ABSTRACT
In the past, the metro in Paris had a very distinctive odor. Someone could have brought me to Paris while I was sleeping and I would have immediately recognized where I was, just by this odor. Today I would give a lot if someone could get me a little bottle of that scent. I would sniff it and from the scent I would smell the Paris of that time, just as Marcel Proust could smell his Combray in a madeleine cake. Paris has changed; it is much more technologically developed and cleaner, and today you would probably have to recognize it by something other than its odor. Perhaps my Paris odor was the last whiff of those miasmata which, according to Alain Corbin’s wonderful presentation in his The Foul and the Fragrant,2 have been forced out of the city in a number of deodorization campaigns by the newly sensitized citizens, since the beginning of the nineteenth century.3 But perhaps today it is just that younger people recognize their Paris by different odors, whereas I, in a nostalgic mood, refuse to perceive them. That cities, districts, neighborhoods, and landscapes have their odors is still true today – in spite of sewage systems, ventilation, or deodorization. So, for example, your nose can still tell you whether you are in East or West Berlin. This is due no longer to the fumes from two-stroke engines, but to the use of brown-coal briquettes in the eastern part of the city. And we know we are somewhere else thanks to the soil, when it is damp, or to the stones, or to particular trees that grow in the city, or because of the fact that you can smell the sea, because of the gasoline used, the means of transportation generally, and of course because of the people themselves, their lifestyles, and eating habits. Odors are an essential element of the atmosphere of a city, perhaps even
the most essential, for odors are, like almost no other sensible phenomenon, atmospheric: “Expelled indeterminately into the distance,”4 they envelop, cannot be avoided; they are that quality of a surroundings which most intensely allows us to sense through our disposition (Befinden) where we are. Odors enable us to identify places and to identify ourselves with places. Hence, it is not surprising that the first scientific book that dealt with the
topic of atmosphere was essentially a book about odors. I am referring to
Hubert Tellenbach’s book Geschmack und Atmosphäre.5 As a psychiatrist, Tellenbach was primarily interested in the disorders of “odor atmospheres.” Even more evident in his approach is the fact that trust between people is founded on the “atmospherical.”6 Using the analogy of nest odor, among animals, he sees the intimacy of the space occupied by the family and one’s native place as constituted by the odor atmosphere.7
