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Peter Szondi 6 Peter Szondi Defi nitions of basic historical concepts: Catastrophe—to have missed the opportunity. Critical moment—the status quo threatens to be preserved. Progress—the fi rst revolutionary measure taken. —Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project In 1936, Walter Benjamin published an anthology titled Deutsche Menschen: Eine Folge von Briefen (German Men and Women: A Sequence of Letters). It contained twenty-fi ve letters sent or received by German poets and thinkers between 1783 and 1883. 1 These included, for instance, a letter from Georg Büchner to his pub- lisher, Karl Gutzkow, another from Johann Heinrich Kant to his brother, Imman- uel, and a third by Franz Overbeck for Friedrich Nietzsche. Conjuring the bygone era of Germany’s high bourgeois culture, Benjamin’s anthology charts the rise and the climax of the Kulturnation while at the same time foreshadowing its dramatic 1. Walter Benjamin, German Men and Women: A Sequence of Letters , in Selected Writings , ed. How- ard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et al., vol. 3, 1935–1938 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002), 167–235. 138 Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany culmination in a sociohistorical process that lead to the triumph of the National Socialist Party and Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933. Written at the moment in which, as Benjamin writes, “the German bourgeoisie had to place its weightiest and most sharply etched words on the scales of history,” German Men and Women is proposed as a cryptic intervention against the mystico-irrational ideology of Fas- cism. 2 Of course the collection ultimately proved ineffective in protecting what many believed to be the nation’s impervious intellectual and moral value system. As T. W. Adorno notes, those who read it were “in any case opponents of the regime, and the book would scarcely have created new ones.” 3 Published fi rst as a feuilleton series in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1933 and subsequently as the 1936 anthology, Benjamin’s German Men and Women was reissued again in 1962 by Suhrkamp Verlag through Adorno’s initiative. But the book had already resurfaced roughly a year earlier, albeit in a less visible manner. On February 22, 1961, Peter Szondi included sections of it in his Antrittsrede (inau- gural speech) at the Free University of Berlin. 4 Szondi’s speech, titled Die Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit bei Walter Benjamin (In Search of Lost Time in Walter Benjamin), is a meditation on Benjamin’s intellectual and moral integrity that pon- ders the following question: “What was Benjamin thinking of when he justifi ed his refusal to emigrate overseas with the assertion that ‘in Europe [there are] positions to defend?’ ” 5 Szondi surmises that Benjamin was driven by a fundamental, almost biblical hope: “For this ark was not intended to save only itself. It sailed forth in the hope that it could reach even those who viewed as a fecund inundation what was in truth the Flood” ( HP , 159). Conceived at a time when the catastrophe of war and 2. Ibid., 3:167. 3. T. W. Adorno, “On Benjamin’s ‘Deutsche Menschen,’ a Book of Letters,” in Notes to Litera- ture, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 2:329. Benjamin had initially published the letters in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung under the pseudonym Detlef Holz. On the anthology’s different editions, see Gert Mattenklott, “Benjamin als Korrespondent, als Herausgeber von Deutsche Menschen und als Theoretiker des Briefes,” in Walter Benjamin , ed. Uwe Steiner (Bern: Lang, 1992), 273–82. 4. Szondi’s speech fi rst appeared as an article, entitled “Walter Benjamin und die Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit,” in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Literary Supplement, October 8, 1961) and subsequently in Zeugnisse: Theodor W. Adorno zum 60. Geburtstag , ed. Max Horkheimer (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1963), 241–56, as well as in Szondi’s essay collection Satz und Gegensatz, in Szondi, Schriften, ed. Jean Bollack (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1978), 2:79–97). In the same year, Szondi created a radio broadcast that was based on his inaugural lecture: Hoffnung im Vergangenen: Walter Benjamin und die Suche nach der verlorenen Zeit (Frankfurt a. M.: Hessischer Rundfunk, 1961). Szondi further published a revised version of the speech: “Die Städtebilder Walter Benjamins,” Der Monat 166 (1962): 55–62, which was also reissued as the epilogue to Benjamin’s Städtebilder (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1963). Finally, this new version appeared once more as “Hoffnung im Vergangenen: Über Walter Benjamin,” in Deutsche Literaturkritik der Gegenwart , ed. H. Mayer (Frankfurt a. M.: Goverts, 1972), 115–31. 5. The present study focuses on the original, spoken presentation of Szondi’s lecture version of the speech, yet given that the latter was neither recorded nor archived by the Freie Universität, all citations are derived from one of its subsequent printed versions: Peter Szondi, Hope in the Past: On Walter Ben- jamin, in Szondi, On Textual Understanding and Other Essays, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 145–60, here 159. Peter Szondi 139 genocide was already imminent, and published once the scope of the disaster had already begun to surpass even the most pessimistic of expectations, Benjamin’s Ger- man Men and Women was an anachronism almost from the date of its inception. At the time of its publication, the German audience for which it was initially intended was incapable of heeding the book’s warning and grasping its signifi cance. But would postwar Germany’s now democratic public sphere be receptive to an admo- nition they had received with silent unconcern less than three decades ago? Would Szondi fi nd an eager and appreciative audience among the faculty and students of a German university? Would he be able to convey his deep concern over the haunt- ing infl uence of Germany’s oppressive history? Through his nonconformist approach to lecturing, Szondi not only breaches the university’s unspoken agreement to remain silent about the mass extermi- nation of Jews, but effectively initiates the formation of a counter-public sphere within academia. Undermining the hegemonic discourse on German suffering, his address articulates the as yet unrepresented experience of persecution and expro- priation “from below.” Obviously Szondi’s preoccupation with Benjamin’s book project is not incidental. Like the fi rst edition of the book, which was published in Switzerland before reaching its intended audience in Germany, Szondi was in the process of trading his home in politically neutral Switzerland for a new residence in German territory, so that his path from Zurich to Berlin effectively replicated the somewhat erratic itinerary of Benjamin’s German Men and Women . Much was at stake for Szondi, whose inaugural speech simultaneously marked his arrival in Germany and his acceptance of a position as professor of comparative literature at one of Germany’s leading research universities. The extraordinary promotion of a thirty-three-year-old Jew of Hungarian descent was also a test of Szondi’s ability to live among the perpetrators of the Holocaust. The diffi culty was further exac- erbated by the fact that Germany and Berlin in particular had once again become the focal point of an international war. On August 13, 1961, only six months after Szondi’s address, the East German government closed all east-west traffi c lanes as well as the border between East and West Berlin by erecting what eventually became the most concrete symbol of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall. These geopolitical complications represent just one point of intersection between Szondi’s and Benjamin’s texts. Their formal resemblance is equally striking, since Szondi’s inaugural speech and Benjamin’s anthology share the same structuring principle. Like Benjamin, who, instead of writing a conventional cultural history about Germany’s bourgeois culture, chose to compile letters that would embody it, Szondi assembled a heterogeneous collection of Benjamin citations that allow the texts to speak for themselves. As such, Szondi’s project corresponds to Noah’s task of saving examples of all the animal species on the ark. Drawing from the full range of Benjamin’s oeuvre, Szondi quotes his prose memoir, Berliner Kindheit um neun- zehnhundert (A Berlin Childhood around 1900); his habilitation thesis, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of the German Mourning Play); his literary and 140 Speaking the Unspeakable in Postwar Germany theoretical studies Zum Bilde Prousts (On the Image of Proust), Paris: Die Haupt- stadt des 19. Jahrhunderts (Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century), Einbahn- straße (One-Way Street), and, fi nally, Geschichtsphilosophische Thesen (Theses on the Philosophy of History). Additional sources include Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and T. W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Refl exionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Minima Moralia: Refl ections on a Damaged Life). Szondi’s commentary, which is more exploratory than argumentative, gathers this heterogeneous assem- bly of quotes into a loose but comprehensive constellation. Alternating between comment and citation, Szondi’s speech is structured so as to persuade his Berlin audience that the reception of Benjamin’s work and legacy must now begin—with them. Hence the speech is an elaborate rescue operation that establishes the precise moment, the institutional setting, and the addressees of Ben- jamin’s reception. Given that this scholar’s name had only recently been reclaimed from relative obscurity, no more than a few audience members might have been familiar with the theories affi liated with his thought. So far Benjamin had had no Wirkungsgeschichte (effective history). 6 The fi rst compilation of his writings, which was edited and published by Gretel and T. W.
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