Walter Benjamin's Schooldays. Pt1

Walter was at boarding school at Haubinda, in the German countryside. He clearly had a wonderful time, describing "catastrophic encounters" and "threatening circumstances."

Ruskin on shoes

Dispite his stuffy image, Ruskin was keenly interested in fashion. As with everything else he thought long and hard about the smallest details of his clothing. In one essay on the watercolours of Edward Clayton, Ruskin found an opportunity to praise the skill of his bootmaker (Hoby & Co, 20 Pall Mall, London):
"He is a man of dew. His sketches breathe of morning air, and his grass would wet your feet if you were to walk on it in Hoby's best."

The Allure of military uniforms

Ruskin on the connection between Fashion and War:
"At least half of that mental bias of young people, which sustains the wickedness of war among us at this day, is owing to the prettiness of military uniforms." - Ruskin

In the concentration camp

Benjamin was in the concentration camp, Clos St Joseph, in Nevers, France. He spent 2 months there. Very little is known about his time there and indeed information on, or any sign of, the camp cannot be found.

Bite-sized Benjamin

Allegory

Benjamin regarded allegories as cypher messages of repressed truth. They were the voice of betrayed men, the expression of their hopes for redemption.

From Benjamin's last letter, on the night of his suicide

"It is in a small village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me that my life will come to a close.... There is not enough time remaining for me to write all the letters I would like to write...." -- Walter Benjamin.

Did Stalin's killers liquidate Walter Benjamin?

The renowned German writer and critic may not have died at his own hands, reports Stuart Jeffries from Paris



Walter Benjamin, the Jewish intellectual long thought to have committed suicide, was killed by Stalinist agents during his wartime flight from the Nazis, according to a new theory.

Since his death in September 1940, it has been believed that the German writer and critic - who posthumously became one of the most celebrated intellectuals of the twentieth century - killed himself while on the run.

His body was found in a hotel room in the Catalan town of Port Bou and it is generally thought he took a drug overdose. The myopic, weak-hearted, 48-year-old philosopher had just crossed the Pyrenees to Franco's Spain with other Jewish refugees, fleeing certain death in his adopted home of Paris.

But a new study suggests it is more likely that Benjamin, a renegade Marxist, was killed by Stalinist agents.

Obscure during his lifetime, Benjamin achieved posthumous success when his writings were published in the Sixties and Seventies. Essays such as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, as well as studies of Kafka, Brecht and book-collecting, established him for many as a brilliant critic and social theorist.

Benjamin fled Berlin for Paris in 1933, but in 1940 Vichy France signed an armistice with the Third Reich and refugees, especially Jews, from Hitler's Germany were in danger of being sent to the death camps.

Fleeing to Marseille, Benjamin made an unsuccessful attempt at escape aboard a freighter bound for Ceylon. He was discovered and put ashore. Later he decided to walk across the Pyrenees to avoid border patrols. He had an American visa and hoped to join Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who had re-established the Frankfurt School in the US.

But soon after his arrival in Spain he was betrayed by the hotel owner. Fearing the Spanish would turn him over to the French border police, who would hand him to the Nazis, Benjamin is said to have taken his life.

'Benjamin's famous fate,' wrote Lesley Chamberlain in the Times Literary Supplement earlier this year, 'was to fall afoul of the Spanish police...who determined to put him on a train to France the next day. Ill, exhausted and hearing that he was beginning a rail journey that would surely lead to his death in a concentration camp, he overdosed on morphine.'

But this account is challenged by Stephen Schwartz, a Montenegro-based journalist and specialist in the study of communism and intellectuals in the Thirties. In an article entitled - The Mysterious Death of Walter Benjamin, Schwartz says that Stalinist agents were operating in the south of France and northern Spain during the early years of the war, when the Nazi-Soviet pact was still in operation. The result was that two of the most powerful secret police forces in Europe were working in close co-operation.

'Unquestionably the Soviet secret police was operating a chokepoint in southern France - sifting through the wave of fleeing exiles for targets of liquidation,' says Schwartz. Willi Münzenberg, a former Soviet agent who had organised front groups that wooed Western liberals during the Twenties and Thirties, was held in an internment camp, but after being released and walking away with two 'German socialists' he was found hanging from a tree near Grenoble. Thus the man who knew most about Russian disinformation operations was airbrushed from history.

'Walter Benjamin walked straight into this maelstrom of evil,' argues Schwartz. 'And, although his acolytes have chosen to ignore it, he was eminently qualified to appear on a Soviet hit list.'

A few months before he died, Benjamin wrote Theses on the Philosophy of History, one of the most insightful analyses of the failure of Marxism ever produced. He died at a time when many former Soviet loyalists were becoming disillusioned with Moscow because of the Hitler-Stalin pact. In response Stalinist agents, often recruited from socialist intellectuals - Schwartz called them 'killerati' - were carrying out assassinations.

Benjamin had, perhaps unwittingly, associated with Comintern agents as well as Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian writer and Soviet agent turned renegade. Schwartz says: 'Benjamin was part of a subculture honeycombed with dangerous people - it was known not to be safe.'

In the late Thirties, argues Schwartz, Stalinist agents in Spain were assigned to track down German-speaking anti-Stalinists and torture them into false confessions of betraying the Republic. 'Moscow wanted a parallel, outside Soviet borders, to the infamous purge trials, and the targets of attempts to realise such a judicial travesty included George Orwell,' he writes.

Schwartz argues in his article for the American magazine The Weekly Standard that the suicide theory is tenuous. Documentation by a Spanish judge shows no evidence of the presence of drugs. A doctor's report states that a cerebral haemorrhage, perhaps aggravated by the exertion of crossing the Pyrenees, killed him.

Henny Gurland, one of the refugees who accompanied Benjamin across the Pyrenees, claimed that he gave her two suicide letters which she later destroyed. She then reconstructed the notes, which were published in The Complete Correspondence of Adorno and Benjamin two years ago.

Schwartz suggests this is not authentic, not least because Benjamin wrote in German, not French, and because Port Bou is not a village but a seaside town.

One further mystery remains. As Benjamin fled he was hugging a manuscript. The American writer Jay Parini has suggested this was the masterwork he had been working on in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. But the briefcase was entrusted to a fellow refugee who lost it on a train from Barcelona to Madrid.

Letter on Arcades

Letter from Walter to Scholem, January 20, 1930 (p. 359-60), reflecting on his goal over the past two years "that I be considered the foremost critic of German literature," and on possible changes to the Arcades Project ("the theatre of all my conflicts and all my ideas"):

I intend to pursue the project on a different level than I had previously planned. Up till now, I have been held back, on the one hand, by the problem of documentation and, on the other hand, by that of metaphysics. I now see that I will at least need to study some aspects of Hegel and some parts of Marx's Capital to get anywhere and to provide a solid scaffolding for my work. It now seems a certainty that, for this book as well as for the Trauerspiel book, an introduction that discusses epistemology is necessary--especially for this book, a discussion of the theory of historical knowledge. This is where I will find Heidegger, and I expect sparks will fly from the shock of the confrontation between our two very different ways of looking at history.

Walter's library card

Walter Benjamin’s library card, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, 1940.

Eagleton on Benjamin

In one of his shrewdest sayings, Benjamin remarked that what drives men and women to revolt against injustice is not dreams of liberated grandchildren, but memories of enslaved ancestors. It is by turning our gaze to the horrors of the past, in the hope that we will not thereby be turned to stone, that we are impelled to move forward.

Benjamin was greatly interested in the work of a fellow Jew, Sigmund Freud, who also saw remembrance as the key to emancipation. In Freud’s view, human beings are naturally amnesiac animals. It is forgetfulness that keeps us going. We survive only by repressing a great deal of unpleasant material from our past. For Freud, it is oblivion that is natural to us. Remembering is just forgetting to forget. It can be an extraordinarily painful process, which is one reason why we tend to avoid it.

There is a parallel here between individuals and nations. Nations sometimes flourish by denying the crimes that brought them into being. Only when the original invasion, occupation, extermination or usurpation has been safely thrust into the political unconscious can sovereignty feel secure.

It is enslaved ancestors, as Benjamin calls them, whom Barack Obama has in his keeping. He may not himself be a descendant of slaves, but he is a child of the continent from where they were shipped. Obama is not especially keen on advertising this fact, given his scrupulously crafted “post-racial” persona. We can certainly expect little from his administration in the way of real change. The US will remain a one-party state, whatever name the capitalist party happens to go under. Even so, with a black man in power, the country still has within its grasp a momentous opportunity to redeem its dead. It has a chance to write an unexpected epilogue to the sordid tale of slavery and racial conflict.

Flaneurs

In 1840’s Paris, it was regarded as the height of cool to take your tortoise for a walk. This century, German thinker Walter Benjamin took up the cause of the flaneurs. Mark Ffytche joins his celebration of the city slackers.

Ah, the golden days of flanerie are gone. Saunter, stroll: dally, dawdle; loiter, linger … arm in arm those magical words float by me, trailing their irretrievable aura. The ability to set the pace of of one’s own life is the elusive dream of the urban loafer. But the times when the city could unfold its pavements at the nonchalant pace of the browser are receding ever more rapidly through the subway of modernity. Gone are the days of the man of letters whose boulevard occupation consisted of posing in pumps and keeping himself in readiness for the next incident, witticism or rumour. Gone are the days when people saw fit to pause and jot down physiology’s of city life whose leisurely descriptions were tailored to the style of the flaneur who goes botanizing on the asphalt. No, the city has long been hostile to the humble foot-wanderer and Reebok artist. In the age of Charles Baudelaire, who scented a chance rhyme in every corner, the city was already preparing to submit to the processed rhythms of Taylorist production and its motto “Down with Dawdling!” The un-flanetic life would stick in the spleen of France’s first literary crusty. Abroad from his beloved Paris, Baudelaire remarked bitterly that, “Strolling, something that nations with imaginary love, is not possible in Brussels”. He could only mourn the demise of the dandy, whose slack demeanour and fashionable tics were, “the last shimmer of the heroic in times of decadence”.
But there was one man this century who refused to abandon the stroller’s code, who could not reconcile himself to the fact that, “in bourgeois society idleness … ceased to be heroic”. Walter Benjamin, writer, collector and slacker, born in Berlin in 1892, saw it as his life’s task to interrupt the continuum of history with his gastropoidal reflections. Francoise Meltzer, author of the indispensable “Walter Benjamin and the Right to Acedia” (published in Hot Property, Chicago) noted how the conditions of Benjamin’s birth encouraged dawdling. “Benjamin, like the flaneur, had his home in the 19th Century, an age of security in which children of upper middle class families were assured an income without having to work,, so that they had no reason to hurry.” Early on in life, Benjamin set himself seriously to the task of preserving this idling advantage. A friend from his youth, H.W. Belmore, recounts Benjamin’s aversion to every profession and his wish to live off his fathers money for the rest of his life. Until his late thirties – right the way through his intellectual maturation, marriage, family life and subsequent divorce – Benjamin tarried in the parental home and availed himself of a small monthly stipend with which to pursue his book-browsing bent. According to Benjamin scholar Hannah Arendt, “it is evident that this arrangement caused him a great deal of suffering, but it is just as evident that in all probability he never seriously considered another solution”. He found his parents’ demand that he work for a living unspeakable, while his one organised attempt to free himself from dependency “ended with the proposal that his father immediately give him funds enabling him to buy an interest in a second hand bookstore”. This is the only gainful employment that Benjamin ever considered.
However, despite the financial difficulties of these years, Benjamin still managed constantly to enlarge his library, establishing himself as an itinerant man of letters and bibliophile. The atmosphere of the book-collector’s armchair, a haven for idlers in all times, is lovingly immortalised in Benjamin’s essay “Unpacking My Library”. Here the author dusts his books off from their packing crates and tries to assuage the spring tides of memories they evoke by recounting his collectors tips. One of his favourite methods of acquisition is the borrowing of a book with its attendant non-returning. The book-borrower proves himself to be an inveterate collector not so much by the deaf ear which he turns to all reminders from the everyday world of legality, as by his failure to read these books. While publicly Benjamin appeared to labour under the difficult task of assessing the position of German culture in a time of great political urgency, engaging with contemporary debates on dialectical materialism, privately he relaxed amongst his paperly friends: “O bliss of the collector, bliss of the man of leisure! Of no one has less been expected, and no one has had a greater sense of well-being.”
Arendt also notes that “when he did work he produced very little (he would have preferred the aphorism if he had not been paid by the line)”. His output in these years consists mainly of essays and reviews for literary magazines, a series of broadcasts for children, and some travel notes and impressions of Moscow, Naples and Marseilles. Benjamin drew intellectual sustenance from his street wanderings. One Way Street (verso), one of only two completed works published in his lifetime, was a series of musings arranged in the form of a street guide. In it he contemplates the art of writing in coffee houses, and remembers the Princes Caf?� where he spent long evenings pouring over his Origin of German Tragic Drama (his other publication). This last, with its notorious epistemo-critical Prologue, was Benjamin’s submission as a doctoral thesis. It was rejected on the grounds of its incomprehensibility. However, even if Benjamin had successfully made the grade to the world of professional scholarship, he is reported to have said, he would have begun by asking for a leave of absence.
All of Benjamin’s writing is characterised by digression and reverie. In A Berlin Chronicle he records the dreamy recalcitrance with which he accompanied his mother through the streets of the city centre.
Right into adult life, Benjamin sought to lose himself in the thoroughfares of cities as in a fairy-tale forest: “Then, signboards and streetnames, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest, like the startling call of a bittern in the distance.” In Marseilles he supplemented his wanderings with some hashish, and found: “My walking stick begins to give me special pleasure.” It is the mark of the Idler to be absorbed by the minor details of life. It is these minutiae – useless perhaps even to him – that provide the main justification for his slower rate of progress through the world. Benjamin himself described his faculty of remembrance as advancing from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal. A characteristic moment finds him ruminating on the moulding, crowned with crenellations, above his old school classroom. Many schoolchildren in their time must have found solace in such architectural features – but Benjamin was still writing about it when he was 40: “this moulding …left stranded like a shell on the shore of my daydreaming. And there I now come across it. I pick it up and question it like Hamlet addressing the skull …”
Moments like these are a tribute to many arduous afternoons spent pillow-farming. However, nothing quite prepares one for his magnificent, sprawling, unwritten masterpiece, the Arcades project – a loose collection of notes and quotes on 19th century Paris, the proceeds of ten years browsing in dusty archives throughout Europe. A bible of Flanerie, it contained drafts for sections on idleness, fashion and boredom, and if completed it would have elevated Benjamin to the position of Euro super-stroller. For first time flaneurs, Francoise Meltzer provides the following useful definitions: “the flaneur, says the Petit Robert, is someone who enjoys doing nothing … the word ‘work’ is given as the antonym. According to the Larousse the verb flaneur means to wander around aimlessly with frequent stops for looking; to waste time.” The flaneur is someone who scorns the ideology of capitalism “by his very prescence on the streets as a loiterer, by his aimless strolling during working hours, by his exhibitionistic wasting of valuable time”.
The rise of the flaneurs coincides with that of the Feuilleton – the daily newspaper that at that time opened its pages to serial novels, city-sketches, short items of news and adverts. It was this journalistic development that allowed the flaneur to maintain the life of a gentleman of leisure, while carving out a modest living from the fringes of society. As revolutionary ferment swept across Europe, the flaneur was occupied with the innocuous novelties of fashion and journalistic ephemera. On a long summer’s day, the flaneur would weave through the city, psychologising, lingering over an amusing trifle for the Feuilleton. According to Benjamin street-journalism demanded a specific form of being on stand-by for work: this specific form is idleness. In the view of the public, these “protracted periods of idleness… were necessary for the realisation of his own labour-power. While others sweated indoors, the flaneur used the street as his lounge, office and smoking-room: “The walls are the desk against which he presses his notebooks; news-stands are his libraries and the terraces of caf?�s are the balconies from which he looks down on his household after his work is done.”
To give some indication of the slacker-than-thou ethos that flourished in Paris Benjamin notes in Arcades: “Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flaneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them.” There arose also the custom of the aperitif and the cocktail hour. The rise of window shopping and the extension of opening hours to ten O’clock were designed to accommodate super-flans. At the height of the Second Empire, 24-hour flanerie was a hip form of noctambulism – equivalent to raving. Delvau writes: “A person may take a rest from time to time, he is permitted stops and resting places; but he has no right to sleep.”
The hub of slacker culture was undoubtedly the arcades. These were 19th Century shopping malls – covered streets covered with lowlife, consumer trifles and loafers: “It is in this world,” writes Benjamin, “that the flaneur is at home; he provides the favourite sojourn of the strollers and the smokers, the stamping ground of all sorts of little metiers, with its chronicler and its philosopher.” The arcades featured prominently in the literature of the time and were likened to a salon for the masses. In 1848 Victor Hugo remarked that where “the monarchy had its Idlers, the republic had its loafers”, Benjamin comments: “Hugo was, in a word, no flaneur.”
The true chronicler was Baudelaire who depicted the life of a hero within a crowd of wasters: “To the perfect spectator, the impassioned observer, it is an immense joy to make his domicile amongst numbers, amidst fluctuations and movement, amidst the fugitive and infinite. To be away from home, and yet to feel at home.” The flaneurs were the aristocrats of the crowd – their way of living “still bestowed a conciliatory gleam over the growing destitution of men in the great city”. At the height of his power the Idler was likened unto God: “As flaneur he has omnipresence at his disposal, as a gambler omnipotence, and as a student, omniscience”.
As a final tribute to Benjamins Arcades, let me quote from a section marked Konvolut M. and headed simply “The Flaneur”. These passages have not to my knowledge been translated. “The street leads the flaneur into a vanished age. For him each one slopes away; it leads upwards, if not to mother, then into a past which is all the more captivating in that it is not his own, private past… In the asphalt over which he passes, his footsteps awaken an astonishing echo. The gaslight, that streams down onto the pavements, throws an ambiguously suggestive light onto this false bottom…
A rapture comes over him who spends a long time marching aimlessly through the streets. With every step, the walking urge grows more powerful; ever quicker come the seductions of shops, of bistros, of smiling women, ever more irresistible the magnetism of the next street corner, a distant mass of foliage, a street name…”
Finally Benjamin quotes from the Larousse dictionary of 1872: “the greater part of men of genius were great flaneurs… Often it is at the time when the artist or the poet seems the least occupied in their work, that they are plunged in it the deepest.” This last passage seems rather tendentiously dropped into the m?�lange. It is the Idlers great wager with society that indolence is merely the outward sign of greater spiritual exertions that will ultimately be of benefit to all. Unfortunately Benjamin only ever actually published a small, incomplete section of his directory of loafers, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism. But the rest of his collected fragments are suffused with the air of a long, treacly, self-absorbed project. The kind of work in progress that is professed as a terrible burden, a daemon of inspiration, but which once entered, has all the cosy familiarity of the garden shed.
According to Benjamin, the Sandwichman is the last Flaneur. Idle gazers long ago left the domain of the street and taken up their abode in front of the TV screen. Here on their daily flatland saunters they can play detective, observer, gossip, connoisseur, archivist and dreamer. A flaneur of the old school, Benjamin would not have been suited to life as a cathode-ray cowboy. In July 1945, fleeing from occupied France and awaiting his exit visa to America, he wrote to Hannah Arendt, quoting an aphorism from La Rochefoucaud which had saved him from the depths of depression: “His laziness supported him in glory for many years in the obscurity of an errant and hidden life,” Two months later, hampered at the Spanish border, he took the Cobain route out of reality. However, before we weep for the loss of a great loafer we should remember this phrase from his heyday: “The flaneur’s last journey: death. Its goal: novelty.”

Letter from the Literary Review

Vol. 22 No. 13 • 6 July 2000

From Agnes Grunwald-Spier

I was struck by the serendipity of T.J. Clark's article on Walter Benjamin appearing in the same issue as the review of Andy Marino's book about Varian Fry (LRB, 22 June). It was Varian Fry who was responsible for organising the expedition over the mountains in which Walter Benjamin attempted to leave occupied France. But his group was refused entry at the Spanish border on 26 September 1940, and fearing repatriation to an internment camp, Benjamin killed himself with morphine that night. The next day the group crossed the border safely. He had already been interned in September 1939, in the Colombes stadium in Paris and his sister Dora had been sent to the Gurs internment camp. Arthur Koestler had also been detained in Colombes and knew that Benjamin had been carrying morphine pills since the burning of the Reichstag. Koestler wrote in Scum of the Earth:
Walter Benjamin, author and critic, my neighbour in 10, rue Dombasle in Paris, fourth at our Saturday poker parties, one of the most bizarre and witty persons I have known. Last time I had met him was in Marseilles … and he had asked me: 'If anything goes wrong, have you got anything to take?' For in those days we all carried some stuff in our pockets like conspirators in a penny dreadful, only reality was more dreadful. I had none, and he shared what he had with me, 62 tablets of a sedative … He did it reluctantly, for he did not know whether the 31 tablets left him would be enough. It was enough.

Agnes Grunwald-Spier
Sheffield

On an edition of Benjamin's letters

Walter Benjamin was not a letter writer of the order of Lawrence or Flaubert, for whom the medium of the letter seems to fill a need, not for mere self-expression, but for some larger exercise of the personality in exasperation or enthusiasm, in that almost instinctive enlargement of reaction to things which others find in unmotivated physical activity. Benjamin was, on the contrary, a person of the greatest reserve; even where he lets himself go with people he trusts, one has the feeling not of the revelation of some true inner self but merely of the relaxation of that reserve. The extraordinarily stiff manner of a central European bourgeoisie – which sought no doubt to designate a certain class pride by its eschewal of aristocratic nonchalance and easiness, as well as of the barbarism and ignorance of country nobles in general – is appropriated and made part of the personality, like a mask that grows onto the skin of your face. Such a reserve may well also express fear, both of the rituals of a class you detest and devote your life to undermining, and of the artificialities of the artists who secede from it. It is in any case very European, and has no American equivalent, even where writers like Henry James have thought it desirable to produce one.
This peculiar ‘death of the subject’ may account for some of the fascination Benjamin has had for several generations of left intellectuals, by lending the interests and commitments of the absent subject a kind of monumental objectivity. Even Benjamin’s hobbies, such as book collecting, are thereby sacralised in advance, as relics and mementos of a defunct will and desire; nor are his more private notes – the Moscow diary, for example, in which traces of a passionate sentimental agitation are preserved – any more revealing. It is as if language were unable to say any more than this; indeed, many of the letters seem to have been provoked less by a need for expression than by all the painful practical necessities of which Benjamin’s life was so full.
One sometimes wonders whether these practical problems were visited on Benjamin as an innocent from the outside, or whether at least a few of them might not have been the fruit of his own awkwardness, his bad judgments and incapacities, if not his self-indulgence. Just as one wonders, faced with a record of his travels, whether exile and the flight from German boredom and misère (even that of the fabled Weimar!) might not have corresponded to some deeper choice fulfilled in its usual grisly and unforeseeable way by History. To have been obliged to spend the Thirties in Paris, for example, does not seem to have been an inconceivable destiny for Benjamin, even in a world without Hitler; nor would the straitened circumstances and appeals for money have been absent from such a world, along with the search for residence permits and the endless negotiations with editors of reviews and the possible intermediaries of possible publishers.
The crucial difference about such a world would have been the existence of a German-language readership. In one of his rare moments of expression, if not of self then at least of its fantasies, Benjamin declares that his life’s ambition is to become ‘le premier critique de la littérature allemande’. In the long run he became something better than that perhaps; it was in any case the one thing he could not become, when a literate German newspaper-reading public was absolutely sealed off from him. For this was an age when the feuilleton still existed, when critics and cultural commentators, writing regularly in the journals, could still claim to form and inflect public taste. Six hundred pages of book reviews by Benjamin exist, in the as yet untranslated third volume of his Collected Works: they give a very different picture of his activity from the lonely achievements of the volume we call Illuminations, or the immense and fragmentary Arcades project.
Like Kafka, Benjamin had to decide early in his life whether he was to be a Jewish writer or a German writer. The reviews show the choices he made, and in the spaces between the lines of this correspondence we can read his attempts to ward off Scholem’s over-enthusiastic embraces, even though the final decision not to emigrate to Palestine (see letter to Scholem of 20 January 1930, written in French and translated into English without comment in the present edition) seems to have been as much as anything else the result of laziness (in learning Hebrew), incompetence (in sorting out his divorce) and sheer lack of ideological commitment.
The present edition of the Correspondence was co-edited in 1966 by Scholem and Adorno, who keep silent on their own priorities (and who had little in common save their friendship with Benjamin, which was obviously supremely precious to each of them). Their attempts both during his lifetime and after it to wrench Benjamin away from bad influences must necessarily inspire some suspicion about their confidences. Scholem deplored Benjamin’s Marxist commitments, and tells us that the essay on Eduard Fuchs was a piece of hackwork, which Max Horkheimer made Benjamin write for the Zeitschrift. As for Benjamin’s trip to the Soviet Union, Scholem comments acidly that, although Benjamin was unaware of it, he was allowed contact with nobody but Jews. For Adorno the contamination was personified by Brecht, whose influence on Benjamin he tried to undermine like a jealous suitor. ‘I held his arms up,’ he boasts about this new Moses, whose temptation to sink back into Brechtian vulgar Marxism and militancy clearly demanded eternal vigilance, even beyond the grave. Coming from Adorno, this will not exactly be considered anti-Marxism, except by the most orthodox, yet the reaction has a family likeness to Scholem’s (Scholem pointed out that, for his generation, both Zionism and Communism were related and equivalent ways of rebelling against the German-Jewish bourgeois family) while Adorno’s concern to defend ‘the autonomy of art’ may now seem as tiresome as Scholem’s lavish insistence on Benjamin’s fascination with Jewish mysticism.
Benjamin himself seems to have regarded all this with bemused impersonality: ‘Our philosophical debate whose time was long due’ – the reference is to Scholem’s visit to Paris in 1938 – ‘proceeded in due form. If I am not mistaken, it gave him an image of me as something like a man who has made his home in a crocodile’s jaws, which he keeps prised open with iron braces.’ The letters show a hapless intellectual at odds with life’s practicalities, and are biographically distorted insofar as they omit the whole ‘middle period’, the friendship with Brecht (of which we get some glimpses in Benjamin’s diary of his visit to Brecht in Svendborg) and his exploration of Marxism; and insofar as they centre on the friendship with Scholem in the early period (Scholem emigrated to Palestine in 1925) and on the more intellectual exchanges with Adorno (they seem never to have said du to each other) in the later one. More complete versions of both correspondences are now available, the Scholem cycle appeared in German in 1980 (after Scholem’s originals were miraculously rediscovered), and was translated in a 1989 Schocken edition; and the first volume in a series of Adorno’s complete correspondence appeared in German last year. The famous letters (Adorno’s rather ostentatious critical responses to various Benjamin texts, and above all to the Arcades materials, in which he shows off his own very keen intelligence a little too feverishly) have mostly been printed already, although without the catty personal references to friends and acquaintances which have been made much of in the German press. (Benjamin thought Bloch had plagiarised him, particularly in Erbschaft dieser Zeit; Adorno describes Marcuse’s great affirmative culture essay as ‘the work of a converted although very zealous high school teacher’.)
Yet, as in the elephantine jokes with Scholem, such exchanges can also be seen as a way of confirming what Adorno considered their narrower alliance against the outside world – our ‘general line’, as he calls it, ‘our old method of immanent critique’. But Adorno seems more anxious to seal this alliance than Benjamin, whose replies reflect his confusion and disappointment at the rejection, by Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School, of his first version of the Arcades. Adorno’s extensive (and quite sensible) critiques and explanations make his responsibility in the matter plain enough to Benjamin, who was probably not aware that Horkheimer had also been responsible for the other great failure of his life, the refusal of his academic thesis on German baroque tragedy: with friends like these ... The Adorno correspondence is a far more satisfactory volume than the collected letters (about which the American publishers complain, ‘we were not permitted’ – by the notorious Suhrkamp people – ‘to revise the notes or to include any additional comments, prefaces, afterwords etc’), and is splendidly edited and annotated.
The notion of the public intellectual has been much abused in recent years, and has served as a stick with which to beat academics (whether political or not) and to reinforce a general climate of anti-intellectualism. But any serious discussion of the matter clearly needs to address changes in the media; Régis Debray has charted this transformation in France, where writers have given way to professors, and journalists to television personalities. These are features of the systemic changes in capitalism, along with its technologies and the enlargement of its markets. Culture, and along with it the possibilities of cultural politics, must necessarily adapt to modifications of the larger social system of which it is a part. Did Benjamin wish to be a public intellectual in this sense? Did the other members of the Frankfurt School? Probably they didn’t think in these relatively Post-Modern terms about a choice between being ‘political’ and apolitical. In their time, the choice was between Left and Right. Benjamin’s numerous reviews for a left journal called Die Literarische Welt, which does not seem to have had a very large circulation (not necessarily a gauge of its influence, however), are, I believe, best seen not as an attempt to reach some wider public and to make a political mark so much as to exercise the literary life in all its variety.
Benjamin was fortunate in still being able, in the interwar years, to participate in that unique form of the ‘public sphere’ which was organised around books and journals and inhabited by literary intellectuals whose domain was print. It was not only for reasons of personal taste that he wrote on novels and cookbooks, antiques, travel books, children’s literature, linguistics, social history, dolls, ideological tracts, French literature, dictionaries and encyclopedias, pedagogy, Chaplin, Jews and cities. Everything was grist to his mill and what was not yet a ‘text’ fairly itched to be turned into one. One assumes, of course, that the ‘literary life’ of Berlin, emerging from the rawer, late-industrial realities of the Wilhelmine state, was not so promising as that of Vienna (the figure of Karl Kraus haunts these letters), let alone that of Paris, which for these intellectuals – like most other Western ones – remains the ideal: Benjamin’s approach to this centre of destiny (with which only a few foreigners could hope to be intimately associated) was not brought about only by exile.
This, then, is the way to investigate the matter of Benjamin’s political commitment, which, like all deep ideological choices, must be grasped on a number of levels at once: Marxism as a form of personal revolt; Communism as a new kind of universalism in which Jews could participate fully; loathing for one’s own class and an instinctive identification with people of radically different backgrounds; ideal images of action, no doubt, whose appeal is a function of the peculiar status of the intellectual. Nor is the appeal of justice to be thought of as some figment of misguided Nietzschean altruism for, as Wilde put it, socialism precludes the necessity for people to ‘spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism’. Indeed, it is most often imagined (by those intent on repressing their complicity with the system) that left intellectuals are unhappy in their own (generally bourgeois) class – that they wish to secede from it and to enjoy an imaginary identification with simpler people, industrial or farm workers, underclasses, oppressed minorities, exotic populations in situations of cruel subjection or heroic revolt. Such identifications are certainly to be welcomed, as they enlarge our sympathies and undermine or dissolve the confines of our own class limits.
Yet Benjamin’s letters are instructive also in the way in which they show how political commitments are something a bourgeoisie makes for itself, for its own good and its psychic well-being. Maimed as well as privileged, it has an interest in lifting the burdens of exploitation it, too, necessarily suffers (and not only, as at the present time, when capitalism devours its own bourgeois children). Benjamin makes the point in his arguments with Scholem. His Communism is not something chosen independently and somehow added onto his writing and intellectual life, capable, as Adorno thought, of deflecting it in wasteful or deplorable directions. The political choice is motivated by the writing itself: ‘a victorious party’ – the German Bolshevist party – ‘might make it possible for me to write differently.’ This is the crucial issue: under what conditions might a truly ‘literary’ life be lived, in what kind of situation might the vocation of the intellectual be most fully realised?
The critique of capitalism is for Benjamin first and foremost a critique of how it affects his own possibilities for writing, the commitment to socialism first and foremost a kind of class interest for the bourgeois intellectual, who suffers under the market and yearns to make fuller use of his intellectual energies. This is why classical right-wing talk about the ressentiment of intellectuals is ignorant and misplaced, and the familiar counter-revolutionary analysis of their role in revolutions and their lust for power an ingenious misconception. True intellectuals want to write, and their deeper political reflections turn on the obstacles a given social system places in the way of that vocation. Hence Benjamin’s allegiance to Brecht, whose ‘essays are the first ... that I champion as a critic without (public) reservation. This is because part of my development in the last few years came about in confrontation with them, and because they, more rigorously than any others, give an insight into the intellectual context in which the work of people like myself is conducted in this country.’
The impersonality I have attributed to Benjamin – it might better be called by Eliot’s term, ‘depersonalisation’ – also plays its part in the glorious effects of style which achieve their most intense concentration in the great essays but which we can surprise here and there in these letters: ‘True criticism does not attack its object: it is like a chemical substance that attacks another only in the sense that, decomposing it, it exposes its inner nature, but does not destroy it. The chemical substance that attacks spiritual things in this way (diathetically) is the light. This does not appear in language.’ The digression is self-referential to the degree to which it includes a theory of its own necessary impersonality (leading the more fatuous, no doubt, to murmur ‘deconstruction’); the two final sentences then prod this formulation upwards into associative leaps that can be grasped either as the intensity of the thinking process or as a dialectical multi-layering (from which, incidentally, alchemy and allegory, the baroque and mystical language theory, are never far away).
Both Adorno and Benjamin wrote important studies of epistolary texts and took the letter seriously as a form. Under a pseudonym, Benjamin edited a beautiful series of classical German bourgeois letters (Deutsche Menschen) which, exceptionally, was published under the Nazis. Adorno used his analysis of the Stefan George-Hugo von Hofmannsthal correspondence to analyse the most significant aestheticist currents in the Weimar period. Unsurprisingly, in the present collection, it is often a question of the letter itself, but now as a form in some sense constructed after the fact, by an interested readership (such as ourselves): ‘The exchange of letters characteristically takes shape in the mind of posterity (whereas the single letter, in regard to its author, may lose something of its life).’ By this Benjamin means to designate the way in which a single communication fulfils its immediate function, whereas the lengthier, more consecutive form of a correspondence we read in a book is neither available nor relevant to its participants.
These bookish letters, then, will interest only those interested in Benjamin – but ought we not to suppose the same about every correspondence centred on a single author? For them, however, the correspondence will be exciting, offering tantalising and fragmentary testimony on student politics in the prewar period, on Benjamin’s early and impenetrable ‘theories’ of language, on literary history and its problems, on nationality and ethnicity (‘for me ... circumscribed national characteristics were always central: German or French’), on travels and places, sometimes on people, much less on historical events or political positions (at least with these particular correspondents); finally and above all on his own reading and projects. Several immense Kafka letters (a fragment of one was included in Illuminations) constitute a more accessible literary criticism of Kafka than the ‘official’ statement in the great essay, and I have already mentioned the exchange with Adorno about the Arcades project (probably, despite its insufferable pretensions, even more important for Adorno’s thinking than for Benjamin’s): one of the classic moments in contemporary theory. There is also the abortive correspondence with Florens Christian Rang, who stands as Scholem’s opposite number and one of the rare non-Jews with whom Benjamin had productive exchanges (‘I was indebted to this man ... for whatever essential elements of German culture I have internalised’).
One can, then, read a correspondence like this in a novelistic way, reconstructing the biographical narrative and re-inventing the various characters at varying distances from the enigmatic central figure himself. Or one can ransack it for moments of particular brilliance; for example, Benjamin’s way of dealing with Bloch’s Erbschaft dieser Zeit, which was published as Hitler came to power. Benjamin felt that Bloch had pre-empted him and stolen something of the thunder of the Arcades project:
The severe reproach I must level against the book (even if I will not level it against the author) is that it in no way corresponds to the circumstances under which it has appeared. Instead, it is as out of place as a fine gentleman who, having arrived to inspect an area demolished by an earthquake, has nothing more urgent to do than immediately spread out Persian rugs that his servants had brought along and which were, by the way, already somewhat moth-eaten; set up the gold and silver vessels, which were already somewhat tarnished; have himself wrapped in brocade and damask gowns, which were already somewhat faded.
We must not take it here that Benjamin repudiates Bloch’s Utopian doctrine of hope and the future, which he himself shared in far more complex and internally conflictual ways; rather, that (alongside the satisfaction involved in portraying Bloch as a rug merchant) he is calling for a much more sombre characterisation of the Utopian in a situation – capitalism – of which he famously said that ‘the catastrophe is that it just goes on like this’, and for which his own notion of the Messianic, as the radically unprepared and unexpected, was a rather different kind of solution. (I cannot resist quoting Adorno’s complementary characterisation of Bloch, which comes during an appreciation of The Old Curiosity Shop, a novel about which he wrote in the early Thirties and which he held to be ‘a book of the highest rank – full of secrets compared to which the Blochian variety show themselves up to be the cloacal odours from eternity which they really are’.)
Passing over the visual details (‘the gas mask in my small room ... looks to me like a disconcerting replica of the skulls with which studious monks decorated their cells’), it seems advisable to juxtapose with the earlier statement about literary criticism what can only be Benjamin’s version of Frankfurt School ‘critical theory’ – it is noteworthy that Scholem feels obliged to comment in a rare personal footnote on the ‘unmistakably esoteric, if not almost conspiratorial, tone’ of this passage:
The point here is precisely that things whose place is at present in shadow de part et d’autre might be cast in a false light when subjected to artificial lighting. I say ‘at present’ because the current epoch, which makes so many things impossible, most certainly does not preclude this: that the right light should fall on precisely those things in the course of the historical rotation of the sun. I want to take this even further and say that our works can, for their part, be measuring instruments, which, if they function well, measure the tiniest segments of that unimaginably slow rotation.
We measure, in other words, not the past itself and its realities and energies, but rather the distance separating what is currently in shadow from some fuller natural light. We measure the distortions of our current unknowledge, without attempting to train our own artificial light on the ‘thing itself’. These sentences map out a tortuous path around the Uncertainty Principle of historicism proper, in which we ourselves, and our ‘current situation’, intervene between our own cognitive faculties and even those moments of the past with which we might have been expected to have some special ‘elective affinities’ – indeed, particularly such moments, for which we think we have been vouchsafed a privileged understanding.
This means that Benjamins’s ‘esoterical and conspiratorial’ relations with the past of Baudelaire and the Paris of Haussmann are relations it is possible we no longer share today. We have none of us succeeded in reconstructing the Arcades project to the point at which the whole operation becomes satisfyingly intelligible (like Pascal’s fragments or Gramsci’s ‘prison notebooks’, perhaps it was necessary that the pieces not be recontained and domesticated by a successful form). But, at least in the version discussed by Adorno and Benjamin in their correspondence, the emphasis on myth and the archaic no longer seems to resonate in a postmodernity which has abolished those things:
As for me, I am busy pointing my telescope through the bloody mist at a mirage of the 19th century that I am attempting to reproduce based on the characteristics it will manifest in a future state of the world, liberated from magic. I must naturally first build this telescope myself and, in making this effort, I am the first to have discovered some fundamental principles of materialistic art theory.
Again, the images of telescopy and celestial measurement, but now the content of the investigation is the peculiar co-existence of a mythic archaic and a birth of modernity in the mid-19th century (along with the historicist question of how a society liberated from such magical elements – and very precisely from that ‘commodity fetishism’ which was Marx’s contemporary version of the paradoxical co-existence – might wish to view such a peculiar past and ‘inherit’ it, to use Bloch’s expression of the same year).
And here is Adorno’s echoing discussion of ‘our central question, that of the identity of modern and archaic’:
It occurred to me that just as the modern is somehow the oldest, so also the archaic is itself a function of the new: in other words historically produced as archaic and to that degree dialectical – not ‘prehistoric’ but the exact opposite. That is: no less than the place of everything silenced by history: measurable only by way of the historical rhythm which alone ‘produces’ it as Ur-history.
Predictably, he goes on to compare his own current work in this spirit to the Arcades project, ‘along with the Ur-history of the 19th century a foreshadowing of the principal and categorical historicity of the archaic: not as what is historically the oldest but what itself emerges only from the innermost law of time’.
We are here at the very secret of Modernism as such, if not of modernity, of which both Adorno and Benjamin now stand revealed to us as prime embodiments fully as much as analysts and interpreters. For modernity can be distinguished from our own post-modernity as a space of ‘unevenness’ (the theory of Bloch in Erbschaft dieser Zeit), in which the most modern uneasily co-exists with what it has not yet superseded, cancelled, streamlined and obliterated. Only from the vantage-point of the Post-Modern, in which modernisation is at last complete, can this secret incompleteness of the modernisation process be detected as the source of modernity and Modernism alike.
In which case Benjamin and Adorno are themselves, now and for us, just such incomprehensible objects covered by shadow in the course of the rotation of history, and we must not seek to illuminate them with our artificial light. Their form of intellectual life is perhaps outmoded, even though the Frankfurt School’s mission, along with their own narrower and more intense version of it, is, in Habermas’s memorable phrase, an unfinished project. They formed a true intellectual avant garde, the formal equivalent of the great artistic or literary movements, about which it is said that in post-modernity they can no longer exist. Yet the rewards of historical commemoration do not always take the form of imitation.