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For someone whose writings are as dispersed as mine, and for whom present conditions no longer allow the illusion that they will be gathered together again one day, it is a genuine endorsement to hear of a reader here and there, who has been able to make himself at home in my scraps of writings, in some way or another.

GB IV, p. 394

The card index marks the conquest of three-dimensional writing, and so presents an astonishing counterpoint to the three-dimensionality of script in its original form as rune or knot notation. (And today the book is already, as the present mode of scholarly production demonstrates, an outdated mediation between two different filing systems. For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index.)

SW 1, p. 456.

Even though Benjamin’s audience was not exactly small in the second half of the 1920s, the difficulties of existence as a freelance author were familiar to him: the necessity to secure money to live on; arising from this the imperative of lobbying editors and publishers; the merciless circuits of acquiring, executing, and delivering commissions; the impossibility of pursuing larger projects, because writing for subsistence money gobbled up all of his time. “Shameful hack paperwork” was the name he gave his commissions in a letter in September 1928, and he let it be known that even this was to be kept at a certain level in order that it not “revolt him.” He did not lack in opportunities to publish bad stuff, but he did lack the courage needed to write it, he claimed (GB III, p. 414). His reviewing and his work for radio are, therefore, not to be seen purely as chores. A tolerably stable system of public activity collapsed, prior indeed to February 1933, once the press and radio were brought under a new political line. In exile in France, the opportunities for earning an income reduced dramatically, even though Benjamin was capable of writing in the tongue of his host land. Indeed Paris of all places was the one place where he could barely procure the cost of living: “There are places where I could earn a minimal income, and places where I could live on a minimal income, but not a single place where these two conditions coincide” (Correspondence, p. 402). How could he ever finance the primary researches for the books on Baudelaire and the arcades, which, after all, could only be undertaken in the Bibliothèque Nationale? In a letter dated July 20, 1938, Benjamin told his acquaintance Kitty Marx-Steinschneider, a resident of Jerusalem, of the difficulties of engaging with a larger project after months of unstable existence and countless obstacles. “I got behind with my ongoing projects and this always led to more or less disjointed scribbling, which then kept me on the go again for quite some time” (Correspondence, p. 568)¹.

The word “paperwork” indicates—as the formulation “income paperwork” (GB III, p. 414) makes clear—a certain disdain for the results of the work. “I had to make a start on something new, something quite different and was handicapped by journalistic-diplomatic scribbles” (GB III, p. 321), as he put it as early as January 1928, prior to the appearance of One-Way Street. Benjamin liked to describe those works that kept him from other work as “allotria.” In similar fashion, he used the term “scrap” (verzetteln): as “disperse,” “hack up,” “lose,” “waste”—regarding the scrap as a handicap or hindrance preventing him from making something new, working on something else, doing something “essential.” He used his last bit of money to amalgamate his books, which were split between Berlin and Paris, at Brecht’s house in Svendborg, “so as not to lose hold of my library by virtue of its being spread [Verzettelung] throughout Europe” (Correspondence, p. 450), as he told Gershom Scholem in July 1934. In January 1934, when he sent the manuscript of Berlin Childhood around 1900 to Hermann Hesse (who had praised One-Way Street highly), he bemoaned that fact that, owing to his distance from Germany and the powerlessness that it implied, he was abandoned to an editorial that “did not accommodate” the manuscript “under its title or author, but rather printed it in scraps as individual contributions to the newspaper supplements” (GB IV, p. 334). The counter-image to this, which was never actually achieved, would be something completed, concentrated, collected, and undivided. Berlin Childhood counted for Benjamin as scrapped. It was one of his “shattered books” (Correspondence, p. 512).²

Benjamin acknowledged with gratitude every effort to safeguard his manuscripts. He appreciated a bibliographic mention of his works, published by the historian and theologian Karl Thieme in a journal titled Religious Reflection: it was “a genuine endorsement to hear of a reader here and there, who has been able to make himself at home in my scraps of writings, in some way or another” (GB IV, p. 394). He saw himself “in a span of history and life,” as he explained to Scholem in February 1935, “in which the final collecting together of the infinite scraps of my production seems less conceivable, indeed more improbable than ever” (GB V, p. 47). It was impossible for him to gather the scraps together, but it is owing to his calculations and the conscientiousness of his friends, that the improbable was still possible after his death. His bequest bears witness to the dogged attempt to write under adverse conditions.

And it tells the story of an extraordinary writing project in which aestheticism and pragmatism are held in balance. Benjamin used the choicest materials. But to an increasing degree, his life situation made any luxury in his working conditions impossible. In exile, it would seem, economic need dictated that everything he got his hands on be used (or re-used): the reverse sides of letters sent to him, postcards or an invitation to review, library forms, travel tickets, proofs, an advertisement for “S. Pellegrino,” prescription pads discarded by his friend Fritz Fränkel, doctor and drug connoisseur (figs 2.3–2.9). The formats are fascinating: some scraps are no bigger than 4.5cm × 9cm. But Benjamin was able to utilize every last square millimeter. And he left behind a wealth of compressed sheets, notes, scraps, on which his great work unfolds richly detailed.

The structure of Benjamin’s bequest is not only indebted to necessity. It exhibits idiosyncrasies in its modes of production, peculiar methods of thought and writing. “An economy of scraps just like in my family,” a distant relation exclaimed recently on seeing Benjamin’s condensed notes. Benjamin wrote constantly. When an idea occurred to him he did not delay its writing down by seeking out the right piece of paper, but rather used the nearest suitable thing at hand. In this way key thoughts are fixed in passing, “scrawled down,” often on the margins of other works or directly interleaved in them (figs 2.10 and 2.11). And of course he knew the meaning of the concept “verzetteln” prevalent in library science or lexicography: “to excerpt,” “to disperse things that belong together into individual slips or into the form of a card index.”

The court library at Vienna introduced a card index catalog around 1780, because the bound catalog could not accommodate the flood of entries. Parish registers are entered on slips or even card, in order to be able to deploy the individual entries independently of the place of their transmission, and to be able to order them according to different criteria. Transfer to individual scraps or cards makes possible lexical projects such as the Goethe-Dictionary, which began to index the Weimar edition on slips of paper in 1946. Slips or their stronger sisters, index cards—of which the Journal for Organisation declared in 1929, “cards can do everything”—stand out because of their flexibility, and thus they represent modernity.

Benjamin recognized the artistic potential of this method of sorting: Mallarmé named as his own “a working instrument for poetry in the form of a card file” (SW 4, p. 117). In the section “Attested Auditor of Books”, in One-Way Street, Benjamin points out a revolution in the administration of knowledge. The present mode of scholarly production demonstrates that the book is already “an outdated mediation between two different filing systems”: “For everything that matters is to be found in the card box of the researcher who wrote it, and the scholar studying it assimilates it into his own card index” (SW I, p. 456). Benjamin repeatedly treated the elements of his text according to the principle of building blocks: he copied them out, cut them out, stuck them on new sheets of paper and arranged them anew, long before such procedures became established in electronic word-processing under the name “copy and paste”—and before the appearance of the German computer program Zettelwirtschaft [Paper Jumble], which was developed to order and re-order notes. Benjamin’s idea of composing a work entirely of quotations ensures that the material within the collection can remain mobile, elements can be shifted at will. At the outset all material is of equal value: knowledge that is organized in slips and scraps knows no hierarchy.

Figures

2.1 Types of Knowledge (1921)—Manuscript, one side. Compare GS VI, p. 48.

2.2 Language and Logic 1 (1921)—Manuscript, one side. Compare SW 1, p. 272.

2.3 and 2.4 Notes for Franz Kafka (1934)—Manuscript, one side, with reverse side (extract). Compare GS II.3, p. 1207.

2.5 and 2.6 Proust and Kafka. Notes for Franz Kafka (1934)—Manuscript, one side, with reverse side. Compare GS II.3, p. 1221.

2.7 What is Aura?—Manuscript, one side.

2.8 and 2.9 Bibliographic notes—Manuscript, one side, with reverse side. These bibliographical notes on a purchase voucher are probably connected to Benjamin’s montage of letters for the 150th anniversary of the French Revolution, which appeared in the journal Europe on July 15, 1939 under the title “Allemands de quatre-vingt-neuf.”

Itemized here are, amongst other things, the biography of Seume by Oskar Planer and Camillo Reißmann (1898), the books Biedermeier in Chains (1924) and Prohibited Literature from Classical Times to the Present (1925) by Heinrich Hubert Houben, Gustav Landauer’s Letters from the French Revolution, Herder’s Letters for the Advancement of Humanity, Benjamin’s “Introduction to Jochmann,” Correspondence by Georg Forster and a letter from Jochmann to Kant.

2.10 and 2.11 Note for On the Concept of History: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of world history. But perhaps it is quite different. Perhaps revolutions are what happens when the humanity travelling in this train snatches at the emergency brake.” (c. 1940)—Manuscript, one side, with reverse side. The reverse side appears to show calculations relating to the cost of a lunch. Compare GS 1.3, p. 1232.

Fig. 2.1

Fig. 2.1

Types of Knowledge

I	The knowledge of truth
	This does not exist. For truth is the death of intention
II	Redemptive knowledge
	This is the knowledge that dawns with redemption, which is thereby completed But it is not the knowledge that precipitates redemption
III	Teachable knowledge
	Its most significant form of appearance is banality
IV	Determining knowledge
	There is knowledge that determines action. It is, however, not determining as a “motive,” but rather due to the force of its linguistic structure. The linguistic moment in morality is connected to knowledge. It is absolutely certain that this knowledge that determines action leads to silence. Therefore, as such, it is not teachable. This determining knowledge is closely related to the concept of Tao. This is in direct contradiction to knowledge in Socrates’ Doctrine of Virtue. While this is motivating for action, it does not determine those who act.
V	Knowledge from insight or perception
	This type is highly enigmatic. In the region of knowledge, it is something that resembles the present in the region of time. It exists only as an ungraspable transition. From what to what? Between foreboding and the knowledge of truth.

Fig. 2.2

Fig. 2.2

I

Sheet of paper has gone missing; must look for it at home. It contained:

1.The discussion of the concept of “system” and the doctrine of the extinguishing of intention in the truth, explained in terms of the veiled image of Sais.

2.Discussion of the concept of “essence” as the mark of truth.

Fig. 2.3

Fig. 2.4

Fig. 2.3

The Potemkin Story

The anecdote from Hamsun

The childhood photograph of Kafka

The little hunchback

The truth about Sancho Panza

Picture from the illustrated History of the Jews

Hasidic beggar story

The Next Village

Fig. 2.4

Dr Fritz Fränkel

Medical Specialist for

Nervous and Mental

Illnesses

207 Kaiserallee,

West Berlin 15

Telephone: B5

Barbarossa 5312

Fig. 2.5

Fig. 2.5

Proust and Kafka

There is something that Proust has in common with Kafka and who knows whether this can be found anywhere else. It is a matter of how they use “I.” When Proust, in his Recherche du temps perdu, and Kafka, in his diaries, use I, for both of them it is equally transparent, glassy. Its chambers have no local coloring; every reader can occupy it today and move out tomorrow. You can survey them and get to know them without having to be in the least attached to them. In these authors the subject adopts the protective coloring of the planet, which will turn grey in the coming catastrophes.

Fig. 2.6

Fig. 2.6

La vie antérieureLes années profondesRecueillement

J’ai plus de souvenirs que

Redonnée [?] The année profonde as seat of mystical experience and of spleen

Fig. 2.7

Fig. 2.7

What is Aura?

The experience of aura rests on the transposition of a form of reaction normal in human society to the relationship of nature to people. The one who is seen or believes himself to be seen [glances up] answers with a glance. To experience the aura of an appearance or a being means becoming aware of its ability [to pitch] to respond to a glance. This ability is full of poetry. When a person, an animal, or something inanimate returns our glance with its own, we are drawn initially into the distance; its glance is dreaming, draws us after its dream. Aura is the appearance of a distance however close it might be. Words themselves have an aura; Kraus described this in particularly exact terms: “The closer one looks at a word, the greater the distance from which it returns the gaze.”

As much aura in the world as there is still dream in it. But the awakened eye does not lose the power of the glance, once the dream is totally extinguished in it. On the contrary: it is only then that the glance really penetrates. It ceases to resemble the glance of the loved one, whose eye, under the glance of the lover

Fig. 2.8

Fig. 2.9

Fig. 2.10

Fig. 2.11

¹“Disjointed scribbling” is the Jacobsons’ translation of verzettelter Schreiberei, heading of this chapter. I have chosen “scrappy paperwork” instead.

²Translation amended (from “frustrated book projects”) to convey sense in this context.