by Jay Parini
Kaddish. Benjamin wondered if these ceremonies had any effect on the living or the dead. Yes, he believed in God, most certainly, but he could not visualize a God so personal that one particular fate, among so many, mattered. God was the energy of the universe, and he represented only a small portion of that energy. It would not surprise him if, after his demise, he returned to earth as an animal, perhaps a hedgehog. He would like to be a hedgehog, since hedgehogs were not overly troubled by niceties; they did not, like the jesuitical fox, require a multitude of options. He recalled the famous line from Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” He guessed that those who knew one big thing were happier in life.
He had himself been a fox, darting among ideas, shape-shifting, trying out this ideology or that dogma. Brecht was a hedgehog, of course; he knew one big thing: that the workers must get control over the means of production. Scholem was another hedgehog: He knew that God was hidden in the world, and that only the best would ever find Him after patient searching through a wilderness of signs. Benjamin, alas, distrusted both of these Big Things, although he understood the truth of both. It made him dizzy just to know he could see so much, so many sides, with options galore. Even here, tonight, he could see many choices.
Life and death were the crude fork in the path before him, but there were countless branches of each, and alternatives to alternatives. He could stumble in the dark, dragging himself back to Banyuls or Port-Vendres, where he could wait in hiding for the war to end. There were Jews in every village along the border, stowed in attics, lofts, cellars, barns; indeed, there was hardly a forest anywhere in southern France that did not contain a clutch of Jews. “The Jews are everywhere, hanging like fruit from the trees,” his grandmother used to say, citing a Yiddish proverb. The Jews would certainly outlast Hitler.
The Führer was doomed, Benjamin was sure of it. Nothing so inhuman, so lifeless, so essentially dull, could survive for very long. The puzzling thing was how Nazism had managed this well so far.
It doubtless appealed to a certain class of people, mostly the uninformed. For bizarre reasons, it had also attracted a handful of bright people, such as Heidegger, that monster and egomaniac, who perhaps saw Hitler as a projection of his own will to absolute intellectual power. As long as Hitler remained out of reach, in Berlin or perched on some distant yodeling hilltop in Austria, he was unthreatening. One could almost imagine him letting Heidegger, the presumed heir of Nietzsche, run the University of Freiburg in his own way.
But this was implausible. Heidegger had taken over as Rector at Freiburg in April 1933 only because the Nazis would not let the gentle Professor von Möllendorf, a Social Democrat, assume that position. To his credit, Heidegger resigned the following February, having refused to capitulate to Nazi mandates on every point. (They had insisted, for instance, that he fire two deans, including von Möllendorf.) This moment of grace notwithstanding, Heidegger had made some horrific speeches during his tenure in that post, once declaring it the “supreme privilege” of the academic community to serve the national will. He had practically wept at the revival of the German Volk, which had “won back the truth of its will-to-be.” Hitler himself represented, to him, “the triumph of hard clarity over rootless and impotent thinking.” Heidegger had gone so far as to publish, in the Freiburger Studenten Zeitung, the following sentence: “The Führer himself is the only present embodiment and future embodiment of German action and its law.”
This article had been sent to Benjamin in Paris by a friend in the philosophy department at Freiburg, who scribbled in the margins: “Was this man not the lover of your cousin, Hannah Arendt?” It was true, and impossible. The world was topsy-turvy. Poor Hannah, he thought. She did not have her wits about her when it came to men.
Hannah had last been seen in Paris, before the invasion, and he did not know if she was alive or dead. She was but one of thousands of intellectuals whom the Nazi machine had mangled in its iron teeth. “And the fools crush what they will not, cannot know,” Goethe had written, and it seemed truer now than ever.
Benjamin had been defeated as an intellectual force in the world, but he had no fear of death as such. Death was simply one more among so many mysteries. As a child, he had once questioned his mother about death, and she—in her inimitable way—explained to him calmly that upon dying, a magic carpet would take him to Jerusalem, where all Jews would eventually gather at the feet of the Messiah. That was the sort of thing Sabbatai Zevi would have preached in the seventeenth century. Or Nathan of Gaza, his rapt disciple, who did even more than Zevi to spread all manner of fantastic teachings, many of which still lingered in certain quarters in asinine, watered-down versions.
Despite his antiliteralism, Benjamin believed in heaven. It was not a place, which is to say it was neither up nor down, neither here nor there. It was a dimension, and transported to this dimension he, Walter Benjamin, would find himself the master of his own experience for the first time. What had made this earthly life for him such an imperfect paradise was a feeling of fraudulence that secretly governed every performance of every text he had written.
He had once turned this ambivalence to his advantage in a story, his only good story: “Rastelli erzählt.” In that tale, he conjured a conjurer: the fabulous Rastelli, a famous juggler whose genius lay in his unbelievable ability to manipulate a single ball. Whoever saw Rastelli perform came away with the impression that his ball was a living creature. It would leap into the air at the juggler’s slightest command, electric, independent of gravity. It could loop and spin, dip and veer. One moment it whirled on Rastelli’s scalp, and the next it popped from his vest pocket.
But Rastelli did not practice an honest form of sorcery. His secret was that the mystifying ball contained a minuscule dwarf who controlled its motion though a network of invisible strings.
In Benjamin’s story, the juggler is invited to perform before a famously cruel and temperamental sultan. Should the performance fail, Rastelli would be instantly beheaded or shackled forever to a damp wall in some dark chamber below the earth. He is at his best, however, on the night of this command performance; the ball, it seems, has never been more responsive, rising and falling, springing to life so uncannily that the sultan is stunned into admiration and gratitude.
As Rastelli leaves the theater, an urgent note from his dwarf is pressed into his hand. “Dear Master,” it says, “You will please forgive me. I am ill today and cannot possibly assist you in your performance before the sultan.” In this way Rastelli is himself deceived in the midst of his own deception; he becomes, unwittingly, authentic for the first time.
The moon was high now, eerily bright though not quite full, orange-colored, pillaring through a scrim of clouds; it seemed, absurdly, to be eavesdropping on Benjamin’s thoughts, and he stepped into the shadow of a tall pine. This kind of audience he did not need.
Standing with his back to the tree, he pressed the rough bark to his spine; he was hiding from the moonlight, much as God in the tradition of Kabbalah withdrew from the world. It was Isaac Luria, writing in the sixteenth century, who characterized God’s self-exile, tzimtzum, so vividly. To make room for the expanding universe, God had hidden himself, sending holy light into the world to buoy it up. The world, alas, could not bear so much glory; it shattered, and the cornerstones of the world—in the shape of vessels—shattered, too. Evil now permeated the world, having found a point of entry. The expansion of the universe had given evil the space it required to live and grow, and it was everywhere now, spoiling what was once good. To humankind was left the agonizing yet essential work of restitution, Tikkun olam, the repair of the world.
Benjamin spoke the lovely phrase aloud: “Tikkun olam.” He drew himself up, feeling a surge of defiance. Having struggled to get here, within sight of the summit, he must not give in, slip back, die. He must repair the world.
Listing slightly to one side,
like a drunk, Benjamin crossed the clearing. His feet seemed to weigh a hundred pounds each as he dragged them through the wiry grass. The moonlight flooded the valley below, giving it an otherworldly tinge, and it sparkled on the sea, dazzling to behold. The wind, less intense than before and somewhat softer, was fragrant, smelling of pine and salt; it felt cool but not bitter on his cheeks.
Suddenly, a voice startled him. Instinctively, he fell to the ground, digging his face into the coarse grass. Not fifty yards away a small patrol passed, chatting freely among themselves. Benjamin listened tensely, hoping they would not see him. His heart seemed to throb loudly in his chest, like a kettledrum. There was no hiding on this bright night, but the path was well below him, and they would have to crane their necks to see where he lay.
They spoke in French, not German, and this was reassuring. They were probably just local boys pressed into service by the border police. For so many of the younger men in service, the war was fun, a boy’s adventure; they would look back on these years later in life with nostalgia, with a vague but unmistakable sense that something important and interesting had once happened to them and was gone. The sad truth was there was no war at all; there were thousands of little wars, in thousands of different places. One could not comprehend such diversity.
When several of the guards broke into loud laughter, Benjamin could not resist lifting his head. They were shockingly close, the moonlight glinting off their helmets and bayonets. Benjamin watched as they filed into the distance, disappearing around a bend in the path, their voices gradually diminishing. He waited for half an hour before lifting himself to his feet to confirm that they were gone.
Afraid that another patrol might be near, he bent low as he walked toward the stable. If they caught him, he would surely be sent to a holding camp, then transported by cattle car to Germany, where he would die. He did not doubt that he would die there; his heart was weak, and he lacked the will to survive in appalling circumstances. Even Georg, his willful brother, was probably dead by now; at least that was his sister-in-law’s opinion.
Benjamin entered the stable and stood for a long time, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dark. At last, he could see a pile of straw in the corner, its sulfurous silver gleam. He did not care if it was moldy or filled with rats and merds, and he burrowed under it; the straw formed a blanket of sorts, and within ten minutes he felt much warmer. What he missed was a glass of brandy, its prickly heat at the back of his throat, the aftertaste of sweetness. But there was, of course, nothing to drink here, and he must not think about it. One of the few things he learned in exile was that you must not dwell on what you do not have.
At least he had a few cigarettes. For comfort and warmth, he lit one, letting the smoke stay in his mouth, in his throat, in his nasal passages; he filled his head with smoke and let his mind float. It surprised him that he felt no need to exhale; he was, perhaps, closer to death than he realized. Death as stillness at the center, a divine breathlessness, suspension of desire.
He had wanted so much in his life, a good deal of it unobtainable: coveted editions of favorite writers, oil paintings, exotic toys, objet d’art. And women. He often found it pleasant to think about women before he fell asleep; the force of eros was such that it took one’s mind off everything else. Self-consciously, he let his mind drift to Asja, then to Jula Cohn. An erotic dream would be lovely at this moment, the perfect escape.
The fire of his love for Jula had dimmed, but the coals might still be fanned by fantasy. He had met her for the first time in 1912, in Berlin. She was a puppy then, full-breasted though still in her teens. Her silky black hair was cut short, daringly so; when she brushed it back, it gave her a boyish look that Benjamin found irresistible. The puffiness around her eyes was merely part of her adolescent charm, as was her moodiness. But mostly, he adored her gaze, its way of attaching itself firmly to his own. She did not have to utter a word to communicate desire.
Benjamin met her secretly many times in obscure cafés, and they would talk into the morning hours, sometimes holding hands beneath a small table. Once, in an isolated section of a park near the river, they kissed deeply; it was a smoky dusk, with a mist floating above the water, swirling around them like a stage set from Wagner. Geese paddled by, snorting, honking, sometimes whirling in rings overhead. Passively, Jula opened her lips for him, letting him dig into her mouth with his tongue, his watery affection drooling into her throat. Another time, nearby, in a grove of copper beeches (he could still see their trunks rising, the bark smooth as steel), she had touched him where no woman had dared to touch him before, unbuttoning his trousers with delicate, moist fingers.
He tried to conjure that time again. It was midsummer, and they had taken a picnic into the park; as the sun dropped behind the high trees, she had casually, unexpectedly, reached for him. He had fallen, weak-kneed as a calf, to the ground, and she sat on top of him, taking the full length of him into her hands. He came too quickly, much to his embarrassment, but she said, “It is all right, my little Walter. This is natural. It is really quite nice, in fact.”
Not long after this incident in the park, Jula left Berlin with her father (her mother was dead); they moved to Heidelberg, where Benjamin visited her on several occasions, even after his marriage to Dora in 1917.
It had been so awkward: loving Jula, living with Dora. The birth of Stefan only made things worse, tying him to the marriage in a most insidious way. But he continued to dream about Jula, to write and visit her. The distance between them, and the physical and moral obstacles to their union, only inflamed him. He often pondered the question of love. Why was it so difficult for him to love what was accessible? He thought of Dante, who merely glimpsed Beatrice on a bridge one afternoon in Florence, yet this image was enough to fuel a life’s work. The beloved is perhaps best captured, possessed, in a text, in lines that writhe on the page, that smolder and burn.
Benjamin wished his marriage to Dora had been better. He had made a bad husband, although this had never been his intention. He had wanted to worship her, to make her happy; he had wanted to be a sympathetic father to Stefan, unlike his own father, who had never listened when he spoke. Benjamin always listened well: It was a cardinal trait, and Dora admitted as much. “You listen, Walter, but you hear things that have not been said,” she used to scold. It was funny at first, then rueful; at last, it was nothing short of tragic. Whenever his wife spoke, he heard other voices; when she looked at him, he averted his gaze. Her hand on his grew colder, day by day.
Why was he such an enigma to himself? Why had self-knowledge of the most rudimentary kind eluded him?
He sank deeper into the loose straw, the musty odor of mulch permeating his clothes. Bat wings flickered above in the rafters, and he did not like bats. Nor was he fond of spiders; he imagined dozens of them around him now, invisible, crawling into his trousers, under his shirt. His back itched terribly, but when he tried to reach under his shirt to scratch, a sharp pain rippled through his right shoulder and he groaned.
I will soon be skull and bones, he thought. Fleshless. Bleached. Empty. But he did not mind. There was, in fact, a little comfort in this notion of emptiness, of cessation. This terrible running would soon be over. Looking up, he saw the moon breaking through tiny cracks in the ceiling, as through a rib cage. This reminded him that the world was his body, and that he would shine beyond the point of fleshlessness; he would shine like the moon, and his horizons would be infinitely broader.
“Dora!” he said aloud. It startled him to hear the name, embodied, floating in the dark. Yet, why was he calling her of all people? How could he expect her to help, when he had not helped her in the least, when he had made her life so frantic? He deeply regretted that he had allowed Jula to share their apartment in Berlin. What madness was that? How could he have been so crazy? Dora had begged him to send Jula away. “What do you want with her?” she cried. “Do you sleep with her when I’m not h
ere? Is that it? When I go shopping, you seduce her in my own house? I hope the two of you burn in Gehenna!”
Gehenna. Benjamin began to understand the meaning of hell as a concept. Hell was not something reserved for after death; it was part of life itself, some inversion of life. He had burned in Gehenna throughout those months in Berlin when Jula slept in the room beside his, so close he could often hear her breathing through the wall. He often made love with Dora while imagining it was Jula throbbing beneath him, wrapping her long, smooth legs around him, pressing her breasts tightly against his chest. Once, at orgasm, he had actually cried her name, and Dora, startled, rose from the bed, put on her nightgown, and went into the sitting room, where she warmed her hands by the embers of the fire. Benjamin, as if temporarily seized by wisdom, did not try to console her. He could say nothing. It would have been offensive to her if he had tried. For some things, there is no excuse.
Day after day, he had tried to negotiate the impossible. How to live with two women was the issue—the mad, irresolvable issue. Benjamin had studied the matter in the mirroring, mediating shield of Perseus held to his eyes by Goethe in his overwhelming novel Elective Affinities. Benjamin’s first triumph as a critic had been his essay on that novel, which meant so much because he saw in that painful, perfect text the uncanny reflection of his own contradictory life. Goethe’s characters—Eduard, Ottilie, and Charlotte—reeled before him now. Goethe had understood that love is never fully consummated in this earthly incarnation; it requires translation unto death. Benjamin had written in this essay: “Death, like love, has the power to make us naked.” In sexual congress, one is divinely naked; in death, too, one enters the divine presence without the guilty pretense of clothes.
He wanted nothing more than to lie in a crypt beside Jula or Asja. Or both! Were they not, in a strange way, the same woman? Or was he so contemptuous of the other sex that he considered them all mere manifestations of the Eternal Female? This Jungian nonsense irritated him as he thought about it. Indeed, he had frequently inveighed, in his letters to Adorno, about “bourgeois psychologizing,” believing Jung even worse than Freud in this regard. At least Freud did not wrap himself in a cloak of facile mysticism.