“Book Descriptions: Black–White–Red, first published in German in 1916, collects six bizarre tales by the “laughing philosopher,” Salomo Friedlaender, who wrote his literary work under the pseudonym Mynona (the reversed German word for “anonymous”). Mynona’s self-styled “grotesques” inhabited an uncertain ground between fairytale, fetishism, and philosophy: a peculiar form of slapstick that satirized anything from nationalism to philanthropy. In this collection, we encounter a tongue-in-cheek showdown between Goethe and Newton, whose theories of color clash in the form of a nationalistic flag; an effort to capture the residual sound waves of Goethe’s voice speaking in his study through a mechanical recreation of his vocal apparatus and infinite amplification. In “The Magic Egg,” one of Mynona’s most emblematic and curious tales, a man encounters an enormous bisecting mechanical egg in the middle of the desert that houses a mummy and a possible pathway to utopia on Earth; other stories see dead lovers arise from their graves to drive off in casket-cars and a would-be philanthropist seeking the good life through an offering of toilet paper to strangers on the street.” DRIVE
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