Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin Walter Benjamin A Critical Life Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press cambridge, massachusetts • london, england 2014 Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Eiland, Howard. Walter Benjamin : a critical life / Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978- 0- 674- 05186- 7 (alk. paper) 1. Benjamin, Walter, 1892– 1940. 2. Authors, German—20th century— Biography. I. Jennings, Michael William. II. Title. PT2603.E455Z6455 2013 838'.91209—dc23 [B] 2013012858 Book design by Dean Bornstein For Elizabeth, Dorothea, Matthew, and Rudolph And for Sarah and Andrew Contents Introduction 1 1. A Berlin Childhood: 1892–1912 12 2. Metaphysics of Youth: Berlin and Freiburg, 1912– 1914 32 3. The Concept of Criticism: Berlin, Munich, and Bern, 1915–1919 75 4. Elective Affinities: Berlin and Heidelberg, 1920–1922 117 5. Academic Nomad: Frankfurt, Berlin, and Capri, 1923– 1925 177 6. Weimar Intellectual: Berlin and Moscow, 1925–1928 235 7. The Destructive Character: Berlin, Paris, and Ibiza, 1929–1932 314 8. Exile: Paris and Ibiza, 1933–1934 391 9. The Pa ri sian Arcades: Paris, San Remo, and Skovsbostrand, 1935–1937 483 10. Baudelaire and the Streets of Paris: Paris, San Remo, and Skovsbostrand, 1938– 1939 576 11. The Angel of History: Paris, Nevers, Marseilles, and Port Bou, 1939–1940 647 Epilogue 677 Abbreviations 681 Notes 682 Selected Bibliography 719 Acknow ledg ments 734 Index 735 Walter Benjamin Introduction The German Jewish critic and phi los o pher Walter Benjamin (1892– 1940) is now generally regarded as one of the most important wit- nesses to Eu ro pe an modernity. Despite the relative brevity of his writing career— his life was cut short on the Spanish border in fl ight before the Nazis— he left behind a body of work astonishing in its depth and diversity. In the years following what he called his “appren- ticeship in German literature,” during which he produced enduring studies of Romantic criticism, of Goethe, and of the Baroque Trauer- spiel or play of mourning, Benjamin established himself in the 1920s as a discerning advocate of the radical culture emerging from the Soviet Union and of the high modernism that dominated the Pa ri sian literary scene. In the second half of the 1920s, he was at the center of many of the developments now known as “Weimar culture.” Along with friends such as Bertolt Brecht and László Moholy- Nagy, he helped shape a new way of seeing— an avant- garde realism— as it was break- ing free of the mandarin modernism that had characterized German arts and letters under the Wilhelmine Empire. In this period, as Ben- jamin gained recognition for his writing, he harbored the not unrea- sonable hope of becoming “the foremost critic of German literature.” At the same time, he and his friend Siegfried Kracauer were virtually inventing pop u lar culture as an object of serious study: Benjamin produced essays on children’s literature, toys, gambling, graphology, pornography, travel, folk art, the art of excluded groups such as the mentally ill, and food, and on a wide variety of media including fi lm, radio, photography, and the illustrated press. In the last decade of his life, most of which was spent in exile, much of his writing originated as offshoots of The Arcades Project, his cultural history of the emer- gence of urban commodity capitalism in mid- nineteenth- century France. Although The Arcades Project remained a massive unfi nished [ 1 ] 2 Walter Benjamin “torso,” the research and refl ection that informed it generated a series of groundbreaking studies, such as the celebrated 1936 polemic “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” and the essays on Charles Baudelaire that established the poet as the represen- tative writer of modernity. But Benjamin was not only a surpassing critic and revolutionary theorist: he also left a substantial body of writing on the border between fi ction, reportage, cultural analysis, and memoir. His 1928 “montage book” One- Way Street, and especially Berlin Childhood around 1900, which remained unpublished in his lifetime, are modern masterpieces. In the end, many of Benjamin’s works defy simple generic classifi cation. Among the prose works long and short are monographs, essays, reviews, collections of philosophical, historiographical, and autobiographical vignettes, radio scripts, edi- tions of letters and of other literary-historical documents, short stories, dialogues, and diaries. There are also poems, translations of French prose and poetry, and myriad fragmentary refl ections of differing length and import. The concentrated “image worlds” evoked on the pages of these works bring into view some of the most turbulent decades of the twentieth century. Growing up in an assimilated, well- to- do Jewish family in Berlin in the years around 1900, Benjamin was a child of the German Empire: his memoirs are fi lled with recollections of the mon- umental architecture beloved of the kaiser. But he was also the child of an explosive urban capitalist modernity; by 1900 Berlin was Eu rope’s most modern city, with new technologies burgeoning everywhere. As a young adult he opposed Germany’s involvement in the First World War and in consequence spent most of the war years in Switzerland— yet visions of the war’s “nights of annihilation” per- vade his work. In the course of the Weimar Republic’s fourteen-year existence, Benjamin experienced fi rst the bloody confl ict between radical left and radical right that followed the end of the war, then the devastating hyperinfl ation of the early years of the young democracy, and fi nally the debilitating politi cal fragmentation of the late 1920s that led to the seizure of power by Hitler and the National Socialists in 1933. Like almost every important German intellectual of the day, Benjamin fl ed the country in the spring of 1933, never to return. He spent the fi nal seven years of his life in a Pa ri sian exile characterized Introduction 3 by isolation, poverty, and relative lack of publishing venues. He was never able to forget that “there are places where I can earn a minimal amount, and places where I can subsist on a minimal amount, but nowhere in the world where these two conditions coincide.” The fi nal period of his career saw the shadow of coming war extend across Eu rope. Why do Benjamin’s works continue to speak so compellingly to the general reader and the scholar alike, more than seventy years after his death? There is the power of his ideas, fi rst of all: his work has re- shaped our understanding of many important writers, of the possibili- ties of writing itself, of the potentials and hazards of technological media, and of the situation of Euro pe an modernity as a historical phenomenon. Yet one fails to appreciate his full impact if one ignores its distinctively etched verbal medium— the uncanny Benjaminian style. Purely as a crafter of sentences, Benjamin bears comparison to the most supple and penetrating writers of his day. And he was a pio- neering formal innovator: his most characteristic works are based on what he came to call, after the poet Stefan George, the Denkbild or “fi gure of thought,” an aphoristic prose form combining philosophical analysis with concrete imagery to yield a signature critical mimesis. Even his ostensibly discursive essays are often secretly composed of sequences of these trenchant “thought images,” arranged according to the principles of avant- garde montage. It was Benjamin’s genius to fi nd the forms within which a profundity and complexity fully com- parable to that of contemporaries such as Heidegger and Wittgenstein could resonate through an immediately engaging and memorable prose. Reading him is therefore a sensory, no less than intellectual, experience. It is like the fi rst taste of a tea-soaked madeleine: dimly remembered worlds blossom in the imagination. And as the phrases linger, constellate, and begin permutation, they subtly attune them- selves to an emerging recombinatory logic, slowly releasing their de- stabilizing potential. Yet for all the brilliant immediacy of his writing, Benjamin the man remains elusive. Like the many- sided oeuvre itself, his personal convictions make up what he called a “contradictory and mobile whole.” This incisive formulation, in which one hears an appeal to the patient reader, is indicative of his protean and polycentric cast of 4 Walter Benjamin mind. But Benjamin’s ungraspability also bespeaks a self- conscious practice aimed at maintaining around him a hermetic space for experi- ment. Theodor W. Adorno once remarked of his friend that he “hardly ever showed his cards,” and this deep reserve, with its recourse to an arsenal of masks and other strategies of indirection, served to guard the well of inwardness. Thus the consummate politeness remarked by all— in the end a complex distancing mechanism. Thus the appearance of weighty maturity at every epoch of his conscious life, a gravity that lent to even casual utterances something of the oracular. And thus his stated “policy” of preventing, whenever possible, extended con- tact between his friends, the better to preserve each individual or group as a sounding board for his ideas. Within this shifting fi eld of operations, Benjamin conducted himself from an early age in such a way as to realize “the many modes of existence inherent in [him].” If Nietz sche saw the self as a social structure composed of many wills, Benjamin conceived it as “a set of pure improvisations from one min- ute to the next.” It was in keeping with a precipitous internal dialec- tic that this utter lack of personal dogmatism coexisted with a sover- eign and sometimes ruthless power of judging.

Load more