Walter Benjamin’s Archive. Walter Benjamin

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СКАЧАТЬ intended to completely cover the page with writing (fig. 3.3). On the other hand, “giant letters” can be found in Benjamin’s hand too (GB II, p. 446). Some letters and work manuscripts are even composed within “normal” dimensions. But these are exceptions.

      Like Walser, Benjamin is an aesthetician of the written sheet; the manuscript should appeal to the eye as a textual image. The manuscript of the gloss Dream Kitsch, a “short consideration of the Surrealists” (GB III, p. 116), from 1925, which Benjamin thought was too difficult to be published in the Literary World, is remarkable both for the small size of the writing and for the format of the sheet: the text, which is separated into narrow columns, is strikingly reminiscent of a newspaper layout (fig. 3.4). The visual aspects of a manuscript of an early sonnet on the death of Christoph Friedrich Heinle (1894–1914) convey an expression of the contents. In the contrast between the small script and the size of the sheet, Benjamin’s grief at the loss of his friend, and the loneliness and abandonment of those left behind, is graspable in the form of an image (fig. 3.5).

      The spatial density of what is written corresponds to the economy of expression, a precise, laconic style. In this is expressed an ethic of “creative modesty typical of the person who lives wholly inside his subject and who is utterly incapable of viewing it complacently from the outside” (SW 1:1, p. 131).

      Benjamin’s small handwriting acts as a restriction, but with positive intent—for the writer as much as for the reader. Just as the writer is forced to attend to each letter, so too for those who are addressed “this objectionable writing style is like nothing else an expression of my most friendly disposition” (GB II, p. 399). But it is not simply an expression of this ethos, but also a claim to it and on it. Benjamin expects of readers such a great deal of concentration and effort that they might well object. He places objects in the way of a too rapid reading. But finally (also) in return he promises objects that impel readers to new thought. Benjamin’s micrographies do not open up to casual readings—and he self-consciously inscribed in them recognition of their magnitude and significance.

      Benjamin had a predilection for “the unassuming, the tiny, and the playful” (SW 2:1, p. 114). The world of experiences and things familiar to childhood, including his own memory of these, apparently trivial and marginal themes, the small format of the gloss, thesis, miniatures, puzzles, reports, and aphorisms—all these are manifestations of the small thematized over and over again in Benjamin’s work. In these Benjamin achieves his ambition “to present in the briefest literary utterance something complete in itself” (Scholem, “Benjamin,” p. 177). His aesthetic of the small is aimed at the particular, which “carries the whole in miniature form” (GS III, p. 51). Only “in the analysis of the small individual moment” might the “crystal of the total event” be discovered (AP, p. 461).

      On June 9, 1926 Benjamin wrote to Jula Radt-Cohn: “You will see that—starting about a week ago, I have once more entered a period of small writing, in which, even after long intervals, I always find some kind of home again, and into which I should like to entice you. If you perceive this little box as homely, then nothing should prevent you from becoming its Princess. (You do know the ‘New Melusine’, don’t you?)” (GB III, p. 171). In Goethe’s fairytale The New Melusine, an allegorical tale in William Meister’s Journeyman Years, the magic box harbors a wonderful realm that has shrunk to a miniature, and is constantly exposed to the dangers of ruin and disappearance. Just as an air of secrecy and fragility surrounds the casket in Goethe, so too Benjamin’s tiny handwriting appears enigmatic and fragile. It bars the reader from direct access to what is written, and initially it can only be experienced sensuously, through the expressive power of the writing’s image; only once it has been deciphered can its contents unfurl. Like the casket it preserves something precious, which disguises itself in the form of a miniature. It parades “the pantomime of the entire nature and existence of mankind, in microcosmic form” (SW 2:1, p. 134).

       Figures

      3.1 Peace Commodity (1926). Critique of Fritz von Unruh’s Wings of Nike (1925)—Manuscript, three sides; shown here, page 1. Compare GS III, pp. 23–5.

      3.2 Draft of The Arcades of Paris (c. 1928/1929)—Manuscript on one double page; shown here, page 1. Compare AP, pp. 873–6.

      3.3 Draft of “Moscow” (c. spring 1927)—Manuscript, one side.

      The manuscript contains drafts for the article “Moscow,” published in the journal Die Kreatur in 1927. Benjamin was in Moscow from December 1926 until February 1927, having traveled there in order to visit the Latvian director Asja Lacis, who had fled to the Soviet capital for political reasons and was recuperating in a sanatorium following an illness. Benjamin recorded striking experiences and impressions of his visit in his Moscow Diary, which he also used as the basis of his article. The notes depicted here relay observations on Moscow city life—lively descriptions of traffic, the Kremlin, street traders, and the proletarian quarter with its youth groups.

      3.4 Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism (c. 1925)—Manuscript, two sides; shown here, page 1. Compare SW 2:1, pp. 3–5.

      3.5 Sonnet, untitled. From the cycle of 73 sonnets on the death of Christoph Friedrich Heinle—Manuscript, one side. Compare GS VII.1, p. 56.

      3.6 Letter to Florens Christian Rang from 27 January 1923—Manuscript, two sides; shown here, page 1. Compare GB II, pp. 309f.

      3.7 Language and Logic II (1921)—Manuscript, two sides; shown here, page 1. Compare SW 1, pp. 272–3.

      Fig. 3.1

      Fig. 3.1

      Peace Commodity

       “Leafing through your volumes!”

      From 1920 to 1923, in Rome, in Zurich, in Paris—in short, whatever place outside of German soil one might have happened to land upon—German products could be found for half the price that one would usually have paid for the same goods abroad, or indeed in Germany itself. Poorly assembled goods for an impoverished population who were no longer capable of normal consumption were thrown into the dumping ground of the inflation era, placed on the European market as “peace commodities” at bargain prices. Around that time the barriers began to lift again and the traveling salesman set off on tour. One had to live on clearance sales and the higher the dollar rose, the greater was the circulation of export goods. At the height of the catastrophe it included intellectual and cultural goods too. For, even if the financial benefit was smaller, turnover raised the prestige of the entrepreneur. The Kantian idea of eternal peace—long undeliverable in a spiritually bankrupt Germany—was right in the first ranks of those spiritual export articles. Uncheckable in its manufacture, a slow seller for the previous ten years, it was available at unbeatable prices. It was a heaven-sent opportunity to smooth the way for more serious export. No thought was given to the genuine quality of its peace. Immanuel Kant’s raw, homemade weave of thought had indeed proven itself to be highly durable, but it did not appeal to a broader public. It was necessary to take account of the modern taste of bourgeois democracy. The cloth of the peace flag was tie-dyed, its white, threadbare weave brightly patterned and, given all the signs and symbols, it was difficult—this will be found to be corroborated—for the green of hope to stand out from the bellicose red of the lobster, the blue of faithfulness from the drab brown of the roast turkey. In such a form this renovated weave of a pacifism in all the colors of the world’s ways—which was sated in СКАЧАТЬ