“Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver,” Reviewed

Shortly aft Germany invaded Poland, connected September 1, 1939, France declared each German nationals surviving wrong its borders and betwixt the ages of seventeen and 50 to beryllium force aliens. Along with thousands of different men—including Austrians, Hungarians, Czechs, and Slovaks—the Berlin-born philosopher and literate professional Walter Benjamin, past forty-seven years old, was interned successful the Stade de Colombes, an arena extracurricular of Paris that had served arsenic the main stadium for the 1924 Summer Olympics.

Conditions were miserable. The prisoners’ valuables were seized arsenic they entered, and they were fixed thing to devour but breadstuff and tins of pork-liver pâté. Rain soaked done the straw connected which they slept. Large unfastened barrels served arsenic toilets. “Since determination was astir nary h2o to lavation with,” Hans Sahl, a person and fellow-prisoner of Benjamin’s, would accidental later, “the pâté clung to our faces and hairsbreadth and penetrated each pore.”

Ten days passed earlier the men were transferred to a situation campy successful cardinal France, wherever Benjamin gave lectures successful speech for Gauloises cigarettes. In a lean-to connected the level adjacent to a staircase, helium held editorial meetings for the intent of establishing a literate journal. For Sahl, Benjamin’s stubborn committedness to the beingness of the mind—his content that humanism could antagonistic crimes against humanity—was its ain benignant of tragedy. “Never,” Sahl wrote, “have I been truthful conscious of the achy nonaccomplishment of a method, which successful sympathetic unworldly innocence thought it imaginable to ‘change’ reality, but which remained lone an interpretation, limping behind.”

When Benjamin was released, 2 and a fractional months later, helium went backmost to Paris, renewed his reader’s paper for the Bibliothèque Nationale, and brushed disconnected friends who urged him to flight to the United States; helium insisted that helium had to decorativeness his 2nd book, connected the French writer Charles Baudelaire. (It would “not endure being neglected,” helium explained, “even to guarantee the endurance of its author.”) After France fell to Hitler, successful June, 1940, helium made a hopeless effort to fly to Portugal, crossing the Pyrenees connected ft contempt terrible asthma and a anemic heart. He arrived successful Spain lone to find that helium could not participate without an exit visa from the French government. That night, nether apprehension successful a section hotel, helium took an overdose of morphine tablets and died the adjacent morning.

Given the circumstances of his death, Benjamin, who was raised successful a mostly secular Jewish household, mightiness easy beryllium made a awesome of “the agelong and troubled past of German Jewry,” Peter E. Gordon writes—a cautionary communicative of failed assimilation and bookish naïveté. But, successful “Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver,” a short, serene measurement published successful Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, Gordon avoids treating his taxable successful specified allegorical terms, successful portion due to the fact that Benjamin ever resisted conscription into a communicative larger than his own. Despite being a Marxist, helium ne'er joined the Communist Party, and, though helium described himself arsenic a idiosyncratic who “sees Jewish values everyplace and works for them,” helium consistently rejected governmental Zionism and its nation-building ambitions. He was, arsenic Hannah Arendt enactment it successful this magazine, successful 1968, stubbornly “sui generis.”

The Benjamin who emerges from Gordon’s publication is simply a sympathetic but often aggravating figure, the quintessential absent-minded prof who fumbles his romances, ne'er works a existent job, and, though helium intelligibly recognizes the existential menace of Nazism, buries his caput successful his books arsenic everything falls down astir him. For each his evident unworldliness, helium was a stunningly prescient theorist of fashionable media, not to notation a prose stylist of exceptional quality and vigor, whose sanction has attained a cult presumption connected assemblage campuses. (When I was successful postgraduate school, a prof erstwhile asked a radical of america doctoral students if we knew we were allowed to work things not written by Walter Benjamin.) Though helium remained obscure successful his ain lifetime, those who knew his enactment recognized its power. On proceeding of Benjamin’s death, Bertolt Brecht reportedly declared it the archetypal existent nonaccomplishment Hitler had dealt to German literature.

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was calved connected July 15, 1892, the eldest of 3 children successful an upper- middle-class family. His father, an art-and-antiques dealer, came from a agelong enactment of Rhineland merchants; his relatives connected his mother’s broadside had made their wealth successful agriculture. Their location was successful Berlin’s Westend, not acold from the Tiergarten, the ample parkland that houses the Berlin Zoo. A frail child, Benjamin was predisposed toward a definite passivity. In his memoir, “Berlin Childhood Around 1900,” helium suggests that his chronic sick wellness was “the root of thing successful maine that others telephone patience but successful information does not lucifer a virtuousness astatine all: the inclination to spot everything I attraction astir attack maine from a distance, the mode the hours approached my sickbed.” (Later, this inclination would marque women seem, to the big Benjamin, “all the much beauteous the longer and much confidently” helium had to hold for them.)

Like galore German teen-agers successful the years earlier the First World War, Benjamin was influenced by a younker question referred to arsenic the Wandervogel, oregon “wandering bird.” As Gordon says, the Wandervogel was not a azygous enactment but, rather, “a wide spectrum of clubs and societies that flourished during the archetypal decades of the twentieth century, uniting some young men and women with the committedness of taste and spiritual renewal.” It was done the question that Benjamin made immoderate of his closest friends, including Gershom (né Gerhard) Scholem, who archetypal spotted Benjamin debating members of the Jung Juda, a Zionist younker group, astatine a gathering astatine a café successful 1913. Scholem noted Benjamin’s awkwardness—“He delivered his perfectly letter-perfect code with large strength to an precocious country of the ceiling, astatine which helium stared the full time”—but besides his brilliance. The code was truthful impressive, Scholem admitted, that “I bash not callback the rejoinder made by the Zionists.”

Scholem, astatine the clip a pupil of doctrine and mathematics, would go the archetypal prof of Jewish mysticism astatine the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His relationship with Benjamin forms the done enactment of Gordon’s biography, with bully reason: their published correspondence comes to much than 3 100 pages. Scholem was 1 of Benjamin’s astir important interlocutors, a thinker who, successful his ain words, “walked the good enactment betwixt religion and nihilism.” It was from Scholem that Benjamin absorbed the messianic strain that characterizes his governmental writing, fraught arsenic it is with themes of apocalypse, divine violence, and unexpected but inevitable redemption. In the last paragraph of “Theses connected the Philosophy of History”—an effort from 1940 that quotes Scholem’s gloss connected Paul Klee’s coating “Angelus Novus”—Benjamin observes that since Jews are prohibited by the Torah from fortune-telling and divination, they person a uniquely urgent narration to the present. “Every 2nd of time,” helium writes, is “the strait gross done which the Messiah mightiness enter.”

As adjacent arsenic they were, Scholem and Benjamin remained astatine likelihood implicit Scholem’s enthusiasm for the Zionist project. After Scholem immigrated to Palestine, successful the nineteen-twenties, helium spent the adjacent decennary and a fractional urging Benjamin to travel suit, insisting that his person effort what helium called “a existent confrontation with Judaism.” Benjamin would entertain these plans astatine champion vaguely, declaring his readiness to question and past uncovering reasons to enactment successful Europe. Gordon chalks up this foot-dragging to Benjamin’s dislike for programmatic thought, and to a corresponding tendency for European Jews to follow an internationalist predisposition that mightiness diffuse their contributions to thought and civilization astir the globe. But Benjamin besides had superior objections to Zionism’s “racial ideology,” which, helium told Scholem, resembled “vulgar anti-Semitism” successful its insistence that “the gentile’s hatred of the Jew is physiologically substantiated connected the ground of instinct and race”—that Jewishness, successful different words, is simply a biologic class superseding each kinds of nationalist oregon governmental belonging.

Benjamin’s ain intelligence disposition was expansively humanist portion being rooted successful the literate traditions of Germany and France. Between 1912 and 1919, helium studied lit and doctrine astatine the Universities of Freiburg, Berlin, and Munich earlier earning his Ph.D. from the University of Bern, successful Switzerland. His doctoral dissertation was titled “The Concept of Criticism successful German Romanticism,” and his postdoctoral thesis, a passport to an world career, was connected German Baroque theatre. “The Origin of German Tragic Drama” was presented to the University of Frankfurt successful 1925 and rejected by its module that aforesaid year, connected the crushed that it was incomprehensible (more precisely, Benjamin was told to retreat his submission). Shut retired of a teaching occupation and chopped disconnected financially by his father, helium recovered enactment translating Proust and began penning abbreviated pieces for journals and magazines. During the adjacent decade, helium would travel to exemplify a caller benignant of criticism, aimed astatine an assemblage of literate laypeople and marked by the exertion of left-wing governmental thought to the investigation of some precocious and fashionable culture, from Marx to Mickey Mouse.

Before the precocious eighteenth century, fewer would deliberation to constitute an effort unpacking the hidden meaning of a caller oregon painting, fto unsocial suggest that works of creation mightiness person ideological agendas oregon biases. Art was bully if it was good executed and managed to entertain without being coarse, immoral, oregon sacrilegious. As Benjamin argued successful his dissertation, it was writers specified arsenic Friedrich Schlegel who, astir 1800, archetypal began to see aesthetic objects arsenic capacious and mercurial entities, whose existent contents could beryllium revealed lone done sustained scrutiny. For them, an creation enactment became a “medium of reflection,” nary longer simply a reflector of the satellite but a instrumentality for knowing things astir history, society, and politics, arsenic good arsenic astir much acquainted matters of the quality heart. As for criticism, it was some a means to observe what the creation entity had to accidental and an hold of the entity itself.

“It was a pleasant astonishment to find retired that each blistery dogs spell to Heaven.”

Cartoon by Lonnie Millsap

Although helium aspired to beryllium “the foremost professional of German literature,” Benjamin’s existent endowment was for grasping the richness and complexity of vernacular culture, not conscionable the caller media of photography and movie but besides the ephemera of user society. In 1928, helium published “One-Way Street,” a postulation of aphoristic meditations connected objects specified arsenic gloves (“All disgust is primitively disgust astatine touching”) and numbered lists of epigrams (“I. Books and harlots tin beryllium taken to bed. II. Books and harlots interweave time”). Elliptical and fragmentary, “One-Way Street” is, Benjamin said, an homage to the “inconspicuous forms” of municipality beingness taken successful by the flâneur, the antheral who strolls aimlessly astir a metropolis covered with “leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards,” whose pithy, highly evocative, and sometimes surreal benignant Benjamin borrowed arsenic his own.

From 1927 to 1933, helium worked arsenic a vigor broadcaster, penning and signaling programs for stations successful Berlin and Frankfurt; successful a small little than six years, helium produced astir ninety episodes connected topics including robber bandits successful aged Germany, E. T. A. Hoffmann, children’s toys, the Bastille, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, postage-stamp fraud, and dogs. No audio recordings survive, but transcripts uncover a playful sensibility and a fondness for sensuous detail, arsenic when, successful an occurrence connected the marketplace halls of Berlin, Benjamin describes their damp chromatic floors feeling “like the acold and slippery bottommost of the ocean.” Although galore of these broadcasts were aimed astatine children, it didn’t halt Benjamin from lacing them with governmental content. In an occurrence connected the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, helium compared the flood waters to those “raging elements of quality cruelty” represented by the Ku Klux Klan.

That occurrence aired connected March 23, 1932. Almost precisely 1 twelvemonth later, forty-six days aft Hitler seized power, Benjamin fled Germany for Paris, and travelled connected to Ibiza, past an obscure and impoverished island, wherever helium spent the adjacent respective months. Paris, helium wrote to Scholem, had go inhospitable. “The Parisians are saying ‘les émigrés sont pires que les boches’ ”—the immigrants are worse than the Krauts—“and that should springiness you an close thought of the benignant of nine that awaits 1 there.”

Benjamin nevertheless did instrumentality to Paris, successful October, 1933. There, helium became recently adjacent to Brecht, whom helium had met years earlier successful Berlin. It was nether Brecht’s influence, Gordon suggests, that Benjamin recovered himself drawn decisively toward Marxist thought, and to the content that “in a nine riven by people conflict, creation indispensable beryllium enlisted successful the conflict for liberation.” The impervious is Benjamin’s best-known portion of writing, an effort called “The Work of Art successful the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (or, much pontifically, “The Work of Art successful the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” a person translation of its German title). Drafted astir 1935 and revised respective times earlier Benjamin’s death, it is simply a monumental and dizzyingly prophetic investigation of the destiny of creation erstwhile it has go an infinitely replicable mass-media product.

Before the advent of photography, if you wanted to spot the “Mona Lisa,” you had to spell to a museum. Now the coating is everywhere—or, rather, its representation is. We find the “Mona Lisa” successful books, and connected posters, T-shirts, and iPhone cases, and we tin spot it astatine immoderate clip by searching connected Google. These copies carnivore nary hint of what Benjamin presumption the “aura” of the original, a quasi-mystical prime that comes from being the lone “Mona Lisa” successful the world. Meanwhile, arsenic anyone who’s pushed done crowds of tourists to drawback a glimpse of the existent “Mona Lisa” volition know, the coating itself seems to person mislaid overmuch of what indispensable erstwhile person been its overwhelming aesthetic power. We person simply seen it excessively galore times.

What astir film, an creation signifier that is thing but reproduction, a “series of mountable episodes” pieced unneurotic from a proviso of interchangeable images? Unlike the “Mona Lisa,” a movie exists wherever it’s projected; it is not an entity but a travelling circus of shadows and light. Film, Benjamin argues, has nary aura astatine all, and truthful represents a full “liquidation” of accepted notions of taste value. As it dismantles aged ideas astir what creation is, it creates a caller benignant of spectator: idiosyncratic who encounters the enactment of creation collectively, successful a theatre with others, and who pays a much slack, casual attraction to it than helium would to a Renaissance painting.

We ticker movies successful a authorities of distraction: spacing out, getting up to usage the bathroom, and, now, checking our phones. For Benjamin, this dreamy, inattentive cognition is afloat of governmental promise, for if we tin beryllium emancipated from a servile, awestruck narration to works of art, possibly we tin besides beryllium emancipated from a servile, awestruck narration to the state. It was a daring, possibly adjacent difficult, decision for Benjamin, an inveterate collector of aged and precious objects, to draw—that believing successful advancement meant submitting to the demolition of the past, of its cherished relics and ways of seeing. And yet, arsenic helium saw it, being a leftist each but required this paradoxical narration to humanities preservation and change. The alternate to the near making usage of the mean was unthinkable: the inherent populism of film, with its accessibility, affordability, and mainstream appeal, would pb to its co- enactment by fascists. There were signs, arsenic Benjamin was writing, that this had already occurred. The aforesaid twelvemonth that helium began his essay, Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will” premièred astatine Berlin’s Ufa-Palast americium Zoo, a movie theatre not acold from Benjamin’s puerility home.

Fascism excels astatine turning fashionable civilization to its ain ends, and astatine getting humanity to presumption “its ain demolition arsenic an aesthetic pleasance of the archetypal order.” The response, Benjamin says, is to politicize art—to marque enactment that trains its assemblage to deliberation critically astir societal life. This requires processing aesthetic techniques susceptible of translating analyzable ideas into images, sounds, gestures, and communicative and poetic forms; it besides requires making creation that draws attraction to its ain artifice, truthful that we are ever conscious of the existent satellite outside. “One-Way Street,” with its clipped, cryptic, strangely juxtaposed chapters, is 1 of Benjamin’s aboriginal attempts to follow montage—the signifier of editing disparate movie images into a azygous sequence—as a literate style. His unfinished masterpiece, “Das Passagen-Werk,” or, successful English, “The Arcades Project,” was meant to cleanable the method.

“The Arcades Project,” a lavish, not terribly well-organized postulation of notes, quotations, idiosyncratic reflections, and theoretical musings compiled implicit thirteen years, is Benjamin’s dossier of probe into the buying arcades of Paris, built chiefly successful the archetypal portion of the nineteenth period and mostly demolished during Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s extremist restructuring of the city, betwixt 1853 and 1870. Benjamin was fascinated by these covered passages, remnants of the aboriginal days of modern commodity culture, erstwhile the arcade felt similar “a satellite successful miniature, successful which customers volition find everything they need.” In the obsolete advertisements that utilized to enactment the walls of the arcades, successful their promises of beauteous clothes, cleanable hair, magical toys, state-of-the-art buildings, technological innovations, holidays successful exotic locales, and medicines to cure everything, helium saw traces of the “collective imagination energy” of society, of our quality longing for a utopian aboriginal lying conscionable beyond this hard present. The montage of prose fragments that makes up “The Arcades Project” is designed to conjure an representation of that future, to beryllium the signifier “wherein what has been”—in German das Gewesene, oregon “that which erstwhile was”—“comes unneurotic successful a flash with the present [das Jetzt] to signifier a constellation” showing what mightiness yet be. It’s not wholly wide however this was meant to happen, but the sheer amplitude of the manuscript, which comes to much than a 1000 pages, implies that Benjamin’s insistent unreserved of words and thoughts mightiness propel america into a benignant of visionary state, overmuch similar the 1 helium entered erstwhile helium wandered the streets of Paris oregon pored implicit his collections of keepsakes.

When Benjamin walked implicit the Pyrenees, stumbling and wheezing, helium carried with him a ample briefcase said to incorporate a manuscript. There has agelong been speculation that the pages were a new, possibly much implicit mentation of “The Arcades Project,” but nary 1 knows for sure: the briefcase disappeared aft Benjamin’s death, and nary important enactment has ever been found. His companions, though, remembered it well. Lisa Fittko, who guided Benjamin to the Spanish border, aboriginal recalled that helium would nether nary circumstances “let himself beryllium parted from his ballast,” and so, “for amended oregon worse, we had to resistance that monstrosity implicit the mountains.” “It is much important than I am,” Benjamin told Fittko, “more important than myself.”

Arendt ruefully described Benjamin, her aged person from Berlin, arsenic having “a sleepwalker’s precision,” ever bumbling into occupation and misfortune. It was, she suggests, conscionable similar him to execute fame lone posthumously, erstwhile it would beryllium some “uncommercial and unprofitable.” It was besides similar him to embody the benignant of tragic idealism that would pb a person, physically anemic and connected the tally from a genocidal regime, to hazard his information and comfortableness for a manuscript. And yet, it is this precise operation of stubbornness and fragility, melancholy and valor that has turned Benjamin into a secular saint, enhancing his estimation nary little than his immense and beautifully heterogeneous assemblage of work, which is itself its ain Parisian arcade, bearing up with elegance nether ruin and despair.

“There is nary papers of civilization,” Benjamin wrote successful “Theses connected the Philosophy of History,” “which is not astatine the aforesaid clip a papers of barbarism.” Every masterpiece is portion of quality history, and determination has ne'er been a infinitesimal successful quality past erstwhile radical were not suffering terribly, needlessly. Benjamin knew this erstwhile helium refused to permission Paris without finishing his book, and helium knew it erstwhile helium carried his briefcase implicit the Pyrenees—when helium was excessively anemic to locomotion and had to beryllium dragged by his companions, who took turns holding the bag. He seemed to believe, each the same, that to wantonness his enactment meant giving successful to what fascism wanted for him: an beingness truthful devoid of worth and meaning that it would beryllium indistinguishable from death. He held connected to his briefcase not until it was excessively precocious but due to the fact that it was excessively late. When the barbarians are past the gate, determination is thing to bash but basal your ground. ♦