The Storyteller

by Walter Benjamin

  The Seer

  Above a great city. Roman arena. At night. A chariot race takes place, it was – as a dark consciousness told me – about Christ. Meta stood in the middle point of the dream-image. From the seats of the arena the hill descended steeply down to the city. I encounter a rolling streetcar at the foot of the hill, on the rear platform ledge of which I notice a close female acquaintance wearing the red, burnt garments of the damned. The coach rushed off, and suddenly before me stood her boyfriend. The satanic features of his indescribably beautiful face emerge as a cautious smile. In his raised hands, he holds a small stick and, with the words, ‘I know that you are the Prophet Daniel’, he smashes it over my head. In this moment, I became blind. Then we continued to go downhill together into the town; soon we were in a street which had houses on the right side, and open fields on the left, and at its end a gate. We walked towards it. A ghost appeared in the window of the ground floor of a house that was on our right. And as we continued, it accompanied us in the interiors of all the houses. It went through all the walls and always stayed with us on the same level. I saw it despite being blind. I felt that my friend suffered under the gaze of the ghost. Then we changed places: I wanted to be next to the row of houses and shelter him. As we reached the gate, I woke up.

  The Lover

  I was out with my girlfriend. We had undertaken something between mountain hiking and strolling, and we were now approaching the summit. Oddly enough, I thought to recognise it by a very high pole that was thrusting obliquely towards the sky, which, looming from the overhanging cliff wall, overlapped with it. When we reached the top, there was no summit, but rather a high plateau, over which went a wide street with rather tall ancient houses on both sides. At once we were no longer on foot but in a car, driving along this street, sitting next to each other on the backwards-facing seat, as it seemed to me; perhaps the car’s direction of travel changed while we sat inside. Then I leaned over my beloved in order to kiss her. She didn’t offer me her mouth, but rather her cheek. And while I kissed her, I noticed that this cheek was of ivory and was permeated along its whole length by black, ornately radiating veins, which struck me because of their beauty.

  The Knower

  I see myself in the Wertheim department store in front of a flat little box with wooden figures, such as a little sheep, just like the animals that made up Noah’s Ark. But this little sheep was much flatter and made of a rough, unpainted wood. This toy lured me. As I let the salesgirl show it to me, it transpires that it is constructed like a magic tile, as found in many magic boxes: these little panels are loose and shift, all turning blue or red, according to how the ribbons are pulled. This flat, magical wooden toy grows on me all the more after I realise this. I ask the salesgirl the price and am most astonished that it costs more than seven marks. Then I make a difficult decision not to buy. As I turn to go, my last glance at it falls on something unexpected. The construction has transformed. The flat panel rises steeply upwards as an inclined plane; at its end is a door. A mirror occupies it. In this mirror I see what is playing out on the inclined plane, which is a road: two children run on the left side. Otherwise it is empty. All this is under glass. The houses, however, and the children on the street are brightly coloured. Now I can no longer resist; I pay the price and put it about my person. In the evening I intend to show it to friends. But there is unrest in Berlin. The Nazis are threatening to storm the café where we have met; in feverish consultation we survey all the other cafés, but none appear to offer protection. So we make an expedition into the desert. There it is night; tents are erected; lions are close by. I have not forgotten my precious treasure, which more than anything I want to show everyone. But the opportunity does not arise. Africa mesmerises everyone too much. And I wake up before I can reveal the secret which has in the meantime been fully revealed to me: the three phases into which the toy falls. The first panel: that colourful street with the two children. The second: a web of fine little cogs, pistons and cylinders, rollers and transmissions, all of wood, whirling together in one plane, without person or noise. And finally the third panel: a view of the new order in Soviet Russia.

  The Tight-Lipped One

  As I knew while in a dream that I had to now leave Italy, I travelled from Capri over to Positano. The thought gripped me that a part of this landscape only seemed accessible to those who land to the right of the actual landing place in an abandoned quarter, which was unsuitable for such a purpose. The place in the dream was nothing like in reality. I ascended a steep pathless slope and hit a deserted road, which wandered wide through gloomy, brittle Nordic pine forest. I crossed over it and looked back. A deer, rabbit or something similar kept running along the road from left to right. I, however, carried straight on, and knew that the place, Positano, remote from this loneliness, somewhat below the place of the forest, was to the left. After a few steps, an old, long-abandoned part of this area appeared – a large, overgrown public square on the long left-hand side of which stood an ancient church. On the right, narrow side, stood a vast alcove, a kind of large chapel or baptistery. Perhaps a few trees demarcated the space. In any case, there was a high iron railing surrounding the spacious square, in which the two buildings were separated by quite a distance. I stepped towards it and saw a lion somersault across the square. It sprang low across the ground. With terror, I immediately noticed an oversized bull with two enormous horns. And as soon as I had registered the presence of both animals, they had already stepped through a gap in the fence, which I had not noticed. In an instant a number of clergymen appeared, as well as other people who, at the command of the clergymen, arranged themselves in a row in order to receive whatever instructions the animals had in mind, whose danger now appeared averted. I remember nothing else, except that a brother stood before me and asked me whether I was tight-lipped. I replied with a sonorous voice, whose calmness astonished me in the dream, ‘Yes!’

  The Chronicler

  The Emperor stood before the court. There was, though, only one table, which stood on a podium, and in front of this table the witnesses were being interrogated. The witness at this moment was a woman with her child, a girl. She was supposed to testify how the Emperor had impoverished them through his war. And in order to support her case, she presented two objects. It was all that she had left. The first of these objects was a broom with a long handle. The second was a skull. ‘For the Emperor made me so poor’, she said, ‘that I can give my child no other receptacle from which to drink.’

  —

  Translated by Sam Dolbear and Esther Leslie.

  Translated from Träume, a collection of Benjamin’s dreams edited by Burkhard Lindner; also published in Gesammelte Schriften IV, 420–5, though with some variations. According to the editors of the Gesammelte Schriften, Benjamin wrote up these dreams from a number of notebooks, spanning a period of some years. In some cases different versions of them appear elsewhere. ‘The Seer’ and ‘The Tight-Lipped One’, for instance, appeared in Ignaz Jezower’s dream collection from 1928, Das Buch der Träume; ‘The Lover’ first appeared in the ‘Ibizan Sequence’, and ‘The Chronicler’ was probably also written in Ibiza in 1932. ‘The Grandson’ might likewise have originated in 1932 when Benjamin began to collate his childhood memories. Benjamin also sent these dreams to the Prague journal The World in Words, but the manuscript was sent back with the stamp ‘journal discontinued’. ‘The Knower’ and ‘The Chronicler’ were eventually published in the Zürich newspaper Der öffentliche Dienst in 1934 under the title ‘Mit einem Spielzeug Staat machen’.

  CHAPTER 11

  Dream I

  In Angel’s Care (In Engelshut), 1931.

  O…s showed me their house in the Dutch East Indies. The room in which I found myself was panelled with dark wood and aroused the impression of prosperity. But that is really nothing, said my guides. What I really must admire was the view over the open sea that was nearby, and so I climbed the stairs. Once at the top, I stood in front of a window. I looked d
own. There in front of my eyes lay that warm, panelled, and snug room, which I had, only a moment ago, left.

  —

  Translated by Sam Dolbear and Esther Leslie.

  Written 1933; Gesammelte Schriften IV, 429–30.

  CHAPTER 12

  Dream II

  In Angel’s Care (In Engelshut), 1931.

  Berlin; I sat in a cab in the company of some highly ambiguous girls. Suddenly the sky darkened. ‘Sodom’, said a woman of mature years in a bonnet who suddenly also appeared in the carriage. In this way we arrived at the purlieus of the train station, where the platforms stretched outwards. It was called something like Oranienburg Station. Here court proceedings were taking place, in which both parties sat opposite each other on two street corners, on the bare pavement. Although the proceedings involved things including property rights, the opposite party was my brother, but my wife was absent. I referred to the overgrown, bleached moon, which bulged low in the sky, as if a symbol of justice. Then I was on a small expedition, which moved downwards on a ramp such as exists in a freight yard (I was in the purlieus of the train station and stayed there). It seemed like the Sternbergian circle – Döblin was, in any case, among them. They stopped in front of a very narrow rivulet. The rivulet flowed between two bands of convex porcelain platters, which floated more than they were fixed, and gave way underfoot like buoys. As for the second one, on the other side, I was not sure whether it was porcelain. More likely glass. Either way, they were totally covered in flowers, which emerged like bulbs from glass containers, only from spherical, colourful ones, and they gently struck against one another in the water, again like buoys. I stepped into the flowerbed on the other side for a moment. At the same moment, I heard the elucidations of a small sub-officer who led us. In this gutter, as his remarks conveyed, suicidal people kill themselves, those poor fellows, who have nothing more than a flower, which they hold between their teeth. Now this light fell on the flowers. Like the Acheron, one might think to oneself; but this was not in the dream. I was told in which place I should put my foot on the first platter when returning. At this spot, the porcelain was white and serrated. In conversation we walked back from the depth of the freight yard. I mentioned it to Döblin, the strange texture of the tiles, which we still had underfoot, and that they might be used in a film. But he didn’t want to speak so publicly of such projects. Then at once, a lad in rags and tatters came towards us on his way down there. It seemed the others calmly let him pass, apparently only I searched feverishly in my pockets: I wanted to find a five-mark piece. It didn’t appear. I slipped him a somewhat smaller coin when he crossed my path – for he did not stop on his way – and I awoke.

  —

  Translated by Sam Dolbear and Esther Leslie.

  Written 1933; Gesammelte Schriften IV, 430–1.

  CHAPTER 13

  Once Again

  Acrobats (Artisten), 1915.

  In the dream, I was in the educational house in Haubinda, where I grew up. The school house lay behind me and I went into the forest, which was deserted, towards Streufdorf. It was now no longer the spot where the forest opens out onto the plain, where the landscape – village and Straufhain’s peak – emerged. Rather, once I had climbed the low mountain at a gentle incline, it suddenly dropped almost vertically on the other side; and from the elevation, which lessened as I descended, I saw the landscape through an oval opening amid the treetops, like a black ebony photo frame. In no way did it resemble the one I expected. On a large blue stream lay Schleusingen, which in fact lies far elsewhere, and I didn’t know: is it Schleusingen or Gleicherwiesen? Everything was as if bathed in humid colours and yet a heavy and wet black prevailed, as if the image were the field which only just now, in the dream, had once again been painfully ploughed, and in which the seeds of my later life had then been sown.

  —

  Translated by Sam Dolbear and Esther Leslie.

  Written c. 1933; Gesammelte Schriften IV, 435.

  CHAPTER 14

  Letter to Toet Blaupot ten Cate

  Siblings (Geschwister), 1930.

  …You see, even my summer represented a major contrast to the last. Back then, I could – as an expression of a totally fulfilled experience – never get up too early. Now I sleep, not only longer, but the dreams persist, often recurring, into the day. In the last few days it was of picturesque and beautiful architecture: I saw B and Weigel1 in the shape of two towers or gate-like structures swaying through the city. The flood of this sleep, which forcefully broke against the day, is moved by the power of your image, like the lake is by the pull of the moon. I miss your presence more than I can say – and, what’s more – more than I could believe.

  —

  Translated by Sam Dolbear and Esther Leslie.

  Written summer 1934 while with Brecht in Denmark; Gesammelte Schriften VI, 812.

  CHAPTER 15

  A Christmas Song

  The Lovers (Der Verliebte), 1923.

  Of all those songs, the one I loved the most was a Christmas song that filled me, as only music can, with solace for a sorrow not yet experienced but only sensed now for the first time.

  I lay and slept and dreamed

  a very beautiful dream

  There stood on a table in front of me

  the most beautiful Christmas tree.

  But it was not only the magic of the melody which made this song tug my heart strings. For me the dreamer did not appear opposite the tree, his dream face awake, upright, rather in the song the sleeper remained and his dream stepped close to him, just as in images by primitive painters the Madonna stands by the bed of an ill person or a sleeper, to whom she has appeared, so ‘the table before me’ stood next to this bed. And the singing had so often brushed over that threshold between dream and waking that it was blurred and smoothed over.

  —

  Translated by Sam Dolbear and Esther Leslie.

  Written c. 1933–4; unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime and omitted from the Gesammelte Schriften. Taken from Träume, 26.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Moon

  Angel Contender (Engel Anwärter), 1939.

  Welti’s Moonlit Night

  In a wide surge, which seemed to befit primeval times, the land swelled in front of this window. And the crest of the surge lifted this knight upwards in front of the woman as once the Sirens may have appeared on crests of waves before Odysseus. Such a sea was surely strange to the Greeks. But the earth, which lifted up the knight in front of the window, was perhaps from the same substance as the woman, who, alongside the sleeping man, now corpselike, had become absorbed in this night by the distant, indistinct form. But was that the earth, whose satellite was the moon laying in this gleam? Had not its whole disc rather transposed the order of nature, so that the earth had become nothing more than a satellite of the moon, its nearby earth, on which now for its part was transposed the order of the day; the wife had become ruler, the mountains sea, sleep death?

  Albert Welti, Mondnacht, 1917

  The Water Glass

  And again the rays of the moon shone like a magician’s wand that reverses the order of nature. The echo, in particular, which now reached me, the more attentively that I listened out for it on the inside, became all the more a noise long-ago heard. The erstwhile seemed to already occupy all the sites of this nearby earth, and so it came that I eventually could approach my bed, when I was just about to step into it, only with the concerned worry that I would have liked to have seen myself lying in it. My worries only completely faded away when I felt the mattress on my back.

  The Moon

  My first walk was to the window. Through the cracks between the slats of the window blinds, I beheld the houses in the backyard. Sometimes my gaze also penetrated higher up. And then it transpired that, in the sky, the moon, with its light separate from the background of the starry heavens, stood in my field of vision. Never for a long period of time, for it always seemed advisable for me to turn myself away again quickly.