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Walter Benjamin (Reaktion Books Walter Benjamin Esther Leslie Walter Benjamin Titles in the series Critical Lives present the work of leading cultural figures of the modern period. Each book explores the life of the artist, writer, philosopher or architect in question and relates it to their major works. In the same series Jean Genet Frank Lloyd Wright Stephen Barber Robert McCarter Michel Foucault Jean-Paul Sartre David Macey Andrew Leak Pablo Picasso Noam Chomsky Mary Ann Caws Wolfgang B. Sperlich Franz Kafka Jorge Luis Borges Sander L. Gilman Jason Wilson Guy Debord Erik Satie Andy Merrifield Mary E. Davis Marcel Duchamp Georges Bataille Caroline Cros Stuart Kendall James Joyce Jean Cocteau Andrew Gibson James S. Williams Walter Benjamin Esther Leslie reaktion books For Iris Rosemarine Simcha Tiley Watson, in anticipation of her own opinions et pensées and big up to Michael Tencer for gruntwork Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2007 Copyright © Esther Leslie 2007 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Leslie, Esther, 1964– Walter Benjamin. – (Critical lives) 1. Benjamin, Walter, 1892–1940 2. Philosophers – Germany – Biography I. Title 193 isbn–13: 978 1 86189 343 7 isbn–10: 1 86189 343 3 Contents Abbreviations 7 1 Benjamin’s Remnants 9 2 Youth Culture, 1892–1916 14 3 Making a Mark, 1917–24 37 4 Books after Books, 1925–9 64 5 Man of Letters, 1930–32 101 6 Noms de Plume, 1933–7 138 7 Writer’s Block, 1938–40 183 8 Afterwords 216 References 234 Select Bibliography 252 Photo Acknowledgements 256 Abbreviations ap Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge, ma, 1999–2003) gb i–vi: Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Briefe, vols i–vi (Frankfurt, 1996) gs i–vii: Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vols i–vii (Frankfurt, 1992) sw i–iv: Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vols i–iv (Cambridge, ma, 1996–2003) Walter Benjamin in his late thirties. 1 Benjamin’s Remnants Walter Benjamin left many remnants. There are the books pub- lished in his lifetime: four monographs, one edited collection of letters and his translations of Proust, Balzac and Baudelaire. There are the many essays and reviews written for various newspapers, magazines and journals from 1910 until 1940. Benjamin broadcast almost 90 radio shows – of which no recordings have yet been found (his voice is lost to us) – but transcripts remain. In addition to this public output, there is a mass of more intimate materials. Benjamin was a prolific letter-writer, cramming his pages with details of his life, his circumstances and his thoughts, if only because, in the many years of exile and dislocation, day-to-day exchange of information with acquaintances was impossible. His many correspondents faithfully held on to these documents of developing ideas and material circumstance. Benjamin wrote con- sciously for the future, constructing from early on archives of his writings, in published, manuscript, draft and photocopied form. Benjamin organized his own archive of materials meticulously. Files, folders, envelopes, boxes and cases harboured correspon- dence, manuscripts by acquaintances, private and business affairs, memoirs, diaries, photographs, postcards, drawings and notes, index cards, inventories, a list of books read since his school days and a list of his publications, as well as copies of his writings, in various drafts and replete with further amendments or curious markings to indicate associations and cross-references. He archived 9 scraps of paper, sketches of essays jotted on the back of library book return reminders, diagrams in the form of compass roses and co-ordinate planes that plotted ideas in relation to each other. Even the most ephemeral objects found a place in his archive, evoking an idea from one of the poets who most fascinated him, Charles Baudelaire, who observed the twinning in modernity of the fugitive and eternal, the transitory and the immutable. One of Benjamin’s most cherished formats was the notebook. 1 When he was without a notebook his thoughts were ‘homeless’. Seven of his notebooks and three notepads still remain. These are crammed with drafts of articles and letters, ideas, diagrams, quotations to be used as epigraphs, bibliographies and diary entries, and often every single centimetre of their pages is 2 covered with tiny handwriting. These books were portable. With them he could indulge his inclination to write on the move, in cafés across Europe. He fostered a cult around his notebooks, relishing in particular those with thin and translucent leaves and supple vellum covers. They survive for, once complete, they were placed with friends, with the request ‘please store 3 the manuscript carefully’, and the proviso that they could be recalled at any time by the author. As he wrote to his friend Alfred Cohn on 18 June 1928, I will continue to ensure the completion of your collection of little grasses and stems from my field. This way at least there is the benefit, more for me than you, of there being another 4 complete herbarium somewhere apart from my own. There were many part-archives. Benjamin deposited materials with friends and institutions. In Frankfurt, Jerusalem, New York, Los Angeles, Barcelona and elsewhere, parts of the Benjamin project were strewn. The uses of the duplicate and dispersed archives was made clear on 31 May 1933, when he wrote to Gershom Scholem 10 with the request that he arrange the replacement of some damaged papers in Benjamin’s archive: But now that moment has arrived when you must allow me to shake a few meager fruits from the tree of conscientiousness, whose roots are to be found in my heart and whose leaves are 5 in your archive. Some of this mass of material was lost in the exile years, along with most of his cherished book collection. But much was preserved, even by those who would destroy Benjamin. The Gestapo seized the papers and effects that Benjamin had managed to keep with him until his flight from Paris in June 1940. Bundled together with other booty, by 1945 they found their way to Moscow. Included amongst letters, contracts, photographs, radio scripts and some writings on Baudelaire was something as slight as an address book from the years of exile, with its details of friends and acquaintances offering an insight into the circles of communication in those years, its deletions a testimony to the frequent displacements of refugees. This batch of papers continued on a journey back to Berlin in 1957, when it was handed to the gdr’s Ministry of the Interior, who passed it on to the German central archive in Potsdam, from where it moved in 1972 to the archive of the Academy of Arts in East Berlin. It was inaccessible for study until 1983, when it was made available to citizens of ‘socialist’ countries, and in 1986 it was opened for all. This fragment of the archive was brought together with two other parts: a Frankfurt archive of the materials that Benjamin had with him on his flight from Paris which found their way to Adorno to join the manuscripts, letters and documents held by the Institute for Social Research, and a Paris archive that contained the papers deposited by Benjamin with Georges Bataille at the Bibliothèque nationale de France for safekeeping before his departure. The archive 11 Walter Benjamin’s passport photo- graph, undated. of traces continues to grow, as documents turn up from private collections or from the dissolved Special Archive in Moscow. Since April 2004 12,000 pages have resided in the archive of the Academy of Arts in unified Berlin. Even ephemera entered posterity, against all odds. Walter Benjamin’s remnants in reproduced form are likewise not hard to come by. The many editions of his writings, and the commentaries on them, abound with photographs and documents. An effect as slight as his address book from 1933–40 is available for 6 purchase now, as perfect facsimile. This book has benefited from the extraordinary efforts that German archivists have made to not only collate and reproduce as much material as exists, but also to furnish it with finely detailed com- mentary, elucidation and cross-references. A life, shortened but intensely lived, is reconstructable from these myriad materials: 12 from the Gesammelte Schriften, issued from 1972 to 1999, with its expansive scholarly apparatus, to the volume that appeared in 2006 under the title Walter Benjamins Archive, with its commented reproductions of the most curious survivals – postcards, doodles and jokes, photographs of Russian toys, drafts of ideas in minus- cule writing scratched on hotel paper or a café receipt advertising S. Pellegrino water, the back of a medical prescription and a cinema ticket. In 1992 Ingrid Scheurmann, investigating the circumstances of Benjamin’s death, tracked down and reproduced every document that could be found pertaining to his final days in Port Bou: the hotel bill, the doctor’s bill, the cemetery and coffin bill, a letter from Max Horkheimer evidencing Benjamin’s connection to the 7 Institute for Social Research. But even she could not find the one item that was rumoured to be with him at the end: a manuscript more important than his life – of what, no one knows. In a different spirit, eschewing speculation and drawing on these many avail- able traces, this book holds rigorously to the facts of a life much fictionalized. 13 2 Youth Culture, 1892–1916 Walter Benjamin was born at 4 Magdeburger Platz in Berlin’s Tiergarten on 15 July 1892.
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