The Collector

“In a situation without escape, I have no other choice. . . . It is in a tiny village in the Pyrenees, where no one knows me, that my life must end.” After penning this message, Walter Benjamin, often considered the greatest German critic of the 20th century, killed himself. The date was Sept. 26, 1940. When Paris fell to the Nazis, Benjamin had joined other leftist and Jewish refugees in France streaming south to Marseilles and Spain. With several acquaintances and a heavy briefcase of manuscripts, Benjamin hiked across the Pyrenees, but he lacked the requisite visas and at the small border town, Port Bou, the authorities refused him entry to Spain. Benjamin never had much luck. Fearing that he would soon be in the hands of the Gestapo, he ingested a fatal dose of morphine. He was 48.

At the time of his death, Benjamin was little known even among the German-speaking cognoscenti; in Anglo American culture he had no presence at all. Yet the unlucky Benjamin was blessed with brilliant and loyal friends like T.W. Adorno, the neo-Marxist culture critic, and Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish mysticism. They rescued his manuscripts, published his books and essays and wrote appreciations and memoirs. Over the decades, the trickle of Benjamin material has turned into a raging river. In English alone, scores of books and thousands of articles have been written about him. At a conference in Amsterdam several years ago, 100 scholars gave presentations on Benjamin to an overflowing audience.

Benjamin surfaces everywhere. Last year, the Texan writer Larry McMurtry used a Benjamin essay as a springboard for autobiographical reflections improbably titled “Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen.” At the local fast-food place, McMurtry “opened a book called ‘Illuminations’ ” and read an essay by Benjamin that was first published in 1936. His reflections about the dwindling role of the storyteller provoked McMurtry to delve into his own career writing about “vanishing breeds” of cattlemen and cowboys.

Hannah Arendt wrote the introduction to “Illuminations,” the 1968 collection of Benjamin essays that McMurtry stumbled upon, in which she had mulled over Benjamin’s reputation, comparing it to Kafka’s. Both men received the acclaim in death they lacked in life. The comparisons go further. As Arendt commented, both defy easy categorization. It would be as misleading to recommend Kafka as a short-story writer as it would be to call Benjamin an essayist. Neither consoles nor entertains. Neither is to be read in the morning sun with coffee and croissants. They are writers of the dusk and the rubble.

Yet Benjamin’s fame is even more mysterious than Kafka’s, as well as more circumscribed. While the educated citizen might know, or pretend to know, Kafka, Walter Benjamin’s name would probably elicit no response. The inexhaustible attention bestowed on Benjamin remains confined to professors and graduate students--an ironic fate because his own teachers rejected his postdoctoral thesis as incomprehensible. With an academic career closed off, Benjamin eked out a life as a freelance critic and translator; he once satirized the academic fashion of writing “fat books.” Principle I: “The whole composition must be permeated with a protracted and wordy exposition of the initial plan.” Or Principle IV, examples should be given for all general concepts: “If, for example, machines are mentioned, all different kinds of machines should be enumerated.” Today, fat books on Benjamin pile up in university libraries.

Apart from Arendt, it is Adorno and Scholem who fashioned Benjamin’s posthumous reputation. Both had been friends of the young Benjamin. Each represented a polar side of Benjamin, and each jealously monitored the other’s influence. Scholem feared that Benjamin might become too Marxist, and Adorno feared he might become too theological. In fact, Benjamin was drawn to both Marxism and Judaism, materialism and spirituality, conventional politics and messianic utopianism. He called for revolutionary aesthetics and studied Hebrew with the intention of moving to Palestine. Benjamin’s thought refuses to relinquish either the street or the temple. In a statement typically limpid and ambiguous, he wrote, “My thinking is related to theology as a blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it. Were one to go by the blotter, however, nothing of what is written would remain.”

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Benjamin collected books and postcards, and wrote lovingly about collecting. For him the collected item radiated history. “One has only to watch a collector handle the objects in his glass case. As he holds them in his hands, he seems to be seeing through them into their distant past as though inspired.” He called collectors “the physiognomists of the world of objects.” If the physiognomist reads character from human faces, the collector interprets “fate” from “the period, the region, the craftsmanship and former ownership” of an object. In fact, Benjamin did more than prize the collector. He approached the world as a collector, seeking to fathom the meaning of history by assembling its objects.

He was a collector with a twist because he revered defamed or ignored objects. Benjamin inventoried the world as if everything mattered equally. He once wrote that the “chronicler,” who recounts events without distinguishing between major and minor ones, obeys the truth that “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history.” This was Benjamin’s principle: Nothing should be lost. Even the most trivial object can illuminate history. Benjamin searched for truths in the everyday stuff of street and home. He sought to divine the essence of the 19th century industrial world from its debris.

This effort to unlock the mystery of industrial culture became his central mission, which he pursued by combing the streets of the Paris he loved--or, more exactly, by combing old books about these streets.

The materials he culled from these books and his commentary on them constitute “The Arcades Project,” Benjamin’s masterpiece, which he worked on for 13 years. For Benjamin, the Parisian arcade or covered street served as a prism of industrial capitalism. He cited an early 19th century Parisian guide that identified the arcades as a “recent invention of industrial luxury . . . glass-roofed, marbled-paneled corridors. . . . Lining both sides of the arcades, which gets its light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the passage is a city, a world in miniature.” Benjamin deliberated on every facet of the arcades: the lighting, construction, foot traffic, advertising, stores, as well as its prostitutes, gamblers, bohemians and rag pickers. He ranged far and wide; he devoted several hundred pages to Baudelaire, whom he considered the poet of Parisian streets. He wrote about mirrors, dandies and photography. For students of urban life and industrial culture, “The Arcades Project” is a gold mine of insights and apercus.

A gold mine, but not gold. Much is dross. It thuds onto the desk at more than a thousand pages. Benjamin never finished it. It remains a series of sketches and plans, not a coherent work. As one professor put it in her introduction to a thick volume on “The Arcades Project”: “This nonexistent text is the object of the present study.” Benjamin fills yards of paper quoting but not analyzing descriptions of old Paris. He vacuums up both the essential and the inessential, the illuminating and the unilluminating. “The worker next door would be obliged if, in closing the door, you refrained from slamming it.” Benjamin quotes this handwritten sign without comment, as well as another from the same building. “ANGELA, 2nd floor, to the right.” He often disappears behind banks of citations.

To be sure, the unfinished state of “The Arcades Project” does not fully explain this mosaic of quotations; it belonged to Benjamin’s method and to his genius. He wanted objects to speak for themselves. By exhibiting scraps and refuse, he would tease out the meaning of 19th century civilization. He once called it “literary montage.” “[I] needn’t say anything,” he claimed, “merely show.” Exactly on these grounds, Adorno, Benjamin’s greatest supporter, was also his greatest critic. Their published correspondence abundantly demonstrates both: the extent to which Adorno viewed “The Arcades Project” as path-breaking and the extent to which he raised fundamental questions about it. He wrote to Benjamin that he regarded the project “as the decisive philosophical work which must find utterance today; as a chef d’oeuvre like no other.”

Yet Adorno did not mince words of criticism. Against the backdrop of rising Nazism, Adorno and Benjamin corresponded about each other’s writings, their fellow refugees and sometimes the political situation; again and again they returned to “The Arcades Project.” For the present age--accustomed to memos and e-mails--their missives recall another universe, in which intellectuals traded thoughts unafraid to be lengthy, complex and tough. The “enormous seriousness of the issue,” wrote Adorno addressing the theoretical viability of “The Arcades Project,” is “why I must speak so brutally.” Adorno questioned Benjamin’s tilt into pure facticity or, as he put it, his “superstitious tendency to attribute to mere material a power of illumination” that belongs to thinking. Adorno missed in the Benjamin draft an interpretation of the information he presented. “The theological motif of calling things by their names tends to switch into a wide-eyed presentation of mere facts. If one wanted to put it rather drastically, one could say that your study is located at the crossroads of magic and positivism. This spot is bewitched.”

Adorno wrote Benjamin from New York, where he had emigrated, but Benjamin tarried in Paris; he saw himself as “defending the last abandoned European post.” Yet even Benjamin began to doubt what soon would be left to save. He felt increasingly despondent: the situation of the Jews; the terminal illness of his sister; his inability to get French citizenship papers. Alluding to the Munich Pact, which delivered Czechoslovakia to Hitler, Benjamin pondered, “I do not know how long it will still physically be possible to breathe this European air.” Friends in New York obtained an American affidavit for him, but in his last letter to Adorno, the doomed writer sensed the doors were closing. “My great fear is that we have much less time at our disposal than we imagined.”

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Years earlier Benjamin had written to Scholem that he stood convicted by a world that had no place for “my thinking.” He was right. The universe of arts and letters had little use for Benjamin’s gnomic brilliance. He bequeathed to an indifferent world, however, a series of shimmering essays and incandescent aphorisms. His writings on art in an “age of mechanical reproduction,” Kafka and growing up in Berlin display an incomparable gift of fusing stunning ideas with sensual detail. The nuggets in “The Arcades Project” can enrich even the weekend prospector. Benjamin’s “theses” on the philosophy of history, completed shortly before his death with their charge “to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it,” inspire countless writers and historians. He had begun his essay on surrealism this way: “Intellectual currents can generate a sufficient head of water for the critic to install his power station on them.” Today many of us read in light from Benjamin’s station.

Recent paeans suggest that the world has finally understood Benjamin. Or has it? His posthumous reputation is well-deserved but threatens to solemnize an unsettling thinker and a fragmentary oeuvre. McMurtry highly esteems Benjamin, but as he reads more of his work, the reading leaves him a little disappointed. “He is all sparks,” but the sparks rarely produce a “steady flame.” He wonders whether the expectation to produce a brilliant masterwork crippled Benjamin, who exhausted himself accumulating a “slag heap of notes.” One must also wonder what the unflinching Benjamin would make of the cult that has grown around him. What would he think of successful professors celebrating a defeated writer? Of conferees droning on about an aphoristic thinker? Or of a recent book titled “Benjamin for Beginners”? Is it possible that Benjamin has succumbed to a mystique that his own work protests?