Walter Benjamin : an Intellectual Biography / Bernd Witte ; Translated by James Rolleston

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/walterbenjamininOOOOwitt UIHLTER BEnmmifl Kritik: German Literary Theory and Cultural Studies Liliane Weissberg, Editor Books in this series Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography, by Bernd Witte, trans. by James Rolleston, 1991 urn liei lEHJHFnm Ml iniEHECTUHl BIDERRPHV Wayne State University Press Detroit TnrMm AS • m60bf*fS5 2HSHI} Ml Originally published as Walter Benjamin: rowohlts monographien, copyright © 1985 by Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH. Revised and enlarged English translation copyright © 1991 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48202. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. 95 94 93 92 91 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Witte, Bernd. [Walter Benjamin. English] Walter Benjamin : an intellectual biography / Bernd Witte ; translated by James Rolleston. p. cm. — (Kritik) Translation of: Walter Benjamin. Included bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8143-2017-1 1. Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940. 2. Authors, German-20th century- -Biography. I. Title. II. Series. PT2603.E455Z95413 1991 838'.91209-dc20 [B] 91-7666 Grateful acknowledgment is made to Inter Nationes for its financial assistance in the translation of this work. Designer: Mary Krzewinski Contents Translator’s Preface 7 I. Childhood and Youth in Berlin (1892-1902) 9 II. Youth Movement, Judaism, Philosophy of Language (1912-1917) 22 III. Art Criticism in the Spirit of Romanticism (1917-1923) 39 IV. History as Catastrophe: Anti-Classical Aesthetics (1923-1925) 68 V. Paris, Berlin, Moscow (1926-1929) 89 VI. Crisis and Critique: The End of an Era (1929-1933) 116 VII. Emigration: The Theory of Non-Auratic Art (1933-1937) 151 VIII. Parisian Arcades (1937-1939) 174 IX. The End of the Story (1940) 199 Notes 207 Index 223 Translator’s Preface While all individual elements of foreign lan¬ guages-words, sentences, structure-are mu¬ tually exclusive, these languages supplement one another in their intentions. — Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator” (1923) o translate a study of Walter Benjamin is to enter a force field dom¬ D inated by his own intensely linguistic consciousness. Benjamin be¬ came convinced early on that language systems define ideas, feel¬ ings, political possibilities, the simplest perceptions of the world. And the systemic power of languages is, for him, complemented by a dimension of longing (“intention” in the essay cited above). Verbal lan¬ guages are only one kind, the highest yet achieved, but still impelled to self¬ transcendence, towards the imaginable but seemingly unattainable language in which the entirety of history would become coherently legible. Benjamin’s life demands to be interpreted in this context: his shifting relations with ideas, literary works, historical data, personal commitments, and political action must be seen as a process of reading. Benjamin struggles to read himself and his times as a single, often nightmarish text-a text whose transformative “intention” might thus become discernible; a conven¬ tional biography, in which private desires drive ideas and public values, could not do justice to this linguistic dynamic. Bernd Witte, however, keeps faith with his subject by establishing three intertwined yet distinct modes of reading (and thereby producing) the text defined as Walter Ben¬ jamin’s life. First, a life is what this book very clearly is, beginning with birth and ending with death: chronology is respected and there is no excess speculation on Benjamin’s posthumous “significance.” Second, the domi¬ nance of ideas and literary texts in Benjamin’s experience of the world is kept in steady focus; although no important event in Benjamin’s personal 7 TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE life is omitted, Witte makes clear that such events were inseparable from his continuous reading and mapping of European culture, in its immediacy as well as in its historical constellations. And third, Witte maintains an understated yet legible perspective from our own time, a time for which Benjamin’s life, both expressed and consumed in the extreme atmosphere of the Weimar Republic and Nazi-dominated Europe, has become at once exemplary and remote. Particularly when recounting Benjamin’s often- conflicted relations with Gershom Scholem and with the directors of the Institute of Social Research in New York, Witte obviously feels that, while ax grinding would be pointless, an ethical stance is both incumbent on a biographer and attuned to Benjamin’s own ruthless self-awareness. Benjamin’s importance for contemporary German-language culture is not in doubt. The present translation of Witte’s book is a contribution to a relatively new and unpredictable process, the confluence of Benjamin’s apocalyptic perspectives with the pragmatic American tradition. I am grate¬ ful to Dr. Witte for his suggestions in response to the first draft of the trans¬ lation and to Norma Dockery, my assistant at Duke University, for her un¬ failing patience and thoroughness in preparing the manuscript. 8 I Childhood and Youth in Berlin 1892-1902 alter Benjamin is the heir and in some way the epitome of that enormously productive German-Jewish cultural tradition that had flourished in Berlin since the days of the friendship between Moses Mendelssohn and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He was born into a family of well-to-do business people, established for centuries in Germany: “an upper middle class child,” as Walter Benjamin accurately characterized himself in the autobiographical sketches of the Berlin Chron¬ icle} His father, Emil Benjamin, born in 1866, descended from a merchant family long settled in the Rhineland and spent his youth in Paris. The ancestors of Walter’s mother Pauline, born Schonflies, “at one time lived as dealers in grain and livestock in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg.”2 After 1871 the two families of Benjamin’s grandparents moved to Berlin, the burgeoning capital of the newly founded empire, where during Walter’s childhood they lived on the same street of the old western district. After their marriage in 1891, Benjamin’s parents also settled in this area southwest of the zoological gardens. There, on July 15, 1892, their eldest son was born, his name registered as Walter Benedix Schonflies Benjamin. Three years later his younger brother Georg was born, and in 1901 his sister Dora.3 Emil Benjamin acquired “his sometimes considerable wealth” as auc¬ tioneer and partner in Lepke’s art dealership on Koch Street. After he re¬ tired from active involvement in this enterprise, he invested his money “speculatively” in a series of smaller companies, among them a “retailer of medical supplies,” a “building society” and a “wine distributor.” From 1910 9 WALTER BENJAMIN The Benjamin family: Emile and Pauline (nee Schonflies) Benjamin with their children Walter and Georg. 10 Childhood and Youth onward he belonged to the consortium that operated the “ice palace,” a Ber¬ lin music hall.4 Even though these paternal business dealings remained hid¬ den from the son, the signs of the family’s prosperity were unmistakable. In Berlin Chronicle, Benjamin recalls in detail the high-bourgeois atmos¬ phere of the apartment at 24 Nettelbeck Street: deliverers of groceries and French nannies, summer residences in Potsdam and Neubabelsberg, and years of private tutoring in a small circle of children “from the better classes.” All this must have given the child an idea of his family’s high rank-as did the numerous social evenings at home, when the luxurious deployment of porcelain and silver so impressed him that, thirty years later, he evoked it with the amazement, blended from awe and disgust, of the passionate col¬ lector and materialist historian.5 In the remembered images of his Berlin Childhood around 1990, which Benjamin began to note down in his fortieth year, he sought to locate the seeds of the destruction that was to bring the world of the nineteenth cen¬ tury to an end in war and inflation, in the sheltered atmosphere of his upper-middle-class childhood. The short prose texts that, mosaic-like, make up the book are not so much historical documents as prophecies projected backwards, installing the perspective of the materialist historian of 1932 already in the unconscious sensations of childhood. The total embedded¬ ness of these sensations in the nineteenth century is seen to be precisely what imperils them. The furniture of the 1870s (Griinderzeit), which filled his family’s large apartments, becomes for the child a second, confining natural order, preventing him from realizing his own identity. More and more he comes to resemble his surroundings, a world dominated by the commodities of the fully industrialized late-nineteenth-century society; but from his “own image” he becomes ever more estranged. As an archetypal evocation of this self-alienation, Benjamin describes two photographs, one of which resembles the one reported as being taken in the “Diary for Wengen” (1902). It shows him as a ten year old with his brother Georg in an artificial “vacation world” with a painted backdrop of mountains. Wherever I looked, I saw myself surrounded by screens, cushions, pedestals which lusted for my blood like the shades of Hades for the blood of the sacrificial animal. Finally I was placed before a coarsely painted Alpine view and my right hand, which had to hold up a goatee hat, cast its shadow upon the vista of clouds and glacier-snow. Yet the worried smile around the mouth of the young mountaineer is less depressing than the gaze penetrating me from the childish face in the shadow of the household palm tree. This tree belongs to one of those studios that, with their stools and tripods, vases and easels, partake of 11 WALTER BENJAMIN Walter Benjamin and his brother Georg as “mountaineers,” ca. 1902. both the boudoir and the torture chamber.

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