Dr. Ervin Malakaj, CENES Head and Associate Professor of German Studies, published a chapter in the volume, Weimar’s Queer Visual Cultures, edited by Birgit Lang, Ina Linge, and Katie Sutton (University of Toronto Press).
The chapter is titled, “The Queer Potentiality of Ernst Tristan Krutzahn’s Weimar Tarot.” More information about the volume is available on the publisher’s website.
Abstract
The first German book on tarot was published in the Weimar era. Written by the occultist Ernst Tristan Kurtzahn, Der Tarot – die kabbalistische Methode der Zukunftsforschung als Schlüssel zum Okkultismus (1920) offered a systematic analysis of tarot’s symbolic orders and formal conventions. The monograph was also accompanied by the first German-language tarot deck. Readers would be able to cut out cards published in an appendix to the book and use these according to the instructions Kurtzahn provided. The cards featured hand-drawn figures associated with a particular meaning behind each card. However, the images were not intended as a means toward efficient access to meaning. Kurtzahn was an elitist interested in cultivating an esoteric practice the few initiated could wield. In this regard, only select people could properly glean information from the interplay between the text and the visual orders of a card.
Notwithstanding this elitism, his book and the accompanying deck of cards became popular. What explains this counterintuitive popularity? This chapter focuses specifically on the image-text relation presented in Der Tarot and its accompanying deck to argue that Kurtzahn’s study casts tarot as a means to make sense of the world not through established Enlightenment epistemologies but an unintentionally generative semiotic practice of divination underpinning the image-text relation of tarot cards. The abstractions characterizing the images and the explanatory notes about each card in the book encourage free association, which in turn affords people opportunities to practice tarot reading on their own terms. As such, as I will argue, Kurtzahn’s tarot came in the Weimar era to be subjected to what Sara Ahmed calls “queer use”, when objects come to be used for a purpose different from its original one.
As the chapter will detail, the text-image relations of Kurtzahn’s tarot depend on situational knowledge. Readers bring their lived experience to each reading, which they use to inform their sense-making of the abstract text-image relations. In so doing, the sensations—ideas and feelings occasioned by the engagement with each card—come to constitute a queer epistemology in that they depart from Kurtzahn’s prescriptive system, which itself stands in queer relation to dominant Enlightenment epistemologies.
