Tuesday, 29 June 2010
Young slut
"sanctimonious old cow - young slut". How many books were once non grata from which young people today are supposed to learn! - WB
Tuesday, 22 June 2010
Sunday, 20 June 2010
One way street
WB - All human relationships having any degree of intimacy are under assault from an almost unbearably piercing clarity such as they can scarcely withstand. This is because on the one hand money, devastatingly, forms the focal point of all life's interests, while on the other hand that same thing (money) is the barrier that brings nearly every human relationship up short; in consequence, things that are disappearing more and more from both the natural and moral worlds are unthinking trust, peace, and good health.
The Cottingley Fairies
In 1917, Elsie Wright, 16, and her cousin Frances Griffith, 10, borrowed a camera belonging to Elsie’s father and took two pictures of what the girls claimed were fairies in Cottingley Beck, England. When Mr. Wright saw fairies in the pictures, he considered them fake and banned Elsie from using the camera again. Her mother, Polly, however was convinced of their authenticity and publicized the photos. Initially, the images were authenticated by some of the leading photography experts of the time although Kodak was less convinced, arguing that there were many ways to fake images like these.
Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes stories and a believer in spiritualism, saw the photos, was convinced that they were genuine and wrote about them in The Strand in 1920. The article created a media storm and the girls took three more pictures showing fairies dancing and enjoying a sun bath.
It was only in 1978 that a researcher spotted that the fairies were identical to drawings in Princess Mary’s Gift Book, a children’s book published in 1917. Three years later the girls, then in their late seventies, admitted that they had staged four of the five images using paper cut-outs and hatpins. Frances continued to claim that the fifth image (below) was genuine; however, they insisted that they really had seen fairies.
Wednesday, 16 June 2010
The Fake Grave
Walter Benjamin’s Grave: A Profane Illumination
And when today he lights up his cigarette, he uses a flintstone and a fuse, like everyone else. “In a boat,” he says, “that is the best way. The wind blows the matches out, but the harder the wind blows, the more the fuse glows.”
—Walter Benjamin, “Spain, 1932”
When she came looking for Walter Benjamin’s grave a few months after he died in the Hotel de Francia in Port Bou on the border between Spain and France, Hannah Arendt found nothing. Nothing, that is, other than one of the most beautiful places she had ever seen. “It was not to be found,” she wrote Gershom Scholem shortly afterwards, “his name was not written anywhere.” Yet according to the records provided by the town hall of Port Bou, one of Benjamin’s traveling companions, Frau Gurland, had paid out seventy-five pesetas for the rental of a “niche” for five years on September 28, 1940, two days after Benjamin died from what was diagnosed by the local doctor, Ramón Vila Moreno, as cerebral apoplexy, but is generally understood to have been suicide by a massive overdose of morphine tablets. “He had enough morphine on him to take his life several times over,” writes Lisa Fittko, who took him over the mountains into Spain.
Yet name or no name, the place was overwhelming.
“The cemetery faces a small bay directly looking over the Mediterranean,” wrote Arendt. “It is carved in stone in terraces; the coffins are also pushed into such stone walls. It is by far one of the most fantastic and most beautiful spots I have ever seen in my life.”
Scholem was not impressed. Years later he seemed downright dismissive, bringing his book-length memoir of Benjamin to an end with these words: “Certainly the spot is beautiful, but the grave is apocryphal.” It was an abrupt and sour note on which to end the story of a life, as if the dead man and therefore we, too, had been cheated of an ending, and what we had gotten instead was a suspension, a book whose last page was missing. For not only was there no name, as Arendt had discovered, but worse still there was a fake name or, depending on your point of view, something even worse, namely, a fake grave. Photographs clearly indicated, to Scholem at least, that a wooden enclosure with Benjamin’s name scrawled on it was nothing more than what he called “an invention of the cemetery attendants, whom in consideration of the number of inquiries wanted to assure themselves of a tip.” Thus ended the life of the person who would be acclaimed, by George Steiner, for example, as the greatest critic of the twentieth century. And thus ends Scholem’s memoir. Even in death, Benjamin was a loser, his grave the plaything of men seeking a tip. In lieu of a real grave, we might say, Scholem buries his subject under charges of profanity.
And when today he lights up his cigarette, he uses a flintstone and a fuse, like everyone else. “In a boat,” he says, “that is the best way. The wind blows the matches out, but the harder the wind blows, the more the fuse glows.”
—Walter Benjamin, “Spain, 1932”
When she came looking for Walter Benjamin’s grave a few months after he died in the Hotel de Francia in Port Bou on the border between Spain and France, Hannah Arendt found nothing. Nothing, that is, other than one of the most beautiful places she had ever seen. “It was not to be found,” she wrote Gershom Scholem shortly afterwards, “his name was not written anywhere.” Yet according to the records provided by the town hall of Port Bou, one of Benjamin’s traveling companions, Frau Gurland, had paid out seventy-five pesetas for the rental of a “niche” for five years on September 28, 1940, two days after Benjamin died from what was diagnosed by the local doctor, Ramón Vila Moreno, as cerebral apoplexy, but is generally understood to have been suicide by a massive overdose of morphine tablets. “He had enough morphine on him to take his life several times over,” writes Lisa Fittko, who took him over the mountains into Spain.
Yet name or no name, the place was overwhelming.
“The cemetery faces a small bay directly looking over the Mediterranean,” wrote Arendt. “It is carved in stone in terraces; the coffins are also pushed into such stone walls. It is by far one of the most fantastic and most beautiful spots I have ever seen in my life.”
Scholem was not impressed. Years later he seemed downright dismissive, bringing his book-length memoir of Benjamin to an end with these words: “Certainly the spot is beautiful, but the grave is apocryphal.” It was an abrupt and sour note on which to end the story of a life, as if the dead man and therefore we, too, had been cheated of an ending, and what we had gotten instead was a suspension, a book whose last page was missing. For not only was there no name, as Arendt had discovered, but worse still there was a fake name or, depending on your point of view, something even worse, namely, a fake grave. Photographs clearly indicated, to Scholem at least, that a wooden enclosure with Benjamin’s name scrawled on it was nothing more than what he called “an invention of the cemetery attendants, whom in consideration of the number of inquiries wanted to assure themselves of a tip.” Thus ended the life of the person who would be acclaimed, by George Steiner, for example, as the greatest critic of the twentieth century. And thus ends Scholem’s memoir. Even in death, Benjamin was a loser, his grave the plaything of men seeking a tip. In lieu of a real grave, we might say, Scholem buries his subject under charges of profanity.
The Life and Death of Walter Benjamin
The official version has Benjamin committing suicide in Portbou, but his grave was labelled incorrectly and many questions still remain. Could it be that he survived that day in Portbou? Cont.....
The Death of WB
In September 1940, after seven years of exile, Walter Benjamin crosses the Pyrenees in a desperate attempt to escape the Nazis.
According to the official version, Walter Benjamin did make it across the French-Spanish border successfully. But when he arrived in the Catalan town of Portbou, a sudden change in legislation impeded his entry into Spain and he was obliged to spend the night at a local hotel under the close vigilance of three guards, whose orders were to deport him the following morning.
In utter despair, Benjamin took his own life, swallowing and overdose of morphine. The local doctor, however, declared it a natural death and Benjamin was given a Catholic burial in the municipal cemetery, under a wrong name.
Did the doctor conceal some hidden cause of Benjamin’s death? Was there really a change of legislation? Was Walter Benjamin aware that Portbou was a pro-Franco town virtually occupied by the Nazis?
According to the official version, Walter Benjamin did make it across the French-Spanish border successfully. But when he arrived in the Catalan town of Portbou, a sudden change in legislation impeded his entry into Spain and he was obliged to spend the night at a local hotel under the close vigilance of three guards, whose orders were to deport him the following morning.
In utter despair, Benjamin took his own life, swallowing and overdose of morphine. The local doctor, however, declared it a natural death and Benjamin was given a Catholic burial in the municipal cemetery, under a wrong name.
Did the doctor conceal some hidden cause of Benjamin’s death? Was there really a change of legislation? Was Walter Benjamin aware that Portbou was a pro-Franco town virtually occupied by the Nazis?
Tuesday, 15 June 2010
The Bradford Arcades Project
Bradford lies at the heart of the City of Bradford, a metropolitan borough of West Yorkshire, in Northern England. It is situated in the foothills of the Pennines, 8.6 miles (13.8 km) west of Leeds, and 16 miles (25.7 km) northwest of Wakefield. Bradford became a municipal borough in 1847, and received its charter as a city in 1897. Following local government reform in 1974, city status was bestowed upon the wider metropolitan borough.
Bradford has a population of 293,717,[1] making it the thirteenth-most populous settlement in the UK. Bradford forms part of the West Yorkshire Urban Area conurbation which in 2001 had a population of 1.5 million[2] and is part of the Leeds-Bradford Larger Urban Zone (LUZ), the third largest in the UK after London and Manchester, with an estimated population in the 2004 Urban Audit of 2.4 million.[3]
Historically a part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, Bradford rose to prominence during the 19th century as an international centre of textile manufacture, particularly wool. It was a boomtown of the Industrial Revolution, and amongst the earliest industrialised settlements, rapidly becoming the "wool capital of the world".[4] The area's access to a supply of coal, iron ore and soft water facilitated the growth of Bradford's manufacturing base, which, as textile manufacture grew, led to an explosion in population and was a stimulus to civic investment; Bradford has fine Victorian architecture including the grand Italianate City Hall.
The textile sector in Bradford fell into a terminal decline from the mid-20th century. Since this time, Bradford has emerged as a tourist destination with attractions such as the National Media Museum and Cartwright Hall. However, Bradford has faced similar challenges to the rest of the post-industrial area of Northern England, including deindustrialisation, housing problems, social unrest and serious economic deprivation.
Since the 1950s Bradford has experienced significant levels of immigration, particularly from Kashmir. Bradford has the second highest proportion of Muslims in England and Wales outside London. An estimated 101,967 people of South Asian origin reside in the city,[5] representing around 20.5% of the city's population, with this figure projected to rise to 28% by 2011.[6] Bradford is often cited as one of the prime examples of 'parallel communities', where the population is effectively segregated along ethnic, cultural and faith lines.[7]
The city grew rapidly as workerw were attracted by jobs in the textile mills.[10] Such unprecedented growth did create problems, however. With over 200 factory chimneys continually churning out black, sulphurous smoke, Bradford gained the reputation of being the most polluted town in England. There were regular outbreaks of cholera and typhoid, and only 30% of children born to textile workers reached the age of fifteen. Life expectancy, of just over eighteen years, was one of the lowest in the country.[12]
The census showed that 69.3% of Bradford's population was White, 1.9% Mixed Race, 26.1% South Asian, 1.3% Black and 1.4% from other races. 22.1% of the population are of South Asian origin, the highest percentage of South Asian's in a single settlement in England and Wales except in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Nearly half of all Asians living in Yorkshire and the Humber live in Bradford, with the central wards of Bradford Moor, City, Little Horton, Manningham and Toller each having large majority Asian populations.[25]
It is forecast that a combination of growing population movement, large-scale immigration and the phenomenon of white flight will mean that no race will hold a demographic majority in Bradford by 2016.[26] Bradford has a large Islamic population, with 16.08% of the wider city identifying themselves as Muslim in the 2001 census.[27] 60.14% were Christians, 1.02% Sikhs, 0.95% Hindus and 13.3% were identified as having no religion. The percentage of Jews, Buddhists and those following other religions each amounted to fewer than 0.5% of the city's population.[27]
The ONS Regional Trends report, published in June 2009, showed that most of Bradford suffers from the highest levels of deprivation in the country.[28][29] Infant mortality stands at double the national average,[30] and life expectancy is considerably lower than in other parts of the district.[31] Bradford has one of the highest unemployment rates in England,[32] with the rate of inactivity amongst Minority Ethnic groups standing at almost 60%.[33][34]
Bradford has a population of 293,717,[1] making it the thirteenth-most populous settlement in the UK. Bradford forms part of the West Yorkshire Urban Area conurbation which in 2001 had a population of 1.5 million[2] and is part of the Leeds-Bradford Larger Urban Zone (LUZ), the third largest in the UK after London and Manchester, with an estimated population in the 2004 Urban Audit of 2.4 million.[3]
Historically a part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, Bradford rose to prominence during the 19th century as an international centre of textile manufacture, particularly wool. It was a boomtown of the Industrial Revolution, and amongst the earliest industrialised settlements, rapidly becoming the "wool capital of the world".[4] The area's access to a supply of coal, iron ore and soft water facilitated the growth of Bradford's manufacturing base, which, as textile manufacture grew, led to an explosion in population and was a stimulus to civic investment; Bradford has fine Victorian architecture including the grand Italianate City Hall.
The textile sector in Bradford fell into a terminal decline from the mid-20th century. Since this time, Bradford has emerged as a tourist destination with attractions such as the National Media Museum and Cartwright Hall. However, Bradford has faced similar challenges to the rest of the post-industrial area of Northern England, including deindustrialisation, housing problems, social unrest and serious economic deprivation.
Since the 1950s Bradford has experienced significant levels of immigration, particularly from Kashmir. Bradford has the second highest proportion of Muslims in England and Wales outside London. An estimated 101,967 people of South Asian origin reside in the city,[5] representing around 20.5% of the city's population, with this figure projected to rise to 28% by 2011.[6] Bradford is often cited as one of the prime examples of 'parallel communities', where the population is effectively segregated along ethnic, cultural and faith lines.[7]
The city grew rapidly as workerw were attracted by jobs in the textile mills.[10] Such unprecedented growth did create problems, however. With over 200 factory chimneys continually churning out black, sulphurous smoke, Bradford gained the reputation of being the most polluted town in England. There were regular outbreaks of cholera and typhoid, and only 30% of children born to textile workers reached the age of fifteen. Life expectancy, of just over eighteen years, was one of the lowest in the country.[12]
The census showed that 69.3% of Bradford's population was White, 1.9% Mixed Race, 26.1% South Asian, 1.3% Black and 1.4% from other races. 22.1% of the population are of South Asian origin, the highest percentage of South Asian's in a single settlement in England and Wales except in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Nearly half of all Asians living in Yorkshire and the Humber live in Bradford, with the central wards of Bradford Moor, City, Little Horton, Manningham and Toller each having large majority Asian populations.[25]
It is forecast that a combination of growing population movement, large-scale immigration and the phenomenon of white flight will mean that no race will hold a demographic majority in Bradford by 2016.[26] Bradford has a large Islamic population, with 16.08% of the wider city identifying themselves as Muslim in the 2001 census.[27] 60.14% were Christians, 1.02% Sikhs, 0.95% Hindus and 13.3% were identified as having no religion. The percentage of Jews, Buddhists and those following other religions each amounted to fewer than 0.5% of the city's population.[27]
The ONS Regional Trends report, published in June 2009, showed that most of Bradford suffers from the highest levels of deprivation in the country.[28][29] Infant mortality stands at double the national average,[30] and life expectancy is considerably lower than in other parts of the district.[31] Bradford has one of the highest unemployment rates in England,[32] with the rate of inactivity amongst Minority Ethnic groups standing at almost 60%.[33][34]
Monday, 14 June 2010
The Bradford Arcades - Swan Arcade
If Swan Arcade existed today and a plan was put forward to demolish it, there would probably be an uproar. In this, the year 2005 we sometimes greatly appreciate what is old, particularly if it has the quality and style of the shops-and-offices arcade which graced Bradford’s Market Street until 1962.
But there were surprisingly few voices of protest raised when it was announced that the 1870s building was to be replaced by a splendid 1960s one. This was the post-war period of great architectural purges, when the decks were cleared for a brave new world of concrete and glass. Not only did Bradford lose Swan Arcade, but it also lost Kirkgate Market - to the subsequent regret of many of its citizens.
At the time, J B Priestley declared himself displeased at the plan, because it was in Swan Arcade that he used to work as a very young man. But Priestley had long since moved well away from Bradford by this time, and most of the citizens who had stayed here didn’t really care much one way or the other.
When the demolition plan was announced in the autumn of 1960, the T&A recalled that the four-storey arcade had been built, at a cost of around £150,000, on the site of the old White Swan Inn.
"The man with the foresight to build it was Angus Holden, four times Mayor and a Bradford MP," the newspaper reported. "He named his arcade after the White Swan and incorporated graceful swans in stone and ironwork at the main Market Street entrance….Ground floor occupants included a cigar merchant, a cabinet maker and two tailors.
"At the start of the century mill owners established offices in the arcade but after many years it reverted to its original role as a shopping centre."
It was a stylish place. The T&A described it thus: "The names of the ground floor occupants were originally painted on the windows against a background which shut out the light. So hanging mirrors were placed in such a position that they reflected light from outside into offices and shops. More recently, there have been mirrors angled downwards from the sides of the avenues.
"The old lift, or chain of cages [driven by a gas engine], never stopped running in business hours but it went so slowly that it was easy to step in or out as it reached a floor level and no attendant was needed. It was replaced by an electric lift many years ago."
The arcade was acquired in 1955 by the Arndale Property Trust for a reported sun of between £225,000-£250,000 - although the exact figure was never disclosed. The year after it was demolished, Arndale House was built on the site. Just as Swan Arcade, when it was new, was described as being 50 years ahead of its time, so the T&A reported that its replacement, according to one of the architects who designed it, was "structurally the most advanced building to be constructed in the United Kingdom".
How It Was Reported Then
"A sale notice on the window of a men’s outfitters’ shop in Swan Arcade today proclaimed ‘The last day’. For when the heavy iron gates are next opened after tonight, the demolition men will move in.
Swan Arcade has been ‘dying’ for many months. Most of the 112 tenants in its shops and offices moved out weeks ago and there were only two doing business there on the last day. One was an outfitters’ shop, still filled with racks of suits and coats which the staff will move over the weekend to Leeds, sometimes described as the ‘city of arcades’. The other was a confectioners’, which was carrying less than its usual Saturday stock. Former tenants and workmen removing fittings were the only other people at work in what was a dusty and melancholy scene. It is estimated it will take about four months to pull down the city’s only arcade, which will be replaced by a more efficient building to marry with the new city centre."
Another Swan Arcade Story
The day sentence was passed on the dying Swan
It was just half a century ago this week that Bradford people learned of a decision many of them have regretted ever since.
The Telegraph & Argus of November 29, 1954, in Bradford, informed its readers that the elegant Swan Arcade, which occupied a site between Market Street and Broadway, had been sold privately for an undisclosed figure (although later informed guesses put it at between £225,000 and £250,000).
The clue to its fate lay in the name of the company which had bought it: the Arndale Property Trust Ltd of Wakefield, which T&A readers were told was “an investment company which specialises in the development of central shopping and office sites, with extensive holdings in the North and Midlands”.
A spokesman for the Bradford company appointed to manage the block of shops and offices, S H Chippendale & Co, said that “no immediate material changes” were envisaged and pointed out that several of the shops were on leases with several years to run.
He added: “It will depend on how Broadway develops. We regard it as a site in a developing area.”
Work had already started on the adjoining site at the corner of Bank Street and Broadway (now occupied by the Yorkshire Building Society) and this, he said, was bound to have “an improving effect” on the Broadway frontage.
The four-storey Swan Arcade, named after the White Swan Inn which used to stand on the site, had been built in 1880 by four-times Mayor and Bradford MP Angus Holden at a cost of around £150,000. It covered a 2,630-square yard site and at the time Arndale bought it was bringing in rent of £15,481 a year from 112 tenants.
Most of the offices were on six-month tenancies and the shops were on leases which were due to expire between 1955 and 1960.
And so began Swan Arcade’s long wait on the property world’s equivalent of Death Row. It was six years before the announcement came. On October 13, 1960, the Arndale Property Trust declared that the arcade was to be pulled down and rebuilt “to fit in with Bradford’s central redevelopment”.
Demolition would start when tenancy agreements ended in early 1962 and it was hoped that the building of what was to become Arndale House would start in May of that year.
Swan Arcade’s wind-down got underway. In October, 1961, the T&A reported that “Already the upper floors, until recently a hive of trade and activity, are dusty and silent. The lift no longer comes when you call.”
In the first days of March, 1962, the last shops closed, the demolition workers moved in, and Bradford’s only arcade was reduced to rubble, to be “replaced by a more efficient building to marry with the new city centre.”
Flaneurs
The Flâneur; from the Arcade to the Shopping Mall. From Modernity to Post-Modernity.
Author: James Addicott
In 1938 Walter Benjamin wrote his essay on ‘The Flâneur’ as part of an analysis of Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire’s. In Baudelaire’s essay; ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, Baudelaire ‘calls forth a poetic – and a poet’s – vision of the public places and spaces of Paris’ (Tester, 1994, p. 1), consequently coining the term; ‘modernity’. Benjamin, was himself associated with of a group of left wing Marxist intellectuals; the Frankfurt School. Benjamin used Baudelaire’s poet, or the figure of the flâneur, as a metaphorical device for understanding the cultural impact that high capitalism had on Parisians during the mid nineteenth century. Benjamin’s essay works as a response to Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann’s ‘concept city’. Haussmann’s newly designed Paris worked two fold, on one hand it; allowed wide avenues for increased traffic flow with an aim of increasing the flow of commodities, and on the other hand it provided wider streets making it easier for the authority to respond to any forms of potential public revolt, in response to the 1848 Paris revolution. In a similar fashion to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (in reference to; ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ (1944)), Benjamin saw the standardising process capitalism coupled with the logic of rational and order produced by this Enlightenment inspired design, as a detrimental totalising process.
With this in mind, Benjamin turned his attention to the urban phenomenon of the arcade, or as he termed it; ‘the original temple of commodity capitalism’ (as quoted in Buck-Morss, 1991 p.83). The arcades glass covered passageway filled with shops, commodities, consumers, and prostitutes, provided the luxurious intérieur for the flâneur. The flâneur’s were petty-bourgeois figures who, in defiance of high capitalism, would stroll and observe the crowd of commodity intoxicated consumers; “The intoxication to which the Flâneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity around which surges the stream of customers.” (Benjamin, 1938, p. 55) As the commodity remains alienated from the consumers, so to the flâneur chooses to remain alienated and isolated. arcades in Paris
Benjamin was particularly interested in the literature produced by the Flâneur, the physiologies du flâneur. According to Benjamin, these physiologies were used by the Flâneur as feuilleton to ‘turn the boulevard into an intérieur.’ (1938, p. 37) Benjamin, like Georg Simmel, took the view that the modern city produced alienated social relationships fundamentally based solely around money and the division of labour. For this reason Benjamin saw this literature of the physiologies as ‘socially dubious’ (1938, p.37.), rather than telling the truth of the situation; ‘the Physiologies helped fashion the phantasmagoria of Parisian life in their own way.’ (1938, p.39.) The phantasmagoria, as James Donald explains, was for Benjamin; ‘closely linked to the logic of capitalism as the ‘concept city’ of the rationalist planners and reformers’ (1992, p.440). The physiologies re-produced social categorisations which Benjamin a likened to Poe’s early invention of the detective story; ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (Poe, 1840).
To assess the critical relevancy of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary culture studies, and its usefulness for understanding life in contemporary city’s, I am draw from the work of two post-modern theorists, namely Michele Foucault and Fredric Jameson. I am going to argue that Benjamin’s essay presents itself to us as a historic milestone from which we can trace the continuing process of standardisation and the continuing effects produced by the rational logic of the Enlightenment era, in the evolution from the arcade, to the department store, to the contemporary shopping mall.
The first step that Benjamin identifies, in the demise of the flâneur’s intérieur, is the introduction of the department store;
‘If the arcade is the classical form of the intérieur, which is how the flâneur sees the street, the department store is the form on the intérieur’s decay. The bazaar is the last hangout for the flâneur. If in the beginning the street had become an intérieur for him, now this intérieur turned into a street, and he roamed through the labyrinth of the merchandise as he had once roamed through the labyrinth of the city.’
(Benjamin, 1938, p. 54)
The flâneur can find no home in the department stores of Paris, the department store, as a newer environment, with its only emphasis being on commodity shopping alone, provides an intérieur that leaves the flâneur disinterested. Priscilla Parkhurst Furgeson notes of the flâneur that; ‘He haunts the arcades, he does not buy. He consumes the city…’ (1994, p.28). The city’s intersecting arcades provided a crowd, the department store provided a city of merchandise, the flâneur interest was in the solely crowd and the city. The development of the department store and its emphasis on commodity shopping was identified by Benjamin as the first step in the demise of the flâneur.
The power of the flâneur was his ability to gaze, as Parkhurst Furgeson explains; ‘The flâneur’s field of action is encompassed by his field of vision.’ (1994, p.27) The flâneur found within himself a hiding place, a dark alienated corner where he could sketch his own existential observations of the crowd. However, the gaze of the flâneur, or the armature detective, is one that was soon to be monopolised, as Benjamin originally noted;
flaneur
“Technical measurements had come to the aid of the administrative control process. In the early days of the process of identification… the identity of a person was established through his signature. The invention of photography was a turning point in the history of this process… Photography has made it possible to preserve permanent and unmistakable traces of a human being.”
(Benjamin, 1938, p. 48)
The present-day technical measurements associated with the process of identification have advanced far beyond the levels of comprehension that anyone of Benjamin’s era could have possibly envisioned. The introduction in-store surveillance technology of the shopping-mall actuality provides us the physical manifestation of Enlightenment philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s Panoptic schema. Before I discuss this, it is important to note that Benjamin makes reference to another identifying process; ‘The numbering of houses in the big city’s may be used to document the progressive standardisation.’ (1938, p.47.) At the beginning of ‘Discipline and Punish’ Foucault writes of the quarantine process undertaken during the plague in the mid seventeenth century, Foucault, quoting Bentham, states; ‘The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities. From the view point of the guardian, it is replaced by a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised’. (1997, p.60-64). Keith Tester points out that; “Benjamin was in no doubt that house-numbering was a measure intended to pin down to a single place and meaning every face in the city. And such pinning down makes flânerie impossible since it establishes meaning and order of things in advance.” (1992, p.14) The ability to number, separate and identify individuals is documented within the texts of Benjamin, Bentham and Foucault and continues to exist in the planning of post-modern city’s. panopticon
cctv
The ability to disguise ones self, in the space of the mall, is increasingly becoming an impossibility and the ability to remain undetected in the mall has become solely a privilege of the mall’s in-store detectives. In 2005 there was a media debate over Britain’s largest shopping Mall; ‘Bluewater’, as they announced a ban on ‘wearing hooded sweatshirt tops and baseball caps in public.’ (Booth, 2005, Available from: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article521620.ece) From a Benjamin / Foucauldian perspective, within this Panoptic space of the mall, the face has now emerges as the new signature. Our presence is recorded in the process of identification with the introduction of new surveillance technology. The flâneur of the nineteenth century would no longer be able to immerse himself within a crowed sea of hats. They have been banned as a requirement of identification, removing mystery of the crowd that go along with them. In a continuing rationalising process, from the signature, to the house number, to the photograph to the face; the mall is the Enlightenments new order over chaos. Tester notes; ‘with rationalisation, all mystery is removed from the city.’ (Tester, 1994, p.14) It was of course, the mystery that motivated the flâneur and a mystery that only those central to the Panopticon schema may possess.
The flâneur was the ‘hero of modernity’, the man of leisure who resisted capitalisms requirement for a division of labour, the ability to casually stroll and reorder the chaos, to suit himself through his poetry, was what made him a hero. However, since then loitering ( and perhaps even strolling) have become mindless pursuits associated, like hoodies and hats, with criminality, Zyfmut Bauman states of the shopping-mall; ‘Aimlessness is mortal sin and capital crime, something it has sworn to burn out, or better still strangle at birth.’ (1994, p.149). Our conduct defined for us in the space of the shopping mall is of course is shopping and not flânerie, or any of the characteristics associated with it.
In Jameson’s writings on post-modern warfare, in response to Michael Herrs book on the experience of Vietnam; ‘Dispatches’ – he mentions that;
jameson
‘Benjamin’s account of Baudelaire, and the emergence of modernism from a new experience of city technology which transcends all the older habits of bodily perception, is both singularly relevant here, and singularly antiquated, in the light of this new and virtually unimaginable quantum leap in technological alienation:’
(Jameson , 1992, p. 84)
The alienation of modernity that Benjamin spoke of can no longer exist for Jameson, who states that; ‘The shift in the dynamics of culture pathology can be characterized as one in which alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject.’ Since the ‘breakdown of all previous narrative paradigms’ (1992, p.84) and the expanse of global third phase capitalism, aided by the invention of the information highway, has lead to a compression of time and space in a new global society; we inhabit a new space – the postmodernist space of the global village. The simulation of the shopping-mall resembles the simulation of post-modern war. We embody the discourse as guests within the globally institutionalised shopping mall. From Jameson’s post-modern Marxist perspective, if there are areas in the mall where we can feel the nostalgia of nineteenth century France, we can only accept that this feeling of nostalgia has been pre-designed into the simulated experience.
In conclusion, if we take on Benjamin and Foucault analysis of Haussmann and Bentham’s Enlightenment inspired architectural designs, coupled with the understanding of the standardising requirements of capitalism that have been identified in Benjamin’s essay, upon reflection, we can see the logical progression from the development of the arcades in Paris in an era of modernity to the shopping malls of the post-modern era. By taking some of the basic elements of Jameson’s argument, we can see how the design of the hyper-simulated space of the shopping-mall continues to refine and secure the shopping experience of consumers. Key elements of the earlier arcade that Benjamin writes of; the gaze, the prostitution, the loitering, have been ‘designed out’ from the conceptual space of the shopping-mall but continue to exist within contemporary society. De Certeau remarks; ‘The city is left prey to contradictory movements that counter-balance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power.’ (1980, p. 95) Benjamin’s essay ‘The Flâneur’ was left incomplete after his death in 1940, and there are still differences of opinion over Benjamin’s intentions, however, his analysis of Baudelaire gives us fantastic documentation era of rapid changes in city planning, which we can genealogically trace back, as I have now, and understand the economic and cultural roots of the present era of third phase capitalism have established themselves.
Author: James Addicott
In 1938 Walter Benjamin wrote his essay on ‘The Flâneur’ as part of an analysis of Parisian poet Charles Baudelaire’s. In Baudelaire’s essay; ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, Baudelaire ‘calls forth a poetic – and a poet’s – vision of the public places and spaces of Paris’ (Tester, 1994, p. 1), consequently coining the term; ‘modernity’. Benjamin, was himself associated with of a group of left wing Marxist intellectuals; the Frankfurt School. Benjamin used Baudelaire’s poet, or the figure of the flâneur, as a metaphorical device for understanding the cultural impact that high capitalism had on Parisians during the mid nineteenth century. Benjamin’s essay works as a response to Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann’s ‘concept city’. Haussmann’s newly designed Paris worked two fold, on one hand it; allowed wide avenues for increased traffic flow with an aim of increasing the flow of commodities, and on the other hand it provided wider streets making it easier for the authority to respond to any forms of potential public revolt, in response to the 1848 Paris revolution. In a similar fashion to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (in reference to; ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ (1944)), Benjamin saw the standardising process capitalism coupled with the logic of rational and order produced by this Enlightenment inspired design, as a detrimental totalising process.
With this in mind, Benjamin turned his attention to the urban phenomenon of the arcade, or as he termed it; ‘the original temple of commodity capitalism’ (as quoted in Buck-Morss, 1991 p.83). The arcades glass covered passageway filled with shops, commodities, consumers, and prostitutes, provided the luxurious intérieur for the flâneur. The flâneur’s were petty-bourgeois figures who, in defiance of high capitalism, would stroll and observe the crowd of commodity intoxicated consumers; “The intoxication to which the Flâneur surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity around which surges the stream of customers.” (Benjamin, 1938, p. 55) As the commodity remains alienated from the consumers, so to the flâneur chooses to remain alienated and isolated. arcades in Paris
Benjamin was particularly interested in the literature produced by the Flâneur, the physiologies du flâneur. According to Benjamin, these physiologies were used by the Flâneur as feuilleton to ‘turn the boulevard into an intérieur.’ (1938, p. 37) Benjamin, like Georg Simmel, took the view that the modern city produced alienated social relationships fundamentally based solely around money and the division of labour. For this reason Benjamin saw this literature of the physiologies as ‘socially dubious’ (1938, p.37.), rather than telling the truth of the situation; ‘the Physiologies helped fashion the phantasmagoria of Parisian life in their own way.’ (1938, p.39.) The phantasmagoria, as James Donald explains, was for Benjamin; ‘closely linked to the logic of capitalism as the ‘concept city’ of the rationalist planners and reformers’ (1992, p.440). The physiologies re-produced social categorisations which Benjamin a likened to Poe’s early invention of the detective story; ‘The Man of the Crowd’ (Poe, 1840).
To assess the critical relevancy of Benjamin’s essay for contemporary culture studies, and its usefulness for understanding life in contemporary city’s, I am draw from the work of two post-modern theorists, namely Michele Foucault and Fredric Jameson. I am going to argue that Benjamin’s essay presents itself to us as a historic milestone from which we can trace the continuing process of standardisation and the continuing effects produced by the rational logic of the Enlightenment era, in the evolution from the arcade, to the department store, to the contemporary shopping mall.
The first step that Benjamin identifies, in the demise of the flâneur’s intérieur, is the introduction of the department store;
‘If the arcade is the classical form of the intérieur, which is how the flâneur sees the street, the department store is the form on the intérieur’s decay. The bazaar is the last hangout for the flâneur. If in the beginning the street had become an intérieur for him, now this intérieur turned into a street, and he roamed through the labyrinth of the merchandise as he had once roamed through the labyrinth of the city.’
(Benjamin, 1938, p. 54)
The flâneur can find no home in the department stores of Paris, the department store, as a newer environment, with its only emphasis being on commodity shopping alone, provides an intérieur that leaves the flâneur disinterested. Priscilla Parkhurst Furgeson notes of the flâneur that; ‘He haunts the arcades, he does not buy. He consumes the city…’ (1994, p.28). The city’s intersecting arcades provided a crowd, the department store provided a city of merchandise, the flâneur interest was in the solely crowd and the city. The development of the department store and its emphasis on commodity shopping was identified by Benjamin as the first step in the demise of the flâneur.
The power of the flâneur was his ability to gaze, as Parkhurst Furgeson explains; ‘The flâneur’s field of action is encompassed by his field of vision.’ (1994, p.27) The flâneur found within himself a hiding place, a dark alienated corner where he could sketch his own existential observations of the crowd. However, the gaze of the flâneur, or the armature detective, is one that was soon to be monopolised, as Benjamin originally noted;
flaneur
“Technical measurements had come to the aid of the administrative control process. In the early days of the process of identification… the identity of a person was established through his signature. The invention of photography was a turning point in the history of this process… Photography has made it possible to preserve permanent and unmistakable traces of a human being.”
(Benjamin, 1938, p. 48)
The present-day technical measurements associated with the process of identification have advanced far beyond the levels of comprehension that anyone of Benjamin’s era could have possibly envisioned. The introduction in-store surveillance technology of the shopping-mall actuality provides us the physical manifestation of Enlightenment philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s Panoptic schema. Before I discuss this, it is important to note that Benjamin makes reference to another identifying process; ‘The numbering of houses in the big city’s may be used to document the progressive standardisation.’ (1938, p.47.) At the beginning of ‘Discipline and Punish’ Foucault writes of the quarantine process undertaken during the plague in the mid seventeenth century, Foucault, quoting Bentham, states; ‘The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of multiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities. From the view point of the guardian, it is replaced by a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised’. (1997, p.60-64). Keith Tester points out that; “Benjamin was in no doubt that house-numbering was a measure intended to pin down to a single place and meaning every face in the city. And such pinning down makes flânerie impossible since it establishes meaning and order of things in advance.” (1992, p.14) The ability to number, separate and identify individuals is documented within the texts of Benjamin, Bentham and Foucault and continues to exist in the planning of post-modern city’s. panopticon
cctv
The ability to disguise ones self, in the space of the mall, is increasingly becoming an impossibility and the ability to remain undetected in the mall has become solely a privilege of the mall’s in-store detectives. In 2005 there was a media debate over Britain’s largest shopping Mall; ‘Bluewater’, as they announced a ban on ‘wearing hooded sweatshirt tops and baseball caps in public.’ (Booth, 2005, Available from: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article521620.ece) From a Benjamin / Foucauldian perspective, within this Panoptic space of the mall, the face has now emerges as the new signature. Our presence is recorded in the process of identification with the introduction of new surveillance technology. The flâneur of the nineteenth century would no longer be able to immerse himself within a crowed sea of hats. They have been banned as a requirement of identification, removing mystery of the crowd that go along with them. In a continuing rationalising process, from the signature, to the house number, to the photograph to the face; the mall is the Enlightenments new order over chaos. Tester notes; ‘with rationalisation, all mystery is removed from the city.’ (Tester, 1994, p.14) It was of course, the mystery that motivated the flâneur and a mystery that only those central to the Panopticon schema may possess.
The flâneur was the ‘hero of modernity’, the man of leisure who resisted capitalisms requirement for a division of labour, the ability to casually stroll and reorder the chaos, to suit himself through his poetry, was what made him a hero. However, since then loitering ( and perhaps even strolling) have become mindless pursuits associated, like hoodies and hats, with criminality, Zyfmut Bauman states of the shopping-mall; ‘Aimlessness is mortal sin and capital crime, something it has sworn to burn out, or better still strangle at birth.’ (1994, p.149). Our conduct defined for us in the space of the shopping mall is of course is shopping and not flânerie, or any of the characteristics associated with it.
In Jameson’s writings on post-modern warfare, in response to Michael Herrs book on the experience of Vietnam; ‘Dispatches’ – he mentions that;
jameson
‘Benjamin’s account of Baudelaire, and the emergence of modernism from a new experience of city technology which transcends all the older habits of bodily perception, is both singularly relevant here, and singularly antiquated, in the light of this new and virtually unimaginable quantum leap in technological alienation:’
(Jameson , 1992, p. 84)
The alienation of modernity that Benjamin spoke of can no longer exist for Jameson, who states that; ‘The shift in the dynamics of culture pathology can be characterized as one in which alienation of the subject is displaced by the fragmentation of the subject.’ Since the ‘breakdown of all previous narrative paradigms’ (1992, p.84) and the expanse of global third phase capitalism, aided by the invention of the information highway, has lead to a compression of time and space in a new global society; we inhabit a new space – the postmodernist space of the global village. The simulation of the shopping-mall resembles the simulation of post-modern war. We embody the discourse as guests within the globally institutionalised shopping mall. From Jameson’s post-modern Marxist perspective, if there are areas in the mall where we can feel the nostalgia of nineteenth century France, we can only accept that this feeling of nostalgia has been pre-designed into the simulated experience.
In conclusion, if we take on Benjamin and Foucault analysis of Haussmann and Bentham’s Enlightenment inspired architectural designs, coupled with the understanding of the standardising requirements of capitalism that have been identified in Benjamin’s essay, upon reflection, we can see the logical progression from the development of the arcades in Paris in an era of modernity to the shopping malls of the post-modern era. By taking some of the basic elements of Jameson’s argument, we can see how the design of the hyper-simulated space of the shopping-mall continues to refine and secure the shopping experience of consumers. Key elements of the earlier arcade that Benjamin writes of; the gaze, the prostitution, the loitering, have been ‘designed out’ from the conceptual space of the shopping-mall but continue to exist within contemporary society. De Certeau remarks; ‘The city is left prey to contradictory movements that counter-balance and combine themselves outside the reach of panoptic power.’ (1980, p. 95) Benjamin’s essay ‘The Flâneur’ was left incomplete after his death in 1940, and there are still differences of opinion over Benjamin’s intentions, however, his analysis of Baudelaire gives us fantastic documentation era of rapid changes in city planning, which we can genealogically trace back, as I have now, and understand the economic and cultural roots of the present era of third phase capitalism have established themselves.
Ways of Seeing
Ways of Seeing (1972) John Berger
Ways of Seeing is an influential book by John Berger, consisting of several essays about art, feminism and publicity. It is often assigned to college freshmen who are studying art history. In it, he makes inquiries in how we view art, why we view art, and possible social implication of art. -
Imagine yourself in front of a television or at your computer terminal. Across the screen streams a series of images: Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, a photograph of Madonna, an advertisement for Calvin Klein underwear, a still life by Picasso, a snapshot of you smiling in a T-shirt with the Mona Lisa's face on the front. Now imagine you are sitting among hundreds of other students in a darkened lecture hall as your Art 100 instructor, laser pointer directed at a ten-foot-high projection of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, recounts various theories explaining the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile. Finally, imagine yourself in the quiet of the Paris Louvre, standing before the 21"x 30" oil-on-wood original portrait of the wife of Francesco del Giocondo--the original Mona Lisa. The differences among these three experiences constitute the topic of John Berger's "Ways of Seeing."
Born in London in 1926, Berger has been an artist, poet and screenwriter as well as essayist, and is very much part of a conversation that includes writers in this volume such as Annie Dillard, Walker Percy, and Susan Sontag. As Berger himself acknowledges, however, the conversation began for him with German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, whose ideas deeply influenced Berger and Sontag, too. Born in 1892, Benjamin was the son of German-Jews. He fled to France in 1933 with the rise of the Nazis, but when Germany invaded France, Benjamin was forced to flee again. While attempting to cross the Franco-Spanish border in September 1940, he was ordered back to France. Benjamin committed suicide that night.
Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," to which Berger refers at the close of his own essay, reflects Benjamin's horror at the Nazi party's efforts to "aestheticize" politics, war and genocide--that is, to turn them into art. Rather than rendering politics aesthetic, Benjamin called for politicizing art. In "Ways of Seeing," Berger does just that. The age of technology, he claims, has freed art objects from the grip of the wealthy few and made them available, through reproduction, to all of us. Yet the "language of images," our experience of art, our appreciation of art, and, most important, our human history represented in art all remain in the grip of a new controlling minority of art specialists who define for the rest of us what we see. The result is to "mystify," rather than clarify, art and our relationship to it. Though thirty years old, Berger's call to liberate art--and us, its viewers--may be especially timely in the current age of computerized image-making and the World Wide
Ways of Seeing is an influential book by John Berger, consisting of several essays about art, feminism and publicity. It is often assigned to college freshmen who are studying art history. In it, he makes inquiries in how we view art, why we view art, and possible social implication of art. -
Imagine yourself in front of a television or at your computer terminal. Across the screen streams a series of images: Mona Lisa, Venus de Milo, a photograph of Madonna, an advertisement for Calvin Klein underwear, a still life by Picasso, a snapshot of you smiling in a T-shirt with the Mona Lisa's face on the front. Now imagine you are sitting among hundreds of other students in a darkened lecture hall as your Art 100 instructor, laser pointer directed at a ten-foot-high projection of Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, recounts various theories explaining the Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile. Finally, imagine yourself in the quiet of the Paris Louvre, standing before the 21"x 30" oil-on-wood original portrait of the wife of Francesco del Giocondo--the original Mona Lisa. The differences among these three experiences constitute the topic of John Berger's "Ways of Seeing."
Born in London in 1926, Berger has been an artist, poet and screenwriter as well as essayist, and is very much part of a conversation that includes writers in this volume such as Annie Dillard, Walker Percy, and Susan Sontag. As Berger himself acknowledges, however, the conversation began for him with German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, whose ideas deeply influenced Berger and Sontag, too. Born in 1892, Benjamin was the son of German-Jews. He fled to France in 1933 with the rise of the Nazis, but when Germany invaded France, Benjamin was forced to flee again. While attempting to cross the Franco-Spanish border in September 1940, he was ordered back to France. Benjamin committed suicide that night.
Benjamin's essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," to which Berger refers at the close of his own essay, reflects Benjamin's horror at the Nazi party's efforts to "aestheticize" politics, war and genocide--that is, to turn them into art. Rather than rendering politics aesthetic, Benjamin called for politicizing art. In "Ways of Seeing," Berger does just that. The age of technology, he claims, has freed art objects from the grip of the wealthy few and made them available, through reproduction, to all of us. Yet the "language of images," our experience of art, our appreciation of art, and, most important, our human history represented in art all remain in the grip of a new controlling minority of art specialists who define for the rest of us what we see. The result is to "mystify," rather than clarify, art and our relationship to it. Though thirty years old, Berger's call to liberate art--and us, its viewers--may be especially timely in the current age of computerized image-making and the World Wide
Tuesday, 8 June 2010
Zizeck
Overrated > Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek
JEREMY JENNINGS
November 2008
Try as one might, it is difficult to avoid the Slovenian-born philosopher Slavoj Žižek. If you miss the 30 or more books he has published since 1989, there are scores of articles, book reviews in the London Review of Books and the New Statesman and even the occasional interview in the Guardian. Failing this you can watch the film Žižek! - where, from beneath his bed sheets, he discourses upon the nature of philosophy. There is also the three-part TV documentary, The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema, from which we learn that The Sound of Music is not really a film about kindly Austrians escaping from the Nazis but rather an everyday tale of honest Fascists resisting a decadent Jewish cosmopolitan takeover. Somewhat improbably, Žižek has been the subject of an art installation and there is even an International Journal of Žižek Studies. He has been called "The Elvis of Cultural Theory", attaining the status of an Academic Rock Star, filling lecture hall after lecture hall. In the words of fellow-Marxist Terry Eagleton, Žižek is less a philosopher than a phenomenon. He is undoubtedly very clever, very engaging and very, very funny.
There is much to admire about Slavoj Žižek. He spent his early adult years as a dissident in the former Yugoslavia, suffering at the hands of the authorities. He refuses to play the conventional role of the leftist intellectual. He cannot abide orthodoxy, preferring the role of gadfly to prophet, jester to sage. He is hostile to postmodernism (describing himself as a "card-carrying Lacanian") and despises the politics of multiculturalism for its reduction of all questions to problems of toleration and difference. He is rude to vegetarians and has no sympathy for humanitarians like Bill Gates, intent on solving the world's ills through charity.
So where is the problem? Look no further than the two books Žižek has published this year: Violence and In Defense of Lost Causes. Žižek believes that the age of ideologies is not over and that the idea of global emancipation is not dead. The liberal consensus just wants us to think that it is. The ambition, in his words, is to forge a new egalitarian and emancipatory politics and to find new sites of resistance to a capitalist order based upon systematic inequality, exploitation and injustice. Where are these to be found? Drawing upon the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Žižek conjures up the category of "divine violence" as a form of pure violence that serves no purpose except as an expression of opposition to injustice in the world. Those annihilated by divine violence, he tells us, are "fully and completely guilty". Next, he imagines that divine violence has been instantiated (although often with "deplorable" outcomes) in the revolutionary politics of terror associated with Jacobinism, Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism. Each has its "redemptive moment". Remarkably, Žižek's suggestion is that if these revolutionary movements failed, it was not because they were too extreme but because they were not radical enough. He then conjectures that the Left of today has become ashamed of the Jacobin legacy of revolutionary terror, in part because, in his paraphrase of Robespierre, it wants a revolution without a revolution, a revolution which respects social rules and existing norms, a decaffeinated revolution.
The challenge for Žižek, then, is to reinvent what he describes as emancipatory or egalitarian terror in order that it might be deployed in today's circumstances. What would this look like? We get a clue from the critical remarks directed against Danton's efforts to turn Jacobin revolutionary terror into "statist violence". Žižek's preference is for "the direct ‘divine' violence of the sans-culottes, of the people themselves". The same sentiment was repeated in a recent article in the New Statesman, where he expressed his admiration for the radical politics of Haiti's Lavalas movement and its leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Here is a movement that is "exemplary of principled heroism". He also endorsed Aristide's failure to condemn acts of popular violence against the people's enemies.
However, in Žižek's view, there is more to egalitarian terror than the eruption of the mob into violence. It amounts to a radical upheaval of basic social relations and the imposition of a new order on quotidian reality. It is at the very end of In Defense of Lost Causes, when he holds out the prospect of impending ecological catastrophe, that Žižek most clearly sketches the chilling vision of what he takes to be an emancipatory politics of "revolutionary-democratic terror". First would be a strict egalitarian justice: the same norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and so on, would be imposed on everyone. Next would be terror, including "ruthless punishment", severe limitations on liberal freedoms, and technological control of "prospective" law-breakers. Third would be recourse to voluntarism in the form of "large-scale collective decisions" running counter to the logic of capitalism. Finally, all this would be combined with trust in the people, the wager that the vast majority of people would support these "severe measures" and would be "ready to participate in their enforcement". Such would be egalitarian-revolutionary terror. It amounts to a reinvented version of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Slavoj Žižek might tell good jokes but this is not one of them. He might be a jester but some people take him very seriously.
Slavoj Žižek
JEREMY JENNINGS
November 2008
Try as one might, it is difficult to avoid the Slovenian-born philosopher Slavoj Žižek. If you miss the 30 or more books he has published since 1989, there are scores of articles, book reviews in the London Review of Books and the New Statesman and even the occasional interview in the Guardian. Failing this you can watch the film Žižek! - where, from beneath his bed sheets, he discourses upon the nature of philosophy. There is also the three-part TV documentary, The Pervert's Guide to the Cinema, from which we learn that The Sound of Music is not really a film about kindly Austrians escaping from the Nazis but rather an everyday tale of honest Fascists resisting a decadent Jewish cosmopolitan takeover. Somewhat improbably, Žižek has been the subject of an art installation and there is even an International Journal of Žižek Studies. He has been called "The Elvis of Cultural Theory", attaining the status of an Academic Rock Star, filling lecture hall after lecture hall. In the words of fellow-Marxist Terry Eagleton, Žižek is less a philosopher than a phenomenon. He is undoubtedly very clever, very engaging and very, very funny.
There is much to admire about Slavoj Žižek. He spent his early adult years as a dissident in the former Yugoslavia, suffering at the hands of the authorities. He refuses to play the conventional role of the leftist intellectual. He cannot abide orthodoxy, preferring the role of gadfly to prophet, jester to sage. He is hostile to postmodernism (describing himself as a "card-carrying Lacanian") and despises the politics of multiculturalism for its reduction of all questions to problems of toleration and difference. He is rude to vegetarians and has no sympathy for humanitarians like Bill Gates, intent on solving the world's ills through charity.
So where is the problem? Look no further than the two books Žižek has published this year: Violence and In Defense of Lost Causes. Žižek believes that the age of ideologies is not over and that the idea of global emancipation is not dead. The liberal consensus just wants us to think that it is. The ambition, in his words, is to forge a new egalitarian and emancipatory politics and to find new sites of resistance to a capitalist order based upon systematic inequality, exploitation and injustice. Where are these to be found? Drawing upon the ideas of Walter Benjamin, Žižek conjures up the category of "divine violence" as a form of pure violence that serves no purpose except as an expression of opposition to injustice in the world. Those annihilated by divine violence, he tells us, are "fully and completely guilty". Next, he imagines that divine violence has been instantiated (although often with "deplorable" outcomes) in the revolutionary politics of terror associated with Jacobinism, Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism. Each has its "redemptive moment". Remarkably, Žižek's suggestion is that if these revolutionary movements failed, it was not because they were too extreme but because they were not radical enough. He then conjectures that the Left of today has become ashamed of the Jacobin legacy of revolutionary terror, in part because, in his paraphrase of Robespierre, it wants a revolution without a revolution, a revolution which respects social rules and existing norms, a decaffeinated revolution.
The challenge for Žižek, then, is to reinvent what he describes as emancipatory or egalitarian terror in order that it might be deployed in today's circumstances. What would this look like? We get a clue from the critical remarks directed against Danton's efforts to turn Jacobin revolutionary terror into "statist violence". Žižek's preference is for "the direct ‘divine' violence of the sans-culottes, of the people themselves". The same sentiment was repeated in a recent article in the New Statesman, where he expressed his admiration for the radical politics of Haiti's Lavalas movement and its leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Here is a movement that is "exemplary of principled heroism". He also endorsed Aristide's failure to condemn acts of popular violence against the people's enemies.
However, in Žižek's view, there is more to egalitarian terror than the eruption of the mob into violence. It amounts to a radical upheaval of basic social relations and the imposition of a new order on quotidian reality. It is at the very end of In Defense of Lost Causes, when he holds out the prospect of impending ecological catastrophe, that Žižek most clearly sketches the chilling vision of what he takes to be an emancipatory politics of "revolutionary-democratic terror". First would be a strict egalitarian justice: the same norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and so on, would be imposed on everyone. Next would be terror, including "ruthless punishment", severe limitations on liberal freedoms, and technological control of "prospective" law-breakers. Third would be recourse to voluntarism in the form of "large-scale collective decisions" running counter to the logic of capitalism. Finally, all this would be combined with trust in the people, the wager that the vast majority of people would support these "severe measures" and would be "ready to participate in their enforcement". Such would be egalitarian-revolutionary terror. It amounts to a reinvented version of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Slavoj Žižek might tell good jokes but this is not one of them. He might be a jester but some people take him very seriously.
Sunday, 6 June 2010
Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin is hard to pin down. His writings do not fit easily into one discipline or area, and his output ranges across art history and aesthetics, literary theory, anthropology, history, philosophy, linguistics and politics. His close friends and correspondents included the Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht, the critical theorist Theodor Adorno and the Judaic scholar Gershom Scholem. The topics that attracted Benjamin are diverse: literature of the baroque, Romantic and modern periods, especially Goethe, Baudelaire, Kafka, Proust and Brecht, the philosophy of history, the social dynamics of technology, nineteenth century Paris, fascism and militarism, the city, capitalist time, childhood, memory, art and photography.
From the New Left Review
New Left Review 51, May-June 2008
Benjamin’s last, unpublished report on the literary situation in France. Critical reflections on the fiction, philosophy, memoirs and art criticism of the time—and on Paris, Surrealism and the logic of Hitlerism—moving constantly from the realm of letters to a world at war.
INTRODUCTION TO BENJAMIN
1940 SURVEY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Completed in Paris six months before his death, Walter Benjamin’s final report to Max Horkheimer on the literary situation in France is published here for the first time in English. It was the third ‘literature letter’ that Benjamin had drafted for the Institute for Social Research in New York; the earlier two (3 November 1937, 24 January 1939) can be found in the Gesammelte Briefe. Almost twice as long as these, the Survey of 23 March 1940—Hitler’s troops would take Holland six weeks later—was composed during the same months as ‘On the Concept of History’. Benjamin’s personal situation was precarious: his health had not recovered from his internment as an enemy alien in Autumn 1939; back in his tiny Paris apartment, he worked in bed because of the cold.
Benjamin’s ‘apologies’ to Horkheimer for the difference between this text and his last may refer to the political and intellectual vistas of war-torn Europe it provides, which open out far beyond the pages under review. It contains perhaps his most direct reflections—via Spengler—on the Hitlerite mentality. If the tone recalls the ‘almost Chinese’ courtesy that Adorno remarked in Benjamin’s correspondence, his sensitivity to the Institute’s reactions was well grounded. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproductibility’ and his great essay on Fuchs had been published in its journal shorn of their Marxian passages; Benjamin had only learnt while in the internment camp that his ‘Baudelaire’ would finally appear, after the virtual rejection of its first version by Adorno the year before. To comply with Horkheimer’s request for a further report, he set aside a planned comparison of Rousseau’s Confessions with Gide’s Journals (‘a historical account of sincerity’), and his Baudelaire: ‘closest to my heart, it would be most damaged if I had to stop after starting it again’.
It is not clear why the Institute never sought to publish the 1940 Survey. It was not included in Scholem and Adorno’s 1966 collection of Benjamin’s Correspondence, nor in the five-volume Selected Writings published in English by Harvard University Press. It first appeared—in its original French—only in 2000, in Volume VI of the Gesammelte Briefe. Yet the text stands as a striking valedictory statement on the themes central to Benjamin’s mature work: Paris, now ‘fragile’ under the threat of war, its clochards signalling the vaster tribe of Europe’s dispossesed; the twilight of Surrealism; and the vocation of cultural theory as material social critique.
WALTER BENJAMIN
1940 SURVEY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Paris, 23 March 1940
Dear Monsieur Horkheimer,
It is over a year since I sent you my last résumé of French literature. Unfortunately it is not in literary novelties that the past season has proved most fertile. The noxious seed that has sprouted here obscures the blossoming plant of belles-lettres with a sinister foliage. But I shall attempt in any case to make you a florilegium of it. And since the presentation that I offered you before did not displease, I would like to apologize in advance for the ways in which the form of the following remarks may differ.
Benjamin’s last, unpublished report on the literary situation in France. Critical reflections on the fiction, philosophy, memoirs and art criticism of the time—and on Paris, Surrealism and the logic of Hitlerism—moving constantly from the realm of letters to a world at war.
INTRODUCTION TO BENJAMIN
1940 SURVEY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Completed in Paris six months before his death, Walter Benjamin’s final report to Max Horkheimer on the literary situation in France is published here for the first time in English. It was the third ‘literature letter’ that Benjamin had drafted for the Institute for Social Research in New York; the earlier two (3 November 1937, 24 January 1939) can be found in the Gesammelte Briefe. Almost twice as long as these, the Survey of 23 March 1940—Hitler’s troops would take Holland six weeks later—was composed during the same months as ‘On the Concept of History’. Benjamin’s personal situation was precarious: his health had not recovered from his internment as an enemy alien in Autumn 1939; back in his tiny Paris apartment, he worked in bed because of the cold.
Benjamin’s ‘apologies’ to Horkheimer for the difference between this text and his last may refer to the political and intellectual vistas of war-torn Europe it provides, which open out far beyond the pages under review. It contains perhaps his most direct reflections—via Spengler—on the Hitlerite mentality. If the tone recalls the ‘almost Chinese’ courtesy that Adorno remarked in Benjamin’s correspondence, his sensitivity to the Institute’s reactions was well grounded. ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproductibility’ and his great essay on Fuchs had been published in its journal shorn of their Marxian passages; Benjamin had only learnt while in the internment camp that his ‘Baudelaire’ would finally appear, after the virtual rejection of its first version by Adorno the year before. To comply with Horkheimer’s request for a further report, he set aside a planned comparison of Rousseau’s Confessions with Gide’s Journals (‘a historical account of sincerity’), and his Baudelaire: ‘closest to my heart, it would be most damaged if I had to stop after starting it again’.
It is not clear why the Institute never sought to publish the 1940 Survey. It was not included in Scholem and Adorno’s 1966 collection of Benjamin’s Correspondence, nor in the five-volume Selected Writings published in English by Harvard University Press. It first appeared—in its original French—only in 2000, in Volume VI of the Gesammelte Briefe. Yet the text stands as a striking valedictory statement on the themes central to Benjamin’s mature work: Paris, now ‘fragile’ under the threat of war, its clochards signalling the vaster tribe of Europe’s dispossesed; the twilight of Surrealism; and the vocation of cultural theory as material social critique.
WALTER BENJAMIN
1940 SURVEY OF FRENCH LITERATURE
Paris, 23 March 1940
Dear Monsieur Horkheimer,
It is over a year since I sent you my last résumé of French literature. Unfortunately it is not in literary novelties that the past season has proved most fertile. The noxious seed that has sprouted here obscures the blossoming plant of belles-lettres with a sinister foliage. But I shall attempt in any case to make you a florilegium of it. And since the presentation that I offered you before did not displease, I would like to apologize in advance for the ways in which the form of the following remarks may differ.
Saturday, 5 June 2010
Carina Birman
Through the Trapdoor
Jeremy Harding
* BuyThe Narrow Foothold by Carina Birman
Hearing Eye, 29 pp, £7.00, August 2006, ISBN 1 905082 10 X
Most of the expatriates in France who had to run for their lives in 1940 made for Marseille, which had working consulates, maritime companies and smuggling networks. The people in the greatest danger were anti-Fascist Germans and Jews of any political persuasion, followed by assorted individuals who had blotted their copybooks in a manner the Gestapo was sure to ascertain or invent. ‘Human trafficking’ had become the order of the day and remained so, long after the hope of leaving by boat had turned out, for most, to be illusory.
The Narrow Foothold, a 16-page memoir, opens in Marseille, where Carina Birman was waiting in September 1940 to get out of the country. Birman had been the legal adviser at the Austrian Embassy in Paris until the Anschluss, when it was shut down. She seems to have remained in Paris and become involved in a human trafficking scam of her own, helping ‘undesirables’ out of Europe on visas obtained from the Mexican Consulate.
When she heard from some new arrivals in Marseille that her name featured high on a list of people wanted by the Germans, Birman prepared to leave immediately. That evening, she and her sister Dele, accompanied by two friends, Grete Freund and Sophie Lippmann, caught a train along the coast to Perpignan and an overnight connection that brought them within a few miles of the Spanish border, to the small town of Banyuls. They arrived early the next day ‘in marvellous southern sunshine’ and came across a group of ‘Austrian socialists’ who said they were making for the mayor’s office. Birman and her friends followed suit and met someone in the mairie – she doesn’t say whether it was the mayor – who offered to show them a safe way over the mountains to Spain. If Birman’s memory is reliable, this would have been 24 or 25 September. In the afternoon, Birman and one of her party made a two-hour reconnaissance trip with their guide. He pointed out the route and advised them to take a bearing on a large cross which they would see a little further along, when they made the journey in earnest. It all seemed straightforward, if a little nerve-racking, and Birman returned to Banyuls. The four women left the following morning at first light.
Lisa Fittko, who has no part in Birman’s story, made a preliminary excursion from Banyuls on what may well, it appears from her own memoir, Escape through the Pyrenees (1985), have been the same day. Fittko was a stateless anti-Fascist, an agitator and propagandist, born in Austria-Hungary; she had lived in Vienna, Berlin and Prague and was, by the end of the 1930s, more or less on the run with her husband, Hans. They had been in Switzerland, France and Holland before returning once more to France. The Fittkos had both been victims of French internment policy, which was already ‘concentrating’ Spanish Republican refugees in camps early in 1939. With the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the onset of the Phoney War in the autumn, they were among many thousands of German-speaking non-nationals detained by the authorities. Hans was in central France at a camp in Vernuche; Lisa was near the Pyrenees in a ‘women’s camp’ in Gurs, which had been holding refugees from Spain. (Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin’s sister Dora were also interned at Gurs, while Benjamin had spent several weeks in Vernuche.) As the Germans advanced deeper into France and the administration reeled, evasion or negotiated exit became a brief possibility: many people, including the Fittkos, got out of the camps. Hans and Lisa Fittko were to remain in France until the end of 1941, in contact though separated for much of the time. In their year of clandestinity, they worked as successful agents enabling refugees to escape through Spain. Both were in contact with the Emergency Rescue Committee set up by Varian Fry, an enigmatic, daring young American who saved the lives of many illustrious figures, including Chagall, Ernst and Arendt.
Fittko and Birman don’t appear to have met in 1940. Fittko remained in Marseille long enough to realise that escape via the port was nearly impossible, but she also understood the uses of the city. Here, prospective refugees could assemble the paperwork to get them through Spain and from there to Portugal, which no one could enter without proof of an onward-bound journey: a boat ticket from Lisbon or a visa issued by a third country. Varian Fry had a friendly US vice-consul who granted hundreds of visas breaching State Department norms. Thomas Cook, Fittko remembers, were issuing bogus transatlantic tickets to help people on their way – at 200 francs a shot – and the Chinese were selling entry permits at 100 francs. Birman and her friends had visas for Mexico. What nobody who needed to get out of France could lay hands on was an exit permit; whence the necessity of a stealthy departure and therefore of a Pyrenean route.
Fittko had already been to the mayor’s office in Banyuls by the time Birman looked in. She had met the mayor himself, a man called Azéma, who was well disposed to the refugees: he’d given her some provisions and a map of the route over the mountains. That evening, walking back to Port Vendres, her new base about four miles from Banyuls, Fittko was in high spirits: ‘Milk and vegetables, and above all a new, safe border route. I remember . . . the incredibly blue sea and the mountain chain, on its slopes green vineyards with a hint of gold between them, and a sky as blue as the sea.’ It was France as she’d not had occasion to see it before. It extended south beyond the bays and on to the shores of the Maghreb, over the Rif mountains, across the desert and down into sub-Saharan Africa, as far as the northern banks of the Congo: the westerly edge of a grand imperium, already undermined by one world war and destined to crumble under the pressure of another.
The passage Azéma favoured was known as the ‘Lister route’. Recoiling from the Phalangist victory, Enrique Lister, one of the Republic’s senior military officials – also a committed Stalinist – had fled up this defile in 1939 on his way into exile in the Soviet Union. (Twenty years later he was in Cuba, advising Fidel on the formation of his Revolutionary Defence Committees.) The advantage of the route, as Azéma explained to Fittko, was that for large parts of the way, it was secluded by canopies of rock. Fittko had done well to establish such a dependable lead so quickly. A few days later, Walter Benjamin arrived on her doorstep in Port Vendres. He’d obtained a visa from the US Consulate, thanks to the good offices of Max Horkheimer, and wanted her to help him escape through Spain.
Fittko’s account of what followed is now a justifiably famous element of the Walter Benjamin cult. Carina Birman’s personal story is not, but it includes the most recent of many last words about Benjamin’s death, a death on which, for his admirers, so much seems to hang that it, too, seems suspended: symbolic to the point of unreality, an enactment more than an event, like the death of the Christian messiah and the disappearance of the ‘risen’ body, for so long a matter of ardent conjecture. In a ritual sense, Benjamin’s death is closer to Judaic purification than a redemptive sacrifice. Yet in the likeness of the scapegoat, he confounds even that tradition, evicted not by his own tribe but by their enemies, wandering a mountainous wilderness not with the misdemeanours of his people on his head – ‘all their iniquities in all their sins’ – but their innocence. At the same time, he is tagged with a prophetic forecast of the impending cataclysm in Europe and the terrible numbers of dead that few could really foresee (probably not even Fittko, who claimed never to have kept count of the people she led to safety in those early days, still less how many were Jewish). As for Birman, she was deeply preoccupied with her own small contingent. Her memoir elides a lot of detail; it can be infuriatingly opaque; it is published with a wealth of footling apparatus, including a photo of the publisher pottering around on the road overlooking the town where Benjamin died. Nevertheless, it is an authentic, pre-mythological fragment from a site strewn with the litter of interested pilgrims and dunned to the substrate by regiments of Benjamin archaeologists. What it amounts to, and where it fits in, depends on what we make of other sources, Fittko in particular, and our readiness to go over this dreadful story yet again.
Benjamin would set out for the border with two other people, Henny Gurland and her teenage son, Joseph (or José), on what was, according to Fittko, 26 September 1940, though others have it as the 25th. There was an orientation trip the day before, like Birman’s, which involved a visit to the mayor’s office in Banyuls followed by a walk up through the vineyards in the direction of the frontier. Even this reconnaissance was trying for Benjamin, and when the time came to turn back, he refused, preferring to remain up in a clearing overnight. It was obvious to Fittko that he didn’t mean to exhaust himself by doing the first leg of the journey three times instead of once; despite her apprehensions she left him. Early the next morning Fittko and the Gurlands set out again, making their way with the grape-pickers. When they reached the clearing, ‘Old Benjamin’, as Fittko called him, ‘sat up and looked at us amiably’. She was alarmed by the dark red spots around his eyes and took them to indicate the onset of something fatal, ‘a heart attack perhaps’. In fact the dew had caused the dye to run from the rims of his spectacles. ‘The colour rubs off when they get wet,’ he explained, wiping his face with a handkerchief. Old Benjamin was a very advanced 48, with a promising future behind him and a number of medical problems, including lung trouble and a heart condition.
Fittko describes the little party striking out at a steady pace, she and Joseph taking turns to carry Benjamin’s black briefcase. Much later, when people asked her if she knew, or he’d said, what it contained, she was impatient. He was carrying a very important manuscript, worth more in his eyes than his own life, as he’d intimated, but that was as far as it went. Fittko was a militant people-smuggler on her first run, not a scholar or literary hanger-on. ‘For better or worse,’ she said of Benjamin’s luggage, ‘we had to drag that monstrosity over the mountains.’ She also called it ‘his ballast’. It’s likely, given the importance attached to it, that she embellished her memoir – and indeed her memory – to make more of the mysterious briefcase. Rolf Tiedemann, co-editor of the Suhrkamp seven-volume Gesammelte Schriften, speculated that its contents might have included a copy of the Theses on the Philosophy of History; the Harvard editors of the Selected Writings say the same. In any event, the manuscript, along with the bag and whatever else it contained, crossed the frontier and promptly disappeared.
On the journey, Benjamin kept up a routine of several minutes’ walking followed by a minute’s rest. ‘I can go all the way to the end using this method,’ he told Fittko. The trick, he added, was to pause ‘before I’m exhausted’. The going was tough and Fittko was struck by Benjamin’s willpower and courtesy. He was a model compared with some of the fusspots she’d later deliver to safety. She remembers resting up, eating ‘a piece of bread I’d bought with bogus food stamps’ and pushing the tomatoes across to Benjamin, who’d asked: ‘By your leave, gnädige Frau, may I serve myself?’ That’s how it was, she says, with ‘Old Benjamin and his Spanish court etiquette’.
In Fittko’s account there is no mention of Birman’s group. Fittko gets her party to the high point of the climb, surveys the coast and feels sure they’re inside Spain: the moment has come for her to retrace her steps but instead she decides to continue a little longer and only turns back when she’s seen the village of Portbou below in the distance. During this first attempt to lead people across she was naturally keen to take a look around. Fittko’s group, it seems, must have caught up with the other party at – or near – the summit, where Birman was in deep dejection. Recalling her guide’s instruction to steer by a large hilltop cross, she was sitting on the ground, trying in vain to match her hand-drawn map to a landscape of hilltops dotted with crosses.
‘In the meantime,’ she remembered, ‘we were joined by an elderly gentleman, a younger female and her son.’ She describes her new acquaintance, who had failed so brilliantly to impress the German academy, as ‘a university professor named Walter Benjamin’. Perhaps it was Benjamin’s admirable unworldliness and civility that evoked the faculty gown: a figure alert in mind and spirit, even if his physique was no match for this crossing. He was, Birman says, ‘on the point of having a heart attack. The strain of mountain climbing on an extremely hot September day . . . was too much for him . . . We ran in all directions in search of some water to help the sick man.’
While the Birman party and the university professor’s trio aimed for what they took to be the nearest customs post, Fittko was retracing her steps. She had taken ten hours to climb from Banyuls to the Spanish border with the Gurlands – it was fewer for Benjamin, who’d slept up in the clearing – but she made it back in two. She was basking in her first triumph, delighted with the route and – this has an air of embellishment – gratified to think that ‘Old Benjamin and his manuscript are safe now . . . on the other side of the mountains.’
Had Portbou remained a quiet fishing community it might never have been bombed by Italian aircraft during the Civil War, but it became a strategic railway station at the end of the 1920s and was still badly damaged when the refugees arrived. On announcing themselves to the authorities, they were told they’d be returned to France the following day. Birman was mortified: evidently they should have gone through the formalities at an earlier point of entry, which they must have missed; their contact in Banyuls had warned against this eventuality. Birman’s neck ‘was seized by a big male hand’. She was ‘turned around and commanded by a stocky man to follow him closely’. Her destination was the Fonda de Francia, a hotel in Portbou where she and the others were placed under garde à vue. It was a watering hole for special services, including the Gestapo (in those days undercover as shipping agents), informers and spooks from both sides of the border.
Birman says that they all had to double up except for Benjamin, who got ‘a room for himself: his companion with son another place, Sophie and I a room, and my sister and Grete Freund a small cell’. The situation could not have been worse, yet there was a trapdoor somewhere in this despair and Birman fell through it when she and Sophie Lippmann decided that the gold coins they’d brought with them should now be used to pay someone – anyone – to intercede on their behalf with the authorities. Lippmann felt the ‘hotel warden’ might be biddable and predictably enough, when she went to look for him, he was ready to help.
On her return she told Birman that she’d heard a ‘loud rattling from one of the neighbouring rooms’. Birman went to investigate and found Benjamin ‘in a desolate state of mind and in a completely exhausted physical condition’. He told her he could not go back to the border and would not move out of the hotel. She said there was no alternative and he disagreed: ‘He hinted that he had some very effective poisonous pills with him. He was lying half naked in his bed and had his very beautiful big golden grandfather watch with open cover on a little board near him, observing the time constantly.’ This ‘big golden grandfather watch’ was perhaps a pocket watch; and if so, surely the one he’d consulted earlier in the day to ration the pauses during his heroic, debilitating ascent. Birman told him about the attempted bribe and urged him to hold off. ‘He was very pessimistic’ and thought the odds were way too long. A little later, Henny Gurland came into the room and Birman left. There were several visits by a local doctor who bled the patient and administered injections, but if Birman was aware of this, she doesn’t say so. She takes it to be a clear case of suicide. ‘The next morning,’ she writes, ‘we heard that he had succeeded and was no more amongst us.’
Birman committed her story to paper in 1975. She was by then a successful lawyer in New York. Published now, 11 years after her death, it is in a slightly dubious sense the breaking news about events in Portbou on the night of 26 September 1940. It leaves a few odds and ends to consider. First, the reminders: Benjamin, who had probably linked up with Gurland in Marseille, left her a note before he lost consciousness. She memorised it, destroyed it as a precaution and relayed its contents to Adorno once she’d got through Spain. ‘In a situation presenting no way out,’ she remembers it saying, ‘I have no other choice but to make an end of it.’ She also wrote to her husband around the same time, mentioning the Birman party and describing the journey to Portbou as ‘an absolutely horrible ordeal’. Later, at various points in their lives, she and her son – and Greta Freund – commented to the best of their abilities on the circumstances of Benjamin’s death, but none could really explain the anomalies, to do with timings mostly, that arose from the doctor’s notes, the death certificate and the burial, recorded on one day in the church register and another in the municipal file.
The archives in Portbou and neighbouring Figueres are full of oddities, carefully laid out in David Mauas’s documentary film Who Killed Walter Benjamin? (2005). They have opened the field for speculative interest about Benjamin’s death. In 2001 Stephen Schwartz, a Trotskyist-turned-Sufist who has always seen the hidden hand of the evil empire, suggested that Benjamin may have been murdered by agents of Stalin. It’s an opportunistic long shot, based on the premise of Fascist-Stalinist co-operation in the mopping-up of Catalonia for the duration of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. If there must be a hidden hand, it’s likelier to be the Gestapo’s. In several published essays Benjamin had advertised his contempt for National Socialist culture and ideology (‘the fusion of the nationalist idea with racial madness’) far more widely than his misgivings about the Soviet Union. Neither partisan view of Benjamin as the object of a specific hatred gets us through the mire of old animosities onto the dependable ground of record.
Mauas’s cagey, unsensational film depicts a little town with more than its share of Phalangist satisfaction in the wake of the Civil War, inimical to the sans nationalités coming over from France and infiltrated by German intelligence. Worrying obscurities cloud the medical record and even the identity of the doctor in attendance. Two doctors were practising in Portbou, according to the residents interviewed by Mauas, and somewhere in the disputatious memory of these local elders is the suggestion that a Fascist sympathiser ministered to Benjamin but that another – allegiance less clear – later completed and signed off the paperwork in his colleague’s absence. Sinister as it seems, this may simply be a function of the duty roster in a small town. In any case Mauas steadfastly refuses to assert that Benjamin was eliminated.
The Narrow Foothold is yet more anecdotal evidence in favour of Gurland’s testimony, the only intimate testimony until now that Walter Benjamin committed suicide. It also enables us to look more coldly at the notion that Benjamin had been specially targeted by the Nazis and that this fact was connected with the detention of the refugees in Portbou: simply, once Benjamin was out of the picture, killed perhaps, dead in any case, there was no longer a reason to return the others to France. But if so, why was Birman, who tells us her name was ‘nearly topping’ a German hit list, permitted to go on her way? Conspiracy theory gets one large truth more or less right, but only inadvertently: what happened to Walter Benjamin was essentially a kind of execution, even if he’d decided to serve as delegate executioner. Cloak and dagger plots in which low-level killers administer lethal doses of contingency detract from this point.
Birman was misled about the importance of finding the ‘first’ customs post: first, second or third was of no consequence. If there’s anything as famous about Benjamin’s death as the briefcase, it’s the fact that at the time he crossed, Spanish officials had been ordered to turn back refugees – anyone sans nationalité, as Henny explained it in her letter to her husband – and that this order was enforced for a day or so, then set aside, or ignored, immediately afterwards. It was Benjamin’s timing that was fatal: Arendt called it ‘an uncommon stroke of bad luck’. Much has been said about this, but Momme Brodersen’s remark, in his 1996 biography of Benjamin, is the one that lingers in the mind: ‘It is hard not to ask whether . . . Benjamin’s death was “preventable”, “unnecessary”, though these are unanswerable, pointless questions. Hundreds of others were dying, unnecessarily, anonymously, on the borders; millions were to die with no border in sight.’
The following day was probably more distressing to Birman than the night before. News of Benjamin’s death, she implies, reached her in the morning, though if the medical record is halfway true he may have been lying in a coma. She recalls a bustle of activity around the hotel telephone: ‘All kinds of personalities were reached and asked for assistance.’ (Research done in Portbou and Figueres by Ingrid and Konrad Scheurmann in the 1990s turned up evidence of four billed phone calls, totalling 8.80 pesetas. They think it likely that the exchange would have tried the number of the US consul in Barcelona.) The warden was serving coffee to Birman, her sister Dele, Sophie Lippmann and Greta Freund when two policemen arrived and announced that they’d all have to return to the border and pick up entry visas. They left under escort and made the ascent in a couple of hours. The only sign of a customs point was a weather-beaten phone booth. The frontier itself consisted of a rope and beyond the rope an ominous, bored assortment of goons, French and German. The Spanish gendarmes turned back, pointing out how honourably they’d refrained from untying the rope and delivering them back into Vichy. They even left some coins for the refugees to use in the phone booth: they should phone through, they advised, to the police at Portbou, requesting permission to set foot on the Spanish soil they’d been pacing in such desolation for the better part of 24 hours.
There we were sitting on rocks and burnt-out slopes. We were so depressed that we did not even notice that the sky was becoming darker and darker, although it was early in the afternoon. A thunderstorm! No, a rainstorm . . . We weighed our possibilities. There was only one direction with uncertain issue, all the others meant death. So we decided to return to Spain. There was no hope of walking down. There were no passable tracks any more, one could only sit on stones and try to glide down.
They slithered back to Portbou under driving rain and arrived at the police station around six in the evening. The captain of the guard thrust some papers in Birman’s pocket, told her their visas were in order and advised them to leave before dark. He waved them on for a baggage inspection, which they survived with their gold intact. The ‘hotel-keeper’, presumably the guardian Sophie had met the night before, was watching eagerly, and once they were through he demanded the promised reward. ‘Her offer had worked,’ Birman says, ‘even in our absence . . . he must have communicated with the police captain to rescind his previous order,’ but too late to stop them being marched back to the frontier. Once the gold was handed over, everything changed. The refugees were escorted to the Fonda de Francia as guests, rather than prisoners, and a lavish spread was prepared.
Before they began the meal the lights went off and a priest led a procession of monks through the dining room, carrying candles and chanting a mass. They climbed the staircase to the first floor.
We were told they had come from a neighbouring monastery to say a requiem at the death bed of Prof. Benjamin and to bury him. We had quite forgotten this most unfortunate occurrence during last night, and although we knew Mr Benjamin to have been Jewish, we made no remark and left this declaration to his lady companion. She never said anything of the kind and let them take the body of the defunct.
The refugees’ clothes were set out to dry, they retired for a brief rest, and well after dark in a pummelling thunderstorm they were taken to catch the night train to Barcelona.
‘Benjamin Walter’, dead not from a morphine overdose but from a ‘cerebral haemorrhage’, was buried in the Catholic section of the cemetery at Portbou, Roman anathema regarding Jews and suicides having been neatly circumvented by the reversal of names on the death certificate and by the given cause of death. The body lay in a niche with a five-year lease. On her way through Portbou not long afterwards, Arendt failed to identify the niche with any certainty.
The gold probably tipped the scales in Birman’s favour, notwithstanding her all-round resourcefulness. If her story is true, it might have held out hope for Benjamin too. But Birman’s ‘professor’ was not a believer. Early in life he’d got out of gold – turning away from the path indicated by his family’s wealth – and into a pure, non-remunerative form of work, perhaps best thought of as the investigation of modernity: a cornucopia of social production and, as he envisaged it, a nearly miraculous condition of the kind you might come to understand after long study of an infant prodigy capable of grand engineering schemes, precocious feats of reasoning, high poetic utterance, generosity of spirit and a cruelty that knew no bounds. The European culture that Benjamin loved had the infernal vigour of the child genius, even though, in his reflections on the Second Empire, he could also discern the outlines of the ageing hag. Living on modest means, he did as much in his century for the discursive essay as Montaigne had done in his, though he was better placed, historically, not just to think about the world, but to try to say how the world thought back. Unlike his father, an auctioneer, rentier and speculator, Benjamin at 48 had a universe to offer but very little to transact, in life or on the point of dying, and so on his last journey he took the cash he could muster and the few articles he rightly considered essential: an obscure manuscript, a pocket watch and enough morphine ‘to kill a horse’, as Koestler had described it after their meeting in Marseille. Gold was not part of this crude survival kit, which provided for dispatch rather more than salvation. Benjamin may have been devoted to memory and posterity, but he had very little intellectual or moral interest in the road ahead – his or anybody else’s. ‘We know,’ he wrote in the last of his aphorisms on ‘Messianic time’ in the Theses, ‘that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however.’
Birman and her sister were shocked by Madrid, ‘a city half destroyed by the Civil War’, but they were able to look in at the Prado, ‘the one luxury on our flight’. The group reached Lisbon on 1 October and in due course they all left on visas, separately, for the Americas. Birman travelled on the Nyassa, an old and overcrowded schooner, formerly German and now Portuguese, in a state of anxiety about the possibility of being hailed and searched by a U-boat, ‘as an examination of papers and a selection of passengers to be taken off was unavoidable’. The ship’s engines stopped and for several days there was no movement. Finally, on 4 December 1940, the Nyassa entered New York harbour. ‘We were all on deck,’ Birman wrote, ‘with tears of emotion in our eyes.’
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
* print print this article
Jeremy Harding
* BuyThe Narrow Foothold by Carina Birman
Hearing Eye, 29 pp, £7.00, August 2006, ISBN 1 905082 10 X
Most of the expatriates in France who had to run for their lives in 1940 made for Marseille, which had working consulates, maritime companies and smuggling networks. The people in the greatest danger were anti-Fascist Germans and Jews of any political persuasion, followed by assorted individuals who had blotted their copybooks in a manner the Gestapo was sure to ascertain or invent. ‘Human trafficking’ had become the order of the day and remained so, long after the hope of leaving by boat had turned out, for most, to be illusory.
The Narrow Foothold, a 16-page memoir, opens in Marseille, where Carina Birman was waiting in September 1940 to get out of the country. Birman had been the legal adviser at the Austrian Embassy in Paris until the Anschluss, when it was shut down. She seems to have remained in Paris and become involved in a human trafficking scam of her own, helping ‘undesirables’ out of Europe on visas obtained from the Mexican Consulate.
When she heard from some new arrivals in Marseille that her name featured high on a list of people wanted by the Germans, Birman prepared to leave immediately. That evening, she and her sister Dele, accompanied by two friends, Grete Freund and Sophie Lippmann, caught a train along the coast to Perpignan and an overnight connection that brought them within a few miles of the Spanish border, to the small town of Banyuls. They arrived early the next day ‘in marvellous southern sunshine’ and came across a group of ‘Austrian socialists’ who said they were making for the mayor’s office. Birman and her friends followed suit and met someone in the mairie – she doesn’t say whether it was the mayor – who offered to show them a safe way over the mountains to Spain. If Birman’s memory is reliable, this would have been 24 or 25 September. In the afternoon, Birman and one of her party made a two-hour reconnaissance trip with their guide. He pointed out the route and advised them to take a bearing on a large cross which they would see a little further along, when they made the journey in earnest. It all seemed straightforward, if a little nerve-racking, and Birman returned to Banyuls. The four women left the following morning at first light.
Lisa Fittko, who has no part in Birman’s story, made a preliminary excursion from Banyuls on what may well, it appears from her own memoir, Escape through the Pyrenees (1985), have been the same day. Fittko was a stateless anti-Fascist, an agitator and propagandist, born in Austria-Hungary; she had lived in Vienna, Berlin and Prague and was, by the end of the 1930s, more or less on the run with her husband, Hans. They had been in Switzerland, France and Holland before returning once more to France. The Fittkos had both been victims of French internment policy, which was already ‘concentrating’ Spanish Republican refugees in camps early in 1939. With the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the onset of the Phoney War in the autumn, they were among many thousands of German-speaking non-nationals detained by the authorities. Hans was in central France at a camp in Vernuche; Lisa was near the Pyrenees in a ‘women’s camp’ in Gurs, which had been holding refugees from Spain. (Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin’s sister Dora were also interned at Gurs, while Benjamin had spent several weeks in Vernuche.) As the Germans advanced deeper into France and the administration reeled, evasion or negotiated exit became a brief possibility: many people, including the Fittkos, got out of the camps. Hans and Lisa Fittko were to remain in France until the end of 1941, in contact though separated for much of the time. In their year of clandestinity, they worked as successful agents enabling refugees to escape through Spain. Both were in contact with the Emergency Rescue Committee set up by Varian Fry, an enigmatic, daring young American who saved the lives of many illustrious figures, including Chagall, Ernst and Arendt.
Fittko and Birman don’t appear to have met in 1940. Fittko remained in Marseille long enough to realise that escape via the port was nearly impossible, but she also understood the uses of the city. Here, prospective refugees could assemble the paperwork to get them through Spain and from there to Portugal, which no one could enter without proof of an onward-bound journey: a boat ticket from Lisbon or a visa issued by a third country. Varian Fry had a friendly US vice-consul who granted hundreds of visas breaching State Department norms. Thomas Cook, Fittko remembers, were issuing bogus transatlantic tickets to help people on their way – at 200 francs a shot – and the Chinese were selling entry permits at 100 francs. Birman and her friends had visas for Mexico. What nobody who needed to get out of France could lay hands on was an exit permit; whence the necessity of a stealthy departure and therefore of a Pyrenean route.
Fittko had already been to the mayor’s office in Banyuls by the time Birman looked in. She had met the mayor himself, a man called Azéma, who was well disposed to the refugees: he’d given her some provisions and a map of the route over the mountains. That evening, walking back to Port Vendres, her new base about four miles from Banyuls, Fittko was in high spirits: ‘Milk and vegetables, and above all a new, safe border route. I remember . . . the incredibly blue sea and the mountain chain, on its slopes green vineyards with a hint of gold between them, and a sky as blue as the sea.’ It was France as she’d not had occasion to see it before. It extended south beyond the bays and on to the shores of the Maghreb, over the Rif mountains, across the desert and down into sub-Saharan Africa, as far as the northern banks of the Congo: the westerly edge of a grand imperium, already undermined by one world war and destined to crumble under the pressure of another.
The passage Azéma favoured was known as the ‘Lister route’. Recoiling from the Phalangist victory, Enrique Lister, one of the Republic’s senior military officials – also a committed Stalinist – had fled up this defile in 1939 on his way into exile in the Soviet Union. (Twenty years later he was in Cuba, advising Fidel on the formation of his Revolutionary Defence Committees.) The advantage of the route, as Azéma explained to Fittko, was that for large parts of the way, it was secluded by canopies of rock. Fittko had done well to establish such a dependable lead so quickly. A few days later, Walter Benjamin arrived on her doorstep in Port Vendres. He’d obtained a visa from the US Consulate, thanks to the good offices of Max Horkheimer, and wanted her to help him escape through Spain.
Fittko’s account of what followed is now a justifiably famous element of the Walter Benjamin cult. Carina Birman’s personal story is not, but it includes the most recent of many last words about Benjamin’s death, a death on which, for his admirers, so much seems to hang that it, too, seems suspended: symbolic to the point of unreality, an enactment more than an event, like the death of the Christian messiah and the disappearance of the ‘risen’ body, for so long a matter of ardent conjecture. In a ritual sense, Benjamin’s death is closer to Judaic purification than a redemptive sacrifice. Yet in the likeness of the scapegoat, he confounds even that tradition, evicted not by his own tribe but by their enemies, wandering a mountainous wilderness not with the misdemeanours of his people on his head – ‘all their iniquities in all their sins’ – but their innocence. At the same time, he is tagged with a prophetic forecast of the impending cataclysm in Europe and the terrible numbers of dead that few could really foresee (probably not even Fittko, who claimed never to have kept count of the people she led to safety in those early days, still less how many were Jewish). As for Birman, she was deeply preoccupied with her own small contingent. Her memoir elides a lot of detail; it can be infuriatingly opaque; it is published with a wealth of footling apparatus, including a photo of the publisher pottering around on the road overlooking the town where Benjamin died. Nevertheless, it is an authentic, pre-mythological fragment from a site strewn with the litter of interested pilgrims and dunned to the substrate by regiments of Benjamin archaeologists. What it amounts to, and where it fits in, depends on what we make of other sources, Fittko in particular, and our readiness to go over this dreadful story yet again.
Benjamin would set out for the border with two other people, Henny Gurland and her teenage son, Joseph (or José), on what was, according to Fittko, 26 September 1940, though others have it as the 25th. There was an orientation trip the day before, like Birman’s, which involved a visit to the mayor’s office in Banyuls followed by a walk up through the vineyards in the direction of the frontier. Even this reconnaissance was trying for Benjamin, and when the time came to turn back, he refused, preferring to remain up in a clearing overnight. It was obvious to Fittko that he didn’t mean to exhaust himself by doing the first leg of the journey three times instead of once; despite her apprehensions she left him. Early the next morning Fittko and the Gurlands set out again, making their way with the grape-pickers. When they reached the clearing, ‘Old Benjamin’, as Fittko called him, ‘sat up and looked at us amiably’. She was alarmed by the dark red spots around his eyes and took them to indicate the onset of something fatal, ‘a heart attack perhaps’. In fact the dew had caused the dye to run from the rims of his spectacles. ‘The colour rubs off when they get wet,’ he explained, wiping his face with a handkerchief. Old Benjamin was a very advanced 48, with a promising future behind him and a number of medical problems, including lung trouble and a heart condition.
Fittko describes the little party striking out at a steady pace, she and Joseph taking turns to carry Benjamin’s black briefcase. Much later, when people asked her if she knew, or he’d said, what it contained, she was impatient. He was carrying a very important manuscript, worth more in his eyes than his own life, as he’d intimated, but that was as far as it went. Fittko was a militant people-smuggler on her first run, not a scholar or literary hanger-on. ‘For better or worse,’ she said of Benjamin’s luggage, ‘we had to drag that monstrosity over the mountains.’ She also called it ‘his ballast’. It’s likely, given the importance attached to it, that she embellished her memoir – and indeed her memory – to make more of the mysterious briefcase. Rolf Tiedemann, co-editor of the Suhrkamp seven-volume Gesammelte Schriften, speculated that its contents might have included a copy of the Theses on the Philosophy of History; the Harvard editors of the Selected Writings say the same. In any event, the manuscript, along with the bag and whatever else it contained, crossed the frontier and promptly disappeared.
On the journey, Benjamin kept up a routine of several minutes’ walking followed by a minute’s rest. ‘I can go all the way to the end using this method,’ he told Fittko. The trick, he added, was to pause ‘before I’m exhausted’. The going was tough and Fittko was struck by Benjamin’s willpower and courtesy. He was a model compared with some of the fusspots she’d later deliver to safety. She remembers resting up, eating ‘a piece of bread I’d bought with bogus food stamps’ and pushing the tomatoes across to Benjamin, who’d asked: ‘By your leave, gnädige Frau, may I serve myself?’ That’s how it was, she says, with ‘Old Benjamin and his Spanish court etiquette’.
In Fittko’s account there is no mention of Birman’s group. Fittko gets her party to the high point of the climb, surveys the coast and feels sure they’re inside Spain: the moment has come for her to retrace her steps but instead she decides to continue a little longer and only turns back when she’s seen the village of Portbou below in the distance. During this first attempt to lead people across she was naturally keen to take a look around. Fittko’s group, it seems, must have caught up with the other party at – or near – the summit, where Birman was in deep dejection. Recalling her guide’s instruction to steer by a large hilltop cross, she was sitting on the ground, trying in vain to match her hand-drawn map to a landscape of hilltops dotted with crosses.
‘In the meantime,’ she remembered, ‘we were joined by an elderly gentleman, a younger female and her son.’ She describes her new acquaintance, who had failed so brilliantly to impress the German academy, as ‘a university professor named Walter Benjamin’. Perhaps it was Benjamin’s admirable unworldliness and civility that evoked the faculty gown: a figure alert in mind and spirit, even if his physique was no match for this crossing. He was, Birman says, ‘on the point of having a heart attack. The strain of mountain climbing on an extremely hot September day . . . was too much for him . . . We ran in all directions in search of some water to help the sick man.’
While the Birman party and the university professor’s trio aimed for what they took to be the nearest customs post, Fittko was retracing her steps. She had taken ten hours to climb from Banyuls to the Spanish border with the Gurlands – it was fewer for Benjamin, who’d slept up in the clearing – but she made it back in two. She was basking in her first triumph, delighted with the route and – this has an air of embellishment – gratified to think that ‘Old Benjamin and his manuscript are safe now . . . on the other side of the mountains.’
Had Portbou remained a quiet fishing community it might never have been bombed by Italian aircraft during the Civil War, but it became a strategic railway station at the end of the 1920s and was still badly damaged when the refugees arrived. On announcing themselves to the authorities, they were told they’d be returned to France the following day. Birman was mortified: evidently they should have gone through the formalities at an earlier point of entry, which they must have missed; their contact in Banyuls had warned against this eventuality. Birman’s neck ‘was seized by a big male hand’. She was ‘turned around and commanded by a stocky man to follow him closely’. Her destination was the Fonda de Francia, a hotel in Portbou where she and the others were placed under garde à vue. It was a watering hole for special services, including the Gestapo (in those days undercover as shipping agents), informers and spooks from both sides of the border.
Birman says that they all had to double up except for Benjamin, who got ‘a room for himself: his companion with son another place, Sophie and I a room, and my sister and Grete Freund a small cell’. The situation could not have been worse, yet there was a trapdoor somewhere in this despair and Birman fell through it when she and Sophie Lippmann decided that the gold coins they’d brought with them should now be used to pay someone – anyone – to intercede on their behalf with the authorities. Lippmann felt the ‘hotel warden’ might be biddable and predictably enough, when she went to look for him, he was ready to help.
On her return she told Birman that she’d heard a ‘loud rattling from one of the neighbouring rooms’. Birman went to investigate and found Benjamin ‘in a desolate state of mind and in a completely exhausted physical condition’. He told her he could not go back to the border and would not move out of the hotel. She said there was no alternative and he disagreed: ‘He hinted that he had some very effective poisonous pills with him. He was lying half naked in his bed and had his very beautiful big golden grandfather watch with open cover on a little board near him, observing the time constantly.’ This ‘big golden grandfather watch’ was perhaps a pocket watch; and if so, surely the one he’d consulted earlier in the day to ration the pauses during his heroic, debilitating ascent. Birman told him about the attempted bribe and urged him to hold off. ‘He was very pessimistic’ and thought the odds were way too long. A little later, Henny Gurland came into the room and Birman left. There were several visits by a local doctor who bled the patient and administered injections, but if Birman was aware of this, she doesn’t say so. She takes it to be a clear case of suicide. ‘The next morning,’ she writes, ‘we heard that he had succeeded and was no more amongst us.’
Birman committed her story to paper in 1975. She was by then a successful lawyer in New York. Published now, 11 years after her death, it is in a slightly dubious sense the breaking news about events in Portbou on the night of 26 September 1940. It leaves a few odds and ends to consider. First, the reminders: Benjamin, who had probably linked up with Gurland in Marseille, left her a note before he lost consciousness. She memorised it, destroyed it as a precaution and relayed its contents to Adorno once she’d got through Spain. ‘In a situation presenting no way out,’ she remembers it saying, ‘I have no other choice but to make an end of it.’ She also wrote to her husband around the same time, mentioning the Birman party and describing the journey to Portbou as ‘an absolutely horrible ordeal’. Later, at various points in their lives, she and her son – and Greta Freund – commented to the best of their abilities on the circumstances of Benjamin’s death, but none could really explain the anomalies, to do with timings mostly, that arose from the doctor’s notes, the death certificate and the burial, recorded on one day in the church register and another in the municipal file.
The archives in Portbou and neighbouring Figueres are full of oddities, carefully laid out in David Mauas’s documentary film Who Killed Walter Benjamin? (2005). They have opened the field for speculative interest about Benjamin’s death. In 2001 Stephen Schwartz, a Trotskyist-turned-Sufist who has always seen the hidden hand of the evil empire, suggested that Benjamin may have been murdered by agents of Stalin. It’s an opportunistic long shot, based on the premise of Fascist-Stalinist co-operation in the mopping-up of Catalonia for the duration of the Hitler-Stalin Pact. If there must be a hidden hand, it’s likelier to be the Gestapo’s. In several published essays Benjamin had advertised his contempt for National Socialist culture and ideology (‘the fusion of the nationalist idea with racial madness’) far more widely than his misgivings about the Soviet Union. Neither partisan view of Benjamin as the object of a specific hatred gets us through the mire of old animosities onto the dependable ground of record.
Mauas’s cagey, unsensational film depicts a little town with more than its share of Phalangist satisfaction in the wake of the Civil War, inimical to the sans nationalités coming over from France and infiltrated by German intelligence. Worrying obscurities cloud the medical record and even the identity of the doctor in attendance. Two doctors were practising in Portbou, according to the residents interviewed by Mauas, and somewhere in the disputatious memory of these local elders is the suggestion that a Fascist sympathiser ministered to Benjamin but that another – allegiance less clear – later completed and signed off the paperwork in his colleague’s absence. Sinister as it seems, this may simply be a function of the duty roster in a small town. In any case Mauas steadfastly refuses to assert that Benjamin was eliminated.
The Narrow Foothold is yet more anecdotal evidence in favour of Gurland’s testimony, the only intimate testimony until now that Walter Benjamin committed suicide. It also enables us to look more coldly at the notion that Benjamin had been specially targeted by the Nazis and that this fact was connected with the detention of the refugees in Portbou: simply, once Benjamin was out of the picture, killed perhaps, dead in any case, there was no longer a reason to return the others to France. But if so, why was Birman, who tells us her name was ‘nearly topping’ a German hit list, permitted to go on her way? Conspiracy theory gets one large truth more or less right, but only inadvertently: what happened to Walter Benjamin was essentially a kind of execution, even if he’d decided to serve as delegate executioner. Cloak and dagger plots in which low-level killers administer lethal doses of contingency detract from this point.
Birman was misled about the importance of finding the ‘first’ customs post: first, second or third was of no consequence. If there’s anything as famous about Benjamin’s death as the briefcase, it’s the fact that at the time he crossed, Spanish officials had been ordered to turn back refugees – anyone sans nationalité, as Henny explained it in her letter to her husband – and that this order was enforced for a day or so, then set aside, or ignored, immediately afterwards. It was Benjamin’s timing that was fatal: Arendt called it ‘an uncommon stroke of bad luck’. Much has been said about this, but Momme Brodersen’s remark, in his 1996 biography of Benjamin, is the one that lingers in the mind: ‘It is hard not to ask whether . . . Benjamin’s death was “preventable”, “unnecessary”, though these are unanswerable, pointless questions. Hundreds of others were dying, unnecessarily, anonymously, on the borders; millions were to die with no border in sight.’
The following day was probably more distressing to Birman than the night before. News of Benjamin’s death, she implies, reached her in the morning, though if the medical record is halfway true he may have been lying in a coma. She recalls a bustle of activity around the hotel telephone: ‘All kinds of personalities were reached and asked for assistance.’ (Research done in Portbou and Figueres by Ingrid and Konrad Scheurmann in the 1990s turned up evidence of four billed phone calls, totalling 8.80 pesetas. They think it likely that the exchange would have tried the number of the US consul in Barcelona.) The warden was serving coffee to Birman, her sister Dele, Sophie Lippmann and Greta Freund when two policemen arrived and announced that they’d all have to return to the border and pick up entry visas. They left under escort and made the ascent in a couple of hours. The only sign of a customs point was a weather-beaten phone booth. The frontier itself consisted of a rope and beyond the rope an ominous, bored assortment of goons, French and German. The Spanish gendarmes turned back, pointing out how honourably they’d refrained from untying the rope and delivering them back into Vichy. They even left some coins for the refugees to use in the phone booth: they should phone through, they advised, to the police at Portbou, requesting permission to set foot on the Spanish soil they’d been pacing in such desolation for the better part of 24 hours.
There we were sitting on rocks and burnt-out slopes. We were so depressed that we did not even notice that the sky was becoming darker and darker, although it was early in the afternoon. A thunderstorm! No, a rainstorm . . . We weighed our possibilities. There was only one direction with uncertain issue, all the others meant death. So we decided to return to Spain. There was no hope of walking down. There were no passable tracks any more, one could only sit on stones and try to glide down.
They slithered back to Portbou under driving rain and arrived at the police station around six in the evening. The captain of the guard thrust some papers in Birman’s pocket, told her their visas were in order and advised them to leave before dark. He waved them on for a baggage inspection, which they survived with their gold intact. The ‘hotel-keeper’, presumably the guardian Sophie had met the night before, was watching eagerly, and once they were through he demanded the promised reward. ‘Her offer had worked,’ Birman says, ‘even in our absence . . . he must have communicated with the police captain to rescind his previous order,’ but too late to stop them being marched back to the frontier. Once the gold was handed over, everything changed. The refugees were escorted to the Fonda de Francia as guests, rather than prisoners, and a lavish spread was prepared.
Before they began the meal the lights went off and a priest led a procession of monks through the dining room, carrying candles and chanting a mass. They climbed the staircase to the first floor.
We were told they had come from a neighbouring monastery to say a requiem at the death bed of Prof. Benjamin and to bury him. We had quite forgotten this most unfortunate occurrence during last night, and although we knew Mr Benjamin to have been Jewish, we made no remark and left this declaration to his lady companion. She never said anything of the kind and let them take the body of the defunct.
The refugees’ clothes were set out to dry, they retired for a brief rest, and well after dark in a pummelling thunderstorm they were taken to catch the night train to Barcelona.
‘Benjamin Walter’, dead not from a morphine overdose but from a ‘cerebral haemorrhage’, was buried in the Catholic section of the cemetery at Portbou, Roman anathema regarding Jews and suicides having been neatly circumvented by the reversal of names on the death certificate and by the given cause of death. The body lay in a niche with a five-year lease. On her way through Portbou not long afterwards, Arendt failed to identify the niche with any certainty.
The gold probably tipped the scales in Birman’s favour, notwithstanding her all-round resourcefulness. If her story is true, it might have held out hope for Benjamin too. But Birman’s ‘professor’ was not a believer. Early in life he’d got out of gold – turning away from the path indicated by his family’s wealth – and into a pure, non-remunerative form of work, perhaps best thought of as the investigation of modernity: a cornucopia of social production and, as he envisaged it, a nearly miraculous condition of the kind you might come to understand after long study of an infant prodigy capable of grand engineering schemes, precocious feats of reasoning, high poetic utterance, generosity of spirit and a cruelty that knew no bounds. The European culture that Benjamin loved had the infernal vigour of the child genius, even though, in his reflections on the Second Empire, he could also discern the outlines of the ageing hag. Living on modest means, he did as much in his century for the discursive essay as Montaigne had done in his, though he was better placed, historically, not just to think about the world, but to try to say how the world thought back. Unlike his father, an auctioneer, rentier and speculator, Benjamin at 48 had a universe to offer but very little to transact, in life or on the point of dying, and so on his last journey he took the cash he could muster and the few articles he rightly considered essential: an obscure manuscript, a pocket watch and enough morphine ‘to kill a horse’, as Koestler had described it after their meeting in Marseille. Gold was not part of this crude survival kit, which provided for dispatch rather more than salvation. Benjamin may have been devoted to memory and posterity, but he had very little intellectual or moral interest in the road ahead – his or anybody else’s. ‘We know,’ he wrote in the last of his aphorisms on ‘Messianic time’ in the Theses, ‘that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however.’
Birman and her sister were shocked by Madrid, ‘a city half destroyed by the Civil War’, but they were able to look in at the Prado, ‘the one luxury on our flight’. The group reached Lisbon on 1 October and in due course they all left on visas, separately, for the Americas. Birman travelled on the Nyassa, an old and overcrowded schooner, formerly German and now Portuguese, in a state of anxiety about the possibility of being hailed and searched by a U-boat, ‘as an examination of papers and a selection of passengers to be taken off was unavoidable’. The ship’s engines stopped and for several days there was no movement. Finally, on 4 December 1940, the Nyassa entered New York harbour. ‘We were all on deck,’ Birman wrote, ‘with tears of emotion in our eyes.’
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
* print print this article
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)