by Jay Parini
Teddy Adorno—that was a different story. Benjamin had felt keenly the fragmentation of that friendship. Adorno had meant so much to him; they knew each other so well that even their dream life had been shared. But something had occurred along the way; Benjamin had not simply bought into the dialectics of the Frankfurt School or subscribed uncritically to the politics of the Institute. He could never quite subscribe to any dogma, except partially. It was his nature, as a critic, to complicate issues and to dissent. His natural skepticism was, in part, a legacy from the Enlightenment, and one he was loath to relinquish.
Benjamin kissed Dora, who had managed to control her sobbing, and joined the soldier in the dark hallway. The man looked sympathetically at Benjamin, who said, “I am ready.” A small suitcase hung from one hand, a briefcase in the other.
“Can I help?” the man asked, reaching for the suitcase.
Benjamin refused. It was too absurd.
They climbed down the staircase, slowly; Benjamin was obviously having difficulty in seeing the stairs, with his nearsightedness. Now his chest began to squeeze, and pain rose in his throat and traveled down his arms to his fingertips. He had seen Dr. Dausse, a fellow refugee and friend, only a few weeks before about these recurring chest pains, and today he wondered if the ordeal that lay ahead of him would be too arduous for a man in his condition. The phrase congestive heart failure had been offered, somewhat lamely, by the doctor, who added: “With the heart, one is rarely confident of a proper diagnosis. You might live for twenty years or twenty minutes.”
Benjamin wished he had asked Dr. Dausse for a medical excuse. What could the French authorities want with somebody too ill to cross the street without experiencing palpitations and weak spells? He could no longer walk more than twenty or thirty steps without having to stop for a rest. He would be worse than useless to the French army. But there was no way to argue the case; this was the problem with a large bureaucracy. Kafka understood this perfectly. Anonymity was the enemy, reducing everyone to an integer on a piece of paper. The artist’s job was to overcome this blankness by naming things. Like Adam in Eden, he must find names for every object, animate and inanimate. He must invent a language full of racy particulars, finding the identities of everything. This was the imagination’s endless and desperately important work.
Benjamin bent over, exhaling slowly.
“You are having difficulty breathing, is that it?” the Frenchman asked. “Are you in pain?”
“What a kind man you are,” Benjamin said, straightening himself out.
“We can sit down if you like, on the steps. There is no rush.”
“I’m all right,” he insisted, swallowing hearty gulps of air. An impish smile came to his lips. “We had better hurry. The war will be over soon, and we’ll have missed it.”
* * *
—
He was taken by military train to a collection point near the Camp des Travailleurs Volontaires at Clos St-Joseph Nevers. The first night was spent, not unpleasantly, in a small boardinghouse with pink shutters and wrought-iron balconies, where he shared a double bed with a pleasant man called Heymann Stein, whom he had met in Paris some years before.
Stein was a well-known journalist and, like himself, a bookish fellow. He had lived in Vienna after the Great War and had moved to Paris during the early thirties after a period as a schoolmaster in Bern. Having studied philosophy at Mainz, he tried to keep up with the subject in case he should one day go to America, where he had been told positions were easily available in the major universities. He carried with him a volume by Martin Heidegger, a fact that Benjamin did not hold against him (however much he despised Heidegger not only for his writing but for the way he had mesmerized and seduced his young relative, a philosophy student called Hannah Arendt). In time, he would set Heymann Stein (and Hannah) straight on Heidegger, whose fraudulent appropriation of Kant and Hegel had irritated him ever since he read “The Problem of Historical Time,” Heidegger’s inaugural lecture, delivered in Freiburg in the spring of 1916, and later published in the Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik.
The sergeant in charge of the “volunteers” woke everyone at six-thirty, allowing them just half an hour to get dressed and swill a cup of coffee and a bit of stale bread with jam before they were to leave for the camp. “Eat up, boys!” he shouted. “This is the last of the good food.”
Stein was annoyed. “Get up, lie down, eat up, sit down,” he said. His white hair stuck out, as if electrified. He had a big nose with a dark nubble of a wart on the left side. An open collar was always his trademark, his sign of identification with the working classes. “There will be a lot of shouting, you can tell. They love it, this ordering around.”
“I don’t mind,” said Benjamin. “It makes life very simple. You do what you’re told. Like school.”
Stein was not convinced.
“I knew your brother, Leon,” said Benjamin.
“Leon the bookseller.”
Benjamin had indeed bought many books from Leon Stein, whose little shop on the rue du Vieux Colombier had become a refuge for German expatriates in the past decade; more important, Leon had bought many books from Benjamin when he was frantic for cash, often paying more than they were really worth.
“What’s the point of putting men like us into a camp?” Benjamin wondered.
“Even an old horse can plow a field. They can’t afford to pay real workers, so they steal labor where they can.”
“You’re a cynic, Heymann.”
“So wait and see. We’re prisoners of the French army, nothing more, nothing less. Why dignify the arrangement?”
Benjamin dressed quickly, putting on his baggy brown suit, worn threadbare at the elbows, his rumpled white shirt, long since permanently stained beneath the armpits, and the red polka-dot tie that had been his father’s. He was worried about the weight of his black leather briefcase, which contained not only a vast manuscript of material for his arcades project but the final draft of his latest essay, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” as well as some books. He could not travel without books.
But he had not counted on the fact that they would be marched to Nevers, en masse: thirty-seven men herded like cattle along a dirt road for a dozen or so miles, with a drill sergeant screaming at the side of the phalanx, more a sheepdog than a man. “They ought to muzzle that dog,” Stein said. “He’s probably rabid.”
Three times Benjamin collapsed, falling on the gravel-and-tar road. The first two times he managed to struggle back to his feet; the last, he was put onto a stretcher and carried straight to the camp infirmary, his briefcase and suitcase on his stomach like paperweights.
“You will not be allowed to work,” the camp physician, Dr. Guilmoto, told him. “This is not a concentration camp like in Germany. We are not intent upon killing you.”
“So why not send me home? Let the Nazis take me away. It will be easier on everyone.”
“You are making a joke?” the doctor asked. His eyebrows lifted like quotation marks. “Yes, you are. I enjoy a sense of humor.”
Benjamin said, “This is so absurd.”
The doctor smiled, rather patronizingly. “We want to be sure the Nazis do not take you away. That is the whole point, Dr. Benjamin.”
“But you think some of us are spies….”
The doctor studied his own hands, avoiding Benjamin’s gaze.
“You are afraid of us, in other words,” he continued.
“I agree, there are those who worry about such things. Part of our job here is to weed out those who might cause trouble, should the Nazis invade. One cannot tell what will happen.”
“The Nazis have already invaded.”
The doctor listened to Benjamin’s heart with a stethoscope, then said, “What are we going to do with you, Dr. Benjamin? You are unfit to work.”
“I’m lazy by
nature, you see. I will spend my days reading and writing. If only there were access to a library….”
The doctor laughed. “Would you like a secretary as well? I will speak to my superior. We appreciate intellectuals in France, as you know. The word intellectual is a French invention.”
Benjamin understood only too well the vexed origins of this word in France. During the Dreyfus scandal, those brave men and women (led by Zola) who spoke up for reason and enlightened values in order to defend an unfortunate Jew were called intellectuals by an outraged press. It remained a term of opprobrium in the popular mind, especially in England. (Benjamin had received mournful letters from Dora, his ex-wife, who detested the English for their snobbishness and refusal to think about serious topics. According to Adorno, the situation was even worse in America, where cultivated and intelligent people had to feign dullness and ignorance just to make a living.)
After two days of rest in a whitewashed clinic with acceptable food, Benjamin joined Heymann Stein and twenty-eight others in a tin-roofed building that had once served as a slaughterhouse for poultry. The men slept on rotting canvas cots without mattresses; each volunteer was issued a single woolen blanket, and most were so moth-eaten you could hold them up to the moon and see an imitation Milky Way poking through. Meals were taken outdoors in what was grandly called the “dining hall,” though it amounted to no more than a platform with a tattered covering of oil-slicked canvas; long makeshift tables had been fashioned from scraps of pine and rusty metal drums.
Most of the work of the camp consisted of latrine duty and cooking. The food, though fetid, was available in sufficient quantities to fuel the activity of the camp at a fairly low level. As it had been raining ever since Benjamin arrived in Nevers, nobody had begun to work very hard. The guards were themselves unwilling to stand in the rain and supervise. The rains, which virtually everyone regarded as a godsend, continued through the first three weeks of Benjamin’s internment: a steely drizzle that made September feel like December.
Like nearly everyone else in the camp, Benjamin could not get warm, no matter how hard he tried. The meager blanket covering him at night only made things worse, since it reminded him of what such coverings were supposed to do. He slept, rather badly, in the fetal position, blowing into his closed fists for warmth. In the morning he felt as though his joints had rusted in place. It hurt simply to stand or bend over.
Benjamin insisted on referring to his fellow detainees as colleagues, and not inappropriately; many were voracious readers, and several had managed to bring into captivity some classics of literature and philosophy. One particularly cold night, a young man from Bavaria acquired a bundle of dry sticks from a sympathetic guard, and a fire was lit in the stove squatting in one icy corner of the barracks. The men gathered around to plot their survival.
Heymann Stein said, “You know, we should consider ourselves lucky.”
“How is that, Stein?” a cocky younger man asked. “I would like to know about my good luck. Maybe I’ve been misreading the situation.”
“We have in our midst a brilliant writer and philosopher—Dr. Benjamin.”
This lavish if somewhat unctuous compliment embarrassed Benjamin, in part because he did not regard himself as a brilliant anything. Perhaps when the arcades project was published, he might be worthy of notice, but not at present. When several of the men began clapping, it shocked him. Were they simply going along with Heymann Stein?
“Good friends,” Benjamin said, under his breath. “I’m very grateful.”
“So why don’t you lecture, Dr. Benjamin?” asked Stein. “We can turn a bad situation into a better one. You can teach us something—philosophy, perhaps. We can turn Nevers into a little university!” He swept his hand around as if onstage. It was quite a performance, Benjamin decided. Stein stared at Benjamin, as if to convince him. “You must do this, for the sake of everyone here.”
Benjamin thanked Stein but demurred. He was not nearly so accomplished as Stein pretended. Furthermore, it had been a long time since he had seen the inside of a classroom. Even after he got his doctorate, he had never done much teaching.
“I, too, would like to hear some lectures,” said a white-bearded man called Meir Winklemann, who had studied to become a rabbi in Odessa before the Great War. “Something with a religious theme would be especially good,” he added. An unfortunate marriage had apparently scuttled Winklemann’s promising career, and he had since made his living as a salesman, crossing borders so blithely that he no longer believed in the existence of separate countries.
Others chimed in, including Hans Fittko, who had just arrived in this camp from another. He was among the handful of familiar faces in the room, and his presence was reassuring to Benjamin. Something about Fittko made everyone feel confident that the situation was, ultimately, under control. “We should make the best use of our time here,” said Fittko. “Herr Stein is right about this.” He went on to explain how, during the Spanish Civil War, Loyalist prisoners of war had famously put their captivity to good use, holding poetry readings and philosophical lectures in camps where living conditions were notoriously inhuman.
A man called Kommerell, a former teacher in Leipzig who had spent several years in an English university, produced from his rucksack a copy of Plato’s Dialogues, in an English translation by Benjamin Jowett of Oxford. Someone else had works by Rousseau and Kant. Stein himself had carried a dog-eared book by Martin Buber, with so many passages underlined that you could not easily read many pages. Benjamin had brought with him a selection of essays by Montaigne, whose work had long been a source of comfort. He also had in hand Mendelssohn’s beautiful (if somewhat decorously old-fashioned) translation of the Torah.
“So we’ve got a library!” said Hans Fittko. “What else do we need?”
“What do you say, Dr. Benjamin?” Stein prodded.
“He will do this, of course,” said Fittko confidently. “I heard him lecture in Paris. He is very good.”
Benjamin wiped his forehead, suddenly thick with perspiration. “If you all wish, I will do as you like,” he said. His attention was tugged into the room’s far left corner as he contemplated the prospect of lecturing on philosophy under these conditions. After a pause, to demonstrate his gratitude for their interest, he said, “I’m quite happy to conduct some philosophical discussions…if that will help to pass the time. But you must bear with me. I am not a teacher, nor a philosopher.”
The next morning, soon after breakfast, with the rain still thundering on the roof and the camp guards reluctant to drive anyone to work, Benjamin began to lecture on Greek metaphysics, reading aloud from Plato (but translating from Jowett’s Victorian English into German by sight). He explained from the outset that his real interest was as much in Kant as in Plato, but he considered the two thinkers so linked in their approach to the world that it was necessary to begin with the great Athenian. “It is often said that Western philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato,” he said. “If this is the case, Kant’s footnotes must be considered the most elaborate and original.” He paused, then began again, in a small voice: “It seems clear to me that in the framework of philosophy and hence of the doctrinal field to which philosophy belongs, there can never be a shattering, a collapse, of the Kantian—and thus Platonic—system. One can only imagine a revising and expanding of Kant and Plato, their philosophies ripening into doctrine, which is not necessarily a good thing.”
He was intrigued by Plato’s “invention” of Socrates. “He is both real and unreal, both historical and ahistorical,” Benjamin explained. He noted that any philosophical system began with an attitude, an approach, to history, and that Plato’s understanding of how one could grant eternal life to a figure such as Socrates was utterly ingenious. It was not a question of mere appropriation. “We’ve seen what happens when a writer overwhelms his subject, as with Max Brod and Kafka,” he said. “Brod did not respect
the aura of the individual genius; he did not proclaim Kafka’s separateness from himself, and so his biography of his friend is horribly flawed.” He explained to them that the figure of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues was “made up” in the sense that Plato had transposed the man he once knew into intellectual and moral situations he had never, in life, encountered. But Plato knew the spirit of Socrates so intimately he could give him a life ancillary to the one he “really” had. Plato could, in other words, be trusted with Socrates; the fiction was real.
Heymann Stein leapt to his feet when Benjamin drew the allusive quotation marks around the term really with fingers in the air. “Surely,” Stein argued, “one has a life. One does not ‘have’ a life.”
Benjamin said, “I am sorry, Herr Stein. I should have made myself clearer. It is our tendency as moderns to cast everything we say in ironic light. This is a mistake, of course.” He began to pace, as if thinking intensely, trying to work out something fresh. “Language brings reality into being; it is, as it were, a bridge between what happens in the mind and what occurs in the world. Perhaps I will try to put this more boldly: Unless one frames reality in words, the reality does not exist. This theory of language plays havoc with conventional notions of time, and that is a problem; on the other hand, I do not believe in time. That is, I can’t believe in unimagined, linear time. To put something between brackets is to expose its linguistic element, its dependency on invented time, its mystery, its final unreality.”
He noticed that Heymann was staring at him, rapt, and he smiled slightly. Perhaps he was a good lecturer, after all? “We are working,” he said, “here and always, to achieve a reality that is not so terribly contingent on mere expression.”
He paused long enough to notice puzzlement on some of the other faces in the audience. Perhaps what he said was not clear? Perhaps he did not himself understand exactly what he was saying? It was frustrating. He wanted to talk about history as catastrophe, about revolution as the only legitimate way out of the nightmare of history, but that would have to wait for another day. He must stay, for the moment, with Plato. But even as he spoke, he was aware of the final goal of all philosophy; in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” he had put it well: “The messianic world is the world of all-sided and integral immediacy. Only there is universal history possible.”