August Poet: Walter Benjamin
Part 1 of our monthly feature on critic, mystic, translator WB (1892–1940).
“A man who dies at the age of thirty-five,” said Moritz Heimann once, “is at every point of his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five.” Nothing is more dubious than this sentence but for the sole reason that the tense is wrong. A man—so says the truth that was meant here—who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five. In other words, the statement that makes no sense for real life becomes indisputable for remembered life. The nature of the character in a novel cannot be presented any better than is done in this statement, which says that the “meaning” of his life is revealed only in his death. But the reader of a novel actually does look for human beings from whom he derives the “meaning of life.” Therefore he must, no matter what, know in advance that he will share their experience of death: if need be their figurative death—the end of the novel—but preferably their actual one. How do the characters make him understand that death is already waiting for them—a very definite death and at a very definite place? That is the question which feeds the reader’s consuming interest in the events of the novel.
—Walter Benjamin, from “The Storyteller”
I begin with the above quote because I was haunted especially by this sentence: “A man—so says the truth that was meant here—who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five.” It points to the tragic end of Walter Benjamin’s life in September 1940. He ended his life by overdosing on morphine tablets, certain Franco’s soldiers along the border would soon arrest and refer him to the Gestapo. Instead, the next morning, the fellow travelers and emigrants he was with were allowed passage into Spain.
Is it possible (desirable) to read Benjamin’s life forward, from the beginning, rather than backwards, from his momentous being suicided by fascism? To not only focus on tragic demise fleeing the Nazis? Benjamin’s “remembered life” not is all that is left, and if as unfinished works sometimes outshine his completed ones, it seems his death eclipses his life (I think of Hart Crane, who died by suicide in 1932 on the U.S.S. Orizaba after being attacked and beaten badly by sailors. I also think of Simone Weil who would only outlive him by three years, exiled in England.) Benjamin invested quite a lot of energy, meanwhile, into studying his childhood—reverently, critically, and experimentally.
One of the most important living critics and interpreters of Benjamin is, no doubt, Frederic Jameson. In an early essay from his first published book Marxism and Form (1972) until most recently The Benjamin Files (2020), Jameson has dedicated a sizable chunk of his capacious attentions to not just reading and interpreting this all-important predecessor, but embodying many of the same principles—extending as much as challenging them.
This is not about some pious theme or topic of History, or even the Past, as some kind of entity that’s in the parking lot doing push ups, ready to overtake and outmaneuver us like the Freudian unconscious. For Benjamin and Jameson the stakes are clear: revolution, liberation, theory-informed practice, materialist reality, and, for one of them—a mystical relationship to Eternity. Nostalgia is not necessarily snake oil, or naiveté, or Kierkegaardian distraction.
For example: James Baldwin studying his childhood in The Devil Finds Work through the Hollywood films and stars he grew up watching, and the white socialized woman mentor figure he had as a boy in Harlem. In this short, too-neglected text, Baldwin will—in proper Benjamin fashion—find the coordinates of not just his world and ensuing life, but its hidden sources: white supremacy, physical and spiritual wretchedness, as well as the ability to love. “To encounter oneself is to encounter the other: and this is love. If I know that my soul trembles, I know that yours does, too: and if I can respect this, both of us can live.”
Personally, I find Jameson’s brilliant synthesis too much short shrift on the messianic, theological, spiritualist side of WB. He tends to read Benjamin’s aesthetics obsessions, say his scrupulous study, devotion, translation of Proust as a passing phase.
Yet here’s something worth emphasizing in how Jameson handles Benjamin’s historical approach, and near fetish about technology: it’s all for shit if we think this or that invention “determines” its age as if in a vacuum. Nothing could be further from Marxist materialism without foregrounding class struggle. Here’s where special pleading comes in to “save” Benjamin’s recreation of his Berlin childhood from being too Proustian (i.e. bourgeois).
Something I am trying to ask myself all month as we look at Benjamin, at poems, texts, films and music of nostalgia, can nostalgia itself be redeemed? And if this strikes you as a semi-ridiculous question, even rhetorically, bear in mind that to our critic of focus, he thought redeeming the past was not about future generations, nor even the present one, but about all those lost and destroyed souls permanently behind us. Here’s a passage from Horkenheimer’s Dawn and Decline (1934) that Benjamin would gleam much from later for his own much more literal messianic visions:
When you are at the lowest ebb, exposed to an eternity of torment inflicted upon you by other human beings, you cherish, as a dream of deliverance, the idea that a being will come who will stand in the light and bring truth and justice for you. You do not even need this to happen in your lifetime, nor in the lifetime of those who are torturing you to death, but one day, whenever it comes, all will nonetheless be repaired . . . It is bitter to be misunderstood and to die in obscurity. It is to the honour of historical research that it projects light into that obscurity.
Benjamin’s biographers and many critics routinely claim nostalgia was “revolutionary” for his vision. And I agree. Though sometimes it also sounds desperate and anxious, as if to salvage his attentions from anything approaching the cul-de-sac of middle class subjectivity, etc. Yet what precisely one means by Revolution in terms of excavating the past is up for grabs. Benjamin absolutely refuted the idea of progress in history, politics, art as well as prophetic Marxism.
Three crucial texts help orient our sense of Benjamin’s own autobiographical exploits as a writer. The first was a more straightforward memoir called Berlin Chronicle that focused on people. The second, as well as its many subsequent revisions, would shift into montage and aphorism, and spend far more attention on objects and reveries. Let’s pause and look at the verbs in each of these opening sentences.
Berlin Chronicle (1932):
Now let me call back those who introduced me to the city.
Berlin Childhood around 1900 (1932):
The strip of light under the bedroom door in the evening, when the others were still up—wasn’t it the first signal of departure?
Berlin Childhood around 1900 (1938):
In 1932, when I was abroad, it began to be clear to me that I would soon have to bid a long, perhaps lasting farewell to the city of my birth.