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The man who went shopping for truth

A complex and brilliant writer, Walter Benjamin died eeing the Nazis before he could complete his nal
project. At last the fragments of that book have been translated into English. JM Coetzee describes the
evolution of a masterpiece

JM Coetzee
Saturday 20 January 2001 16.40GMT

The setting is the Franco-Spanish border, the time 1940. Walter Benjamin, eeing occupied
France, presents himself to the wife of a certain Fittko he has met at an internment camp. He
understands, he says, that Frau Fittko will guide him and his companions across the Pyrenees
to neutral Spain. Frau Fittko takes him on a trip to scout out the best routes; he brings along a
heavy briefcase. Is the briefcase really necessary, she asks? It contains a manuscript, he replies.
"I cannot risk losing it. It... must be saved. It is more important than I am."

The next day they cross the mountains, Benjamin pausing every few minutes because of a
weak heart. At the border they are halted. Their papers are not in order, say the Spanish police;
they must return to France. In despair, Benjamin takes a fatal overdose of morphine. The
police make an inventory of the deceased's belongings. The inventory shows no record of a
manuscript. What was in the briefcase, and where it disappeared to, we can only guess.

Benjamin's friend Gershom Scholem suggested it was the last revision of the unnished
Passagen Werk , or Arcades Project. By his heroic if futile eort to save his manuscript from
fascism and bear it to the safety of Spain, Benjamin became an icon of the scholar for our
times. The story has a happy twist. A copy of the Arcades manuscript left behind in Paris had
been secreted in the Bibliothque Nationale by Benjamin's friend, Georges Bataille. Recovered
after the war, it was published in 1982 in its original form - that is to say, in German with huge
swathes of French.

Now we have Benjamin's magnum opus in full English translation, and are at last in a position
to ask the question: why all the interest in a treatise on shopping in 19th-century France?
Benjamin was born in 1892, in Berlin, into an assimilated Jewish family. His father was a
successful art auctioneer who branched out into property investments; the Benjamins were, by
most standards, well-to-do. After a sickly, sheltered childhood, Benjamin was sent at the age of
12 to boarding school, where he was inuenced by one of the directors, Gustav Wyneken.

For years after leaving school, he was active in Wyneken's anti-authoritarian, back-to-nature
youth movement; he broke with it only when Wyneken came out in support of the rst world
war. In 1912, Benjamin enrolled as a student in philosophy at Freiburg University.

Finding the intellectual environment not to his taste, he threw himself into activism for
educational reform. When war broke out, he evaded military service rst by feigning a medical
condition and then, after his marriage in 1917 to Dora Sophie Pollak, by moving to
Switzerland. There they stayed until 1920, reading philosophy and working on a doctoral
dissertation for the University of Bern; but the lack of a social life unsettled Dora, and they
returned to Berlin. Benjamin was drawn to univer sities, remarked his friend Theodor Adorno,
as Franz Kaa was drawn to insurance companies.

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Benjamin set out 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 to urge his
case. His academic plans having failed, Benjamin launched himself on a career as a translator,
broadcaster and freelance journalist. Among his commissions was a translation of Proust's La
Recherche du Temps Perdu; three of 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 committed communist. The
meeting was fateful. "Every time I have experienced a great love, I have undergone a change so
fundamental that I have amazed myself," he later wrote. "A genuine love makes me resemble
the woman I love." In this case, the transformation entailed a change of political direction.

"The path of thinking, progressive persons in their right senses leads to Moscow, not to
Palestine," Lacis told him. All traces of idealism in his thought, to say nothing of his irtation
with Zionism, were abandoned. His friend Scholem had emigrated to Palestine, expecting
Benjamin to follow. Benjamin found an excuse not to come; he kept making excuses to the
end. In 1926 Benjamin travelled to Moscow for a rendezvous with Lacis.

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. Two years later the pair were briey
reunited in Berlin: they lived together and attended meetings of the League of Proletarian-
Revolutionary Writers. The 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.

He spoke no Russian. Rather than fall back on interpreters, he tried to read Moscow from the
outside - what he would later call his physiognomic method - refraining from abstraction or
judgment, presenting the city in such a way that "all factuality is already theory" (the phrase is
from Goethe). Some of Benjamin's claims for the "world-historical" experiment he saw being
conducted in the USSR now seem naive. Nevertheless his eye was acute. Many new Muscovites
were still peasants, he observed, living village lives according to village rhythms. Class
distinctions might have been abolished, but within the party a new caste system was evolving.

A street market scene captured the humbled status of religion: an icon for sale was anked by
portraits of Lenin "like a prisoner between two policemen". Though Lacis is a constant
presence in the Moscow diary, and though Benjamin hints that their sexual relations were
troubled, we get little sense of her physical self. Benjamin had no gift for evoking other people.
In Lacis's writings we get a much livelier 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; for years after meeting Lacis, he would repeat Marxist verities
- "the bourgeoisie... is condemned to decline due to internal contradictions that will become
fatal as they develop" - without having read Marx.

"Bourgeois" remained his cuss word for a mindset - materialistic, incurious, self-satised - 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 and
mordant observations on Weimar Germany with which he announced himself in 1928. Not
having run away early enough meant that he was condemned to run away from Emil and Paula

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Benjamin for the rest of his life: in reacting against his parents' assimilation into the middle
class, he resembled many German-speaking Jews of his generation, including Kaa.

What troubled Benjamin's friends about his marxism was that there seemed to be something
forced about it, something merely reactive. Benjamin's rst ventures into the discourse of the
left are depressing to read - rhapsodies on Lenin (whose letters have the "sweetness of great
epic"), and rehearsals of the ominous euphemisms of the party: "Communism is not radical.
Therefore, it has no intentions of simply abolishing family relations.

It merely tests them to determine their capacity for change. It asks: can the family be
dismantled so that its components may be socially refunctioned?" These words come from a
review of a play by Bertolt 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 the 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. In his view, writers should become engineers of human souls, meaning
that they should take it as their task to "refunction" humanity from the inside out.) Of
Benjamin's better-known pieces, The Author as Producer (1934) shows the inuence of Brecht
most clearly.

At issue is the old chestnut of Marxist aesthetics: which is more important, form or content?
Benjamin proposes that a literary work will be "politically correct only if it is also literarily
correct". The Author as Producer is a defence of the left wing of the modernist avant-garde,
typied for Benjamin by the surrealists, who were against the party's stance on easily
comprehensible, realistic stories with a strong progressive tendency.

To make his case, Benjamin appeals once again to the glamour of engineering: the writer, like
the engineer, is a technical specialist and should have a voice in technical matters. Arguing at
this crude level did not come easily to Benjamin. Did his faithfulness to the party cause him no
unease at a time when Stalin's persecution of artists was in full swing? (Lacis herself was to
become one of Stalin's victims, spending years in a labour camp.)

A brief piece from 1934 may give a clue. Here Benjamin mocks intellectuals who "make it a
point of honour to be wholly themselves on every issue", refusing to understand that to
succeed they have to present dierent faces to dierent audiences. They are, he says, like a
butcher who refuses to cut up a carcass, insisting on selling it whole. How does one read this
piece? Is Benjamin ironically praising old-fashioned intellectual integrity? Is he issuing a veiled
confession that he, Benjamin, is not what he seems to be? Is he making a practical, if bitter,
point about the hack writer's life? 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 deprived of any means of production to proclaim
his right to them".

In other words, he follows the party for the same reason that any proletarian should: because it
is in his material interest. By the time the Nazis came to power, many of Benjamin's associates,
including Brecht, had read the writing on the wall and taken ight. Benjamin, who had felt out
of place in Germany for years, soon followed. (His younger brother Georg was less prudent:
arrested for political activities in 1934, he perished in Mauthausen concentration camp in
1942.)

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Benjamin settled in Paris, where he scratched a precarious existence contributing to German

newspapers under Aryan pseudonyms (Detlef Holz, KA Stemplinger) and living on handouts.
With the outbreak of war, he found himself interned as an enemy alien. Released through the
eorts of French PEN [the world association of writers], he made arrangements to ee to the
United States, then set o 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 - concern the means it used to sell itself to the German people: by turning itself into
theatre.

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 debate, was not just one of the trappings of fascism, but
fascism in essence. In the lms of Leni Riefenstahl, as well as in newsreels exhibited in every
theatre in the land, the German masses were oered images of themselves as their leaders
called upon them to be. Fascism used the power of the art of the past - what Benjamin calls
"auratic art" - plus the multiplying power of the new postauratic media, particularly cinema, to
create its new fascist citizens.

For ordinary Germans, the only identity on show 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 dierent varieties
of aesthetic politics?

The key concept that Benjamin invents (though his diary hints it was in fact the brainchild of
the bookseller and publisher Adrienne Monnier) to describe what happens to the work of art in
the age of technological reproducibility (principally the age of the camera - Benjamin has little
to say about printing) is the loss of aura. Until roughly the middle of the 19th century, he says,
an inter-subjective relationship of a kind survived between an artwork and its viewer: "To
perceive the aura of a phenomenon [means] to invest it with a capacity to look at us in turn."
There is thus something magical about aura, derived from ancient links, now wandering
between art and religious ritual.

Benjamin rst 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 - have auras, whereas photographs of a generation later have lost them. 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. 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... you respond (!).
The expectation that whatever you look at is looking at you creates the aura... This is the way
in which the materialist approach to history is adapted! It is pretty horrifying."

Throughout the 1930s Benjamin struggled to develop an acceptably materialist denition of

aura and loss of aura. Film is postauratic, he says, because the camera, being an instrument,
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cannot see. (A questionable claim: actors respond to the camera as if it is looking at them.) In a
later revision he suggests that the end of aura can be dated to the moment in history when
urban crowds grew so dense that people - passers-by - no longer returned one another's gaze.
In the Arcades Project he makes the loss of aura part of a wider development: the spread of a
disenchanted awareness that uniqueness, including the uniqueness of the traditional artwork,
has become a commod ity like any other commodity. The fashion industry, dedicated to the
fabrication of unique handiworks intended to be reproduced on a mass scale, points the way
here.

In the late 1920s Benjamin conceived of a work that would deal with urban experience;
inspired by the arcades of Paris, it would be a version of the Sleeping Beauty story, a dialectical
fairy tale told surrealistically by means of a montage of fragmentary texts. Like the prince's
kiss, it would awaken the European masses to the truth of their lives under capitalism. It
would be 50 pages long; in preparation for its writing, Benjamin began to copy out quotations
under such headings as Boredom, Fashion, Dust.

But as a stitched-together text, it became overgrown each time with new quotations and notes.
He discussed his problems with Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who convinced him he could
not write about capitalism without a proper command of Marx. The Sleeping Beauty idea lost
its lustre.

By 1934 Benjamin had a new, more philosophically ambitious plan: using the same method of
montage, he would trace the cultural superstructure of 19th-century France back to
commodities and their power to become fetishes. As his notes grew in bulk, he slotted them
into an elaborate ling system based on 36 convolutes (from German Konvolut : sheaf, dossier)
with keywords and cross-references. Under the title "Paris, Capital of the 19th Century" he
wrote a rsum of the material, which he oered to Adorno (he was by then receiving a stipend
from, and was thus in some measure beholden to, the Institute for Social Research, which had
been relocated by Adorno and Horkheimer from Frankfurt to New York).

From Adorno, Benjamin received such severe criticism that he decided to set aside the project
and extract from his mass of materials a book about Baudelaire. Adorno saw part of the book
and was again critical: facts were made to speak for themselves, he said; there was not enough
theory. Benjamin made further revisions, which had a warmer reception.

Baudelaire was central to the Arcades plan because, in Benjamin's eyes, Les Fleurs du Mal rst
revealed the modern city as a subject for poetry. (Benjamin seems not to have read
Wordsworth, who, 50 years before Baudelaire, wrote of what it was like to be part of a street
crowd, bombarded on all sides with glances, dazzled with advertisements.)

Yet Baudelaire expressed his experience of the city in allegory, a literary mode out of fashion
since the Baroque. In Le Cygne, for instance, he allegorises the poet as a swan, scrabbling
comically in the paved marketplace, unable to spread his wings and soar.

Why did Baudelaire opt for the allegorical mode? Benjamin uses Marx's Kapital to answer his
question. The elevation of market value into the sole measure of worth, says Marx, reduces a
commodity to nothing but a sign - the sign of what it will sell for. Under the reign of the
market, things relate to their actual worth as arbitrarily as, for instance, in baroque
emblematics, a death's head relates to man's subjection to time. Emblems thus make an
unexpected return to the historical stage in the form of commodities which, as Marx had
warned, "(abound) in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties". Allegory, Benjamin
argues, is exactly the right mode for an age of commodities.

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While working on the never-completed Baudelaire book, Benjamin continued to take notes for
the Arcades. What was recovered after the war from its hiding place in the Bibliothque
Nationale amounted to some 900 pages of extracts, mainly from 19th-century writers but from
contemporaries of Benjamin's as well, grouped under headings, with interspersed
commentary, plus a variety of plans and synopses.

The history of the Arcades Project, a history of procrastination and false starts, of wanderings
in archival labyrinths in a quest for exhaustiveness, of shifting theoretical ground, of criticism
too readily acted on, and generally speaking of Benjamin not knowing his own mind, means
that the book we are left with is radically incomplete: incompletely conceived and hardly
written in any conventional sense. Rolf Tiedemann, who published an edition of the work in
1982, compares it to the building materials of a house. In the hypothetical completed house
the materials would be held together by Benjamin's thought. We possess much of that thought
in the form of Benjamin's interpolations, but cannot always see how the thought ts or
encompasses the material.

In such a situation, says Tiedemann, it might seem better to publish only Benjamin's own
words, leaving out the quotations. But Benjamin's intention, however utopian, was that at
some point his commentary would be withdrawn, leaving the quoted material to bear the full
weight of the structure.

The arcades of Paris, says an 1852 guidebook, are "inner boulevards, glass-roofed, marble-
panelled corridors extending through blocks of buildings... lining both sides... are the most
elegant shops, so that such an arcade is a city, a world in miniature". Their airy glass and steel
architecture was soon imitated in other cities of the west. The heyday of arcades extended to
the end of the century, when they were eclipsed by department stores.

The Arcades book was never intended to be an economic history (though part of its ambition
was to act as a corrective to the entire discipline of economic history). An early sketch suggests
something far more like his autobiographical work, A Berlin Childhood. "One knew of places in
ancient Greece where the way led down into the underworld. Our waking existence likewise is
a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld - a land full of
inconspicuous places from which dreams arise. All day long, suspecting nothing, we pass them
by, but no sooner has sleep come than we are groping our way back to lose ourselves in the
dark corridors. By day, the labyrinth of urban dwelling resembles consciousness; the arcades...
issue unremarked on to the streets. At night, however, under the tenebrous mass of the
houses, their denser darkness protrudes like a threat, and the nocturnal pedestrian hurries
past - unless, that is, we have emboldened him to turn into a narrow lane."

Two books served Benjamin as models: Louis Aragon's A Paris Peasant, with its aectionate
tribute to the Passage de L'Opra, and Franz Hessel's Strolling in Berlin, which focuses on the
Kaisergalerie and its power to summon up the feel of a bygone era. In his book, Benjamin
would try to capture the "phantasmagoric" experience of the Parisian wandering among
displays of goods, an experience still recoverable in his own day, when "arcades dot the
metropolitan landscape like caves containing the fossil remains of a vanished monster: the
consumer of the pre-imperial era of capitalism, the last dinosaur of Europe".

The great innovation of the Arcades Project would be its form. It would work on the principle
of montage, juxtaposing textual fragments from past and present in the expectation that they
would strike sparks from and illuminate each other. Thus, for instance, if item 2,1 of convolute
L, referring to the opening of an art museum at the palace of Versailles in 1837, is read in
conjunction with item 2,4 of convolute A, which traces the development of arcades into

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department stores, then ideally the analogy "museum is to department store as artwork is to
commodity" will ash into the reader's mind.

According to Max Weber, what marks the modern world is loss of belief, disenchantment.
Benjamin has a dierent angle: that capitalism has put people to sleep, that they will wake up
from their collective enchantment only when they are made to understand what has happened
to them. The inscription to convolute N comes from Marx: "The reform of consciousness
consists solely in... the awakening of the world from its dream about itself."

The dreams of the capitalist era are embodied in commodities. In their ensemble these
constitute a phantasmagoria, constantly changing shape according to the tides of fashion, and
oered to crowds of enchanted worshippers as the embodiment of their deepest desires. The
phantasmagoria always hides its origins (which lie in alienated labour). Phantasmagoria in
Benjamin is thus a little like ideology in Marx - a tissue of public lies sustained by the power of
capital - but is more like Freudian dreamwork operating at a collective, social level.

"I needn't say anything. Merely show," says Benjamin; and elsewhere: "Ideas are to objects as
constellations are to stars." If the mosaic of quotations is built up correctly, a pattern should
emerge that is more than the sum of its parts but which cannot exist independently of them:
this is the essence of the new form of historical-materialistic writing that Benjamin believed
himself to be practising.

What dismayed Adorno about the project in 1935 was Benjamin's faith that a mere assemblage
of objects could speak for itself. Benjamin was, he wrote, "on the crossroads between magic
and positivism". Adorno later had a chance to see the entire Arcades corpus, and again
expressed doubts about the thinness of its theorising. Benjamin's response was to invent the
notion of the dialectical image, for which he went back to baroque emblematics - ideas
represented by pictures and Baudelairean allegory. Allegory, he suggested, could take over the
role of abstract thought.

The objects and gures that inhabit the arcades - gamblers, whores, mirrors, dust, wax gures
- are to Benjamin emblems, and their interactions generate meanings, allegorical meanings
that do not need the intrusion of theory. Along the same lines, fragments of text taken from
the past and placed in the charged eld of the historical present are capable of behaving much
as the elements of a surrealist image do, interacting spontaneously to give o political energy.
In so doing the fragments constitute the dialectical image, dialectical movement frozen for a
moment, open for inspection, dialectics at a standstill: "Only dialectical images are genuine
images."

So much for the theory, ingenious as it is, to which Benjamin's deeply anti-theoretical book
appeals. But to the reader unpersuaded by the theory, the reader to whom the dialectical
images never quite come alive as they are supposed to, the reader perhaps unreceptive to the
master narrative of the long sleep of capitalism followed by the dawn of socialism, what does
the Arcades Project have to oer? The briefest of lists would include: a treasure hoard of
curious information about Paris, a multitude of thought-provoking questions, the harvest of
an acute and idiosyncratic mind's trawl through thousands of books, succinct observations,
pol ished to a high aphoristic sheen, on a range of subjects (example: "Prostitution can lay
claim to being considered 'work' the moment work becomes prostitution"); and glimpses of
Benjamin toying with a new way of seeing himself: as a compiler of a "magic encyclopaedia".
Suddenly Benjamin, esoteric reader of an allegorical city, seems close to his contemporary
Jorge Luis Borges, fabulist of a rewritten universe.

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From a distance, Benjamin's magnicent opus is reminiscent of another great ruin of 20th-
century literature, Ezra Pound's Cantos. Both works are built out of fragments, and adhere to
the high-modernist aesthetics of image and montage. Both have economic ambitions and
economists as presiding gures (Marx in one case, Gesell and Douglas in the other). Both
authors have investments in antiquarian bodies of knowledge whose relevance to their own
times they overestimate. Neither knows when to stop. And both were in the end consumed by
the monster of fascism: Benjamin tragically, Pound shamefully.

It has been the fate of the Cantos to have a handful of anthology pieces excerpted and the rest
quietly dropped. The fate of the Arcades may well be similar. One can foresee a condensed
student edition drawn mainly from convolutes B (Fashion), H (The Collector), I (The Interior), J
(Baudelaire), K (Dream City), N (On the Theory of Knowledge) and Y (Photo- graphy), in which
the quotations will be cut to a minimum and most of the surviving text will be by Benjamin
himself. And that would not be a wholly bad thing.

What was Walter Benjamin: a philosopher? A critic? A historian? A mere "writer"? The best
answer is perhaps Hannah Arendt's: he was one of "the unclassiable ones... whose work
neither ts the existing order nor introduces a new genre".

His trademark approach - coming at a subject not straight on but at an angle, moving stepwise
from one perfectly formulated summation to the next - is as instantly recognisable as it is
inimitable, depending on sharpness of intellect, learning lightly worn and a prose style which,
once he had given up thinking of himself as Professor Benjamin, became a marvel of accuracy
and concision. Underlying his project of getting at the truth of our times is an ideal he found
expressed in Goethe: to set out the facts in such a way that the facts will be their own theory.

The Arcades book, whatever our verdict on it - ruin, failure, impossible project - suggests a
new way of writing about a civilisation using its rubbish as materials rather than its artworks:
history from below rather than above. And his call elsewhere for a history centred on the
suerings of the vanquished, rather than on the achievements of the victors, is prophetic of
the way in which history writing has begun to think of itself in our lifetime.

This is an edited extract from an article that rst appeared in the New York Review of Books.
The Arcades Project, by Walter Benjamin, translated from the German and French by Howard
Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, is published by Belknap Press/Harvard University Press
(27.50).

Topics
History
Society
JM Coetzee

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