Illuminations, page 3
On September 26, 1940, Walter Benjamin, who was about to emigrate to America, took his life at the Franco-Spanish border. There were various reasons for this. The Gestapo had confiscated his Paris apartment, which contained his library (he had been able to get ‘the more important half’ out of Germany) and many of his manuscripts, and he had reason to be concerned also about the others which, through the good offices of George Bataille, had been placed in the Bibliothèque Nationale prior to his flight from Paris to Lourdes, in unoccupied France.7 How was he to live without a library, how could he earn a living without the extensive collection of quotations and excerpts among his manuscripts? Besides, nothing drew him to America, where, as he used to say, people would probably find no other use for him than to cart him up and down the country to exhibit him as the ‘last European.’ But the immediate occasion for Benjamin’s suicide was an uncommon stroke of bad luck. Through the armistice agreement between Vichy France and the Third Reich, refugees from Hitler Germany – les refugiés provenant d’Allemagne, as they were officially referred to in France – were in danger of being shipped back to Germany, presumably only if they were political opponents. To save this category of refugees – which, it should be noted, never included the unpolitical mass of Jews who later turned out to be the most endangered of all – the United States had distributed a number of emergency visas through its consulates in unoccupied France. Thanks to the efforts of the Institute in New York, Benjamin was among the first to receive such a visa in Marseilles. Also, he quickly obtained a Spanish transit visa to enable him to get to Lisbon and board a ship there. However, he did not have a French exit visa, which at that time was still required and which the French government, eager to please the Gestapo, invariably denied to German refugees. In general this presented no great difficulty, since a relatively short and none too arduous road to be covered by foot over the mountains to Port Bou was well known and was not guarded by the French border police. Still, for Benjamin, apparently suffering from a cardiac condition (Briefe II, 841), even the shortest walk was a great exertion, and he must have arrived in a state of serious exhaustion. The small group of refugees that he had joined reached the Spanish border town only to learn that Spain had closed the border that same day and that the border officials did not honour visas made out in Marseilles. The refugees were supposed to return to France by the same route the next day. During the night Benjamin took his life, whereupon the border officials, upon whom this suicide had made an impression, allowed his companions to proceed to Portugal. A few weeks later the embargo on visas was lifted again. One day earlier Benjamin would have got through without any trouble; one day later the people in Marseilles would have known that for the time being it was impossible to pass through Spain. Only on that particular day was the catastrophe possible.
II. THE DARK TIMES
‘Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate … but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.’
– Franz Kafka, Diaries, entry of October 19, 1921
‘Like one who keeps afloat on a shipwreck by climbing to the top of a mast that is already crumbling. But from there he has a chance to give a signal leading to his rescue.’
– Walter Benjamin in a letter to Gerhard Scholem dated April 17, 1931
Often an era most clearly brands with its seal those who have been least influenced by it, who have been most remote from it, and who therefore have suffered most. So it was with Proust, with Kafka, with Karl Kraus, and with Benjamin. His gestures and the way he held his head when listening and talking; the way he moved; his manners, but especially his style of speaking, down to his choice of words and the shape of his syntax; finally, his downright idiosyncratic tastes – all this seemed so old-fashioned, as though he had drifted out of the nineteenth century into the twentieth the way one is driven onto the coast of a strange land. Did he ever feel at home in twentieth-century Germany? One has reason to doubt it. In 1913, when he first visited France as a very young man, the streets of Paris were ‘almost more homelike’ (Briefe I, 56) to him after a few days than the familiar streets of Berlin. He may have felt even then, and he certainly felt twenty years later, how much the trip from Berlin to Paris was tantamount to a trip in time – not from one country to another, but from the twentieth century back to the nineteenth. There was the nation par excellence whose culture had determined the Europe of the nineteenth century and for which Haussmann had rebuilt Paris, ‘the capital of the nineteenth century,’ as Benjamin was to call it. This Paris was not yet cosmopolitan, to be sure, but it was profoundly European, and thus it has, with unparalleled naturalness, offered itself to all homeless people as a second home ever since the middle of the last century. Neither the pronounced xenophobia of its inhabitants nor the sophisticated harassment by the local police has ever been able to change this. Long before his emigration Benjamin knew how ‘very exceptional [it was] to make the kind of contact with a Frenchman that would enable one to prolong a conversation with him beyond the first quarter of an hour’ (Briefe I, 445). Later, when he was domiciled in Paris as a refugee, his innate nobility prevented him from developing his slight acquaintances – chief among them was Gide – into connections and from making new contacts. (Werner Kraft – so we learned recently – took him to see Charles du Bos, who was, by virtue of his ‘enthusiasm for German literature,’ a kind of key figure for German emigrants. Werner Kraft had the better connections – what irony!8) In his strikingly judicious review of Benjamin’s works and letters as well as of the secondary literature, Pierre Missac has pointed out how greatly Benjamin must have suffered because he did not get the ‘reception’ in France that was due him.9 This is correct, of course, but it surely did not come as a surprise.
No matter how irritating and offensive all this may have been, the city itself compensated for everything. Its boulevards, Benjamin discovered as early as 1913, are formed by houses which ‘do not seem made to be lived in, but are like stone sets for people to walk between’ (Briefe I, 56). This city, around which one still can travel in a circle past the old gates, has remained what the cities of the Middle Ages, severely walled off and protected against the outside, once were: an interior, but without the narrowness of medieval streets, a generously built and planned open-air intérieur with the arch of the sky like a majestic ceiling above it. ‘The finest thing here about all art and all activity is the fact that they leave the few remainders of the original and the natural their splendour’ (Briefe I, 421). Indeed, they help them to acquire new lustre. It is the uniform façades, lining the streets like inside walls, that make one feel more physically sheltered in this city than in any other. The arcades which connect the great boulevards and offer protection from inclement weather exerted such an enormous fascination over Benjamin that he referred to his projected major work on the nineteenth century and its capital simply as ‘The Arcades’ (Passagenarbeit); and these passageways are indeed like a symbol of Paris, because they clearly are inside and outside at the same time and thus represent its true nature in quintessential form. In Paris a stranger feels at home because he can inhabit the city the way he lives in his own four walls. And just as one inhabits an apartment, and makes it comfortable, by living in it instead of just using it for sleeping, eating, and working, so one inhabits a city by strolling through it without aim or purpose, with one’s stay secured by the countless cafés which line the streets and past which the life of the city, the flow of pedestrians, moves along. To this day Paris is the only one among the large cities which can be comfortably covered on foot, and more than any other city it is dependent for its liveliness on people who pass by in the streets, so that the modern automobile traffic endangers its very existence not only for technical reasons. The wasteland of an American suburb, or the residential districts of many towns, where all of street life takes place on the roadway and where one can walk on the sidewalks, by now reduced to footpaths, for miles on end without encountering a human being, is the very opposite of Paris. What all other cities seem to permit only reluctantly to the dregs of society – strolling, idling, flânerie – Paris streets actually invite everyone to do. Thus, ever since the Second Empire the city has been the paradise of all those who need to chase after no livelihood, pursue no career, reach no goal – the paradise, then, of bohemians, and not only of artists and writers but of all those who have gathered about them because they could not be integrated either politically – being homeless or stateless – or socially.
Without considering this background of the city which became a decisive experience for the young Benjamin one can hardly understand why the flâneur became the key figure in his writings. The extent to which this strolling determined the pace of his thinking was perhaps most clearly revealed in the peculiarities of his gait, which Max Rychner described as ‘at once advancing and tarrying, a strange mixture of both.’10 It was the walk of a flâneur, and it was so striking because, like the dandy and the snob, the flâneur had his home in the nineteenth century, an age of security in which children of upper-middle-class families were assured of an income without having to work, so that they had no reason to hurry. And just as the city taught Benjamin flânerie, the nineteenth century’s secret style of walking and thinking, it naturally aroused in him a feeling for French literature as well, and this almost irrevocably estranged him from normal German intellectual life. ‘In Germany I feel quite isolated in my efforts and interests among those of my generation, while in France there are certain forces – the writers Giraudoux and, expecially, Aragon; the surrealist movement – in which I see at work what occupies me too’ – so he wrote to Hofmannsthal in 1927 (Briefe I, 446), when, having returned from a trip to Moscow and convinced that literary projects sailing under the Communist flag were unfeasible, he was setting out to consolidate his ‘Paris position’ (Briefe I, 444–45). (Eight years earlier he had mentioned the ‘incredible feeling of kinship’ which Péguy had inspired in him: ‘No written work has ever touched me so closely and given me such a sense of communion’ [Briefe I, 217].)Well, he did not succeed in consolidating anything, and success would hardly have been possible. Only in postwar Paris have foreigners – and presumably that is what everyone not born in France is called in Paris to this day – been able to occupy ‘positions.’ On the other hand, Benjamin was forced into a position which actually did not exist anywhere, which, in fact, could not be identified and diagnosed as such until afterwards. It was the position on the ‘top of the mast’ from which the tempestuous times could be surveyed better than from a safe harbour, even though the distress signals of the ‘shipwreck’ of this one man who had not learned to swim either with or against the tide, were hardly noticed – either by those who had never exposed themselves to these seas or by those who were capable of moving even in this element.
Viewed from the outside, it was the position of the free-lance writer who lives by his pen; however, as only Max Rychner seems to have observed, he did so in a ‘peculiar way,’ for ‘his publications were anything but frequent’ and ‘it was never quite clear … to what extent he was able to draw upon other resources.’11 Rychner’s suspicions were justified in every respect. Not only were ‘other resources’ at his disposal prior to his emigration, but behind the façade of free-lance writing he led the considerably freer, albeit constantly endangered, life of an homme de lettres whose home was a library that had been gathered with extreme care but was by no means intended as a working tool; it consisted of treasures whose value, as Benjamin often repeated, was proved by the fact that he had not read them – a library, then, which was guaranteed not to be useful or at the service of any profession. Such an existence was something unknown in Germany, and almost equally unknown was the occupation which Benjamin, only because he had to make a living, derived from it: not the occupation of a literary historian and scholar with the requisite number of fat tomes to his credit, but that of a critic and essayist who regarded even the essay form as too vulgarly extensive and would have preferred the aphorism if he had not been paid by the line. He was certainly not unaware of the fact that his professional ambitions were directed at something that simply did not exist in Germany, where, despite Lichtenberg, Lessing, Schlegel, Heine, and Nietzsche, aphorisms have never been appreciated and people have usually thought of criticism as something disreputably subversive which might be enjoyed – if at all – only in the cultural section of a newspaper. It was no accident that Benjamin chose the French language for expressing this ambition: ‘Le but que je m’avais proposé … c’est d’être considéré comme le premier critique de la littérature allemande. La difficulté c’est que, depuis plus de cinquante ans, la critique littéraire en Allemagne n’est plus considérée comme un genre sérieux. Se faire une situation dans la critique, cela … veut dire: la recréer comme genre’ (‘The goal I set for myself … is to be regarded as the foremost critic of German literature. The trouble is that for more than fifty years literary criticism in Germany has not been considered a serious genre. To create a place in criticism for oneself means to re-create it as a genre’) (Briefe II, 505).
There is no doubt that Benjamin owed this choice of a profession to early French influences, to the proximity of the great neighbour on the other side of the Rhine which inspired in him so intimate a sense of affinity. But it is much more symptomatic that even this selection of a profession was actually motivated by hard times and financial woes. If one wants to express the ‘profession’ he had prepared himself for spontaneously, although perhaps not deliberately, in social categories, one has to go back to Wilhelminian Germany in which he grew up and where his first plans for the future took shape. Then one could say that Benjamin did not prepare for anything but the ‘profession’ of a private collector and totally independent scholar, what was then called Privatgelehrter. Under the circumstances of the time his studies, which he had begun before the First World War, could have ended only with a university career, but unbaptized Jews were still barred from such a career, as they were from any career in the civil service. Such Jews were permitted a Habilitation and at most could attain the rank of an unpaid Extraordinarius; it was a career which presupposed rather than provided an assured income. The doctorate which Benjamin decided to take only ‘out of consideration for my family’ (Briefe I, 216) and his subsequent attempt at Habilitation were intended as the basis for his family’s readiness to place such an income at his disposal.
This situation changed abruptly after the war; the inflation had impoverished, even dispossessed, large numbers of the bourgeoisie, and in the Weimar Republic a university career was open even to unbaptized Jews. The unhappy story of the Habilitation shows clearly how little Benjamin took these altered circumstances into account and how greatly he continued to be dominated by prewar ideas in all financial matters. For from the outset the Habilitation had only been intended to call his father ‘to order’ by supplying ‘evidence of public recognition’ (Briefe I, 293) and to make his grant his son, who was in his thirties at that time, an income that was adequate and, one should add, commensurate with his social standing. At no time, not even when he had already come close to the Communists, did he doubt that despite his chronic conflicts with his parents he was entitled to such a subvention and that their demand that he ‘work for a living’ was ‘unspeakable’ (Briefe I, 292). When his father said later that he could not or would not increase the monthly stipend he was paying anyway, even if his son achieved the Habilitation, this naturally removed the basis of Benjamin’s entire undertaking. Until his parents’ death in 1930, Benjamin was able to solve the problem of his livelihood by moving back into the parental home, living there first with his family (he had a wife and a son), and after his separation – which came soon enough – by himself. (He was not divorced until 1930.) It is evident that this arrangement caused him a great deal of suffering, but it is just as evident that in all probability he never seriously considered another solution. It is also striking that despite his permanent financial trouble he managed throughout these years constantly to enlarge his library. His one attempt to deny himself this expensive passion – he visited the great auction houses the way others frequent gambling casinos – and his resolution even to sell something ‘in an emergency’ ended with his feeling obliged to ‘deaden the pain of this readiness’ (Briefe I, 340) by making fresh purchases; and his one demonstrable attempt to free himself from financial dependence on his family ended with the proposal that his father immediately give him ‘funds enabling me to buy an interest in a secondhand bookstore’ (Briefe I, 292). This is the only gainful employment that Benjamin ever considered. Nothing came of it, of course.
In view of the realities of the Germany of the twenties and of Benjamin’s awareness that he would never be able to make a living with his pen – ‘there are places in which I can earn a minimum and places in which I can live on a minimum, but there is no place where I can do both’ (Briefe II, 563) – his whole attitude may strike one as unpardonably irresponsible. Yet it was anything but a case of irresponsibility. It is reasonable to assume that it is just as hard for rich people grown poor to believe in their poverty as it is for poor people turned rich to believe in their wealth; the former seem carried away by a recklessness of which they are totally unaware, the latter seem possessed by a stinginess which actually is nothing but the old ingrained fear of what the next day may bring.
