—
Translated by Sam Dolbear and Antonia Grousdanidou.
The drafting of this cycle was concluded on 15 August 1930 and published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, 18 September 1930. Gesammelte Schriften IV, 383–7.
CHAPTER 28
Tales Out of Loneliness
Knauer Drummed (Knauer Paukt), 1940.
The Wall
I had lived for a few months in an eyrie on Spanish soil. I often resolved to wander at some point in the vicinity, which was edged by a wreath of severe ridges and dark pine woods. In between lay hidden villages; most were named after saints, who might well have been able to occupy this paradisiacal region. But it was summer; the heat allowed me, from one day to the next, to defer even the most cherished promenade to the Windmill Hill, which I could see from my window. And so I stuck to the usual meander through the narrow, shady alleyways, in whose networks one was never able to find the same crossing-points twice. One afternoon in this labyrinth I stumbled across a junk shop, in which picture postcards could be bought. In any case some were displayed in the window, and among them was a photo of a town wall, as has been preserved in this corner of the world. I had never seen one like this before, though. The photograph had captured its whole magic: the wall swung through the landscape like a voice, like a hymn through the centuries of its duration. I promised myself not to buy this card until I had seen the wall that it depicted with my own eyes. I told no one of my resolution, and I could refrain from doing with greater reason, for the card led me with its caption, ‘S. Vinez’. For sure I did not know of a Saint Vinez. But did I know more of Saint Fabiano, a holy Roman or Symphorio, after whom other market towns in the vicinity were named? That my guide book did not include the name did not necessarily mean much. Farmers had occupied the region, and seafarers had made their markings on it, and yet both had different names for the same places. And so I set about consulting old maps, and when that did not advance my quest at all, I got hold of a navigation map. Soon this research began to fascinate me, and it would have been a blot on my reputation to seek help or advice from a third party at such an advanced stage in the matter. I had just spent another hour poring over my maps when an acquaintance, a local, invited me for an evening walk. He wanted to take me in front of the town onto the mound, from where the windmills that had long been still had so often greeted me over the pine tops. Once we managed to reach the top it began to grow dark, and we halted to await the moon, upon whose first beam we set about on our way home. We stepped out of a little pine wood. There in the moonlight, near and unmistakable, stood the wall, whose image had accompanied me for days, and within its protection, the town to which we were returning home. I did not say a word, but soon parted from my friend. The next afternoon, I stumbled suddenly across the junk shop. The picture postcards were still hanging in the window. But above the door I read on a sign, which I had missed before, ‘Sebastiano Vinez’, painted in red letters. The painter had added a sugar cone and some bread.
The Pipe
On a walk, in the company of a married couple who were friends of mine, I came close to the house I was occupying on the island. I felt like lighting my pipe. I reached for it and, as I didn’t find it in its usual place, it seemed opportune to fetch it from my room, where I assumed it must be laying upon the table. With a few words I invited the friend to go on with his wife, while I collected the missing item. I turned around; but I had barely gone ten steps, when I felt, upon searching, the pipe in my pocket. And so it came to pass that the others saw me again with clouds of smoke thrusting from the pipe before even a whole minute had passed. ‘Yes it really was on the table’, I explained, prompted by an incomprehensible whim. Something arose in the man’s face resembling someone who has just woken from a deep sleep, having not yet worked out where he actually is. We walked on, and the conversation took its course. Somewhat later I steered it back to the interlude. ‘How come’, I asked, ‘you didn’t notice? After all, what I claimed was impossible.’ – ‘That’s right’, answered the man, after a short pause. ‘I did want to say something. But then I thought to myself: it must be true. Why should he lie to me?’
The Light
For the first time I was alone with my beloved in an unfamiliar village. I waited in front of my night’s lodgings, which weren’t hers. We still wanted to take an evening walk. While waiting, I walked up and down the village street. There I saw in the distance, between trees, a light. ‘This light’, so I thought to myself, ‘says nothing to those who have it before their eyes every evening. It may belong to a lighthouse or a farmyard. But to me, the stranger here, it speaks volumes.’ And with that I turned around, to pace down the street again. I kept this up for some time, and whenever I turned back after a while, the light, between the trees, lured my gaze. But there came a moment when it requested that I stop. That was shortly before the beloved found me again. I turned myself around once more and realised: the light that I had spotted over the flat earth had been the moon, moving slowly up over the distant tree tops.
—
Translated by Sam Dolbear and Esther Leslie.
Unpublished in Benjamin’s lifetime; Gesammelte Schriften IV, 755–7. Also translated in Walter Benjamin’s Archive. According to the notes in the Gesammelte Schriften, Gershom Scholem claimed these stories were probably written between 1932 and 1933. The arrangement of the three texts cannot, however, be guaranteed.
CHAPTER 29
The Voyage of The Mascot
Hero With Wings (Held mit Flügel), 1905.
This is one of those tales that one gets to hear out on the sea, for which the ship’s hull is the proper soundboard and the machine’s pounding is the best accompaniment, and of which one should not ask whence it hails.
It was, so my friend the radio operator recounted, after the end of the war, when some ship owners got the idea of bringing back to the homeland the sailing vessels and saltpetre ships which had been caught off guard in Chile by the catastrophe. The legal situation was simple: the ships had remained German property and now it was just a matter of readying the necessary crew in order to re-commandeer them in Valparaiso or Antofagasta. There were plenty of seafarers who hung around the harbours waiting to be taken on. But there was a small snag. How was one to get the crew to Chile? This much was obvious: they would have to board as passengers and take up their duties upon arrival. On the other hand, it was equally obvious that these were people who could hardly be kept in check by the kind of power that the captain ordinarily wields over his passengers, especially not at a time when the mood of the Kiel uprising still lingered in the sailors’ bones.
No one knew this better than the people of Hamburg, including the Baton of Command of the four-masted sailing ship The Mascot, which consisted of an elite of determined, experienced officers. They recognised that this journey could come at a great personal cost. And because wise men plan ahead, they did not rely on their bravery alone. Rather, they attended closely to the hiring of each member in their crew. But if there was a tall chap among the recruits whose papers weren’t completely in order, and whose physical state left much to be desired, then it would be overly hasty to blame his presence solely on the commander’s negligence. Why this is will become clear later on.
They were barely fifty miles out of Cuxhaven when certain things became evident that bade ill for the crossing. Upon deck and in the cabins, even on the stairs, from early until late, there were meetings of all kinds of associations and coteries, and by the time they were off Helgoland, there were already three games clubs, a permanent boxing ring and an amateur stage, which was not recommended for sensitive folk. In the officers’ mess, where, overnight, the walls had been decorated with explicit drawings, men danced the shimmy with each other every afternoon, and in the stowage an on-board exchange had been established, whose members traded dollar notes, binoculars, nude photos, knives and passports with each other by torchlight. In short, the ship was a floating ‘Magic City’ and – even without women – one w
as tempted to say that all the delights of harbour life could be produced out of thin air or, as it were, out of the ship’s beams.
The captain, one of those seamen who combined only a little school-learning with much worldly wisdom, kept his nerve under these uncomfortable circumstances and he did not lose it even when one afternoon – it might have been just off Dover – Frieda, a well-built girl from Saint Pauli with a bad reputation and a cigarette in her mouth, appeared on the boat’s stern. Undoubtedly there were people on board who knew where she had previously been stowed; what’s more, these people were clear on the measures that were to be taken were they to receive instructions from above to remove the excess passenger.
From this point onwards, the nightly business was even more worth seeing. But it would not have been 1919 if politics had not been added to the list of on-board divertissements. There were voices which proclaimed that this expedition was to mark the start of a new life in a new world; others saw in it the long yearned-for instant when the reckoning with the rulers would finally be settled. Unmistakably, a harsher wind was blowing. It was soon discovered whence it came: it was a certain Schwinning, a tall chap of limp posture who wore his red hair parted and of whom nothing was known, except that he had travelled as a cabin attendant on various shipping routes and that he was well versed in the trade secrets of the Finnish bootleggers.
Initially he had kept to himself, but now one encountered him at every turn. Whoever listened to him had to concede that they were dealing with a shrewd agitator. And who did not listen in when he embroiled someone or other in a loud, contentious conversation at the ‘bar’, such that his voice drowned out the sound of the phonograph record, or when, in the ‘ring’, he provided precise, entirely unsolicited information about the fighter’s party affiliation. Thus, while the crowd gave in to the on-board amusements, he worked relentlessly on their politicisation, until finally his efforts were rewarded when he was appointed chairman of the sailors’ council during a nocturnal plenary meeting.
As they entered the Panama Canal, the elections gained momentum. There was a lot to vote for: a house commission, a control committee, an on-board secretariat, a political tribunal. In short, a magnificent apparatus was set up, without causing even the slightest clash with the ship’s command. However, within the revolutionary leadership disagreements arose all the more often; these disagreements were all the more vexatious given that – upon close examination – everyone belonged to the leadership. Whoever had no position could expect one from the next commission’s meeting, and so not a day passed without difficulties to resolve, votes to count, resolutions to carry. But when the action committee finally detailed its plans for a surprise attack – at exactly eleven o’clock on the night after the next, the high command was to be overpowered and the ship was to be rerouted on a westerly course bound for the Galapagos – The Mascot had, unbeknownst to all, already passed beyond Callao. Later on these bearings would turn out to have been falsified. ‘Later’ – that means the following morning – forty-eight hours before the planned, carefully prepared mutiny, when the four-mast ship docked at the quay of Antofagasta, as if nothing had happened.
With that my friend stopped. The second watch came to an end. We stepped into the chart room, where some cocoa waited for us in deep stone cups. I was silent, attempting to make sense of what I had just heard. But the radio operator, who was about to take his first sip, suddenly paused and looked at me over the edge of his cup. ‘Leave it be,’ he said. ‘We didn’t know what was going on at the time either. But when I ran into Schwinning some three months later in the administration building in Hamburg with a fat Virginia between his lips, coming straight from the director’s office – then I fully comprehended the voyage of The Mascot.’
—
Translated by Sam Dolbear and Esther Leslie.
This story has two versions, and it is likely, according to the type of paper and the typewriter, that the second version was written in conjunction with Das Taschentuch and Der Reiseabend. It is therefore probable that Benjamin wrote ‘The Voyage of The Mascot no later than these two stories from 1932. Published in Gesammelte Schriften IV, 738–40.
CHAPTER 30
The Cactus Hedge
Hardy Plants, 1934.
The first foreigner who came to us in Ibiza was an Irishman, O’Brien. That was about twenty years ago, and by then the fellow was already in his forties. In the years prior to settling down with us, he had travelled far and wide. As a young man, he had lived as a farmer in East Africa, and was a great hunter and lasso-thrower. But above all he was a misfit, like no one else I’ve ever known. He kept his distance from the educated circles, clerics, magistrate officials, and even with the natives he maintained only loose contact. Nevertheless his memory lives with the fishermen until this day, primarily because of his mastery at knot-tying. Moreover, his fear of other people seemed to be only partly a result of his temperament; adverse experiences with those closest to him contributed to the rest.
I was unable to find out much more back in those days, other than that a friend, to whom he entrusted his only valuable possession, had vanished with it. It was a collection of Negro masks, which he had acquired from the natives themselves in his African years. In any case, it didn’t bring good luck to he who had acquired it. He had perished in a fire on a ship along with the collection of masks, which had accompanied him on board.
O’Brien sat in his finca, high above the cove, but when he wanted to work, the path would always lead him back to the sea. There he busied himself with fishing, casting the fish trap plaited from reeds a hundred metres and deeper down, where the rock lobsters walk on the craggy seabed, or he sailed out on calm afternoons in order to place nets, which were hauled in again twelve hours later. Aside from this, though, the bagging of land animals remained his passion, and he had sufficient relationships with amateurs and scientists in England so as to seldom be without commissions, be they for bird skins, rare species of beetle, geckos or butterflies. Mostly, however, he occupied himself with lizards. One can still recall those terrariums from the olden days, which took up residence in the cactus corner of dressing rooms or winter gardens, in England, first of all. Lizards started to become a fashion item, and our Balearics were soon as well known to the animal traders as they had once been to the leaders of Roman legions on account of their slingshotters. For ‘balea’ means slingshot.
O’Brien, as I have said already, was a misfit. From the way he caught lizards to his cooking, sleeping and thinking, it seemed he did nothing in the way others do it. As far as eating was concerned, he didn’t think much of vitamins and calories and suchlike. All food, he used to say, was either a cure or a poison, and nothing existed in between. The eater therefore would have to consider himself continually as a kind of convalescent, if he wanted to properly nourish himself. And one could hear him reel off a long list of foods, of which some would match a sanguine person, the others a choleric person, another again the phlegmatic and still again others for the melancholic – these being beneficial for each, inasmuch as they incorporate the right supplementary and soothing substances.
It was a similar case with sleep; in relation to this, he had his own theory of dreams and claimed to have got to know, through the Pangwe, a Negro tribe in the interior, a fail-safe means to ward off nightmares, those tormenting visions which recur in sleep. One need only to conjure up the terrifying vision in the evening, before one goes to sleep – as Pangwes do during ceremonies – in order to be protected from it by night. He called it dream immunisation.
And thought, finally – how he dealt with thought I was to experience one afternoon, as we lay in a boat on the water in order to pull in nets, which had been thrown out the day before. It was a miserable catch. We had just about brought in a net, which was almost empty, when a few meshes caught on a reef, and, in spite of all our carefulness, tore during the salvaging.
I rolled up my waterproofs, shoved them into my little boat and stretched myself out
. The weather was cloudy, the air calm. Soon a few drops fell, and the light, which makes such high demands from the sky on all things here, edged away in order to return them to the earth.
As I raised myself up, my gaze fell upon him. He was still holding his net in his hands, but lay at rest; it was as if the man was absent. Disconcerted, I looked at him more closely; his face was expressionless and ageless; a smile played around his mouth, which was closed. I snatched up my oars, a few strokes led us over still water.
O’Brien looked up.
‘Now it will hold again’, he said and he tested the new knot in the net, tugging vigorously. ‘It is a double Flemish bend too.’ Uncomprehendingly I looked at him.
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