Introduction excerpted from my book Euroconnections: Literature, Philosophy, Religion, and Sexuality (1880-1940), available for purchase in both paperback and kindle versions.
In October of 1913 Walter Benjamin attends the First Free German Youth Congress. Many youth groups are represented, including those who favor German military preparedness and rigorous physical training in the countryside and those whose goals are more intensely intellectual. After the event Benjamin publishes an essay called “Youth Was Silent.” He admires the fact that so many young people had gathered together with a new sense of dedication and responsibility and of the special role of youth. But sports competitions, ceremonial attire, and folk dances, so he claims, do not really approach the true spiritual tasks that now face Germany and that have nothing to do with war or nationalism or pageantry.
That year of 1913 is a significant one for Franz Rosenzweig. (Years later, in 1922, Benjamin will visit Rosenzweig in Frankfurt and will be influenced by his anti-Hegelian book The Star of Redemption.) He has an all-night conversation with Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Rudolf Ehrenberg.1 Eugen is a Jew who has converted to Christianity and Franz, whose family’s practice of Judaism is quite weak, is persuaded that he should also convert. A key metaphysical problem, one taken quite seriously by intellectual young people of the time, is how to reconcile an intense experience of individual subjectivity (such as Kierkegaard has portrayed) with the objective historical and political order, so that one can find a substantial role to play in a larger course of history found to be meaningful. Rosenstock, perhaps with Hegel’s philosophy in the background, argues that it is only through Christianity that this reconciliation with the course of history can take place. Franz decides that, in becoming a Christian, he will do so by taking the route of the very first Christians, that is, by moving through Judaism and experiencing the emergence of a Christian worldview out of that Jewish origin. He therefore attends Jewish Yom Kippur ceremonies later in the year and finds himself deeply moved by the piety and faith of the Jews that he observes during the service. He comes to the conclusion that while Christianity is generally the way that individual subjectivity becomes reconciled with the world order, as in Hegel’s narrative, that does not apply in the case of Jews. If Christianity works at transforming the historical world and bringing it into relationship with God, Jews are needed to provide the model of a community of faith that already, by its very communal life and its lived unity with the divine, anticipates the redemption of the world. Jews are the utopian model of a kind of reconciliation with the divine that Christianity is trying to achieve on a far grander historical scale.
In 1913, as Rosenzweig is considering his conversion, an era of relative prosperity, peace, and progress is about to end in war, though participants in the arts of the period do not know this. Marcel Proust in 1913 has two very serious enterprises. He is trying to get his novel published and he is trying to maintain some level of intimacy with Alfred Agostinelli, at different times his secretary and his chauffeur. After his social and literary connections have failed to get the novel placed, Proust negotiates with the publisher Bernard Grasset to have Grasset’s press put out the volume, with Proust assuming all costs and allowing Grasset to make a significant profit for every book sold. Upon publication of further volumes of the novel he will be criticized by some literary friends for his science-like and even obsessive attention to the theme of homosexuality in the novel. But he replies to them that he is guided by an engineer’s curiosity as to how the human psyche works, and that he must report on his investigations accurately, rather than trying to appeal to the moral expectations of an audience. He claims as well that ultimately he does place these psychological researches in a moral framework, through showing that the dream of masculine beauty is a sign of a neurotic defect. He is not justifying homosexuality, he says, but is tracing out the precise psychological route of its failure to bring about a satisfying human life.
Proust’s attentions have become oppressive to Agostinelli and, as will happen with Albertine in the volume called The Fugitive, he flees, in this case to Monte Carlo. Proust asks his young friend Albert Nahmias (who had been his secretary and who, according to rumor, had engaged in improper activity with Proust) to visit Agostinelli’s father in Monaco and to offer him a bribe if he will send his son back to Paris.2 Proust conducts this strange affair as if he were in a detective novel, with cover stories and assumed names. His obsessiveness shows itself in a 473-word telegram to Nahmias instructing him exactly on how he is to handle various circumstances that may arise in the attempt to retrieve Agostinelli. On 14 November 1913 the first volume of his great novel appears.
In that same year of 1913, just before the Great War will destroy the familiar social world of Europe, Stefan George arranges a private printing of his volume of poems The Star of the Covenant, full publication of which will occur in January 1914. The poems are not meant merely as lyrical achievements. They also are aimed at promoting a worldview in line with the doctrine of George’s circle, an outlook expressed in three editions of The Yearbook for the Spiritual Movement. The 1912 edition is especially animated and assertive in defining the group’s enemies: liberal, Protestant, and feminist moralizers of culture whose political goals and moral sentiments will make society flat, uniform, and culturally impoverished. Culture will become a place of small-minded resentments, low-level utilitarian satisfactions, and aesthetic mediocrity.3 America as a whole represents all the qualities of modernity that George and his circle dislike. It is what Europe threatens to become in the near future. They blame a female-dominated social order for bringing about a shallow consumerist society with little sense of excellence, nobility, honor, sacrifice, or heroism, and with an aggrieved leveling out of the kind of distinctions that a truly admirable society would encourage. The highest forms of poetry and art, and more generally of Geist, will thus no longer be possible. George’s enemies, reading these yearbooks of the spiritual movement, attack him for being culturally pessimistic, for dismissing modernity and science, for too great a focus on aesthetic experience, for his contemptuous stance on women, for an overvaluing of eroticized male friendship, and for what they see as Catholic, ritualist tendencies in the kinds of art favored by George and his followers. Those six features form a constellation that can appear, whether valued positively or negatively, with surprising frequency and stability in different accounts of aesthetic culture. George’s circle is quite happy to defend precisely that constellation.
In that year of 1913 Franz Kafka visits Felice Bauer on three occasions in Berlin. He will be briefly engaged to her the following year. His interactions with her seem to be more emotionally intense and more psychologically successful when they are merely epistolary. In-person meetings appear to bring out in him a mix of indifference, disgust, unease, and fear that he will lose hold of the one thing that safeguards his most basic sense of integrity: his writing. He also goes to Vienna in September for a conference on accident prevention, since he is employed by the state-run Workers’ Accident Insurance Company for the Kingdom of Bohemia. While in Vienna on this professional business, he takes time to visit the Eleventh Zionist Congress. Also during 1913 he publishes “The Stoker”, the first chapter of The Man Who Disappeared, and he visits a health spa on Lake Garda in Italy.
Harry Kessler is many things: a count, an intellectual, an aesthete, a wealthy supporter of avant-garde art, a supreme diarist, and a Prussian officer who will be in battle on both the eastern and western fronts during the war.4 His 1913 is a busy year. On 17 February he attends the premiere of Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun at Covent Garden in London. Two days later he has lunch with Nijinsky, Diaghilev, and Gordon Craig, a pioneer of modern stage design. He confers with these three about developing a ballet and Craig suggests that Nijinsky appear in the production as both a man and a girl. Kessler continues through the year to discuss his proposed ballet that eventually will be a collaboration with Richard Strauss, Nijinsky, and Diaghilev, with Kessler providing the scenario. He also has lunch with Winston Churchill’s mother and has time alone with the king and queen of England at a large dinner. Also during 1913 Kessler is in the middle of a delicate negotiation involving the Middle East. For Germany would like to build a railway from Berlin to Baghdad, or perhaps even as far as Basra, to increase its influence in Central and West Asia. The railroad is a threat not only to British power in the region but, more particularly, to the British company that controls steamship traffic on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It so happens that this British company is owned by Kessler’s very close relatives, the Lynch brothers, since his mother, Alice Blosse-Lynch, is the Anglo-Irish daughter of the founder of the company and the granddaughter of the one-time British minister to Baghdad.5 (This minister, Robert Taylor, had a wife who was either Armenian or Persian and who, according to family legend, had been stolen away from the Persian royal family.) On 15 February 1913 Kessler meets with his cousin Harry Lynch. On the one hand, Kessler wants to work with the British to strengthen Turkey and to counteract Russian influence in the Great Game. On the other, he also mentions, as a German, wishing to outflank the British so as to reduce the global role they have established through their control of India. He uses his extensive network of social relations in England to try to determine just how ready the British are to join with the French if military trouble between France and Germany should arise. His strategizing about the art world is matched by his strategizing about the diplomatic and military role of Germany in the future.
On 21 April 1913 Kessler travels to Neuilly, near Paris, to attend the funeral of Isidora Duncan’s two children. Seven and three years old, they had been in a car with their nanny while the chauffeur was starting up the vehicle. It took off without him and rolled into the Seine, leaving all three passengers dead. He comments approvingly to his sister on the funeral ceremony, with no words and an exquisite taste in music. Years later, on 15 September 1927, Kessler will record his learning of the death of Duncan herself on the previous evening. She had been in a car wearing her familiar long shawl and the garment, becoming caught in the back wheel, has choked her. On that occasion he remembers clearly the death of her children and recalls as well that on the very evening before they died he had been with her in a box at the Russian ballet in Paris. She had invited him to lunch at Neuilly the next day, with the promise that her two young children would perform a dance for him. He turned down the invitation because he had another engagement and he has always wondered if the children, in order to fulfill her promise, would have stayed at home to dance for him and would not have been out in the auto with their nanny and chauffeur.
On 29 May in that year 1913 Kessler attends the Paris premiere of The Rite of Spring starring Nijinsky. All older forms seem to be going under, he says, with new ones emerging from the chaos. He reports in his diary on the outraged shouts and sneering of the Paris elite and on how Claude Debussy, André Gide, and the writer Gabriele d’Annunzio were screaming back at them. At Larue’s afterward, Kessler joins Diaghilev, Nijinsky, Leon Bakst, and Jean Cocteau at a late supper and then these five take a wild taxi ride through Paris at night, with Bakst putting his handkerchief on a cane to wave it as a flag, Cocteau and Kessler on the roof of the cab, and Nijinsky smiling quietly in top hat and tails.6 A short time later Kessler visits Baron Charlus, or rather Robert de Montesquiou, in his startling pink home full of roses. In midsummer he joins his regiment in Germany for military maneuvers.
Many years later, on 27 December 1928, Kessler is attending a performance of Diaghilev’s ballet group, with music by Stravinsky. After the performance, Diaghilev introduces a gaunt young man to Kessler and asks if he recognizes him. He cannot place this individual and then is dumbfounded to be told that it is Nijinsky. The face which he had thought of as radiantly divine, a vehicle for higher meanings, is now drooping and expressionless and Nijinsky seems unable to speak a single word. Diaghilev and Kessler have to help him very slowly down a long staircase by supporting his shoulders, Nijinsky who once seemed able to leap over buildings. At dinner later, Kessler cannot focus on the other diners at all, as he recalls how this most spiritual being has flickered almost to nothing and how an extraordinarily passionate relationship between two individuals has left only a brief sputter faintly illuminating a lifeless residue.
Also in that year of 1913 T. S. Eliot is back at Harvard as a graduate student, after spending 1911-1912 in Europe. He reads Appearance and Reality, by the British idealist F. H. Bradley and begins writing a dissertation on this thinker.7 He finds in Bradley a way to justify his own view that experience as studied by the empirical sciences misses something essential to human life: those privileged moments when we are offered glimpses of a sublime Absolute beyond appearances that gives meaning to our lives. Walter Benjamin’s desire at just this time to be linked with a sublime Absolute and to be of service to Geist makes him and Eliot quite similar in this respect. (And Wittgenstein, writing during the war, will ask how meaning and value can shine ineffably on the world in a way that cannot be captured by our logical arrangement of the phenomenal order of things. As he claims regarding the Tractatus, he has clearly articulated the realm of the sayable precisely in order to point to what is unsayable.) Bradley argues that even though experience is subjective, one does not end up in a terrifying solipsism, unsure of one’s connections to the world and to others. Eliot fears such a solipsism and is also afraid that the world as we experience it is a fragile construction that might easily dissolve. So reading Bradley may help form a kind of scaffolding for his vulnerable psyche, for it is able to offer him a more confident sense of being connected to a substantial reality. Eliot thinks that religion is not taken seriously enough by many of the intellectuals around him and he is unsympathetic with anthropologists who wish to reduce religion to a merely behavioral and social phenomenon, such that the status of actual religious belief is severely diminished. Perhaps we should pay more attention to dreams and hallucinations, he thinks, as these might indicate how the mind remains open to fragments of experience that suggest something beyond us. Also in 1913 he buys two books on Eastern philosophy: Upanishads des Veda and Die Sûtras des Vedânta. These are both written by Nietzsche’s former schoolmate and friend Paul Deussen. On 4 April 1913 Eliot gives a paper on the New Realism to the Harvard Philosophy Club. It includes a review of A Preface to Politics by Walter Lippmann, a former Harvard classmate. In his talk Eliot makes fun of the popularity of present intellectual tendencies toward socialism and radicalism. He attacks Rousseau and what he calls the fallacy of progress. He complains that Georges Sorel and others fail to see that socialism is not an overcoming of the mythical element in society but merely the introduction of a new myth. His greatest fear is the reduction of meaning to merely human meaning and to merely human standards. Without a larger point of view external to the human world, he warns, every aspect of human life will become senseless.
On the evening of 15 June 1926 Walter Benjamin and Harry Kessler both attend the premiere in Paris of Jean Cocteau’s play Orphée.8 Benjamin has moved to the city in March, hoping both to live more cheaply and to become a leading German reporter on French cultural affairs. He is living in the Hotel du Midi, is becoming a great urban walker, and is corresponding with Gershom Scholem about how a radical Marxism might fit in with Jewish mysticism. (Scholem is skeptical.) At the end of the year he will head off to Moscow to visit his communist lover, Asja Lacis, and will reflect there on the achievements of the Bolshevik experiment. Kessler has been a generous and wide-ranging patron of contemporary artists and an informal German diplomat before the war. As we see him at the Cocteau premiere in 1926, he has been exerting himself in support of pacifist movements, the Weimar Republic, internationalism, and greater social justice for workers. In the days prior to the performance, he has attended formal meetings whose point is to renew warmer social ties among French and German intellectuals and politicians, still problematic after the war. Benjamin meets with Cocteau following the theater performance and finds the work of great interest. Kessler sees the play as muddled and unsure and is much put off by one of the lead characters, an angel played by a young actor whom he finds annoyingly effeminate, as if he were a hairdresser. He is disgusted enough that he leaves early without staying to greet Cocteau, whom he knows well from their shared experience, years earlier, of defending Diaghilev and Nijinsky at the Paris performances of the Ballets Russes.
Benjamin and Kessler, who strongly admires Nietzsche, can be seen as offering competing views of what aesthetic experience might come to mean in a human life. Benjamin is shaped by an idiosyncratic Marxism, by the Jewish belief that what is divine ineffably transcends nature, by surrealist practices, and by a radical messianism. He is influenced as well by the Protestant theology of his time. That theology, notable in Karl Barth’s retrieval of Kierkegaard, rejects the belief, favored by one typical interpretation of Hegel’s German idealism, that the divine can be explained ultimately in terms of human cultural achievements or through a self-unfolding process immanent in cultural history. Certain Protestant thinkers complain that in Hegel’s work the radical edge of the Protestant movement has been lost through a regression to the very features of Catholic and Hellenic practices, with their attachment to external ceremonies and external objects, that this movement was intended to overcome. In responding to these various influences, Benjamin develops a rich notion of a theological and linguistic sublime that is strongly anti-Hegelian, though he mentions Hegel only rarely. While Hegel’s view of the Jewish religion is quite positive in the later editions of his philosophy of history, his early theological writings create a narrative in which Judaism finishes a poor second to Christianity.9 Hegel’s story secularizes the key points of disagreement between the two religions: the Trinity and the Incarnation. For him, what we call the divine is simply the idea of rational self-determining and self-knowing as that idea becomes more fully realized in history. So the Christian notion of incarnation, once we properly understand it, turns out to be the story of how political and social institutions, as well as individual lives, come to express and incarnate that idea of rational autonomy. The theological narrative is transformed into a tale of how both individuals and political entities become more self-determining in that they fix their circumstances for themselves, rather than being determined by arbitrary and external forces. The development of this process through art, religion, and political forms has for Hegel a triune structure. Tensions such as that between spirit and nature, between the particular good and the universal one, between freedom and necessity, and between finite and infinite, are mediated at a higher, more sophisticated level of development. Such is the philosophical version of the Christian Trinity and of the reconciling work of Spirit, which, in the theology of the Trinity, mediates between father and son.
For the early Hegel, the Jewish religion is a site of radical separations without any of that structure of mediation. God is so separate from nature that he cannot be mirrored or embodied in any of its aspects. Abraham left the land of his birth and completely separated from it, without any return. There is, on Hegel’s view of Judaism, a very lofty spiritual notion on one side and slavish devotion to arbitrary practices on the other, but no way of bringing the two sides together in a political unity. If that lofty notion cannot be incarnated in actual human institutions, then there will be no political development in history for the Jews and they will not be able to have a state. Any historical development that matters for Hegel will work through a back-and-forth process that sees the divine (again, the activity of rational self-determination) made present in the human in ever more adequate and sophisticated forms. One of these is the Greek transfiguring of nature into what is well-formed and has a self-sustaining life of its own, or what Hegel calls beautiful individuality. The Jewish structure of non-mediation will not allow it to develop this kind of thinking, so the notion of beautiful individuality and even of beauty itself must, on Hegel’s story, be in some sense foreign to the Jewish religion. Instead of a self-to-other structure with an increasing mobility and complexity in how one’s identifications work, as well as with more sophisticated structures of mediation, the Jewish religion for Hegel will remain one of sheer, unreconcilable oppositions. He does, however, praise the Jewish poetry in the Psalms.
Benjamin can be read as conducting a fierce campaign against this entire Hegelian narrative, without ever mentioning Hegel. He will do so by accepting a great deal of Hegel’s overall description and then performing a Nietzschean transvaluation of values on the Hegelian assessment. It will turn out that a rejection of the Incarnation and the Trinity, especially in their secularized Hegelian analogues, will be crucial for Benjamin to a proper understanding of the human situation in the world. He will find all apparent moves toward a reconciling of deep cultural oppositions to be unpersuasive and in need of vigorous rejection, just as Marxists reject any moves within the bourgeois-liberal order that apparently reconcile and pacify social oppositions instead of intensifying them. That the Jewish religion in Hegel’s telling remains one of stark oppositions is therefore, for Benjamin, to its credit. This religion is not susceptible to so strong a desire for an overcoming of severe social and intellectual tensions that one will accept dangerously illusory resolutions of them. He will tell his friends that in the intellectual and spiritual realms he is fiercely opposed to all reconciliations and mediations. For Benjamin any notion of progress based on an unfolding inner logic of history must be rejected. The lofty spiritual meanings we are reaching toward manifest themselves only in our repeated failures to make them present or even to describe them. Instead of living in a reality that incarnates Hegel’s “divine”, we are facing a world that on its own is one of emptiness, ruin, and catastrophe. The radical absence of an unrepresentable divine hollows out the world and leaves one with a stance that Benjamin is happy to call, at least at times, theological anarchism or theological nihilism. His angel of history looks back on a realm of accumulating ruin and destruction without any progress.10 He says that “redemption depends on the tiny fissure in the continuous catastrophe.”11
For Benjamin, then, an iconoclastic attitude toward beauty is required, as if any attempt at admiring the beautiful, with its mystifying presence, is equivalent to a worship of false idols or a premature belief in a false messiah. Beauty will be just one more version of the disallowed embodiment of the highest form of the spiritual in natural objects. While beauty might be one step in man’s emerging from his entrapment in nature, as human forms appear to stand on their own as admirably self-actualizing, the beautiful object is still for Benjamin a mark of human enslavement in the pagan realm of cult and myth. It represents a transfiguring, elevating, and shaping of the natural instead of an overcoming of nature’s dominant power through an openness to sudden, unbidden illumination from a mystical, transcendent order. Myth gives ordinary natural events the divinized aura of an independent, privileged realm of spiritual beings that readily show themselves in the human sphere. In just that way the beautiful object offers itself as a site where a spiritual realm is supposed to be shining through ordinary items with an evident and compelling presence or aura, so that what is natural is being given a heightened and convincing appearance. Spirit and nature, then, seem very well integrated together when beauty is achieved. That is why Friedrich Schiller finds aesthetic experience to be crucial to a human education; it shows how spiritual values and the instinctive natural life of humans can be brought together without coercion, without a merely arbitrary juxtaposition. Both the ancient Hellenic world and Christianity have their versions of the incarnation of the highest level of the spiritual in human appearances. (Hegel himself argues that the Greek idea of beautiful individuality is ultimately inadequate as an expression of our capacity for rational self-determination, and that the proper vehicles for our highest spiritual values in the modern world will be social and political ones that express and enhance our freedom, as well as modern philosophy. The idea of freedom that evolves in modern Western Europe will not, for Hegel, be dependent on the givenness of nature in the way that the Hellenic notion of beauty was.)
What is needed, Benjamin believes, is a more radical demystification and disenchantment that will empty the world of any pretensions of the religion of the beautiful, so that we face our situation, and the overall emptiness of the world on its own, in a more reflective and honest manner. Only a space of hollowness and failure can suggest the sublimely utopian, messianic possibility of a very different future, one that we cannot now give any articulation to at all. He will use his powerful notion of allegory to point to a process of devaluing that overtakes worldly things, a turning of what appears to be a vessel of life, an expression of Spirit, into what is petrified and inorganic, without any inner, self-unfolding vitality. Cultural objects that, with the advance of modernity, have lost their aura of beauty, presence, and ritual power will become just more lifeless commodities to be circulated. But that loss is essential to seeing the need for radically different future possibilities that will be capable of standing up to our critical reflection. Late capitalism is a powerful force in making the emptying out of the world vividly evident, so that, as with Marx, it is helping to clear the way for a radically different future.
In contrast with Benjamin and under the influence of Nietzsche, Harry Kessler considers experience of the beautiful to be central to a human life. He sees ancient Hellenic culture as modeling a deeply satisfying engagement of human individuals with themselves and with the world around them. Where Benjamin takes most aesthetic experience to represent still an entrapment in nature’s cycles and in mystifying rituals linked to sensory objects, Kessler sees that experience as a healthy acceptance of, and a self-mastery in relation to, our sensuous nature. Like Nietzsche, he believes that interaction with what is beautiful brings us a sense of vitality and joy, while that which is ill-formed, carelessly held together, and poorly resistant to forces of dissolution makes us feel tired, listless, and passive, so that cultures as a whole suffer from exhaustion. This belief makes him collect excellent art for his own home, contribute very generously to a range of aesthetic projects, and also fund programs to provide beautiful, low-cost household items for the working classes. Hegel in his philosophy of history and in his philosophy of religion had developed a rich contrast between the religion of the beautiful, expressed in the Hellenic world, and the religion of the sublime, which appeals to what is incommensurably and ineffably other and is expressed with special clarity in the religion of the ancient Hebrews.12 Kessler and Benjamin continue the complex cultural working out of that contrast.
Benjamin tells his friend Gershom Scholem that in the work of Franz Kafka we find a primordial world where the shame of human creatureliness is predominant and where there is no way to determine whether any messengers from a higher realm have arrived. Scholem replies that since the Law is present in Kafka’s realm, the Jewish cultural world of law and justice must already be operative there.13 That realm cannot be simply a primordial space of natural beings exiled in the dominating conditions of nature. Benjamin wishes to combat the regressive elements in the German culture of his time, yet he remains fascinated with thinkers such as Ludwig Klages who would celebrate a primitive, archaic relation of humans to the world and to one another. Such an earlier time is supposed to be one in which humans were profoundly close to nature and its processes, often through mimetic rituals that imitated the movements of nature and natural creatures, before the primacy of conceptualizing, of rational reflection, and of economic exchange created an impoverishing distance. Benjamin sees the individuals of Klages’s picture as enslaved to a natural world that can only generate empty, ritualized repetitions. But he agrees with Theodor Adorno that some features of that archaic space, such as a classless society and an openness to the world prior to any system of abstract identities and exchanges, may offer a brief suggestion of a future utopian order. There was once something like a paradisiacal relationship to reality through a privileged naming, as in the garden of Eden story, and while this has now been lost, glimmers of it give faint hints of what a messianic future might be. To be in the realm of conceptual thought and of economic exchange is to circulate and exchange items that are treated as identical, even though they are not. We try to find what is redeemable in Klages’s picture not to return to it but rather to find a place for it within a critical, reflective, and indeed messianic stance. Kafka’s world then, for Benjamin, has a strong tension between a primordial swampland where nature pulls all things toward the conditions of creatureliness and ultimate decay, and a Law that may well appear arbitrary and fraudulent, since the realm it emerges from is beyond our capacity to grasp it.
In July 1923 Kafka meets Dora Diamant in Müritz, a resort on the Baltic Sea.14 Dora is twenty-five and from an Orthodox Jewish family originating in Eastern Europe, though she has moved away from living among the Orthodox and now works with children at the Jewish People’s Home in Berlin. They become lovers and in September he moves to Berlin in order to live with her. She is more serious in her Jewish practices than he is and she tries to interest him in the Talmud. They talk of opening a restaurant in Palestine with Dora as cook and Franz as a waiter, but that discussion is hardly a serious one, given the health of the latter. German inflation is catastrophic, wrecking the economy, and he is forced to leave Berlin and return to Prague with her. Soon his tuberculosis has spread from his lungs to his larynx and the two of them go to the Wienerwald sanitorium in Austria and then to another sanatorium near Klosterneuburg. Dora’s Orthodox father forbids her to marry him and Franz will die on 3 June 1924, with burial in the Jewish cemetery in Prague.
In July 1923, at precisely the time when Kafka is meeting Dora Diamant on the Baltic, Ernest Hemingway is taking his wife Hadley to the bullfights during the festival of San Fermín in Pamplona, on the recommendation of Alice Toklas.15 Hadley is pregnant and both she and her husband feel that her exposure to the bullfights might lend a stronger character to a future son. Earlier in the spring he has viewed bullfighting at Seville and Ronda with Bob McAlmon, who disappoints Hemingway by being physically and morally upset at the goring of the horses. Hemingway will go on to write a novel in which a ceremony that layers Catholic ritual practice over pagan Mediterranean rites can stand for the individual’s risking of dissolution back into nature. Yet through beautiful form held stable in the face of that threat, as with the performance of the bullfighter Pedro Romero, one manages, through such rites, to achieve and maintain an ongoing style of individuation. Finding a convincing style of writing will be for Hemingway a complement to that process. As he puts in his description of the bullfights, clearly referring to his own writing: an aesthetic gesture that appears mannered may be, if performed close to the bull (or to the analogous psychological dangers facing a human individual), beautiful and courageous. Aesthetic merit will be due in part to the role of art in that kind of psychological achievement, so that Hemingway differs from Benjamin regarding what one ought to expect of art and literature. Hemingway, at least in this novel, still occupies a space of the fragile emergence from nature of individuals who are seeking to order and sustain themselves as such. Literature may then, through the rhythm and self-control of a style of prose, offer rituals that test the pressure on one’s boundaries and on one’s identity and that also, in the end, establish one as more reliably self-supporting. Hemingway’s writing will be analogous to Romero’s performance in its combination of psychological courage in the face of real threats to identity and in the craft and grace of its art that allow one to resist being dissolved back into nature’s forces.
For Benjamin, a repeating on a literary level of the structures of pagan or Catholic ritual, as in Hemingway, is not enough to emancipate us from our servitude to nature; only something far more radical can do the trick. Instead of being concerned with negotiating a self-sustaining individuation able to hold itself vulnerably against pressures toward dissolving, he is concerned with the ethical demands on the individual of a now impossible-to-conceive future realm. He does not think of literature as being about the strategy mechanisms of a metaphysically fragile self. It seems he could not agree with an account of literature that made the achievement of a self-sustaining style and rhythm of individuation, a sense of more active self-determination in one’s handling the pressure of experience, the literary goal. That would be just one more chapter in the history of humanism, which Benjamin opposes because it takes what ought to be the starkly radical difference of the theological level and lets humans count as having, prior to any messianic renewal of the world, an analogous share in it. By the same reasoning he cannot believe that any of the parliamentary parties in Germany, even on the left, has the slightest share in articulating and realizing the world of justice to come. Benjamin can, however, approve of avant-garde art whose very transforming of the means of cultural production can be seen as parallel to the Marxist workers’ transforming of the means of economic production.
In the very same summer month when Kafka is on the Baltic and Hemingway is in Pamplona, Benjamin in Frankfurt is first developing a friendship with Adorno, after being introduced to him by Siegfried Kracauer.16 His meeting with these intellectuals will blossom into an eventual association with the Frankfurt School. Its Institute of Social Research, having moved to Switzerland and then to New York, will provide him with a crucial stipend after he flees Germany for France with Hitler’s assumption of power, though the Institute perhaps does not do enough to get him to New York. This year 1923 is a trying time politically, as France has taken over Germany’s industrial Ruhr region in order to force the payment of war reparations, and the German leadership, in response, has called for a national strike, which only exacerbates the economic situation in the country. Benjamin suffers the effects of the same German hyperinflation that also unsettles Kafka in Berlin. Returning to Berlin, he rejoins his wife and son and is surprised by how much Stefan has changed during the long period when his rather neglectful father was away in Frankfurt. The family is living in an apartment in his parents’ home in Grunewald as Walter is still seeking employment of his own that he finds suitable to his talents. His enterprising wife Dora responds to their economic plight by getting a job as a secretary to a reporter for the Hearst newspapers. Payment will be in dollars and thus is inflation-proof. Fortunately for their son, she will continue to be unusually resourceful long into the future, including when World War II approaches, for Walter himself is very poor at taking on any parental responsibility.
During that very same summer period of 1923, Ludwig Wittgenstein has been communicating with a very young Cambridge mathematics student, Frank Ramsey, about coming to Austria to study the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus with its author.17 Ramsey finally arrives in the small Austrian village of Puchberg, where Wittgenstein is teaching young pupils, on 17 September. He comments on Wittgenstein’s poverty, as he lives in a single tiny, sparsely furnished room and eats very simple meals, though he appears quite healthy. Every day, after Wittgenstein has finished his work in the local school, the two of them discuss the Tractatus for five hours straight. He wishes to explain the book as clearly as he can to Ramsey because he finds his own mind becoming less flexible and thinks that he will never produce another worthy philosophical work again. Within less than seven years Ramsey himself will be dead, at the age of twenty-six, while Wittgenstein will go on to reject the views he expressed in the Tractatus and to write further works questioning practices of philosophy that have been taken for granted for centuries. Wittgenstein’s religious feelings are strong but he has little institutional connection with religion, in spite of his baptism as a Catholic and his Catholic religious training at an Austrian secondary school. Historically his extended family background is three-fourths Jewish but they now identify as either Protestant or Catholic. The language in which he reflects on his religious feelings is often Christian, with clear influences of Kierkegaard and Tolstoy. It is the practice of a certain ascetic form of life that appears to be what is at stake for him rather than belief in the tenets of a particular religion. For Benjamin, born around the same time as Wittgenstein, the choice is rather different. After spending an intense period as a leader in one branch of the German youth movement, he turns more and more to his own particular version of Judaism. Rather than going to Palestine he wishes to work within European culture and to show that the highest level of thinking and of spiritual development in it, as well as its most promising hopes for the future, can be shown to have an ultimately Jewish character.
Also in that summer of 1923 Klaus and Erica Mann tell their parents they are going on a walking tour of Thuringia but travel instead to Berlin, which the seventeen-year-old Klaus finds to be Sodom and Gomorrah in a Prussian tempo.18 The monetary inflation seems to have led to moral anarchy, as Klaus asks why Germans should be any more stable than their currency. Klaus sees men dancing with men and speaks to male prostitutes, and he and Erica manage to be invited to decadent parties. Thomas Mann is not at all pleased by this threat to the family’s reputation and his difficult relation with Klaus will last throughout the latter’s life. In Thomas’s “Disorder and Early Sorrow,” which is about this hyperinflationary period of 1923, the professor has a son of seventeen who wears makeup and who wishes to be a dancer or a cabaret performer. While Thomas is disappointed in Klaus, it will be the son, not the father, who makes an earlier and more vigorous attack on National Socialism.
Again in that summer of 1923 Jean Cocteau takes the handsome young writer Raymond Radiquet, who is just turning twenty, on a writing vacation with him in Piquey, France.19 He is extravagantly infatuated with Radiquet, but Raymond, who is working on his second novel and thinks of himself as among the greatest writers in France, does not respond in the way his older friend would like. Radiquet will be dead by the end of the year, from typhoid that was perhaps picked up during his writing vacation in the summer of 1923 with Cocteau.
On 21 January 1936, Benjamin seems to have attended a meeting in Paris where André Breton and Georges Bataille are scheduled to speak, as an attempt is being made to heal schisms within the surrealist movement.20 But Breton fails to appear. Benjamin has had hopes that he can learn from the surrealists a way of finding allegorical meanings in the landscapes and objects of Paris, in the sudden illuminations they allow. He is also interested in their acceptance of a Marxist perspective. A group of surrealists comes to the opening in 1926 of Cocteau’s Orphée, at which Benjamin is present, in order to boo and to cause disruption. Breton, as a leader of this movement, wishes to explode, to annihilate, all the structures of the bourgeois order and all the social structures of art. He believes that if one is to be ruthless enough for this task, then one must take on the attitudes of the period of the Terror during the French Revolution, and one of his followers goes out into the streets with the intention of murdering Cocteau, who is considered an enemy of the movement, only he does not find him at home.21 Benjamin, for his part, discovers much to like in surrealism.22 He approves of its radical, liquidationist stance toward present political and cultural institutions and he favors the attempts to link up surrealism with Marxism. What is important, he claims, is to release the energies of intoxication, dream, and ecstatic experience for the necessary social revolution, and surrealism seems well-placed to assist that project. The surrealists might also be able to contribute to Benjamin’s work of liberating humans from a mythical subordination to nature. Enlightenment modernity believes that it has already accomplished this liberation, but the surrealists observe the modern city and see the scenes and commodities they find there to be still deeply involved in the mythical, in an unconscious dreaming that shapes our interactions with objects. So one might understand more readily, through looking at the city in this manner, why a thorough transformation of human experience is needed and why what humans truly desire is not being satisfied by present-day institutions. The surrealists show as well how outmoded objects may contain sudden glimmers of useful illuminations. One may find, in the surrealist dreaming and in their juxtapositions of the archaic and the modern, hints of a collective form of experience that, impossible now, is still a promise of human happiness for the future. But they do not go far enough, Benjamin says. They retain aspects of romanticism that make them favor extreme states and the fruits of ecstatic experience. So they don’t understand the dialectical reversal that transforms such experiences, when one presses them further, into sober, prosaic reflection. Dream consciousness must eventually become, he says, an awakening, a cool grasp of what is happening in the social world. Its capacity to undermine bourgeois structures should be encouraged, but in the end it must be subject to theoretical critique, especially of a Marxist sort.
In the early fall of 1925 Walter Benjamin, a translator of Proust into German, and Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff, the key translator of Proust into English, would have been able to bump into each other in Pisa, Italy. The thought of that virtual encounter might provoke us to reflect further on the relation between aesthetic matters, in this case translation, and religious ones. Benjamin’s Habilitation thesis has just been rejected by the German university system and he is trying to determine whether he can make it on his own as a freelance journalist, cultural commentator, and translator. In August he first takes a barge from Berlin to Hamburg along with the Communist woman he is in love with, Asja Lacis, and then, alone, he takes a freighter from Hamburg to Genoa. He continues with this freighter to Spain, where he has stays in Seville, Córdoba, and Barcelona. He visits the great mosque in Córdoba and also in that city this writer on baroque drama views the work of the Spanish baroque painter Juan de Valdés Leal. In spite of his own hyperintellectual style, he seems to get on well with the captain and crew of the ship and he visits some of the wilder areas of Barcelona along with them. The ship then docks in Pisa after another stay in Genoa.23
Scott Moncrieff has recently moved to Pisa after working on his translations for a time in Florence and then at a villa outside Lucca.24 He is residing in Italy instead of Britain because he has become an unofficial spy for the Foreign Office, supposedly working for the Passport Control Department, and because Italy is a cheaper place for a writer and translator to live. It is also a serious consideration for him that Italy is a good place to have sex with young men, usually heterosexual, who wish to alleviate their poverty. Then, too, the climate of Italy will be preferable for someone still with the effects of a serious war injury whose memories are of the cold, rainy trenches of the western front. His time as a spy in Italy coincides with the rise of Mussolini, whose adventures in the Mediterranean and around the Horn of Africa, especially as Italy’s investment in its navy increases, are of considerable interest to the British. Upon first arriving as a permanent resident in Italy, in October 1923, he has had the pleasure of taking visitors met by chance, namely the American writer Sinclair Lewis and his family, to Padua to see the Giotto frescoes that are important to the narrative of Swann’s Way. Looking at Caritas, Invidia, and Iustitia in the frescoes, he reads to the Lewises his own translation of Proust’s description of these works.
Given his espionage assignment to track Italian and other naval units, Charles may well have been observing when Benjamin’s ship docked in the fall of 1925 in Pisa. Of course, the connection between Benjamin and Scott Moncrieff is on a different level: both are translators of Proust. Charles has earlier translated the volumes Swann’s Way, Within a Budding Grove (A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur), and The Guermantes Way. He has spent much of 1924 translating the first volume of Sodom and Gomorrah and is supposed to be working on the second volume. Both the theme and the title of these volumes are controversial, given their explicit coverage of homosexual seduction, and Charles is unsure if publication can proceed either in England or in America. His American publisher is asking for the work but is suggesting that the most offensive passages be left in French, a possibility that Charles cannot accept. Charles has some reservations himself about the project and has discovered that he prefers for the moment to be translating Stendhal and Luigi Pirandello. So he spends the summer of 1925 translating the former’s The Red and the Black and a book of short fiction by him.25 His admiration for Stendhal is very high, though he will later declare Balzac (not Proust) to be his favorite writer.
Benjamin has also decided to translate Sodom et Gomorrah and is engaged in that project in the summer and early fall of 1925 as he moves from Pisa to Naples to Capri, taking his friends Theodor Adorno and Siegfried Krakauer to the resort island after encountering them in Naples. Benjamin supposedly later completes his translation of Sodom et Gomorrah but it is never published and has since vanished. Beginning in 1926 he works consistently with a friend, Franz Hessel, on translating Proust’s novel, and their collaboration leads to the publication of German versions of A l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleur (1927) and Le Côté de Guermantes (1930). They begin La Fugitive (Albertine Disparue) but do not complete it.26
It is not clear to what degree Benjamin’s work with Hessel is actually influenced by his own rather quirky views of translation. In an essay of the early 1920s, “The Task of the Translator,” he claims that translating is not to be understood as an accurate transmission of the original text’s meaning or of what the author intended to get across.27 What is communicable in a text is inessential to it. Beyond the actual sayings of individuals, he claims, there is a pure structure of language that can only be pointed to. Only the great texts are truly translatable, since their greatness does not consist in the information conveyed (poor translators can easily convey the information offered by lesser works) but rather in the way they point to “a language of truth, a tensionless and even silent depository of the ultimate secrets for which all thought strives.”28 So translation is hardly a secondary task. In translation, the original “rises into a higher and purer linguistic air.” The translator must release in his own language “that pure language which is exiled among alien tongues.” So there is a gnostic or Kabbalistic sense of a paradisiacal language that has become fragmented in falling into the world of everyday languages. The translator helps put the pieces back together not by making the translation copy the original, but rather in the manner that repairing a broken vessel requires putting together fragments that are very different from one another. In speaking a single language one can easily get lost in its everyday uses. But in translating, in placing oneself at the intersection of different languages, one has lightning-like moments of glimpsing a purer, more mystical structure at work beyond all meaning. Benjamin has a strong dislike of vitalist notions and he claims that one’s task is not at all to make the original work come alive but rather to see the ruin it becomes over time, with a more transparently revealed truth, once the superficially exciting aspects of it are weakened through changes in fashion and reading habits. Languages crucially for him are historical and the translator must capture, even more than the original does, the ways that time affects language, the ways that it is inherent in language that some words become hackneyed or archaic that were not originally so. It is like the case where skeletal ancient ruins reveal a building’s architectural patterns better than would a viewing of the original building. The attention to history and its accumulating ruins is usually accompanied for Benjamin, as it is here, by a reference to the messianic. In speaking of languages, he mentions “the messianic end of their history,” when revelation will clarify the pure structure of language, a structure that is in some sense beyond the realm of meaning.29 Sacred scripture is ultimately the model of the translatability of great texts since its meaning is always between the lines rather than information to be transmitted. Benjamin thinks that, in contrast, the French are quite shallow in treating Proust mostly as a brilliant psychologist rather than as someone whose writing points to an unutterable language beyond particular words. It is not clear how happy Proust would be with the idea of a translation that fails to capture the ongoing movement of his prose, with its underlying pulse, its quiet surging, and its organic unfolding from within, as with the flowers that he uses so often as metaphors, but that rather tries to turn the space of the text into a site of ruins after all life has passed from them. Neither does it appear that he would be happy with a downplaying of his capacity for psychological analysis.
Scott Moncrieff’s idea of translation is rather different. From the time he was young his mother has read good literature out loud to him, including such unexpected selections as the poetry of Walt Whitman. Charles would practice reciting Milton and at the age of ten he memorizes ten verses of Milton’s “Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” for a family recital of the poem. He will repeat that Christmas morning recitation for the rest of his life, even when alone.30 His habit as a translator is to recite his renderings of Proust aloud until the music and rhythm of the sentences feel proper. He is happy when a close acquaintance, usually female, reads Proust’s French to him and then he pauses for reflection and finally recites his translation of the sentence or two as his reader jots down his words. Benjamin for his part does not seem to have had much of an interest in music. Would emphasizing the musical quality of a text in translating it make one more susceptible to Dionysian elements that would express the dominance over us of elements of nature and of creatureliness, elements that he wishes to transcend?
Marcel Proust in May 1895, just a few months after Captain Alfred Dreyfus’s shaming and dismissal from the French army and while Oscar Wilde’s trial on charges of indecency and sodomy is taking place in London, attends Wagner’s Tannhäuser in Paris.31 He reacts to that composer’s music with strong enthusiasm. His friends Reynaldo Hahn and Madame Émile Straus criticize Wagner’s works for exaggerating and mythologizing ordinary human emotion, while Proust thinks that this exaggeration is precisely what is most human in Wagner. Without mentioning him by name, Proust will describe Wilde’s trial and punishment in the Sodom and Gomorrah volume of In Search of Lost Time.32 He mentions a poet who was one day applauded in every theater in London and the next driven from every lodging, while made to turn a mill-wheel. The Dreyfus case, for its part, is a repeating theme in the novel, as the Prince de Guermantes and his wife both change their positions and become Dreyfusards, and as Robert de Saint-Loup makes the opposite turn.
Proust’s narrator insists on an analogy between Jews and homosexuals. Both are considered races on whom a curse has been placed. They are cut off from salvation as they try to pass in a culture not their own. Jews and homosexuals often seek to spend their time among, and to adopt the appearances and characteristics of, those who are the opposite of them. In doing so, they look down on, and often try to avoid, Jews or homosexuals who appear too Jewish or too homosexual. When a sodomite is blackballed from membership in a selective society, the narrator assures us, it is usually another sodomite who has cast the excluding vote. In the tale of Esther, the narrator continues, the Jew Mordechai, while working for the Persian king, appoints only young Jewish women around the queen’s person. Similarly, in today’s embassies and ministries, so it appears, powerful people behind the scenes, for reasons one can easily guess, will often place handsome young homosexuals on the staff. Baron Charlus takes pleasure at a grand party in pointing out how many of the embassy aides are of this particular tribe. The narrator again associates homosexuals and Jews when he says that only the most stubborn and obdurate people would have put up with all the pains and disadvantages of being Jewish when conversion to Christianity was easier, and only the most stubborn individuals would remain homosexual in the face of the far easier life for heterosexuals. Sometimes a group of homosexuals will go off on their own instead of mixing with heterosexuals, but a waiter in a restaurant will have the same scorn in serving a table of them as he has in serving a table of Dreyfusards. Homosexuals and Jews may be mistaken for one another in conversation in that both are considered to be groups with a secret and perhaps sinister affiliation. When a salon guest, in hinting at someone’s homosexuality, says that he is a “member of the confraternity,” another guest assumes that this person is being called Jewish and draws odd inferences because of the misunderstanding.
Eventually appearance gives both types away, claims the narrator, even as they try to fit in. The baron Charlus’s character as a woman in a man becomes more evident as he ages, as his womanly aspects become inescapably prominent. In his tone of voice and in his movements he begins to resemble someone’s aunt. In a similar manner, Swann’s character as a Jew comes out in his face, his large nose, and his prophet’s beard, even if he has appeared during his life as the perfect French courtier and as a knowledgeable aesthete. It is the most natural thing for him, when we first meet him, to make reference to a pregnant servant in terms of a Giotto fresco, to compare the narrator’s friend Bloch to the Bellini portrait of Mahomet II, or to form the intention to write an essay on Vermeer. Toward the end, with his prophet’s look, he will be a deeply engaged Dreyfusard, judging his acquaintances solely by their stances on the matter. Swann’s decline in appearance, as he is ill and dying, is made especially notable because its description immediately follows that of the two young sons of Madame de Surgis, with their exceptional male beauty, whom Charlus is trying to engage in conversation. The Dreyfus trial enables Jews to rally in support of one of their own, and the Wilde trial, the narrator suggests, may offer a similar opportunity for homosexuals, though in fact Wilde receives rather little support and many homosexuals flee for the continent. Proust himself is more assertive in supporting the cause of Dreyfus than he is in admitting publicly to his sexuality. Indeed, the narrator grants that Jews are more likely to rally around one of their own than homosexuals are. He advises that if homosexuals try to copy the Zionism of the Jews, the enterprise will be a failure. He imagines homosexuals returning to reclaim their habitation of the city of Sodom as Jews are returning to Palestine, but says cynically that no homosexual would ever settle there. They would all reside elsewhere, with a wife, mistress, and children, while making secret assignations with shepherds in the hills.33
Charlus’s standing as a member of the high nobility makes him almost automatically an anti-Dreyfusard, though of a peculiar sort. He claims that the French are wrong to say that Dreyfus is guilty of treason. For his allegiance is ultimately to Judaea and he has not been treasonous to that nation. No Jew can be a true Frenchman and so no Jew can commit treason against France. One character associates homosexuality with support of Dreyfus. “Whenever you come across a Dreyfusard, just scratch a bit. Not far underneath you’ll find the ghetto, foreign blood, inversion, or Wagneromania.” The claim appears foolish once we recall how many members of the nobility have been shown to have homosexual tastes. And the association with Wagner-loving is ironic since, while many homosexuals loved the composer’s work, so too did many antisemites who were highly unlikely to be Dreyfusards.
Charlus himself is attracted to the narrator’s young Jewish friend Bloch and finds that Bloch’s family has taken over a country home called La Commanderie.34 Charlus comments that this shows the typical Jewish love of sacrilege, as that title descends from the centers set up by the Catholic Knights of Malta, of which he is a member. He continues in this vein, commenting on how often Jews choose to reside on streets and avenues named after Christian saints, archbishops, and holy places. One in particular that he mentions is the Place Saint-Augustin. It is curious that many years later Jacques Derrida, in his autobiographical work called Circumfession, makes much of his family having lived for his early years on the rue Saint-Augustin in Algiers, a fact that leads to further meditations by him on his similarities with the saint.35 Derrida takes the text of Augustine’s Confessions very seriously as a scaffolding to his own, as Augustine has moving passages about his mother’s death and Derrida’s own mother is dying at the time of his writing the journal in question. Both Derrida and Augustine had fled North Africa to reside in the metropolitan center of an empire. Charlus would surely have thought of Derrida’s use of the Augustinian writings as very much like the habitation of La Commanderie by the Bloch family, and thus as sacrilegious. For it is Derrida’s method to inhabit and repurpose texts as he sees fit, and at one point he says that he imagines Augustine as a little homosexual Jew who is taking off for New York. His discussion of Augustine on original sin is in the service of a claim that Jewish circumcision, because it acknowledges the absence or lack that befalls any identity or integrity from the start, shows a more profound understanding of what it is for humans to be linguistic beings. Perhaps Derrida, with his favoring of a deconstructive contamination of anything original, has this passage from Proust in his mind when he emphasizes his origins on the rue Saint-Augustin and when he repurposes the Confessions. What Charlus would have counted as a contamination or sacrilege of an originally given meaning is assigned a strongly positive value, precisely as contamination, by Derrida.
Charles Swann resembles Ludwig Wittgenstein in that there are questions among observers about his religious origins. Wittgenstein seems to have let his English friends believe that, in the origins of his grandparents, he was one-fourth Jewish instead of three-fourths, and he later apologizes to G. E. Moore for this implicit deceit.36 There were stories in his family that their grandfather, instead of being the son of an estate agent for the princely Wittgensteins, had actually been a bastard son of a noble family. He had been secretly taken as his own by that estate agent, the Jewish Moses Maier, who then changed the family name to Wittgenstein. Proust’s narrator tells readers that many suppose that Swann’s maternal grandfather was not the Jewish man listed on the birth certificate but the Catholic nobleman for whom that man’s wife was serving as a mistress. Another story is that Swann’s paternal grandparents were both Catholic, with a long connection to the Bourbon line, through there is mention also of a conversion well back in history and Swann thinks of himself as, and is thought by others to be, Jewish.
On 8 August 1914 Fritz Heinle, a poet and Walter Benjamin’s most intimate young friend, commits suicide along with the sister of a woman with whom Walter is also close.37 It is apparently a war protest, though personal matters may be involved as well, and Walter is devastated by the news. The two turn on the gas at the Sprechsaal, a discussion hall for high school and university students in Berlin. As one of their final acts, they have sent Walter a message about where he may find their bodies. He indicates that his trauma over the event is so great that for months he hardly knows where he is and feels it necessary to cut ties, permanently and ruthlessly, with those who had known both him and Heinle. Over the years he will dedicate several dozen sonnets to this lost friend and will read Heinle’s poetry emotionally to others. They had met during the summer session at Freiburg in 1913 and had taken long walks into the surrounding woods late into the night. Walter later reveals how reading the poetry of Stefan George had been important to their relationship. George’s poetry, he says, legitimated the experiences of his youth, whether the experience of love or that of being in the service of Geist or Spirit.
We can observe a crucial change over time in Benjamin if we consider, as a contrast with his youthful reading of George, what he says later on about reading Kafka.38 No writer, he declares, has been more obedient than Kafka to the Jewish commandment that thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image. We misread Kafka’s work, he says, when we suppose we can capture its meaning through a religious, political, or psychological interpretation. (He is especially contemptuous of the religious reading offered by Max Brod, Kafka’s close friend.) Kafka rather presents a world where messages and meanings are supposed to arrive from a realm that is mysteriously alien. If that other realm is truly incommensurable with the present one, then it is likely we are unable to discern if some message from that realm has truly become present in our own and just what the content of that message is. Perhaps there never was a message to deliver in the first place and perhaps the messengers themselves have never arrived. We should treat the reading of Kafka in the same way, says Benjamin.
We can note how very different this attitude is from that of Stefan George, the poet of Benjamin’s youth. After the death of a young adolescent with whom he was much enamored, Maximilian Kronberger, George’s succeeding poetry insists without irony that Maximin, as he refers to him, has been a god descended into human form.39 He insists as well that his followers accept this version of events. On the wall of a special room in Munich he keeps a large nude photo of Maximin, seen from the side, and treats the room as a kind of shrine where poetry is to be recited in a ceremonial, hieratic manner. Earlier he had taken Maximin to carnival balls in Munich dressed as a Greek youth or a Florentine page, only to have Maximin die of meningitis. The gods, it appears, have been gracious enough to let the divine level appear, even if far too briefly, in a human form as a guide for a poetic cult that is needed to transform German culture.
Evidently Benjamin, as he follows Kafka in honoring the Hebraic Bilderverbot, can never accept such an easy transition between realms whereby the divine becomes human and the human, in this case Maximin, divine. That is too much like the paganism of the ancient Hellenic world. George is a poet who stresses the priestly, ritual nature of poetry. In the sacramental manner of Catholic or pagan rituals, the poet’s incantatory words, recited aloud, are supposed to make present by means of the recitation some aspect of the spiritual order of Geist. The life of the individual or of the larger community can be animated by a meaning that displays itself compellingly in the art of the greatest poets. So we have a profound contrast between the youthful Benjamin’s love of George and his fascination with Kafka in the 1920s and 1930s. On the one side is a vitalist aesthetic order defined by the incarnation of Geist in the form of the beautiful. Art on this view may often be linked to idealizing attachments that contain elements of homoerotic intensity. On the other side is the Hebrew commandment against any embodiment or representation of the highest spiritual realm in the actual circumstances of the world. After the death of Heinle, Walter gives up his attachments to the German youth movement, to that movement’s project of advancing the order of Geist in the world, to the Hellenic sense of the beautiful, to a deep intensity of male friendship, and to an aestheticizing and vitalist understanding of culture. He becomes interested more and more in versions of the Jewish idea of a divine realm so lofty and so radically divorced from the natural or sensory order that no representation of any sort of that realm is possible. On the other hand, he continues to be fascinated by the works of the George circle, which he considers both dangerous and profound.
To defend a suitably sublime notion of God, the world itself, for the theological voluntarists of medieval times, must be hollowed out of any metaphysical character that it is thought to possess on its own. What then keeps things together as wholes and prevents them from dispersing or collapsing? It cannot be their natures, which they have been shorn of, but rather the immediate free willing of God. That which at any point is granting things the determinacy they have is arriving from an incommensurable elsewhere that can make no sense from the standpoint of things themselves and that human thought cannot hope to penetrate. Something like that thinking will be central to the Protestant Reformation. If God’s saving of any individual depends on the actual moral qualities of that individual, on his “works” in the Protestant terminology, then God’s freedom is limited and God is not sublimely divine. So the grace that saves must come absolutely unbidden, not as a response to any qualities at all in the natural, human order.
What we have, then, is a thorough hollowing out of the natural realm. Things have no self-animating, self-actualizing power of their own that emerges from within them and helps to define them. All determination that matters comes radically, incomprehensibly from an ineffable point external to everything we can experience. God might make an object move up instead of down when it is dropped. He might grant his grace to the worst sinner and withhold it from the largely virtuous individual. No movement or gesture will seem more natural than any other but must rather appear artificial and arbitrary. Benjamin’s treatment of German baroque drama and of allegory will follow this overall framework quite precisely.40 Renaissance thought, with its background in Hellenism, believes in an art object that can be a self-manifesting of the ideal world in the sensory realm, a seamless interpenetration of spirit and nature, a convincing incarnation of the higher order that is aimed at. Benjamin points out that while the German baroque mourning-play occurs partly in the context of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, its leading practitioners were Lutheran, and thus affected by the Protestant sense that “works” do not matter in relation to the seemingly arbitrary grace of God from without. We have a de-Aristotelianized world where things no longer have any self-animating power of their own. They thus appear in these plays as fragments and ruins. The theatrical stage, Benjamin says, ends up piled with corpses, as organically vital life developing from within is radically denied. That which might turn things into organic wholes has absented itself, like God, to a sublime, incalculable distance.
Things and persons in these plays, says Benjamin, seem to be carrying some hidden allegorical interpretation from a different order of meaning instead of standing straightforwardly on their own. Characters and objects in their interactions may stand for moral qualities or for operations at a more spiritual level: for example, the soul’s turning away from God and its possible return to him or the progression of a Christian life. Divine and other mythological figures are no longer actual beings who might appear with their force but abstract ideas or moral meanings, as when the seminakedness of Bacchus is said to stand for the way that the vice of drunkenness leaves the drunkard bare of all possessions. The problem is that the allegorical tendency is so powerful that its application becomes promiscuously multiple and arbitrary. But this is actually a virtue for Benjamin, and we can see how the structure of late medieval theology is repeated here. God’s incomprehensible sublimity and freedom are shown in that objects are emptied out of any metaphysical character and become fragments to be ordered and moved about arbitrarily by God. God might make a sensory impression appear to the self even when there is nothing corresponding to it in existence, so that the integrity of experience itself seems to break down.
So too in the case of allegory: the other realm that expresses itself in these objects through allegory seems to be employing them from an ever greater and more arbitrary distance, hardly dependent on the qualities of the allegorical vehicle itself. Instead of the natural symbol of Hellenism and the Renaissance, with its seamless and inevitable incarnating of a spiritual meaning, we have a multiplication of lifeless, unconvincing meanings whose principal message is their failure to express the higher realm they point to. As with Kafka, there seems little difference between there being multiple, unconvincing expressions of a higher realm and, on the other hand, there being no entry at all from such a higher realm into our own but rather a world of arbitrary ruins that can never express anything more lofty than themselves. Allegorical success thus advances in a manner that turns it into utter failure. But that, for Benjamin, is a sign of its greater honesty in contrast with the incarnational illusions of the concrete symbol. Hegel criticizes the Jews for a radical, unmediated split between a lofty notion of the sublime and a slavish devotion on earth to arbitrary practices. For Benjamin, once again, the condition Hegel assigns to the Jews is not a sign of failure in the development of Geist, as in Hegel’s story, but rather of a sophisticated understanding of the character of our human relationship to what is sublimely other. The arbitrariness of the practices is a sign of their aiming at a sublime elsewhere regarding which we have no clue as to how to represent it. We are left with an accumulating world of duller, prosaic objects (a Jewish world in Hegel’s terms). But that is the kind of world in which messianic possibility makes sense and in which the mythological character of Hegel’s Geist, which still is supposed to make its appearances in the human order as a living reality, becomes more evident. For Benjamin, the central aspect of allegory is the devaluing of worldly things. From being vessels incarnating metaphysical or spiritual power they become, under the sign of allegory, petrified ruins with no inner life of their own. Later Benjamin will argue that the world of commodities under advanced capitalism follows the same logic. “The devaluation of the world of things in allegory is surpassed within the world of things itself by the commodity.”41
Implicit in the background here perhaps is Hegel’s contrast between symbolic art and classical art. The former, in aiming for a lofty meaning that it cannot comprehend or represent, expresses its longing and its failure in representations that display their inadequacy through the clumsy, awkward juxtapositions and the artificial unities they employ to suggest the divine or the spiritual. The Egyptians, for example, instead of trying for organic, self-actualizing, convincing wholes to represent their gods, do so by forcing together heterogeneous body fragments, such as the head of a jackal or crocodile and the body of a man. For Benjamin, this awkward, artificial juxtaposing of fragments that do not belong together captures something profound. While Hegel then goes on to favor the classical art of the Greeks, where compelling, self-ordering wholes are the desideratum, Benjamin thinks that such art is a step down in human understanding, even if he also holds that hieratic art such as that of the Egyptians remains entrapped in nature and so does not match the sublime understanding of the Jews.
On 1 January 1892, Harry Kessler is on a voyage from Le Havre to New York, on the Normandie. (Forty years later that port will be Sartre’s Bouville, the site of his undesirable teaching assignment after finishing at the École Normale Supérieure. Around the turn of the century it is also the port that the Pococks arrive in while replacing Lambert Strether as Mrs. Newsome’s ambassador to Paris; they are charged with bringing home her son Chad.) To amuse themselves, some passengers put on a humorous skit in which Kessler plays Joseph and an older woman plays Potiphar’s wife.
Both Kessler and Thomas Mann turn to the subject of the Biblical Joseph, especially his encounter with Potiphar’s wife, and Kessler will find something lastingly absorbing in this story. He likes the theme well enough that he makes it the basis for the ballet scenario that he writes just before the war, The Joseph Legend. Indeed this is a work that gets mentioned in passing in Proust’s great novel.42 Proust’s narrator is describing a painting in Venice by Carpaccio, The Patriarch of Grado exorcizing a demoniac. He notes in it the Rialto, the Ponte Vecchio, the marble palaces with encrusted chimneys like tulips, and the canal on which the gondolas are steered by adolescents in pink jackets and plumed toques. These are just like the costumes in “the dazzling Legend of Joseph by Sert, Strauss, and Kessler,” which supposedly has been inspired, says the narrator, by Carpaccio. In Kessler’s diaries the inspiration is said rather to be Paolo Veronese. Serge Diaghilev had already ordered a set of costumes for another ballet that was to include both Venetian characters dressed in the style of Veronese and Oriental characters dressed in a more eastern style. He asks Kessler to come up with some way to use these clothing designs and Kessler in just a couple of days comes up with the Joseph-and-Potiphar’s-wife scenario. The Egyptians as a riper, almost decadent culture will wear the Venetian designs, while the Hebrews will wear the Oriental ones.
While Kessler is generally a contributor to, and a strong financial supporter of, the artistic efforts of others, he wants to make a name for himself as creative and he is irked when his friend Hugo von Hofmannsthal simply ignores the work he sends to him for comment. But he has his opportunity when creating this ballet about the ancient Jewish figure Joseph.43 Vaslav Nijinsky is to be the choreographer and he is also supposed to play the role of Joseph, but he falls out with Diaghilev, who had been his lover, through marrying Romola de Pulszky while they are touring Latin America. Diaghilev responds by rejecting him and by turning to a new lover and dancer, Léonide Massine. Kessler is disappointed because he thinks that Nijinsky radiates an uncanny spiritual power through both his face and his bodily gestures, even while being attractive as a beautiful young man. Both of these qualities, the physical beauty and spiritualizing elevation, are important for the character of Joseph as Kessler imagines him. He is afraid at first that Massine will be too pretty and thus will not convey the magnetic, idealizing attractiveness of Nijinsky. But he soon decides that Massine, with the lightness and leaping power of a young animal in the springtime, will express certain aspects of Joseph better than Nijinsky would have done.
Richard Strauss informs Kessler at first that he isn’t sure he can do the music for the ballet. The composer, who writes so well for women’s roles and for the back and forth of heterosexual courtship, is not sure he can handle the theme of Joseph’s chastity and sublimation, as those features are not part of his own character. In reply Kessler tells him that, in his musical shaping of emotion, he should emphasize the distance and innocence of Joseph and should stress his separateness from the strong physical desires of Potiphar’s wife. Before this moment in the ballet there has been nakedness on stage in the dance of the women, but in that case, Kessler says, it is earthly, theatrical, and seductive. Joseph’s nudity has to be of a different sort. It must come not as a continuing of the earlier earthly display of bodies but as a kind of revelation, as a magical rising up to a higher level in the manner of Joseph’s dreaming. The transcendent glowing nudity of the young male must destroy Potiphar’s wife with its distance from anything that she herself can reach to. Kessler is pleased that the musical motif Strauss has developed so far for Potiphar’s wife is heavy and gloomy, so that it contrasts with the transfiguring lightness that raises Joseph above natural gravities. Kessler does not seem to reflect on the homoerotic misogyny and sexism in his distinction between the young male’s “spiritual” nudity and the nudity of the dancing women. It seems he can accept the idea of erotic attraction to a male only when it is part of a process of elevation and spiritualization, when what one is celebrating is a lightness and form that raise themselves above the ordinary workings of nature.
The ballet opens successfully to glittering audiences in Paris in May 1914 and in London in June 1914. But Kessler, as a reserve officer in the German army, has to miss the third London performance when called up for service after the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand is assassinated in Sarajevo. After that event and its immediate consequence, a ballet by a German military officer and a German composer is not likely to be popular in London and Paris. Strauss’s music for the ballet is today not considered especially memorable and indeed is thought of by some a herald of a long, relatively mediocre period for the composer.
As Benjamin develops a stronger commitment to Marxism in the 1920s, he has to develop an especially radical and esoteric version of that philosophy. For Marx himself in some respects follows the line of Aristotle and Hegel rather than that of the Jewish mysticism and radical Protestantism that influence Benjamin. Marx wishes humans to reclaim again the powers they have alienated in religious and economic systems; these have broken off and have become external forces that dominate humans from without. While he believes that Hegel’s manner of transforming our being determined from without into a proper self-determination is unsuccessful, he accepts the overall Hegelian model. Humans must be reconciled with what their own powers have placed out there into the world in an alienating manner. Benjamin, in contrast with Marx, rejects virtually every aspect of the Hegelian philosophy, including all its forms of reconciliation. He seems not unhappy with a theological orientation that grants a dominating alien power to an incommensurable, non-human realm, an attitude Marx felt needed to be erased so that workers could reclaim their externalized capacities. Benjamin’s solution is a messianic Marxism whose utopian world must come out of nowhere, like divine grace or divine intervention from another realm, that we cannot describe at all in our present state, and that is not the natural outgrowth of anything whatever in the present order, even of the so-called Marxist parties. It is difficult to imagine Marx accepting such a theological interpretation of his work.
Benjamin in the late Weimar period is not much involved in politics and is consistent throughout his career in having only extreme contempt for the Social Democrats and for any party on the left other than radical Communists. In his later essay “On the Concept of History” and in the “Paralipomena” attached to it, he says that Marx secularized the idea of messianic time in his notion of the classless society.44 That worthy move was then spoiled when the Social Democrats elevated this notion to an “ideal,” to an “infinite task” that would be gradually achieved in a progressive movement toward the future. (The neo-Kantian Hermann Cohen had said something very much like that. Benjamin’s version of Jewish thought is very different from Cohen’s.) The Social Democrats believe, like Hegel, in the homogeneous time of a continuous universal history. The workers are making changes in the political order for the sake of the happiness of their grandchildren. Messianic time is not like that at all, Benjamin says. In some ways it is oriented rather toward the past, toward redeeming the suffering of one’s ancestors. The historical materialist who follows Benjamin’s model will offer no picture whatever of what a redeemed humanity might be like. After all, Jews, he says, are traditionally forbidden to represent the future. In messianic time there is no forward movement and it seems that time has somehow stopped, as a radically different possible order may emerge that is not continuous at all with, not an outgrowth of, what had been there before it. He sees Marx’s idea of a classless society not as a program for historical improvement but as something so different from everything we know that we could never plan for its implementation now.
Messianic time, he says, does look to the past for sudden glimmers of possibility. Surprisingly Benjamin takes Proust’s scene of the madeleine dipped in tea as a model here. This was not a conscious retrieval of a memory but a sudden involuntary leap between a present scene and a past moment around which a constellation of meanings and feelings now forms. He uses the analogy of a photographic plate that has captured an image but that may require a long while before the working of chemicals makes the image become visible. What he needs to do as a Marxist, says Benjamin, is to find moments of collective memory that are like personal memory in Proust, where a present social moment allows a long-past moment to come forward with a newly available network of meanings around it. As with the photographic plate, these meanings were not visible when the older situation actually happened, but now crystallize for us into a significant constellation at a later time. Benjamin uses as well the metaphor of heliotropic plants that bend toward the sun.45 He means that past moments have a heliotropic tendency to bend toward the sun of our own present, seeking there to express a significance that was not available to them earlier. The examples he is looking for are in nineteenth-century Paris. He studies a massive number of materials from that period in France, trying to see if sudden electric jolts of significance for the present will emerge. He hopes that the unconscious cultural life of the unknown and unredeemed people of that age, expressed in some of their objects and habits, will hint at their messianic dreams of a very different order, in the way that Proust’s involuntary memory of the madeleine shows his hope for a relationship, seemingly impossible in his present life, that would bring a satisfying sense of attachment, intimacy, intensity, and reliability.
Benjamin has attempted to publish an essay on Baudelaire, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire,” with the Institute for Social Research, led by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. In a letter of mid-November 1938, Adorno, writing for Horkheimer as well, rejects this essay and tells Benjamin that in his treatment of nineteenth-century Paris he is practicing a vulgar Marxism.46 He is settling for a nearly random juxtaposition of material objects and processes, on the one side, with intellectual and aesthetic ones on the other. What is necessary, says Adorno, is that higher cultural life must be related to the conditions of the material world through the mediation of the social order, as that order is understood by a well-developed social theory. Without that sort of mediation, Benjamin’s work on Paris threatens to become merely subjective and impressionistic. The connections Benjamin is noting seem, therefore, to be based on a kind of primitive thinking, a search for magical correspondences, and he chooses arresting features out of the positivist, given order of the world without truly comprehending that world theoretically. To link a Baudelaire poem about wine with Paris’s recent imposition of a wine tax is, again, to give an impressionistic juxtaposition rather than to understand the material basis of culture. Benjamin, says Adorno, is looking in a Romantic manner for illuminations that arise from material objects as if they had the spontaneity and density of meaning that capitalism has removed from them. He is situated at the crossroads of “magic and positivism.” We may recall at this point Benjamin’s claim that he is not interested in ordinary political action because he is looking for sudden, magical sparks that join words and deeds in an unexpected manner. He thus favors precisely the attitude that Adorno is telling him to get rid of; he doesn’t believe in such theoretical mediations. Adorno and Horkheimer, while resisting Hegel’s own particular account of the reconciling of oppositions in the modern world, still (in the 1930s) place their Marxism within something of a Hegelian structure, and so can worry about culture’s mediation between theory and the economic order. Benjamin has very little of Hegel in him. The flashes of connection he intuits are like the lightning-like traces that a mystic finds of one order in another. His notion of the theological trumps his Marxist sensibility. He is not reading nineteenth-century French culture as a typical Marxist would but in the manner in which he reads Kafka. In the abject, arbitrary failure of communication and mediation between the village and the Castle, one might get sudden glimmers of an incommensurable realm that has failed to appear but that is somehow putting the faintest detectable pressure on the given situation. No wonder that the flashes of illumination he finds arising from the objects and scenes of Paris cannot possibly have pleased Adorno. There is nothing truly dialectical about them.
Benjamin has little connection to the actual politics of Weimar Germany, while Harry Kessler is a keen observer. One sees from the latter’s diaries a tension in his portrayal of the situation, which he is describing as someone who does not yet know what will happen. On the one hand, he follows the details of shifting government coalitions and the contours of everyday party politics. Loathing Hitler, he reports on the multiple Reichstag elections, celebrating when the National Socialists do badly and expressing his deep unease when their vote increases. On the other hand, he recognizes that something historically different is going on. The situation, he says, is not like that of the usual negotiations among political parties, with the goal being compromise. Instead it is like the religious wars in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with each side believing the other must be absolutely defeated. In a discussion with André Gide, Harry says that the condition of Germany is not like any ordinary political one.47 It is a case where, so it seems, a new religion and even a new manner of being human are being created. He comments that in all his cosmopolitan years traveling widely in England, France, Germany, Italy, and Austria, he has noted two features that seem especially to characterize the Germans. They have a need for metaphysics, for fitting what they do into a larger, more ideal reality beyond the ordinary one. And they have a need for discipline and sacrifice in the service of some suprapersonal end. The two of these together are especially dangerous, he says, when they are linked with militarism. A leftist member of the Social Democrats confesses to him that his party has made a serious error. It has continued to focus on gradually improving the material lot of workers and of members of unions. It has thereby missed the point that especially for the young of the nation, a more compelling and moving ideal is needed to struggle for.
Harry has been a great supporter of the Weimar Republic and its complicated politics, even coming to recognize that the conservative leader Gustav Stresemann, who died in 1929, was excellent for Germany within Europe. But he shows only disgust in his diaries once Fritz von Papen takes over as Chancellor, expressing contempt for virtually every one of his moves. And he has some sympathy for the Communists. When one political analyst says that the way to break Germany’s isolation is to form a Western European political coalition, based especially on a Franco-German alliance, against the Bolshevism of the Soviet Union, Harry notes approvingly the response of another analyst: that young people today have so accepted various versions of socialism and collectivism that the old capitalist alliances against communism will not work.
At the same time as his diaries reflect the political situation, we see other interests as well. He continues to visit sites where nude swimming and sunbathing are practiced and he insists that a new form of healthy physical and psychological life is being developed in Germany that puts it well ahead of the other nations of Europe. Young men and women are more physically in shape than he has ever seen them before in Germany, and they accept the nudity of the body without any shame or pretension. But he has to record as well that on 13 October 1930 the Reichstag opens and the Nazis demonstrate by breaking the windows of Wertheim’s, Grünfeld’s, and other Jewish businesses along the Leipzigerstrasse, shouting “Death to Judah.” He goes down to observe the demonstrators and calls them adolescent riff-raff and rabble and concludes in his diary: “The vomit rises at so much pig-headed stupidity and spite.”48 Kessler has been a member of the German Democratic party but records at one point in the early 1930s that, given the present situation, he is now voting for the Social Democrats. On 19 February 1933, after Hitler’s appointment, Harry attends a Freedom of Speech Congress in Berlin and is elected to the main committee. In leaving the hall a large part of the assembly joins in singing the Internationale.
One may ask how the kind of cultural constellation from the past that Benjamin looks for can have a redemptive promise that takes it beyond what an ordinary sociological analysis would give us. Does looking at advertisements and forms of consumer display and at descriptions of cultural expositions in nineteenth-century Paris really allow us to see sudden flashes of messianic possibility for human life, beyond any of the ordinary social, political, and aesthetic promises made by various others at that time? Could surrealist illuminations really do the trick? What could there be in the collective order that is truly analogous to Proust’s madeleine dipped in tea? In that writer’s case a rich psychological world does indeed return, especially regarding his lifelong project of learning to handle the emotional complexities of attachment, loss, and separateness. But what would the other side of the analogy be here? Benjamin has the suggestive thought that the story of a homogeneous, continuous universal history is told by victors who bring only ruin and destruction yet are able to interpret the past in their own interest. They represent the Anti-Christ, he claims, and a messianic reading of history must demolish their stories and redeem those who have been lost to history. Perhaps we can make sense of something like this in ordinary terms. Perhaps only now, with our knowledge of viruses, immune systems, New World archaeology, the effects of globalization on indigenous cultures, and so forth, can we properly tell the story of the “discovery” of America by Columbus. We can see the image emerging on the photographic plate, as it were, in a way that was not available to observers back then. But that retelling, with its redeeming of the lives of previously marginalized peoples, seems to require our ordinary intellectual resources today. Where would a notion of messianic time that bursts apart history fit in? Benjamin might reply that since the messianic future is unrepresentable, all he can do is present us with scenes that, to him, offer brief glimmers of an allegorical connection to what is now inexpressible. If they do not do this for us as well, that is to be expected by the very nature of the game. When he says that messianic history is supposed to upend the history told by the victors, whom he equates with the Anti-Christ, one is definitely reminded of Karl Barth’s claim that the Thomist Catholic belief in the analogy of being between God and humans is the beginning of the Anti-Christ. To see the divine as already at least partly present in humans and their history is to fail to hold open a space for the inexplicable entry of God from beyond history. Hegel, for Benjamin, would be on the side of the Thomists and of the Anti-Christ.
There is throughout Benjamin’s work a tension between the Marxist and the Judaic-mystical. “On the Concept of History” suggests how that tension should be read. He offers us the memorable picture of what was apparently a mechanical chess-playing puppet that was actually controlled inside by a small dwarf who was excellent at chess. He is clear that historical materialism is the puppet while theology is the dwarf inside the machine.49 The traditional Marxist believes that historical-materialist factors are truly the engine moving history. But these apparently are just a mechanical puppetry really controlled by the factors of divine messianic history that Judaism is sensitive to and the Marxism on its own is not. Other thinkers who appear to address this theological aspect of history do not do so successfully, he believes. Kierkegaard is a crucial case, since he has written that God’s address to the inner life of the Protestant individual is like Yahweh’s sudden call out of nowhere to Abraham. In “Kierkegaard: The End of Philosophical Idealism,” Benjamin argues that this thinker is not theological enough.50 For he remains within the idealist structure of Hegel, who gives very great attention to the incarnation of Geist in the modern world of subjective innerness. Kierkegaard supposes that the realm of interiority is privileged and incommensurable, and is open only to the address of the divine. But in historical materialist terms, the mythical image-system based on Protestant innerness is built around economic changes that allow individuals to arrange the very intricate interiors of their homes. Only a more radical idea of the theological can thoroughly challenge present conditions of bourgeois power instead of expressing them, as cultural mythologies of the Kierkegaardian sort still do. It is this notion of the “theological” as radically unknowable and as radically annihilating all metaphysical and sociopolitical determinacy set up in opposition to it that is the engine ultimately driving Benjamin’s positions. Benjamin can bring Marx’s notion of a classless society into this structure by making it not a story of the proletariat and the Communist Party but rather a gesture at a form of life that we cannot now comprehend.
In the 1920s Benjamin is both a translator of Proust and an admirer of his work. By 1933 he seems more skeptical. In writing an article on the situation of literature in France, he asks what has been gained for human freedom by recent French writing. Proust’s defense of homosexuality, he says, offers itself as one possibility here, yet Benjamin seems to share some of the Marxist repugnance toward same-sex relations. He links Proust’s explorations of homosexuality with his complete lack of interest in the socioeconomic forces that account for the social world he describes in his novel. In both cases there is a clear distancing, says Benjamin, from the actual forces of production, whether biological or economic. The more Benjamin turns his attention to Marxism, the more he writes about the need for authors to be aware of the social functioning of the means of cultural production, such as journals, newspapers, publishing houses and so forth, that they employ as writers. They must also work to transform those cultural machineries in the direction of a socialist, proletarian revolution. Proust does not do well by this standard.
In September 1911 Harry Kessler drives to Cabourg with a young French cyclist and jockey whom he is in love with, Gaston Colin. Cabourg is a Normandy seaside resort to the west of Trouville and Deauville, towns well-known to admirers of Proust. Cabourg has been as well a favorite resort destination of the Proust family, especially for Proust’s mother, whose own mother had earlier taken her on vacation there. Jeanne Proust’s walking in a ritual manner along the Cabourg beach will be one way of recalling her mother after her death. Colin’s position as chauffeur to Kessler reminds one of the role of Alfred Agostinelli, who is the driver and then the secretary for Proust and, like Colin, an object of erotic attraction. Just like Kessler and Colin, Agostinelli and Proust can be seen driving together to Cabourg, this time in August 1913.51 They make a side trip to Houlgate, just as Kessler and Colin had done two years earlier. Proust becomes disturbed and ill at ease and finds it necessary to return to Paris. On 16 July 1907 Kessler visits the sculptor Aristide Maillol in his studio near Paris. He has asked him to make a nude bronze sculpture of Colin, who is posing in the studio. Kessler watches Maillol make a clay model of the young man, still in his late teens. The statue that results is now in the Musée d’Orsay.
Proust is a central figure in any examining of the rich symbiosis between the psychological project of separation-individuation and the functioning of the aesthetic sphere. He spends several pages having his narrator go through the process of saying good-night to his mother while still attempting to hold on to her. In a later scene in Venice, the narrator tries stubbornly to remain behind while his mother goes to the railroad station to return to Paris, yet he is struck with a desolating sense of solitude and has to return to her. So at the core of Proust’s writing is a negotiation of attachment, profound loss, and individual separateness, in a manner that tries both to relinquish what must be separated from and to retain in some respects what is being left behind. In that often intricate and anxious negotiation, erotic objects may be sought after for the purpose of allowing a particular kind of identification. One wants to attach oneself to others who appear to embody features of successful individuation, of having achieved a compelling autonomy. Such features in the eroticized other might include an apparent ease of self-containment; a style and rhythm of existence that appear self-sustaining; and a sense of grace, lightness, and inevitability in one’s gestures. They might include as well a successful joining of ideal, spiritualized qualities with a confident inhabiting of the physical body and an electric liveliness in one’s bodily and facial expressions that seems to resist the ordinary gravities of existence. Other features calling forth that sort of erotic identification with another might be the capacity to hold together in an integrated manner elements that, in the observer, feel diffuse and fragmented, and the sense of a vital subjectivity whose sources seem hidden and inaccessible. It may also be true that this desired other contains a suggestion of earlier investments, as when Billy Budd, as an object of clearly erotic veneration in Melville’s story, shows faint elements of femaleness and of childlikeness in his masculine appearance. In an emotive investment in Billy one may seem to achieve, through an almost magical identification, a degree of separateness and individuation. Yet one may also retain, in a negotiated manner, some relation to what has been left behind, including childhood and female identifications, so that one’s status as a self has considerable fragility about it and perhaps one never fully overcomes a background sense of loss and mourning.
Insofar as such eroticized others are not available or unresponsive (Proust’s typical situation), one may try to compensate for their absence by creating aesthetic objects that have qualities closely analogous to those that had been desired in the eroticized other. So we get the intricately unfolding, assured, rhythmically confident sentences of Proust, with their self-sustaining manner of ordering themselves, their dependable underlying pulse, and their lightness and electricity of connection to earlier and later sequences. Again, there will be elements of regression in that aesthetic space, such that a hypnotic sense of earlier attachments not quite relinquished, and of losses not quite made up for, will be present in the musical mood of the prose. Since the achievement is a fragile one, it must be repeated over and over in the act of writing. That aesthetic space is very different from what is aimed at by Benjamin, who is on the lookout for places where a disenchanted viewing shows how fragmented, arbitrary, and empty matters are. It will be unsurprising if Benjamin sees Proust as, in some respects, still bound up erotically in mythical repetition, in a compulsion to return to and identify with a more natural, original order, and in a general entrapment in (a maternal) nature that seeks there the timeless. But he will also look in Proust for moments of reflective disruption and demystification that counteract that movement, that acknowledge the socio-historical disintegration of a social class. And he will claim also that Proust is not really writing about selfhood and individuation but about language. He believes that Proust, more than most other writers, lets appear in his work hints of a higher-level, purer language that is beyond ordinary human meanings and that becomes more evident in the translation of one language into another. To understand this aspect of Proust, we apparently have to read not the object-relation theorists but commentators on the Kabbalah.
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra says that his enemy is the spirit of gravity and he wishes to soar to heights that other humans are unable to reach, not as an escape to a Platonic realm but as an elevating and refining of what is natural and bodily. He offers the image of the mountains themselves, which once were deep under the sea and now have been raised violently to great heights, as well as the image of the mountain pines, which thrive in their lofty place only because their roots go very deep into the earth. So human elevation into the spiritual must be rooted in the instinctive lowest levels of our natures rather than being part of a move to reject these.52 It is the upheaval of those deep, nonmoral levels into the greatest heights of thinking and of character that, as with the formation of mountains from oceanic depths, produces what is most lofty and admirable in humans. Male friendship, Zarathustra continues, should be a stimulation that brings about that lightness, grace, and elevation in thought and sentiment but that never turns against its origin in the biological body.
Proust is infatuated with his chauffeur and secretary Alfred Agostinelli, who also wishes to challenge gravity, like Zarathustra, by taking up flying lessons.53 On 28 May 1914 Proust sells some shares of stock so that he can offer to buy Agostinelli, who has left Proust’s employ and fled to the south of France, some rather extravagant gifts, apparently an airplane and a Rolls-Royce. Agostinelli, who has become tired of Proust’s excessive attention, refuses these gifts, and Proust on 30 May writes to him saying that Agostinelli has to cancel the order for these items himself, apparently betting that the young man will be unable to do this. He promises he will write on the fuselage of the airplane some lines from a Mallarmé poem that he thinks the chauffeur has a liking for. On the very day that he writes this, Agostinelli, taking flying lessons in Antibes, goes off on his second solo flight, disobeys his flight instructor’s orders, and crashes in the bay, losing his life. Later W. H. Auden will write a poem about an Old Masters painting of Icarus, the beautiful young man falling from the sky and hardly being noticed by those passing beneath.
Wittgenstein’s first real love, a love not reciprocal in the way he himself feels it, is for a Cambridge student, David Pinsent, whom he takes on an expensive trip to Iceland before the Great War. Pinsent during the war is assigned to an airplane-testing facility in England. While Wittgenstein is fighting for Austria-Hungary on the eastern front in truly miserable conditions, he receives letters from Pinsent saying that their relationship cannot be harmed by their being on opposite sides in the war. Nothing is more glorious in his life at this time than receiving a letter from David, which seems to do him more good than his readings from Tolstoy and the Bible. Later in the war, still on the eastern front, he receives word that Pinsent has died.54 A certain type of plane has crashed and Pinsent has been sent up in another one of these planes to observe the aerodynamics. It too ends up crashing, killing its observer-passenger. After hearing the news Wittgenstein has to confront suicidal thoughts.
Harry Kessler’s lover Gaston Colin is much like Proust’s Agostinelli in being interested in cars, planes, sports, and racing, as if he is one of Marinetti’s futurists. He is a cyclist and a jockey, and in a letter to his sister Wilma, Kessler says that Colin is building an airplane on his own. Later he will become a member of France’s first military air division. Nietzsche’s hymns to a lightness and ease of movement that seem to defy the usual pull of gravity suggest what is appealing in the body language of certain eroticized individuals. The ordinarily clumsy, heavy, and awkward movements of most humans seem to rise up, in a few, into an implicitly choreographed music. Such individuals, while remaining clearly physical, possess a lightness and charm that appear to mock the gravities dominating the physical realm and to move easily, in the manner of an acrobat, on the cresting power of that realm. So they may stand, whatever their flaws, for the much larger process by which nature is elevating itself into a more spiritual form; they are thus embodiments of Geist.
In Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a German SS rocket commander tries to send his lover, a beautiful young German soldier, into space in the final rocket launch of the war. Again same-sex eros appears linked with an attempt to defeat the ordinary pull of gravity and to be elevated into a more spiritual order. The novel seems to make that action count for all such cultural attempts, ever since the time of Plato. But the rocket will be carried back to earth by gravity and the young soldier, Gottfried, will be sacrificed to that constellation joining beauty, eros, and Geist. The novel suggests that the great spiritual energies of the West, as metaphorically expressed in homoerotic aestheticism, are leading to death instead of to a renewal of life.
Hegel in his early writing criticizes Moses, and the Jews more generally, for being unable to carry out the mediating work of Spirit, since for them the realms of spirit and nature are set in such an incommensurable, unbridgeable opposition. God thus takes all spiritual power to himself and leaves natural objects, and humans themselves, with no self-actualizing power of their own, no proper share in Geist. The situation of late medieval voluntarism, in which things become metaphysically hollowed out, and thus de-Aristotelianized, in relation to God’s unconditioned will, would then have for Hegel a Jewish aspect. So Moses, he claims, is like a bird that has warmed stones instead of eggs and when it takes these into the air and releases them into flight, they fall immediately back to earth.55 His words have no self-animating, self-actualizing Geist of their own, so he is unable to speak to the people in a way that moves them by his language. We can imagine Benjamin reading this description. For him, what is picked out would be, it seems, a virtue of Moses instead of a failure. For the things of the world truly cannot fly on their own, they do not have Geist within them, but in themselves are fragments and ruins; the same applies to human language. Only God from his stance as radically, incomprehensibly other can raise items arbitrarily to a more spiritual level. One thus takes a stance superior to Hegel’s when one understands the sublime spiritual level that our activities sometimes point to as having nothing to do with the unfolding developments of human nature and of the human world order. Arnold Schoenberg, in his opera Moses und Aron, will present Aron as like the Catholic or pagan who needs to give the people solace through an idol-worshipping ritual that appeals to their human needs and characteristics. Moses cannot properly speak to them because he has experienced the anxiety and terror of an encounter with a spiritual realm that goes absolutely beyond the human and cannot be represented at all through human sensory capacities. So Moses’ inability to carry out the incarnational work of Geist, to make communication of the divine message real in the world, is a sign of the loftiness of what has been granted to him rather than of some weakness on his part.
In 1922 Karl Barth publishes the second edition of his The Epistle to the Romans. Martin Heidegger has recently remarked that the only spiritual life of the age is in Barth. Back on 5 March 1919 his mentor Edmund Husserl writes quite happily to Rudolf Otto that Heidegger, raised a Catholic, is now an “undogmatic Protestant.”56 Heidegger has determined that he must remain faithful to the inner truth of his own experience and pursue philosophy wherever it leads him, so that he must reject the dogmatic structure of Catholicism. He and his wife Elfriede have decided not to have their son baptized Catholic. Barth’s principal claim is that God is the absolute negation of the human order, not something inherent in it. He must never be identified with anything we can name or experience.
We noted, in considering Benjamin, that Jewish thinkers after Hegel might well feel a need to defend their religion against his narrative, with its clear privileging of Christianity and, at least in his early writings, its devaluing of Judaism. The situation is different in their encounter with Kant. Kant distances what is ethically correct from any natural inclination and from Aristotelian eudaimonism, and he distinguishes between phenomenal experience and an ineffable realm beyond it. So he can appear to favor a stance that radically detaches the truly spiritual from any confinement in nature and in the mere givenness of the ordinary world. He also exalts the sublime over the beautiful. These positions might be interpreted as belonging very loosely to a philosophical version of Jewish religious experience. Judaism might be seen as having achieved the highest level of spiritual development in its ethical notions and as the religion of reason, so that Kant has finally approached what the Jewish religion has known implicitly all along.
Hegel’s narrative, in contrast, has to be combatted. Two post-Hegelian Jewish thinkers, among others, enter this debate. Solomon Formstecher is especially influenced by Schelling, while Samuel Hirsch is responding more directly to Hegel.57 Both take the philosophical notion of Geist or spirit and see it as having two distinct forms. In one form it is coming to know itself from out of nature and so it engages in a lengthy effort to liberate itself from the confines and conditions of the natural, which overwhelm it at first. In the other form it is more self-conscious of itself as ethical spirit and so does not have to engage in a long struggle against its subjugation to nature. The first form is the field of activity of Christianity. It has to purify Spirit by working through the pagan forms and rituals in which it finds itself embedded, with their slavish dependence on natural cycles and their mistaking of natural items and effects for the divine. Through disentangling itself gradually and with difficulty from the bonds of nature, this sort of Geist achieves a purer status. The second form is that of Judaism, which, through revelation, was conscious from the start of the existence of the spiritual as ethical and as not conditioned and limited by the happenstances of nature. Hegel’s story of the development of spirit from Asian religion through the Hellenic manifestation of Geist in the beautiful, and then to its expression in Christian subjectivity, is therefore the story of spirit’s struggle to lift itself above pagan nature and refers to the historical task set for Christianity. When the overall task has been accomplished, then, according to Formstecher, Christianity will come eventually to reach the stage of ethical Geist that has been a feature of Judaism from very early on, so that the two religions will converge. It is just that Judaism does not have to go through the long process that Hegel describes of transfiguring a beginning point fully bound up in nature.
Samuel Hirsch is less positive about Christianity and feels that Geist’s self-education through its relationship to nature is ultimately a dead end. The route of transfiguring nature into something more spiritual, by going through Hellenic and then European-Protestant stages, will be unable, he believes, to arrive at an ethical relation with the divine, the relation that Judaism has always known. The entrapment in nature will remain too powerful and the emancipation from it too limited. In reading these two Jewish thinkers, one might recall the ancient Hellenic anxiety about the need to transfigure West Asian nature religions into a less overwhelming form as well as Schopenhauer’s view that human individuation is an illusion put forward by all-consuming nature. According to Formstecher and Hirsch, these would be anxieties only for those engaging with Geist in the pagan or Christian manner, through attempting to elevate human beings who are dominated by the conditions of nature, both internal and external, that have shaped them. Since Judaism follows the path of an ethical Geist determined as such from the start, perhaps there is no comparable fear on its part of losing one’s individuation through being absorbed back into nature. Ethical identification with the Jewish God and the Jewish people will be strong enough to prevent such dissolution. So aesthetic work may be favored that does not have to be driven by anxieties about a fragile self that has been unable to achieve a satisfying individuation in its emergence from its identifications with a maternal nature. Instead of renegotiating that emerging of the self as an individual from more natural conditions, as must be the task of those carrying out the long work of elevating and purifying natural Geist, one may be free for greater textual and aesthetic experimentation.
It is curious that the precise picture given by Solomon Formstecher and Samuel Hirsch, by which Christianity has to work through the project of spiritualizing natural Geist, a project that may in the end be unsuccessful, can be used as an explanatory framework for reading T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Hegel’s Philosophy of History is a key background text. One of his memorable images is that of the Egyptian Sphinx that, in being half animal and half buried, shows that the Egyptian idea of Geist has only partly freed itself from the limiting confines of brute nature. The Greek sense of beautiful, self-ordering individuation (as expressed in their free-standing statues of individuals) and, later, the northern European Christian understanding of innerness and freedom, will be for Hegel successful advances in the emancipation of Geist as self-determining. Hirsch (and Benjamin would likely agree with him) thinks that modern Christian Europe is much closer to the case of the Egyptian Sphinx than Christian thinkers understand. One can read Eliot’s poem as expressing worries about exactly this issue. The long Hegelian journey is supposed to advance from West Asian religions, where individuals are subjugated to natural processes, toward the cultures of modern Europe, where rational autonomy has supposedly now become real and self-supporting. But perhaps that whole journey has been an illusion, as Hirsh’s account of Hegel would suggest. Perhaps the splendid Magnus Martyr church mentioned in the poem, which stands for the emancipation of European Christianity from its West Asian origins, threatens to slip back far too easily, verbally as well as culturally, into the Magna Mater of West Asia. Hegel in his Philosophy of History speaks of the Phoenician sailor who has dared to leave behind his dependence on the land and to test his own powers, as a confident individual, on the oceanic currents. Those Phoenician sailors, we are told, made it as traders all the way to the south coast of England, just where Eliot is staying as he writes part of the poem. But we find out in Eliot’s work that a particular Phoenician sailor identified with in the poem has drowned, and perhaps Eliot worries that he has done no better in resisting the oceanic forces that pull against his own individuation. As Samuel Hirsch might put it, the Christian project of the emancipation of natural Geist from nature has failed. Christianity has turned out to be just one further expression of the nature rites of West Asia and so cannot bring about that desired emancipation.
On 21 January 1922 Benjamin submits to the publisher the full manuscript of what he proposes as the first issue of a new journal, Angelus Novus, named after the Klee painting. Just a few days later, on 27 January, Franz Kafka arrives at the resort of Spindelmühle in northern Bohemia, near the Polish border. There he begins work on The Castle, whose wintry setting and deep snow will be like that of the scene around him.
Both Benjamin and Kafka are strongly interested at this period in understanding their relation to Judaism. The Castle is interpreted early on, especially by Max Brod and by its translators into English, the Muirs, as a religious allegory about the unfathomability and seeming arbitrariness of a divine revelation to the individual. The arbitrary and unknowable character of the activities of the Castle officials are, for Brod, like the ineffable offer of grace from God, a topic that Karl Barth, at just this time, is insisting on among Protestant theologians. Other interpreters talk of an analogy with the different levels of spiritual powers that, in Kabbalah literature, may strive to make the seeker’s upward movement difficult. While those readings still have some power, the names of the novel’s characters hint at Kafka’s concern with particular social and religious matters of his own time and place. The name of Barnabas, who greets K. as his apparent mediator with the castle, must quickly make us recall, given Kafka’s religious and personal interests, the New Testament disciple and friend of Paul who is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles.58 For a Prague Jew who feels both the attraction of assimilating to German-European culture and worries about losing his roots in Judaism, the apostolic Barnabas is a richly evocative character. For he is torn between loyalty to a Christian sect that wishes to remain within Judaism and loyalty to Paul’s more universal gospel to the Gentiles. Barnabas is from a Levite family probably residing in Cyprus. Early in the Jesus movement he sells some land and donates the proceeds to the new sect in Jerusalem. Soon we see him assigned to spread the word in Antioch and he selects Saul of Tarsus as his companion. Although the intention at first is to preach only among the Jews of that city, many Gentiles wish to join the new movement and the question arises as to whether they have to first become strict Jews, through being circumcised and through following dietary laws and other practices set out in the Torah. Paul’s (Saul’s) clear answer is that they do not. Barnabas sides with him against a more rigidly Jewish faction of Jesus-followers in Jerusalem. When Peter visits Antioch to see what Paul and Barnabas have been achieving, he at first dines comfortably with these non-Jewish Gentile converts who call themselves Christians. But when he is criticized by James, the leader of the Jerusalem faction, for breaking the Mosaic Law through such shared eating rituals, he agrees to halt the practice and Barnabas then takes his side. Paul is angry at both of them and in the Epistle to the Galatians he argues fiercely against the position taken by Peter and Barnabas, as he sees them giving in to an attack undertaken by the circumcised. Though he and Barnabas have spent more than a year preaching together in Antioch, they decide to go their separate ways on their next travels. Presumably this is because Barnabas wishes to bring along a third traveling companion, John Mark, and Paul disagrees, but one wonders if the doctrinal dispute over an issue so central to Paul has its effect as well. Kafka has to be thinking of these matters, since one of the officials in the castle is named Galater and that is the German word for ‘Galatians’, the recipients of Paul’s angry letter about too narrow an attitude toward converts. It is in Galatians 2:14 that we find the single New Testament use of the term ‘Judaizers,” referring to those who insist on strict adherence to Jewish law among Gentile converts to Christianity.
One can easily imagine then that for Kafka, to name his character Barnabas is to frame a clear parallel between the question of being a Hellenizing Jew in the ancient world and the question of being a German-speaking, Enlightenment-endorsing Jew in the modern world. On this narrative Christianity is simply the name we give to the ancient Hellenizing Jews who were willing to water down their particular Jewish practices in order to be able to offer a more universally acceptable doctrine to the Greco-Roman world. Assimilationist Jews who are more German than the Germans in their devotion to high culture, and who as endorsers of the liberal Enlightenment are the most European of Europeans, are thus Hellenizers very much like those ancient Christians. Kafka’s generation of middle-class Central European Jews perceive their parents as having given up too much of their Jewish identity in order to succeed economically and socially. A similar criticism might be made against certain Jewish intellectuals. Hermann Cohen makes Judaism a religion of reason that sounds very much like Kantianism and that could be practiced with little strain by socially progressive Protestants. That stance is then like Paul’s Judaism in the ancient world, which could be adopted universally throughout the Greco-Roman world, with the caveat that some of the most crucial identifiers of Judaism had been lost. The new Judaism of Cohen and of liberal and socialist Jews is than an attempt, like that of the ancient Jewish Christians, to find a universal form of their religion that others might adopt who have no tie to Jewish ethnicity. Perhaps some will see Marx as an example here as well. He is offering a universal form of Jewish ethical and messianic demands while, like Paul in the ancient world, taking a negative, biased view toward certain practices associated with his Jewish origins.
Barnabas in the novel comes from a family that is disliked and stigmatized by the other villagers. K. learns that this bias derives from an incident when Amalia, the sister of Barnabas, refused to obey a command to have intercourse with one of the officials from the castle. That refusal can stand for a rejection of the idea of assimilation and in Kafka’s novel it is absolute. For Amalia tears up the proposal from the Castle official and is angry as well that her brother Barnabas wants to serve as a messenger or mediator with the Castle. That proposal had been a vulgar one, after Amalia’s appearance in a beautiful dress at a village festival. When her sister Olga tries to make up for the family’s alienation from the Castle, she ends up sleeping with Castle servants who may give her the knowledge she needs to help her brother succeed. So assimilation appears to come off as a form of prostitution. The villagers are afraid Amalia’s action has made the administration of the castle angry and that negative consequences are likely to occur for all of them. K. himself as a land surveyor wants to be fully accepted by the castle administration and thinks all will be settled if he can reach a certain high-ranking official. Kafka as a writer, and thus as surveyor of a different kind of geography, thinks of himself as among the most Western of Jews, someone who is like Paul in having little remaining of the identifying practices of Judaism.
Perhaps K.’s hoping to be accepted by the Castle officials is like wishing to believe in the mediating, reconciling structures of Christianity and of Hegelian Geist as embodied in the social arena. People talk often in the novel about being or wishing to be in service to the Castle and one is reminded of Benjamin’s claim when young that his great purpose, along with countless other young Germans, was to serve Geist. It is not difficult to imagine Hegel’s system as a great intricate bureaucracy of levels of mediation between different positions, so that the messengers, envoys, and deputies of the novel, as reconciling links, have their Hegelian role. The Castle is Hegel’s Geist and if its aristocratic head is named Westwest, that is because Hegel’s philosophy of history shows ever more adequate levels of Geist developing as history moves toward the west. The name Westwest also suggests Kafka’s belief that West Jews have given up their Eastern European and also oriental, West-Asian linkages. Kafka’s frequent play throughout the novel on the Herr-Knecht or master-servant distinction reminds us that this distinction is part of one of the most famous Hegelian narratives. A young intellectual of Kafka’s time will have read both the Hegelian master-slave dialectic and Nietzsche’s response to it through his contention that the triumph of slave morality over master morality has led to unhealthy human psyches and not to greater autonomy. The novel tells us, in perhaps a suggestive reference to Hegel, that the servants often are in charge of determining affairs at the Castle and a villager claims that there really is no difference between the two ranks. So Nietzsche’s story seems to be correct.
To emphasize that messages never quite arrive and may never have been sent in the first place is to press a particular anti-Hegelian Jewish view that might then be supported by Benjamin. The Castle is not the realm of grace but another false messiah that pretends to be an embodiment of Geist but that fails to be such. The Castle seems to be a Hegelian structure through which one seeks recognition, which is the whole point of the master-slave dialectic. If the dwellers in the Castle will only recognize K. and give him a place in the larger system, then he will finally have a determinate share in reality. But that hope is trumped by a reality in which messages fail to get through, in which promised mediations fail, in which recognition never materializes, in which something else seems to be at stake that cannot become transparent. A Jewish structure of non-mediation has turned out to be the deeper truth of the apparently Christian, Hegelian, mediating structure of the Castle. The level of the spiritual is not successfully incarnated in everyday social practices and institutions, as Hegel insisted, but withdraws to an unfathomable distance, as attempts to link the everyday and the spiritual realm keep failing. Judaism, against the sweep of Hegel’s story, remains an oriental religion with a non-representable divine.
On the other side, Jewish efforts to serve Geist in the guise of present-day European institutions will meet with resistance and non-acceptance. Barnabas, the novel suggests, may be a pseudo-messenger who has tried to insinuate himself into the Castle without proper legal recognition and so may suggest that Jews, even as they assimilate, remain outsiders who never gain full status. He isn’t given a proper suit and his sister has to stitch together a coat that makes him look like a Castle official, though K. will see when Barnabas takes it off that he is wearing the rough clothes of the poor villagers and so does not truly belong in the Castle’s world. For Nietzsche the ancient Jews founded the slave religion that is replacing all aristocratic virtues in Europe, though in Kafka’s novel the behavior of the “Herren” at the Herrenhof and elsewhere shows that their aristocratic character has become quite empty. The Hellenic aspect of Hegelian Geist is shown when K. finally gets to meet with a Castle official, Bürgel, by accidentally entering his room at night. He falls asleep on Bürgel’s bed and dreams that he is battling an official who seems like the statue of a Greek god and who tries to cover his nakedness against K.’s advances that eventually turn into tickling. He wakes and is reminded of his dream by the bare chest of Bürgel on the bed with him. Starting to fall asleep again, he grabs hold of the official’s “foot” underneath the covers, a gesture the official does not fend off. The episode is another failure at mediation and recognition. Barnabas is also presented, from K.’s viewpoint, as an attractive young man with something feminine and childlike about him and a deeply appealing smile. Kafka’s diary and letters show that he may have had homoerotic desires to some degree, perhaps never acted upon. Yet he believed that he should marry. This belief came partly from the Talmudic insistence that the goal of an adult man is to marry and have a family, and partly (it is likely) from Max Nordau’s claim that heterosexuality and marriage are proper to a healthy adult and that unorthodox sex, as in Verlaine and Wilde, is a sign of decadence and nervous deterioration, of those who will be eliminated in a survival of the fittest.
The apostle Barnabas is also associated with the “Epistle of Barnabas,” though scholars today rather doubt he is the author. The Jewish Encyclopedia of 1906, available to Kafka, describes Barnabas as, like Paul, the founder of the first church of Gentiles called Christians, in Antioch. It adds that Barnabas, in the epistle attributed to him, shows an unusually close understanding of Jewish rites but also a bitter anti-Judaic spirit. This epistle can have been written only by someone who was once a knowledgeable and practicing Jew but who now is engaged in polemics against Jews who wish to adhere firmly to their ancient rites. For the writer of the epistle, Jewish sacrifice must be abolished, Jewish teaching is of no value, and the idea of a rebuilding of the temple is not about a physical architecture but about a spiritual one. Christians are now the heirs of the earlier covenant. Circumcision of the flesh, continues the epistle, is a delusion of the devil and circumcision should be seen to have a spiritual rather than bodily meaning, as is true as well of the distinction between clean and unclean meat. So to name the mediator with the Castle Barnabas is to suggest a particular and burdened history, especially for a Jew who takes a harsh attitude toward his Jewish upbringing and wishes to engage in a more universal enterprise. And it suggests that reacting to Hegel’s rich account of the development of the West will be problematic for Kafka.
In 1920 Benjamin reads Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia, with its mixture of the messianic and the Marxist. In response he begins to think about what he considers to be a theological politics, which he tries to express in his “Theological-Political Fragment” and, shortly afterward, in his “Critique of Violence.” In the latter he says that violence used by left-socialist parties to increase their power in the state still remains in the realm of myth.59 Its acts of boundary setting and negotiation are like the frequent violent interventions of the pagan gods in the natural human order and do not allow for true emancipation from the hold of nature over us. Such acts are like the repetitive, reconfiguring cycles of nature itself. On the other hand, the radical violence of an anarchist revolution, with no pre-planned goal of setting up any social or political order whatever, is like the divine out-of-nowhere violence of the God of the Hebrew scriptures. No matter how catastrophic its results, it does not truly count as an act of violence and is ultimately superior to more ordinary political acts, for it stands apart from anything that the unfolding development of nature or of history has led up to at this point. It breaks in upon all natural cycles and replaces these with something else.
Just as Benjamin is considering these topics in 1920 Thomas Mann receives a letter from a homosexual writer, Carl Maria Weber, who is upset by Death in Venice’s negative portrayal of homosexuality. Today a typical defense of same-sex relationships is that they are very much like heterosexual ones in matters of love, long-term attachment, desire for recognition of their status, and, quite often, the hope of raising a family. Mann’s reply to Weber of 4 July 1920 comes out of a different worldview.60 He says that one side of homoerotic eros expresses the Dionysian spirit of lyricism and is irresponsible, individualistic, and transgressive. It must be tempered by an Apollinian control that makes it morally and socially responsible. Mann suggests that he himself is capable of feeling the attraction of that Dionysian homoerotic, but insists that in his life the moral duty to raise a family comes first. He admits there is something Puritan and Protestant in him that makes him take a certain stance toward Aschenbach’s behavior in Venice and he says as well that he shares something with the earlier “naturalist” novelists in that he presents homosexuality in a pathological as well as a potentially positive light. He comes down firmly on the side of the masculinist figures of homoerotic love, such as Michelangelo, Frederick the Great, Platen, and George, and contemptuously describes Magnus Hirschfeld’s “ghastly ‘committee’ as chandalism,” using Nietzsche’s manner of referring to the lowest, least noble elements of society. (For Hirschfeld, homosexuals are a small minority, a third sex characterized by a substantial degree of effeminization.) Homoerotic desire, Mann says, is more likely to be involved in a deep attachment to the realm of spirit than is any other form of desire. The polarity that is functioning here is not that between genders but that between mind and life, with each side attracted to the other and finding the other beautiful. Beauty is an expression, then, of this tension between the realm of life and the realm of mind, a tension never adequately resolved.
Benjamin’s reflections on allegory remain central to this thought.61 As the late antique world turned more reflective, the gods lost their power to become actually present for humans and became, instead, allegories of abstract ideas. A Roman might travel as a tourist to sites where great mythological events were supposed to have occurred or where special ceremonies were thought to make the gods present, but these sites were now ruins and the easy commerce between the divine and the human worlds no longer occurred. (One is tempted to suppose that Benjamin is making a suggestion here. Into that culturally mature Roman world of allegory, Christianity introduced the regressive idea that God still incarnated himself in the person of Jesus and in the ritual of the Eucharist.) Allegory is thus associated with a sense of loss and melancholy, but it is an intellectual advance in a necessary disenchantment of nature, as the spiritual is not naturalized but is removed more and more from the natural world. This loftier notion of the spiritual emphasizes the fallenness of humans themselves after their expulsion from the garden. So Benjamin can speak, in his essay on baroque drama, of the melancholy and hollowness of a Lutheran world after the destruction of the Catholic sacramental realm.62 The baroque stage often ends up covered in dead bodies; the skull held by Hamlet is for Benjamin more representative of the period than is, say, something like the Renaissance statue of David, with its youth, beauty, and vitality. If the Hellenic concrete symbol is expressed very well in beautiful physical bodies that seem to embody the divine, allegory is more like writing or like hieroglyphics. One might imagine a rebus-like language that still used natural objects for certain syllables, as if representing the world ‘vowel’ by the sound ‘v’ followed by a picture of an owl. There would be a clear distancing from nature in that the word’s meaning has nothing at all to do with the bird that is pictured, whereas in the plastic symbol the natural qualities of the object remain crucial. Allegory is more like a hieroglyphic script in that sense, in that the dependence on nature that still dominates the concrete symbol has been weakened. Almost anything can stand, rather arbitrarily, for anything else in such allegories, just as almost any material shape may stand arbitrarily for the sounds of a language. Bodies, it seems, would have to become, for Benjamin, more like script or texts and no longer expressions of the beautiful, the necessary, and the whole if one is to gain greater distance from the mythical and the natural, if one is no longer to expect appearances of the divine at such a “mythological” site. The homoerotic glance may seek out what seems intrinsically beautiful and vital, a metaphorical enactment of something more spiritual. Benjamin, in contrast, believes that truth content, whether of a world or of a work, emerges when beauty and vitality disappear from it, as when buildings that are no longer inhabited, with their painted surfaces long vanished, reveal their architectural structure more transparently. It would seem, then, that the eroticized other must become a disenchanted, impoverished marker for spiritual ideas it can only point to vaguely instead of embodying.
Benjamin treats several of the figures he writes about in terms of this dialectic of emancipation from nature. He greatly admires both Karl Kraus and Goethe, for example. He thinks that the former, in his critique of Viennese discourse, has a Jewish sense of the purification of language and of the sanctification of the name.63 But in the end Kraus, he says, is on the side of nature. Instead of seeing how what we count as human nature is socially constructed by economic, historical, and political conditions, he appeals to a nature in humans that is universal, biological, and primordial and that belongs to the primary world of human shame and troubled embodiment portrayed in Kafka. There is a suggestion that this continued submission to the givenness of nature is linked with Kraus’s readiness to convert to Catholicism for a decade and a half and with the fact that he manages to be both revolutionary and reactionary at the same time. Benjamin finds a similar structure in Goethe.64 Early on his thought has a genuinely revolutionary character. But as his career develops he sees the bourgeois emancipation he favors as taking place within the context of the aristocratic courts that he spends so much time in, with their authoritarian ethos. It is no surprise, then, says Benjamin, that at the end of Goethe’s Faust the character Gretchen is seen in a Catholic heaven. The reactionary feudal-Catholic world of Europe remains in the background as giving shape to Goethe’s ideas of culture and of individual self-formation. Benjamin compares him to Napoleon in that both brought about a certain liberation of the bourgeois class but did so within a framework of despotic rule. He adds that also at the end of Faust the technological project that is brought up for consideration is that of claiming more land from the ocean. But that project is still defining human activity in terms of controlling nature and its processes and so allows only a very limited emancipation from the natural. In Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities, says Benjamin, the characters are torn between a desire for emancipation and a dependence on natural, mythical forces they do not comprehend. Goethe himself sees the need for critical reflection, but even in his case the affinities he looks for in the novel are often grounded in natural elements, so that he has not fully mastered the workings of nature in his thinking. The constellation that links a feudal and Catholic ritual order with a subordination to a certain givenness of nature can be shattered only by the Marxist and Jewish-messianic elements of European culture. Marx himself criticizes Catholic nations as being still tied too closely to nature in their mercantilist sense of wealth: the gold and silver that have value as they come from nature as opposed to the value given to valueless materials by intelligent human labor. Marxism and Jewish messianism would liquidate what appears as natural in favor of the social and the historical. Goethe and Kraus still resemble, for Benjamin, the Catholic mercantilist nations in that their notions of value contain elements of the natural that one has not yet been fully liberated from.
A Nietzschean might still wonder if Benjamin’s attraction to the messianic and the allegorical do not show too much of a revulsion at, and a disgust with, nature. Benjamin follows the Swiss thinker Johann Jakob Bachofen in hypothesizing a primal world of rampant, extravagant natural growth and of human promiscuity prior to our social and political forms of life. (This world sounds rather like the scene in the Ganges delta that Aschenbach imagines rather fearfully in Mann’s story.) He supposes that Kafka fears regression to this primal natural world as well, and that Law and Torah are supposed to be the weapons that allow us to overcome it. But we cannot be sure that the Law has ever arrived from the incommensurable realm in which it originated, so that what we think of as our emancipated world may really be just another version of that primal swampland. We may therefore need extremely strong and radical resources, both messianic and Marxist, to escape from that world. Nietzsche’s answer would be Zarathustra’s: that we must come to love the earth, that the heights we achieve are like those of the mountains that once were sedimented layers at the bottom of the sea, and that this dependence on nature, even as we transfigure it, is a good thing. To come to identify with what is beautiful, inevitable, and autonomously self-unfolding in a work of art, to use its patterns to enact rituals negotiating matters of separation-individuation, is not to revert to the age of myth. It is to locate resources that are useful for biological creatures such as we are. Our natural fragility against nature may be intensified as we become more reflective and self-conscious, more aware of how difficult it is to maintain our individuation against both natural and cultural pressures, as a boundary-dissolving that seems both attractive and fearful threatens us. Literature and art can offer, as it were, phenomenologies that are training devices, or perhaps prosthetic or orthopedic templates, in how to take in experience richly without losing a distinctive rhythm and style of selfhood. The qualities we seek to make our own are not thereby associated with a porous descent of a mythical divine into the human but rather with a culturally developed technology important to the task of being human. If we learn, through the right sort of literature, music, and art, to make mental movements that have a lightness, assurance, ease, and rhythm about them, says Nietzsche, then our experience of this very world can be joyful rather than depressing. We thus move thoroughly beyond the theological framework of the late medievals and of the Protestant Reformation.
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For Rosenzweig’s philosophy, see Julius Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism, trans. David W. Silverman (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 416-51.
William C. Carter, Marcel Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 555-56.
Robert E. Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and his Circle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 482-86.
Besides offering us the admirable achievement of translating Harry Kessler’s diaries of 1890-1918, Laird M. Easton has written a very helpful biography. See Easton, The Red Count: The Life and Times of Harry Kessler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
Laird M. Easton, The Red Count, 143.
Harry Kessler, Journey to the Abyss, The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler 1880-1918, edited, translated, and with an introduction by Laird M. Easton (New York: Vintage Books, 2013), 619-620.
See Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000), 71-76.
Harry Kessler, Berlin in Lights, The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler (1918-1937), translated and edited by Charles Kessler (New York: Grove Press, 1999, first published in Great Britain by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 302-303. Also: Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 261.
G. W. F. Hegel, Early Theological Writings, trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971, paperback of original edition by University of Chicago Press, 1948), 182-205.
My interest in Benjamin was initially sparked by my reading of three works: Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1998); Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, translated by Edmund Jephcott, edited and with an introduction by Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 1978); and Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, edited by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968). I am, as is evident by the nature of my project, very deeply indebted to the excellent recent biography of Benjamin by Eiland and Jennings. And we have now as well the four volumes of Benjamin’s selected writings from Harvard University Press, edited by Eiland and Jennings and others, so that his essays on romanticism, Stefan George, Kafka, Karl Kraus, Proust, Baudelaire, Julien Green, messianic history, and many other topics are readily available, as well as his interchanges with Theodor Adorno over his Paris Arcades project. I have also been much helped by referring to John McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). In reading The Origin of German Tragic Drama, especially the long section on allegory, I was struck by how much of the work made sense if it was read as a devaluation of the qualities Hegel admired in Hellenism and Christianity, and a revaluation upward of the qualities he found in Judaism. I was also affected early on by some of his more theology-influenced writings: “Critique of Violence”, “The Destructive Character”, “Theologico-Political Fragment”, and “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man”, all in Reflections. I then turned to the curious Marxism of his readings of Baudelaire and wished to ask how his view might relate to other accounts of aesthetic experience in modernism.
Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” Selected Writings Vol. 4, 1938-40, trans. Edmund Jephcott and other, eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2003), 185.
See G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, edited by Peter C. Hodgson, translated by Brown, Hodgson, and Stewart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 347n-348n, 364-66. Also: G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (NY: Barnes and Noble Books, 2004), 219-223, 253-286.
See Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2014), 455-56.
Saul Friedländer, Franz Kafka, The Poet of Shame and Guilt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), 3.
Kenneth S. Lynn, Hemingway (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 207-210.
For basic biographical facts I will keep depending especially on Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life, and on the two compilations of Harry Kessler’s diaries: Journey to the Abyss and Berlin in Lights. I will make further endnote references to these texts where they are especially significant or informative.
Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Free Press, 1990), 216-7.
Frederic Spotts, Cursed Legacy: The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 26-27.
Claude Arnaud, Jean Cocteau: A Life, trans. Lauren Elkin and Charlotte Mandell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 337-340.
Eiland and Jennings, 520.
Arnaud, Jean Cocteau, 321.
See, for example, Benjamin, “Surrealism”, in Reflections, 177-192. See also the treatment in McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antinomies of Tradition, 206-252.
Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 241.
For the story of Scott Moncrieff at this time in Italy, see Jean Findlay, Chasing Lost Time (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 209-49.
Findlay, Chasing Lost Time, 240.
Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 248-9.
Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913-26, eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press,1996), 253-63.
Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 259.
Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 257.
See Jean Findlay, Chasing Lost Time, 17, 22, 58, 286.
William C. Carter, Marcel Proust: A Life, 189-190.
See Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin, rev. D. J. Enright (New York: The Modern Library, 1993), vol. 4, Sodom and Gomorrah, 20-44.
See In Search of Lost Time, vol. 4, 43-44.
See In Search of Lost Time, vol. 4, 687-691.
Jacques Derrida, Circumfession, in Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 129-130.
Monk, Wittgenstein, 368-69.
See Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 70-71.
See Walter Benjamin, “Franz Kafka: Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer”, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927-34, eds. Michael Jennings, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith (Cambridge: Belknap Press).
For the story of George and Maximilian Kronberger, see Robert E. Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan George and his Circle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 316-350.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama (NY: Verso, 1998). See especially the long section on allegory, 159-235.
Benjamin, “Central Park,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 4, 1938-40. 164.
Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1993 Modern Library Edition), vol. 5, 876-77.
Kessler’s reporting on his ballet is in his Journey to the Abyss, 626-31.
Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-1940, 389-400. This is followed by “Paralipomena to ‘On the Concept of History,” 400-411. The claim about the classless society, Marx, and the Social Democrats is on p. 401.
Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 390-91.
See Walter Benjamin, “Exchange with Theodor W. Adorno on ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’”, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-1940, 99-115. Also see Eiland and Jennings, Walter Benjamin, 622-25.
Kessler, Berlin in Lights, 432-3.
Kessler, Berlin in Lights, 399-401.
Benjamin, “On the Concept of History, 389.
Walter Benjamin, “Kierkegaard: The End of Philosophical Idealism,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927-34, 703-05.
Carter, Marcel Proust, 543-44.
See Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 29.
See Carter, Marcel Proust, 569-72.
Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 154-55.
See Hegel, Early Theological Writings, 199.
Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 108.
My treatment here of Solomon Formstecher and Samuel Hirsch is very much indebted to Julius Guttmann, Philosophies of Judaism, trans. David W. Silverman (NY: Schocken Books. 1973), 345-64.
For an account of Barnabas the New Testament disciple, I found the Wikipedia article useful. The same goes for the discussion here of the so-called Epistle of Barnabas.
See Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin: Reflections, 277-300.
Thomas Mann, Letters of Thomas Mann 1889-1955, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 93-97.
Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 174-87.
Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 138.
See Walter Benjamin, “Karl Kraus,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927-34, 433-58.
Walter Benjamin, “Goethe,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 2, 1927-34, 161-93.