What Walter Benjamin Knew
Shortly after Germany invaded Poland, on September 1, 1939, France declared all German nationals living within its borders and between the ages of seventeen and fifty to be enemy aliens. Along with thousands of other men—including Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs, and Slovaks—the Berlin-born philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin, then forty-seven years old, was interned in the Stade de Colombes, an arena outside of Paris that had served as the main stadium for the 1924 Summer Olympics.
Conditions were miserable. The prisoners’ valuables were seized as they entered, and they were given nothing to eat but bread and tins of pork-liver pâté. Rain soaked through the straw on which they slept. Large open barrels served as toilets. “Since there was almost no water to wash with,” Hans Sahl, a friend and fellow-prisoner of Benjamin’s, would say later, “the pâté clung to our faces and hair and penetrated every pore.”
Ten days passed before the men were transferred to a prison camp in central France, where Benjamin gave lectures in exchange for Gauloises cigarettes. In a lean-to on the floor next to a staircase, he held editorial meetings for the purpose of establishing a literary journal. For Sahl, Benjamin’s stubborn commitment to the life of the mind—his belief that humanism could counter crimes against humanity—was its own kind of tragedy. “Never,” Sahl wrote, “have I been so conscious of the painful failure of a method, which in sympathetic unworldly innocence thought it possible to ‘change’ reality, but which remained only an interpretation, limping behind.”
When Benjamin was released, two and a half months later, he went back to Paris, renewed his reader’s card for the Bibliothèque Nationale, and brushed off friends who urged him to escape to the United States; he insisted that he had to finish his second book, on the French poet Charles Baudelaire. (It would “not suffer being neglected,” he explained, “even to ensure the survival of its author.”) After France fell to Hitler, in June, 1940, he made a desperate attempt to flee to Portugal, crossing the Pyrenees on foot despite severe asthma and a weak heart. He arrived in Spain only to find that he could not enter without an exit visa from the French government. That night, under arrest in a local hotel, he took an overdose of morphine tablets and died the next morning.
Given the circumstances of his death, Benjamin, who was raised in a mostly secular Jewish household, might easily be made a symbol of “the long and troubled history of German Jewry,” Peter E. Gordon writes—a cautionary tale of failed assimilation and bookish naïveté. But, in “Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver,” a short, serene volume published in Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, Gordon avoids treating his subject in such allegorical terms, in part because Benjamin always resisted conscription into a story larger than his own. Despite being a Marxist, he never joined the Communist Party, and, though he described himself as a person who “sees Jewish values everywhere and works for them,” he consistently rejected political Zionism and its nation-building ambitions. He was, as Hannah Arendt put it in this magazine, in 1968, stubbornly “sui generis.”
The Benjamin who emerges from Gordon’s book is a sympathetic but often aggravating figure, the quintessential absent-minded professor who fumbles his romances, never works a real job, and, though he clearly recognizes the existential threat of Nazism, buries his head in his books as everything falls down around him. For all his apparent unworldliness, he was a stunningly prescient theorist of popular media, not to mention a prose stylist of exceptional beauty and vigor, whose name has attained a cult status on university campuses. (When I was in graduate school, a professor once asked a group of us doctoral students if we knew we were allowed to read things not written by Walter Benjamin.) Though he remained obscure in his own lifetime, those who knew his work recognized its power. On hearing of Benjamin’s death, Bertolt Brecht reportedly declared it the first real loss Hitler had dealt to German literature.
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was born on July 15, 1892, the eldest of three children in an upper- middle-class family. His father, an art-and-antiques dealer, came from a long line of Rhineland merchants; his relatives on his mother’s side had made their money in agriculture. Their house was in Berlin’s Westend, not far from the Tiergarten, the large park that houses the Berlin Zoo. A frail child, Benjamin was predisposed toward a certain passivity. In his memoir, “Berlin Childhood Around 1900,” he suggests that his chronic ill health was “the source of something in me that others call patience but in truth does not resemble a virtue at all: the inclination to see everything I care about approach me from a distance, the way the hours approached my sickbed.” (Later, this tendency would make women seem, to the adult Benjamin, “all the more beautiful the longer and more confidently” he had to wait for them.)
Like many German teen-agers in the years before the First World War, Benjamin was influenced by a youth movement referred to as the Wandervogel, or “wandering bird.” As Gordon says, the Wandervogel was not a single organization but, rather, “a broad spectrum of clubs and societies that flourished during the first decades of the twentieth century, uniting both young men and women with the promise of cultural and spiritual renewal.” It was through the movement that Benjamin made some of his closest friends, including Gershom (né Gerhard) Scholem, who first spotted Benjamin debating members of the Jung Juda, a Zionist youth group, at a gathering at a café in 1913. Scholem noted Benjamin’s awkwardness—“He delivered his absolutely letter-perfect speech with great intensity to an upper corner of the ceiling, at which he stared the whole time”—but also his brilliance. The speech was so impressive, Scholem admitted, that “I do not recall the rejoinder made by the Zionists.”
Scholem, at the time a student of philosophy and mathematics, would become the first professor of Jewish mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His friendship with Benjamin forms the through line of Gordon’s biography, with good reason: their published correspondence comes to more than three hundred pages. Scholem was one of Benjamin’s most significant interlocutors, a thinker who, in his own words, “walked the fine line between religion and nihilism.” It was from Scholem that Benjamin absorbed the messianic strain that characterizes his political writing, fraught as it is with themes of apocalypse, divine violence, and unexpected but inevitable redemption. In the final paragraph of “Theses on the Philosophy of History”—an essay from 1940 that quotes Scholem’s gloss on Paul Klee’s painting “Angelus Novus”—Benjamin observes that since Jews are prohibited by the Torah from fortune-telling and divination, they have a uniquely urgent relationship to the present. “Every second of time,” he writes, is “the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.”
As close as they were, Scholem and Benjamin remained at odds over Scholem’s enthusiasm for the Zionist project. After Scholem immigrated to Palestine, in the nineteen-twenties, he spent the next decade and a half urging Benjamin to follow suit, insisting that his friend attempt what he called “a true confrontation with Judaism.” Benjamin would entertain these plans at best vaguely, declaring his readiness to travel and then finding reasons to stay in Europe. Gordon chalks up this foot-dragging to Benjamin’s dislike for programmatic thought, and to a corresponding desire for European Jews to adopt an internationalist orientation that might diffuse their contributions to thought and culture around the globe. But Benjamin also had serious objections to Zionism’s “racial ideology,” which, he told Scholem, resembled “vulgar anti-Semitism” in its insistence that “the gentile’s hatred of the Jew is physiologically substantiated on the basis of instinct and race”—that Jewishness, in other words, is a biological category superseding all kinds of national or political belonging.
Benjamin’s own intellectual disposition was expansively humanist while being rooted in the literary traditions of Germany and France. Between 1912 and 1919, he studied literature and philosophy at the Universities of Freiburg, Berlin, and Munich before earning his Ph.D. from the University of Bern, in Switzerland. His doctoral dissertation was titled “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” and his postdoctoral thesis, a passport to an academic career, was on German Baroque theatre. “The Origin of German Tragic Drama” was presented to the University of Frankfurt in 1925 and rejected by its faculty that same year, on the ground that it was incomprehensible (more precisely, Benjamin was told to withdraw his submission). Shut out of a teaching job and cut off financially by his father, he found work translating Proust and began writing short pieces for journals and magazines. During the next decade, he would come to exemplify a new kind of criticism, aimed at an audience of literate laypeople and marked by the application of left-wing political thought to the analysis of both high and popular culture, from Marx to Mickey Mouse.
Before the late eighteenth century, few would think to write an essay unpacking the hidden meaning of a novel or painting, let alone suggest that works of art might have ideological agendas or biases. Art was good if it was well executed and managed to entertain without being coarse, immoral, or sacrilegious. As Benjamin argued in his dissertation, it was writers such as Friedrich Schlegel who, around 1800, first began to consider aesthetic objects as capacious and mercurial entities, whose true contents could be revealed only through sustained scrutiny. For them, an art work became a “medium of reflection,” no longer simply a mirror of the world but a tool for understanding things about history, society, and politics, as well as about more familiar matters of the human heart. As for criticism, it was both a means to discover what the art object had to say and an extension of the object itself.
Although he aspired to be “the foremost critic of German literature,” Benjamin’s real talent was for grasping the richness and complexity of vernacular culture, not just the new media of photography and film but also the ephemera of consumer society. In 1928, he published “One-Way Street,” a collection of aphoristic meditations on objects such as gloves (“All disgust is originally disgust at touching”) and numbered lists of epigrams (“I. Books and harlots can be taken to bed. II. Books and harlots interweave time”). Elliptical and fragmentary, “One-Way Street” is, Benjamin said, an homage to the “inconspicuous forms” of urban life taken in by the flâneur, the man who strolls aimlessly about a city covered with “leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards,” whose pithy, highly evocative, and sometimes surreal style Benjamin borrowed as his own.
From 1927 to 1933, he worked as a radio broadcaster, writing and recording programs for stations in Berlin and Frankfurt; in a little less than six years, he produced roughly ninety episodes on topics including robber bandits in old Germany, E. T. A. Hoffmann, children’s toys, the Bastille, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, postage-stamp fraud, and dogs. No audio recordings survive, but transcripts reveal a playful sensibility and a fondness for sensuous detail, as when, in an episode on the market halls of Berlin, Benjamin describes their damp stone floors feeling “like the cold and slippery bottom of the ocean.” Although many of these broadcasts were aimed at children, it didn’t stop Benjamin from lacing them with political content. In an episode on the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, he compared the flood waters to those “raging elements of human cruelty” represented by the Ku Klux Klan.
That episode aired on March 23, 1932. Almost exactly one year later, forty-six days after Hitler seized power, Benjamin fled Germany for Paris, and travelled on to Ibiza, then an obscure and impoverished island, where he spent the next several months. Paris, he wrote to Scholem, had become inhospitable. “The Parisians are saying ‘les émigrés sont pires que les boches’ ”—the immigrants are worse than the Krauts—“and that should give you an accurate idea of the kind of society that awaits one there.”
Benjamin nonetheless did return to Paris, in October, 1933. There, he became newly close to Brecht, whom he had met years earlier in Berlin. It was under Brecht’s influence, Gordon suggests, that Benjamin found himself drawn decisively toward Marxist thought, and to the belief that “in a society riven by class conflict, art must be enlisted in the struggle for liberation.” The proof is Benjamin’s best-known piece of writing, an essay called “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (or, more pontifically, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” a closer translation of its German title). Drafted around 1935 and revised several times before Benjamin’s death, it is a monumental and dizzyingly prophetic analysis of the fate of art once it has become an infinitely replicable mass-media product.
Before the advent of photography, if you wanted to see the “Mona Lisa,” you had to go to a museum. Now the painting is everywhere—or, rather, its image is. We find the “Mona Lisa” in books, and on posters, T-shirts, and iPhone cases, and we can see it at any time by searching on Google. These copies bear no trace of what Benjamin terms the “aura” of the original, a quasi-mystical quality that comes from being the only “Mona Lisa” in the world. Meanwhile, as anyone who’s pushed through crowds of tourists to catch a glimpse of the real “Mona Lisa” will know, the painting itself seems to have lost much of what must once have been its overwhelming aesthetic power. We have simply seen it too many times.
What about film, an art form that is nothing but reproduction, a “series of mountable episodes” pieced together from a supply of interchangeable images? Unlike the “Mona Lisa,” a movie exists wherever it’s projected; it is not an object but a travelling circus of shadows and light. Film, Benjamin argues, has no aura at all, and therefore represents a total “liquidation” of traditional notions of cultural value. As it dismantles old ideas about what art is, it creates a new kind of spectator: someone who encounters the work of art collectively, in a theatre with others, and who pays a more slack, casual attention to it than he would to a Renaissance painting.
We watch movies in a state of distraction: spacing out, getting up to use the bathroom, and, now, checking our phones. For Benjamin, this dreamy, inattentive attitude is full of political promise, for if we can be emancipated from a servile, awestruck relation to works of art, perhaps we can also be emancipated from a servile, awestruck relation to the state. It was a daring, perhaps even difficult, conclusion for Benjamin, an inveterate collector of old and precious objects, to draw—that believing in progress meant submitting to the destruction of the past, of its cherished relics and ways of seeing. And yet, as he saw it, being a leftist all but required this paradoxical relationship to historical preservation and change. The alternative to the left making use of the medium was unthinkable: the inherent populism of film, with its accessibility, affordability, and mainstream appeal, would lead to its co- option by fascists. There were signs, as Benjamin was writing, that this had already occurred. The same year that he began his essay, Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” premièred at Berlin’s Ufa-Palast am Zoo, a movie theatre not far from Benjamin’s childhood home.
Fascism excels at turning popular culture to its own ends, and at getting humanity to view “its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” The response, Benjamin says, is to politicize art—to make work that trains its audience to think critically about social life. This requires developing aesthetic techniques capable of translating complex ideas into images, sounds, gestures, and narrative and poetic forms; it also requires making art that draws attention to its own artifice, so that we are always conscious of the real world outside. “One-Way Street,” with its clipped, cryptic, strangely juxtaposed chapters, is one of Benjamin’s early attempts to adopt montage—the practice of editing disparate film images into a single sequence—as a literary style. His unfinished masterpiece, “Das Passagen-Werk,” or, in English, “The Arcades Project,” was meant to perfect the method.
“The Arcades Project,” a lavish, not terribly well-organized collection of notes, quotations, personal reflections, and theoretical musings compiled over thirteen years, is Benjamin’s dossier of research into the shopping arcades of Paris, built primarily in the first part of the nineteenth century and largely demolished during Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s radical restructuring of the city, between 1853 and 1870. Benjamin was fascinated by these covered passages, remnants of the early days of modern commodity culture, when the arcade felt like “a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need.” In the obsolete advertisements that used to line the walls of the arcades, in their promises of beautiful clothes, perfect hair, magical toys, state-of-the-art buildings, technological innovations, holidays in exotic locales, and medicines to cure everything, he saw traces of the “collective dream energy” of society, of our human longing for a utopian future lying just beyond this difficult present. The montage of prose fragments that makes up “The Arcades Project” is designed to conjure an image of that future, to be the form “wherein what has been”—in German das Gewesene, or “that which once was”—“comes together in a flash with the now [das Jetzt] to form a constellation” showing what might yet be. It’s not entirely clear how this was meant to happen, but the sheer amplitude of the manuscript, which comes to more than a thousand pages, implies that Benjamin’s insistent rush of words and thoughts might propel us into a kind of visionary state, much like the one he entered when he wandered the streets of Paris or pored over his collections of keepsakes.
When Benjamin walked over the Pyrenees, stumbling and wheezing, he carried with him a large briefcase said to contain a manuscript. There has long been speculation that the pages were a new, perhaps more complete version of “The Arcades Project,” but no one knows for sure: the briefcase disappeared after Benjamin’s death, and no significant work has ever been found. His companions, though, remembered it well. Lisa Fittko, who guided Benjamin to the Spanish border, later recalled that he would under no circumstances “let himself be parted from his ballast,” and so, “for better or worse, we had to drag that monstrosity over the mountains.” “It is more important than I am,” Benjamin told Fittko, “more important than myself.”
Arendt ruefully described Benjamin, her old friend from Berlin, as having “a sleepwalker’s precision,” ever bumbling into trouble and misfortune. It was, she suggests, just like him to achieve fame only posthumously, when it would be both “uncommercial and unprofitable.” It was also like him to embody the sort of tragic idealism that would lead a person, physically weak and on the run from a genocidal regime, to risk his safety and comfort for a manuscript. And yet, it is this very combination of stubbornness and fragility, melancholy and valor that has turned Benjamin into a secular saint, enhancing his reputation no less than his vast and beautifully heterogeneous body of work, which is itself its own Parisian arcade, bearing up with elegance under ruin and despair.
“There is no document of civilization,” Benjamin wrote in “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” “which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” Every masterpiece is part of human history, and there has never been a moment in human history when people were not suffering terribly, needlessly. Benjamin knew this when he refused to leave Paris without finishing his book, and he knew it when he carried his briefcase over the Pyrenees—when he was too weak to walk and had to be dragged by his companions, who took turns holding the bag. He seemed to believe, all the same, that to abandon his work meant giving in to what fascism wanted for him: an existence so devoid of value and meaning that it would be indistinguishable from death. He held on to his briefcase not until it was too late but because it was too late. When the barbarians are past the gate, there is nothing to do but stand your ground. ♦