Inner Workings

by J. M. Coetzee

  Benjamin was drawn to universities, remarked his friend Theodor Adorno, as Franz Kafka was drawn to insurance companies. Despite misgivings, Benjamin went through the prescribed motions to acquire the Habilitation (higher doctorate) that would enable him to become a professor, submitting his dissertation, on German drama of the Baroque age, to the University of Frankfurt in 1925. Surprisingly, the dissertation was not accepted. It fell between the stools of literature and philosophy, and Benjamin lacked an academic patron prepared to urge his case. (When it was published in 1928, the dissertation received respectful attention from reviewers, despite Benjamin’s morose claims to the contrary.)

  His academic plans having failed, Benjamin launched himself on a career as translator, broadcaster, and freelance journalist. Among his commissions was a translation of Proust’s À la recherche; three of the seven volumes were completed.

  In 1924 Benjamin visited Capri, at the time a favourite resort of German intellectuals. There he met Asja Lacis, a theatre director from Latvia and a committed communist. The meeting was fateful. ‘Every time I’ve experienced a great love, I’ve undergone a change so fundamental that I’ve amazed myself,’ Benjamin wrote in retrospect. ‘A genuine love makes me resemble the woman I love.’3 In this case, the transformation entailed political reorientation. ‘The path of thinking, progressive persons in their right senses leads to Moscow, not to Palestine,’ Lacis told him sharply.4 All traces of idealism in his thought, to say nothing of his flirtation with Zionism, had to be abandoned. His bosom friend Scholem had already emigrated to Palestine, expecting Benjamin to follow. Benjamin found an excuse not to come; he kept on making excuses to the end.

  The first fruits of Benjamin’s liaison with Lacis were an article co-written for the Frankfurter Zeitung. Nominally about the city of Naples, it is at a deeper level about an urban environment of an intriguing kind that the Berlin-bred intellectual is exploring for the first time, a labyrinth of streets where houses have no numbers and boundaries between private life and public life are porous.

  In 1926 Benjamin travelled to Moscow for a rendezvous with Lacis. Lacis did not wholeheartedly welcome him (she was involved with another man); in his record of the visit, Benjamin probes his own unhappy state of mind, as well as the question of whether he should join the Communist Party and subject himself to the Party line. Two years later he and Lacis were briefly reunited in Berlin. They lived together and together attended meetings of the League of Proletarian-Revolutionary Writers. Their liaison precipitated divorce proceedings in which Benjamin behaved with remarkable meanness toward his wife.

  On the Moscow trip Benjamin kept a diary which he later revised for publication. Benjamin spoke no Russian. Rather than fall back on interpreters, he followed what he would later call his physiognomic method, reading Moscow from the outside, refraining from abstraction or judgement, presenting the city in such a way that ‘all factuality is already theory’ (the phrase comes from Goethe).5

  Some of Benjamin’s claims for the ‘world-historical’ experiment he saw being conducted in the USSR – for instance, his claim that with a stroke of the pen the Party had severed the link between money and power – now seem naïve. Nevertheless, his eye remains acute. Many new Muscovites are still peasants, he observes, living village lives according to village rhythms; class distinctions may have been abolished but within the Party a new caste system is evolving. A scene from a street market captures the humbled status of religion: an icon for sale flanked by portraits of Lenin ‘like a prisoner between two policemen’. (V2, pp. 32, 26)

  Though Asja Lacis is a constant background presence in the ‘Moscow Diary’, and though Benjamin hints that their sexual relations were troubled, we get little sense of Lacis’s physical self. As a writer Benjamin had no gift for evoking other people. In Lacis’s own writings we get a much more lively impression of Benjamin: his glasses like little spotlights, his clumsy hands.

  For the rest of his life Benjamin called himself either a communist or a fellow-traveller. How deep did his affair with communism run?

  For years after meeting Lacis, Benjamin would repeat Marxist verities – ‘the bourgeoisie . . . is condemned to decline due to internal contradictions that will become fatal as they develop’ – without actually having read Marx.6 ‘Bourgeois’ remained his cuss word for a mind-set – materialistic, incurious, selfish, prudish, and above all cosily self-satisfied – to which he was viscerally hostile. Proclaiming himself a communist was an act of choosing sides, morally and historically, against the bourgeoisie and his own bourgeois origins. ‘One thing . . . can never be made good: having neglected to run away from one’s parents,’ he writes in One-Way Street, the collection of diary jottings, dream protocols, aphorisms, mini-essays, and satirical fragments, including mordant observations on Weimar Germany, with which he announced himself in 1928 as a freelance intellectual. (V1, p. 446) Not having run away early enough meant that he was condemned to run away from Emil and Paula Benjamin for the rest of his life: in reacting against his parents’ eagerness to assimilate into the German middle class he resembled many German-speaking Jews of his generation, including Franz Kafka. What troubled Benjamin’s friends about his Marxism was that there seemed to be something forced about it, something merely reactive.

  Benjamin’s first ventures into the discourse of the left are depressing to read. There is a slide into what one can only call willed stupidity as he rhapsodises about Lenin (whose letters have ‘the sweetness of great epic,’ he says in a piece not reprinted by the Harvard editors), or rehearses the ominous euphemisms of the Party: ‘Communism is not radical. Therefore, it has no intention of simply abolishing family relations. It merely tests them to determine their capacity for change. It asks itself: Can the family be dismantled so that its components may be socially refunctioned?’7

  These words come from a review of a play by Bertholt Brecht, whom Benjamin met through Lacis and whose ‘crude thinking’, thinking stripped of bourgeois niceties, attracted Benjamin for a while. ‘This street is named Asja Lacis Street after her who, like an engineer, cut it through the author,’ runs the dedication to One-Way Street. The comparison is intended as a compliment. The engineer is the man or woman of the future, the one who, impatient of palaver, armed with practical knowledge, acts and acts decisively to change the landscape. (Stalin too admired engineers. It was his view that writers should be engineers of human souls, meaning that they should take it upon themselves to ‘refunction’ humanity from the inside out.)

  Of Benjamin’s better-known writings, ‘The Author as Producer’, composed in 1934 as an address to the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris, shows the influence of Brecht most clearly. At issue is the old chestnut of Marxist aesthetics: which is more important, form or content? Benjamin’s proposes that a literary work will be ‘politically correct’ only if it is also ‘literarily correct’. ‘Politically correct’ is of course a shibboleth term; in practice it meant in accord with the Party line. ‘The Author as Producer’ is a defence of the left wing of the Modernist avant-garde, typified for Benjamin by the Surrealists, against the Party line on literature, with its bias toward easily comprehensible, realistic stories with a strong progressive message. To make his case Benjamin feels obliged to hold up the now forgotten Soviet novelist Sergei Tretiakov as exemplar of the union of ‘correct political tendency’ with ‘progressive’ technique, and to appeal once again to the glamour of engineering: the writer, like the engineer, is a technical specialist and should therefore have a say in literary-technical matters. (V2, pp. 769, 770)

  Arguing at this crude level did not come easily to Benjamin. Did his decision to follow the Party line cause him no unease, at a time when Stalin’s persecution of artists was in full swing? (Asja Lacis herself was to become one of Stalin’s victims, spending years of her life in a labour camp.) A brief piece written in the same year, 1934, may give a clue. Here Benjamin mocks intellectuals who ‘make it a point of honor to be wholly themselves on every issu
e’, refusing to understand that to succeed they have to present different faces to different audiences. They are, he says, like a butcher who refuses to cut up a carcass, insisting on selling it whole. (V2, p. 743)

  How is one to read this piece? Is Benjamin ironically praising old-fashioned intellectual integrity? Is he issuing a veiled confession that he, Walter Benjamin, is not what he seems to be? Is he making a practical, if bitter, point about the constraints faced by a hack writer? A letter to Scholem (to whom he did not always, however, tell the whole truth) suggests the last reading. Here Benjamin defends his communism as ‘the obvious, reasoned attempt of a man who is completely or almost completely deprived of any means of production to proclaim his right to them’. In other words, he adheres to the Party for the same reason any proletarian should: because it is in his material interest. (V2, p. 853)

  By the time the Nazis came to power, many of Benjamin’s associates, including Brecht, had read the writing on the wall and taken flight. Benjamin, who had anyhow for years felt out of place in Germany, and spent time in France or on Ibiza whenever he could, soon followed. (His younger brother Georg was less prudent: arrested for political activities in 1934, he perished in Mauthausen in 1942.) He settled in Paris, where he scratched a precarious existence contributing to German newspapers under Aryan-sounding pseudonyms (Detlef Holz, K. A. Stempflinger), otherwise living on handouts. With the outbreak of war he found himself interned as an enemy alien. Released through the efforts of French PEN, he at once made arrangements to flee to the United States, then set off on his fatal journey to the Spanish border.

  Benjamin’s keenest insights into fascism, the enemy that deprived him of a home and a career and ultimately killed him, are into the means it used to sell itself to the German people: by turning itself into theatre. These insights are most fully expressed in (to use the title preferred by the Harvard translators) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’ (1936) but were foreshadowed in 1930, in a review of a book edited by Ernst Jünger.

  It is commonplace to observe that Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies, with their combination of declamation, hypnotic music, mass choreography, and dramatic lighting, found their model in Wagner’s Bayreuth productions. What is original in Benjamin is his claim that politics as grandiose theatre, rather than as discourse and debate, was not just the trappings of fascism but fascism in essence.

  In the films of Leni Riefenstahl as well as in newsreels exhibited in every theatre in the land, the German masses were offered images of themselves as their leaders were calling upon them to be. Fascism used the power of great art of the past – what Benjamin calls auratic art – plus the multiplying power of the new postauratic media, cinema above all, to create its new fascist citizens. For ordinary Germans, the only identity on show, the one looking back at them insistently from the screen, was a fascist identity in fascist costume and fascist postures of domination or obedience.

  Benjamin’s analysis of fascism as theatre raises many questions. Is politics as spectacle really the heart of German fascism, rather than ressentiment and dreams of historical retribution? If Nuremberg was aestheticised politics, why were Stalin’s May Day extravaganzas and show trials not aestheticised politics too? If the genius of fascism was to erase the line between politics and media, where is the fascist element in the media-driven politics of Western democracies? Are there not different varieties of aesthetic politics?

  Less questionable than his analysis of fascism is what Benjamin has to say about cinema. His sense of the potential of cinema to extend experience is prophetic: ‘Film . . . burst [our] prison-world asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and adventurously go travelling.’8 His insight is all the more surprising because even by 1936 his film theory was out of date. He overvalued the practice of montage, where he followed Sergei Eisenstein and Eisenstein alone, underestimating the rapidity with which a more extensive grammar of film narrative would be mastered by cinema audiences. Nor had he any way of speaking about visual pleasure: to him cinema was about being jolted by startling montages into new ways of seeing (again Brecht’s influence is manifest).

  Benjamin’s key concept (though in his diary he hints it was in fact the brainchild of the bookseller and publisher Adrienne Monnier) for describing what happens to the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility (principally the age of the camera – Benjamin has little to say about printing) is loss of aura. Until about the middle of the nineteenth century, he says, an inter-subjective relationship of a kind survived between an artwork and its viewer: the viewer looked and the artwork, so to speak, looked back. This mutuality defined aura: ‘To perceive the aura of a phenomenon [means] to invest it with the capacity to look at us in turn.’9 About aura there is thus something magical, derived from ancient links, now waning, between art and religious ritual.

  Benjamin first speaks of aura in his ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931), where he tries to explain why it is that (in his eyes) the very earliest portrait photographs – the incunabula of photography, so to speak – have aura, whereas photographs of a generation later have lost it. One explanation he advances for this state of affairs is that, as photographic emulsions were improved and exposure times decreased, what was captured on film was no longer the inwardness of a subject collecting him- or herself for a portrait, but an instant excised from the continuity of the sitter’s life. Another suggestion he makes is that the first generation of photographers were trained as artists, whereas the next generation were mere journeymen. Another is that something happened to the typical subject between the 1840s and the 1880s, something to do with the coarsening of the bourgeoisie.

  In ‘The Work of Art’ the notion of aura is extended rather recklessly from old photographs to works of art in general. The end of aura, says Benjamin, will be more than compensated for by the emancipatory capacities of the new technologies of reproduction. Cinema will replace auratic art.

  Even Benjamin’s friends found it hard to get a grip on aura in its expanded version. Brecht, to whom Benjamin expounded the concept during lengthy visits to Brecht’s home in Denmark, writes as follows in his diary. ‘[Benjamin] says: when you feel someone’s gaze alight upon you, even on your back, you respond (!). the expectation that whatever you look at is looking at you creates the aura . . . all very mystical, despite his anti-mystical attitudes. this is the way in which the materialist approach is adapted! it is pretty horrifying.’10 Other friends were no more encouraging.

  Throughout the 1930s Benjamin struggles to develop a suitably materialist definition of aura and loss of aura. Film is postauratic, he says, because the camera, being an instrument, cannot see. (A questionable claim: actors certainly respond to the camera as if it were looking at them.) In a later revision Benjamin suggests that the end of aura can be dated to the moment in history when urban crowds grow so dense that people – passers-by – no longer return one another’s gaze. In the Arcades Project he makes loss of aura part of a wider historical development: the spread of a disenchanted awareness that uniqueness, including the uniqueness of the traditional artwork, has become a commodity like any other commodity. The fashion industry, dedicated to the fabrication of unique handiworks – what it calls ‘creations’ – that are intended to be copied and reproduced on a mass scale, here points the way.

  Before long, Benjamin tempered his optimism about the liberatory potential of technology. By 1939 he was likening the rhythm of the cinema projector to the rhythm of the conveyor belt. Even the 1936 essay ‘The Storyteller’ shows a change in his attitude. Memory is the chief preserver of tradition, he says, storytelling the chief transmitter; but the privatisation of life characteristic of modern culture is proving fatal to storytelling. Storytelling has become artificially confined to the novel, a creation of print technology and of the bourgeoisie.

  Benjamin was not especially interested in the novel as a genre. On the evidence
of his fiction in the Harvard Selected Writings, he had no talent as a storyteller. His autobiographical writings are instead built out of discontinuous, intense moments. His two essays on Kafka, which can usefully be supplemented with the long letter to Scholem of June 12, 1938, treat Kafka as a parabolist and teacher of wisdom rather than as a novelist. But Benjamin’s most abiding hostility was reserved for narrative history. ‘History decomposes into images, not into narratives,’ he wrote. Narrative history imposes causality and motivation from the outside; things should be given a chance to speak for themselves.11

  ‘A Berlin Childhood around 1900’, Benjamin’s most engaging work of autobiography, was unpublished during his lifetime. Despite its title, the earlier ‘Berlin Chronicle’ is built not chronologically but as a montage of fragments, interspersed with reflections on the nature of autobiography, and in the end is more about the vicissitudes of memory – the impress of Proust is strong – than about actual events in Benjamin’s childhood. Benjamin uses an archaeological metaphor to explain his opposition to autobiography as the narrative of a life. The autobiographer should think of himself as an archaeologist, he says, digging deeper and deeper in the same few places in search of the buried ruins of the past.

  Besides ‘Moscow Diary’ and ‘A Berlin Chronicle’, Volumes 1 and 2 contain a number of short autobiographical pieces: a rather literary account of being stood up by a lover; records of experiments with hashish; transcriptions of dreams; diary fragments (Benjamin was preoccupied with suicide in 1931 and 1932); and a Paris diary, worked up for publication, which includes a tour of a male brothel frequented by Proust. Among the more surprising revelations: an admiration for Hemingway (‘an education in right thinking through correct writing’), a dislike of Flaubert (too architectonic). (V2, p. 472)