by Jay Parini
I will write again, Hans. An underground post is just beginning, and I’m in touch with people who will smuggle this to you. If you’re alive, you’ll get it. If you are not alive, then I am not alive either, and so none of this matters.
With all my love to you, darling.
Lisa
WALTER BENJAMIN
History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the Eternal Now. Thus, to Robespierre, ancient Rome was a past infused with the time of the Now, which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome reincarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger’s leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands. The same leap into the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the Revolution.
4
Lighting a cigarette, Benjamin wondered when they would come for him, and how it would happen. He had heard chilling stories, about a man wakened in the night by a policeman, then led to a waiting van while his wife and children stood by. Another had been snatched from a restaurant, not a minute after his meal had arrived. He knew personally of a man who was seized while playing chess in a park at midday—whisked into a van without his belongings, the last moves in the game all left to his opponent.
Benjamin’s own health was so precarious that he wondered if he could survive a shock like that. His heart would probably stop dead on the spot if he were apprehended without warning. He would collapse into their military arms, an instant corpse, and they would have to waste a couple of good hours burying him, and it would serve them right.
The chairs in the reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale had been emptying over the past month. His own table was now like a mouth with missing teeth. A goodly number of scholarly Jews had made a home of this celestial room, with its vaulting domes; these faithful readers could be found in place most days, plowing through massive tomes on Roman history, aerodynamics, modern linguistics, whatever. Solomon Weisel, Joseph Wertheimer, Salman Polotsky, Jacob Spiegel, a dozen others. Benjamin knew them all well; they formed a silent family, each with a private candle burning in the altar of his mind. Every one of them had made astounding sacrifices to keep that candle burning.
This was the sort of thing the secular world did not understand. What was it that could drive a man to sit for nine hours a day in a library chair, exploring byways of human knowledge? What form of ambition led to the sacrifice of family, friendship, worldly possessions, even communal esteem? For the most part, there was no gold medal from the academy to adorn the scholar’s neck at the end of his road. There was no public acclaim. Most of the books composed in this room would never find a publisher; if they did, the readership for each book would be minuscule. So what accounted for this vigilance?
Benjamin was perhaps the most vigilant of all, sitting day after day in the same chair, willfully blocking out whatever seemed irrelevant to his project, including the Nazis. He had been researching and writing his book since the late twenties, when it began in notes and aphorisms. A thick wad of material accumulated in brown folders. He kept wishing he had not left behind so many notebooks at Brecht’s house in Denmark, where he had been a summer guest two years before. The prospects of returning to Denmark grew slimmer and slimmer, and he could not rely on Brecht to send the material on to Teddy Adorno. Brecht was lazy and indifferent. “He is a scoundrel, but a holy scoundrel in his way,” Benjamin said to his sister, Dora, who would reply, invariably, “They all take advantage, Walter. Every one of them takes advantage.”
Although he never would have said such a thing, even to himself, Benjamin felt sure that his encyclopedic study of the Parisian arcades, now all but done, would help to justify his existence, which otherwise amounted to fits and starts, a thousand insights fluttering like crisp leaves on an autumn tree before being wasted by the proverbial four winds. It had, at first, jostled for room amid other projects, always on the back burner; Benjamin reserved the white flame of the front burner for immediate work: a critical essay, a review that was due the following week, a story, or, occasionally, a poem. The arcades project moved toward the full heat of his attention during the bitter winter of 1934, when he was staying at a cheap pensione in San Remo, in a bare, white-washed room overlooking the gray-green sea. By this time Germany had become uninhabitable for a Jew or, for that matter, any person of conscience.
In Benjamin’s mind, he was a defender of the Enlightenment. This was his private work against fascism. In his journal he admonished himself to “clear fields where until now only madness has been seen, to forge ahead with the sharp ax of reason, looking neither left nor right in order to protect myself from the madness beckoning from the primeval forest.” With a rare ferocity, he wrote: “All ground must occasionally be broken by reason, made arable, cleared of the messy undergrowth of delusion and myth.”
Delusion and myth ruled the world that Benjamin knew. Paris, as both capital of the nineteenth century and the unholy womb that had delivered into being this rough beast of the present, was therefore an appropriate focus for his research. The consumerism on display everywhere, the thirst for acquisition, distressed him, and this madness was uncannily represented by the arcades, which in French and German were called passages, emphasizing their spatial aspect. These lurid, glittering paths were, quite literally, passageways; the glass-covered tunnels became a showroom for every product of modern capitalism.
The arcades turned the otherwise rational structure of the city into an irrational maze, a nightmare of connecting tunnels, an inward spiral culminating in a kind of spiritual implosion. The streets of Paris, with their symmetrical houses and perfectly ordered parks, all meant to mirror Reason, now foundered in the dream-architecture of the ancients: the figure of the labyrinth. As Benjamin said, “What generates the mythic dimension of all labyrinthine structures is their downward pull; once inside, the spectator is seized, drawn into a convoluted world with no visible or predictable existence.” The labyrinth is both interior and exterior: street and house, mask and voice speaking through the mask. Weather does not intrude upon the glassy corridors of the arcade labyrinth; even the light of the sun is filtered and distorted, caught in the enameled squares of floor tile, in the polished metal facades and glaucous mirrors that everywhere double reality and turn it in upon itself, in the eyes that swarm, dissatisfied, searching for some bright thing to land on, to consume.
Benjamin mused on the symbol of the labyrinth in history:
In ancient Greece, one pointed out places that led down into the underworld. Our waking existence, too, is a land where hidden places lead into the underworld, full of inconspicuous sites where dreams trickle out. In the daytime we pass them by unwittingly, but once sleep comes we swiftly claw our way back to them and lose ourselves in the dark passageways. The city’s labyrinth of houses, by day, is like consciousness; the arcades (those galleries that lead into its past existence) trickle unnoticed into the streets. But at night, beneath the somber mass of houses, their more compact darkness gushes out frighteningly.
Benjamin saw the world as many-layered but, like the Greeks, he believed in a deep substructure, a mythic or spiritual dimension on which the present rested as on some invisible yet sturdy foundation. He savored the daily shunting back and forth between night and day, between sleep and waking, mirrored by the mind as it moves between conscious and unconscious realms. Dreams, for him, were real. “We pull the material of our dreams back with us into the world of wakefulness,” he said. “It is all part of our journey.”
But the journey cuts through hell, through the purgatory of consumerism. “The modern age,” he said, “is the age of hell. Our punishment is the latest thing available at the time.” And the “
latest” is always “the same thing through and through. This constitutes the eternity of hell and the sadist’s mania for novelty.” Thus fashion fills every shop window, consumes all our conversation and thought, becomes a regressive phenomenon, a form of compulsive repetition in the mask of novelty.
Thus the nightmare of history returns: liberated, vengeful, unyielding, uprooting. This is what Sigmund Freud meant when he referred menacingly to the “return of the repressed.” It is the Minotaur that must be slain, that lies half asleep at the bottom of the labyrinth. It glimmers in the unnatural light of consumerism, which is merely an aberrant extension of our normal appetites for food, for shelter and clothing, for personal objects that endear us to the world and, unfortunately, to ourselves.
What nettled Benjamin was the alienation from history produced by this cycle of unwanted recurrence, an alienation that he himself experienced, and that restrained his ability to gaze, clearly, on the present. The past now became a substratum of nightmare and irrationality, of ancient fury cloaked in the forms of myth. Progress was the flight from this bad dream, made swifter by current technologies; the past had never seemed more distant. Yet distance was simply a spatial metaphor. “We have been schooled in the romantic gaze into history,” he said. Hence, Walter Scott, Stendhal, the fetishing of medieval iconography, the worship of ruins, the reverence for dark mythologies, as in Wagner. What could save us, he said, was nearness; “history recovered, dissolved”; propinquity was all.
But how to accomplish this? Aren’t those who have gone before us irretrievably lodged in a far, impossible country? Who can wake the dead? Benjamin believed that the equivalent of a Copernican revolution in thinking must occur. Fiction would replace history, or become history. The past, “what has been,” had previously been accepted as the starting point; history stumbled toward the dimly lit present through the corridors of time. Now the process must be reversed; “the true method,” said Benjamin, “was to imagine the characters of the past in our space, not us in theirs. We do not transpose ourselves into them: They step into our life.” One does not proceed by seeking empathy with the past: Einfühlung. This was historicism of the old mentality. Instead, he argued for what he called Vergegenwärtigung: “making things present.”
History, as such, was the dream from which we must awaken, and to understand culture as the dream of history was to understand time as postponement, as that which stands between us and the realization of an eternal kingdom. The task of the anti-historian, as Benjamin saw it, was to render visible the utopian element in the present, working backward toward the past. “Literary montage,” in his phrase, was “the instrument of this dialectic, the act of placing moments of history in apt juxtaposition.” This was what he had tried, in the arcades project, to accomplish: to create the ultimate montage, to recover and dissolve history in one bold stroke.
* * *
—
They came for him, not in the middle of the night as he expected, but at noon. It was a Tuesday, and he had quite by chance decided to work at home instead of the library. He was writing at the three-legged oak table in the alcove off his sitting room, cutting a picture from a fashion magazine: an advertisement for toothpaste, with three beautiful women holding brushes and smiling like the three Graces of mythology. He had, only a few moments before, copied out an apposite passage from a favorite book about Paris: Le Paysan de Paris by Louis Aragon. Walking through the streets of the capital, Aragon had contemplated the faces that flickered by:
It became clear to me that humankind is full of gods, like a sponge immersed in the open sky. These gods live, attain the height of their power, then die, leaving to other gods their perfumed altars. They are the very principles of any total transformation. They are the necessity of movement. I was, then, strolling with intoxication among thousands of divine concretions. I began to conceive a mythology in motion. It rightly merited the name of modern mythology. I imagined it by this name.
One of these concretions—in the shape of a military policeman—was now standing in the doorway of Benjamin’s flat on the rue Dombasle; he wore a uniform that Benjamin did not recognize. The jacket was belted, with tarnished silver buttons and expansive epaulets, the sort of thing a soldier in a music-hall comedy might wear. The fellow’s capacious silver mustache pushed out ahead of his face like the cow-catcher on a steam engine.
To Benjamin’s relief, the man was French and therefore not German. A German soldier would have been devastating.
“I’m looking for Monsieur Walter Benjamin,” he said. “Are you, in fact, this gentleman?”
“Yes,” he said. “I am Dr. Benjamin.” Perhaps because the official was polite and well-mannered, Benjamin did not feel afraid. It also helped that the man was not young; the young, Benjamin decided, are more frightening in the guise of power. They are not aware of the dangers, to themselves as well as others. Silly, tragic things can happen too easily when inexperience is a factor.
Benjamin continued, “What may I do for you, sir?”
“It has come to our attention that you are an illegal alien from Germany.”
“I am a Jew.”
The man looked over Benjamin’s shoulder. “I’m afraid you must come with me, monsieur. You may carry one bag—a small one, if you will. I would definitely recommend a small bag…for your convenience.”
“I am working on a book, you see. I would need to bring a briefcase. It is not especially large.”
“As you like,” the man said, nodding, then stepping back, as if not to intrude on the last moments of Benjamin’s privacy.
“You will give me a few minutes?”
“I shall wait for you in the hall,” he said.
“Thank you.”
Dora hovered in the bedroom, afraid to come out. She had thus far eluded the authorities and would not present herself to any public official voluntarily, no matter what the papers said. When her brother hurried into the bedroom to pack, she whispered, “Please, Walter, you must escape the back way! The stairs to the basement! Go!”
“It is quite all right, Dora. They will not hurt me. The officer is French.”
She scoffed. “I know the French as well as you do. They will cut your throat, given the chance.”
Benjamin studied his sister’s round, even puffy, face; her big eyes—like the eyes of an ox—stared at the world dumbfoundedly. He could not understand her distrust of the French people, who had sheltered them so hospitably. He himself admired the French unreservedly, with their fierce intellectual tradition, their literature and architecture, their sense of morality and love of justice. The French were among the most remarkable of civilizations. He had said that often, in public, much to the despair of his (mostly) French friends, who never tired of deriding their own kind.
Dora was sobbing now, a small-boned woman in a rumpled, gray dress. Her mascara ran, making black splotches on her cheeks.
Benjamin drew close to Dora. “I shall write to you at once. You’ll know exactly where I am, and you must not worry,” he said. “They are protecting us, Dora. You must understand this. If you would only…”
“Never!” she said, in a loud voice.
Benjamin looked over his shoulder nervously, hoping her shout had not carried.
“I will stay here until I die,” she said. “If they want me, they can wring my neck, like a chicken.”
“You are a stubborn woman,” he said. “You are like our mother.”
“And you are like our father: stupid. What you know about politics could be written on the back of a postage stamp.” She grabbed his shirt, popping several buttons. “There is a war on, Walter. They are killing Jews. They are murdering Jews!”
Benjamin sighed. He had not, in his last minutes with his sister, wanted to quarrel. “Be careful, Dora,” he said. “If you need help, get in touch with Julie. Georges Bataille will be useful, too.” He scribbled a phone
number on a slip of paper. “Call him at once if you find yourself in difficulty. His brother has a position in the finance ministry, and he can pull strings if the situation becomes tricky.”
“You think this isn’t tricky?” Dora said, shaking her head. “I suppose, for you, this is a picnic?”
“I cannot argue. Not now, Dora…”
“You put too much faith in your friends. But ask yourself this, Walter. Has it ever done you any good? Why didn’t Scholem find you a job in Palestine? It’s a disgrace, that’s my opinion. We could be living off the fat of the land by now, in Jerusalem.”
Benjamin tried to shush her. He heard the soldier knocking at the front door, and he began to cram a few necessities into his bag. There was no point in going over this ground again with Dora: Scholem was a difficult friend, at best. He had a consuming ego, and somewhere along the way Benjamin had trampled on it; he had not acquiesced in Scholem’s point of view on everything, so he was being punished. No matter now. When the war was over, he would visit Jerusalem and make amends. Although he and Scholem had fallen out frequently in the past, each time the dispute had led to periods of greater understanding.
