Book Review: 'Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life' by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings
An incessant gambler, a serial adulterer, an experimenter with drugs: Walter Benjamin was as much an incarnation of the modern as its theoretician.
What credibility as a critic of modern life does a fellow have who admits at age 40 that he can't make a cup of coffee? Such is the strange case of Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), a man who wanted to break down the barriers between high and low culture, the esoteric and the banal, in order to redefine contemporary life but who seemed ultimately to disassemble everything, including himself.
And yet, after virtually disappearing from the historical record following his suicide in 1940, he has returned in recent decades as an intellectual cyclone. His posthumous fame, let alone his impact on cultural studies, is now immeasurable. Publishers have series devoted to him, library stacks groan under his weight, students can't get enough of him. His emphasis on the broader context—social, psychological and material—of art and literature and his rejection of conventional notions of causality brought aesthetic theory down from its imperial and imperious heights. The humanities will never be the same after the Benjaminian storm. He made us more humble and less sure of ourselves.
Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life
By Howard Eiland & Michael W. Jennings
Harvard, 755 pages, $39.95
Still, not everyone is applauding. The critic Clive James can't understand the hullabaloo, dismissing Benjamin's writing as "mush." The Columbia historian of ideas Mark Lilla groups Benjamin with other "reckless" modern intellectuals who, despite their claims to being interpreters of popular culture, were breezily unaware of the real world and of the political implications of their theorizing.
In the most comprehensive biography we are ever likely to have of Benjamin, Howard Eiland, who teaches literature at MIT, and Michael W. Jennings of the German department at Princeton don't really answer these charges—such specificity would contradict the persona of their subject—but they do relate, brilliantly at that, the life story and the nature of the intellectual accomplishment. Both authors have spent close to a lifetime on the subject. The devotion and care evident in their account are clearly based on sympathy and admiration. Their exposition of Benjamin's thought is exemplary, their sleuthing about his personal life breathtaking. Definitive is an archaic and much abused term that Benjamin would have abhorred; suffice it to say that it is unlikely that anyone will ever be able to tell us more about this German-Jewish thinker or present that knowledge with greater stylistic aplomb.
Benjamin is here as much a flesh-and-blood representative of the modern as its theoretician. Modernism was all about the peripheral, the ephemeral, the accidental, the transient. It was about plurality, not singularity; ambiguity instead of certainty. Walter Benjamin traveled this off-road, and his thought was consistent with his experience. He was an incessant gambler, a serial adulterer, an experimenter with drugs and a refugee in every sense. In discarding traditional intellectual categories and seeking new kaleidoscopic sources of inspiration, he showed parallel urges in his ideas.
Born in 1892 to an affluent Berlin Jewish merchant family, Benjamin got caught up in the energetic idealism of the prewar German youth movement, embracing what he regarded as a spiritual mission to renew German culture and attracted to the messianic motifs in both Judaism and Christianity. But in the course of the 1914-18 war, which he experienced mostly at a distance as a university student in Switzerland, and subsequently during the horrendous postwar difficulties that a defeated Germany faced, he moved away from mysticism and religiosity and toward a secular understanding of crisis, whereby the marginal and inconsequential received primary attention. His postdoctoral dissertation, the work necessary for a university appointment in Germany—the high status Benjamin craved—was on just such exotica, the so-called plays of mourning by minor German dramatists of the 17th century. These second-tier and largely forgotten works, Benjamin argued, revealed much that was central to the spirit of their age. Such a topic, he felt, required new concepts, a new language, instead of the classical Aristotelian criteria traditionally applied to drama. Some early readers didn't understand his approach. The thesis was turned back by the University of Frankfurt in 1925 on grounds that it was incomprehensible.
Benjamin was shattered. But instead of backtracking and compromising, he forged ahead, inviting more confrontation, which developed into a pattern in both his intellectual and personal life. While his essays and reviews would appear occasionally in the highbrow left-of-center German press and be presented on radio—he had a fine speaking voice—much of his work was turned down. He had numerous false starts and no consistent income. A marriage during the war produced a son in 1918, but his relationship to wife and child involved scant emotional commitment. Out of financial necessity, the small family lived with his parents off and on, never happily. Benjamin seemed to feed off and even encourage conflict and rejection.
The dissertation debacle coincided with the breakdown of his marriage and his encounter with a woman who mesmerized him, the Latvian theater director Asja Lacis, whom he had met on Capri in 1924. She was a convinced revolutionary, involved in promoting proletarian and children's theater in Riga and Moscow. Benjamin was smitten. Her influence, along with that of a recent acquaintance, Siegfried Kracauer, who was one of the first film critics in Germany, led him to shift his focus to popular culture, to the commotion of the city street, to alleyways and arcades, with their licit and illicit pleasures, to what has come to be called the "urban sensorium," a world where sounds, tastes and smells mingle in endless combination. The flâneur, that great urban spectator, became, metaphorically, his main character. Together with Kracauer, he developed the notion of the Denkbild, the "thought image," the idea that observation of the mobile modern world consisted of flashes of insight rather than coherent and consistent patterns of revelation. The brief snapshot-in-prose, be it of a cinema palace, a dance hall or a shop window, would be a more accurate representation of the fractured nature of urban life than any sustained dissertation.
In this micrological perspective, grand theory and grand narrative became anathema. Life was too full of accident and surprise to be shoved, like some tall sailing ship, into a miniature interpretative bottle destined for a bourgeois fireplace mantel. Hence, while Benjamin would sympathize with the moral impulse behind communism, he could never join the party. Fascinated by the notion of transgression, he read and translated Baudelaire, enchanted by the poet's "flowers of evil"; he studied Proust, Flaubert and Kafka, especially impressed by Kafka's view that our only salvation is in the acknowledgment of our hopelessness. He sought out the artistic avant-garde, the Cubists and Surrealists, for in them, with their focus on collage and montage, he found support for his own approach to cultural criticism.
The advent of Hitler to power in 1933 forced Benjamin, like so many Jewish intellectuals, to flee to the city of light, Paris. There, penurious and dependent on handouts from friends and benefactors, he began a catalog of Parisian thought-images, his grand study of the passageways and arcades of the city. The project, perhaps appropriately, remained incomplete and would eventually be published in the 1980s as the fragmentary notes in which it was left. Yet, for Benjamin, the fragment was the key. He thought in terms of associations rather than causal connections; relations, not fixities. This emphasis on the medium instead of the end product brought him to perhaps his most famous formulation, in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility," that fascism involved the aestheticization of politics. Fascism, for him, was a matter of mode rather than purpose. In that sense, it was truly modern.
If his work seems unusual and difficult, so of course was his life. All of his many amorous affairs had a suggestion of triangularity, inviting escape or, more commonly, defeat. He exploited his parents and his two siblings, financially and emotionally. He loved and yet at the same time neglected his only child; after his divorce he refused to make support payments. In virtually all the pictures we have of him he is leaning forward, head bowed, eyes inquisitive but morose. Deep, incapacitating depression was a constant in his life.
He appeared, however, to revel in the hurt, as if asking for more. On arriving unannounced in Riga in 1925 in pursuit of Asja Lacis, he was told to buzz off. "He came from another planet," she said in her autobiography, "and I had no time for him." Buzz off Benjamin did, like a puppy in pain. Even friends and former disciples, like the social philosopher and musicologist Theodor Adorno, could be callous. Sitting comfortably in New York in November 1939, two months after war had broken out in Europe yet again, and aware that his German colleague was in a desperately fragile state in France, Adorno turned down for publication Benjamin's study of Paris and Baudelaire. Not only that, Adorno was acerbic in his reply. He said that the work lacked theoretical sophistication and was at best an impenetrable layering of "facticity." Some months later, Benjamin, who had sought but not received French citizenship, was trying to make his way across the mountains to Spain and then to Portugal, to safety. He was held up at the Spanish border. In despair, he took an overdose of the morphine he had with him for just such an emergency. The next day the rest of his party was allowed to proceed.
Mr. Eksteins, professor emeritus of history at the University of Toronto, is the author of "Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age."
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