding out what it "feels like" to see those outcomes augmented by the authoritative aura of the map, seems to be part of the appeal of the genre. There's also a kind of metaphysically "archaeofuturist" sensibility in such maps, because what's implicit in the genre is that in order to go forward, first one has to go back, to recover (geovisually or otherwise) some forgetten set of previous possibilities. The genre lends itself, sometimes, to expressing lost-cause, dead-ender or irredentist sensibilities (e.g. "North America in the year 2000 if the Confederacy had won", this kind of thing). Urban counterfactual cartography, whose primary lineographic element is street patterns rather than geopolital borders, tends not to wind up in this irredentist part of the genre.

Thus, the Königsberg mapping project presented here is not really about the borders of Prussia or Germany or the USSR or Russia or Poland. It is about an urban morphology which, due one of WW2's strangest and most permanent urban erasures, we in the 21st century never got to experience. As a matter of urban erasure, the only other city Königsberg is comparable with is Tenochtitlan. (Another page on this site shows the lake-island setting of this city on the eve of Spanish conquest: https://jacobshell.carbonmade.com/projects/7165421)