Benjamin's Crossing

by Jay Parini

  * * *

  —

  One did not have newspapers in this so-called camp des travailleurs volontaires, so gossip abounded. “The Germans have overrun Paris, and they will be here any moment,” Stein whispered to Benjamin. “I have this from a guard, who would not lie.” But there was no artillery fire in the distance, and the guards did not seem especially nervous. Surely if the Germans were really coming, the camp would have devolved into chaos?

  Benjamin felt detached from camp life, as if somehow floating above it. The physical discomfort was curiously bearable, and even the worst things felt oddly acceptable: the bitter nights under the single blanket or the agony of a weekly sprinkle under a cold spigot. The dinners of lukewarm broth, with a chunk of gristle lurking at the bottom of the bowl like a creature from the deep sea, were demoralizing but not devastating. Even the humiliation of shitting in a putrid shed with a dozen other men could be borne. Perhaps the finite amount of reading material was the worst thing to suffer, but even this he could tolerate.

  It was harder when the boy who slept in the cot next to him developed a terrible pain in his side one night and died a few days later from a ruptured appendix. Young Efraim Wolff—he was not yet twenty-three—had come to France only recently from Lublin, where he had taught in a school for young boys. He was already ailing when he arrived, and the guard would do nothing to help him, even though he begged to see a doctor. “Stop the nonsense. You have indigestion,” said the guard. “Who wouldn’t have indigestion, given the food in this place?”

  Efraim Wolff lay in agony for three nights, groaning; he subsided to a whimper on the fourth day, and he died, in silence, on the fifth, with Benjamin applying wet towels to his forehead and whispering lies into his ear about how the indigestion would soon pass. The body was interred on the sixth day, on the edge of a hazel wood half a mile or so from the gates of the camp, with a dozen men saying Kaddish above the grave. Benjamin, for the first time in many years, wept as he rocked back and forth on his heels.

  In the third month of his captivity, a commission de triage informed Benjamin that he would soon be released. His sister Dora wrote to explain that this good fortune was due in part to the intervention of Adrienne Monnier and Jules Romains, who had circulated a petition on his behalf among the right people. “The God of the Jews is with you,” she had said, though it was most unlike her.

  The reaction in the camp was mixed. On the one hand, people were glad enough to see one of their number freed. It was a propitious sign; if Benjamin had been released, perhaps everyone would be sent home soon. Perhaps even the war itself was nearing an end? On the other, a beloved figure in their little society was to be withdrawn, and his lectures—which had proved entertaining even to those who could not really understand a word of what he was saying—would come to an end.

  “So I’m left here to rot like a squirrel while you do the cancan in Paris?” Heymann Stein said on the night before Benjamin’s release. “I see you’ve left all the hard work for me, the lectures on Nietzsche,” he added. “I hope you sleep very badly, thinking about what I’m going to say.”

  “Nietzsche we don’t need,” said Meir Winklemann. “Not today. Hitler will have us all reading Nietzsche next week.” He stood close to Benjamin, studied him as if he were a piece of sculpture, then kissed him on either cheek. “Go with God,” he said.

  Hans Fittko, too, with his strong masculine face and dark hair pushed back like a film star’s, kissed Benjamin. “We’ll meet again soon,” he said, squeezing his hands. “If you see Lisa, tell her I’m well.”

  “But you’re still a schmuck,” Stein insisted, and everyone laughed.

  That night he fell into a woolly sleep and had a dream in which he was led by his friend, Dr. Dausse, into a steep underworld: a version of Hades, a labyrinthine tunnel. There were many chambers in this tunnel, and beds were pushed to the walls at either side. Men and women—some of them friends, some acquaintances or strangers—lay on the beds or sat up, a few of them smoking cigarettes. In one vast candlelit chamber full of golden stalactites, Benjamin noticed a blond woman with short hair lying on her bed with her legs slightly parted. He came close to her and saw she was beautiful. Upon hearing him approach, she opened her eyes, and their green lightning dazzled him. The blanket covering her seemed to hold in its luminous pattern an intricate design much like one that Benjamin had once described to Dr. Dausse: a kind of spiraling blue line. “A spiral,” he said to himself, “is a circle released from space.” He suddenly realized that the woman had lifted the blanket to one side to show him the design, which seemed to offer some kind of spiritual key, a way out of the labyrinth into which he found himself burrowing. He must reverse himself now. He must seek the light.

  Her eyes were glittering, and her white thighs. Her small breasts lifted with each breath. It was all so heartbreaking, so beautiful. But did he know this woman? Would she speak to him? Was she, indeed, alive or dead?

  Benjamin wakened to find himself staring at the ceiling of the barrack, which was crossed by rotting beams; through his narrow window he could see a million stars pricking little points of light in the black sky. Galaxies seemed to be exploding, spreading great concentric rings of fire. He realized that he would never be able to go back to sleep. The dream burned like coals after a hot fire, and it warmed his whole body. For once he felt no compulsion to interpret the dream; there would be plenty of time for that in days to come. Just now, as he lay there, he felt something strangely akin to bliss.

  WALTER BENJAMIN

  The growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two sides of the same coin. Fascism tries to organize the newly created masses without affecting the underlying property structure….Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations, but fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life….

  All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war. War and war only can set a goal for mass movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system. This is the political formula for the situation. The technological formula may be stated as follows: Only war makes it possible to mobilize all of today’s technical resources while maintaining the property system.

  5

  SCHOLEM

  It was never easy, getting and holding Benjamin’s attention. He was self-absorbed, even selfish; his work came first, to a point where one never believed he really heard what one said. Often I wanted to shake him, to say, “Walter, listen to me! I am talking to you!” His wife, Dora, would say, “I must get a hand grenade. I could scream, ‘Walter, I’ve just pulled the pin. Wake up!’ ” Then again, even that might not work. The whole house could crash around his ears and he wouldn’t notice.

  One thing that did lure him into the open was sex. He was, at various times in his life, a visitor of brothels, although he complained that sex lost some of its excitement when one had to pay. “Perhaps it’s the miser in me,” he would say. “I can always hear the coins dropping in the till.” His eyes were always darting about, and his hands; more than once a firm slap on the cheek had been required to subdue him.

  Friendship, I’m afraid, came third in his life, after books and sex. I did not like being third. The possibility for perfect intellectual and spiritual friendship had loomed before us: a piece of ripe fruit hanging from a bough just beyond reach. More than anything, I wanted a friend who understood my deepest concerns, whose language and knowledge were in every way equal to my own. I had given up hope for such a thing, and then I met Benjamin, although our encounters over many years were often disappointing. It is not easy to know a man who does not know himself.

  Three or four times he tried to take his own life, usually in despair ov
er some woman. It seemed inevitable that he would succeed one day, perhaps by accident. Once, in Berlin, not long after we became good friends, he said, “Life is not something we can control, but death we can. It may be the last option, but it’s an option.”

  I tried to explain to him that suicide was not an option. If one believes, as I do, in a single, all-knowing, and all-powerful God, there can be no justifiable reason for total self-destruction. Suicide is always a spiteful act, a fist raised in the face of the Almighty. It is unethical, too, because it cuts against the grain of nature, confounding the logic of organismal development, which is God’s invention. All living things break into being, are nourished, grow and flourish, then fade and die; the rhythm is essential, and it remains the only hope for man: Everywhere in the universe one sees rebirth. No energy is lost. Not a single drop of rain is wasted.

  Of course I do not expect to return to earth as myself, as Gershom (Gerhard) Scholem, scholar of Jewish mysticism. But my energies will somehow manage to reassemble. If life comes with so many surprises, imagine what death must offer! I do not actually want to come back as Scholem. I want to be sky: a wide-awake mind overarching the world, weeping with the clouds, shimmering with the sun, throwing Jove-like bolts of black lightning at whatever angers me, laughing like an earthquake when the folly of man amuses me. When the core of the earth rumbles, they will say, “Scholem is stirring again. Beware!”

  I suspect the idea of suicide was planted in Benjamin’s mind back in 1914, when his beloved friend, Fritz Heinle, killed himself at the outbreak of war. Heinle was a brilliant poet, with tangled red hair and the whitest skin, and Benjamin loved him. “I am not sure which I loved more,” Benjamin said to me, “the man or his words.” Heinle would sit in cafés until well past midnight, reading his poems aloud to anyone who would listen. He had to fight his way through a stutter, but it was Demosthenes speaking with a mouthful of pebbles; the effect was thrilling.

  Heinle and his girlfriend, Rika Seligson (a Germanic beauty with long legs and blond hair), entered a suicide pact; they did so, or so they said in a note, because they did not want to live in a world where human beings destroyed other human beings in the name of morality. “The immorality of this war will infect the entire country,” they wrote, defending their self-destruction. This double suicide disturbed our cozy little circle in Berlin.

  Benjamin had hoped to stand in solidarity with German youth in support of the war, and only days before Heinle’s death he had volunteered for service, reporting to the cavalry barracks on Bellalliance Street. That very night he learned of Heinle’s death; in an instant, everything changed. He realized that war was no answer to whatever vague questions might be hanging in the air. When he was notified that volunteers were to report for a physical examination the following week, he presented himself as a palsy victim. He had rehearsed with great care the trembling associated with those who bear that disease, and he succeeded in fooling the army doctors. He was told to report back in a year for reexamination.

  The next year he followed a procedure meant to induce palsy that was adopted by many in our circle at the time; it involved drinking poisonously strong, black coffee for days on end. Benjamin did so in the Neu Café des Westerns on Kurfürstendamm while playing cards (a variant of Sixty-six, a popular game among our crowd). The coffee brought on shortness of breath and red eyes, and it made one’s hands tremble and one’s vision double. Speech usually became slurred. I sat up with Benjamin all night before the exam, and he was suitably crimson-eyed and shaking by the time he saw the doctors, who gave him another reprieve. I worried, in fact, that he had overdone it: His heart was racing, and he could scarcely talk. Shortly after failing the exam, on the way home, he collapsed on the trolley, and it took several days for him to feel well again.

  Those were peculiar times for all of us. The war rolled on, and schoolmates—some of them good friends—went off in waves to the front, where most of them appeared on casualty lists within a month. My neighbor and boyhood best friend, Fritz Meinke, was cut to ribbons by machine guns in France, and even though we hadn’t been close in years, I spent several days alone in my room, gazing out the window at an impossibly dull winter sky. The utterly pointless killing of young men in the millions was too hard to understand.

  Having spoken to no one for days, I went to see Benjamin at his apartment. He behaved in an unsettling way.

  “What did you expect?” he asked. “When there is a war, men die.”

  “Fritz was a boy,” I said.

  “It is inhuman, I agree. One does not like to see children murdered. But you must not sentimentalize war. It is a construct of the human mind, like everything else; one cannot alter it.”

  “We must oppose the war.”

  “No. We must not participate in the war, but opposing it would be useless and silly. History is a machine, and if you withdraw the fuel, eventually it will run down.”

  Our conversation turned to the Youth Movement. We both agreed that the original ideas of Gustav Wyneken had been betrayed by Wyneken himself when he decided it was proper for German youth to get involved in this war. I maintained—I still do—it is never dulce et decorum pro patria mori. War represents a complete disfigurement of the human psyche, a perversion of ethical principles. After wavering briefly, Benjamin came around to my viewpoint, although one could never really tell. There was always something noncommittal about him, something oblique.

  I was pleased, however, when on March 9, 1915, he wrote a blistering letter to Wyneken in which he dissociated himself permanently from the Youth Movement; he even accused Wyneken of “sacrificing young people to the state.” In spite of this, Benjamin thanked him for being “the first person who introduced me to the life of the spirit,” and he promised to be true to that spirit forever. Wyneken had represented, for Benjamin, an escape from the bourgeois mentality of his parents and their friends. The ideals of freedom and self-determination lay at the heart of the Youth Movement, which had taken up school reform as one of its main tasks. At first, I quite sympathized with their program, which began as an attempt to critique the imperial tradition of German education, founded on a vision of Greek culture that put a good deal of emphasis on “harmonies” and “heroism.”

  In his pro-Wyneken days, Benjamin wrote a fascinating essay called “Teaching and Valuing” in which he decried the old Athenian model of education and its emulation of “the misogynist and homoerotic Greek culture of Pericles, which was aristocratic and based on slavery.” He railed against “the dark myths of Aeschylus.” The problem was that Wyneken himself seemed devoted to an autocratic form of leadership, arguing boldly for “free commitment to the self-chosen leader.” He was himself, of course, the leader he had in mind.

  Benjamin was repelled by strong leaders and preferred to live in the margins, beyond the influence of power brokers. In an article called “Dialogue on Religious Feeling Today,” he called for “a new religion,” one that would “emanate from the enslaved.” He placed writers among those groups of slaves who would eventually be responsible for creating the conditions of freedom for humankind. A writer, he said, is “always a kind of Jew, an outsider. But our future salvation is dependent on this man.”

  I was not convinced. Benjamin was curiously out of touch with reality, especially when it came to politics and women. His ignorance of the former is what killed him in the end—his refusal to face history in any form unmediated by language; the latter just made his life miserable, although it was not unrelated to his view of history. He could never meet a woman face-to-face; his affairs of the heart were often conducted in the safe realm of memory or imagination; embodiment, for him, was always a disappointment. (With Asja Lacis, for example. She blazed at the back of his mind like an altar. The few occasions when she actually slept with him were disastrous. “Only Zeus can rape the world with impunity,” he once said. “The rest of us must tell our parents what we’ve done.”)
<
br />   I will never forget that afternoon when I met him on Unter den Linden with a dark-eyed, vaguely rotund young woman called Grete Radt. She had unusually bad teeth, and when she smiled, one instinctively turned one’s gaze away. I had noticed at once that she wore an engagement ring but was truly stunned when Benjamin referred to her as his fiancée.

  “What?” I said, in a loud voice that seemed to panic both of them. “You are getting married?”

  “That is the whole point of an engagement,” said Benjamin, coolly, while Grete looked around as if terrified somebody might overhear us.

  Many years later, in Paris, Benjamin explained to me how that engagement had come about.

  He had become friendly with Grete sometime during the war, and she seemed to enjoy chatting with him about philosophy. He had planned a little holiday (financed by his father) in the Bavarian Alps, and when he told Grete about his trip, she somehow mistook this for an invitation. “Yes, I would love to go with you to the Alps, Walter,” she said, in a highly formalized manner that made his skin crawl. “I have always enjoyed the mountains—their height and so forth. They are very high, the Alps.” Benjamin acknowledged their massive height and was stuck.

  A few days later, rather stupidly, he told his father that a woman was going with him on this holiday. This was not, he assured him, a “romantic affiliation.” Nevertheless, unmarried couples simply did not travel together in those days, and Herr Benjamin could not approve. He grumbled something about appearances, but he did not cut off funds, which his son unwisely regarded as a kind of tacit support.