The Everlasting Now: Walter Benjamin’s Archive Maria ZIMMERMANN BRENDEL “1 most likely lost several pieces through the hasty departure from Berlin [to Paris in 1933] and the unsettled existence of the early years of emigration,” wrote Walter Benjamin on April 4, 1937 to Gershom Scholem in Palestine, one of the keep- crs of the flame.’ After escaping the Nazis, Benjamin lived the life ofa refugee, suffering from social isolation and financial hardship. Yet he continued researchingand writing and distributed his valued docu: ‘ments among friends. “Benjamin knew the magnitude of his work and made sure that future generations would haveaccesstoit,” contends Erdmut Wizisla. director of the Walter Benjamin Archive. At first Benjamin ‘expressed the hope that one day he would see his Archiv-Kartothek reunited, But after ‘realizing that “circumstances do not allow thisillusion anymore,” he took consolation in knowing “that a reader here and there will become heimisch [comfortable] with my variously distributed texts”? During his travels in Europe in the early decades ofthe twentieth century, Benjamin collected postcards of Italian townscapes, sibyls, and Russian toys, numerous pho- tographs of the Arcades in Paris, as well as his own notes scribbled on anything that came to hand when the muse struck him: the back of receipts, on library cards, ‘or newspaper ads. Friends bestowed great ‘are in protecting his documents. Georges Bataille hid the manuscript ofthe “Arcades Project” (1927-39) in the Bibliotheque Nationale (where it was discovered by Giorgio Agamben in 1981, and published a year later*), while Gretel and Theodor ‘Adorno kept papers in their New York safe, later transporting them to Frankfurt. Bertold Brecht was to have shipped Benjamin's library, his “intellectual wine cellar,” as he liked to call it, to Svendborg, in Denmark, where Brecht took refuge, but it was lost during WWIL. After leaving Berlin, Benjamin's existence was put on permanent hold, trapping him between “two dialectic poles of order and disorder.” He once used those words to describe the collector-archivist’s ontological dilemma, as requiring a sort of Rettung (rescue), but ‘now it had become his destiny too, With the tides of history turning, the hope of a resuscitated archive was real- ized in the fall of 2004 when two sec- tions of the Walter Benjamin Archive were transferred from Frankfurt and Paris to Bertin’s Akademie der Kunste, custodian of the Moscow portion (confiscated by the Gestapo from Benjamin's last Berlin apartment and taken by the Red Army to the USSR) The project of centering the Archive in Berlin (more papers have now surfaced in Moscow) was initiated and funded by the Hamburg Foundation for Supporting Science and Culture. The Archive currently consists of some 12,000 ages of manuscripts, notebooks, news- Paper clippings, letters, fragments, essays, postcards, and photographs, a selection of which was exhibited for the first time last year in Berlin. “Walter Benjamin's Archive: Signs, Texts and Images” (October 3- November 11, 2006) was part of the expansive international Benjamin festi- val, “JETZT—The Now of Cognizability” (October 17-22), with its conferences and artevents. Having access to this updated archive was a thrill for many visitors, prompting new engagements with texts previously known only through published versions. But it was also poignant seeing Benjamin's ‘own typed résumé hanging on a gallery wall, while below it visitors pored over a series of glass cabinets containing photo- graphs and handwritten papers written in his small, meticulous seript. His résumé points toa life cut brutally short, to a future that never arrived. On his way to the US. to take up a position at the Institute for Social Research—which Adorno and Max Horkheimer had relocated from Frankfurt to New York in 1934—Benjamin was refused entry into Spain from where he was due to set sail. While sequestered at the Catalan border town of Portbou, the il Benjamin took morphine pills and died on the night of September 27, 1940 (some suspect it was suicide). Hannah Arendt, the Adornos, and ‘Scholem were among the first to ensure publication of his manuscripts after his death, Since the 1950s, Benjamin has been widely hailed for his unique dialecti- cal method of engaging the “now” (Jetzt), that revelatory moment when past and present fleetingly collide. In his confer- fence homage, Georges Didi-Huberman remarked that this dialectic method allows one “to immerse oneself in the ‘after’ (Nachgeschichte) so as to make sense of the ‘before’ (Vorgeschichte),” a method that Benjamin first introduced in the Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 1928)5 Benjamin’s notion of the tem- poral index (discussed in Theses on the Philosophy of History,1940) refers to the process whereby certain knowledge bur. ied in human artifacts or events is only revealed (or “rescued,” to use Benjamin's term) at particular moments in history— not in “empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now” (he doesn’t say Gegenwart here but “Jetztzeit,” the quota: tion marks possibly alluding to Thomas ‘Aquinas's nuncstansor “everlastingnow”) This idea of the work of art not disclosing everything at once, like the continuum of life itself (“once upon a time’ [is] his toricism’s bordello”), was the focus of festival director Sigrid Weigel: each now is the now of a temporally informed act of cultural (re)cognition (hence the festival's title). According to Weigel, Benjamin's ideas have once again resurfaced among artists and intellectuals in the digital age, seeming almost tailor-made for the recent return of terror and religious fundamen- talism to the world stage. Indeed, few cultural analysts of his or any other era have dealt so expressively and acutely with the unconscious sacred underpin- s4221 Delt Gang ® Jig els oa Voki aul 4 sg ta tf eer oy tofoc of Yarbucee, latent elton be Hibs ih, Sin CAO ain seat PUL LA MIGLIORE DA TAVOLA aVe, yadda ln meh ia iy jae taped cde H wa at eaee. bbl biog a fll liydahibes® sage of en BA Ds ety wy Arges gfe’ (Auk : Bajeall ath te re llt ath areal bs hy hy He fod ag aoe pee aet TLE ig He te tie a eo Sainhe we sage ah wagleifons eS a Sad guna tlopenai, fae at ttt cee Cony shaver tle Yoeod vig ctiommsil chacgect a ynt bl mma Umma fark il cd lr tent praia Sith pom wpa Teaey inv oe Joh Suah £5 poy Yeo why pete esas fe ba Clair, Tord $e be Grande tbr gpreties pera, Integy ed 1 abe atic 'lteg_ box die cake Lb clludionns, Hrompulu ld erties te deberebe, & caphamaiimdo reba. feat mmrtriege, om chore iatellgesh, iC Tarmatic me Am iertre nn eine, kaordann ua Yemdirhala per le davrindl def Indadsdeientes a ese de fmcsrpencr, (Se vin ct de heap esaly terre, T2 43/50) Boe oho {fst Se lol fla Sphaientad y oh de-fy Pf otae Hh Mee t ea Hivof viernden wit, te a Bebrec poker is pote, [Tauro jcadre sora dio Mewahardd Gpandl Hatten cer on ori ogoPostmortem nings of secular society, the religious overtones of modernist thought, as well as the dialectical relationship between tyrants and martyr figures Texts like the Trauerspielsbuch, the essay “Zur Kritik der Gewalt” (Critique of Violence, 1921), or Theses on the Philosophy of History, Weigel argues, need to be reread with such politi- cal concerns in mind. Benjamin's growing popularity in the US. rests widely on his essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935-36; recently translated as “The Work of Artin the AgeofltsTechnological Reproducibility’), in which the conceptof auraisraised. In fact, the prototype of this chef d’oeuvre can be found on a piece of paper advertising Acqua di S. Pellegrino, ‘on which he scribbled “Was ist Aura?” in old German Sutterlin cursive. According to panelist Sabine Gélz, now that we can see the original page's discussion of aura, stars, astrology, and mimesis laid out more in the manner of a poem, all care- {ully appointed in relation to Pellegrino's five-pointed red star logo, the published essay can never be read the same way again. Dated by Scholem toaround 1935, this manuscript underscores the perfor- mative aspect of Benjamin’s work, one where text becomes image and discourse poetry. Gélz stressed that the source sheds light on Benjamin’s core idea of perceptive mimesis in regard to photog- raphy, aura, and temporal cognizability— or in the words of Didi-Huberman, that “image now exploding lke a star.” Wizisla in turn, emphasized how impor- tant the physical act of writing was for Benjamin, who expressed his researches into spectacle via his corporeal traces fon the page. He was a Papierarbeiter or “paper drone,” for whom writing seemed a pleasurable experience (as Adorno once remarked)? Other speakers pointed to the extreme care Benjamin took in submitting his ideas to paper (preferably in any shade but white), or how the creative process for him involved transforming cognitive frag- iments into Denkbilder (thought-images), marshaling populariconstoarticulate com- plex ideas or even as a personal aesthetic flourish. Exemplary here is the manuscript called “Passagen-Konvoluten/Baudelaire,” featuring colored squares, rectangles, and other shapes meant to help orga- nize hs collected thoughts on the ongoing Passagenwerk or “Arcades Project.” some- what like a modern spreadsheet program (note the rust stains left by the paper- clip Benjamin used to attach this paper to his notes). In his book Einbahnstrasse (One Way Street, 1928), where he refers to “a new [technological] system requiring variable script coordinates” Benjamin even foretold the advent of computers. Benjamin's treatment of body-image- spaceas mapped out in Passagenwerkarose in response to the modern metropolis, with its changing social and spatial topog- raphies, where the individual is enticed by a phantasmagoria of consumer goods. ‘The Parisian Arcades were the result of industrial wealth, new developments in engineering (such as the use of steel in the Eiffel Tower), a lively textile trade, and ‘a mushrooming bourgeois society, all already sown with the seeds of their own destruction, Places of dazzling flanerie the Arcades became outmoded only a few decades after they were hailed in a Paris, guidebook (which Benjamin quotes) as “a new step up in industrial luxury, glass covered streets paved in marble [and] the most elegant shops; the world of the Arcades, complete unto itself’—and now, thanks to gas lighting, one navigable at night® Thomas Struth, who gave a slide- show address at the opening session of the conference, makes a similar argument by juxtaposing America’s empty inner city plazas with densely crowded markets in China, all photographed around the same time of day. Struth contrasts the Western post-industrial, late-capitalist malaise with a post-communist, Eastern-style consum- erst frenzy, al of which points back to the diminishing returns of newness even then amr A BS oso sa se a We a a Aad TR artUS 17 wane Apa 2007 associated with the Arcades, one in which the consumer (and spectator), to para- phrase Didi-Huberman, is caught between theadvent and obsolescence of history The festival also provided a welcome ‘opportunity to explore Benjamin's ever- increasing global appeal. Responding to the rmuch-quoted “The Task of the Translator” (1923), Gyu-Hwan Seo and jae-Ho Kang recounted the difficulties surrounding the recent translation of Passagenwerk into Korean, a process made even more prob- ematical by a non-alphabetic language system incompatible with the nuances of Benjamin's theoretical fldnerie. In Latin ‘America, to the contrary, Benjamin's for- tunes have waxed and waned lke the polit cal climate itself. Carlos Rincon spoke of ‘numerous atternpts by influential writers in Brazil and Argentina to latch onto or plun- der Benjamin's “holy word,” which explains why Portuguese and Spanish translations and interpretations have had such a strong visceral reception in the South, unlike the North where the response has been much more “magnetic” (or cultural). Elsewhere, Stéphane Mosts discussed the linkbetween Benjamin’s Jewish and German heritage. While the Hebrew language and literature were apparently important for Benjamin, Zionism or Judaic nationalism did not inter- est him. In fact, it was Scholem who was ultimately responsible for bringing the “Adamic: Urtext” to Benjamin's attention, as well as the Kabbala and other mystical writings, including the Spinozist metaphor ‘ofthe Messiah who only ever arrives too late. ‘Through his great personal courage and pas- sionate resistance to barbarism in any form, Benjamin instead forged his own unique birthright and writing, which now belongs tohumanity at large. [MARIA ZIMMERMANN BRENOEL i a a et based fri NOTES: Sore of se papers ve oi the Schnen Archive at he fev Nasional Une Lary Jouslo. 2 Whlter Benjamin Archive: Bide, Tete und Zechen (Fran Suk, 2006), 20. Ura Marg, "Das Wal Bejan Arc "Tajle 13/7 (Sepomber2006 14 Teisue ‘seal devoted 0 Bejan Thanks got Ural Marx for prong dit age of be Benjarin Acie 4 Ma, 15 Formoreon Boyan lec Sun Buck Mors, “The Ofghs of Nepave Dalat (1977) an hr Dia of Sing Waker onan and th Arcades Poe (1999) 6 Seva Sid Wag, et Waker Bein Kutstitung ex Bund (2006, 26; and “tori,” Trjle 137,13 7 Erdmt Weds, "Veceate Severs” Tele 13/7, 8 8 Tyas MS by Bejan Wale Benjamins Archie, 207 37