A paper about Walter Benjamin delivered to the Prairie Club in October 2013

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.