The Storyteller

by Walter Benjamin

  In the Dark

  Slowly the moonlight moved further along; sometimes it had already left my room before I fell asleep again. Then there was a question that arose inside me in the dark; I believe today, it was the other, unilluminated side of the fear that had gripped me in the moonlight. The question, though, was: why then is there something in the world, why does the world exist? Ever again with renewed astonishment I noticed that nothing could force me to think the world. It could have been missing. The non-existent was not one jot more hostile or stranger to me than existence. The beam of the moon could alienate its most familiar details from me.

  The Dream

  Thus I was the prisoner of the nights of the full moon, which threw the slats of my venetian blinds over my bed cover. Once, however, the moon reappeared to me on the front side of the house. Childhood already lay long behind me, since finally we measured ourselves – like to like. Then finally it came to the great encounter.

  Once, however, the moon reappeared to me on the front side of the house. Childhood already lay long behind me. But only then, never before and never after, the image of what is mine stepped clearly in front of me, at the same time as the moon. And I saw myself in this dream in their midst. Only my sister was missing. ‘Where is Dora?’ I heard my mother say. For the moon, once full in the sky, had suddenly grown bigger, coming closer and closer, it tore the earth apart. The railings of the iron balcony, upon which everyone had been sitting, went to pieces, and the bodies that had sat on it quickly dispersed into their cell particles.

  When I awoke at night in the dark, the world was nothing more than a single mute question. It might be that this question, though I didn’t know it at the time, sat in the pleats of the plush curtains which hung from my door to keep out the noise. It might also be that a reflection was its kernel, which sometimes sat in the brass knobs which crowned the foot of my bed. Maybe it was just the residue of a dream that had solidified upon awakening.

  —

  Translated by Sam Dolbear and Esther Leslie.

  Written c. 1933–4, concurrent with the writing of the moon sections in Berlin Childhood. Unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime and omitted from the Gesammelte Schriften; taken from Träume, 29–32.

  CHAPTER 17

  Diary Notes

  Head (Bearded Man) (Kopf [Bärtiger Mann]), 1925.

  6 March 1938. Over the last few nights, I have had dreams which remained deeply etched on my day. Tonight, in the dream, I was amid company. People showed much kindness; I believe this consisted mainly of women showing an interest in me, in fact they complimented my appearance. I seem to remember saying aloud, ‘Now I would not live much longer’ – as if they were the last demonstrations of friendship of those who were taking their leave.

  Later, immediately before waking up, I was in the company of a lady in the rooms of Adrienne Monnier. Inside was the staging of an exhibition of things, which I can no longer accurately recall. Books with miniatures were among them, and large platters or hammered arabesques, coloured as if covered in enamel. The rooms were on the ground level with the street, from which one could see into the room through a great plate of glass. I found myself indoors. My lady had clearly treated her teeth for some time according to the techniques which this exhibition wanted to promote. She had created an opalescent sheen on them. Her teeth toyed faintly with greenish and bluish hues. I endeavoured to get her to understand, in the most polite way, that it was not the correct use of the materials. Anticipating my thoughts, she pointed out to me that the inner side of her teeth were mounted with red. I had indeed wanted to express that, for the teeth, the strongest colours are just strong enough.

  I had suffered very much from the din in my room. Last night the dream retained this. I found myself in front of a map and, at the same time, in the landscape which was depicted on it. The landscape was incredibly gloomy and bleak, and it wasn’t possible to say whether its desolation was merely a craggy wasteland or empty grey ground populated only by capital letters. These letters drifted curvily on their base, just as if they were following the mountain range; the words formed from these letters were more or less remote from each other. I knew, or came to know, that I was in the labyrinth of the ear canal. The map was at the same time a map of hell.

  28 June. I found myself in a labyrinth of steps. This labyrinth was not covered at all points. I ascended; other steps led into the depths. On a landing I saw that I had come to stand on a peak. A view over all the land opened up. I saw other people standing on other peaks. One of these others was suddenly gripped with vertigo and plunged down. This vertigo spread around; other people now plunged down from other peaks into the depths. As I too was struck by the feeling, I awoke.

  On 22 June, I arrived at Brecht’s …

  —

  Translated by Sam Dolbear and Esther Leslie.

  Diary entry, 1938; Gesammelte Schriften VI, 532–4.

  CHAPTER 18

  Review: Albert Béguin, The

  Romantic Soul and the Dream

  Debut of an Angel–Heavy Being of an Angel (Debut eines Engels–Schwerer Anfang eines Engels), 1938.

  Albert Béguin, The Romantic Soul and the Dream:

  Essays on German Romanticism and French Poetry,

  Marseille: Editions des Cahiers du Sud 1937, (two volumes)

  The predominant part of this extensive work by Béguin is devoted to examinations of German Romanticism. If a shorter characterisation of the French Romantics is included at the end, it is not on account of the interests of comparative literary history (from which Béguin distances himself [vol. II, 320]). German Romanticism does not present itself to the author as the mother of the French variant, but rather as the Romantic phenomenon par excellence through which the initiation into this movement of the spirit unfolds. For Béguin it is indeed an initiation. The object of study, he writes, engages ‘that most secret part of our selves … in which we now only sense a wish, the wish to decode the language of signs and omens, and thus we may get hold of the disconcertment that fills the person who considers human life for one moment in all its strangeness, with its dangers, its alarm, its beauty and its sad limits’ (xvii). Considerations in the concluding part are devoted to Surrealist poetry and determine the author’s orientation from the outset – a sign, indeed, of how concerned he is to remove himself from the realm of academic scholarship. It should be added that he does not at all relinquish the most rigorous academic standards in his handling of the apparatus of scholarship, even if that is not the case with his method. The book is exemplarily worked through, with precision, without learned pomposity. Due to this commitment, the details here are often as original as they are appealing, irrespective of the problematic aspects of the book’s basic position.

  The weaknesses of the work are clearly exposed in its allegiant formulations. The author says: ‘Objectivity, which certainly can and should form the law of the descriptive sciences, cannot fruitfully determine the humanities. In this realm every “disinterested” research includes an unforgivable betrayal of the self and of the “object” of investigation’ (xvii). One would not want to raise any objections to this. The error only arises where one tries to align an intensive interest with an immediate interest. The unmediated interest is always subjective and has just as little right in the human sciences as in any other. One cannot immediately pose the question of whether Romantic doctrines of the dream were ‘correct’; rather, one should explore the historical constellation from which the imaginary Romantic enterprises sprang. In such a mediated interest, which directs itself first and foremost towards the historical state of affairs of Romantic intentions, our own contemporary involvement in the object comes into its own more legitimately than in the appeal to inwardness, which approaches the texts immediately in order to retrieve truth from them. Béguin’s book proceeds with such an appeal and thereby has, perhaps, fostered misunderstandings.

  André Thérive, who supplies Le Temps with literary criticism in the secular tradition, obs
erves of this book that it depends on the opinion that we hold of the purpose of humanity, whether we declare ourselves in agreement with it, or whether we are compelled to find it utterly repellent ‘when the spirit is directed towards the darkness as the only place where it finds joy, poetry, the secret dominion over the universe’ (Le Temps, August 1937). Perhaps it should be added that the path via the initiates of earlier times is enticing for the adept only if these are authorities, only if they appear to him as witnesses. When it comes to poets that is rarely the case; it is most certainly not true of Romantic poets. Only Ritter might be understood as an initiator in the strict sense. The shaping not only of his thoughts, but of his life, is proof of that. One might also call Novalis to mind and Caroline von Günderode – the Romantics were for the most part too bound up in the business of literature to feature as ‘guardians of the threshold’. This state of affairs means that Béguin often has to echo the usual modes of procedure in literary history. One can agree with him that these do not quite correspond to his theme. This speaks as much against them as against the theme.

  Anyone who undertakes an analysis, as Goethe reminds us, should ensure that a genuine synthesis is at its root. As alluring as the object dealt with by Béguin is, the question remains whether the mindset with which the author approached it can be compatible with Goethe’s counsel. Completion of the synthesis is the privilege of historical cognition. The object, as it is sketched in the title, indeed encourages one to expect a historical construction. This would have accentuated more effectively the state of consciousness of the author, and thereby ours, than what discloses itself in his up-to-the-minute considerations of Surrealism and existential philosophy. It would have unmasked the fact that Romanticism completes a process which was begun in the eighteenth century: the secularisation of mystic tradition. Alchemists, Illuminati and Rosicrucians set in train something concluded in Romanticism. The mystical tradition did not survive this process without damage. This was proven in the excrescences of Pietism, as much as the theurgy of figures such as Cagliostro and Saint Germain. The corruption of mystical teachings and needs was just as great in the lower social strata as in the higher ones.

  Romantic esoterism grew out of these circumstances. It was a movement of restoration along with all of its violence. With Novalis mysticism was finally able to find a place for itself floating above the continent of religious experience, and even more so in Ritter. Even before the close of late Romanticism, Friedrich Schlegel already shows the secret sciences once again on the point of returning to the lap of the church. The beginnings of a social and industrial development – one in which mystical experience, which has lost its sacramental place, was put into question – coincided with the time of the complete secularisation of mystical tradition. For a Friedrich Schlegel, a Clemens Brentano, a Zacharias Werner, the consequence was conversion. Others, like Troxler or Schindler, took refuge in evoking the dreamworld, and the vegetative and animal manifestations of the unconscious. They retreated strategically and evacuated areas of higher mystical life in order to consolidate those rooted in nature. Their appeal to dream life was a distress signal; it indicated not so much the return home of the soul to the motherland as the fact that obstacles had already rendered that return impossible.

  Béguin did not reach such a conception. He has not reckoned with the possibility that the actual synthetic core of his object, the way it discloses historical cognition, could emit a light in which the dream theories of the Romantics disintegrate. This shortcoming has left traces in the methodology of this work. In its turning to each Romantic writer separately, it reveals the fact that his confidence in the synthetic power of his question is not unlimited. Of course this weakness also has its merits. It gives him the opportunity to prove himself as a portraitist whom it is often truly charming to pursue. It is the portrait studies which make the book worth reading, irrespective of its construction. The first of them, which sketches the relations of sprightly G.Ch. Lichtenberg to the dream life of his fellow humans and to his own, provides a higher sense of Béguin’s capability. In his treatment of Victor Hugo in the second volume he delivers a masterpiece in a few pages. The more the reader burrows into the details of these physiognomic showpieces, the more often we will find the correction of an inherent prejudice which might have scuppered the book. A figure such as G.H. Schubert, especially as described by Béguin, shows, with great clarity, how limited the significance is of certain esoteric speculations of the Romantics, which, the more modest the yield that is granted to its immediate pickings, does all the more honour to the historian’s loyalty.

  —

  Translated by Esther Leslie and Esther Leslie.

  First published in Mass und Wert 2 (1938–9); Gesammelte Schriften III, 557–60. Also translated in Selected Writings 4, 153–55.

  PART TWO

  Travel

  Paul Klee’s Hilterfingen, 1895.

  City and Transit

  CHAPTER 19

  Still Story

  My Room (Meine Bude), 1896.

  TOLD ON THE OCCASION OF MY MOTHER’S BIRTHDAY

  A D-train passed through a rainy landscape. A student sat in a third-class carriage. He was returning from Switzerland, where he had spent a few expensive and rain-filled days. With a certain tender care, he let his feelings rest and sought to summon up a mild sense of boredom. Sitting in the yellow coupé was an older gentleman and beside him a lady in her sixties. Unthinkingly, the student stared at them for a minute, then got up and went slowly into the corridor. He looked through the glass panes of the compartments and noticed a female student from his university with whom he was besotted – silently until now, as was his custom with such matters in their early stages. And as he saw her, he could not help feeling that this was quite natural. With the air of someone who had acted judiciously, he returned to his compartment.

  In the evening, around nine thirty, the train pulled into the university town. The student got off without looking back. When, soon after, he saw the female student lugging a big black suitcase ahead of him, he approved of this scene as being quite natural. The memory of rainy Swiss days began to fade.

  He made little effort to follow her through the station, this female student whom he was in love with (‘after all – in love’, he remarked to himself). Without a doubt she would wait with her suitcase at the tram stop. And indeed: there she stood with a few other passengers. A fine rain was falling. The tram came (not his line, as he noted), but there is nothing more unpleasant than waiting in the rain. The female student embarked at the front, and the conductor stashed her heavy suitcase. The dark mass of this suitcase had something fascinating about it. How spectral it looked, rising from the platform! As the tram began to move the student stepped onto the front platform.

  They were the only two. The rain relentlessly showered his face. She stood beside her suitcase, wrapped in a thick travel coat in which she looked ugly – like some plaid monstrosity. The tramcar moved quickly; few people got on. They travelled to a distant district which was almost a suburb. Vexation rained down on the student like drizzle from the wet clouds. Slowly he worked himself up into a rage. He felt hatred for the administration, which had steered the tram into this distant area. Hatred for the darkened streets with windows in which lights were flickering. A glowing, passionate hatred of the vile, unfitting rainy weather. He wrapped himself in his coat and decided not to speak, not a word. For he was not the slave of this woman in the monstrous raincoat. Oh no!

  The tramcar was moving very quickly. A sense of sovereignty came over him and he began to plan a work of poetry.

  Then he thought nothing except: I just want to see how far she will travel.

  Two minutes later the tramcar stopped. The lady got off and the conductor reached for her suitcase. This awoke the young man’s jealous fury. He grabbed the suitcase without saying a word, alighted from the tram and began following her. He had walked a hundred paces behind her when, upon perceiving an elastic gesture of her head,
he felt compelled to recount to her a few words about the time and the weather, by way of apology, as it were.

  At that moment he saw the young girl stop before a door. He heard the key turn in the lock and saw the darkness of an entrance hall with barely enough time to utter an inaudible ‘Good evening’, before handing over the suitcase to the female student. The door slammed shut. He heard it being locked from the inside. With his hands deep in his coat pockets he walked uprightly into the rainy darkness, with one word playing on his mind: ‘luggage-carrier’.

  —

  Translated by Sebastian Truskolaski.

  Written c. 1911–12; unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime. Gesammelte Schriften VII, 295–6; also translated in Early Writings, 85–7.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Aviator

  Hat, Lady and Little Table (Hut, Dame und Tischchen), 1932.

  The empty marble table reflected the arc lamps. Günter Morland sat in front of a café. The cold grenadine made his teeth hurt. Violin sounds came from inside, as though bright spiritual voices were storming irritably towards their goal.

  ‘Why did you sleep with a woman? It was a girl, it was a prostitute. Oh Günter, you were pure.’

  An old woman made a fuss as she sought a space among the empty chairs. Günter examined her tiny body with interest. One could have twisted off her neck, that’s how thin she was. The waiter cheated him when he paid the bill. He pushed himself into the stream of people on the boulevard. Every evening the sky was a milky brown, the small trees were black, and the doorways to the amusement halls were dazzling. He was spellbound by the jewellers’ shops. With the golden knob of his walking stick buttressed against his hip, he would pause in front of the window displays. For minutes at a time he observed the hats at a milliner’s shop and imagined them on the heads of women in full make-up.