Walter Benjamin

And since mere reputation, however high, as it rests on the judgment of the best, is never enough for writers and artists to make a living that only fame, the testimony of a multitude which need not be astronomical in size, can guarantee, one is doubly tempted to say (with Cicero), Si vivi vicissent qui morte vicerunt— how different everything would have been “if they had been victorious in life who have won victory in death.”

When Adorno criticized Benjamin’s “wide-eyed presentation of actualities” (Briefe II, 793), he hit the nail right on its head; this is precisely what Benjamin was doing and wanted to do. Strongly influenced by surrealism, it was the “attempt to capture the portrait of history in the most insignificant representations of reality, its scraps, as it were” (Briefe II, 685).

The allegory must be explained before it can become meaningful, a solution must be found to the riddle it presents, so that the often laborious interpretation of allegorical figures always unhappily reminds one of the solving of puzzles even when no more ingenuity is demanded than in the allegorical representation of death by a skeleton.

Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about.

What is so hard to understand about Benjamin is that without being a poet he thought poetically and therefore was bound to regard the metaphor as the greatest gift of language.

In a letter to Max Brod about German-Jewish writers he said that the Jewish question or “the despair over it was their inspiration—an inspiration as respectable as any other but fraught, upon closer examination, with distressing peculiarities. For one thing, what their despair discharged itself in could not be German literature which on the surface it appeared to be,” because the problem was not really a German one. Thus they lived “among three impossibilities . . .: the impossibility of not writing” as they could get rid of their inspiration only by writing; “the impossibility of writing in German”—Kafka considered their use of the German language as the “overt or covert, or possibly self-tormenting usurpation of an alien property, which has not been acquired but stolen, (relatively) quickly picked up, and which remains someone else’s possession even if not a single linguistic mistake can be pointed out”; and finally, “the impossibility of writing differently,” since no other language was available. “One could almost add a fourth impossibility,” says Kafka in conclusion, “the impossibility of writing, for this despair was not something that could be mitigated through writing”—as is normal for poets, to whom a god has given to say what men suffer and endure. Rather, despair has become here “an enemy of life and of writing; writing was here only a moratorium, as it is for someone who writes his last will and testament just before he hangs himself.” 16

For the insolubility of the Jewish question for that generation by no means consisted only in their speaking and writing German or in the fact that their “production plant” was located in Europe—in Benjamin’s case, in Berlin West or in Paris, something about which he did “not have the slightest illusions” (Briefe II, 531). What was decisive was that these men did not wish to “return” either to the ranks of the Jewish people or to Judaism, and could not desire to do so—not because they believed in “progress” and an automatic disappearance of anti-Semitism or because they were too “assimilated” and too alienated from their Jewish heritage, but because all traditions and cultures as well as all “belonging” had become equally questionable to them. This is what they felt was wrong with the “return” to the Jewish fold as proposed by the Zionists; they could all have said what Kafka once said about being a member of the Jewish people: “. . .My people, provided that I have one.”23

“Quotations in my works are like robbers by the roadside who make an armed attack and relieve an idler of his convictions” (Schriften I, 571).

This discovery of the modern function of quotations, according to Benjamin, who exemplified it by Karl Kraus, was born out of despair—not the despair of a past that refuses “to throw its light on the future” and lets the human mind “wander in darkness” as in Tocqueville, but out of the despair of the present and the desire to destroy it; hence their power is “not the strength to preserve but to cleanse, to tear out of context, to destroy” (Schriften II, 192).

As Benjamin was probably the first to emphasize, collecting is the passion of children, for whom things are not yet commodities and are not valued according to their usefulness, and it is also the hobby of the rich, who own enough not to need anything useful and hence can afford to make “the transfiguration of objects” (Schriften I, 416) their business.