Illuminations, page 29
VIII
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge – unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.
IX
Mein Flügel ist zum Schwung bereit,
ich kehrte gern zurück,
denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit,
ich hätte wenig Glück.
– Gerhard Scholem,
‘Gruss vom Angelus’fn2
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, 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 make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
X
The themes which monastic discipline assigned to friars for meditation were designed to turn them away from the world and its affairs. The thoughts which we are developing here originate from similar considerations. At a moment when the politicians in whom the opponents of Fascism had placed their hopes are prostrate and confirm their defeat by betraying their own cause, these observations are intended to disentangle the political worldlings from the snares in which the traitors have entrapped them. Our consideration proceeds from the insight that the politicians’ stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their ‘mass basis,’ and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the same thing. It seeks to convey an idea of the high price our accustomed thinking will have to pay for a conception of history that avoids any complicity with the thinking to which these politicians continue to adhere.
XI
The conformism which has been part and parcel of Social Democracy from the beginning attaches not only to its political tactics but to its economic views as well. It is one reason for its later breakdown. Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was moving with the current. It regarded technological developments as the fall of the stream with which it thought it was moving. From there it was but a step to the illusion that the factory work which was supposed to tend toward technological progress constituted a political achievement. The old Protestant ethic of work was resurrected among German workers in secularized form. The Gotha Programmefn3 already bears traces of this confusion, defining labour as ‘the source of all wealth and all culture.’ Smelling a rat, Marx countered that ‘… the man who possesses no other property than his labour power’ must of necessity become ‘the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners …’ However, the confusion spread, and soon thereafter Josef Dietzgen proclaimed: ‘The saviour of modern times is called work. The … improvement… of labour constitutes the wealth which is now able to accomplish what no redeemer has ever been able to do.’ This vulgar-Marxist conception of the nature of labour bypasses the question of how its products might benefit the workers while still not being at their disposal. It recognizes only the progress in the mastery of nature, not the retrogression of society; it already displays the technocratic features later encountered in Fascism. Among these is a conception of nature which differs ominously from the one in the Socialist utopias before the 1848 revolution. The new conception of labour amounts to the exploitation of nature, which with naïve complacency is contrasted with the exploitation of the proletariat. Compared with this positivistic conception, Fourier’s fantasies, which have so often been ridiculed, prove to be surprisingly sound. According to Fourier, as a result of efficient co-operative labour, four moons would illuminate the earthly night, the ice would recede from the poles, sea water would no longer taste salty, and beasts of prey would do man’s bidding. All this illustrates a kind of labour which, far from exploiting nature, is capable of delivering her of the creations which lie dormant in her womb as potentials. Nature, which, as Dietzgen puts it, ‘exists gratis,’ is a complement to the corrupted conception of labour.
XII
We need history, but not the way a spoiled loafer
in the garden of knowledge needs it.
– Nietzsche, OF THE USE AND ABUSE OF HISTORY
Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden. This conviction, which had a brief resurgence in the Spartacist group,fn4 has always been objectionable to Social Democrats. Within three decades they managed virtually to erase the name of Blanqui, though it had been the rallying sound that had reverberated through the preceding century. Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.
XIII
Every day our cause becomes clearer and people get smarter.
– Wilhelm Dietzgen,
DIE RELIGION DER SOZIALDEMOKRATIE
Social Democratic theory, and even more its practice, have been formed by a conception of progress which did not adhere to reality but made dogmatic claims. Progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, first of all, the progress of mankind itself (and not just advances in men’s ability and knowledge). Secondly, it was something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibility of mankind. Thirdly, progress was regarded as irresistible, something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course. Each of these predicates is controversial and open to criticism. However, when the chips are down, criticism must penetrate beyond these predicates and focus on something that they have in common. The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.
XIV
Origin is the goal.
– Karl Kraus, WORTE IN VERSEN, Vol. 1
History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now [Jetztzeit].fn5 Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution.
XV
The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action. The great revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar serves as a historical time-lapse camera. And, basically, it is the same day that keeps recurring in the guise of holidays, which are days of remembrance. Thus the calendars do not measure time as clocks do; they are monuments of a historical consciousness of which not the slightest trace has been apparent in Europe in the past hundred years. In the July revolution an incident occurred which showed this consciousness still alive. On the first evening of fighting it turned out that the clocks in towers were being fired on simultaneously and independently from several places in Paris. An eye-witness, who may have owed his insight to the rhyme, wrote as follows:
Qui le croirait! on dit, qu’irrités contre l’heure
De nouveaux Josués au pied de chaque tour,
Tiraient sur les cadrans pour arrêter le jour.fn6
XVI
A historical materialist cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop. For this notion defines the present in which he himself is writing history. Historicism gives the ‘eternal’ image of the past; historical materialism supplies a unique experience with the past. The historical materialist leaves it to others to be drained by the whore called ‘Once upon a time’ in historicism’s bordello. He remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history.
XVII
Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. Materialistic historiography differs from it as to method more clearly than from any other kind. Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time. Materialistic historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad. A historical materialist approaches a historical subject only where he encounters it as a monad. In this structure he recognizes the sign of a Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past. He takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history – blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time cancelledfn7; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history. The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.
XVIII
‘In relation to the history of organic life on earth,’ writes a modern biologist, ‘the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitute something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.’ The present, which, as a model of Messianic time, comprises the entire history of mankind in an enormous abridgement, coincides exactly with the stature which the history of mankind has in the universe.
A
Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously, as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian who takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one. Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.
B
The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance – namely, in just the same way. We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
fn1 ‘Few will be able to guess how sad one had to be in order to resuscitate Carthage.
fn2 My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back.
If I stayed timeless time,
I would have little luck.
fn3 The Gotha Congress of 1875 united the two German Socialist parties, one led by Ferdinand Lassalle, the other by Karl Marx and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The programme, drafted by Liebknecht and Lassalle, was severely attacked by Marx in London. See his ‘Critique of the Gotha Programme.’
fn4 Leftist group, founded by Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg at the beginning of World War I in opposition to the pro-war policies of the German Socialist party, later absorbed by the Communist party.
fn5 Benjamin says ‘Jetztzeit’ and indicates by the quotation marks that he does not simply mean an equivalent to Gegenwart, that is, present. He clearly is thinking of the mystical nunc stans.
fn6 Who would have believed it! we are told that new Joshuas
at the foot of every tower, as though irritated with
time itself, fired at the dials in order to stop the day.
fn7 The Hegelian term aufheben in its threefold meaning: to preserve, to elevate, to cancel.
EDITOR’S NOTE
Benjamin’s work consists of two books on German literature – his dissertation on ‘The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism’ (Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik, Bern, 1920) and ‘The Origin of German Tragedy’ (Der Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels, Berlin, 1928) – of two books of general reflections in the form of short essays or aphorisms – ‘One-Way Street’ (Einbahnstrasse, Berlin, 1928) and ‘A Berlin Childhood Around 1900’ (Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert, written during the late thirties and published posthumously, Frankfurt, 1950) – and of a great number of literary and critical essays, book reviews, and commentaries.
The chief purpose of this collection is to convey the importance of Benjamin as a literary critic. It contains the full-length essays with two very regrettable exceptions – the study of ‘Goethe’s Elective Affinities’ (published in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Neue Deutsche Beiträge in two instalments, 1924 and 1925) and the article on ‘Karl Kraus’ (in the Frankfurter Zeitung, 1931). Since Karl Kraus is still practically unknown in English-speaking countries and since the Goethe essay consists to a large extent of a polemic against Friedrich Gundolf’s Goethe, equally unknown, these two essays would have needed so many explanatory notes that the thrust of the text itself would have been ruined.
The translation of the text follows the two-volume German edition of Benjamin’s writings which, under the title Schriften, was edited and introduced by Theodor W. Adorno and published by the Suhrkamp Verlag in 1955. The title of the present collection, but not its content, is identical with the title of a selection from the Schriften, published by Suhrkamp in 1961; Benjamin himself had approved this title for an earlier selection of some of his works. The German text is chiefly drawn from the published texts in various magazines and newspapers. Professor Adorno points out in his Introduction that it is not definitive: in the few instances where the original manuscripts could be consulted, it turned out that Benjamin’s handwriting was difficult to read, and as for the typescripts and printed newspaper or magazine copies, they ‘unquestionably contain numerous errors.’ In the only case in which I was able to compare the original manuscript with the printed text, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ which Benjamin gave me shortly before his death, I found many important variants.
As I mentioned in the Introduction (Note 7), manuscripts, typescripts, and reprints of Benjamin’s work are scattered. Most manuscripts are in the possession of Professor Theodor W. Adorno in Frankfurt; a number of letters and manuscripts are in the East German Zentralarchiv in Potsdam. Professor Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem possesses a collection of reprints and carbon copies of typescripts.
The two-volume Schriften does not contain the collected works. Large portions of what Benjamin considered his main oeuvre, ‘Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century,’ seem to have been finished in manuscript, and a number of his essays and reviews, published during his lifetime, have not been reprinted. Two volumes of letters, edited by T.W. Adorno and G. Scholem, were published in 1966; a collection of essays on Brecht, which includes several previously unpublished articles and notes on ‘Conversations with Brecht,’ also appeared in 1966 under the editorship of Rolf Tiedemann. Finally, a collection of German letters, written between 1783 and 1833, with commentaries and first published under the pseudonym Detlev Holz with the title Deutsche Menschen in Switzerland in 1936, has been reissued in Germany.
