The Storyteller
Page 4
The beautiful summer nights were used for sleeplessness. Nevertheless, the patients were awoken as early as five a.m. for their morning diagnosis. Monday and Friday mornings were devoted to testing for anxiety; Sundays were for nightly indigestion. Thereafter ensued six hours of psychoanalysis. Subsequently hydrotherapy, which was administered telepathically due to the water, which tended to be wet and cold throughout most of the year. There followed a break at noon. It was dedicated to telephone consultations with European luminaries and to the theoretical exploration of diseases that have hitherto remained untargeted.
The meals are served in a chemically cleansed Bazillopher,2 surrounded by ether and camphor fumes. The physicians oversee the procedure with a loaded rifle in order to slay any attacking germs. After being checked for various pathogens, the germs are doused with hot water, anatomically dissected, and killed. They then either appear on the supper table or in the exhibition rooms of the library, which contains the directory, description, danger and cure for all the diseases weathered by the patients to date.
For the twenty-fifth anniversary of each disease, a splendid monograph with cinematographic images is published. The library is open to patients between four and five every day and serves, above all, to incite new illnesses.
After dinner, physicians and patients organise germ hunts in the park. Oftentimes it happens that a patient is accidentally shot. In such cases a simple bed of moss and forest herbs is prepared as the patient sinks to the ground. Bandages lie ready in the tree hollows.
Everything has been provided for. Should the physician fall ill, an automatic operating room is provided, whose automated apparatuses perform all procedures upon the insertion of three to twenty pennies. At three pennies, the cheapest operation entails the chemical cleaning of the nose; for twenty pennies one can get treatments with life-threatening consequences.
One evening, a serious tête-à-tête took place. The following morning, the physician disappeared on a clinical study tour to explore the latest diseases.
—
Translated by Sebastian Truskolaski.
Fragment written c. 1906–12; unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime. Gesammelte Schriften VII, 641–2.
CHAPTER 4
The Morning of the Empress
The Witch with the Comb (Die Hexe mit dem Kamm), 1922.
Healthy people must turn to the books of poets in order to feel life in all the deep and undivided sovereignty that cannot be grasped intentionally, to feel it as it was felt by that ailing Empress of Mexico on the third day of spring in the year 18–. She had been brought to this palace such a long time ago that no one could keep track any longer. Who even thought that she was ill? None of her maids and servants – all of whom led boring lives inside this palace, only rarely tending to excess – believed it. A person had arrived whose beautiful, ageing body required all the care that servants could offer. She was loved by all for her splendour. The farmers from the environs of Palace Drux told tales of this Empress who was foreign to the land, who was only supposed to die in that broad palace which towered above the plains of Holland.
But the Empress did not think of death, nor did she feel the life that stirred around her; accordingly she could be called disturbed of mind. Each evening when the sun went down, she pursued anew the question that haunted her like one of the broad paths that transforms in the twilight. This question was secret, and although the Empress had disclosed it to people she interacted with, the only answers she received were evasive, uncomprehending excuses – almost enough to infuriate – so that the Empress descended further and further down the ranks with this question: from the lady’s companion to the chamber maid, from the maid to the equerry, from the equerry to the cook, and – finally – to the children. And, indeed, the children seemed to understand her question; but she understood the language of the children as little as that of thunder, although she had often begged this of God while kneeling on a prayer stool by the window. A vault lay in the basement of the palace, dark and filled with bottles of wine – there the Empress had struggled most deeply with the question. Hunched over, her tall figure under the low ceiling, she had fashioned a set of scales out of yarn and little tin bowls. She deemed these scales to be fine enough to examine the weight of the world. And this was her question.
—
Translated by Sebastian Truskolaski.
Fragment written c. 1906–12; unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime. Gesammelte Schriften VII, 642–3.
CHAPTER 5
The Pan of the Evening
Little Jester in a Trance (Kleiner narr in trance), 1929
The evening had woven a shining pale yellow ribbon of magic over the snowy mountains and low wooded hilltops. And the snow on the peaks shone pale yellow. The forest, however, already lay in darkness. The glowing of the peaks awoke a man who sat on a bench in the forest. He looked up and relished the strange light from the peaks, looking into it until he had only a radiant flickering in his eyes; he thought nothing more and only saw. Then he turned to the bench and took the walking-stick that leaned there. He said to himself, reluctantly, that he had to return to the hotel for dinner. And he trod slowly on the broad path leading down to the valley, watching his step because it was dusk and there were roots protruding from the ground. He did not know why he walked so slowly. ‘You look ridiculous and pathetic stalking along on this broad path.’ He heard these words clearly and with some indignation. He stopped defiantly and looked up at the snowy mountain tops. Now they too were dark. As he observed this, he clearly heard a voice inside him, a completely different one, which said ‘alone with me’. For this was its greeting to the darkness. Hereupon he lowered his head and trod onwards against his will. He felt as though he was about to hear another voice which was mute and grappled for speech. But that was despicable … The valley was in sight … The lights from the hotel were surging up. As he peered into the grey depths below, he fancied he saw a workshop down there. He felt from a pressure on his own body how giant hands were forming masses of fog, how a tower, a cathedral of twilight arose. ‘The cathedral – you yourself are within it,’ he heard a voice say. And he looked around as he walked on. But what he saw seemed to him so marvellous, so stupendous … yes (quietly he felt it: so terrible) that he came to a stop. He saw how the fog hung between the trees, he heard the slow flight of a bird. Only the nearest trees still stood there. Where he had just been walking, something else had begun to spread, something grey. It covered up his steps as though they had never been taken. He realised as he walked here that something else walked through the forest too; a spell presided over things that made the old disappear, making new spaces and unknown sounds out of the familiar. More clearly than before the voice recited a rhyme from a wordless song: ‘dream and tree’. As he heard this, so loud and sudden, he came to his senses. His eyes focussed; yes, he wanted to see in focus: ‘reasonable’, warned the voice. He fixed his gaze on the path and, to the extent that it was possible, he distinguished. Over there a footprint, a root, moss, a tuft of grass, and at the edge of the path a large rock. But a new horror gripped him – as clearly as he saw, it was not as it usually was. And the more he mustered all of his strength to see, the more alien everything became. The rock over by the path grew larger – it appeared to speak. All relations were transformed. Everything particular became landscape, a spread-out image. Desperation seized him; to flee from all of this, to gain clarity in the horror. He took a deep breath and looked to the sky with resolve and composure. How strangely cold the air was, how bright and near the stars.
Did somebody scream? ‘The forest’, a voice rang loudly in his ears. He saw the forest … He ran in, jostling against the tree trunks – only further, deeper through the fog, where he had to be … where there was somebody who made everything different, who created the dreadful evening in the forest. A tree stump threw him to the ground.
There he lay and wept with fear, like a child who feels a strange man approaching in a dream.
After a while he grew silent – the moon came and the brightness dissolved the dark tree trunks into the grey mist. Then he recovered and went home.
—
Translated by Sebastian Truskolaski.
Fragment written c. 1911; unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime. Gesammelte Schriften VII, 639–41; also translated in Early Writings (1910–1917), 46–8.
CHAPTER 6
The Second Self
A New Year’s Story for Contemplation
Public Duel (Öffentliches Duell), 1932.
Krambacher is a rather dwarfish clerk and moreover a man ‘with no attachments’, as he assures the landladies of the furnished rooms, which he changes every four to six weeks. For several weeks he has been wondering where he might spend New Year’s Eve. But all his arrangements have fallen through. With the last of his money he has bought two bottles of punch. From nine o’clock onwards he starts a lonesome binge in the constant hope that his doorbell might ring, that somebody might call on him to keep him company.
His hopes are dashed. Just before eleven he heads out. He got cabin fever. We follow his uncannily lilting stride through the nocturnal streets. It is obvious that he has been drinking. Maybe he is not even really walking; maybe he is only dreaming that he is walking. This suspicion may arise fleetingly in the reader.
Krambacher enters a secluded alley. A dim light attracts his attention. A dubious looking tavern, open on New Year’s Eve? But why so quiet? He goes nearer; no trace of a tavern: faded wood lettering above a whitewashed shop window from which the milky light seeps spell: IMPERIAL PANORAMA.
He wants to pass by but a mucky piece of paper in the window holds him back: Today! Gala performance. Journey through the old year! Krambacher hesitates, timidly opens the door and, since he cannot see anyone, rallies himself to enter. There stands the Imperial panorama. Now it is described with the thirty-two chairs in a round. On one of these chairs the owner – a widowed Italian, Geronimo Cafarotti – is asleep. As the guest approaches he leaps to his feet.
Great gush of words. One can gather from his speech that every evening the place is sold out; today, coincidentally, few guests despite the gala performance; ‘but I knew that someone would come: the right one.’ While he urges the visitor onto a stool before two peepholes, he explains: ‘Here you are going to make a curious acquaintance; you will see a gentleman who bears no resemblance to you: your second self. You have spent the evening reproaching yourself, you have an inferiority complex, you feel inhibited, you blame yourself for not following your impulses. Well, what are these impulses? That’s the pressure of your second self on the handle of the door that leads to your life. And now you will recognise why you keep this door closed, have inhibitions, don’t follow your impulses.’
The journey through the old year begins. Twelve images, each with a caption; in addition, the explanations of the old man who slides from one chair to another. The images:
The path that you wanted to take
The letter that you wanted to write
The man that you wanted to rescue
The seat that you wanted to occupy
The woman that you wanted to follow
The word that you wanted to hear
The door that you wanted to open
The costume that you wanted to wear
The question that you wanted to pose
The hotel room that you wanted to have
The opportunity that you wanted to seize
On some of the images the second self can be seen, on others only the situations in which it wanted to embroil the first. The images are described just as they begin to detach from their positions with a quiet ringing, allowing subsequent ones to take their place. Barely have they settled with a quiver when they already begin to make way for a new one. The last ringing is submerged in the clanging of the New Year’s bells. Krambacher wakes up in his chair, an empty punch glass in his hand.
—
Translated by Sebastian Truskolaski.
Written c. 1930–3; unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime. Gesammelte Schriften VII, 296–8.
Dreams
CHAPTER 7
Dreams from Ignaz Jezower’s
Das Buch der Träume
Revolving House (Dreh Haus), 1928.
In the dream – I dreamt it for three or four days, and it won’t leave me – there was a country road in front of me in the darkest twilight. Tall trees lined both sides, and on the right-hand side it was bordered by a wall that soared high. While I stood in a group of people, the number and sex of which I no longer know (just that there was more than one), at the opening to the road, the ball of the sun appeared faintly between the trees, almost covered by the foliage, as white as mist and without any radiating force, and without becoming noticeably brighter. As fast as the wind I rushed on my own along the country road in order to be blessed by a more open view; then, in a moment, the sun vanished, neither sinking nor behind clouds, rather as if it had been extinguished or removed. Instantly it was a black night; rain, which completely softened the road under my feet, began to fall with tremendous force. Meanwhile, I wandered around, feeling nothing. Suddenly part of the sky flashed white, neither from the sunlight nor from the lightning – I knew it as ‘Swedish light’ – and one step ahead of me lay the sea, into the middle of which led the road. Beatified by the brightness that I had now indeed attained and the timely warning of danger, I ran triumphantly back along the street in the same storm and darkness.
* * *
I dreamt of a student revolt. Sternheim1 somehow played a role, and later he gave a report of it. In his papers, the sentence appeared word for word: When one sifted the young thoughts for the first time, one found well-fed brides and brownings [Bräute und Brownings].
—
Translated by Sam Dolbear and Esther Leslie.
First published in Ignaz Jezower’s anthology Das Buch der Träume (1928), a volume that includes other dreams by Benjamin, dreams that also appear in One Way Street (1928). Gesammelte Schriften IV, 355–6.
CHAPTER 8
Too Close
Angel Couple (Engelpaar), 1931.
In the dream, on the left bank of the Seine in front of Notre Dame. I was standing there, but there was nothing that resembled Notre Dame. A brick building towered above a high fence made of wood, revealing the extremities of its highest echelons. I stood, though, overwhelmed, right in front of Notre Dame. And what overwhelmed me was longing. Longing for the very same Paris in which I found myself in the dream. But where does this longing come from? And where does this disfigured, unrecognisable object come from? The reason being I came too close to it in the dream. The tremendous longing which had struck me here, in the heart of that which was longed for, did not press itself from the distance into an image. It was a blissful one, which has already crossed the threshold of the image and property, and knows only the power of the name, from which the lover lives, transforms, ages, rejuvenates and, imageless, is the refuge of all images.
—
Translated by Sam Dolbear and Esther Leslie.
Written in 1929; published in the cycle ‘Short Shadows I’ in Gesammelte Schriften IV, 370; also translated in Selected Writings II, 269.
CHAPTER 9
Ibizan Dream
West-Eastern Village (Westöstliches Dorf), 1925.
A dream from the first or second night of my stay in Ibiza: I went home late in the evening – it was actually not my house, but rather a splendid rental house, in which I, dreaming, had accommodated Seligmann. There I encountered a woman, hurrying towards me from a side street in close proximity to the entrance of the house, who whispered, in passing, as fast as she moved: ‘I am going for tea, I am going for tea!’ I didn’t pursue the temptation to follow her, but rather stepped into the house of S, where an unwelcome scene immediately transpired, in the course of which the son of the house grabbed me by the nose. With resolute words of protest, I slammed the house door shut behind me. I was hardly outdoors again when, on the
very same street, with the very same words, the very same wench sprang at me and this time I followed her. To my disappointment, she wouldn’t let anyone talk to her; rather she hurried away at a steady pace down a somewhat sloping alley, until she made the closest of contact, in front of an iron railing, with a whole bunch of whores, who were obviously standing at the entrance to their district. A policeman was positioned not far from there. In the midst of so much embarrassment, I awoke. Then, it crossed my mind that the girl’s arousing, strangely striped silk blouse had gleamed in the colours green and violet: the colours of Fromms Akt.1
—
Translated by Sam Dolbear and Esther Leslie.
Diary entry, Ibiza, written 1932; Gesammelte Schriften VI, 447.
CHAPTER 10
Self-Portraits of a Dreamer
In Readiness (Bereitschaft), 1931.
The Grandson
A trip to Grandmother’s had been decided on. A cab was taken. It was evening. Through the panes of the carriage doors I saw light in some of the houses of the old West End. I said to myself: that is the light from that time; exactly the same. But it wasn’t long before I was reminded of the present by a whitewashed facade that broke into the front of old terraced houses, which were still unfinished. The cab crossed Potsdamer Strasse at the intersection with Steglitzer. As the carriage continued along the other side of the road, I asked myself suddenly: how was it before, when grandmother was still alive? Were there not little bells on the horse’s yoke? I need to listen out for whether or not they still exist. In the same moment I sharpened my ears and I actually heard little bells. At the very same time the cab appeared not to roll but to glide over the snow. Snow now lay on the road. The houses shifted their oddly formed roofs up close together so that only a small strip of sky was visible between them. There were clouds capped by roofs, which were shaped like rings; I thought to point to these clouds and was astonished to hear them name ‘moon’ before me. In grandmother’s apartment it turned out that we had brought everything we needed for refreshment. On a tray raised high, coffee and cake were carried along the corridor. In the meantime, it had become clear to me that we were approaching grandmother’s bedroom, and I was disappointed that she was not yet up. I was soon inclined to surrender myself there. So much time had passed meanwhile. When I entered the bedroom, a precocious girl lay there in a blue robe that was no longer fresh. She was not covered, and she seemed quite comfortable in the wide bed. I went out and saw six or more cots next to each other in the corridor. In each of these beds sat a baby who was dressed as an adult. I had no choice but to internally count these creatures among the family. This perplexed me and I awoke.