Posthumous Fame-a montage in the mountains
Walter Benjamin wrote about
history and about tragedy. History and
tragedy converged fatefully for Benjamin
on September 26, 1940 at Port Bou, Spain in the Pyrenees. Port Bou, at the border between France and Spain
could have been the threshold to freedom for Benjamin, but, instead, the border
was closed to him. Faced with the choice
of the Nazi Gestapo or death, he chose death.
Here is a picture of Benjamin.
Benjamin, a German Jew, left
Germany and established residence in Paris when the Nazis took power in Germany
in 1933. When
World War II broke out in September, 1939, Benjamin was subject to France's
extradition policy. As an enemy
alien, he was imprisoned in a transit camp at a monastery near Nevers (niv-air),
a small town in the Burgundy region. He was then transferred to another prison,
a former furniture factory, in Vernuche. Benjamin was released from this prison in
November 1939, with the intervention of some French friends,. Germany invaded France on May
10, 1940 and France surrendered on June 24, 1940. The armistice
that was signed included an extradition clause that prevented German refugees,
such as Benjamin, from getting exit visas from France. Benjamin, as a German-Jew, living in
Vichy France realized the Nazi Gestapo
would be coming to arrest him soon. He
was a fugitive from the Vichy regime, so
he began working on a plan to escape from France to Spain and to the United
States. A French exit visa would be
required at the Spanish border, which he hoped he could get in Marseilles. In Spain, he would travel through Spain to
Lisbon, Portugal and from there to the United States.
In May 1940, Benjamin left Paris and went to
Marseilles. He got to Marseilles in the
middle of September; where he met friends: Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler and Hans
Fittko. Benjamin and Hans Fittko had
been imprisoned together at Vernuche. In
a conversation between Koestler and Benjamin, Benjamin told Koestler that he had a supply of morphine sufficient
to kill a horse. Hans Fittko told Benjamin that his wife, Lisa,
who lived in Port-Vendres (von-dra), would be ready to help him escape through the Pyrenees to the Spanish
border town of Port Bou. Benjamin was
issued a visa from the U.S. consulate in Marseilles that authorized his entry
into the United States. However, he
could not get the French exit visa.
Benjamin then went to Port-Vendres to meet
Fittko's wife, Lisa. In the book titled Escape Through the Pyrenees, Lisa Fittko
tells about meeting, Benjamin. She said,
he meekly knocked at her door and politely requested her help. Lisa Fittko said, "The world is falling
to pieces, I thought, but Benjamin's courtesy is unshakeable" (103). Benjamin was only forty-eight years old, but
he seemed much older to Fittko and she described him as "Old
Benjamin." They worked out the time
and the way for the walk from to
Banyuls, France to Port Bou, Spain. Even
though the distance between Banyuls and Port Bou is short, the mountain terrain
is harsh so it would take more time than one might otherwise expect. Benjamin
had a bad heart, so he had to walk slowly and rest often. Benjamin had met Frau Gurland and her sixteen
year old son, Jose, in Marseilles and they had come to Banyuls with him. He arranged with Fittko for them to be members
of the group.
We will get
back to the Port Bou in a moment, but, first, who was Walter Benjamin? He was an intellectual and a scholar, but his
scholarship doesn't fit precisely in a single discipline. Hannah Arendt, a friend and herself a
scholar, in arguing that Benjamin defied classification said, "The trouble
with everything Benjamin wrote was that it always turned out to be sui generis. Posthumous fame seems, then, to be the lot of
the unclassifiable ones, that is, those whose work neither fits the existing
order nor introduces a new genre that lends itself to future classification"
(ILL 3). In 1940 Benjamin was known to only
a select few. His works and his story have become widely recognized and the
subject of scholarly studies and artistic works. In addition to the book by Lisa Fittko, just
mentioned, Jay Parini wrote a novel about Benjamin entitled, Benjamin's Crossing. Susan Sontag wrote an essay entitled, “Under
the Sign of Saturn,” which, among other things, describes Benjamin's composure
in a manner that suggests melancholy. Charles
Bernstein and Brian Ferneyhough wrote the opera “Shadowtime” based on
Benjamin’s life. it was performed at the
Lincoln Center in New York City in July, 2005. There is an International Walter
Benjamin Society that, according to its website, "brings together scholars
and interested readers from around the world."
Whatever else Benjamin may
have been he was, without a doubt, a prolific writer. War was one of the subjects. In an essay "The Storyteller," he
defines storytelling as "the ability to exchange experiences" and he
argues that these "experiences" are being devalued. He gives the
example of soldiers who returned from the Great War, who were silent about
their experience dumfounded by the forces of war and its aftermath. Benjamin described this aftermath, "A
generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under
the open sky in a countryside in which, nothing remained unchanged but the
clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents
and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body" (ILL 84).
Now only a little more than twenty
years later the world was at war again and it was Benjamin's "tiny,
fragile human body" that was beneath the clouds at Port Bou. Beneath these same clouds the destructive
power of Fascism was growing in Europe, which, in the spring of 1940, Benjamin
described as in a "state of emergency" in the "struggle against
Fascism" (ILL 257). Benjamin was
caught up in the fanaticism of Fascism in
which being born a Jew was unpardonable.
Now a segue from the personal
to the intellectual. At the outset I
want to state Benjamin's most basic intellectual fundamental principles. The first was the use of the literary montage
as an intellectual mechanism. The
second was Historical Materialism, or, Marxism if you will.
The literary montage is and I
quote, "guided by the assumption that what seems diffuse and disparate
will be found to be linked in the adequate concepts as elements of a
synthesis" (OGTD 58). He
represented the "diffuse and disparate" in his works with the "literary
montage." Benjamin, in his The Arcades Project, which we will
discuss in a moment, defined, metaphorically, the Literary Montage as: "I needn't
say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no
ingenious formulations. But the rags,
the refuse---these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to
come into their own: by making use of them." (AP, N1a, 8). We tend to think of a montage as composed of
visual images. Benjamin's montage,
however, included many textual entries, insights, and observations as well. The
entries were juxtaposed to create a montage
that might ordinarily be thought to be at the margins of critical
discourse. The margins of a text were
focused on by deconstructionists, for example Derrida, during the latter half
of the twentieth century. However, I
hasten to add Benjamin was not a deconstructionist per se. He argued the elements of a literary montage
in all its heterogeneity could form a "synthesis."
J.M. Coetzee,
the South African author, believed the form of the literary montage was
Benjamin's great innovation. He compares
Benjamin's literary montage to "Goethe's ideal of setting out the facts in
such a way that the facts will be their own theory"(63).
The idea of
juxtaposition and interruption in liberating meaning was shared by Benjamin and
Bertolt Brecht his friend and associate.. Benjamin, in his literary
montage and Brecht in his theater performances.
Benjamin wrote an essay titled "What is Epic Theater?" which,
among other things, discusses Brecht's
use of the technique of "interruption," in his theater
productions. Mara Polgovsky
Ezcurra in a 2012 journal article in Contemporary Aesthetics entitled,
"On 'Shock:' The Artistic Imagination of Benjamin and Brecht" states,
"Brecht's techniques of interruption and juxtaposition in the practice of epic
theater were in close relationship with Benjamin’s use of montage as a
mechanism to “liberate” meaning."
Benjamin's
second fundamental
proposition was the theory of historical materialism, which can be summed up in
a quote from Karl Marx: “it is not the consciousness of men that determines
their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence that determines
their consciousness.” To expand on this I quote from another source:
"Marxist theory argues that the way we think and the way we experience the
world are either wholly or largely conditioned by the way the economy is
organized. . . . The base of a society, the way its economy is organized,
broadly speaking, determines its superstructure, everything that we might
classify as belonging to the realm of culture again in a broad sense:
education, law, but also religion, philosophy, politics and the arts"
(82).
I began by
saying that Benjamin wrote about history, so how did he view history? His view of history is stated in eighteen
"Theses on the Philosophy of History" that he wrote only a short time
before his death. Note these are theses
and not essays and they discuss the Philosophy of History and not history per se. The Philosophy of History
considers what history should be, what is should document and whether it has eventual significance. He asks the rhetorical question, "with
whom do the adherents of historicism actually empathize" ? His answer: "The answer is inevitable:
with the victor. And all rulers are the
heirs of those who conquered before them.
Hence, empathy with the victor invariably benefits the rulers" (ILL
256). This may sound cynical or
realistic depending on your viewpoint. Benjamin believed the victors appropriated
the spoils and that the historical materialist should resist and "regard
it as his task to brush history against the grain" (ILL 257). The idea of brushing history against the
grain was central to Benjamin's attitude about Marxism.
Since a
painting of Paul Klee's underlies his view of history I need to digress a
moment to talk about Klee. Klee too, had
trouble with the Fascists. His home was searched by the Gestapo and he was fired from his job at the
Bauhaus. The Klee family emigrated to Switzerland in
late 1933. He died on June 29, 1940, just a few months before
Benjamin committed suicide.
I was
introduced to and fascinated by Klee's painting when I was a member of the
Museum of Modern Art while I lived in New York City in the late 80s. The Des Moines Art Center has three of Klee's
paintings. The next image is of Klee's
"Angelus Novus" and this painting underlies Benjamin's way of viewing
history. Benjamin had owned this painting since 1923.
This is
the passage from Benjamin's "Theses
on the Philosophy of History," written in the spring of 1940, which is emblematic
of the manner in which he interpreted history.
I quote:
"IX
My wing is ready for flight, I would like to turn back. If I stayed timeless time, I would have little luck."----Gerherd Scholem, ‘Gruss vom Angelus’*
A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an
angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly
contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we
perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling
wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay,
awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a
violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly
propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of
debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."
The "Angel of
History" just described seems battered by powerful forces beyond its
control. The one who pictures the angel,
i.e., Benjamin says of the true picture of the past and its movement: "The true picture of the past flits
by. The past can be seized only as an
image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never
seen again. . . . For every image of the past that is not recognized by the
present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably"
(ILL 255). He further stated, "one
reason Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents
treated it as a historical norm" (ILL 257). He found this view of history untenable. For Benjamin there are "images of the
past" that need to be "recognized by the present as one of its own
concerns." He would disagree with
the victors as to which "images of the past" should be recognized by
the present as its concerns. Present recognition
vs. irretrievable disappearance, for Benjamin, would likely be evaluated on the
basis of historical materialism.
A bit of a
segue to Shakespeare and allegory in his plays.
I took a course on Revenge Tragedies at Drake University recently. In studying Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus we read an essay in which the authors, Di Pietro and
Grady, take up Benjamin's theory of allegory in interpreting the play. You may
recall Titus Andronicus is set during the latter days of the Roman Empire. Di Pietro and Grady refer to the
"explicit analogies between the classical past of the Roman Empire the
play represents and an Elizabethan present of Shakespeare and how these
analogies exemplify Benjamin's theory of allegory"(52). Benjamin believed allegories are "in the
realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things" (51) and that
from these ruins a new art can be born in a different age. Shakespeare expressed through the
anachronistic character and actions of Titus Andronicus the truth of human
existence that spoke to Elizabethan audiences. This use of his theory of
allegory demonstrates the posthumous influence of Benjamin as well as his
intellectual versatility. As Hannah
Arendt said he is one of the unclassifiable ones.
Now to move
from the allegory of Shakespearean Theater to the concept of the work of art we
have another of Benjamin's essays titled, "The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction." This 1936
essay by Benjamin has become a fixture in the canon of English Literature and is
included in most Literary Theory courses taught in English departments. Benjamin
states, "Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in
one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place
where it happens to be" (ILL 220).
This is what he defines as the work of art's "aura." Benjamin
then says, "that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is
the aura of a work of art" (ILL 221).
The aura which had originally been in the service of ritual, either in
the form of magic or religion, bestowed the work of art with authenticity in a
domain of tradition. It is an oxymoron
to call a mechanically reproduced work of art authentic. Benjamin states "the instant the
criterion of authenticity ceased to be applicable to artistic production, it
begins to be based on another practice----politics" (ILL 224). Fascism was the political system gaining
power when Benjamin wrote this essay and it was his belief that Fascists would appropriate
and employ "art reproductions," to mollify and control the masses. He
referred to this practice as, "the violation of the masses, whom Fascism,
with its Fuhrer cult, forces to their
knees" (241). Coetzee states,
"Benjamin's keenest insights into Fascism, the enemy that deprived him of
a home and a career and ultimately killed him, are into the means it used to
sell itself to the German people: by turning itself into theatre" (47). Benjamin believed this propagandistic use of
reproduced art as theatre was the fundamental nature of Fascism and that it
inevitably culminated in war. Since the
essay was written in 1936 it conclusion of inevitable war, while accurate, was
a fait accompli.
We now return to Benjamin's journey. Lisa Fittko tells the story of Benjamin's
"new manuscript," in her book that I have already mentioned. This is
the manuscript Benjamin was working on at his death. She and Benjamin were at Banyuls where the walk
to Port-Bou was to begin. Banyuls is
near Port-Vendres where Fittko
lived.
Fittko says, "I saw that Benjamin
carried a briefcase, . . . It appeared
to be heavy, and I asked if I could help him with it."
"It contains my new
manuscript," he explained to me.
"But why have you brought it
along on this scouting trip?"
"Do you know, this briefcase is
most important to me," he said. I
dare not lose it. The manuscript must be saved. It is more important than I am, more
important than myself" (Fittko 106).
On the grueling walk through the
Pyrenees Fittko and others in the party carried the briefcase to help Benjamin. Years later Fittko was asked if she and
Benjamin discussed the content of the manuscript, and, she said, "I was
busy rescuing some human beings from the Nazis, and here I was with this odd
character, Old Benjamin, who under no circumstances would let himself be parted
from his ballast, the black leather briefcase" (Fittko 110).
It was a hard, demanding trip, albeit
a short distance, through the Pyrenees. Fittko
told of her excitement on reaching the peak of the mountain, "I had gone
on ahead, and I stopped to look around.
The spectacular scene appeared so unexpectedly that for a moment I
thought I was seeing a mirage. Far
below, where we had come from, the deep-blue Mediterranean was visible; on the
other side, in front of us, steep cliffs fell away to a glass sheet of
transparent turquoise---a second ocean?
Yes, of course, it was the Spanish coast. . . . I gasped for breath---I
had never seen such beauty before" (111).
Let us look briefly an image of Port Bou.
After a moment of reflection on the
summit, Fittko instructed the members of the party: "There below us is
Port Bou! The town has a Spanish border
station where you must register. . . . Go directly to the border post and show
them your papers, the travel documents, the Spanish and Portuguese transit
visas. As soon as you have your entry
stamp, take the first train to Lisbon. Now I have to go. Auf
wiederschen. . . . In two hours I
was back in Banyuls. Ten hours up, two
hours down. Then when I was back in
Banyuls, I thought: Old Benjamin and his
manuscript are safe now, safe on the other side of the mountains. . . . A few
days later the news came: Walter
Benjamin was dead. The night after his
arrival in Port-Bou, he had taken his own life. . . . The manuscript could not
be found. Only the black leather
briefcase was entered in the death register back then, with the notation: 'with
papers of unknown content.'" (115),
Benjamin's close friend Gershom
Scholem believed the mysterious manuscript was the work Benjamin called The Arcades
Project and his belief was later validated.
J. M. Coetzee referring to the manuscript of The Arcades Project says,
"Of course the story has a happy twist.
A copy of the Arcades manuscript left behind in Paris had been secreted
in the Bibliotheque Nationale by Benjamin's friend Georges Bataille. The
manuscript was recovered after the war and it was published in 1982 and, in
1999, it was translated into English.
What was this mysterious manuscript entitled The Arcades Project, which Benjamin worked on for thirteen years
before his death and which preoccupied his thoughts during the last moments of
his life? The underlying idea originates
with the physical structure of "The Arcades" in nineteenth-century Paris.
The glass-roofed rows of shops, what we might now call a shopping mall,
are shown in the following image.
Benjamin, himself, took a passage from the Illustrated
Guide to Paris, a German
publication of 1852, to describe the Arcades:
"These
arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled
corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined
together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of the corridors, which get
their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a
city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they
need".
Benjamin had
a personal affinity for Paris and to the
Arcades. Hannah Arendt, believed that when
he traveled to Paris in 1913, after a few days, he felt more at home in the
streets of Paris than in the streets of Berlin, where he had lived for
years. Benjamin, a stranger to Paris,
saw the passageways of the Arcades as "inside and outside at the same
time" so he could inhabit the city as he inhabited his own apartment (ILL
21). The Arcades became for him a symbol
of Paris.
The structure of Benjamin's
work, The Arcades Project is similar
to the physical structure of the Paris Arcades.
Most of the book consists of thirty-six of what he called
"Convolutes," which, in German spelled with a "K," means
"dossier." Each Convolute is a
section of the work. Each of the
thirty-six sections has a title, with a theme inherent in the title, with titles,
for example, "Fashion" "Idleness" "The Streets of
Paris" "Marx" etc. Each
Convolute or thematic section consists of quotations, observations, and
insights, i.e. commentary. For example
Benjamin's comment on the Literary Montage I mentioned a moment ago, that
emphasized "merely showing," is in a section titled, "On the
Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress," complete with a coding scheme
for each entry in the section. The
entries are, in fact , the commentary of Benjamin. Leon Wieseltier, who wrote the preface to a
collection of essays by Benjamin, says, "The Paris Arcades Project is,
among other things, a milestone in the history of commentary, an astounding
renovation of an old point of regard for a new reality. . . . Benjamin
demonstrated by example that commentary may be an instrument of originality. .
. . in Benjamin's view, interpretation does not so much discover meaning as
release it, and loose it upon the world so as to liberate it" (ILL ix).
Here is a copy of The Arcades
Project from the Drake University
library. I assume the manuscript
Benjamin carried would have been heavier than this published work, so it is
little wonder that the briefcase would have been heavy to carry.
Benjamin's personal connection
to the Paris Arcades has a hint of romance which may seem in contrast to the
Marxist ideology he believed was operating in the shops along the
passageways. Commodities were sold in
these shops, which is the source of the Marxist concept of commodity fetishism. By this theory the commodity, a material
object, becomes venerated for its exchange value in the market place. Relationships among people are economic and,
not social when goods are produced to be exchanged, as opposed to being used by
the producer. The subjective experience of "use"
is replaced by the objective experience of "exchange." The Paris Arcades
featured a large stock of commodities offered for exchange. This marketplace for Benjamin, signified the
replacement of a compassionate society with one obsessed by material goods. His work, The
Arcades Project, is dedicated to
exposing the true nature of such a market.
While this explanation clears up the mystery of the missing manuscript, the
subject matter of the manuscript may seem mysterious. However, this work embodies the literary
montage, which, many, including Coetzee, believe, is the mechanism that reveals Benjamin's
greatest originality. You will recall
Coetzee compared Benjamin's literary montage to Goethe's ideal of arranging facts
in a pattern that will reveal its own theory.
Benjamin identified with both Kafka and Proust, which may offer clues about
how he saw himself. He wrote two essays
on Franz Kafka; "Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death"
and "Some Reflections on Kafka."
He missed meeting Kafka on a visit to Prague, and forever regretted it. Benjamin reflects on the attribute of "solitariness"
as he compares Kafka and Klee: "Klee's work in painting is just as
essentially solitary as Kafka's work is in literature." (ILL 143). Benjamin in his essay "The Image of
Proust" cites this quotation about Proust that most surely applies to Benjamin
as well: and I quote, "Marcel Proust died of the same inexperience which
permitted him to write his works. He
died of ignorance of the world and because he did not know how to change the
conditions of his life which had begun to crush him. He died because he did not know how to make a
fire or open a window" (ILL 213).
The qualities of solitariness and naiveté were present in Benjamin's essential
being and played a role in his penetrating power of observation in which the
familiar is ever cast in a strange perspective. Wieseltier describes this perspective, "The
strangeness that you encounter upon reading Benjamin for the first time is
almost a cognitive strangeness: he makes everything no longer familiar. His
incompetence at ordinary living allowed him to see it more sharply" (ILL
viii).
Several
caveats: I have discussed little about Benjamin's biography, which should be studied
to gain an appreciation of Benjamin, the man.
The other caveat relates to his position as a Marxist. Even though in two of his works we have
discussed commodity fetishism, which is Marxist, his engagement with Marxism
seems to me, forced. I tend to agree
with Wieseltier when he states, "His infatuation with Marxism, the most
embarrassing episode of his mental
wanderings, the only time that he acquiesced in the regimentation of his own
mind, may be understood as merely the most desperate of his exercises in arcane
reading" (ILL viii). Benjamin, certainly
believed in Marxism, or, at least, many of its key tenets, but his originality
seems to be missing on this subject.
Now to
close. Even mystery shrouds Benjamin's
dead body and exactly where his bones are buried. When Hannah Arendt went to Port Bou a few
months after Benjamin's death she found nothing, i.e., no grave and no
marker. Michael Taussig in his book, Walter Benjamin's Grave, published in
2010, explains what is known about Benjamin's burial and its site. Frau Gurland had provided funds sufficient for
his burial in a niche for a period of five years. And although no one knows
with certainty it is likely that Benjamin was buried in a niche in the Catholic
cemetery for five years under the name Benjamin Walter, with the family name
and the given name reversed. Upon his
death the death certificate---number 25---dated September 27, 1940 records the
name of Benjamin Walter, forty-eight years old, of Berlin, Germany. There is irony for a person who has committed
suicide to be buried in a Catholic cemetery. At the end of the five years it is likely the
bones were disinterred and placed in a common grave. This is the monument to Benjamin's memory, at
Port Bou:
I have summarized, briefly, just a few of Benjamin's works. These works
may pique your interest and then again they may not. Again we will gaze at Paul Klee's Angelus
Novus, which Benjamin adopted as his "Angel of History."
In your own Philosophy of History you may want to decide whether you
think Benjamin is worthy of being remembered, and, if so, how. His words were prescient when he said, "A chronicler who recites
events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance
with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as
lost for history" (ILL 254).
Certainly, Benjamin has not been lost for history. At first, it was his friends, who were also
scholars, who kept his works and memory alive.
But along the way there was an inflection point at which both his works
and his personal story took on an independent existence that has been both renovating
and refreshing. It may be the Angel of
History who has guarded Benjamin's legacy, and, has done what Benjamin describes
in these words, "The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make
whole what has been smashed" (ILL 257).
Benjamin is an exemplar of being smashed and being made whole again. Hopefully, the Angel of History will keep
Benjamin's legacy alive in the future.
