—
Translated by Esther Leslie.
First published in Frankfurter Zeitung, 21 December 1930; Gesammelte Schriften III, 272–4.
CHAPTER 42
Verdant Elements: Review of
Tom Seidemann-Freud,
Play Primer 2 and 3
Something More on the Play Primer
Hoffmanesque Scene (Hoffmanneske Szene), 1921.
Tom Seidmann-Freud, Spielfibel 2 and Hurra, wir rechnen!
Spielfibel 3, Berlin: Herbert Stuffer Verlag, 1931
One year ago (13 December 1930) the Frankfurter Zeitung introduced its readers to the first play primer by Tom Seidmann-Freud. The idea back then was to loosen up the primer in a playful way, represent its historical development and, at the same time, give some indication of the circumstances which act as preconditions for this most recent and most radical solution. In the meantime, the enterprise has advanced further: the second part of the reading primer and the first part of the arithmetic primer are now available. Yet again, the two methodological guiding themes have been retained most brilliantly: the complete activation of the drive to play through the most intimate association of writing and drawing, and the affirmation of infantile self-confidence by the expansion of the primer into an encyclopaedia. This provides us with an opportunity to recall one of the crucial sentences from the introduction to the first play primer: ‘It is not oriented towards “appropriation” and “mastery” of a particular task – this style of learning only suits grown-ups – rather it takes account of the child, for whom learning, as with everything else, naturally signifies a great adventure.’ If, at the beginning of this adventurous journey, flowers and colours, children’s names and names of countries were the little islands in the sea of fantasy, then it is now segmented continents, the world of leaves on trees and fish, shops and butterflies, which rise up from the water. Resting places and little huts to lodge in have been provided everywhere: this means that it is not necessary for the child to write on and on to the point of exhaustion. Rather, there an image awaits his signature, here a story awaits the missing words; there again a cage waits for a bird to be sketched in, or – elsewhere – a dog, a donkey and a cock await their woof, bray and cook-a-doodle-do. Groupings and classifications join in, now and again they are even of a lexical type, whereby painted things are written out according to initials, or, just as in a real encyclopaedia, in topics organised by concepts. Small boxes are as good for ABCs as for things made of leather, wood, metal and glass, or for furniture, fruits and objects of everyday use. With all of this, the child is never placed in front of, but rather above the object of instruction: as if, for example, in a zoological class, he or she were not led in front of the horse, but rather placed upon it as a rider. Here every letter, every word and drawing is such a horse, which accompanies all the stages of this learning process. With its curves, just as with its bridle and collar, it is able to bring all that is recalcitrant under the control of the little rider. It is quite extraordinary how, from the beginning, the author also accentuates the power of command, so crucial for childish play, in relation to numbers. The point-system is retired after only a few pages; there follow red or black battalions of fish or insects, butterflies or squirrels – and, if at the end of each sequence, the child sets down a number, then he does not draw the digit any differently than when he plants a sergeant in front of his squad.
At every point the author made sure to guarantee the sovereignty of the player, allowing him never to relinquish any power to the object of learning and banishing the horror with which the first numbers and letters so readily configure themselves as idols before the child. This is surely the way that the older generation recalls the impression – so hard to describe – made on them by the first ‘applied tasks’ in their arithmetic textbooks. What coldness was spread by the phoney moral uprightness of these lines, into which – like a trap door – numerals were embedded every now and again. It was nothing less than a betrayal by the most trusted and beloved thing that the child had received from his mother: the story. And, therefore, it is a whole world of reconciliation which rings forth from the simple imperative of this maths primer: ‘8 – 6 = 2. Invent a story to go along with this and write it here.’ Part of the charm of these textbooks – and simultaneously their highly pedagogical achievement – is the manner in which they capture the easing of tension that corresponds to their confident attitude, an attitude which the child may, at first, seek outside of these pages. For if, in turn, the child is prepared to natter away about what he has just learnt, to get up to mischief and silliness with it, then this book is, once again, his best friend. After all, it contains enough white spots to be painted and scribbled on, broad fertile territories on which all its owner’s monsters and favourites can be settled comfortably. Of course none of this occurs without some clearance work:
In this story, cross out the following:
All As and as in red
All Rs and rs in blue
All Ds and ds in green
All Ls and ls in brown.
But, oh, the parties to which one gets invited after the work is done! Garlands, which had already cropped up in the first primer as traces of the ‘writing tower’, wind their way through the land of reading and the letters assume carnivalesque disguises. ‘Onca ipon e tuma thara wes a luttla gurl, who hed e meguc cet. Thus cet coild spaak’: so it begins in a dialect between old high German and thieves’ slang. In addition, however, there is sufficient room for an unmasking: ‘Copy down the story, but replace every a with an e and vice versa; for every i put a u and vice versa.’ Quite underhandedly an old pedagogical bone of contention is thus resolved: whether, when it comes to children, one may model error as a warning. The answer: yes, as long as one exaggerates. Hence it is exaggeration, the experienced confidante of the littlest ones, which protectively places its hand over so many pages of this primer. Or is it a case of not exaggerating a lie when a story begins as follows? ‘A boy with the name Eve got up one morning from the closet and sat down to eat his evening meal.’ Is it any surprise if such a person concludes his day by plucking chocolate biscuits, which grow in the grass, until he gets hungry? It is certain that the child feasts itself on such stories. Another story begins: Adolf lived at the house of a bumpkin together with little Cecily – is that not an exaggeration of the world order, to allow all the nouns up to ‘witchcraft’ and ‘Yucatan’ to appear in the story in the correct alphabetic sequence? In the end, does it not mean exaggerating even the regard for the preschool pupil? To place questionnaires in front of him as before a professor: what are you doing on Monday? Tuesday? Wednesday? etc., or to cover a table for him with lined plates on which he may write his favourite meals? – Yes. But Shock-Headed Peter, too, is exaggerated, Max and Moritz are exaggerated, as is Gulliver. Robinson’s loneliness is exaggerated and so is what Alice saw in Wonderland – why should not letters and numbers also have to authenticate themselves in front of children through their exaggerated exuberance? Certainly their challenges will still be strict enough.
Perhaps some person or another (such as the writer of these lines) has held onto the primer from which his mother learnt to read. ‘Egg’, ‘whee’, ‘mouse’ – its first pages may have begun this way. I won’t say a word against this primer. How could anything negative be said by he who learnt from it how to rebel against it? Of all the things that he encountered later in life, what could rival the rigour and certainty with which he approached these strokes; what subsequent submission filled him with such a strong sense of immeasurable import as the surrender to the letter? Nothing against this old primer then. But it was ‘the seriousness of life’ which spoke therefrom, and the finger that followed along its lines had crossed the threshold of a realm from which no wanderer returns: he was under the spell of the black-upon-white, of law and right, the irrevocable, the being set for all eternity. We know today what we should think of such things. Perhaps the misery, lawlessness and insecurity of our days is the
price for which we alone can pursue the enchanting-debunking game with type, from which these primers by Seidmann-Freud acquire such deep reason.
—
Translated by Esther Leslie.
Written 1931; published in Frankfurter Zeitung, 20 December 1931; Gesammelte Schriften III, 311–14.
Notes
Introduction: Walter Benjamin and the Magnetic Play of Words
1 See: Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften VII, Nachträge, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag), 846–8.
2 See: Walter Benjamin, ‘Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death’, in Selected Writings 2.2, 1931–1934, ed. Howard Eiland, Michael Jennings and Gary Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 794–818.
3 Among other references see Walter Benjamin, ‘One Way Street’, in Selected Writings 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 450–5; Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’, trans. Michael W. Jennings, Grey Room 39 (Spring 2010): 11–37; Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 42–4.
4 See: Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, in Selected Writings 3, 1935–1938, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 143–62.
5 See: Walter Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, in Selected Writings 2.2, 1931–1934, 731–5.
6 Ibid., 732. This wording is echoed almost verbatim in Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, 144.
7 Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, 731.
8 See: Walter Benjamin, ‘Karl Kraus’, in Selected Writings 2.1, 1927–1930, 433–58.
9 Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, 147. The irony that the newspaper is, for the most part, the forum in which Benjamin’s literary efforts appear is not lost on him.
10 Sigrid Weigel, ‘Zu Franz Kafka’, in Benjamin Handbuch, Leben – Werk – Wirkung, ed. Burkhardt Lindner (Stuttgart/Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 2011), 543.
11 Walter Benjamin, ‘Imagination’, in Selected Writings 1, 1913–1926, 281.
12 Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, 144.
13 See: Rolf Tiedemann’s editorial remarks in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften VII, 635.
14 Walter Benjamin, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin (1910–1940), ed. Gershom Scholem and Theodor W. Adorno, trans. Manfred R. Jacobson and Evelyn M. Jacobson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 31.
15 See: Benjamin, Correspondence, 189.
16 See: Tillman Rexroth’s editorial remarks in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften IV, Kleine Prosa/Baudelaire Übertragungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991), 1074.
17 Benjamin, Correspondence, 401 [translation altered].
18 As Tiedemann notes, a number of writings from this period – apparently itemised in an unpublished note – appear to have been lost. They include Bettlergeschichte, Jenaer Geschichte, John-Heartfield-Geschichte, Das Erste Beste, Der Bettler als Käufer, Sevilla-Geschichte, Sotto Lefronde di Limone, Weinberggeschichte, Kapitalgeschichten (Der abgehängte Wagen, Der gewohnte Nachmittagsspaziergang, Das Testament auf dem Amtsgericht, Der denunzierte Bankier), Henkergeschichte, Nimbus, Anna Czyllac und der Astrolog, Weingeschichte, An der Mole, Die Fahrt der Heimdal and Warum es mit der Kunst, Geschichten zu erzählen, zu Ende geht.
19 Walter Benjamin, ‘A Glimpse into the World of Children’s Books’, Selected Writings 1, 1913–1926, 442.
20 Benjamin, ‘Imagination’, 281.
21 Eli Friedlander, ‘A Mood of Childhood in Benjamin’, in Philosophy’s Moods: The Affective Grounds of Thinking, ed. Hagi Kenaan and Ilit Ferber (Heidelberg: Springer Dodrecht, 2011), 47.
22 See: Heinz Brüggemann, Walter Benjamin über Spiel, Farbe und Fantasie (Würzburg: Konighausen und Neumann, 2006).
23 Walter Benjamin, Träume, ed. Burkhardt Lindner (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2008). Many of the dreams that appear in Lindner’s volume are taken from One Way Street, Berlin Childhood and Berlin Chronicle. However, the present collection focuses only on previously untranslated texts written in the first person.
24 See: Theodor W. Adorno, Dream Notes, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity, 2007).
25 Walter Benjamin Archive, Berlin, manuscript 1709.
26 Benjamin, Träume, 44; Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften IV, 423.
27 Benjamin, One Way Street, 444.
28 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2006), 29.
29 See: Walter Benjamin, ‘Little History of Photography’, in Selected Writings 2.2, 1931–1934, 510.
30 See: Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Letter to Walter Benjamin, 02.08.1935’, in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1977), 113.
31 Walter Benjamin, ‘Dream Kitsch’, in Selected Writings 2.1, 1927–1930, 3.
32 Ibid.
33 Walter Benjamin, ‘Berlin Chronicle’, in Selected Writings 2.2, 1931–1934, 621.
34 See: Walter Benjamin, ‘May–June 1931’, in Selected Writings 2.2, 1931–1934, 471.
35 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 518.
36 Ibid.
37 Walter Benjamin, ‘Opinions et Pensées: His Son’s Words and Turns of Phrase’, in Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, ed. Ursula Marx, Gudrun Schwarz, Michael Schwarz and Erdmut Wizisla, trans. Esther Leslie (London: Verso, 2007), 109–49.
38 Walter Benjamin, ‘Funkspiele Dichter nach Stichworten’, in Südwestdeutsche Runfunk-Zeitschrift VIII/3 (1932), 5.
39 See: Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser’s editorial remarks in Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften I (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), 851.
40 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ (2nd version), in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’ and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Bridget Doherty and Thomas Levin, trans. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 45.
41 See: Walter Benjamin, ‘Russian Toys’, in Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs, 107.
42 Ibid., 73.
43 See: Walter Benjamin, ‘Toys and Play’, Selected Writings 2.1, 1927–1930, 117–21.
44 Ibid., 118.
45 Walter Benjamin, ‘Moscow’, in Selected Writings 2.1, 1927–1930, 27.
46 Walter Benjamin, ‘Program for a Proletarian Children’s Theatre’, in Selected Writings 2.1, 1927–1930, 202.
47 See: Walter Benjamin, ‘Lily Braun’s Manifest an die Deutsche Schuljugend’, in Gesammelte Schriften III, ed. Hella Tiedemann-Bartels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972).
48 Ibid., 11.
49 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 514 [translation altered].
50 Ibid., 855–6 [translation altered].
51 Ibid., 515 [translation altered].
52 Ibid., 497 [translation altered].
53 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Image of Proust’, in Selected Writings II, 1927–1934, 240.
Chapter 3: The Hypochondriac in the Landscape
1 ‘Morgenrot, Morgenrot, leuchtest mir zum frühen Tod.’
2 A neologism coined by Benjamin which plays on the word Bazille, meaning ‘germ’ or ‘bacteria’.
Chapter 7: Dreams from Ignaz Jezower’s
1 Carl Sternheim (1878–1942) was an expressionist playwright and short-story writer.
Chapter 9: Ibizan Dream
1 Fromms Akt was a brand of condoms invented by Julius Fromm, a chemist and inventor of a process for making condoms from liquefied rubber. Mass production started in 1922.
Chapter 14: Letter to Toet Blaupot ten Cate
1 Bertolt Brecht and Helene Weigel.
Chapter 25: Review: Franz Hessel
1 Franz Hessel, Seven Dialogues, with
seven etchings by Renée Sintenis, Berlin, 1924.
2 Franz Hessel, The Widow of Ephesus: Dramatic Poem in Two Scenes, Berlin, 1925.
Chapter 33: Fantasy Sentences
1 The German Feder can mean ‘feather’ or ‘quill’.
Chapter 34: Fantasy Sentences
1 Aquarius is Wassermann in German. Jakob Wassermann (1873–1934), a German Jewish novelist, is pictured.
2 S. Fischer refers to the head of the publishing house, S. Fischer Verlag. Samuel Fischer (1859–1934) is pictured.
The Storyteller Page 15