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Historiography according to Walter Benjamin: seizing a memory

Staying squarely with Gramsci’s central question: What lessons can be learned from the revolutionary upheaval of 1917 to 1921? Gramsci’s work is treated in mainstream literature like an abandoned quarry. In this quarry, the researcher can discover a wide variety of treasures such as Gramsci’s thoughts on the philosophy of science and language, on Italian and European cultural development, on the bourgeois system of rule, on the theory of intellectuals, or on a non-authoritarian school system, to name only a few important ones. The various intellectual treasures are dragged away from this quarry and processed in contexts quite different from those of Gramsci. Within certain limits, this is a fruitful method. In this book, however, a different path is to be followed. This path consists in taking up Gramsci’s central question – his leitmotif – and staying with it: What lessons are to be drawn from the revolutionary upheaval of 1917 to 1921, and how can another attempt to overcome bourgeois society be justified and prepared? All the themes discussed in the following historical drama serve as moments of wanting to understand in relation to this central question. This perspective suggests a particular approach to history, which will be presented below.

The ordering of historical facts depends on the contemporary knowledge of the person who rethinks past events: in what way should Gramsci’s complete works be approached? Gramsci had already criticized in 1917 an approach to history that turns it into a collection of dead facts. History thus becomes a chain of events that are strung together in time. This approach to history constructs chains of cause and effect that are supposed to explain history and whose continuation in time extends to the present day. History thus becomes something inevitable, which makes “people prisoners of their own history. In this regard, the young Gramsci wrote, even during World War I: “To be history, and not merely graphic marks, or source material, or aids to memory, past events must be thought up again, and this rethinking brings them up to date, since the evaluation or ordering of those facts necessarily depends on the ‘contemporary’ knowledge of the person rethinking the past event, about who makes history, and who made it in the past.”⁸⁶ Gramsci thus contested the assumption that there could be such a thing as a secure historical knowledge that was not tied to the time in which it was known.

“Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it as it actually was. It means seizing a memory as it flashes up at the moment of danger.” To seize the memory of Antonio Gramsci is the task to which this book is dedicated. A proposal for dealing with history in a way that does justice to this concern can be found in Walter Benjamin’s (1892-1940) writing “On the Concept of History.” Benjamin was a German philosopher, literary critic, and contemporary of Antonio Gramsci. Benjamin had worked with Bert Brecht in Germany in the early 1930s and was forced into exile in Paris after the Nazis seized power in 1933. Benjamin wrote “On the Concept of History” while fleeing the Nazis in the south of France in the last months of his life before committing suicide on the border with Spain in September 1940. In “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin proposed a procedure for an author to seize the memory of a particular historical person. This procedure requires, first, that the author separate himself from a historiography that sees itself as objective. Benjamin wrote: “To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it as it actually was. It means seizing a memory as it flashes up at the moment of danger.”⁸⁷

Leaving the road of victors in history to seize the memory of a historical person: Second, the process described by Benjamin involves leaving the victors’ road in history. Whom will the historian “empathize” with based on the facts and documents at hand? Benjamin wrote about this: “The answer is inevitably into the victor. The respective rulers are the heirs of all who have ever been victorious. (…) Whoever has been victorious up to this day marches along in the triumphal procession that leads those who now rule over those who are now down.”⁸⁸ The historian will meet on this road only the victors, their victories, their temporary defeats, their great events, and their achievements, their spiritual and material cathedrals and reproduce them. Who, then, are the victors who pushed Gramsci aside, imprisoned him, finally killed him, and in the aftermath trampled over his work? These victors were, first, Italian fascism under Mussolini and, in his wake, German and European fascism, which was able to conquer almost all of Europe in the course of World War II. Then Stalinism, which isolated Gramsci in prison and saw in him a deviant. Gramsci had advocated an anti-fascist united front instead of the implementation of the theory of social fascism, and he had foreseen a constituent assembly for a democratic republic in Italy after the end of fascism. His party, the Italian Communist Party, elevated Gramsci to the status of a revered resistance fighter and popular hero after World War II. As a result, he became part of another victorious history, namely the victorious history of the Stalinist CPSU and its party supporters in Western Europe. Benjamin proposed in “The Concept of History” to write a history in the tradition of the losers, of the oppressed, that is, of those who had remained in the shadow of official history. This is to raise the intellectual treasure of those who lost the struggles of their time, whose interests, ideas, and ambitions were pushed to the side, banished, and annihilated. Benjamin invited to think in the perspective of a person whose life, thinking and whose deeds remained only a possibility, which could not be realized and thus did not become part of the history of the victors.

The immobilization of a particular epoch in order to blast it out of the homogeneous course of victorious history: The third feature that distinguishes Benjamin’s procedure in dealing with history is the application of a constructive principle: the memory of the loser, that is, his retrospective view of a particular epoch of his activity, is silenced. Stilling means that the historian describes a certain epoch in history through “the eyes” of a person who participated in that epoch. In this way, the author – living in the present time and mentally filled by it – lives through an epoch, but with a practical interest in the knowledge that comes from the present time. The historical person whose memories are to be appropriated according to this procedure is Antonio Gramsci. The stillness is carried out “in order to blast a certain epoch out of the homogeneous course of (victorious) history; thus he (the author, the author) blasts a certain life out of the epoch, thus a certain work out of the life-work. The yield of his procedure consists in the fact that in the work the life-work, in the life-work the epoch, and in the epoch the entire course of history is preserved and suspended.”⁸⁹ The “epoch” – here it would be better to write of a phase or a particular section of history – that is to be broken out of the course of victorious history begins with World War I and ends in 1937 with the death of Antonio Gramsci. The revolutions in Russia (1917), Austria-Hungary (1918), Germany (1918) and the two red years in Italy (1919 and 1920) are the culmination of this period. In the geographical triangle, Russia-Germany-Italy took place what was conceived in Russia as the beginning of the world revolution and by Gramsci as the European revolution. The yield of the still will lie in the fact that thereby not only the view of Antonio Gramsci as an eyewitness and active revolutionary is compiled, but from a philosopher, in whose thinking the content of this for Europe and the world so crucial phase is preserved. That Gramsci had the opportunity to do so is perhaps due to a “trick of history” (Hegel). For he was able to reflect on his experiences during the 11 years of his incarceration from 1926 to 1937 and to process them in writing, while Rosa Luxemburg was assassinated in January 1919 and Lenin died in January 1924 – probably as a result of an assassination attempt. The breaking out of Antonio Gramsci’s life work from the history of the victors is undertaken to seize his memory, his philosophy. The immobilization of time on the phase between 1914 and 1937 dictates a concentration on the philosophical and the resulting political-strategic substance in Gramsci’s thought. The historical account and the history of philosophy woven into it will focus on those elements that had significance for Gramsci. By focusing on the thought of Antonio Gramsci and his history of philosophy, the work of Kant and Hegel will not be purged of passages that might be considered reactionary today. The work of Marx and Engels is not to be cleansed of inconsistencies, ambivalences, and unanswered questions. The focus is on how Gramsci worked with these philosophers and their works, what elements he used, and what his synthesis – the philosophy of praxis – looked like. The procedure outlined above dictates that Gramsci’s work should be approached only in a very controlled manner with philosophical problems or political questions that he did not present to himself in his retrospective. To emphasize the application of this procedure stylistically, Gramsci’s thoughts in prison are presented in the present tense.

86 Quoted from Davidson, 1974, Gramsci and Lenin 1917-1922, The Socialist Register, 1974, S.125 Note 4: For Gramsci’s expression of these principles see Sotto la Mole, Einaudi, Turin, 1960, p. 365

87 Benjamin, 1940, On the Concept of History, in: Walter Benjamin – Language and History – Philosophical Essays, Philipp Reclam Junior GmbH & Co., Stuttgart, 1992, Ch. VI, p. 144

88 Ibid, chap. VII, p. 145

89 Benjamin, 1940, On the Concept of History, Ch. XVII, p. 52