3 The German for springtime is Lenz. Leo Lenz (1878–1962) was also the name of an Austrian playwright of the period.
4 Hermann von Wedderkop (1875–1956) was editor of Die Querschnitt, a rather highbrow cultural magazine. He is pictured.
5 Rudolf Grossmann (1882–1941) is the illustrator.
6 Ludwig Fulda (1862–1939) was a playwright and poet. He is pictured.
7 Julius Bab (1880–1955), dramatist and theatre critic, is referenced here. Neustadt (Dosse) is known primarily for horse breeding.
8 The German word for cornfield is Kornfeld. Paul Kornfeld (1889–1942), a native of Prague, was a Jewish playwright and drama theorist who wrote in German and worked in an Expressionist idiom; he also wrote satire and sexual comedies.
9 Depicted in the scales are two cultural sensations from 1926: Lulu, the sexually liberated and ultimately tragic figure from Wedekind’s play, which was performed in Berlin, and General Gneisenau, a military figure who was the subject of a military history drama by Wolfgang Goetz, which was performed in Berlin and was praised as a masterpiece depicting German military bravery.
10 Siegfried Jacobsohn (1881–1926) was an influential theatre critic and editor of the theatre journal Die Weltbühne. Carl Sternheim (1878–1942) was a playwright and short-story writer. Jacobsohn is pictured.
11 Arno Holz (1863–1929) was a poet and dramatist. Carl Heinrich Becker (1876–1933) was a scholar of the Orient and Prussian minister of culture, with whom Holz had run-ins in relation to the formation of the Prussian Academy of the Arts. Wilhelm Külz (1875–1948) was interior minister of the Weimar Republic in 1926–7. He is performing the balancing act.
Chapter 35: Riddles
1 The word for guilders, a type of coin, is transformed to a word meaning ‘wait patiently’ by the addition of two letters.
Translators’ Note
The texts were translated by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie and Sebastian Truskolaski, except for ‘Nordic Sea’, which was jointly translated by Sam Dolbear and Antonia Grousdanidou. Although the editors checked one another’s drafts, each text acknowledges its principal translator. Thanks to Ursula Marx at the Walter Benjamin Archiv. In addition, Sam Dolbear would like to thank the following people for their invaluable assistance in preparing and refining the drafts: Koshka Duff, Miriam Gartner, Robin Kreutel, Magda Schmukalla, and Cat Moir. On the whole, as editors, we concentrated on previously untranslated work, but included a handful of previously translated pieces for the sake of internal consistency.
About the Illustrations
Paul Klee
Self Portrait, 1911.
A Klee drawing named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the Angel of History. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe that keeps piling ruin upon ruin and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
– Walter Benjamin, Thesis IX, ‘On the Concept of History’
In 1921, Walter Benjamin purchased Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, the drawing that opens this book, which became one of his most prized possessions. Remarkable for their simplicity, humor and fantastical nature, Klee’s illustrations here bring to life Benjamin’s stories.
PAUL KLEE (1879–1940) was a Swiss-German painter and an important figure in the development of modern art, known for his explorations in color and line in his work. His extensive writing on color theory and lectures while a teacher at the Bauhaus from 1921 to 1931 were collected as Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, and are considered a foundational text in the understanding of modern art. In 1937, more than a hundred of Klee’s works were labeled as ‘degenerate art’ and seized from public collections in Germany by the Nazis.
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