The Storyteller Essays Read online

  WALTER BENJAMIN (1892–1940) was the oldest of three siblings born to an intellectual Jewish family in Berlin. From 1912 to 1915, he studied philosophy at the Universities of Freiburg, Berlin, and Munich, befriending the young philosopher Gershom Scholem at the latter. In 1917, Benjamin transferred again, to the University of Bern, where he met and married Dora Sophie Kellner; their son, Stefan, was born in 1918. While working on the periphery of the academy, he wrote parables, criticism, and short stories; translated Baudelaire’s Tableau Parisien and two volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time; made major contributions to twentieth-century criticism and thought in essays such as “The Task of the Translator,” “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” and “Theses on the Philosophy of History”; and worked on his unclassifiable and unfinished Arcades Project. After Hitler’s rise to power, Benjamin fled Germany for Ibiza, Nice, and finally, Paris. In 1938 he was arrested and imprisoned in a furniture factory in Burgundy. After his release and the day before the Germans invaded Paris, he and his sister fled to Portbou, on the Spanish border. Carrying a leather suitcase with an unknown manu-script inside, Benjamin made the grueling crossing over the Pyrenees to Spain, where his request for entry was rejected by the local authorities; that night he committed suicide.

  SAMUEL TITAN is an editor and translator based in Brazil. He teaches comparative literature at the University of São Paulo.

  TESS LEWIS has translated works from the French and German, including books by Peter Handke, Anselm Kiefer, Philippe Jaccottet, and Christine Angot. Her awards include the 2017 PEN Translation Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. She serves as the co-chair of the PEN Translation Committee and is an advisory editor for The Hudson Review.

  THE STORYTELLER ESSAYS

  WALTER BENJAMIN

  Edited and with an introduction by

  SAMUEL TITAN

  Translated from the German by

  TESS LEWIS

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Translation copyright © 2019 by Tess Lewis

  Introduction copyright © 2019 by Samuel Titan

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Lorenz Frølich, Tod und Wandrer (Death and Wanderer), illustration from the Sächsischer

  Volkskalender for 1848; courtesy Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Düsseldorf

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940, author. | Lewis, Tess, translator. | Titan, Samuel, editor, writer of introduction. | Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940.

  Storytellers.

  Title: The storyteller essays / by Walter Benjamin ; trans. by Tess Lewis ; edited and introduction by Samuel Titan.

  Other titles: Walter Benjamin’s Storytellers

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2019. | Series: New York Review Books classics.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018036771 (print) | LCCN 2018058293 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681370590 (epub) | ISBN 9781681370583 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940—Translations into English. | Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940—Books and reading. | BISAC: LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays. | LITERARY CRITICISM / European / German. | FICTION / Short Stories (single author).

  Classification: LCC PT2603.E455 (ebook) | LCC PT2603.E455 A2 2019 (print) | DDC 838/.91209—dc 3

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018036771

  ISBN 978-1-68137-059-0

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  THE STORYTELLER ESSAYS

  Johann Peter Hebel

  The Crisis of the Novel: On Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz

  Mulberry Omelet

  The Lisbon Earthquake

  Oskar Maria Graf as Storyteller

  On Proverbs

  The Handkerchief

  Storytelling and Healing

  Reading Novels

  The Art of Storytelling

  By the Fire: On the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of a Novel

  Experience and Poverty

  The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov

  Writings by Others

  Silence and Mirror by ERNST BLOCH

  The Giant’s Toy as Legend by ERNST BLOCH

  The Embroidery of Marie Monnier by PAUL VALÉRY

  From The Theory of the Novel by GEORG LUKÁCS

  On Sadness by MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE

  From The Histories by HERODOTUS

  From The Treasure Chest of the Rhenish Family Friend by JOHANN PETER HEBEL

  Selected Sources

  INTRODUCTION

  BOOKS have their fates, and the same probably applies to essays. The fate of “The Storyteller” is, in any case, a fine example of just how surprising the career of a text can be. The work of a German Jewish exile trying to scrape together a living after the Nazi takeover in 1933, it purports to discuss the stories of a great but lesser-read Russian writer—but then veers off into a number of other topics. The piece appeared in 1937 in the very last issue of an eccentric Swiss review, which counted a mere thirty-five subscribers at the time. Its author committed suicide three years later, as he fled occupied France, leaving behind a dispersed body of critical work and a formidable mass of unfinished manuscripts. None of this looks like the stuff a success story is made of, and yet Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” has become one of the best-known literary essays of the twentieth century. Widely familiar to students of literature, it is also regularly featured on reading lists in fields such as anthropology, media studies, and creative writing—a remarkable reversal of fate when one considers the essay’s obscure beginnings.

  Benjamin’s renown owes much to the loyalty of the likes of Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and Georges Bataille, to name just a few of those who kept his memory alive after the war. His writings and correspondence were devoutly unearthed, footnoted, and printed in multiple formats, from cheap paperbacks for undergraduates to multivolume hardbound editions of his complete writings, both in German and in translation. Right now, Suhrkamp Verlag, Benjamin’s publisher in his homeland, is halfway through its second take on his complete works, a densely annotated critical edition quite reminiscent of classical scholarship. Given that, why another collection of his essays—and, more to the point, why one like this, centered on “The Storyteller”?

  •

  The answer has to do exactly with the popularity of the essay, which all too often is presented as a stand-alone text, a brilliant piece of literary theory, or a poetic exercise in historical nostalgia that the reader can appreciate without, say, having to tackle Benjamin’s dense dissertation Origin of the German Trauerspiel or getting lost in the maze of his unfinished Arcades Project. The fluent prose of “The Storyteller,” full of memorable formulations and striking images, tends to confirm this preconception, and indeed the essay seems to have taken shape unusually easily for Benjamin. Begun around late March 1936, it was probably finished by June, though it was only in the summer of the following year that it came out in Fritz Lieb’s review Orient und Occident—quick work indeed when compared to the tortuous genesis of some of Benjamin’s other major essays.

  The essay and its origins are, however, more complicated than this would suggest. “The Storyteller” was the outcome of a long train of thought that goes ba
ck to Benjamin’s student days in Berlin and gathers momentum in the second half of the 1920s. From 1926 to 1936, he published a number of pieces—essays, newspaper articles, book reviews, short stories, etc.—in which he tested concepts and probed images and observations that would finally converge in his critical portrait of Nikolai Leskov. The Storyteller Essays puts “The Storyteller” in the company of these texts, the better to chart the development of Benjamin’s thoughts about three key concepts in the 1936 essay: experience, tradition, and storytelling. Read in the company of its forerunners, one can hear how “The Storyteller” resonates with his larger themes and recognize its place at the heart of his oeuvre, next to “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and the Baudelaire essays of the 1930s. Last but not least, this volume offers a revealing glimpse of the dynamics of Benjamin’s writing: the way he tries out an idea in one context only to take it up again—sometimes quoting himself verbatim—in quite another; his manner of smuggling ideas from authors like Michel de Montaigne or Paul Valéry to reflect his own, different concerns; and his gift for aphorisms—phrases that he would sometimes polish over the course of years (for example, “Boredom is the dream bird that broods the egg of experience”)—but equally for jarringly abrupt, montage-like transitions.

  •

  “The art of storytelling is dying out.” The claim is presented early in “The Storyteller” as a matter of simple observation, born out, Benjamin writes, “almost every day.” He swiftly renders this loss as the loss of “the most reliable of all our capacities,” namely “the ability to share experiences,” and he puts a date on the phenomenon: soldiers came back from World War I battlefields “not richer in experiences they could share, but poorer.” Established experience has been “refuted” on all fronts, first by mechanized warfare, later by runaway inflation and political turmoil, until only the “tiny, fragile human body” is left in the middle of a “force field” of “currents and explosions.” Benjamin himself was no stranger to the consequences of those years of upheaval. Coming from a well-to-do, assimilated Jewish family, he had seen his means diminish, particularly after Origin of the German Trauerspiel was refused as a postdoctoral dissertation by the University of Frankfurt in 1925, shattering his hopes for an academic position. But what stands out here is the way Benjamin moves from an array of contemporary experiences of loss to the general claim that shared experience and its verbal correlative—the oral tale—have lost their relevance to social life, leaving us without a compass by which to navigate.

  A loss of experience, then, to be mourned but also reflected upon. This contrasts strikingly with the tone Benjamin had used to discuss the word in an early text, “Experience,” published in 1913, when he was a prominent figure in the Berlin branch of Gustav Wyneken’s vitalistic youth movement. In this manifesto-like essay, Benjamin urges his readers to stick to their youthful openness and enthusiasm as opposed to grown-up (that is, world-weary) attempts at stifling them in the name of a supposedly superior experience, recourse to which is usually no more than “the mask of the adult.” Hence, according to the young Benjamin, the need for a notion of experience that might open mankind to the fullness of the world, beyond the limitations imposed upon it by philistine adulthood and academic philosophy. These motives echo again in his 1915 essay “The Life of Students” and later in an unpublished piece, “On the Program of the Coming Philosophy,” written in 1918.

  Sometime in the early or mid-1920s, however, Benjamin abandons the rallying tone and starts to worry. Not in a conservative way, though: years later, in his 1933 essay “Experience and Poverty,” he would recall the “mishmash” of revivalist styles and fashions trying to cover up the void left by the war and by the onset of a “monstrous development of technology.” He seems to notice early on that the war had destroyed not only late-nineteenth-century bourgeois culture but also all other forms of social and intellectual life that were in its way, with results far removed from any sort of Nietzschean dawn he had yearned for in his student days.*

  •

  Benjamin’s growing distance from his early intellectual commitments was accompanied by a growing distrust of authors, books, and literary genres that presumed to cope with the ongoing historical catastrophe without acknowledging the extent to which it had undermined the accumulated cultural experience they took for granted. A note of contempt can be discerned as early as 1917, in the essay “Dostoevsky’s The Idiot,” in which Benjamin tries to set the Russian writer apart from “the average novelist” who, in “the cheapest kind of novel,” reduces protagonists to “marionettes,” and sees everything through the lens of commonsense psychology, unable to envision character and destiny on a wider scale. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, Benjamin has no kind words to spare for what in 1936 he calls the “flood” of conventional war novels and war memoirs, and this discontent fueled a quest for other narrative models, either ante- or post-bourgeois, to help him understand and deal with the crisis of collective experience.

  Benjamin’s interest in alternative modes of storytelling led him in a number of different directions. He developed an interest in the fairy tale (Märchen) and even considered writing a whole book on this “form” he took to be untainted by “subjectivity” and “self-conscious individuality” (as he wrote to Gershom Scholem, May 20–25, 1925); the project never materialized, but some traces of it emerge in the final pages of “The Storyteller.” Benjamin even went so far as to try his hand at the genre in “Mulberry Omelet” (1930), a superb tale on the Proustian theme of lost time.

  Another pathway took Benjamin to the Kalendergeschichten, short prose tales meant for publication in popular almanacs, a genre that emerged in the seventeenth century. Its undisputed master is Johann Peter Hebel (1760–1826), a Lutheran vicar from southwestern Germany who composed scores of stories for the almanac of the Grand Duchy of Baden.† From 1926 to 1929, Benjamin wrote three polemical pieces on Hebel, denouncing his hijacking by conservative critics who presented him as a folk author, a herald of a small-town Germanness that they contrasted with modern rootless cosmopolitanism. Benjamin’s Hebel cuts a completely different figure and is notable for complexity, not simplicity: He is a Christian but he also embodies the spirit of the Enlightenment, prizing ethics and tolerance over mysticism and bigotry; he is a practical man of peasant stock, steeped in traditional wisdom, and yet he is no less of a contemplative soul, who can ponder both the stars and contemporary history; finally, he is a masterful storyteller, with an ear for his local dialect but no interest in the novel. It is hard to overestimate Hebel’s importance for Benjamin and “The Storyteller.” Hebel paved Benjamin’s way to Leskov, whom he started to read seriously a bit later, as he tells Hugo von Hofmannsthal in a letter from February 1928; and it is more than likely that Hebel would have figured centrally in two unwritten essays, “Why the Art of Storytelling Is Dying Out” and “The Novelist and the Storyteller,” which Benjamin mentions in his correspondence of 1928 and 1929. Hebel also influenced Benjamin’s reading of his contemporary Oskar Maria Graf and provided him with a stylistic key to tune his voice in radio tales for children, like “The Lisbon Earthquake” (1931).

  In these years, Benjamin is also keenly interested in contemporary novels that break away from the nineteenth-century mold. In his 1929 essay “The Image of Proust,” for example, he has a lot to say about Proust’s “text” or “work” and the novelty of a book that seems to dissolve the novel as we knew it; in the same year, in his essay on surrealism, Benjamin praises Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (1926) and André Breton’s Nadja (1928) for taking the novel into the city streets, “seul champ d’expérience valable,” in Breton’s famous formula. Finally, Benjamin’s 1930 essay on Berlin Alexanderplatz brings him very close to “The Storyteller”: Alfred Döblin’s book, published in 1929, is an attempt to go beyond the novel and even beyond the written word, and it sets Benjamin to musing about the birth of a new form of epic poetry, archaic in its orality while thoroughly modern in
its cinematic impetus.

  •

  It should be clear by now that Benjamin’s thoughts on the dynamics and the demise of traditional experience and storytelling and his ideas on the nature and the fate of the novel are two sides of the same coin. This becomes particularly apparent when one reads the short story “The Handkerchief” (1932) and the essay “By the Fire” (1933) side by side, as a diptych. The first presents a fleeting vision of one of the central types in the world of oral narrative—the seafaring captain —while the second, ostensibly a review of Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale, relates the novel as a genre to a very different foundational scene: the isolated individual brooding by the fireside. Taken together, they amount to a draft of a theory of the novel that echoes but also differs from Georg Lukács’s own.‡ Lukács’s brilliant essay is built on the opposition between epic poetry and the novel—that is, a world where meaning is “immanent” to every act and a world abandoned by meaning and reduced to a fantasmatic persistence in the guise of convention. To Benjamin, on the contrary, the rise of the novel seems to be linked not so much to the inception of a metaphysical “dissonance” but rather to a breakup of tradition that leaves the individual—and the reader of novels—alone, deprived of “counsel” and left to his own resources in finding a meaning for his life. Hence the paradoxical structure of a typical novel, which is “not meant to be durable but to burn brightly” and thus to warm its solitary reader.

  Benjamin’s last stop before “The Storyteller” is “Experience and Poverty” (1933), where he wants us to “admit” that we are all at a loss and that our lack of social and human bearings amounts to “a completely new kind of poverty.” If we are to move beyond it, we must first resist escapist fantasies and call this new poverty by its name: “barbarism.” Of course, Benjamin knew perfectly well that this was a highly charged term in the year of Hitler’s rise to power: Nazi propaganda had its own Spenglerian tune to play on the fall of bourgeois culture and the rise of a new, guilt-free barbarian age. Benjamin knowingly enters the lion’s den to propose “a new, positive notion of barbarism” whose heroes are not Aryan purebloods but artists and scientists willing “to start fresh, to make do with little, to rebuild with next to nothing”: Albert Einstein, Paul Klee, the Cubists, Bertolt Brecht, Paul Scheerbart, Adolf Loos, and Le Corbusier—the list even includes Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse. Benjamin is aware that the critical stakes of what he is proposing are high, but he probably also felt that going for less would be as good as irrelevant under the “shadow of the coming war.”