Reflections Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Introduction

  One

  A Berlin Chronicle

  One-way Street

  Two

  Moscow

  Marseilles

  Hashish in Marseilles

  Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century

  Naples

  Three

  Surrealism

  Brecht’s Threepenny Novel

  Conversations with Brecht

  The Author as Producer *

  Karl Kraus

  Four

  Critique of Violence

  The Destructive Character

  Fate and Character

  Theologico-political Fragment

  On Language as Such and on the Language of Man

  On the Mimetic Faculty

  Editor’s Note

  Index of Names

  Footnotes

  First Mariner Books edition 2019

  English translation copyright © 1978 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

  ISBN 978-1-328-47022-5

  Cover design by Christopher Moisan

  Cover illustration © iStock

  eISBN 978-0-547-71116-4

  v1.0219

  These essays have all been published in Germany. “A Berlin Chronicle” was published as Berliner Chronik, copyright © 1970 by Suhrkamp Verlag; “One-Way Street” as Einbahnstrasse, copyright 1955 by Suhrkamp Verlag; “Moscow,” “Marseilles,” “Hashish in Marseilles,” and “Naples” as “Moskau,” “Marseille,” “Haschisch in Marseille,” and “Neapel ” in Gesammelte Schriften, Band IV-1, copyright © 1972 by Suhrkamp Verlag; “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” “Karl Kraus,” and “The Destructive Character” as “Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts,” “Karl Kraus,” and “Der destruktive Charakter” in Illuminationen, copyright 1955 by Suhrkamp Verlag; “Surrealism,” “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” and “On the Mimetic Faculty” as “Der Sürrealismus,” “Über die Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” and “Über das mimetische Vermögen” in Angelus Novus, copyright © 1966 by Suhrkamp Verlag; “Brecht’s Threepenny Novel ” as “Brechts Dreigroschenroman” in Gesammelte Schriften, Band III, copyright © 1972 by Suhrkamp Verlag; “Conversations with Brecht” and “The Author as Producer” as “Gespräch mit Brecht” and “Der Autor als Produzent” in Versuche über Brecht, copyright © 1966 by Suhrkamp Verlag; “Critique of Violence,” “Fate and Character,” and “Theologico-Political Fragment” as “Zur Kritik der Gewalt,” “Schicksal und Charakter,” and “Theologisch-politisches Fragment” in Schriften, Band I, copyright 1955 by Suhrkamp Verlag.

  Introduction

  In the mid-fifties, Theodor W. Adorno presented the first collection of Walter Benjamin’s essays to German audiences, and in the late sixties, Hannah Arendt prepared a similar volume for American readers. It was, both in Frankfurt (1955) and in New York (1968), a matter of rescuing Walter Benjamin from near-oblivion and of transforming what had been, in the late twenties and early thirties, a rumor among the cognoscenti into an incisive challenge to our ossifying habits of thought. Today, the situation has radically changed, and Walter Benjamin has become a new classic, at least among the members of the philosophical left on the European continent, who study his essays as avidly as those of Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukács, or Ernst Bloch. We now have a nearly complete edition of his collected works in which even some of his improvised reviews are preserved (as they should be) with a philological care never bestowed on Sainte-Beuve or N. G. Chernyshevski; and many groups of partisan interpreters ally their political cause, by quoting chapter and verse, with the ideas of a writer obsessed with protecting the privacy of his experience. Reading and interpreting an author have never been activities that evolve outside a complex net of committed interests and social pressures, and I cannot pretend to approach Walter Benjamin from a more impersonal view than others have done. My difficulty is that I find myself unable to share his assumptions in the traditions of Romantic metaphysics or Hegelian dialectics, but I hope to balance these serious deficiencies by a compassionate effort to understand the tragic quality of his life and the internal contradictions of his thought, which was intent, at least at times, upon a vision of history violently disrupted by the coming of the Messiah and/or the revolution of the proletariat.

  Over a long period, Gershom (Gerhard) Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno collaborated loyally in editing Benjamin’s revealing letters and in suggesting diverse ways in which we should understand his ideas and commitments. Gershom Scholem, who was instrumental in introducing Benjamin to the Jewish spiritual tradition, continues to suggest in his memoirs that his restless friend was a religious if not a mystical thinker who may have been tempted, against the grain of his sensibilities, to superimpose the terms of Marxist discourse upon his metaphysical vision of God, language, and a society ontologically in need of salvation.

  Theodor W. Adorno, Benjamin’s irascible friend and his first editor of substantial merit, was inclined to make some allowances for an early metaphysical infatuation that was followed, to be sure, by a more important though uneasy alliance with a critical philosophy basically incarnated in the work of the Frankfurt Institut fur Sozialforschung, which was continued, after Hitler had come to power, in Geneva and New York. In his own sophisticated way, Fredric Jameson, in one of the first important essays on Benjamin published in this country, fully supports Adorno’s claims and adds a dash of inevitable melancholy characteristic of American academic Marxists in their frustrating search for an old-fashioned proletariat. Yet the neat division between a metaphysical and a materialist reading of Benjamin, advanced by Scholem and the critical Marxists respectively, has been modified more recently by the German critic Helmut Heissenbüttel and some younger interpreters emerging from the radical German student movement of the late sixties, who rightly stress the substantial differences between Adorno’s and Benjamin’s way of using Marxist ideas. These critics say, with a good deal of justification, that we cannot entirely understand Benjamin’s particular brand of Marxism without looking more closely at his creative friendship with the playwright Bertolt Brecht, a relationship very little appreciated by either Scholem or Adorno. Scholem’s religious views thus compete with a rich array of highly differentiated Marxist readings of Benjamin, and yet I prefer a third way, suggested by Martin Jay’s sober history of the Frankfurt Institut, Hannah Arendt’s biographical essays concerning the paradoxes of Benjamin’s personality, and René Wellek’s judicious panorama of his critical views. I am less concerned with constructing a systematic pigeonhole than with sketching a biographical account of Benjamin’s experiences against crucial years of Central European history and with trying to ease, if it can be done at all, the exhilarating difficulties of reading some of his best writings, which are totally alien to the pragmatic and analytic orientations long prevalent in American thought.

  In many Jewish families of late nineteenth-century Europe, gifted sons turned against the commercial interests of their fathers, who were largely assimilated (after moving from the provinces to the more liberal cities) to bourgeois success, and, in building their counterworlds in spiritual protest, they incisively shaped the future of science, philosophy, and literature. Articulating an insight of far-reaching implications, Karl Kraus, the be
lligerent Viennese satirist, suggested in his Magical Operetta (much enjoyed by Benjamin) that little Jewish family dramas were being played all over, the stern fathers concerned with tachles—profitable business ploys—and the spiritual sons with shmonzes—the less profitable matters of the pure mind. Whether we think of Sigmund Freud, Edmund Husserl, or Franz Kafka, we need few modifications to apply this description to what happened in these families, and in the story of Benjamin’s development, the fundamental pattern reasserts itself with particular clarity. Walter Benjamin’s parents belonged to the Berlin Jewish upper-middle class, and his childhood was protected by an elegant household of refined dîners and prescribed shopping excursions, the inevitable governesses, and the best schools. His father was a knowledgeable auctioneer, art dealer, and investor who believed that he was distantly related to the poet Heinrich Heine. His mother came from a clan of lawyers and merchants successfully established in the Jewish communities of Prussia’s eastern provinces. There was a sister, Dora, and a brother, George, who, as a physician, loyally served the working people in the northern industrial districts of Berlin, joined the German Communist Party, and later died in a concentration camp (his wife, Hilde Benjamin, was to serve the German Democratic Republic as a fierce state prosecutor and appeared, in fictional shape, in Le Carré’s Spy Who Came in from the Cold). Walter received his first education in the Kaiser Friedrich School, a rather liberal institution (whatever he was to say about it later), and spent some time in an élite prep school in Thuringia, well known for the pedagogical experiments it directed against petrified educational tradition. One of his teachers there was Gustav Wyneken, the later founder of the “Free School Community” (Freie Schulgemeinde) under whose guidance the young student enthusiastically immersed himself in the ideas—or, rather, feelings—of the idealistic German Youth Movement, the counterculture of Wilhelmine Germany; “my thinking,” young Benjamin wrote, “has its origins in my first teacher, Wyneken, and returns to him again and again.”

  In Berlin Benjamin actively participated in organizing the collective life of the “Free Students,” who were aligned with the romantic ideology and the conservative orientations of the Youth Movement, rather than with the young Zionists or Socialists, who were competing for the allegiance of middle-class students in revolt against their fathers and the advances of industrial civilization. In 1912 he went to the University of Freiburg for a while because of the neo-Kantians there, and a year later traveled to Paris (the future capital of his sensibilities), but returned to Berlin again. There he published neo-Romantic poetry and essays concerning the need for change in the educational system, and was duly elected president of the Berlin “Free Students,” who defended Wyneken’s ideas about friendship, Eros, and the purity of the mind. On the first day of the war, Benjamin and his friends immediately volunteered for service in the Prussian army (the argument of his later left-wing defenders, that the young people simply wanted to stay together, obscures the patriotic enthusiasm of the Youth Movement volunteers who died en masse onthe Western Front and were later hailed by the Nazis as true war heroes). Fortunately, however, his induction was postponed, and when his number came up later, he prepared for the physical examination by drinking innumerable cups of coffee and was, as he appeared before the recruiting board pale and with trembling hands, promptly rejected on medical grounds.

  In 1915, Benjamin wrote an abrupt letter to Gustav Wyneken, breaking with him and the Youth Movement, but it would be difficult to say that he actively committed himself to political opposition to the monarchy and the war. If Franz Kafka, on August 2, 1914, laconically noted in his diary that war had broken out and that he went swimming in the afternoon, Benjamin kept a similarly studious distance from political and military events for a long time, read Kant and the German Romantics, collected rare editions, and branched out, rather early in his studies, into the philosophy of language and contemporary linguistics. During the first year of the war, he wrote about Hölderlin as any young German intellectual close to the Youth Movement would have done at that time. In October 1915, he went to Munich, less attracted by the university than by the presence of Dora Pollak, née Kellner (whom he was to marry after she obtained her divorce). At the same time he met Gershom Scholem, an active Zionist and scholar who, for the next twenty years or so, untiringly involved Benjamin in the study of Jewish religious traditions and, though disappointed again and again, kept encouraging him to think of moving to Palestine in order to write and teach in the homeland of the Jews. In the spring of 1917, Walter and Dora married and, with the permission of the German authorities, moved to Bern, Switzerland, where Benjamin continued his studies of philosophy, literature, and aesthetics; he was by deepest inclination a true Privatgelehrter, most happy when he could hide behind his papers and rare editions, but (possibly because his parents wished him to do so) he submitted a professionally done dissertation entitled “The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism” and received his doctoral degree summa cum laude (1919). While the battles of the civil war were raging in many cities and regions of Germany, Benjamin in his Swiss retreat devoted critical attention to his studies of Baudelaire and Adalbert Stifter, an Austrian conservative writer, and in his letters indulged in a Swiftian game of establishing a new university that would gather in one distinguished place the silliest and most pedestrian minds of the German university world.

  The progressing inflation in Germany forced Benjamin, Dora, and their three-year-old son, Stefan, to return home, and in the subsequent years in Berlin (when the young family lived in his parents’ villa in the fashionable Grunewald district) Benjamin turned critic, translator of Baudelaire and Proust, and, for pressing financial reasons, reviewer for the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Literarische Welt, reporting with equal interest on Charlie Chaplin, old toys (which he continued to love), odd assortments of Russian novels, and new publications about German literary history. These were, in terms of productivity and challenging friendships, intense and strong years, coinciding with the most creative epoch of the Weimar Republic: Benjamin developed an intense interest in anarchist theory (Sorel); his interpretation of Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities, moving to a mythopoeic approach, was much admired by Hugo von Hofmannsthal; and he wrote his difficult study of the origins of the German Trauerspiel, which constitutes a pioneering philosophical analysis of allegory, symbol, and the “play of lament” in German tradition and in European tradition as a whole. (This study accompanied his halfhearted application for a nonsalaried lectureship at the University of Frankfurt, but Benjamin preferred to withdraw the application, rather than let it be rejected by an uncomprehending faculty involved in Byzantine intrigues.) In 1923, Benjamin met the young philosopher Theodor W. Adorno for the first time and, on a vacation trip to Capri in the summer of 1924, the Latvian actress Asja Lacis, an active Bolshevik (and later, through Stalinist justice, for nearly ten years a prisoner in the Gulag Archipelago) who, as he confessed, immediately inspired him to a feeling of the vital relevance of radical Communism; these feelings, however, did not prevent his subscribing, at about the same time, to the ultraconservative Action Française, or from saying that its viewpoints were the best antidote to German political stupidity. In the winter of 1926–27, Asja Lacis had Benjamin invited to Moscow, but although he accepted a commission to write the entry on Goethe (never published) for the Bol’shaia Entsiklopediia, he did not join the Communist Party, cryptically alluding to his “old anarchism” when the question came up in his correspondence. Somewhat later, he readily accepted a fellowship provided by the good offices of Gershom Scholem and the Jewish citizens of Palestine to concentrate on studying Hebrew in preparation for a teaching job in Jerusalem. It is difficult to say why Benjamin (who was divorced in 1930) once again rejected Scholem’s urgent invitation to leave Germany; on January 20, 1930, he wrote a long and melancholy letter to his friend explaining in French why he had been dilatory in his Hebrew studies (which were not to be continued) and declaring that he had made up his min
d to become Germany’s most outstanding literary critic. Three years later, Hitler was in power, the brown shirts roamed through the streets of Berlin, and Benjamin was an exile, without a roof over his head, or, rather, without his collection of rare editions to protect him against a world of merciless enemies.

  For the last seven years of his life, Walter Benjamin was condemned to a way of life closely resembling that of the émigré extras in Rick’s Café in Casablanca, but there was nothing fictional about his efforts to be paid a decent fee for an occasional review, to avoid the attention of the French police (who were eager to collaborate with the German authorities when it came to Jewish and leftist refugees), or to find somebody willing to help with a visa that would open the doors to England or the United States. He continued publishing little reviews in Germany under his own name until April 1933, and under the playful pseudonyms of Detlev Holz and K. A. Stampflinger until the summer of 1935, but by that time Nazi control of the press, including the once liberal newspapers, was totally consolidated, and he was lucky if he could publish here and there in Switzerland, in Czechoslovakia, or in the Gazette des amis des livres (Paris). German radicals have lately accused Adorno and the Institut für Sozialforschung of dealing with Benjamin in less than humane ways, but the record shows that in spite of the frank views that he exchanged with Adorno in letters, Benjamin was made a member of the Institut (1935), received a regular stipend that came with the membership, and published his seminal study of Baudelaire in a periodical sponsored by the former Frankfurt group; and it was Max Horkheimer, of the Institut, who secured for Benjamin (who thought of himself as the “last of the Europeans” and a rather hesitant candidate for emigration to America) an affidavit and entry visa for the United States. Yet in these most difficult years of his life Benjamin felt closer than ever to Bertolt Brecht, with whom he stayed again and again in Brecht’s Danish dacha, discussing Kafka, the uneasy situation of the radical left in the age of the Stalinist purges, and the importance of technological changes in the revolutionary arts. It was Benjamin who (perhaps in the wrong place and at the wrong time) became the first philosophical defender of Brecht’s revolutionary experiments in the arts. In late September 1940, Benjamin (who had picked up his U.S. visa in Marseilles) crossed the French-Spanish border with a small band of fellow exiles, but was told on the Spanish side by the local functionary (who wanted to blackmail the refugees) that Spain was closed to them and that they would be returned in the morning to the French authorities, who were just waiting to hand them over to the Gestapo. Benjamin—totally exhausted and possibly sick—took an overdose of morphine, refused medical help, and died in the morning, while his fellow refugees were promptly permitted to proceed through Spanish territory to Lisbon. He is buried in Port Bou, but nobody knows where, and when visitors come (Scholem tells us), the guardians of the cemetery lead them to a place that they say is his grave, respectfully accepting a tip. We have neither monument nor flower, but we have his texts, in which his elusive, vulnerable, and terribly tense mind continues to survive.