Writers in immigration — schriftsteller in der emigration: Walter Benjamin — Helmut Heissenbuttel

The following exerts from ‘writers in immigration: Walter Benjamin’ point towards Heissenbuttel’s remarkable materialist critique of Adorno, Bloch and Arendt. Machine translation…

For Walter Benjamin’s emigration, the active underground work in the innermost sphere of power of the Nazi regime represents the antithesis, so to speak. He always had in mind what could actually and physically happen. On May 2, 1936, he wrote to Scholem:

“I read your messages about your brother’s fate with horror. I do not know him; but to have to associate a name with such an existence is terrible. My brother is also still in Germany, but in freedom. He has, since my sister-in-law works in the Russian commercial agency in Berlin, no immediate hardship to suffer.” On i November 1938, Benjamin writes to Gretel Adorno: “My brother has been transtered to the penitentiary at Wilsnak, where he is engaged in road work. The existence there is said to be still bearable. The alp that lies on the people in his situation, as I often hear from Germany, is not so much the coming penitentiary day as the concentration camp looming after years of imprisonment.” In order to make the initial situation of Walter Benjamin’s emigration clear, it is important to note that he had in mind more tangibly than others what it meant not to emigrate. Nor, when he emigrated, was it a matter of simply saving himself; such a rescue made sense to him only if he could continue to pursue the work he had already begun; if he was able to grasp theoretically what his brother and others were fighting against in political practice. Benjamin’s emigration was an act inseparable from his work. This work, already projected in advance in parts of the Einbabnstrafße, lives from the impulses of the immediate experience of emigration. In this, it is comparable only to what has been handed down so far from Carl Einstein, who, of course, emigrated to Paris already in 1926, for the same reasons as Benjamin. Einstein’s work, like Benjamin’s, is therefore free of the ambiguity of Ernst Bloch’s statements, for instance, who in the 1936 anthology Erbschaft dieser Zeit at least shows something like understanding for the susceptibility to fascism, but for Benjamin only derision. Bloch says: 40

“National Socialism does its part as a ghost to use the good room quite directly. It rejects precisely the elements of the XIXth century pointing to the future, that is, its first or engineer face; but close it lives in the second, in the plush…. The indirect recency, on the other hand, the strange avant-garde of surrealism, which distills skin-goût for equally strange, new-symbolic purposes, has the XIXth century forensically: as chok and object, as wax cabinet and haunt that had been alive, as excavation and “antiquity with dead spots…. But the content of the spoils is just the completely decaying dream style me-long, and the means with which its hieroglyphics are amplified to be strangely concerning, perhaps even readable, is diabolical montage of the ornaments already shot through criss-cross at that time. The photographs easels, the thermometers on halberds, the enigmatic chamber of horrors of the time: this century is closer than childhood, more distant than China. But surrealists like Max Ernst, Chirico, Aragon, Benjamin light a chimney fire in the Chinese Wall, move in the little gold chair from the pastry shop, and the Chinese Wall encloses a time that is the experiment of man from Abbub.”

These sentences by Bloch, published in 1935, outline the other image of Benjamin the emigrant (and not only the emigrant, the writer and thinker in general), which has remained the official image to this day, especially on the part of those who, as they repeatedly affirm, were friends of his. Adorno completed it in his “Charakteristik Walter Benjamins” of 1950. He says: “The subjectivity of his thinking was dressed up as a specific difference; the idiosyncratic moment of his own spirit, the singularity of it, which the conventional philosophical way of proceeding would regard as accidental, ephemeral, void, proved itself with him as the medium of the binding…. so one could actually speak of the energy of intellectual atomic decay…. He wanted to comprehend the essence, where it can neither be distilled in an automatic operation nor be seen dubiously: to guess it methodically from the configuration of meaningless elements. The rebus becomes the model of his philosophy.”

And in the preface to the 1966 two-volume edition of Walter Benjamin’s selected letters, Adorno makes it even clearer what he means. He begins there: >Walter Benjamin’s person was from the beginning such a medium of the work, he had his happiness so much in his spirit that whatever else is called immediacy of life was broken. Without being ascetic, without even appearing so, he had an almost incorporeal quality. He who was powerful of his ego like few, seemed alienated from his own physique. This is perhaps one of the roots of the intention of his philosophy, to bring home by rational means what is announced by experience in schizophrenia.”

That is, translated into simpler German, Walter Benjamin was what one calls unworldly, spun into his insoluble mental webs, and all that one could take from his literary and theoretical activity was something that came about, so to speak, without the intervention of this unworldly mind: energy of an intellectual atomic decay. And even the benevolent Hannah Arendt, interlocutor of the last years of emigration in Paris, says in her memoirs published in 1968: >Benjamin- 42 understood nothing less than “to change living conditions that had become devastating for him, and his clumsiness guided him with a somnambulistic precision to the place where the center of a murderous fate was or at least could be.< Was it this “somnambulistic precision” that made him write from Berlin to Gerhard Scholem on February 28, 1933 From Berlin to Gerhard Scholem:

“The little composure that was shown in my circles towards the new regime is quickly used up, and one gives oneself an account that the air is hardly to be breathed; a circumstance that, of course, becomes less significant because one’s throat is tightened.

Was it his unworldliness that made him, almost in the face of the imminent threat, write to Scholem from Paris on April 8, 1939: “The green of hope permeates your letter as sparingly as that which permeates the streets of Paris in this cold spring. The more precise the wintry views between your lines. I have never been an enemy of clarity, and I am least of all now, when with the years I believe I have a precise concept of what I can make my peace with, and also of what I do not have in mind. That this second side of the alternative is also represented — it had this meaning that my letter of the 4th of March spoke of a certain sum — no other. The very circumstances that threaten my European situation so much will probably make my move to the U.S. impossible.”

Walter Benjamin chose Paris as his destination when he emigrated in March 1933 because he wanted to complete very specific investigations, because he wanted to formulate certain trains of thought, and because he wanted to try to establish certain relations between experience and cognition. His experience related to the political and literary situation in Europe in the transition from the twenties to the thirties of the twentieth century. Political agitation within the sphere of power of fascism or from outside would not have added anything new to his experience. But he could not remove himself from the indirect sphere of influence of fascism. His movements during the emigration, from Paris to Ibiza, from Paris to Funen, from Paris to San Remo, even if they were outwardly determined by accidental personal relationships, always remained at the same distance from the object. He did not have the planning will of Adorno, who first procured emergency quarters in Oxford and then, when he no longer dared to appear in Germany, carefully prepared his resettlement in the USA. Benjamin could not only not move away from a certain environment, he saw a possibility to complete the undertaken work only there, where he could search the roots of the phenomena that determined his experience. That was the prehistory in the 19th century, that was, as the name he found now, “Paris, the capital of the XIX century”, and that was the quintessence of what constituted the spirit of this capital, the work of Baudelaire.