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Walter’s teeninesses do not allow my ambition to rest. I can do it too […]. As you see my writing is getting bigger again, a sign, I suppose, that I should stop writing such nonsense.

Dora Sophie Benjamin to Gershom Scholem, GB II, p. 198

I’ll bring with me a new manuscript—one, tiny, book—that will surprise you.

GB IV, p. 144

He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments. No image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside—that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this has been unfurled and dissected; and now remembrance progresses from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier.

SW 2:2, p. 597

Memory does this: lets the things appear small, compresses them. Land of the sailor.

Ms. 863v

For Benjamin, writing was not only a means of securing his thoughts, but also an object and theme of theoretical reflection. Perfect writing should flow as if from itself: “If the smoke from the tip of my cigarette and the ink from the nib of my pen flowed with equal ease, I would be in the Arcadia of my writing” (SW 1, p. 463). High-quality paper, particular pens, ink, and nibs, and, furthermore, specific spatial preconditions were important prerequisites for a non-resistant and smoothly running flow of writing. In a letter to Siegfried Kracauer, for example, Benjamin reports on the acquisition of a new fountain pen, an “enchanting creation, with which I can fulfill all my dreams and develop a productivity which was impossible in the days of the now desiccated—nib” (GB III, p. 262).

But in order to aid the cogitations in finding their way to an appropriate realization on paper, some resistance is necessary. The route from inspiration to thought to phrasing to writing is to be hindered. The writer, according to Benjamin, should keep the “pen aloof from inspiration,” and “it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself” (SW 1, p. 458). Flow and delay must coincide, in order both to satisfy dreams and propose ideas.

Benjamin’s characteristically small handwriting, his graphic minimalism, which compelled him to concentration, deliberateness, and exactness, can be located within this context. His miniaturized script is reminiscent of Robert Walser’s “pencil system,” which he used to help him write again, once his abilities had dwindled. From 1924 Walser began “to jot in pencil, to sketch, to dilly-dally” (Walser, cited from Morlang, p. 58) his first intuitions, prior to writing his texts cleanly in pen. He tried to solve his “writer’s block” by a resistance-less pencil gliding on paper, forming quite blurred, almost illegible characters. Benjamin’s manuscripts, despite similarities in appearance, are the expression of a diametrically opposed method. While Walser learnt “to play, poeticize” once more (Walser, cited from Morlang, p. 58) in the small and the smallest details, attempting to unlock the open space of childish light-heartedness, so as to allow script and language to flow, for Benjamin it is a matter of the “placing” of script, the composition of thoughts. The small here is not childhood re-attained and imitated, but, rather, a product of adult reflection and concentration. Even in the choice of writing implement—Benjamin wrote mostly with a fountain pen—this other face of writing is expressed. Jean Selz recalls “such a small handwriting that he never found a pen that was fine enough, which forced him to write with the nib upside down” (Selz, p. 355)—such a posture in writing is directed against the stroke and flow of script.

The manuscripts in Benjamin’s bequest document how up until around 1917–1918 his writing was somewhat larger and using wider swings than in later periods. But it is not really possible to date his manuscripts from the size and style of the script. Benjamin’s handwriting does not develop in a uniform way. It varies. It is almost always precise and fine; even in notes that were intended only for his own eyes he rarely renounced “definition or accuracy” (Scholem, Benjamin, p. 177). In spite of the density of script, the compressing together of signs in the smallest space, he hardly ever wrote carelessly. The letters measure between one and around 7mm. Benjamin’s penchant for small script developed in particular in the 1920s. One example is a sharp polemic against Fritz von Unruh’s Wings of Nike (1925) titled “Peace Commodity,” which appeared on May 21, 1926 in the Literary World. With each letter measuring from one to 1.5mm, the fair copy is difficult to decipher with the naked eye (fig. 3.1). The same is true of an early draft of The Arcades of Paris (1928/1929), which Benjamin jotted on a sheet of fine handmade paper of an exceptionally lengthy format and folded in the middle (fig. 3.2). The 22cm of sheet allowed him to write eighty-one lines. Scholem has already noted Benjamin’s “never-realized ambition to get a hundred lines onto an ordinary sheet of notepaper” (Scholem, “Benjamin,” p. 177) and reports on how his fascination was aroused by two grains of wheat in the Museum Cluny in Paris, “on which a kindred soul had inscribed the complete ‘Shema Israel’” (Scholem, “Benjamin,” p. 177). In many cases it looks as if he intended to completely cover the page with writing (fig. 3.3). On the other hand, “giant letters” can be found in Benjamin’s hand too (GB II, p. 446). Some letters and work manuscripts are even composed within “normal” dimensions. But these are exceptions.

Like Walser, Benjamin is an aesthetician of the written sheet; the manuscript should appeal to the eye as a textual image. The manuscript of the gloss Dream Kitsch, a “short consideration of the Surrealists” (GB III, p. 116), from 1925, which Benjamin thought was too difficult to be published in the Literary World, is remarkable both for the small size of the writing and for the format of the sheet: the text, which is separated into narrow columns, is strikingly reminiscent of a newspaper layout (fig. 3.4). The visual aspects of a manuscript of an early sonnet on the death of Christoph Friedrich Heinle (1894–1914) convey an expression of the contents. In the contrast between the small script and the size of the sheet, Benjamin’s grief at the loss of his friend, and the loneliness and abandonment of those left behind, is graspable in the form of an image (fig. 3.5).

The spatial density of what is written corresponds to the economy of expression, a precise, laconic style. In this is expressed an ethic of “creative modesty typical of the person who lives wholly inside his subject and who is utterly incapable of viewing it complacently from the outside” (SW 1:1, p. 131).

Benjamin’s small handwriting acts as a restriction, but with positive intent—for the writer as much as for the reader. Just as the writer is forced to attend to each letter, so too for those who are addressed “this objectionable writing style is like nothing else an expression of my most friendly disposition” (GB II, p. 399). But it is not simply an expression of this ethos, but also a claim to it and on it. Benjamin expects of readers such a great deal of concentration and effort that they might well object. He places objects in the way of a too rapid reading. But finally (also) in return he promises objects that impel readers to new thought. Benjamin’s micrographies do not open up to casual readings—and he self-consciously inscribed in them recognition of their magnitude and significance.

Benjamin had a predilection for “the unassuming, the tiny, and the playful” (SW 2:1, p. 114). The world of experiences and things familiar to childhood, including his own memory of these, apparently trivial and marginal themes, the small format of the gloss, thesis, miniatures, puzzles, reports, and aphorisms—all these are manifestations of the small thematized over and over again in Benjamin’s work. In these Benjamin achieves his ambition “to present in the briefest literary utterance something complete in itself” (Scholem, “Benjamin,” p. 177). His aesthetic of the small is aimed at the particular, which “carries the whole in miniature form” (GS III, p. 51). Only “in the analysis of the small individual moment” might the “crystal of the total event” be discovered (AP, p. 461).

On June 9, 1926 Benjamin wrote to Jula Radt-Cohn: “You will see that—starting about a week ago, I have once more entered a period of small writing, in which, even after long intervals, I always find some kind of home again, and into which I should like to entice you. If you perceive this little box as homely, then nothing should prevent you from becoming its Princess. (You do know the ‘New Melusine’, don’t you?)” (GB III, p. 171). In Goethe’s fairytale The New Melusine, an allegorical tale in William Meister’s Journeyman Years, the magic box harbors a wonderful realm that has shrunk to a miniature, and is constantly exposed to the dangers of ruin and disappearance. Just as an air of secrecy and fragility surrounds the casket in Goethe, so too Benjamin’s tiny handwriting appears enigmatic and fragile. It bars the reader from direct access to what is written, and initially it can only be experienced sensuously, through the expressive power of the writing’s image; only once it has been deciphered can its contents unfurl. Like the casket it preserves something precious, which disguises itself in the form of a miniature. It parades “the pantomime of the entire nature and existence of mankind, in microcosmic form” (SW 2:1, p. 134).

Figures

3.1 Peace Commodity (1926). Critique of Fritz von Unruh’s Wings of Nike (1925)—Manuscript, three sides; shown here, page 1. Compare GS III, pp. 23–5.

3.2 Draft of The Arcades of Paris (c. 1928/1929)—Manuscript on one double page; shown here, page 1. Compare AP, pp. 873–6.

3.3 Draft of “Moscow” (c. spring 1927)—Manuscript, one side.

The manuscript contains drafts for the article “Moscow,” published in the journal Die Kreatur in 1927. Benjamin was in Moscow from December 1926 until February 1927, having traveled there in order to visit the Latvian director Asja Lacis, who had fled to the Soviet capital for political reasons and was recuperating in a sanatorium following an illness. Benjamin recorded striking experiences and impressions of his visit in his Moscow Diary, which he also used as the basis of his article. The notes depicted here relay observations on Moscow city life—lively descriptions of traffic, the Kremlin, street traders, and the proletarian quarter with its youth groups.

3.4 Dream Kitsch: Gloss on Surrealism (c. 1925)—Manuscript, two sides; shown here, page 1. Compare SW 2:1, pp. 3–5.

3.5 Sonnet, untitled. From the cycle of 73 sonnets on the death of Christoph Friedrich Heinle—Manuscript, one side. Compare GS VII.1, p. 56.

3.6 Letter to Florens Christian Rang from 27 January 1923—Manuscript, two sides; shown here, page 1. Compare GB II, pp. 309f.

3.7 Language and Logic II (1921)—Manuscript, two sides; shown here, page 1. Compare SW 1, pp. 272–3.

Fig. 3.1

Fig. 3.1

Peace Commodity

“Leafing through your volumes!”

From 1920 to 1923, in Rome, in Zurich, in Paris—in short, whatever place outside of German soil one might have happened to land upon—German products could be found for half the price that one would usually have paid for the same goods abroad, or indeed in Germany itself. Poorly assembled goods for an impoverished population who were no longer capable of normal consumption were thrown into the dumping ground of the inflation era, placed on the European market as “peace commodities” at bargain prices. Around that time the barriers began to lift again and the traveling salesman set off on tour. One had to live on clearance sales and the higher the dollar rose, the greater was the circulation of export goods. At the height of the catastrophe it included intellectual and cultural goods too. For, even if the financial benefit was smaller, turnover raised the prestige of the entrepreneur. The Kantian idea of eternal peace—long undeliverable in a spiritually bankrupt Germany—was right in the first ranks of those spiritual export articles. Uncheckable in its manufacture, a slow seller for the previous ten years, it was available at unbeatable prices. It was a heaven-sent opportunity to smooth the way for more serious export. No thought was given to the genuine quality of its peace. Immanuel Kant’s raw, homemade weave of thought had indeed proven itself to be highly durable, but it did not appeal to a broader public. It was necessary to take account of the modern taste of bourgeois democracy. The cloth of the peace flag was tie-dyed, its white, threadbare weave brightly patterned and, given all the signs and symbols, it was difficult—this will be found to be corroborated—for the green of hope to stand out from the bellicose red of the lobster, the blue of faithfulness from the drab brown of the roast turkey. In such a form this renovated weave of a pacifism in all the colors of the world’s ways—which was sated in other ways too—was to be unveiled before the international public. And just as one expects that the simplest apprentice can throw out, fold, and prepare the bales of cloth according to the rules, so too the gentleman who markets this gaily colored pile, for good or for evil, has to drape himself in the colors of the universe and hold in front of the customer’s nose the world of God which he sells in pieces. All that was necessary was to find the traveling salesman who also had at his immediate disposal the required vim of gesticulation, such as has the journalist with his triply loosened wrist and pen. That the reserve lieutenant was formerly popularly perceived as a traveling salesman is well known. He was easily imported into “better circles.” This is also thoroughly true of Mr von Unruh, who, in 1922, as a traveling salesman going from city to city for eternal peace, processed the Paris position. Of course—and this was accordingly so apt that Mr von Unruh himself bridled at moments—his import into French circles some years ago at Verdun did not occur without furore, not without commotion, not without the spilling of blood. Be that as it may, the report that he presents—Wings of Nike: The Book of a Journey—implies that his contact with his customer base has persisted, even when he presented for inspection peace commodities rather than heavy munitions. It is not equally as certain whether it can be assured that the publication of this travel journal—a list of his customers and done deals—is of use to the broader course of business. For barely had it occurred before the commodity began to be returned from Paris.

In any case it is extremely instructive to examine Mr von Unruh’s pacifism more closely. Since the supposed convergence of the moral idea and that of right, on whose presupposition the European proof of the Kantian gospel of peace rested, began to disconnect in the mind of the nineteenth century, German “peace” has pointed more and more to metaphysics as the place of its foundation. The German image of peace emanates from metaphysics. In contrast to this it has long been observed that the idea of peace in West European democracies is a thoroughly worldly, political, and, in the final instance, juristically justifiable one. Pax is for them the ideal of international law. To this corresponds, in practical terms, the instrument of the arbitration court and its treaties. The great moral conflict of an unlimited and reinforced right to peace with an equitable peace, the diverse ways in which this theme has been instrumentalized in the course of history, are not up for discussion in Mr von Unruh’s pacifism, just as indeed the world-historical events of this hour remain unaddressed. And “in terms of the philosophical politics of France”—Florens Christian Rang analyzed them for the Germans (in his final work German Shelters, the most truthful critique of war and post-war literature and one of the greatest political works ever, and of which out of the entire German daily press only the Frankfurter Zeitung took note in any sort of adequate fashion): its rigor matched by its humanity, its precision detracting not in the least from its depth—here, though, “philosophical politics” fuses in Unruh’s pathos with idealistic waffle. “Tout action de l’esprit est aisée si elle n’est plus soumise au réel”—that is how Proust phrases the old truth. Mr von Unruh has heroically wrestled himself free from reality. In any case, the great formal dinners are the only international facts that his new pacifism takes into account. His new international is hatched in the peace of the communal digestion and the gala menu is the magna carta of the future peace of nations. And just as a cocky sidekick might smash a valuable vessel at a love feast, so the thin terminology of the Königsberg philosopher dispatches to the devil with the kick of a jackboot, and what remains is the innerness of the heavenly eye in its attractive alcoholic glassiness. The image of the gifted blabbermouth with a teary look, as Shakespeare alone could capture!—The great prose of all evangelists of peace spoke of war. To stress one’s own love of peace is always the close concern of those who have instigated war. But he who wants peace should speak of war. He should speak of the past one (is he not called Fritz von Unruh,¹ the one thing about which he would remain silent), and, above all, he should speak of the coming one. He should speak of its threatening plotters, its powerful causes, its terrifying means. And yet this would be perhaps the only discourse against which the salons, which allowed Mr von Unruh entry, remain completely hermetically sealed? The much pleaded peace, which is already in existence, proves, when seen by daylight, to be the one—the only “eternal,” known to us—which those enjoy who have commanded in war and who wish to set the tone at the peace party. For this is what Mr von Unruh has become too. “Woe” his Cassandra-like gobbledegook clamors over all who have realized at the correct moment—that is roughly between the fish and the roast—that “inner conversion” is the only acceptable revolt and that the

Fig. 3.2

Fig. 3.2

“In speaking of the inner boulevards,” says the Illustrated Guide to Paris, a complete picture of the city on the Seine and its environs from the year 1852, “we have made mention again and again of the arcades which open onto them. These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors extending through whole blocks of buildings, whose owners have joined together for such enterprises. Lining both sides of these corridors, which get their light from above, are the most elegant shops, so that the arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which customers will find everything they need. During sudden rainshowers, the arcades are a place of refuge for the unprepared, to whom they offer a secure, if restricted, promenade—one from which the merchants also benefit.” The customers are gone, along with those taken by surprise. Rain brings in only the poorer clientele without waterproof or mackintosh. These were spaces for a generation of people who knew little of the weather and who, on Sundays, when it snowed, would rather warm themselves in the winter gardens than go out skiing. Glass before its time, premature iron: it was one single line of descent—arcades, winter gardens with their lordly palms, and railroad stations, which cultivated the false orchid “adieu” with its fluttering petals. They have long since given way to the hangar. And today, it is the same with the human material on the inside of the arcades as with the materials of their construction. Pimps are the iron bearings of this street, and its glass breakables are the whores. Here was the last refuge of those infant prodigies that saw the light of day at the time of the world exhibitions: the briefcase with interior lighting, the meter-long pocket knife, or the patented umbrella handle with built-in watch and revolver. And near the degenerate giant creatures, aborted and broken-down matter. We followed the narrow dark corridor to where—between a discount bookstore, in which colorful tied-up bundles tell of all sorts of failure, and a shop selling only buttons (mother-of-pearl and the kind that in Paris are called de fantaisie)—there stood a sort of salon. On a pale-colored wallpaper full of figures and busts shone a gas lamp. By its light, an old woman sat reading. They say she has been there alone for years, and collects sets of teeth “in gold, in wax, and broken.” Since that day, moreover, we know where Doctor Miracle got the wax out of which he fashioned Olympia. They are the true fairies of these arcades (more salable and more worn than the life-sized ones): the formerly world-famous Parisian dolls, which revolved on their musical socle and bore in their arms a doll-sized basket out of which, at the salutation of the minor chord, a lambkin poked its curious muzzle.

All this is the arcade in our eyes. And it was nothing of all this. They <the arcades> radiated through the Paris of the Empire like grottoes. For someone entering the Passage des Panoramas in 1817, the sirens of gaslight would be singing to him on one side, while oil-lamp odalisques offered enticements from the other. With the kindling of electric lights, the irreproachable glow was extinguished in these galleries, which suddenly became more difficult to find—which wrought a black magic at entranceways, and peered from blind windows into their own interior. It was not decline but transformation. All at once, they were the hollow mold from which the image of “modernity” was cast. Here, the century mirrored with satisfaction its most recent past. Here was the retirement home for infant prodigies …

When, as children, we were given those great encyclopedic works World and Mankind, New Universe, The Earth, wouldn’t our gaze always fall, first of all, on the color illustration of a “Carboniferous Landscape” or on “Lakes and Glaciers of the First Ice Age”? Such an ideal panorama of a barely elapsed primeval age opens up when we look through the arcades that are found in all cities. Here resides the last dinosaur of Europe, the consumer. On the walls of these caverns, their immemorial flora, the commodity, luxuriates and enters, like cancerous tissue, into the most irregular combinations. A world of secret affinities: palm tree and feather duster, hair dryer and Venus de Milo, prosthesis and letter-writing manual come together here as after a long separation. The odalisque lies in wait next to the inkwell, priestesses raise aloft ashtrays like patens. These items on display are a rebus; and <how> one ought to read here the birdseed kept in the fixative-pan from a darkroom, the flower seeds beside the binoculars, the broken screws atop the musical score, and the revolver above the goldfish bowl—is right on the tip of one’s tongue. After all, nothing of the lot appears to be new. The goldfish come perhaps from a pond that dried up long ago, the revolver will have been a corpus delicti, and these scores could hardly have preserved their previous owner from starvation when her last pupils stayed away.

Never trust what writers say about their own writings. When Zola undertook to defend his Thérèse Raquin against hostile critics, he explained that his book was a scientific study of the temperaments. His task had been to show, in an example, exactly how the sanguine and the nervous temperaments act on one another—to the detriment of each. But this explanation could satisfy no one. Nor does it explain the unprecedented admixture of colportage, the bloodthirstiness, the cinematic goriness of the action. Which—by no accident—takes place in an arcade. If this book really expounds something scientifically, then it’s the death of the Paris arcades, the decay of a type of architecture. The book’s atmosphere is saturated with the poisons of this process, and its people are destroyed by them.

One knew of places in ancient Greece where the way led down into the underworld. Our waking existence likewise is a land which, at certain hidden points, leads down into the underworld—a land full of inconspicuous places from which dreams arise. All day long, suspecting nothing, we pass them by, but no sooner has sleep come than we are eagerly groping our way back to lose ourselves in the dark corridors. By day, the labyrinth of urban dwellings resembles consciousness; the arcades (which are galleries leading into the city’s past) issue unremarked onto the streets. At night, however, under the tenebrous mass of the houses, their denser darkness bursts forth like a threat, and the nocturnal pedestrian hurries past—unless, that is, we have emboldened him to turn into the narrow lane.