Walter Benjamin’s self was from the beginning so much the medium of his work, his happiness so bound up with his spirit, that whatever is usually referred to as immediacy of life was refracted in him. Although he was not ascetic, and did not make the impression of being so, even in his appearance, there was something almost incorporeal about him. Benjamin, who had a control of his own ego that few others do, seemed alienated from his own physical being. This may be one of the roots of his philosophical intention of capturing with rational means the experience manifested in schizophrenia. Just as his thought forms the antithesis to the existentialist concept of the person, empirically he seems, his extreme individuation notwithstanding, hardly a person at all but rather an arena for the movement of the content that forced its way to expression through him. It would be pointless to reflect on the psychological origins of this characteristic; such reflection would presuppose a conception of normal living—a conception that Benjamin’s speculative thought exploded and to which the general conformist mentality holds all the more stubbornly the less life remains life at all. A remark Benjamin once made about his own handwriting—he was a good graphologist—to the effect that its chief intention was to reveal nothing, bears witness if nothing else to his attitude toward this dimension of himself; in other respects he was not much concerned with his own psychology.
Almost no one else has succeeded in making his own neurosis—if indeed that is what it was—so productive. Part of the psychoanalytic concept of neurosis is the blockage of the productive forces, the misdirection of energies. Nothing of the sort occurred with Benjamin. The productivity of this person estranged from himself can be explained only by the fact that something objective and historical had been precipitated in his touchy subjective form of response, something that rendered him capable of turning himself into an organ of objectivity. Whatever Benjamin may have lacked in immediacy, whatever it must early on have become second nature for him to hide, has been lost in a world that is governed by the abstract law of human relations. It can show itself only at the cost of the most bitter pain, or falsely, as tolerated nature. Benjamin drew his conclusions from this long before he was fully aware of such matters. Within himself and in his relationships with others he gave unreserved primacy to spirit, and this, rather than immediacy, became his form of immediacy. His private demeanor approached ritual. Here one looks to the influence of Stefan George and his school, with whom Benjamin had nothing in common philosophically, even as a youth: he learned the schemata of ritual from George. In his letters ritual extends even into the typography and the choice of paper, which played an uncommonly significant role with him; even during the period of emigration his friend Alfred Cohn continued to provide him with gifts of a particular kind of paper. The ritual features are most marked in his youth; only toward the end of his life were they relaxed, as though fear of catastrophe, of something worse than death, had awakened the deeply buried spontaneity of expression that he had banished by means of a mimesis of death.
Benjamin was a great letter writer; it is clear that he had a passion for writing letters. Many have survived, despite the two wars, the Third Reich, and emigration. It was difficult to make a selection from them.1 The letter became a literary form for Benjamin. The form transmits the primary impulses but interposes a third thing between them and the addressee, the artistic shaping of what is written, as if under a law of objectification—despite and also by virtue of the occasion of time and place, as though only the occasion gave legitimacy to the impulse. With thinkers of significant force, the insights that strike closest to the mark are often also insights about the thinker himself, and so it was with Benjamin: the description of Goethe in his old age as the clerk of his inner self is paradigmatic for this. There is nothing affected about this kind of second nature, and in any case Benjamin would have accepted the reproach with equanimity. The letter was so congenial to him because from the outset it encourages a mediated, objectified immediacy. Writing letters creates a fiction of life within the medium of the frozen word. In a letter one can disavow one’s isolation and nevertheless remain separate and at a distance.
A detail that is not immediately related to correspondence may shed some light on Benjamin’s specific characteristics as a letter writer. Our conversation once led to the differences between the written and the spoken word, as for instance in the way people sometimes neglect considerations of linguistic form in face to face conversation, out of humaneness, using the more comfortable perfect tense when strictly speaking the simple past would have been required. Benjamin, who had an extremely fine ear for nuances of language, rejected this distinction, contesting it with some emotion, as though a sore spot had been touched. His letters are the figures of a speaking voice that writes in speaking.
But these letters are most richly rewarded for the renunciation that underlies them. This justifies making them accessible to a wider audience. This man who truly experienced the present “in its colored reflection,” to use Goethe’s words, was given power over the past. The letter form is now anachronistic and was already becoming so in Benjamin’s lifetime; that does not impugn his own letters. It is significant that whenever possible he wrote his letters by hand, at a time when the typewriter had long been dominant; in the same way, the physical act of writing brought him pleasure—he liked to make excerpts and fair copies—just as mechanical aids repelled him: like much in his intellectual history, his monograph on the work of art in the era of its mechanical reproduction is in that respect an identification with the aggressor. Letter writing announces a claim on the part of the individual that it can not do justice to nowadays, any more than the world is willing to honor it. When Benjamin remarked that it is no longer possible to make a caricature of anyone, he came close to expressing that state of affairs, as he did in his essay on the storyteller. In a totalized state of society that degrades each individual and relegates him to a function, it is no longer legitimate for anyone to report on himself in a letter as though he were still the unsubsumed individual the letter says he is: there is already something illustory about the “I” in a letter.
But in the age of the disintegration of experience human beings are no longer subjectively disposed to letter writing. For the present it looks as though technology is eliminating the preconditions for the letter. Because letters are no longer necessary, given the speedier possibilities of communication and the shrinking of spatio-temporal distances, their inherent substance is disintegrating as well. Benjamin brought to letter writing an antiquarian and uninhibited talent; for him the letter represented the wedding of something in the process of disappearing and the utopia of its restoration. What induced him to write letters was also connected with his mode of experiencing, in that he saw historical forms—and the letter is one of them—as nature, something to be deciphered and its commandments obeyed. Benjamin’s attitude as a letter writer tends toward that of the allegorist. For him letters were natural-philosophical images of something that survives transience and decay. His letters do not resemble the ephemeral utterances of a living human being at all, and they thereby acquire objective force, a force of formulation and refinement worthy of a human being. The eye, mourning the losses it is about to incur, rests patiently and intensively on things, as it ought to be able to do again sometime in the future. A private remark of Benjamin’s leads us to the secret of his letters: I am not interested in people, he said; I am interested only in things. The force of negation emanating from that statement is one and the same as the force of his productivity.
The early letters are all written to friends, male and female, from the Free German Youth Movement, a radical group led by Gustav Wyneken, whose ideas came closest to being realized in the Wickersdorf Free School Community. Benjamin was an important contributor to Der Anfang, the group’s journal, which caused a stir in the years 1913–14. It seems paradoxical to imagine Benjamin, whose responses were completely idiosyncratic, in such a movement, or in fact in any movement. The fact that he plunged into it without reservations and treated the debates within the “Sprechsäle”—debates which are no longer intelligible to those who did not take part in them—and all those who participated in them with uncommon seriousness was no doubt a compensatory phenomenon. Designed by nature to express the universal through extreme particularity, through what was peculiar to him, Benjamin suffered so much from this that he feverishly sought out collectivities, certainly in vain, and he continued to do so as a mature man. In addition, he shared the universal tendency of the youthful spirit to overvalue the people he first became involved with. As befits a person of pure will, he unquestioningly assumed that his friends shared the striving for the utmost that inspired his own intellectual life from its first day to its last. Not the least of his painful experiences must have been learning that not only do most people not have the strength of elevation he assumed of them, judging them by himself; they do not even desire the distant goal he ascribed to them because it is the potential of humankind.
Benjamin experienced youth, with which he earnestly identified, and himself as a young person as well, in the medium of reflection. Being young became an attitude of consciousness for him. He was sovereignly indifferent to the contradiction in this, to wit, that anyone who takes naiveté as a position and even plans a “metaphysics of youth” negates naiveté. Later Benjamin articulated the melancholy truth of what characterized his early letters when he said that he venerated youth. He seems to have tried to bridge the gulf between his own nature and the circle he joined through a need to dominate; even later, during his work on his book on the baroque tragic drama, he remarked that an image like that of the king had originally meant a great deal to him. The early letters, for the most part clouded, are shot through with touches of imperiousness, like flashes of lightning trying to strike; the gesture anticipates what his intellectual power later accomplished. What young people, students, for instance, readily and eagerly find fault with in the most talented among them—arrogance—must have been prototypically true of Benjamin. This arrogance cannot be denied. It marks the difference between what human beings of superior intellectual status know to be their potential and what they already are; they compensate for that difference through a mode of behavior that necessarily appears presumptuous from the outside. All the less is either arrogance or the need to dominate any longer visible in the mature Benjamin. He was characterized by an utter and extremely gracious politeness, which is documented in the letters as well. In this he resembled Brecht; without that characteristic, the friendship between the two of them would hardly have endured.
With the embarrassment that people who make such demands on themselves often experience in the face of the inadequacy of their beginnings—an embarrassment equal to their earlier assessment of themselves—Benjamin put an end to the period of his participation in the youth movement when he reached full self-awareness. He maintained contact with only a few people, like Alfred Cohn. And with Ernst Schoen; that friendship lasted until death. Schoen’s indescribable refinement and sensitivity must have affected Benjamin at the deepest level; certainly Schoen was one of the first people Benjamin encountered who was his equal. The few years during which Benjamin was later able to live relatively free of worry, following the failure of his academic plans and prior to the outbreak of fascism, he owed in no small measure to the solidarity of Schoen, who as program director of Radio Frankfurt provided him with an opportunity for regular and frequent work. Schoen was one of those deeply self-assured people who love to withdraw into the background, without resentment and to the point of complete self-effacement; all the more reason to remember him when speaking about Benjamin’s personal life.
Apart from his marriage to Dora Kellner, the decisive experience of the period of emancipation is Benjamin’s friendship with Gershom Scholem, who was his intellectual equal; this was probably the closest friendship in Benjamin’s life. In many respects Benjamin’s talent for friendship resembled his talent for letter writing, even in eccentric features like the secretiveness that led him to keep his friends apart as far as possible—friends who then, moving within a small circle, always got to know one another anyway. If from aversion to the clichés of Geisteswissenschaft Benjamin rejected the idea of a development in his work, the difference between his first letters to Scholem and all the earlier ones shows how much he developed, aside from the path traced by his work itself; in his letters to Scholem he is suddenly free of all affected superiority. Its place is taken by that infinitely gentle irony that gave him an extraordinary charm in personal relations, despite his strangely objectified and untouchable quality. One of the elements of this irony was the way this so sensitive and fastidious man played with popular language, with the Berlin dialect, for instance, or idiomatic Jewish expressions.
From the early twenties on, the letters do not seem as distant from us as those written before the First World War. In the later letters Benjamin opens up, in charming reports and stories, in pointed epigrammatic formulations, and occasionally—not so very often—in theoretical argumentation; he was moved to the latter when great spatial distances prevented this much traveled man from having oral discussions with his correspondents. His literary relationships were very extensive. Benjamin was anything but an unknown who is only now being rediscovered. His quality could remain hidden only from the envious; it became generally visible through journalistic media like the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Literarische Welt. Only as fascism approached was he rebuffed; and even in the first years of the Hitler dictatorship he was able to publish a number of things in Germany pseudonymously. The letters provide a progressive picture not only of him but also of the spiritual climate of an era. The breadth of his professional and personal contacts was not restricted by any political considerations. Those contacts extended from Florens Christian Rang and Hofmannsthal to Brecht; the interweaving of theological and social motifs in him becomes visible in his correspondence. In many cases, Benjamin adapted to his correspondent, without thereby diminishing his own individuality; in such cases, his tact and his reserve, constituents of all his letters, enter the service of a certain diplomacy. There is something touching about this if one thinks how little the often artfully weighed sentences actually did to make his life any easier; how incommensurable with the status quo and unacceptable to it he remained despite his temporary successes.
I would like to point out the dignity and, when it was not a question of sheer survival, the composure with which Benjamin endured emigration, although it subjected him to the most miserable material conditions during the first years and although he did not deceive himself for a moment about the dangers of remaining in France. He put up with the danger for the sake of his great work, the Paris Arcades project. His almost impersonal quality worked to the benefit of his attitude during that time; he understood himself to be the instrument of his ideas, and did not think of his life as an end in itself, despite or precisely because of the immense wealth of substance and experience he embodied, and similarly he did not lament his fate as a private misfortune. Understanding the objective conditions of his fate gave him the strength to rise above it; the strength that permitted him, even in 1940 and doubtless thinking of his death, to formulate his theses on the concept of history.
Only by sacrificing life did Benjamin become the spirit that lived by the idea of a way of life without victims.