considered ‘the most rational of the senses’. ‘While smell may have become “inessential” in the world of science, in the fields of humanities and social sciences it has only begun to show its potential to open vast new territories of exploration. At the very least, it has demonstrated its ability to inspire.’ To put it plainly, we need to ‘sniff around’ history more.8
In wide swathes of Western intellectual thought, we find a suppression of the sense of smell, but also a persistent rebellion against the hegemony of the ‘rational’ senses. Hegel feels powerless against the spread of ‘pure insight’, which he compares to the spread of an odour: ‘It is on this account that the communication of pure insight is comparable to a silent expansion or to the diffusion, say, of a perfume in the unresisting atmosphere. It is a penetrating infection which does not make itself noticeable beforehand as something opposed to the indifferent element into which it insinuates itself, and therefore cannot be warded off.’9
Kant ranks smell as the most ‘dispensable’ sense in his anthropology and identifies ‘stench’ as the background with which a smell contrasts, the only way it makes ‘sense’:
Which organic sense is the most ungrateful and also seems to be the most dispensable? The sense of smell. It does not pay to cultivate it or refine it at all in order to enjoy; for there are more disgusting objects than pleasant ones (especially in crowded places), and even when we come across something fragrant, the pleasure coming from the sense of smell is always fleeting and transient. – But as a negative condition of well-being, this sense is not unimportant, in order not to breathe in bad air (oven fumes, the stench of swamps and animal carcasses), or also not to need rotten things for nourishment.10
Nietzsche, by contrast, says of himself: ‘My genius is in my nostrils.’11 And: ‘Tell me, my animals: these higher men, all of them – do they perhaps smell bad? O pure smells about me! Only now I know and feel how much I love you, my animals.’12 The Russian perfumer Konstantin Verigin harks back to Arthur Schopenhauer, who refers to the sense of smell as ‘the sense of memory, because it recalls to our mind more directly than anything else the specific impression of an event or an environment, even from the most remote past’.13 And one of the most ruthless observers of the twentieth century, George Orwell, pinpoints smell as the deepest distinction between the classes: ‘The lower classes smell . . . For no feeling of like or dislike is quite so fundamental as a physical feeling.’14
We perceive not only with our eyes, our perception not only comprises images, and our memory adheres not only to iconic and emblematic signs. Just as there is a ‘noise of time’ and every epoch has its own sound, every age has its own scentscape. The generations who grew up in the shadow of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, whose rites of passage involved border crossings, such as the Friedrichstrasse station between East and West Berlin or the Cheb crossing on the old German–Czech border, will probably always have an olfactory memory of those borders. Even after a long period of enlightenment and distance from the specific smells that usually have negative connotations, even now that the world has been progressively deodorized, we cannot simply catapult ourselves out of the realm of scent. We perceive the world not only with our eyes, but also with our nose. The rhythm of the seasons materializes not only in shades of lightness and darkness, but in shades of smell – the scent of snow on the air, a fresh spring breeze, the heat of summer weighing down on cities and fields, the mustiness of autumn leaves. Day after day, we traverse zones marked out by smells – the steam rising from coffee in a takeaway paper cup, the grease of a chip shop, the technoid whiff of oil and tar as we glide down an escalator into a subway station. We ride in buses where, depending on the temperature and time of year, the perspiration of bodies pressed close can prove stronger than the deodorized layer in which we swathe ourselves each day. We inhale the sharp, almost fruity aroma of petrol at service stations and the generic smell of department stores and supermarkets, where all the differences between an endless variety of goods have melded into a stew of odours difficult to describe.
The slightest disruption to our everyday smells – uncollected rubbish, for instance – pops the deodorized bubble in which we usually live, causes irritation and unease. We must make an effort to bear a stench. We suffer not only from the tyranny of intimacy, but from the world of smells produced by that intimacy. We do not want it to touch us. Progress is measured by the suppression of stench, and what we consider pleasant or repugnant is an aspect of the lordship–bondage relationship described by Hegel and Marx: the struggle between the centre and the periphery, between above and below, between people living in close proximity, between the West and the non-European world. The spread of the ‘sanitary convenience’ is as reliable an indicator of civilization as the establishment of a parliamentary order – at least according to Somerset Maugham.15 The smell of progress in the industrial age, the belching smokestacks and chimneys, has been followed by an odourless postindustrial digital economy, and even the creation of smoke-free zones in restaurants to guarantee a pleasant dining experience. In the language of political agitation, the ancien régime lands on the ‘trash heap of history’, and the new era dawns like a paradise with its attendant paradisiacal fragrances.
Literature is full of smells: the scent of flowers, the ‘smoke of the fatherland’ (Fyodor Tyutchev), the pungency of Soviet Belomorkanal cigarettes. The catastrophes of the twentieth century involved not only apocalyptic landscapes but also the gas of the gas chambers, the stench of the smoke rising from the crematoria, the stink of the camps in which people were left to rot away while still alive. Smells and scents have their own production time and their own expiry time. Smells linger long after regimes have fallen and ideologies have faded – and vice versa. Cycles of scents do not coincide with legislative periods. They live by their own time. Scents can survive revolutions.
The ‘scent of the big wide world’, as one cigarette brand billed itself, was once associated with the horizons opened up by Pan American Airways. Generations are divided not only by their changing tastes but by their signature scents. Wars create a din and also generate smells of gun smoke, burning and corpses. The air that follows a thunderstorm is fresh, cleansed. We cannot describe the most banal aspects of present or past without mentioning times and places, but nor can we avoid mentioning tastes and smells. We need not debate which of the senses is given priority: sight, sound, touch, smell, taste. Images impress themselves on our memory, but smells take hold there as well. It requires no more than a breath of air and the hint of a scent to bring whole scenes to life in our mind: the waxy smell of a parquet floor, a school stairwell, the aroma of a stationery shop, a gymnasium, incense billowing from a censer during Holy Mass, the smell of petrol from a car – be it an Eastern Trabant or Western Ford.
The odour of an age clings to all phases of life, and it cannot be wrong to take this into account when reconstructing the past. The ‘ur-scene’ in this process must be the madeleine episode in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, in which a small cake dipped in a cup of tea triggers an ‘all-powerful joy’ as soon as it touches the narrator’s lips. Proust’s description of the sense of taste must surely also apply to the sense of smell: ‘No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shiver ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin.’ What follows is several pages of reflection on what had been unleashed by that sensation of taste. There is no logical conclusion, only ‘evidence of its felicity’:
Undoubtedly what is thus palpitating in the depths of my being must be the image, the visual memory which, being linked to that taste, is trying to follow it into my conscious mind. But its struggles are too far off, too confused and chaotic; scarcely can I perceive the neutral glow into which the elusive whirling medley of stirred-up colours is fused, and I cannot distinguish its form, cannot invite it, as the one possible interpreter, to translate for me the evidence of its contemporary, its inseparable paramour, the taste, cannot ask it to inform me what special circumstance is in question, from what period in my past life. . . . And suddenly the memory revealed itself.
The memory is of a specific place, a specific day, a specific