In 1845, the German physicist Gustav Robert Kirchhoff formulated his two circuit laws while a student at the University of Königsberg in Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). Kirchhoff's current law, that the sum of currents entering a junction equals the sum leaving it, and his voltage law, that the sum of voltage drops around any closed loop is zero, provided the mathematical tools needed to analyze complex electrical circuits. These laws, developed at Königsberg, remain fundamental to all electrical engineering and circuit analysis.

Kirchhoff's laws, which describe how electrical currents divide and recombine at junctions like streams flowing through a network of channels, provided a structural metaphor that resonates with the narrative techniques of modernist literature. The idea that complex systems could be analyzed by applying simple conservation principles at each node anticipated the structuralist approach to literature that would emerge in the twentieth century. Königsberg, where Kirchhoff formulated his laws, was also the city of Immanuel Kant, and the mathematical precision of Kirchhoff's analysis of electrical networks stood in provocative relationship to Kant's philosophical exploration of the categories of understanding.