by Jay Parini
“A Jew is by definition an outsider,” I said, “especially in Germany. Which is why Zionism seems to me a natural response to a specific historical circumstance.”
Georg Benjamin blundered in: “The Germans have been good to Jews. There are no real Germans anyway: The country is a recent invention, composed of many different races. The Jews make up one little piece of the large mosaic that is modern Germany.”
Benjamin nodded as if he agreed with him, although I later discovered one could not rely on these ordinary signals of human discourse. There was something oddly disjunctive about him; he did not telegraph his intentions, like most of us do. There was an invisible wall between himself and the real world, but it was solid; his friends were constantly rebuffed and stunned by its solidity and omnipresence.
“Socialism is at heart a messianic creed, however secular,” I continued. “This is perhaps too obvious to need stating. My own feeling is that spiritual feelings—a vision of justice—should arise from reading the Torah. I am, after all, a Jew.”
You would never know this, of course, if you merely observed my parents from a distance. Like Benjamin’s parents, they had lost touch with their roots; they were branches swaying in thin soil, ready to be toppled by a culture they adored but which despised and reviled them. Hindsight is perfect sight, but even then I could envision only too crisply the fate of Jews in Europe. The self-deception practiced by Jews everywhere around me was sickening, and I vowed to persuade Benjamin of the importance of Zionism before it was too late.
“In wartime, we are all Germans,” said Georg.
“A Jew should not fight in this war,” I insisted. “There is no good reason to support this fabricated nation with our lives. The Germans will never thank us. They will kill us, eventually.”
Georg seemed to scoff but said nothing.
“My brother is a simple patriot,” Benjamin said. “He actually believes that war will have a purifying effect on people.”
“Have you been called up?”
“Soon I shall be, as will you.” His eyes glittered with mischief. “Can you see me with a rifle in my hands?”
“You would shoot yourself in the foot,” Georg said, laughing. “If the enemy knew enough, they would beg Germany to enlist you, Walter.”
Benjamin himself chortled now, an odd laugh to which I grew accustomed in years to come. “It amuses me to hear you speak of ‘the enemy,’ Georg. The enemy!” His laughter grew shrill, even offensive.
“So you imagine we have no enemy?”
“I refuse to imagine nonsense. The politicians do that for us.”
Benjamin, in later years, was rarely so explicit. He simply withdrew from the world of everyday politics, retreating into himself: into a world of ideas, a heavenly conversation in which Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Heine, Baudelaire, Mendelssohn, and a dozen others sat in glory above the fray, on an alabaster cloud.
Georg left the room now, shaking his head.
That afternoon, Benjamin and I began to think of ways to avoid conscription. However different our views of history, we shared a belief in the disastrous nature of this particular war. If ever any conflict was pointless, this was it. What could Germany possibly hope to gain from it? How could one justify the millions of young men gassed, bayoneted, shredded by machine guns—or pushed beyond despair into nihilism by the absurdity of it all? This was a war without spoils, and without honor—a point that would grow even clearer in the years to come.
* * *
—
When I think of him, a peculiar, almost inexpressible pity overwhelms me. The death of Benjamin was, for me, the death of the European mind, the end of a way of life. If only he had come to Jerusalem, this final disaster might have been averted. But his stubbornness killed him, and his impossible vacillation. He waited too long for everything, my dear Walter. Far too long. It was perhaps inevitable that it should come to this: an unmarked grave in Port-Bou, and the wasted, sad years without him stretching before me like a desert.
WALTER BENJAMIN
A person listening to a story is in the company of the storyteller; even somebody reading a story aloud shares this companionship. The reader of a novel, however, is isolated, more so than any other reader. In this solitude, readers of novels seize upon their material more jealously than anyone else. They are ready to make it completely their own, to devour it, as it were. Indeed, they destroy and swallow up the material presented to them as a fire devours logs in a fireplace. The suspense that permeates a good novel is akin to the draft that fans the flame in a fireplace and enlivens its play.
Letters
Walter Benjamin to Dora Benjamin
Paris
9 June 1940
My Dearest Dora,
I sit, as usual, in the library, at the same table where I’ve sat for the past decade, working on the book. The book: Dare I call it so, these thousand pages that have become my life? I have been absorbed by these pages; they have soaked me up, blotted out my life.
I could have had a life, a “real” life, something other than this. A life with you and our dear son, my darling Stefan. Could have, should have, might have…I lose myself in the tenses.
What a ridiculous man you married, Dora. Not a man at all: a locus for meaning, however temporary. Words gather around me, shift through me. My apartment, as you know, is nothing but a room of books, of clippings from journals, of pages that swirl in the air like crisp October leaves caught in an updraft. Nietzsche insists that God is dead, by which he suggests that all forms of centralized or centralizing meaning have been called into question. You could say I am the embodiment of this death, this loss of determined meaning. I no longer believe in it myself, or wish for it nostalgically.
The Nazis are coming, bringing their own kind of determined meaning, their hatred of all ambiguity. They have gobbled up so much: Austria and Poland, Holland and Belgium. It gives me some relief that you and Stefan are safe in London. If I can, I will send the promised money soon. I have little at present: Teddy Adorno seems to have forgotten our arrangement, and the post contains no checks, rarely even a good word. I must not, however, complain about the Institute. They have made it possible for me to live by writing and research this past decade. Their stipend has allowed a meager living.
I wish I could place a few reviews and articles in the French papers, but this will not happen. I have had to sell everything, even the edition of Heine that I bought in Munich, with you, soon after we were married. Do you recall it, with the gold flowers splayed on a maroon buckram cover? We read the poems aloud to each other through much of the night, then made love by a wood fire, in the apartment overlooking the park that Ernst let us borrow while he was in Italy. You see, I remember these things. Does it surprise you?
You underestimate me, Dora, you really do. Just because I could not make my feelings plain to you, you assumed I did not have feelings. It was my fault, of course, for expressing so little. I never knew quite what to say.
My sister and I will stay here as long as we can. I cannot believe that Paris will fall to the Germans, no matter what the papers say. Everyone is so pessimistic. But in case I must go, I have been making arrangements for exit visas. I will go to Portugal, or perhaps to Casablanca. One can get to New York from Marseilles, so I’m told. It is difficult to verify anything.
I will visit you both in London when the war ends; it cannot last long, you know. Hitler is already overextended, pressing forward on too many fronts. There is considerable opposition among the people he wishes to colonize, as you may have heard. In France, for example, one rarely meets people sympathetic to the Nazis.
I realize that, because we have been living apart for so long, we are nearly strangers, but I would like to visit you again. Each time we meet, the spark between us seems to rekindle, does it not? And Dora, you must believe that I want very ba
dly to be a father to my son. A boy in his teenage years needs a father. You have said as much in your letters, and I agree with you.
Perhaps with cause, you do not trust me. Often I do not trust myself. I wander the blazing streets of Paris at night, and I see the giddy, terrified, motley crowds moving together—this mass of humanity—but I do not feel connected. I do not know how to acknowledge my part in their vast company.
Last night, in the theatre in Montmartre, they showed several of my favorite Chaplins. I do love the sweet small man, his wide-eyed wonder at the world, that hapless shuffle. I laughed and wept so hard: for you, for me, for all the comical, unhappy lives whirled around us like scraps of newspaper. The pages are torn and scattered, and the whole paper can never be reassembled.
Have you heard anything from Scholem? I often wish I had followed him to Palestine, and taken you and Stefan there as well. We might have found an apartment overlooking the Old City. Your father, I know, would have liked that. But here we are, with the Channel between us, and all borders closed. I would make the crossing if I could. I would come immediately.
Please give Stefan my love, and tell him to behave in ways that would make me proud. It is so important, you see, to choose the right path, and to follow it consistently. That I have failed to do so myself is of course of genuine pain to me, as you will understand.
I hope you can find it somewhere in your heart to forgive me, Dora. I have been unfaithful to you, but also to myself. Yet I can change. I can do so, now that the book is finished. If I may boast, I will say that it is good. If there is any reason for my brief residence on this planet, it’s in these pages.
Please write to me when you can. We are not leaving Paris soon, not if we can help it.
With much affection,
Walter
Gershom Scholem to Dora Benjamin
Jerusalem
15 September 1940
Dear Dora,
I seem to have lost track of Walter. Do you know his whereabouts? His last letter seemed to trail off in midsentence. I imagine if anyone knows where he might be, you do. He always loved you, as I’m sure you know.
It didn’t surprise me that you could not live together in peace. He is a difficult man, though a great one. Yes, I will use that improbable word: great. I do so in full awareness of his limitations. He happens to possess the most subtle mind of our generation. It is fair to say that he has never, not once, compromised this brilliance—something one can say about so few of us. His mind burns up whatever text or image comes before it. It dissolves meaning, then reconstitutes it, making it present to itself. Only the greatest critical thinkers can do this.
Had he been more disciplined (and, my dear, we all know his distracted manner), he might have walked the corridors of eternity with Plato and Moses Mendelssohn. He would still make a welcome guest at their table, would he not? Even if, as usual, he said almost nothing, they would find his aura—the gnomic stare and occasional wisecrack—interesting. And then, suddenly, the way his conversation will lift off vertically, move into strange, unearthly regions…
Has it really been two decades or more since our time together in Switzerland? We very nearly reached a point of perfect intellectual congress, as if the normal barriers of skin and skull did not inhibit the fluid transfer of ideas. Words somehow did not come between us, as they do now, hopelessly tainting clear thought and lucid expression. We seemed in those days to move beyond language, but through language. I still don’t know what happened, or how the enterprise collapsed on us. It was never the same again after that.
I loved him, Dora, as did you. But he could not love either of us fully—not in the way we loved him. He could not release some part of himself. Was it selfishness? I don’t think so (though you might well disagree). Something like the emotional equivalent of myopia. And yet, when he saw, he saw completely; he could read a person the way he did a text, entering that labyrinth boldly, going into the deepest recesses. I felt plumbed by him, interrogated and discovered.
But I fear for him now. He has stayed too long in Paris, Dora. The Nazis are winning this war. They may well consume Europe and destroy whatever we thought we meant by the term civilization. I swear, if they damage one hair on Walter’s head, I will curse them forever. He represents, in a curious way, everything they oppose. He is so open to everything: the contrarieties, the absurdities. He will face death, I know, with a rueful wince, then a dark chuckle that will boom through heaven.
If you hear of his whereabouts, write to me at once. I will try to contact him. Meanwhile, if you and Stefan are in need of anything, please do let me know.
With my regards,
Gerhard
Walter Benjamin to Asja Lacis
Paris
12 June 1940
My dearest Asja,
No word of you, not for two years. I have almost given up hope, but I write just in case what everyone says is wrong. The rumors are terrible, Asja. If there is any truth to them, you will never see these words, never know that I am thinking of you.
I did try to suggest that you leave the Soviet state to its own machinations. I will say nothing more on this matter. It is not my place to make judgments for other people. As you know, I have only admired your political constancy and idealism, so hugely greater than my own. I often recall that winter in Moscow, when I came because I loved you. I knew I could only be happy in your love, folded into your life. The idea of existing outside the glow of your being seemed unthinkable. You said it was nonsense, that I would certainly find someone else and be just as happy. But you were wrong. I have found no one. I have not found anything that resembles love in these fifteen or sixteen years.
I have been living with Dora, my sister. You have never met her. She is a peculiar woman, deeply inward, hugely bored by life. She has read nothing and has thought about nothing. In this, I suppose, she resembles most people one might encounter on the street. In a way, I find this easier than living with the other Dora, my former wife. She had indeed read everything and was full of ideas. Like you. Only we fought for every inch of intellectual ground, and my life became exhausting. If only we had never had a child…
Oh, Asja, what is the point? I keep writing and writing, hearing nothing and fearing the worst. Should I resign myself to your perpetual absence from my life? Should I put my pen in a drawer and shut it tight?
I will talk to you, darling, if only in prayer. If only to myself, whispering in the night, conjuring your presence as one summons the dead. There is some comfort there.
From the day we first met, on Capri, I have had no image dearer to me than your face. Sometimes it appears in the dark, glimmering above me, its candle-yellow glow and kindling stare. I talk to this vision, earnestly, but there is no answer, no counter-love, no response. I am alone, Asja. I know it. You often said I was the loneliest man you knew, and I protested. In this, you were correct. The loneliness only grows, I’m afraid. And the worse for lack of you.
Your own, always loving,
W. B.
WALTER BENJAMIN
Now I am on the last half-emptied case of books, unpacking my library in the quiet hours past midnight. Other thoughts fill me besides the ones I have mentioned—images more than thoughts, memories. I remember so vividly the cities where I found certain books: Riga, Naples, Munich, Danzig, Moscow, Florence, Basel, Paris. I recall Rosenthal’s sumptuous apartment in Munich, and the Danzig Stockturm where the late Hans Rhaue lived, and Süssengut’s musty book cellar in North Berlin. I recall the exact rooms where these books were stored, and my own unkempt rooms as a student in Munich. My apartment in Bern comes to mind, and my solitude on the Lake of Brienz. Finally, I recall my boyhood bedroom, where only four or five of the thousands of books piled up around me now once lived. Oh, the collector’s bliss! The bliss of a man of leisure!
2
Benjamin would not leave Paris, that much was clear. There was no point. First of all, the Germans would never make it so far; they would be stopped at the Belgian frontier. René Gautier, writing in Le Monde, had been quite specific about this. “Hitler’s army,” he wrote, only yesterday, “is inherently weak, in morale and physical strength.” He also noted that “Hitler is no fool, and will never push beyond the limits of obvious power.” Even in Germany itself, so he heard, the opposition was gaining ground each day.
He had been sitting alone by a bright window in the Café des Deux Magots for some hours, nursing a single demitasse of espresso. His last pack of cigarettes—a cheap Turkish brand called Salomé that he loathed anyway—was gone, and the prospects for buying another today were nil. The waiter, who had come to know his strange but courteous customer, had left a basket of rolls on the table, without charge, and all but one had been gratefully eaten. (Benjamin did not want to appear greedy, especially in the eyes of the supercilious maître d’, who stood in a black tie by the front entrance, as if vetting customers.)
The motley street life along the Saint Germain des Prés did not interest him as much as his open notebook. Even a chilling parade of army tanks seemingly in a hurry did not hold his attention; the war, in his mind, was still metaphorical. It was something Dora, his frightened sister, nagged him about every night. “We must leave Paris while the going is good,” she kept saying. “The going will never be good,” he would reply. In the course of nearly five decades on this benighted planet, the going for him had never been anything but difficult.
This morning, in the café, Benjamin hit upon the idea of diagramming his life, and his preferred spatial model was unquestionably the labyrinth. His pencil circumnavigated the page, swirling inward; his labyrinth soon began to look more like a reverse, impacted spiral. “Enough!” he shouted, to no one in particular, causing eyebrows to be raised around the room and attracting the waiter’s attention.
