He was met by a gust of perfume that came from four women. They edged their way through the crowd and Günter followed them unashamedly. Well-dressed men turned their heads after these women; newsboys squawked after them. With a hiss, an arc lamp flared up and illuminated the hair of a slender blonde. The women huddled together. As they turned around, Günter approached them with wavering steps. The girls laughed. Stiffly, he went past them and one of the women pushed her arm against him, making him hot. Suddenly he appeared in the brightness of a mirror which reflected the lights. His green tie was glowing; it sat well. But he saw himself looking dishevelled amid the lights. His arms hung limply at his sides. His face appeared flat and red, and his trousers hung in deep folds. Shame had befallen his body in all its limbs simultaneously. A stranger surfaced from the depths of the mirror. Günter fled with his head bowed.
The streets were empty and the voices rang sharply, all the more so now that it was dark. Günter Morland was astonished that during these last twenty-four hours he had not yet succumbed to some debilitating disease. He steered well clear of other people and yet kept his eye on them.
At around eleven at night, he found himself in a square and noticed a crowd of people with upturned heads looking at the sky. In a circle of light above the city there drifted an aeroplane, black and jagged in the pinkish mist. It seemed as if one could hear its quiet rumbling, but the aviator remained invisible. He steered an even course, almost without accelerating. The black wing hovered sedately in the sky.
When he turned, Günter had to sharpen his gaze to make out the prostitute he had slept with. She did not notice the look in his childlike eyes as he took her by the arm assuredly.
—
Translated by Sebastian Truskolaski.
Fragment written c. 1911–12; unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime. Gesammelte Schriften VII, 643–4; also translated in Early Writings, 126–7.
CHAPTER 21
The Death of the Father
Novella
Two Men, Each Suspecting the Other to be of Higher Rank, Meet (Invention 6) (Zwei Männer, einander in höherer Stellung vermutend, begegnen sich [Invention 6]), 1903.
During the journey, he avoided thinking about the real meaning of that telegram: ‘Come immediately. Turn for the worse.’ In the evening, in bad weather, he had left the town on the Riviera. Memories surrounded him like morning light bursting in upon a late carouser, sweet and shaming. Indignantly he heard the sounds of the city, whose midday he had entered. Feeling upset appeared to him to be the only response to the annoyances of his hometown. But he harboured a chirruping lust for those hours he had whiled away with a married woman.
His brother was standing there. And, like an electrical shock running down his spine, he despised this black-clad figure. The brother greeted him hastily with a despondent look. A car stood waiting. The drive was rattly. Otto stammered out a question, but the memory of a kiss enraptured him.
Suddenly the maid was standing on the steps of the house, and he broke down as she took his heavy suitcase off him. He hadn’t yet seen his mother, but his father was alive. There he sat by the window, bloated in his armchair … Otto went towards him and gave him his hand. ‘You won’t kiss me anymore, Otto?’ his father asked quietly. The son threw himself at his father, then ran outside and stood on the balcony, yelling into the street. He grew weary from crying and dreamily began to remember his schooling, his practicum years, the passage to America. ‘Mr Martin.’ He composed himself and felt ashamed, knowing his father was alive. As he sobbed once more, the girl put her hand on his shoulder. Looking up mechanically, he saw a healthy, blonde person: the repudiation of the sick man he had touched. He felt himself at home.
In the liveliest quarter of town lay the library that Otto frequented during his two-week stay. Every morning he worked for three hours on a text that was supposed to earn him a doctorate in political economy. In the afternoons he went back to study the illustrated art journals. He loved art and dedicated much time to it. He was not alone in these rooms. He was on good terms with the dignified clerk who issued and received books. When he looked up from his books with a furrowed brow, his mind blank, he frequently spotted a familiar face from his high-school days.
The solitude of these days, which was never idle, did him good after the last few weeks on the Riviera, when all his nerves had been enlisted in the service of a passionate woman. At night in bed he sought the details of her body, or took pleasure in sending her his weary sensuality in lovely waves. He rarely thought of her. If he sat opposite a woman on the tram he only raised his eyebrows meaningfully, wearing a blank expression – a gesture with which he hoped to solicit unapproachable solitude for sweet inertia.
The activities of the household were steadily focussed on the dying man. They did not bother Otto at all. But one morning he was awoken earlier than usual and led before his father’s corpse. It was bright in the room. His mother lay in pieces in front of the bed. The son, however, felt such strength that he took her under the arm and said firmly: ‘Stand up, Mother.’ On this day he went to the library as usual. His gaze, when it passed over the women, was even emptier and more impassive than usual. As he stepped onto the platform of the tram, he held close the folder containing two pages of his work.
And yet from this day on he worked with less certainty. He noticed deficiencies; fundamental problems, which until then he had regularly passed over, began to preoccupy him. While ordering books, he would suddenly lose all composure and orientation. He was surrounded by stacks of periodicals in which he searched for the most inane data with absurd meticulousness. When he interrupted his reading, he could never shake off the feeling that he was someone whose clothes were too big. As he chucked the clods of soil into his father’s grave, it dawned on him that there was a connection between the eulogy, the endless row of acquaintances and his own thoughtlessness. ‘This has all happened so often. How typical it is.’ And as he passed from the grave through the crowd of mourners, his heartache became like a thing that one is accustomed to carrying around, and his face appeared to have broadened with indifference. He was irritated by the quiet conversations between his mother and brother when the three of them sat at the dinner table. The blonde girl brought the soup. Mindlessly, Otto raised his head and looked into her brown, clueless eyes.
In this manner Otto sought to brighten the petty anxieties of these days of mourning. Once – in the evening – he kissed the girl in the hall. His mother always received heartfelt words when she was alone with him. However, for the most part she discussed business affairs with his older brother.
As he returned home from the library around noon one day, it occurred to him that he should leave. What else was he to do here? He had studying to do.
He found himself alone in the house and so went into his father’s study as had been his custom. Here on the divan, the deceased had suffered his final hours. The blinds had been lowered because it was hot, and through the slits the sky shone. The girl came in and put some anemones on the writing desk. Otto stood leaning against the divan and, as she walked past, he pulled her towards him silently. As she pushed herself up against him, they lay down together. After a while she kissed him and got up; he did not hold her back.
Two days later he departed. He left the house early. The girl walked beside him, carrying his suitcase, and Otto told her about the university town and his studies. But on parting they only shook hands as the station was crowded. ‘What would my father say?’ he thought to himself as he leaned back and yawned the last bit of sleep from his body.
—
Translated by Sebastian Truskolaski.
Written 1913; unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime. Gesammelte Schriften IV, 723–5; also translated in Early Writings, 128–31.
CHAPTER 22
The Siren
Singer of the Comic Opera (Sängerin der komischen Oper), 1923.
One speaks of people who took their secret to the grave. Not much was missing for Captain G to h
ave numbered among them. It was his misfortune that he did not keep his secret to himself. For those who love wordplay, one might say that it was his misfortune that he did not keep his misfortune a secret, even though he had sworn to himself that he would.
He was no longer a young man when he let himself go for the first and final time. This happened in the harbour of Seville. Seville lies on the Guadalquivir, which is navigable until said harbour, though naturally only for vessels with small or medium tonnage. Captain G had not advanced beyond the command of the Westerwald, which could hold two-and-a-half-thousand tonnes. The load line of the Westerwald was half a metre above the water. The cargo comprised iron scaffolds bound for Marseille and seven hundred tonnes of ammonia bound for Oran. Claus Schinzinger was the name of the sole passenger.
The most remarkable thing about this passenger was the care he took to appear for every meal in the officer’s mess with a different pipe, which he produced as soon as the rules of decency permitted. But perhaps even his considerable stockpile had been exhausted during the twelve-day journey, which had brought him from Cuxhaven to Seville. In any case, it was an unsightly growth, or rather a stump, from which the smoke curled upwards as Schinzinger dreamily listened to a story. His half-closed eyes were but one sign that his entire soul had resolved to listen. For Schinzinger – and perhaps this was the Captain’s great misfortune – was a great listener.
Indeed, one would really have to possess G’s level of aloofness and misanthropy to keep one’s interactions with this passenger as rigidly within the confines of convention as had been the case during this passage. Schinzinger, for his part, appeared not to have waited for them to connect by any means; yet his willingness to endure even the longest pauses without a hint of awkwardness demonstrated sufficiently that he was a born listener. For the first time in a long while, both the captain and the passenger sat at a table where the wine in their glasses did not pitch and toss. It was a calm evening. No wind moved through the tops of the palm trees in the large park which surrounds Seville like a belt. The Westerwald was docked in the harbour as placidly as the sturdy garden pavilion out of which the guests, who sat at hidden tables in the thicket, were served. Incidentally, there were few of them. Most had been prudent enough to bring a woman with them in order to be able to transform the melancholy of a Spanish song into the rhythms of their stride and their shoulders.
Schinzinger and his partner had no such avenue of escape. How is it that they had come to be there in the first place? They had barely been sitting opposite each other for five minutes when Schinzinger raised this very question. Not that he had other, let alone better plans. He was a man in his fifties and the disreputable quarters around the city’s harbour no longer presented either a mystery or an attraction to him. This much, however, appeared probable: had they – he and G – sat at separate tables at opposite ends of the city, they would have been more comfortable. He had managed to laboriously prolong their consultation regarding the choice of Mavrodaphne, but their conversation soon deteriorated.
‘Greek wine? Well, as you wish.’ This was the last thing that G said. Then, after an unusually short pause: ‘Do you know Wilhelmshaven?’ Suddenly Schinzinger felt as though he had sojourned for an eternity in this town, with its ugly dockworkers’ barracks, cranes and long, straight, desolate terraces, only to become acquainted with the young happiness that the man opposite him was able to draw in these dreary surroundings from his marriage to Elsbeth.
‘A few weeks later’, G continued, ‘our afternoon class in mechanical engineering had been moved on board the Olga, which was alleged to be the most modern oil tanker in the German navy. Our lesson plan left something to be desired. It had not been taken into account that the examiner’s commission of the North German Boiler Surveillance Association was also going to be on board in order to inspect the ship in the name of the Stern insurance firm. The chief engineer of the commission directed the procedures while our class stood waiting at the stern. The lesson, which we had whiled away by laughing and chatting, was drawing to a close when we heard voices from the midship. Some movement ensued and we realised that something had happened. I, who at the time seized every opportunity to try out my technical skills, ran towards the chief machine operator. Yes – there had indeed been an incident.’
—
Translated by Sebastian Truskolaski.
Fragment written c. 1925; unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime. Final paragraph thought to have been lost. Gesammelte Schriften VII, 644–6.
CHAPTER 23
Sketched into Mobile Dust
Novella
Garden of Passion (Garten der Leidenschaft), 1913.
There he sat. He always sat there around this time. But not like this. Today the unmovable one, who customarily stared off into the distance, looked idly about himself. Yet it did not appear to make a difference, for he saw nothing here either. But the mahogany cane with the silver knob did not lie beside him, perched on the edge of the bench as it usually did; he held it, directed it. It slid across the sand: O, and I thought of a fruit; L, and I halted; Y, and I felt embarrassed, as though I’d been caught doing something forbidden. I saw that he wrote the thing not as someone who wishes to be read. Rather, the signs interwove, as if each one wanted to incorporate the next: there followed – in nigh on the same spot as before – MPIA, and the first marks had already begun to vanish as the last ones emerged. I came closer. This too did not cause him to look up – or should I say awaken? – so accustomed was he to my presence. ‘Calculating again, are you?’ I asked, without letting on that I had been watching him. I knew that his ruminations concerned imaginary budgets for distant journeys, journeys that extended as far as Samarkand or Iceland but which he never undertook. Had he ever left the country at all? Aside from that secret journey, of course, which he’d gone on in order to escape the memory of a wild and, as they say, unworthy, indeed, shameful young love – Olympia – whose name he had just absent-mindedly scrawled into the sand.
‘I’m thinking of my street. Or of you, if you will – they’re one and the same. The street where a word of yours became more vivid than any other I have heard before or since. It is just as you once told me in Travemünde: that in the end, every journey and every adventure must revolve around a woman, or at least a woman’s name. For such is the grip required by the red thread of experience, in order to pass from one hand to the next. You were right. But as I walked up that hot street, I could not yet fathom quite how strange it was – and why – that for the past few seconds my footsteps appeared to call out to me like a voice from the reverberant, deserted alleyway. The surrounding buildings had little in common with the ones that made this southern Italian town famous. Not old enough to be weathered and not new enough to be inviting, this was an assembly of whims from the purgatory of architecture. Closed shutters underscored the obduracy of the grey facades, and the glory of the South seemed to have withdrawn into the shadows that mounted under the earthquake supports and arches of the side streets. Every step that I took led me further away from all the things that I had come to see; I left behind the pinacoteca and the cathedral, and I would have scarcely had the strength to change direction even if the sight of red wooden arms – apparently candelabras which, as I only just noticed, appeared to grow in regular intervals out of the walls on either side of the street – had not given me cause for new reverie. I say reverie precisely because I could not fathom, and did not even attempt to explain how traces of such archaic lighting forms could have survived in this mountain town, which – though it is poor – is nonetheless electrified and irrigated. That is why it seemed perfectly reasonable to me, a few steps farther, to stumble across shawls, drapes, scarves and rugs that had seemingly just been washed. A few crumpled paper lanterns, which hung from the dingy windows of the surrounding houses, completed the image of wretched, paltry housekeeping. I would have liked to ask someone how to get back to town by a different route. I was fed up with this street, not least because it was so
devoid of people. Precisely because of that, I had to abandon my intention and – nigh on humiliated – go back the way I had come, as though under the yoke. Determined to make up for lost time, and to atone for what appeared to me as a defeat, I decided to forgo lunch, and – more bitterly – any midday rest, so that after a short walk up some steep steps, I found myself on the square before the cathedral.
‘If previously the absence of people had been oppressive, now it seemed a liberating solitude. My spirit was lifted instantaneously. Nothing would have been more unwelcome than being spoken to or even noticed. All at once I was returned into the hands of my traveller’s fate – that of the lone adventurer – and once more I recalled the moment when I first became conscious of it, standing, racked by pain, above the Marina Grande, not far from Ravello. This time too I was surrounded by mountains. But in place of the stony cliffs with which Ravello cascades into the sea, it was the marbled flanks of the cathedral, and above its snowy slopes countless stone saints seemed to descend on a pilgrimage down to us humans. As I followed the procession with my eyes, I saw that the foundation of the building lay exposed: a passage had been excavated, and several sharp steps led underground to a brass door that stood slightly ajar. Why I sneaked in through this subterranean side entrance, I do not know. Perhaps it was only the fear that sometimes befalls us when we enter one of those places that we’ve heard described a thousand times, a fear that I sought to avoid through my aimless wanderings. But if I had believed that I would enter a dark crypt, then I was duly punished for my snobbishness. Not only was the room that I entered, the sacristy, whitewashed and illuminated by the bright light from its upper windows; it was filled with a tour group, whom the sexton regaled for the hundredth or thousandth time with one of those stories whose every word resounds with the ringing of copper coins, which he raked in each of the hundred or thousand times he told it. There he stood, pompous and rotund, beside a pedestal upon which the attention of his listeners was fixed. An apparently ancient, yet exceedingly well-preserved early Gothic capital was attached to it with iron clamps. In his hands, the speaker held a handkerchief. One might have assumed that it was because of the heat. Indeed, sweat was streaming from his forehead. But far from using it to dry himself, he just absent-mindedly wiped it across the stone block, like a maid who habitually runs a dust cloth over shelves and console tables during an awkward conversation with her masters. The self-tormenting disposition, known to all those who travel alone, regained the upper hand and I let his explanations beat about my ears.
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