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Thus the life of a collector manifests a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order.

SW 2:2, p. 487

The scruples, sometimes disturbing even to me, with which I view the plan of some sort of “Collected Works” correspond to the archival precision with which I preserve and catalog everything of mine that has appeared in print. Furthermore, disregarding the economic side of being a writer, I can say that for me the few journals and small newspapers in which my work appears represent for me the anarchic structure of a private publishing house. The main objective of my promotional strategy, therefore, is to get everything I write—except for some diary entries—into print at all costs and I can say that I have been successful in this—knock on wood!—for about four or five years.

Correspondence, p. 385

I, however, had something else in mind: not to retain the new but to renew the old. And to renew the old—in such a way that I myself, the newcomer, would make what was old my own—was the task of the collection that filled my drawer.

SW 3, p. 403

The “struggle against dispersion,” which is the “most deeply hidden motive of the person who collects” (AP, p. 211), finds no more pregnant expression than in the archive. Given the insecurities that beleaguered his life, Walter Benjamin led this struggle with particular perseverance and finesse. His own contribution as a collector to the preservation and transmission of his works is not without irony. “I will continue to ensure the completion of your collection of little grasses and stems from my field,” Benjamin wrote to his friend Alfred Cohn in 1928, in a statement that predates his departure into exile. “This way, at least, there is the benefit, more for me than you, of there being another complete herbarium somewhere apart from my own” (GB III, p. 388). His carefulness stood him in good stead early on, and his friends ensured the conservation of the scripts passed to them as reservoirs of his thought and writing. “But now the moment has come,” Benjamin wrote to Gershom Scholem on May 31, 1933, “when you must allow me to shake a few meager fruits from the tree of conscientiousness which has its roots in my heart and its leaves in your archive” (Benjamin/Scholem Correspondence, p. 53).

Benjamin was extremely conscientious not only in distributing and conserving his works. The archival logging of his manuscripts and collections was an equally important task. He compiled a catalog (which is no longer in existence) of the contents of his library (Correspondence, p. 306) and he kept a notebook with meticulous details of his reading since graduation from high school (Correspondence, p. 268). This catalog, preserved in a small black leather lined notebook, begins with entry number 462 (the previous list of items is missing) and registers Benjamin’s reading from the age of twenty-two, in 1917, until 1939: it ends with Robert Hichens’ Le Toque noire (1939), which bears the number 1712. Another notebook preserves bibliographical lists on various themes such as “Romantic Journals,” “Gnomic Science,” “Mythological Research,” and “Greek and Roman Literature.” Numerous card indexes and scraps of paper with addresses, excerpts, and literature lists are likewise preserved. Benjamin ordered some of these odds and ends thematically, separated into envelopes marked with lists of their contents (fig. 1.1). A note on a slip of paper in the bequest mentions a “friendship book with quotation entries” (WBA 210/12), which Benjamin must have once possessed. And lastly there are also catalogs detailing the contents of his archive. An early inventory, left behind in his apartment when he fled Berlin, is presented here (figs 1.2 and 1.3). It is written in black ink on a chamois-colored piece of paper, which is folded in the middle to make a double sheet. Additional corrections, addenda, crossings out, and colored marks indicate that Benjamin contributed to it over a long period of time and reworked it on several occasions. The itemization it provides is a research tool, a floor plan of Benjamin’s archive. On the basis of this inventory, the life and writing of Benjamin can be traced in model form.

The inventory comprises thirty groups. Predominant amongst them is correspondence but there are also headings for manuscripts by others, personal and business documents, and his own writings. His writings are classified according to thematic aspects relating to content, as well as partly in relation to their written format (“printed,” “only in handwriting,” “typewritten”). The arrangement is systematic, “but according to a surprising coherence that is incomprehensible to the profane” (GS III, pp. 216f). Measured against any conventional system, Benjamin’s ordering appears distorted, affected by subjective memories and meanings. His classifications—including “Letters from deceased people except for Fritz Heinle and Rika Seligson” and “Letters from all living male correspondents except for relatives and Gerhardi, Blumenthal, Sachs, Wolf Heinle / In addition letters from Jula [Cohn]”—evidence a personal relationship to the material, in which the writers continue to live. It is as if only certain people might be brought together, while others must be kept apart from each other or be given their own separate place. These living connections break through the “mild boredom of order” (SW 2:2, p. 486), recognizing in things less their “functional, utilitarian value” than the “scene, the stage, of their fate” (SW 2:2, p. 487).

Each of the archival containers—folders, files, envelopes, cases, and boxes—is precisely described by an indication of the brand (Sönneken), color, size, provenance (“cardboard envelope from The Demons”), as well as any material peculiarities (“with crest,” “extendable”) or breakages (“torn in half”). These containers are aids in systematizing the material. At the same time, they offer protection against damage: they stow away and preserve the papers stored in them, holding them together in one place. For Benjamin, the securing of his archive was an important task in several regards. Mechanical damage to papers was mended with thin strips of vellum or the edges of sheets of stamps or, as in one case, sewn with needle and thread (figs 1.4 and 1.5). In the mid-1930s he arranged for The Arcades Project to be photographically reproduced and he sent the images to the Institute for Social Research in New York for safekeeping. He made transcriptions of his writings (or had them made) and sent them to friends and colleagues with the request, “please store the manuscript carefully” (GB I, p. 452). When it came to requests for their return or for them to be sent on to someone else, he asked, on various occasions, that they be insured, and indicated the estimated value. His “Memorandum on the Mexican Seminar,” for example, which he requested Scholem return, was assessed by him immodestly “at a value of 400M” (GB I, p. 453). According to an early note written in Berlin, he stored photographs “in the large bureau—middle compartment, small drawer at the bottom on the right” (fig. 1.6). He also owned a “magazine chest” (WBA 210/12). In the last apartment he inhabited in Berlin there was a locked manuscript cupboard (see GB IV, p. 90), in which Benjamin kept the residues of his life and writing, the “masked” things of his existence, ordered “in drawers, chests, and boxes” (SW 3, p. 403).

While the inventory evidences the significance that Benjamin attributed to his own writings, it provides just as precisely confirmation of the loss of documents from the years prior to exile. Some things listed were destroyed or are assumed missing—such as a large part of the correspondence, including letters from Grete Radt, his parents, Franz Sachs, Wolf Heinle, and other friends from the milieu of the youth movement. Whether and which of the “Philosophical works, Fragments” are lost is very difficult to ascertain. Proofs of published writings, which Benjamin most probably kept in the brown cardboard box with a crest on it, have survived. In a letter to Scholem on October 28, 1931 Benjamin indicates the “archival precision with which I preserve and catalog everything of mine that has appeared in print” (Correspondence, p. 385). Presumably this is a reference to the Catalogue of My Published Works, which is amongst the papers of the bequest (fig. 1.7). This consists of ten written sheets, some of which have writing on the reverse side and it collates—if not quite exhaustively—436 entries from the years 1911 to 1939. It is to be assumed that he arranged for a secretary to type up the copy that is in the archive (Ts. 2379–2393). Up until 1928 every entry was also individually transferred to an index card (WBA 218). Benjamin collected sheets of his published work, snipped them out (or received them as offprints) and then stuck them to large sheets with gummed strips. These were then furnished with details of sources and corrections, additions, and observations (fig. 1.8).

Through all of this careful ordering and classification of his papers, the compilation of bibliographic catalogs, the lists of themes and books, the collections of excerpts and notes, a mode of work is documented, which aims at something far more than the mere securing and stock-taking of knowledge. Benjamin’s archive represents a reserve of drafts, thoughts, and quotations. And yet what is collected is not only supposed to be held in safekeeping: it is also to be used productively and grounded in the present. For, as Benjamin notes in Excavation and Memory, “he who merely makes an inventory of his findings, while failing to establish the exact location of where in today’s ground the ancient treasures have been stored up, cheats himself of his richest prize” (SW 2:2, p. 576).

Figures

1.1 Envelope for literature lists and notes on various themes.

1.2 and 1.3 Early inventory of Walter Benjamin’s archive—Manuscript on a double sheet, two sides.

1.4 and 1.5 Book list on the reverse side of a form from the Bibliothèque Nationale. The parts of the sheet of paper that have come away along the perforation have been sewn together again, presumably by Walter Benjamin.—Manuscript, one page, with materials on reverse.

It is presumed that this list of books belongs to the work for The Arcades Project. It lists titles on history, technology, architecture, photography, fine arts, and literature. These include: the several volumes of History of Iron in its Technological and Cultural-Historical Context by Ludwig Beck (1897ff), The Tragedy of the Technological Epoch by Otto Veit (1935), Karl Marx by Auguste Cornu (1934), the Goncourt Brothers’ Journal, Houben’s Conversations with Heine, books by Fourier, Balzac, Alexandre Dumas (père), and others.

1.6 Archival notes—Manuscript, two sides; shown here, page 1.

1.7 Catalogue of My Published Works (1911–1939)—Manuscript, thirteen sides; shown here, page 1. Compare GS VII.1, pp. 477–9.

1.8. Discussion of Gabriele Eckehard, The German Book in the Epoch of the Baroque. On the top right-hand corner Benjamin has noted: “The Lit[erary] World VI, 23/6 June 1930”—printed, one side. Compare GS III, pp. 236f.

1.9 Walter Benjamin’s Paris address book (1930s)—shown here, pp. 33 verso and 34 recto.

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 1.1

Literary history

Philology

Art history

Psychology

Religious science

Fig. 1.2

Fig. 1.2

I	Sönneken writings expanding file: Letters from all living male correspondents except for relatives and Gerhardi, Blumenthal, Sachs, Wolf Heinle. In addition manuscripts by others’ hands In addition letters from Jula plus those in XVI
II	Long brown cardboard box: Memories from school and university days
III	Long white cardboard box: Letters from Grete Radt
IIIa	White cardboard box: Letters from Grete Radt
Japanese casket: Letters from Grete Radt
IV	Three medium-sized cardboard boxes; letters from parents, IVa Letters to Haubinda and Freiburg, I Semester IVb Letters to Munich, first semester, as well as 1917 and after IVc Letters to Freiburg II, Munich final semester
	[and later]
V	Letters from Dora Extendable grey cardboard box: Letters from Dora
VI	Cardboard envelope from The Demons: Letters from Blumenthal and Sachs
VII	Cardboard envelope from Meyrink: Letters and other papers from Gerhardi
VIII	Blue cardboard box: Diaries and letters from relatives except for those from parents
	Letters to F. Sachs
IX	Brown cardboard box: Letters from Wolf Heinle and Werner Kraft
	Werner Kraft and Gerhard Scholem
X	Extendable grey cardboard box: Writings and fragments on the youth movement
	Large brown
XI	Extendable black cardboard box (torn in half): Poetic works Namely 1) published in any version, 2) others that are only handwritten
XII	Brown cardboard box with crest: Duplicates of own works (in manuscript or print)
XIIa	Envelope: Lecture-hall files Heinle—Guttmann
XIII	White cardboard box: Letters from all living female correspondents except for relatives, plus those in XVI
XIV	White cardboard box: Letters from deceased people except for Fritz Heinle and Rika Seligson
XV	Sönneken letter file: Duplicates, Manuscripts by other people
XVI	Sönneken letter file: Miscellaneous letters from living correspondents

Fig. 1.3

Fig 1.3

XVII	Grey patterned cardboard box: Photographs, letters of recommendation, certificates;, library papers
XXIII	Yellow envelope: Duplicates of the Hölderlin work and manuscripts by others
XXX	Black extendable cardboard box: Philosophical works, fragments and letters
XXIV	Ernst Schoen (yellowy cardboard box with green edging)
XXV	Philosophical essays and critiques typewritten (blue folder)
XXVI	Long white cardboard box: Wolf Heinle
XXVII	Yellow envelope: Older letters from parents (probably after Switzerland)
XXVIII	Book box: Personal and business papers/stamps, certificates
XXIX	Small, yellow-brown envelope: Parents Summer 1921

Fig. 1.4

Fig. 1.5

Fig. 1.6

Fig. 1.6

Miscellany

An old farmer’s pipe, amber mouthpiece, bowl studded with silver

Photographs: in the large bureau—middle compartment,

small drawer at the bottom on the right

Heinle brothers’ bequest	in a large marbled rectangularquite flat marbled cardboard boxwhich probably is in one of the cases
Heinle brothers’ bequest	several slim notebooks covered in stiff cardboard

Fig. 1.7

Fig. 1.7

Catalogue of My Published Works

The publications listed here are as follows: his pseudonymous publications for the youth movement magazine Der Anfang [The Beginning]: Sleeping Beauty published in March 1911; The Free School Community from May 1911; the two-part Teaching and Evaluation from May–July 1913; Romanticism from June 1913; Thoughts on Gerhart Hauptmann’s Festival from August 1913; and Experience from October 1913.

Listed also: School Reform, A Cultural Movement, published in a Free Students’ publication on students and school reform in 1912; Moral Education in The Free School Community journal; Youth Was Silent, published in the journal Action in 1913; Aims and Methods of the Student-Pedagogic Groups at the Universities of the German Reich, published in a collection of papers from a student conference in 1914; Students’ Author Evenings published in The Student in 1914; and Erotic Education (On the Occasion of the Latest Students’ Author Evening in Berlin), which appeared in Action in 1914.

Fig. 1.8

Fig. 1.8

Gabriele Eckehard: The German Book in the Baroque Epoch Ullstein, Berlin

It is rare for collectors to present themselves to the public. They hope to be regarded as scholars, connoisseurs, if needs be as owners too, but very rarely as that what they above all are: lovers. Discretion appears to be their strongest side, frankness their weakest. When a great collector publishes the glorious catalogue of his treasures he may be displaying his collection, but only in the rarest cases does he display his genius for collecting. The present book provides a welcome exception from these rules. Without exactly being a catalogue, it showcases one of the most impressive private collections of German Baroque literature. Without exactly being a history of the mode of acquisition of the collection, it contains the impulses out of which it was built. Many love to speak of the “personal relationship” that a collector has to his things. Fundamentally this phrase appears rather designed to trivialize the attitude that it wants to recognize, placing it as tentative, as agreeably moody. It is misleading. + It would be better to characterize the community of genuine collectors as those who believe in chance, are worshippers of chance. Not only because they each know that they owe the best of their possessions to chance, but also because they themselves pursue the traces of chance in their riches, for they are physiognomists, who believe that everything that befalls their items, no matter how illogical, wayward or unnoticed, leaves its traces. These are the traces that they pursue: the expression of past events compensates them a thousandfold for the irrationality of events.—All this is said in order to indicate why it is not just the author of this work but also the collector who is honored, when we designate her a connoisseur of physiognomy. What she records about the binding, the printing mode, the conservation, the price and the distribution of the works with which she deals, are likewise many such transformations of coincidental fate into mimetic expression. To speak of books as she does is the prerogative of the collector. We hope that the example that is given here—right down to the layout and illustrations—is followed by many, unlike the few who preceded.++

Handwritten marginalia:

Top right:

The Lit World

VI, 23

6 June 1930

Handwritten amendments: “laudable” substituted for “welcome”

+ Collectors may be loony—though this in the sense of the French lunatique–according to the moods of the moon. They are playthings too, perhaps—but of a goddess—namely τυχη.

++ That amongst these few, though, the best—Karl Wohfskehl—is a lover of the Baroque shows that, for the true book collector, few similarly adequate objects of his love exist apart from precisely these books stemming from the German Baroque epoch.

Fig. 1.9

Fig. 1.9

A page from Benjamin’s Paris address book of the 1930s.

The names listed here: Margarete Steffin, Mopsa Sternheim, Günther Stern, Ernst Schoen, Ruth Schwarz, Toet Sellier, Max Strauss, Jean Selz, Eliane Simon and Gershom Scholem.