Benjamin's possessions

Benjamin's possessions at the time of his death were described as follows: "a leather briefcase like businessmen use, a man's watch, a pipe, six photographs, an x-ray picture, glasses, various letters, magazines, and a few other papers whose content is unknown, and also some money."

The Manuscript

On his fateful final journey over the Pyrennees Benjamin was carrying the famous suitcase, which allegedly contained a manuscript; "It looks to me as if his life was worth less to him than the manuscript." - Lisa Fittko

Ruskin and the pre-Raphaelites

Among the wider pre-Raphaelite circle some made the Italian landscape their subject. But on the whole they were less successful. Ruskin's critical arguments, if followed too literally, could lead to disappointment, as even John Brett, arguably the best of them, was to find. A follower of Ruskin, he took his advice about painting from nature and spent five months working in and near the Val d'Aosta. The resulting picture was accepted at the Royal Academy only to be described by Ruskin as showing no more than "what a Piedmontese valley is like in July" and being in consequence just "Mirror's work, not man's". Sensing perhaps the unfairness of this, Ruskin at least had the decency to buy the picture himself.

Beyond the inner circle of the brotherhood new and younger admirers of pre-Raphaelitism began to emerge. This second generation was more willing to travel, though they went in search of the author of Modern Painters as much as Tintoretto. Ruskin actually paid for the young Edward Burne-Jones to visit Italy in the autumn of 1859. Travelling with his fellow artist Val Prinsep, he piously followed in the master's footsteps: "Ruskin in hand, we sought out every cornice, design or monument praised by him." Though he came to regard Italy as a second home, Burne-Jones was not much more open to its direct influence than Rossetti.

Gradually, and somewhat to Ruskin's irritation, Burne-Jones developed ideas of his own, daring to admire Michelangelo and rediscovering Botticelli. In introducing Ruskin to the work of Carpaccio, however, he repaid the debt of influence. Ruskin was captivated by the paintings of the Legend of St Ursula, especially the scene showing Ursula visited by an angel in a dream, and he made a detailed copy of it. Yet as so often in the pre-Raphaelites' engagement with the Italian, the resolve to depict what was there – to educate and reform national taste – was also a way of treating what lay beneath: currents of troubled emotion and frustrated desire. Ruskin's St Ursula is yet another rich and airless interior, occupied by another of the doomed, semi-conscious young women who haunt these pictures.

Over the decades their imaginary Italy had become the landscape in which the tangled reality of the artists' love lives was played out. By the 1870s, the freshness of the early dream had been tarnished by bitter experience. In Ruskin's increasingly disordered imagination Ursula became identified with, Rose La Touche, with whom he had been obsessively in love from her teens until her death at the age of 27. Copying the picture tipped him into one the psychotic episodes that blighted his later years. He had already separated from his wife Effie, who obtained an annulment on grounds of non-consummation, and was now married to her husband's early disciple Millais.

Suicide Note

On the night he committed suicide Benjamin wrote a postcard to Henny Gurland and Adorno. Henny destroyed the postcard but reconstructed it from memory. It read:-
"In a situation with no way out, I have no choice but to end it. My life will finish in a little villiage in the Pyrenees where no one knows me. Please pass on my thoughts to my friend Adorno and explain to him the situation in which i find myself. There is not enough time to write all the letters i had wanted to write."

The Four Telephone Calls

That last night in the Fonda de Francia, Walter made 4 last phonecalls. He was charged 8.80 pesetas for these calls. Where these phonecalls were to, remains a mystery. Its likely they were to the American Embassy in Barcelona, but this is not verifiable.

The Hotel Owner

At the Fonda de Francia where Benjamin committed suicide the owner Juan Suner Jonama was known to be friends with the Spanish border police and the Gestapo, who came to eat in the hotel's restaurant. When Walter sat down for dinner in the hotel bar that night he would have been surrounded by Nazis or Nazi sympathisers.

Walter Benjamin for Children

Walter Benjamin for Children, An Essay on his Radio Years

Jeffrey Mehlman, (University of Chicago Press, 1993). 117p.

Reviewed by Philip Beitchman

This slim but exciting little book has to do, first of all with some 30 broadcasts that Walter Benjamin prepared and delivered for German Radio between 1929-1932 specifically for children, maybe 7-14 or so, each consisting of a 20 minute talk or monologue. A main emphasis was on introducing the youth to various, some of them classical, natural catastrophes, for instance the Lisbon earthquake of the 1750's that so shook the optimism of Voltaire and the century (Aufklarung für Kinder [Enlightenment for Children] was the name of the series in German), a flood of the Mississippi of 1927, the Pompeii disaster as came through the famous letter of Pliny the Younger; another subject was various episodes of lawlessness fraud and deceit, much of it recent, for instance bootlegger's boats that were bringing rum or whatever to America through the prohibition blockade, postage stamp (and cancellation) counterfeiting, the 'miracles' of Faustus; or in a minor key that Mehlman makes much of, through an analysis developed on basis of Freud's Jokes and the Unconscious, "tea" that's sold to passengers at a stop of a liquor-less train, with the understanding that it's really booze, but which turns out to be tea as in Freud's "you told me you were going to Cracow thinking that I would assume Lemberg, but you're really going to Cracow, so why are you lying to me!" In short, lots of funny little stories, cute aperçus and deconstructing allusions, with also some strange dog stories, illustrating the loyalty of man's best friend as opposed to treachery of the other humans.

Illustrating... well, reason why the book would be promulgating a sort of Cabala, teaching somewhat more discreetly the lessons of Jewish mysticism, especially in its powerfully heretical antinonomian currents, as so profoundly disseminated by Benjamin's close friend Gershom Scholem, that of the great apostate Sabbatai Zevi. He was the Jewish "false messiah" of the 17th century who Pied Pipered Judaism into a cabalistic catastrophe.

Zevi had been 'to the mountain', like Moses before him, and had received that sensational 11th commandment, which was to disobey the first 10, incarnating also the realization of the law in its transgression; this was an obsession that Benjamin had to have picked up from Scholem (citing many references to it in their communication and contact).

Mehlman, accordingly, does a minute analysis and search of Benjamin's radio stories for children for evidence of this kind of subversive Cabala -, then comes to his very definite conclusions that Benjamin was being the (secular-heretic) cabalistic rabbi in storytelling for the kids. Bitterly ironic and contradictory, then, would be these shows being called "enlightenment for children", since Benjamin would be in opposition to the notion that the Enlightenment, at least in the humanist and humanitarian guise it has assumed for us, would make any sense of the structurally corrupt and deceiving world around us; as such an Enlightement was merely a fairy tale (the idea of progress?) only for children under 12 whom now Benjamin wants to disillusion!

German Men

With the Nazis in power the publishing of new books was subject to rigorous controls. Benjamin's books would pretty much fail most of these, so it was that his anthology of annotated letters by great German writers, 'German Men', was cunningly disguised as something the Nazis would approve of. Benjamin took extreme measures to make sure the book met the liking of the National Socialists; he deliberately gave it an innoculous, but nationalistic title; the typeface was in Gothic type which the Nazis liked to use, and saw as typically German; he even adopted a pseudonym - Detlef Holz, disguising his Jewishness. This ploy was initially successful with the book selling up to 2,000 copies before it made it onto the list of banned books.

1936

In exile Walter longed for Asja. At this time he described Asja's calls for him to join her in Moscow as 'medieval'. For the life of me I cannot figure out what he means by that. Is it good? Is it bad? It sounds good to me, but I really cant tell.

Benjamin in the News

Nice to see Walter at the top of the list of books burned by the Nazi's in the Guardian this week. The article on book burning prompted by the idiot preacher in America gearing himself up to burn some Korans. Since poor old Walter dint get too much stuff published in his lifetime i was pretty surprised to see him top of Hitler's literary hit list.

Walter contemplates suicide:

1932 and Walter proposes to Olga Parem. She rejects his proposal. Walter takes it badly and decides the time has come to make his final farewells. He writes his will, and decides life is “not particularly worth living”. When it comes down to it however, he decides that “suicide is not worth the trouble.”

Love

It became clear to me that I changed radically every time a great love gained power over me. This is because of the fact that a true love affair makes me similar to the woman I love. This transformation into a similar being was most prominent in my relationship with Asja.