by Jay Parini
The talk finished, he did not even nod toward his audience (who clapped politely, some of them with real enthusiasm) but, improbably, left the room altogether. I somehow imagined there would be questions, but he walked straight up the central aisle, peering at the floor ahead through the gold rims of thick glasses. He gave the clear impression of a man who did not care what anyone thought about his speech—an attitude I grudgingly admired. Why answer all of these dolts? Moreover, there was something sublime, even otherworldly, about his self-absorption. One could easily imagine him as an old man drowsing over the Talmud, in some remote yeshiva.
I noticed in passing that his black shoes were highly polished—an attempt at conformity, perhaps—but he had smeared the wax onto his white socks, and the results were ludicrous; his tie was food-stained, and his shirt needed pressing. In all, he was short, thin-boned, extremely dark in complexion, with masses of wiry black hair that looked more like a fur hat than real hair. He walked with the sideways shuffle typical of myopics, his peripheral vision poor or nonexistent. In later years, when I saw him coming toward me in the distance, I often thought of Charlie Chaplin, and once or twice I called him Herr Chaplin to his face—a joke that seemed not to register.
My first personal encounter with Benjamin came two years later, when he was twenty-three and I seventeen. It was 1915, a year into the Great War, and a singularly hot and melancholy summer had consumed Berlin. The streets teemed with eager young soldiers who did not quite realize the devastation that lay ahead of them, although one sensed from all the wild merrymaking that many could feel death coming on, could even smell it rising in their nostrils. Army vehicles appeared in the streets, rattling down the broad vistas and beside the parks, some of them already scorched and pocked from battle; the Kaiser’s face blazoned from posters in shop windows. Flags multiplied and fluttered from every balcony in the city. I remember seeing a phalanx of equestrian warriors riding grandly through the streets—an absurdity in the age of machine guns and gas warfare, but typical of Germanic sentimentality. The myth of Teutonic invincibility would take decades to shatter.
I ignored the war as best I could. I was in the habit of attending lectures now and then, and one evening I chanced upon an address by a popular (and now deservedly forgotten) figure called Kurt Hiller, who had just published a book about the wisdom of boredom. His remarks went down very well with everyone but me. As I recall, he attempted to argue that history was complete nonsense, that we are born into one generation and this remains our reality. Whatever happened before us must be erased, forgotten. Since history cannot be fathomed or described, there is no point to worrying over it. And so on. A disgraceful performance.
I interrupted him rudely at one point, objecting to some particularly weak link in his argument and adopting, I fear, a pompous tone. Though a teenager yet, I had confidence in my own powers of intellect, and I did not suffer fools gladly. Benjamin, who was sitting in the row ahead of me, turned and smiled when he caught my eye. I believe I winked at him, involuntarily, then rued my peculiar gesture. What would he think of me?
As was the custom of this group, a discussion of Hiller’s lecture was held the next week in Charlottenburg in a student residence hall, and Benjamin—as I had dared to hope—was present. He wore a baggy suit with a waistcoat, and a gold watch chain draped in a semicircle across his belly, which bulged slightly: a hint of the portly middle-age that as yet lay sleeping in the cave of his youth. The seat beside him was empty, but I shifted for a while at the back of the room, wondering if I dared sit next to him. Several people came in, and my heart thumped: I wanted someone else to sit there, to relieve me of having to do so. But no one did. I steeled myself and sat down firmly beside him, nodding politely when he looked up to see who I was.
In the ten minutes or so before the discussion began, I tried several times to get up sufficient courage to speak to him. Werner, my brother, had put the fear of God into me about Benjamin, and I preferred not to make a fool of myself. Once the meeting got under way, however, I found myself speaking volubly, challenging nearly everyone who made a significant point. For his part, Benjamin said little, sitting beside me like a sphinx, his eyes fixed ahead of him. What he did say, however, contradicted me, though not explicitly. In retrospect, I can see the crude beginnings of his vexed posture toward history in his remarks that night, but these were sufficiently inchoate then; one could not have pinned him down, I suspect.
At one point I contradicted him sharply, and I felt weak and silly as I left the room, thinking I would never see him again. Already I had lost two friends, old schoolmates, in the war, and sometimes it seemed that everyone I knew would eventually be sucked into that whirling vortex, swallowed whole by the History that people like Kurt Hiller so readily mocked.
Life grew less comfortable at this time, even for people like my parents. Mysteriously, servants disappeared; meals became less bountiful, and certain foodstuffs disappeared from shops. Meat, for example, became almost too expensive to buy, and fruit became scarce. Veal, which had been a staple of our prewar diet, seemed to vanish. “The troops are eating well,” my father would say, with only a touch of irony.
One day, perhaps a fortnight after the discussion in Charlottenburg, I was in the catalog room of the university library, sitting at a long table with a lacquered top, when Benjamin suddenly appeared. His jacket was covered with a snowy lint of dandruff, and he leaned harshly to one side, as if the ship’s deck of the room had shifted in a great swell. He came right up to me, splay-footed, his face bobbing on his neck, and stopped within a foot of my face. He did not say a word as he surveyed my presence from shoe to scalp. Impassive myself, I tried to meet his gaze, my heart pounding. Then he turned and rushed from the room. Not a minute later, however, he was back. This time he strode right up to me, as if emboldened.
“I believe you are the gentleman who had much to say about history in your talk” he said. It was impossible to determine his tone. Was he accusing me of something? (Later, I would come to understand his peculiar way of speaking, which was curiously inward and indirect, as if the world were far too difficult to interpret up close.)
I confessed I was, indeed, the gentleman in question.
“In that case,” he said, “you must give me your address and telephone number. We should have a talk.”
I scribbled the details on a slip of paper, which he stuffed into the pocket of his jacket. I imagined it jostling there with laundry slips, tobacco crumbs, and random notes on the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Here was a man who did not compartmentalize like the rest of us, nor did he compromise with everyday life. His mind was ablaze with ideas, and their concrete embodiments in the world seemed only to puzzle him, to disrupt the pure serenity of mind. It would seem, as I came to know him, that the details of living actually hurt him; he did not want, could hardly stand, the necessary interruptions that human life entails.
Before taking his leave, he bowed with exaggerated courtesy. “Thank you very much, sir,” he said.
Not three days later a note arrived for me at home: “Dear Sir—I should like you to visit me this Thursday at around five-thirty.”
No sooner had I opened the note, however, than the telephone rang. It was Benjamin.
“I wonder, Herr Scholem, if you might come on Wednesday instead? Or perhaps Tuesday? Tuesday is perhaps a better day for me.”
“So I will come on Tuesday,” I said.
“No, I think Wednesday is better. Do you like Wednesday?”
“Wednesday has always been a particular favorite of mine, Herr Benjamin,” I said.
There was a gap as he tried to process my tone.
“Are you there, Herr Benjamin?” I asked.
“This line is not good,” he said. “Wartime conditions, I suppose.”
“I hear you quite well.”
“Ah, good! Very good. Is Wednesday all right, then?” He was now shou
ting into the phone, distorting the sound.
“Yes, I am free on Wednesday.”
“Marvelous. I will see you on Wednesday, if you’re quite certain.”
It was a maddening trait of his, this indecisiveness, which in his case was complicated by his extreme politeness. He hovered ceaselessly between this and that opinion or idea, terrified to put his money down. When it came to women, he was also hopeless in making decisions; no woman was ever quite right, unless she was living with somebody else or found him unattractive. In smaller ways, too, this lack of firmness arose only to confound him; in a restaurant, for example, he would order the fish, then call the waiter to change his mind several times; in the end, it was the fish he ate, all the while coveting whatever morsels appeared on the plates of others. Once I said, “All right, Walter, I shall switch plates with you. It ruins the meal for me to watch you stare at my food.” But even then, with the plates switched, he sighed, “I was right the first time around, wasn’t I? Yours is not so good.”
* * *
—
Benjamin lived at that time with his parents in the Grunewald section of Berlin, at 23 Delbrückstrasse, just around the corner from the broad, tree-lined Jagostrasse, near the famous park. A dark, oak-paneled elevator took one to their apartment on the top floor, where an elderly maid in a navy blue dress with a lace collar let one in. It was all quite proper, as one might expect of a wealthy household in the western section of Berlin in those days.
“We have been expecting you, Herr Scholem,” said the maid.
I was led to Benjamin’s room down a long corridor from which I could glimpse the opulence of the apartment itself. The 1870s (Grunderzeit) furniture cried out to the onlooker: “Be careful what you say in my presence!” In the main sitting room, the sofas were covered with a mauve velvet; the curtains were a thick silvery brocade. I noticed a particularly nice Aubusson tapestry hanging on one wall: a hunting scene with several rapacious Dutchmen attacking a hapless wolf. There were purple and red rugs on the floor, like islands of color in a sea of honeybrown wood. Burnt-orange flowers drooped from Chinese vases, redolently oppressive. It was all quite grand, though something of an haute bourgeois cliché.
The walls along the corridor boasted depressing landscapes in oil by minor Parisian and Bavarian artists; they had presumably been acquired by Benjamin’s father, Emil, who was rumored to have made a killing in the field of art. Indeed, my father had recently bought a painting at Lepke’s, the auction house on Koch Street that Emil ran, so I had heard a good deal about the elder Benjamin, who was also involved in the wine and building trades. “Herr Benjamin,” my father pronounced last night over dinner, “has a finger in every pie.” He liked very much that I should be friendly with the son of this respectable man of business.
“Ah, Scholem, it’s you!” Benjamin said, opening the door of his bedroom. “I am pleased to see you, Herr Scholem.”
A slightly younger fellow sat beside him, elegantly dressed in a brown suit, quite unlike Benjamin in appearance but unmistakably a brother; they had the same dark eyes and ever so vaguely hooked noses.
“Let me introduce Georg Benjamin, my brother,” he said.
I shook hands with Georg, who began to chatter about a party he attended the night before, a bash held in honor of friends soon to be sent to the front. There was much drinking and dancing, and the girls were loose. I pretended to listen, forcing the occasional grin. I could see that Georg’s performance displeased his older brother, who stared out the window with a serious frown.
The objects in the room held my attention, the way everything tumbled on itself. Old and new books lined every wall and formed precarious stacks in two corners. I happened to see Nattlau’s biography of Bakunin lying open on a narrow bed, its margins crammed with notes. I could just make out the word “nonsense!” in capital letters beside one paragraph and cringed. One always regrets these youthful ejaculations in later years. The Aufruf zum Sozialismus of Gustav Landauer lay on the floor, facedown—a second-rate but dangerous book pleading the case for socialism. A novel by Balzac could also be seen, open, near the table by his bed, although I could not read the title.
Benjamin seemed to ignore me while Georg blathered on. It was quite a surprise when, unexpectedly, he belted out, “Georg, please! You will drive us mad!”
Georg caught himself midsentence, as if hung up and dangling on barbed wire.
“You must not rattle on like this,” Benjamin added. “Herr Scholem has come here to discuss a lecture that we both attended.”
“I see,” he said. He took out a pipe and began to play with lighting it. “So, discuss.”
“It was very kind of you to invite me around,” I said, trying to shift the conversation into its proper channel.
“My dear Scholem, you must never apologize for yourself. It does not become you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sit down, please. We were going to talk about history, I believe. The Hiller lecture got us thinking, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about history—not any specific history, but the notion of the past, and the ways we try to represent it.”
I saw Georg wince. He was not used to thinking about these things, or thinking at all.
I was settled now in a large leather chair, the arms of which overwhelmed me. Benjamin sat opposite, cross-legged, on the bed. Georg stood in the corner, with his pipe, now disgorging blue rings into the air.
“You must explain why you reacted as you did to what Herr Hiller was saying.” Benjamin said. “I disliked it, too, but perhaps for different reasons…and not so intensely as you.”
“Only an idiot would believe that history is of no consequence,” I said. “The man has obviously been reading Nietzsche.”
“You dislike Nietzsche?”
“He is a dangerous influence. We Jews, you know, have a vested interest in history. People who forget their past may wish, perhaps unconsciously, to destroy their future. They have the stink of death about them. What they really hope is to destroy every trace that leads to their loathsome present.”
“Bravo!” cried Georg. “You have a wonderful manner of speaking, Herr Scholem. A real Demosthenes!”
Benjamin rolled a cigarette on his lap, ignoring his brother. “I am largely in agreement with your point of view,” he said, speaking very slowly. “You see, my work here, such as it is, concerns the nature of history, the historical process. There is no such thing as history, you see. It’s a grand fiction, a layering of points of view.” He paused for quite some time. “History is a kind of myth,” he added. “It’s a dream, perhaps even the dream of a dream. All very subjective—I suppose that is what I’m saying.”
“I cannot agree, Herr Benjamin,” I said.
“Nor I,” said Georg. “It was my worst subject in school. I nearly failed my exams last year because of history.”
“So what is history?” I asked Georg.
“It’s what has happened.”
Benjamin was smiling hugely, his crooked, tobacco-stained teeth like an ill-conceived fence around his gums. “So how would you describe the current war, Georg? What has really happened?”
“We have had to defend ourselves against a vicious enemy.”
“I see.”
“You make everything so complicated,” Georg added. “There is no need to dismantle every incident, to tear apart every text, limb from limb. Life is too short for that.”
“Some lives are shorter than they need be,” I said, although the implications of my remark appeared not to register.
Now Benjamin weighed in at some length, talking about what he called “the fragile text of history,” which he said “we revise over and over.” It was clear he’d read a good deal of Hegel and was fond of what he called dialectical thinking. Quite naturally, we moved on to discuss socialism, which was
in the air now and on the tip of every tongue in the more interesting cafés. I had myself been reading Fourier with some distaste.
“Socialism is simply jealousy,” said Georg. “Quite naturally, the poor would like what the rich possess. If they can’t get it any other way, they will legislate it into their pockets.”
I could not disagree. “You would detest my brother, Werner,” I said. “A rabid socialist, but he doesn’t think his ideas through. He’s something of a gadfly.” I went on to describe my own interest in anarchism, having recently read the Russian anarchist Kropotkin.
“Ah, Kropotkin,” Benjamin sighed. “A dear soul but no thinker. An enthusiast, really. It is the problem with most dialectical thinkers: They see too little at one time. The form of the argument controls its content.”
“Socialism is a kind of secular religion, is it not?”
One hates saying the obvious, but I don’t think Benjamin noticed. Because of his myopia, he was peculiarly unresponsive to the mood of anyone around him.
“You are a Jew, of course,” I said, “and, as such, you must see things from a certain angle. I do.”
“I am a Jew, I suppose. I do myself like to visit synagogues, don’t you? They are beautiful museums of a lost culture.”
It startled me to realize that here was a man afraid of his own heritage. Like most assimilated Jews, he preferred to keep the subject of Judaism at bay.
