Walter Benjamin: Fragments, salvage and detours

Carolin Duttlinger discusses a writer who sought to ‘bring past events into a dialogue with the present’

Footnotes to Plato is a TLS Online series appraising the works and legacies of the great thinkers and philosophers

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is one of the most influential of modern thinkers – perhaps surprising given that his work does not neatly align with any particular discipline or theoretical position. Benjamin was loosely affiliated with, and at times financially supported by, the Frankfurt School of leftist critics, but he sustained friendships with a wide range of people, including the expert on Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem, the avant-garde artist László Moholy-Nagy, and the playwright Bertolt Brecht. His writings are equally hard to pigeonhole, ranging from philosophy to literary criticism, from history to anthropology. Benjamin was moreover a prolific journalist, broadcaster and creative writer.

Benjamin was born into a family of assimilated Ashkenazi Jews in Berlin; his father Emil was an auctioneer and investor, while his mother Pauline, née Schönflies, came from a wealthy merchant family. Walter’s younger sister Dora became an economist and sociologist, his brother Georg a paediatrician and resistance fighter, who was murdered by the Nazis. Benjamin studied German literature and philosophy at the Universities of Freiburg, Berlin and Munich. Inspired by his schoolteacher, the charismatic Gustav Wyneken, he played a leading role in the Independent Students’ Association, which campaigned for educational reform. In 1914, one of Benjamin’s closest friends, the young poet Fritz Heinle, committed suicide in protest against the outbreak of the war; devastated by this loss, Benjamin broke off all contact with Wyneken and the Students’ Association because of their endorsement of the war.

That event marked a radical caesura in Benjamin’s life and intellectual trajectory. In 1917 he moved to the University of Bern in Switzerland to escape conscription, together with Dora Kellner, whom he married the same year. Their son Stefan was born there in 1918, and in 1919 Benjamin submitted his PhD thesis “The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism” (“Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik”). The thesis focuses on the poetic theory of the philosopher Friedrich Schlegel but also explores the literary works of Friedrich Hölderlin, Novalis and Jean Paul. This method of working between disciplines – in this case between philosophy and literature – would remain characteristic of Benjamin’s writing throughout his life.

After his return to Germany, Benjamin matriculated at the University of Frankfurt to write his professorial dissertation on German baroque tragedy, or Trauerspiel, then a largely neglected part of literary history. This study, which was published in 1928, is written in an idiosyncratic, dense and sometimes opaque style. In the opening section, the “Epistemo-Critical Preface”, Benjamin argues that thought must resist appropriating its subject matter and subsuming it into a coherent theoretical framework. Philosophical reflection should be made up of small parts, or “thought fragments”, for the truth can only be captured “by means of the most precise immersion in the details of a specific subject”. The genre best suited to this kind of philosophical inquiry is not the book but the theological tract, he argues, for its argument unfolds not in a linear fashion but intermittently, by means of detours and excursuses.

This meandering, unpredictable and yet highly focused way of thinking would become Benjamin’s hallmark. It is an approach that is also illustrated in another of his books: the short prose collection One-Way-Street (1928; Einbahnstraße). The book’s title sets the scene for the assembled pieces, whose headings evoke the street signs and placards we might encounter on a walk through the city: “Travel Souvenirs”, “Optician”, “Toys”, “Polyclinic”, “These Spaces for Rent”, “Office Equipment”, “Mixed Cargo: Shipping and packing”. Its short pieces oscillate between aphorisms, essays and short stories, and they show us a very different Benjamin: not a literary historian but a thinker keenly interested in contemporary politics and culture, ranging from the avant-garde to the mass media of radio and film. The form of the book is meant to reflect this focus. As Benjamin declares in the opening piece, the present-day writer “must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit … in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book – in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards”. So although One-Way Street is very different from Benjamin’s professorial dissertation, it continues the intermittent, provisional and deliberately fragmented mode of inquiry that he advocates in his “Epistemo-Critical Preface”. Indeed, One-Way Street and the Trauerspiel study were published in the same year, 1928; between them they embody a radical change in Benjamin’s intellectual trajectory as well as the underlying continuities.

In 1925 he had been told by his examiners at Frankfurt University that his professorial dissertation would not pass, and so he withdrew it. In the following year, his father died, his fortune having been eroded by post-war inflation. With his hopes of an academic career dashed and a young son to provide for, Benjamin decided to relaunch himself as a freelance journalist and writer. He quickly built up a network of publishing contacts, producing book reviews, essays and short prose texts for leading German and Swiss journals and newspapers. One-Way Streetassembles some of these journalistic writings. In addition, Benjamin also wrote broadcasts for the radio, many of which he presented himself; indeed, in the late years of the Weimar Republic the radio became his main source of income. His prolific output of about 220 journalistic pieces and sixty radio broadcasts reflects his skills and enthusiasm for a more accessible and entertaining kind of writing, and yet this body of work is still regarded as marginal compared to his “major” essays and book projects. This, however, is a skewed perception. Benjamin’s journalistic commissions opened up new disciplines and subject areas, particularly through book reviews. His journalistic pieces were far more than a means of earning money. They acted as a creative laboratory for his intellectual explorations, with which they are connected in often unexpected ways.

Alongside this work, Benjamin continued to pursue a multitude of academic projects, including his many erudite and illuminating essays on literary authors, from nineteenth-century figures such as Charles Baudelaire, Johann Peter Hebel and Gottfried Keller to modernists including Karl Kraus, Robert Walser, Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka. Benjamin’s interest in these authors is never solely literary; rather, he treats their texts as interventions – responses to a particular historical or cultural situation. In Kafka’s works, this includes the experience of secularization. Though he rejects a narrowly religious interpretation of Kafka’s works, Benjamin argues that religion does have a spectral kind of presence in Kafka’s texts, where its laws and traditions are still present but have lost their meaning. As he writes, Kafka’s characters are “beadles who have lost the house of prayer, his students are pupils who have lost the holy scriptures”. Benjamin’s friend Scholem coined the phrase “nothingness of revelation” to characterize this state on the borderline between religion and nihilism.

Though Walter and Dora Benjamin remained married for thirteen years, they soon grew estranged. Benjamin had a string of affairs, among them a passionate but one-sided relationship with the Latvian actor and director Asja Lacis, whom he followed to Moscow in the winter of 1926/27. This visit fuelled Benjamin’s interest in communism, although he characterized himself as a “leftist outsider”, signalling his distance from the movement.

Between 1924 and 1932, he was almost constantly on the move, travelling to Capri, Ibiza, Paris, Marseille and Norway. His journeys provided him with ample material for his journalistic work. Travel anecdotes could be written while on the move, away from libraries, and then pitched to newspapers and magazines. The gaze in these pieces, as in One-Way Street, is that of the outsider observing foreign peoples and customs.

In September 1933, after the Nazis came to power, Benjamin left Germany for good and settled in Paris. Despite his detailed knowledge of French literature and history, and even though he became a member of the Collège de Sociologie, founded by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois, he never really managed to get a foothold in French intellectual culture. He lived in isolation and increasingly dire poverty. Yet these circumstances did not affect his productivity; in fact, Benjamin wrote some of his most famous works in his years of exile. One of them is his essay on “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (“Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”, 1936). He worked on the essay for several years, and it exists in five versions, but only a shortened French translation was published in the author’s lifetime.

Contrary to the title, the essay’s primary concern is not with the work of art as such but with its human observer – how does human perception evolve over the course of history, as a result of social and technological change? While paintings and sculptures had traditionally been viewed in a contemplative state of mind, the invention of photography and film brought about a radical change – a shift from contemplative viewing to what Benjamin calls “reception in a state of distraction”. For him, film exemplifies this shift, its fast cuts and sudden changes of camera angle preparing people for the cognitive challenges of modern city life. But Benjamin also invests this modern mode of looking with a political dimension. As he argues, this distracted mode of perception makes the members of a cinema audience more aware of each other – of their identity as a group, as a (political) collective.

The “Work of Art” essay became the subject of a fierce debate between Benjamin and his friend, the Frankfurt School thinker Theodor W. Adorno. Though Adorno would later edit the first posthumous collection of Benjamin’s writings, in his letters of the 1930s he was often harshly critical of Benjamin’s work and particularly of his advocacy of mass culture. In propagating a non-contemplative mode of looking as aesthetically and politically progressive, Benjamin was influenced by Brecht’s Epic Theatre, in which the immersive, passive viewing experience of traditional theatre is replaced by a state of critical detachment. Adorno, who was wary of Brecht’s influence on Benjamin, rejected this argument as inaccurate and naive. As he and Max Horkheimer argued in their jointly authored study Dialectic of Enlightenment (Dialektik der Aufklärung, 1944), cinema, particularly Hollywood film, in fact prevents critical reflection, as viewers are reduced to passive consumers. While Horkheimer and Adorno’s critique of the links between mass culture and capitalism has lost none of its relevance, Benjamin’s advocacy of the creative and political potential of the technical media offers a more optimistic and progressive vision of modern culture.

In Parisian cafés and the Bibliothèque nationale, Benjamin worked on his magnum opus, the Arcades Project (Passagenarbeit), a materialist history of France in the nineteenth century. The project is essentially a vast collection of quotations, which are organized thematically and framed by Benjamin’s own comments. The headings of the thirty-five section, or “convolutes”, range from the theoretical (epistemology; theory of progress) via psychological phenomena (boredom; dreams; leisure) and particular figures (Baudelaire; the collector; the flâneur) to material culture (fashion; architecture; dolls and automata). The Arcades Project has become a foundational text of cultural studies, but the work – which runs to over 1,300 printed pages and remained unfinished in Benjamin’s lifetime – also illustrates the difficulties of “using” Benjamin’s texts as models or theoretical frameworks. As he writes:

Method of this project: literary montage. I have nothing to say. Only to show. I won’t steal anything precious and won’t appropriate any witty formulations. But the rags, the debris: I won’t take stock of them but will give them their rightful place in the only possible way: by using them.

Rejecting the role of “original” thinker, Benjamin instead casts himself in the more modest role of the collector – indeed, of the rag-and-bone-man. His interest is in the debris of history – in people, events, and objects which have been forgotten, excluded from the grand narratives of history as well as from collective memory. At first glance, such a project may strike us as timid, the product of an antiquarian rather than a critical thinker. Nothing could be further from the truth. For Benjamin, historical inquiry is no conservationist project. His aim is not to reconstruct the past but to bring past events into a dialogue with the present, so that they take on a sudden relevance and become culturally and politically illuminating for the present-day observer.

Benjamin’s immense productivity during his exile years belies his increasingly desperate circumstances. When the Second World War broke out he was arrested by the French government and interned for three months in a camp for German refugees in Clos Saint-Joseph near Nevers. While he was in exile, Benjamin’s publishing opportunities began to dry up, and he became reliant on the support of family and friends, such as the philosopher Hannah Arendt and the Institute for Social Research, which had migrated to the US under the directorship of Horkheimer. A modest stipend paid to him by the Institute became Benjamin’s principal source of income, and these payments forced him to heed Adorno and Horkheimer’s criticism of the texts he produced for the Institute. Having spent some time in the hotel his ex-wife ran in San Remo, Italy, Benjamin and his sister Dora fled Paris in June 1940 as the German army was approaching. In August he obtained a travel visa to the US, which Horkheimer had negotiated for him. Although he managed to cross the border into Spain at Port Bou, he feared that he would be sent back to France and arrested by the Gestapo. Benjamin committed suicide with an overdose of morphine tablets on the night of September 26. The unpublished manuscripts he was carrying are presumed lost.

Benjamin’s experiences of exile and persecution are central to his later writings and particularly to his model of historical inquiry. Encountering the past is no safe undertaking; it requires a leap into the unknown, what in the Arcades Project is famously described as a “tiger’s leap into the past”. As Benjamin writes in his last completed text, “On the Concept of History” (“Über den Begriff der Geschichte”):

To articulate the past historically does not mean to understand it “as it had really been”. It means capturing a memory as it flashes up in a dangerous moment. Historical materialism wants to arrest an image of the past as it presents itself to the historical subject unexpectedly, in the moment of danger.

The Arcades Project speaks of a “constellation of danger, which threatens both that which is being passed down and the recipient of that transmission”. Critical thinking was, for Benjamin, a subversive and destabilizing activity, for it involves questioning established narratives – established versions of history – which in turn prop up a particular interpretation of the present propagated by those in power. This subversive, politically informed intellectual project is summed up by the notion of Rettung, meaning salvaging or rescue. Rescue plays an important part in Benjamin’s literary criticism, whose aim is to save a text or author from oblivion, cultural appropriation, or misinterpretation. In his later writings Rettung takes on a more overtly political and existential dimension: as a form of resistance against fascist rule, which threatens to appropriate culture and history for its own ideological ends. In “On the Concept of History” he writes:

Every epoch must try anew to wrest its inheritance from conformism, which is about to overwhelm it … Only the historian has the ability to rekindle in the past the spark of hope which is permeated by the following thought: even the dead won’t be safe from the enemy when he is victorious. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.

This passage encapsulates both the enduring attraction of, and the challenges posed by, Benjamin’s work. As a thinker writing under and against the threat of totalitarianism, his thought has a strongly ethical and indeed utopian dimension – thought as a tool in the struggle against the “victors”, against discourses of power, whose version of history is designed to cement the status quo. Yet Benjamin’s posthumous rise to fame risks his becoming canonical himself, subsumed into a new kind of orthodoxy. One way to resist this danger is not to limit our reading of Benjamin to a small set of “iconic” texts (such as the “Angel of History” section of “On the Concept of History”), but to read him broadly, to read texts from different parts and periods of work. Only in this way can his thought retain its provisional and self-questioning nature, its suspicion of the deadening coherence of intellectual systems and schools of thought, which is his enduring legacy.

Carolin Duttlinger is Associate Professor of German at the University of Oxford