Walter Benjamin’s Archive. Walter Benjamin

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.

       2

       Scrappy Paperwork

       Collecting and Dispersal

      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