Illuminations Page 2
However – and this is where bungling and bad luck come in – in the Germany of that time there was another way, and it was precisely his Goethe essay that spoiled Benjamin’s only chance for a university career. As often with Benjamin’s writings, this study was inspired by polemics, and the attack concerned Friedrich Gundolf’s book on Goethe. Benjamin’s critique was definitive, and yet Benjamin could have expected more understanding from Gundolf and other members of the circle around Stefan George, a group with whose intellectual world he had been quite familiar in his youth, than from the ‘establishment’; and he probably need not have been a member of the circle to earn his academic accreditation under one of these men who at that time were just beginning to get a fairly comfortable foothold in the academic world. But the one thing he should not have done was to mount an attack on the most prominent and most capable academic member of the circle so vehement that everyone was bound to know, as he explained retrospectively later, that he had ‘just as little to do with academe … as with the monuments which men like Gundolf or Ernst Bertram have erected.’ (Briefe II, 523). Yes, that is how it was. And it was Benjamin’s bungling or his misfortune to have announced this to the world before he was admitted to the university.
Yet one certainly cannot say that he consciously disregarded due caution. On the contrary, he was aware that ‘Mr Bungle sends his regards’ and took more precautions than anyone else I have known. But his system of provisions against possible dangers, including the ‘Chinese courtesy’ mentioned by Scholem,2 invariably, in a strange and mysterious way, disregarded the real danger. For just as he fled from the safe Paris to the dangerous Meaux at the beginning of the war – to the front, as it were – his essay on Goethe inspired in him the wholly unnecessary worry that Hofmannsthal might take amiss a very cautious critical remark about Rudolf Borchardt, one of the chief contributors to his periodical. Yet he expected only good things from having found for this ‘attack upon the ideology of George’s school … this one place where they will find it hard to ignore the invective’ (Briefe I, 341). They did not find it hard at all. For no one was more isolated than Benjamin, so utterly alone. Even the authority of Hofmannsthal – ‘the new patron,’ as Benjamin called him in the first burst of happiness (Briefe I, 327) – could not alter this situation. His voice hardly mattered compared with the very real power of the George school, an influential group in which, as with all such entities, only ideological allegiance counted, since only ideology, not rank and quality, can hold a group together. Despite their pose of being above politics, George’s disciples were fully as conversant with the basic principles of literary manoeuvres as the professors were with the fundamentals of academic politics or the hacks and journalists with the ABC of ‘one good turn deserves another.’
Benjamin, however, did not know the score. He never knew how to handle such things, was never able to move among such people, not even when ‘the adversities of outer life which sometimes come from all sides, like wolves’ (Briefe I, 298), had already afforded him some insight into the ways of the world. Whenever he tried to adjust and be co-operative so as to get some firm ground under his feet somehow, things were sure to go wrong.
A major study on Goethe from the viewpoint of Marxism – in the middle twenties he came very close to joining the Communist Party – never appeared in print, either in the Great Russian Encyclopedia, for which it was intended, or in present-day Germany. Klaus Mann, who had commissioned a review of Brecht’s Threepenny Novel for his periodical Die Sammlung, returned the manuscript because Benjamin had asked 250 French francs – then about 10 dollars – for it and he wanted to pay only 150. His commentary on Brecht’s poetry did not appear in his lifetime. And the most serious difficulties finally developed with the Institute for Social Research, which, originally (and now again) part of the University of Frankfurt, had emigrated to America and on which Benjamin depended financially. Its guiding spirits, Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, were ‘dialectical materialists’ and in their opinion Benjamin’s thinking was ‘undialectic,’ moved in ‘materialistic categories, which by no means coincide with Marxist ones,’ was ‘lacking in mediation’ insofar as, in an essay on Baudelaire, he had related ‘certain conspicuous elements within the superstructure … directly, perhaps even causally, to corresponding elements in the substructure.’ The result was that Benjamin’s original essay, ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in the Works of Baudelaire,’ was not printed, either then in the magazine of the Institute or in the posthumous two-volume edition of his writings. (Parts of it have now been published – ‘Der Flâneur’ in Die Neue Rundschau, December 1967, and ‘Die Moderne’ in Das Argument, March 1968.)
Benjamin probably was the most peculiar Marxist ever produced by this movement, which God knows has had its full share of oddities. The theoretical aspect that was bound to fascinate him was the doctrine of the superstructure, which was only briefly sketched by Marx but then assumed a disproportionate role in the movement as it was joined by a disproportionately large number of intellectuals, hence by people who were interested only in the superstructure. Benjamin used this doctrine only as a heuristic-methodological stimulus and was hardly interested in its historical or philosophical background. What fascinated him about the matter was that the spirit and its material manifestation were so intimately connected that it seemed permissible to discover everywhere Baudelaire’s correspondances, which clarified and illuminated one another if they were properly correlated, so that finally they would no longer require any interpretative or explanatory commentary. He was concerned with the correlation between a street scene, a speculation on the stock exchange, a poem, a thought, with the hidden line which holds them together and enables the historian or philologist to recognize that they must all be placed in the same period. When Adorno criticized Benjamin’s ‘wide-eyed presentation of actualities’ (Briefe II, 793), he hit the nail right on its head; this is precisely what Benjamin was doing and wanted to do. Strongly influenced by surrealism, it was the ‘attempt to capture the portrait of history in the most insignificant representations of reality, its scraps, as it were’ (Briefe II, 685). Benjamin had a passion for small, even minute things; Scholem tells about his ambition to get one hundred lines onto the ordinary page of a notebook and about his admiration for two grains of wheat in the Jewish section of the Musée Cluny ‘on which a kindred soul had inscribed the complete Shema Israel.’3 For him the size of an object was in an inverse ratio to its significance. And this passion, far from being a whim, derived directly from the only world view that ever had a decisive influence on him, from Goethe’s conviction of the factual existence of an Urphänomen, an archetypal phenomenon, a concrete thing to be discovered in the world of appearances in which ‘significance’ (Bedeutung, the most Goethean of words, keeps recurring in Benjamin’s writings) and appearance, word and thing, idea and experience, would coincide. The smaller the object, the more likely it seemed that it could contain in the most concentrated form everything else; hence his delight that two grains of wheat should contain the entire Shema Israel, the very essence of Judaism, tiniest essence appearing on tiniest entity, from which in both cases everything else originates that, however, in significance cannot be compared with its origin. In other words, what profoundly fascinated Benjamin from the beginning was never an idea, it was always a phenomenon. ‘What seems paradoxical about everything that is justly called beautiful is the fact that it appears’ (Schriften I, 349), and this paradox – or, more simply, the wonder of appearance – was always at the centre of all his concerns.
How remote these studies were from Marxism and dialectical materialism is confirmed by their central figure, the flâneur.4 It is to him, aimlessly strolling through the crowds in the big cities in studied contrast to their hurried, purposeful activity, that things reveal themselves in their secret meaning: ‘The true picture of the past flits by’ (‘Philosophy of History’), and only the flâneur who idly strolls by receives the message. With great acumen Adorno has
pointed to the static element in Benjamin: ‘To understand Benjamin properly one must feel behind his every sentence the conversion of extreme agitation into something static, indeed, the static notion of movement itself (Schriften I, xix). Naturally, nothing could be more ‘undialectic’ than this attitude in which the ‘angel of history’ (in the ninth of the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’) does not dialectically move forward into the future, but has his face ‘turned toward the past.’ ‘Where a chain of events appears to us, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and join together what has been smashed to pieces.’ (Which would presumably mean the end of history.) ‘But a storm is blowing from Paradise’ and ‘irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of ruins before him grows skyward. What we call progress is this storm.’ In this angel, which Benjamin saw in Klee’s ‘Angelus Novus,’ the flâneur experiences his final transfiguration. For just as the flâneur, through the gestus of purposeless strolling, turns his back to the crowd even as he is propelled and swept by it, so the ‘angel of history,’ who looks at nothing but the expanse of ruins of the past, is blown backwards into the future by the storm of progress. That such thinking should ever have bothered with a consistent, dialectically sensible, rationally explainable process seems absurd.
It should also be obvious that such thinking neither aimed nor could arrive at binding, generally valid statements, but that these were replaced, as Adorno critically remarks, ‘by metaphorical ones’ (Briefe II, 785). In his concern with directly, actually demonstrable concrete facts, with single events and occurrences whose ‘significance’ is manifest, Benjamin was not much interested in theories or ‘ideas’ which did not immediately assume the most precise outward shape imaginable. To this very complex but still highly realistic mode of thought the Marxian relationship between superstructure and substructure became, in a precise sense, a metaphorical one. If, for example – and this would certainly be in the spirit of Benjamin’s thought – the abstract concept Vernunft (reason) is traced back to its origin in the verb vernehmen (to perceive, to hear), it may be thought that a word from the sphere of the superstructure has been given back its sensual substructure, or, conversely, that a concept has been transformed into a metaphor – provided that ‘metaphor’ is understood in its original, nonallegorical sense of metapherein (to transfer). For a metaphor establishes a connection which is sensually perceived in its immediacy and requires no interpretation, while an allegory always proceeds from an abstract notion and then invents something palpable to represent it almost at will. The allegory must be explained before it can become meaningful, a solution must be found to the riddle it presents, so that the often laborious interpretation of allegorical figures always unhappily reminds one of the solving of puzzles even when no more ingenuity is demanded than in the allegorical representation of death by a skeleton. Since Homer the metaphor has borne that element of the poetic which conveys cognition; its use establishes the correspondances between physically most remote things – as when in the Iliad the tearing onslaught of fear and grief on the hearts of the Achaians corresponds to the combined onslaught of the winds from north and west on the dark waters (Iliad IX, 1–8); or when the approaching of the army moving to battle in line after line corresponds to the sea’s long billows which, driven by the wind, gather head far out on the sea, roll to shore line after line, and then burst on the land in thunder (Iliad IV, 422–23). Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about. What is so hard to understand about Benjamin is that without being a poet he thought poetically and therefore was bound to regard the metaphor as the greatest gift of language. Linguistic ‘transference’ enables us to give material form to the invisible – ‘A mighty fortress is our God’ – and thus to render it capable of being experienced. He had no trouble understanding the theory of the superstructure as the final doctrine of metaphorical thinking – precisely because without much ado and eschewing all ‘mediations’ he directly related the superstructure to the so-called ‘material’ substructure, which to him meant the totality of sensually experienced data. He evidently was fascinated by the very thing that the others branded as ‘vulgar-Marxist’ or ‘undialectical’ thinking.
It seems plausible that Benjamin, whose spiritual existence had been formed and informed by Goethe, a poet and not a philosopher, and whose interest was almost exclusively aroused by poets and novelists, although he had studied philosophy, should have found it easier to communicate with poets than with theoreticians, whether of the dialectical or the metaphysical variety. And there is indeed no question but that his friendship with Brecht – unique in that here the greatest living German poet met the most important critic of the time, a fact both were fully aware of – was the second and incomparably more important stroke of good fortune in Benjamin’s life. It promptly had the most adverse consequences; it antagonized the few friends he had, it endangered his relation to the Institute of Social Research, toward whose ‘suggestions’ he had every reason ‘to be docile’ (Briefe II, 683), and the only reason it did not cost him his friendship with Scholem was Scholem’s abiding loyalty and admirable generosity in all matters concerning his friend. Both Adorno and Scholem blamed Brecht’s ‘disastrous influence’5 (Scholem) for Benjamin’s clearly undialectic usage of Marxian categories and his determined break with all metaphysics; and the trouble was that Benjamin, usually quite inclined to compromises albeit most unnecessary ones, knew and maintained that his friendship with Brecht constituted an absolute limit not only to docility but even to diplomacy, for ‘my agreeing with Brecht’s production is one of the most important and most strategic points in my entire position’ (Briefe II, 594). In Brecht he found a poet of rare intellectual powers and, almost as important for him at the time, someone on the Left who, despite all talk about dialectics, was no more of a dialectical thinker than he was, but whose intelligence was uncommonly close to reality. With Brecht he could practise what Brecht himself called ‘crude thinking’ (das plumpe Denken): ‘The main thing is to learn how to think crudely. Crude thinking, that is the thinking of the great,’ said Brecht, and Benjamin added by way of elucidation: ‘There are many people whose idea of a dialectician is a lover of subtleties … Crude thoughts, on the contrary, should be part and parcel of dialectical thinking, because they are nothing but the referral of theory to practice … a thought must be crude to come into its own in action’6 Well, what attracted Benjamin to crude thinking was probably not so much a referral to practice as to reality, and to him this reality manifested itself most directly in the proverbs and idioms of everyday language. ‘Proverbs are a school of crude thinking,’ he writes in the same context; and the art of taking proverbial and idiomatic speech literally enabled Benjamin – as it did Kafka, in whom figures of speech are often clearly discernible as a source of inspiration and furnish the key to many a ‘riddle’ – to write a prose of such singularly enchanting and enchanted closeness to reality.
Wherever one looks in Benjamin’s life, one will find the little hunchback. Long before the outbreak of the Third Reich he was playing his evil tricks, causing publishers who had promised Benjamin an annual stipend for reading manuscripts or editing a periodical for them to go bankrupt before the first number appeared. Later the hunchback did allow a collection of magnificent German letters, made with infinite care and provided with the most marvellous commentaries, to be printed – under the title Deutsche Menschen and with the motto ‘Von Ehre ohne Ruhm/Von Grösse ohne Glanz/Von Würde ohne Sold’ (Of Honor without Fame/Of Greatness without Splendour/Of Dignity without Pay); but then he saw to it that it ended in the cellar of the bankrupt Swiss publisher, instead of being distributed, as intended by Benjamin, who signed the selection with a pseudonym, in Nazi Germany. And in this cellar the edition was discovered in 1962, at the very moment when a new edition had come off the press in Germany. (One
would also charge it to the little hunchback that often the few things that were to take a good turn first presented themselves in an unpleasant guise. A case in point is the translation of Anabase by Alexis Saint-Léger Léger [St.-John Perse] which Benjamin, who thought the work ‘of little importance’ [Briefe I, 381], undertook because, like the Proust translation, the assignment had been procured for him by Hofmannsthal. The translation did not appear in Germany until after the war, yet Benjamin owed to it his contact with Léger, who, being a diplomat, was able to intervene and persuade the French government to spare Benjamin a second internment in France during the war – a privilege that very few other refugees enjoyed.) And then after mischief came ‘the piles of debris,’ the last of which, prior to the catastrophe at the Spanish border, was the threat he had felt, since 1938, that the Institute for Social Research in New York, the only ‘material and moral support’ of his Paris existence (Briefe II, 839), would desert him. ‘The very circumstances that greatly endanger my European situation will probably make emigration to the U.S.A. impossible for me,’ so he wrote in April of 1939 (Briefe II, 810), still under the impact of the ‘blow’ which Adorno’s letter rejecting the first version of the Baudelaire study had dealt him in November of 1938 (Briefe II, 790).
Scholem is surely right when he says that next to Proust, Benjamin felt the closest personal affinity with Kafka among contemporary authors, and undoubtedly Benjamin has the ‘field of ruins and the disaster area’ of his own work in mind when he wrote that ‘an understanding [Kafka’s] production involves, among other things, the simple recognition that he was a failure’ (Briefe II, 614). What Benjamin said of Kafka with such unique aptness applies to himself as well: ‘The circumstances of this failure are multifarious. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream’ (Briefe II, 764). He did not need to read Kafka to think like Kafka. When ‘The Stoker’ was all he had read of Kafka, he had already quoted Goethe’s statement about hope in his essay on Elective Affinities: ‘Hope passed over their heads like a star that falls from the sky’; and the sentence with which he concludes this study reads as though Kafka had written it: ‘Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope’ (Schriften I, 140).